I’ll be honest — I spent a long time thinking that the secret to getting better results was setting better goals. More specific ones. More ambitious ones. Goals with deadlines, accountability partners, and colour-coded tracking spreadsheets.
It turns out I was looking in the wrong place.
The idea that stopped me in my tracks came from James Clear’s Atomic Habits. He puts it simply: forget about goals, focus on systems instead. At first that sounds a bit counterintuitive. Goals feel productive. They give you something to aim at. But Clear’s argument is that goals are actually a pretty poor predictor of success — and the evidence he uses to make that point is hard to argue with.
Think about the Olympics. Every single athlete who qualifies has the goal of winning a medal. Every single one. So if everyone shares the same goal, the goal can’t be what separates the winners from the rest. What separates them is the system — the training routines, the recovery habits, the coaching structures, the daily decisions that compound over months and years.
The same logic applies at work, at home, and in teams.
Bill Walsh said it before Clear did
American football coach Bill Walsh won three Super Bowls with the San Francisco 49ers. And one of his most quoted lines is this: “The score takes care of itself.”
He wasn’t being glib. Walsh was making a serious point about where to direct your attention. If you obsess over the scoreboard — the outcome — you miss the thing that actually produces it. He focused relentlessly on the quality of his team’s preparation, culture, and execution. The wins followed.
I find this weirdly reassuring. Because it means that results aren’t something you chase. They’re something you earn, gradually, by building the right environment around you.
What I’ve seen this look like in practice
In my work as an Agile coach, I’ve watched teams pour enormous energy into delivery goals — “we need to ship X features by Q3” — while quietly tolerating the broken systems underneath. Slow feedback loops. Technical debt piling up. Meetings that don’t actually help anyone make decisions.
And then they wonder why the goal keeps slipping.
The teams I’ve seen thrive aren’t necessarily the ones with the most ambitious targets. They’re the ones that invest in their ways of working. They ask: are our retrospectives actually improving anything? Are we reducing the friction in how we ship? Is the team able to sustain this pace without burning out?
Those aren’t goal questions. They’re system questions. And they lead somewhere.
The thing about goals that nobody says out loud
Here’s what I’ve noticed: achieving a goal doesn’t necessarily improve your system. But improving your system always produces results — sometimes ones you didn’t even know you needed.
When you focus only on the goal, you’re essentially asking: did we get there? When you focus on the system, you’re asking: are we getting better? One is a binary outcome. The other is a direction.
And direction, it turns out, is worth a lot more than destination.
So what does this actually mean?
I’m not saying goals are useless. A clear direction matters — especially in teams, where shared intent keeps people aligned. But the goal should be a compass, not the obsession.
The obsession should be the system.
For me, that’s meant shifting the questions I ask. Instead of “did we hit the target?”, I’m trying to ask “what made that easier or harder, and what can we change?” Instead of “how do we go faster?”, I’m asking “where are we losing time, and why?”
Small questions. Ongoing conversations. Boring, unglamorous, consistent attention to how things actually work.
That’s the system. And if you get it right, the score takes care of itself.
What systems have you been neglecting while chasing a goal? I’d love to hear it.
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