Icon generated with DALL·E 3: “a futuristic, minimal icon representing a systems diagram”
No shortcuts, only better maps.
Systems-Driven Growth is a process I’ve been gradually developing through thousands of hours of research, experimentation and direct application over the last decade.
Think of Systems-Driven Growth as a lens placed over top of many (existing) interconnected ideas - bringing the path forward into focus.
It’s based on my own personal experience, as well as a deep curiosity about key topics that have been developed & refined by individuals much smarter than myself.
You’re very likely to end up recognizing many fundamental concepts - this is by design (in fact, I specifically call out these critically important puzzle pieces and attribute credit whenever I can. If I missed something it’s out of failed memory rather than malice…).
My goal here is to document the process through which I’ve curated, synthesized, and continuously evolved this model & framework.
I hope you find it as exciting and engaging as I do!
Don’t hesitate to reach out to and let me know what I missed - or simply to nerd out about it :)
THINK BETTER. BUILD BETTER.
I very occasionally send out an email recapping some thoughts, learnings and ideas typically centred around a thesis & approach I call being “FUTURENATIVE”.
In short, the thesis is about finding a unique way to leverage apparent tensions and blend both discovery & execution work, in order to unlock massive impact.
You can sign up here to learn more:
PREFACE
These are a collection of quotes/tweets I’ve become quite fond of that relate very well to the interconnected topic of Systems-Driven Growth. Enjoy!
“The system is the solution.” — AT&T
"Systems are for people who care about winning repeatedly. Goals are for people who care about winning once." - James Clear, Atomic Habits
“You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.” - James Clear, Atomic Habits
Gall’s Law: A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked.
“The system isn’t something you bring to the business. It’s something you derive from the process of building the business.” - Michael Gerber, The E-Myth
“The greatest things Jobs designed was his business.” - Peter Thiel, Zero To One (on Steve Jobs)
“[…] The world is a complex adaptive system. And it’s sort of inherently… it’s not a predictable system. It’s not a linear system. It doesn’t behave in ways that you can expect. And that, by definition, so they say, is “complex” because it’s just, you know, many, many, many dimensions and variables, and then “adaptive”, like, it changes. Like, things change. The introduction of new product changes the system, and then the system recalibrates around the product […] to launch a new type product and have it succeed , you have to have a keen awareness of all of the different elements of the system. You have to have a willingness to engage in the entire system. You know, it’s a gigantic problem […] if you’re in denial about that, if you’re not willing to think in systems terms” - Marc Andreessen, a16z (The Moment podcast)
“I realized there was a whole world of thinking that was needed before a line of code should be written. And that thinking was fascinating. That thinking was what I wanted to do […] I realized coding and designing hardware wasn't as interesting to me as seeing how the whole product, the whole business came together. It became exceedingly obvious that I could never guarantee success through great engineering alone”. - Tony Fadell, Build
“Making is a kind of thinking and thinking is a kind of making.” - Jessie Shefrin
“Lack of planning […] lack of systems […] creates friction. Problems surface - with customers, with cash flow, with schedules.” - Jim Collins, Good to Great
Most men would rather die, than think. Many do. - Bertrand Russel
“[…] business competition is not just a battle of strength and wills; it is also a competition over insights and competencies. - Richard Rumelt, Good Strategy, Bad Strategy
“Usually people never think that much about what they're doing or why they do it. They just do it because that's the way it has been done and it works. That type of thinking doesn't work if you're growing fast and if you're going up against larger companies, you really have to outthink them, and you have to be able to make those paradigm shifts in your own point of view.” - Steve Jobs
“Everything that needs to be created needs to be designed - not just products and marketing, but processes, experiences, organizations, forms, materials. At its core, designing simply means thinking through a problem and finding an elegant solution. Anyone can do that. Everyone should. It's not just about making things pretty-it's about making them work better.” - Tony Fadell, Build
“Everything is connected to everything, so everything must be understood together.” - Tony Fadell, Build
“There are thousands of years of history in which lots and lots of very smart people worked very hard and ran all types of experiments on how to create new businesses, invent new technology, new ways to manage, etc. They ran these experiments throughout their entire lives. At some point, somebody put these lessons down in a book. For very little money and a few hours of time, you can learn from someone’s accumulated experience. There is so much more to learn from the past than we often realize. You could productively spend your time reading experiences of great people who have come before and you learn every time.” - Marc Andreessen, a16z
INTRODUCTION
There are many interconnected ideas on the topic of what I’m framing as Systems-Driven Growth - if you knew where to look.
Systems Thinking, Business Design, Design Thinking and many more. However, recently it feels like more of these ideas are beginning to enter the mainstream zeitgeist.
The main theme of this web of interconnected ideas is that there simply must be a way to design and engineer better businesses - not just from the get-go but at any stage.
But where do you start?
Whereas many other (excellent) models & frameworks like:
- Product-Led Growth
- Founder-Led Sales
- Community-Led Growth
- and many others
mostly all of these tend top focus on a specific, go-to market oriented method.
And while they could be used in combination, most proponents tend to pick one or the other and treat them as a religion.
Systems-Driven Growth can be thought of as having tiers (like an iceberg):
You don’t necessarily need to start at the top and progress downwards (towards the foundation, the most fundamental elements); with enough experience, you can begin directly at/from Tier 3 - however there are many more elements to adds.
Here’s a quote that perfectly encapsulates why:
“IBM is what it is today for three special reasons. The first reason is that, at the very beginning, I had a very clear picture of what the company would look like when it was finally done. You might say I had a model in my mind of what it would look like when the dream—my vision—was in place. The second reason was that once I had that picture, I then asked myself how a company which looked like that would have to act. I then created a picture of how IBM would act when it was finally done. The third reason IBM has been so successful was that once I had a picture of how IBM would look when the dream was in place and how such a company would have to act, I then realized that, unless we began to act that way from the very beginning, we would never get there. In other words, I realized that for IBM to become a great company it would have to act like a great company long before it ever became one. From the very outset, IBM was fashioned after the template of my vision. And each and every day we attempted to model the company after that template. At the end of each day, we asked ourselves how well we did, discovered the disparity between where we were and where we had committed ourselves to be, and, at the start of the following day, set out to make up for the difference. Every day at IBM was a day devoted to business development, not doing business. We didn’t do business at IBM, we built one.“ - Tom Watson, Founder, IBM (via The E-Myth: Revisited)
The key consideration for founders - and anyone else involved in the operation a business in fact - is that at the end of the day:
- you either have your own business systems established - and you teach others how to operate the system you’ve designed (if you’re good at building & refining systems….), OR
- if you don’t know or don’t have any systems to begin with, you bring someone in and they will either add (or maybe worse invent to some degree!) their own system (BEWARE: you need to evaluate where they learnt their systems from…. but also importantly how they operate their system [and continue to evolve it] if they are to embed it within your organization).
RESOURCES
There are many resources (across a variety of topics and fields) that all point to the (compounding) power of systems.
I’ve tried to list and reference as many as possible throughout my process and materials, but here is a growing list of any resource where any kind of system related topic is covered:
THINK BETTER. BUILD BETTER.
I very occasionally send out an email recapping some thoughts, learnings and ideas typically centred around a thesis & approach I call being “FUTURENATIVE”.
In short, the thesis is about finding a unique way to leverage apparent tensions and blend both discovery & execution work, in order to unlock massive impact.
You can sign up here to learn more:
