Beyond Outputs and Outcomes: The Systems Advantage
- Darren Emery
- Sep 8
- 5 min read
Why Winning depends on systems, Not Scoreboards
Most transformations fail. You’ve heard the statistic: around 70% collapse under their own weight.
It’s not for lack of effort. Boards demand more outputs - projects delivered, features shipped, reports produced. When that doesn’t work, they pivot to outcomes - customer metrics, OKRs, “value realised.” Yet results remain stubbornly inconsistent.
Put simply, outcomes are not enough. They’re only a byproduct. You don’t win by chasing wins. You win by fixing the system that makes winning inevitable.
That idea comes not from a management textbook, but from Nick Saban - a college football coach in the US, largely unknown over here, but one of the most successful leaders in sport. Saban talks endlessly about “the process”: don’t obsess about the scoreboard, obsess about the system. In business language, that’s systems thinking.
Transactional vs Transformational Leadership
Saban often contrasts transactional leadership with transformational leadership.
Transactional leaders rely on rewards and punishments. They get compliance, maybe effort, but rarely commitment.
Transformational leaders shape culture, identity, and systems. They build something bigger than any individual transaction.
If we’re honest, most executives default to transactional. Bonuses for outputs. Sanctions for missed targets. Firefighting when delivery drifts. All of it is scoreboard-watching.
Transformational leaders, by contrast, redesign the system. They don’t shout louder for outcomes. They build conditions where outcomes become the natural byproduct.
That’s why Saban doesn’t talk about championships. He talks about how you practice, recover, eat, and prepare. The system.
Outputs, Outcomes, and Systems
Let’s translate this to the organisational world.
Outputs are the things you produce. Features shipped, projects delivered, reports filed. Easy to count, but a vanity metric - you can deliver a shed-load of them and still achieve nothing.
Outcomes are what changes as a result. Customer adoption, revenue growth, risk reduced. Harder to measure, but still lagging indicators. They tell you what happened, not why.
Systems are the structures, feedback loops, incentives, and ways of working that create conditions for outcomes. They’re harder to see, but they’re where the real leverage lies. As Deming put it: “A bad system will beat a good person every time.”
Most Organisations stop at outcomes. They celebrate an occasional win, tweak a KPI or two, and wonder why it doesn’t sustain. But outcomes are emergent properties of systems. Without changing the system, you’re relying on luck.
The Analogy From Sports
Sport gives us a sharper metaphor than any business textbook.
Outputs are the drills - the sprints, the weightlifting, the hours of practice. You can count reps all day long. But reps alone don’t win games.
Outcomes are the wins - the scoreboard, the silverware. The things fans (and shareholders) obsess over.
The System is everything behind it: the playbook, recruitment pipeline, coaching staff, culture of accountability, strength and conditioning, recovery protocols.
Teams that obsess about outputs (“we did 500 sprints this week”) confuse effort with progress. Teams that obsess about outcomes (“just win”) leave themselves at the mercy of luck, opponents, or referees.
Championship teams obsess about the system. They design it so that winning is not a surprise - it’s inevitable. Business is no different.
Why Most Transformations Fail
Here’s the problem in numbers: 70% of transformations fail. I use it all the time and the figure has barely budged in decades.
Why? Because most are transactional. They reward outputs. Or they pivot to outcomes without fixing the system.
Take one bank I worked with. The board declared it was “outcome-driven.” Success would be measured by customer satisfaction. On the surface, enlightened. But the incentives for managers remained tied to features shipped per quarter. The funding process was still annual, siloed by department. Delivery teams were still buried under strict PMO governance.
The result? Features nobody used, outcomes unchanged, and another failed transformation to add to the list.
They wanted outcomes. But they refused to change the system.
The System Always Wins
Systems thinking isn’t just theory. It’s pragmatic.
Peter Senge: “Today’s problems come from yesterday’s solutions.”
Russell Ackoff: “The performance of a system depends on how the parts interact, not on how they act taken separately.”
Leaders love tinkering with the parts - a new team here, a new metric there. But unless you change the interactions - the funding model, decision rights, flow of information - the system produces the same outcomes.
That’s why MIT Sloan found companies that redesign systems of work are four times more likely to sustain performance improvements. You can’t bribe or bully your way past a bad system.
What Leaders Should Actually Obsess Over
If you’re a leader, here’s the pivot that matters:
Stop obsessing about outputs
They’re shallow and misleading.
Don’t only obsess about outcomes.
They’re lagging and fragile.
Start obsessing about systems.
The design, the incentives, the culture, the structures. The things that make outcomes repeatable.
Ask yourself:
What system produced last quarter’s outcomes?
Are we rewarding behaviours that strengthen the system, or just the quick win?
If we doubled the pressure, would the system break - or scale?
Because the truth is simple: outcomes are a lagging measure of systems.
Back to Saban
When Nick Saban took over at Alabama, he didn’t rally the team with speeches about trophies. He started with the basics: how training sessions were structured, how recovery was managed, how players prepared off the pitch as well as on it. To outsiders, it looked obsessive. Players were baffled. Supporters were impatient. The press dismissed it as over-coaching.
But then the wins came. And they kept coming. Six national titles later, nobody questions “the process.”
It’s the same lesson Sir Dave Brailsford drilled into British Cycling. Success didn’t come from demanding more medals - it came from redesigning the system. Marginal gains in equipment, diet, sleep, recovery, training methods. Alone, each change looked trivial. Together, they built a system where winning became inevitable.
Saban and Brailsford both understood what many business leaders still resist: you don’t win by chasing wins. You win by building a system so robust that success becomes the natural byproduct - inevitable.
Stop Chasing, Start Building
Organisations have spent the last decade pivoting from outputs to outcomes. It was progress of sorts, but it isn’t enough. The real game is systems.
Or, to borrow Saban’s words: “Don’t worry about the scoreboard. Worry about the process.”
Because outcomes don’t come from wish-lists or pep talks. They come from systems designed to deliver them, again and again.
At Agilicist, that’s exactly what we help leaders do: move beyond outputs and outcomes, and build the systems where results become inevitable. If that’s the challenge you’re facing, we should talk.
