What is a system anyway?

All right, welcome to today, what is a system anyway, this is an interesting topic, because there's a lot of advice out there that your salvation, your opportunity to have a business that thrives, that gives you results that you want the money, the lifestyle, the ability to bring through ideas to lead your teams.

All of this lies at some level in your ability to run systems.

But I want you to ask yourself the question, well, what is a system? How do you actually think of a system? What is it because often, when people are pushed for this, it kind of dissolves into well, it's, it's sort of just a system, a system is a system I'm I do that's not that helpful to find a word as itself?

But this is quite common, there's a lot of confusion, there's not really clear about what it is.

And I was at breakfast this morning.

And some ideas about a definition of this came through.

And this is helpful, because when you understand what a system is, then it allows you to have a much better chance of building them.

You see, when I was first getting into all of this system stuff, I was like, Okay, well, what, what is the system? And particularly one question, what is its relationship to process processes.

And, and this, trying to fit them together trying to work out how they fit together, it led me to a conundrum.

And that is, well, how do I build a system? I need a system for building systems.

But I don't know how to build a system at all.

So how am I going to build a system for systems all very difficult or very tricky is like what the heck is like some kind of horrible Rubik's cube with like, 15 sides and like, this sucks.

This is no fun.

But along the way, I was like, Okay, I'm working this out, I worked out that you really need two essential things as part of a system and one is those processes, those actions.

And actions are actually the things that you or your team doing the things that get done.

And when they get done.

There's an outcome, there's some sort of results.

Sometimes that's a physical result like something gets produced into the world, like pen or tablet, or I don't know, like anything that is physically available.

But sometimes that result is intangible like it's that the cash gets moved out of your accounts and pays your team.

So you pay your bills or cash comes in, and your account for it in your books.

There's no actual physical object for this.

But across the board, this appeared to be the two essential ingredients number one that there was action.

And number two, there were outcomes.

And I was sitting there this morning.

And this definition came and I hope it helps you as a definition of a system.

And I will share it with you.

So what is it a repeatable, repeatable, tracked actions, repeatable tracked actions that create defined results? Okay, let's break this down.

So we've got a bunch of words here repeatable.

Why is the system repeatable? Well, you want to have an idea in your head about a system that you can use it over and over and over and short it might improve with time, but the idea being that it comes with the ability to be used more than once that it can be used weekly, if it needs to be it can be used on demand, it can be used monthly, whatever that requirement for its timeframe is but there is this repeatable nature of it.

Secondly, tracked Now, this may or may not be essential, but I like it.

I like having the tracked nature in there.

Why? Because it means that you can find your way through a larger system.

Now, if you've got a really simple system with one action and one result, the tracking of it.

It's pretty superfluous, like it may not make a lot of difference, other than it is a very good habit.

But once you start getting into bigger systems with a lot of moving parts, a lot of actions, a lot of results.

tracking them gives you the ability to return to where you are at in a system.

Imagine a system actually takes six days to complete.

You've got six days of work there or you've got multiple people working on a system at once you are going to need to be able to track that in order to tell, hey, who's working on what, which processes are getting done right now, which results are being generated right now.

And if you track them, then you actually have the ability to consistently work through the actions that need to be taken.

So that next word is actions.

And actions are the things that are going to get done.

Like just like in a recipe, you're actually cracking the eggs and adding the flour and adding the milk and stirring it up.

Like they're all actions.

They're all actions.

And so we've got the first three words of this definition of a system, a repeatable, tracked actions, that create defined results, you see, it's not just any results, it's not random results, it's defined results.

Because when those actions are taken in order, and potentially in certain timeframes, there will be a consistent result.

And that result is defined.

Now those results are interesting, you see, because you might need in bigger systems, not just an immediate results, it's not like okay, we do this, and we get that.

But rather, you might have us do this, this and this, and we get an intermediate result.

And then we do some more things, this, that and that.

And that intermediate result gets resolved into the final result.

But nonetheless, both the intermediate and the final results are defined results.

And they come from the actions that were taken.

So let's go through that definition.

One more time, the definition of a system, trackable, so repeatable, tracked actions that create defined results.

And it gives you the framework for thinking about systems that you need, the actions, you need them a tract, which is going to require them being written down.

And you need to know what results they come from.

If you need a model to think about.

My suggestion is that you think about a Lego set.

Yes, that humble, amazing children's toy.

Because when you think about that, what do you get? Well, you get a bunch of Lego bricks, and you get instructions.

And they are actually repeatable, you can build that entire model all the way to finish and break it apart and build it again, break it apart and build it again.

Now the tracking is not there.

Other than you know what page number you're up to, you know, if you're up to page nine, and you leave it open, or your dog here at page nine, and you come back a great you know where you are.

So it's a very basic form of tracking.

But essentially, this is the model for you to think about how to build your systems, that if you think about humble Lego sis, le humble LEGO sets, this is the perfect model because it has your actions to take.

And it has the building blocks that come through and generate the final result, which is the completed Lego set actually made a cool YouTube video on this one time attempting a relatively inverted commas.

Easy a nine year old, plus Lego so for nine year olds impossible to do, I'll spoil it for you.

It was impossible to do.

I did okay, all I had was the picture.

But then I got two hours in just could not produce it.

And then I went to build it with the instructions, our 10 built perfectly.

And then the coolest thing, broke it apart.

And my son who was 10 at the time, went through and built the whole thing once again, go and check that out on the smile.

YouTube channel.

Thanks for tuning in today.

I hope you got a lot of value and take this definition of a system with you repeatable tracked actions that create defined results.

So I look forward to seeing the next episode.

Catch you then.