Designing Organizational Systems for World-Class Outcomes
Love ’em or hate ’em, the Patriot dynasty won the Super Bowl again earlier this year, even in the face of a formidable opponent: the LA Rams. While there are star players sprinkled across each team, what truly got them to the big game is one thing: their systems.
In a fascinating new book, Gridiron Genius, Mike Lombardi reveals how his thirty-plus years as a coach in the NFL (49ers, Raiders, Patriots) revealed the mastermind nature required to build and constantly improve systems that deliver world-class results. We can think of a “system” as every facet (direct or indirect) that contributes to an organization’s outcomes. And when competing at the top levels, literally everything matters, down to how energetic the public address announcer is. Relentless commitment to optimizing the system is why Bill Belichick is exceedingly successful in what might be the most complex and demanding sport in the world.
Success in today’s business environment requires the same level of detail and commitment to excellence. Cyber security, analytics, and IT are perfect examples of “systems” that needs to be continually and expertly tuned and integrated with the overall enterprise structure for a business to thrive.
Applying pigskin lessons to business
There are several main lessons we can extract from Lombardi and other coaches of great systems in the NFL. Namely, these include great leadership, system articulation, priority setting, and continual refinement.
Leadership: Belichick, Bill Walsh, Al Davis, and other NFL greats illustrate how critically important it is to have the right leaders manning the helm. These are the people responsible for visualizing the “to be” state of the organization — working to imagine what the art of the possible is within the emerging construct. A parallel in cyber security would be the CISO consciously and consistently elevating to higher altitudes, working to understand how the piece-parts of the program can better interact with one another and external components. A great leader envisions the ideal outcomes — not getting consumed with the “how”, but instead deciphering what needs to be achieved and who can make it real.
System articulation: A leader must codify his/her view of how the overall system should work. This is beyond a process view, and instead a higher-order conceptual view of the world. It should naturally feel a bit abstract, with flexibility for details to be filled in and refined over time. As the 49ers head coach, Bill Walsh had a view that his team should be atypical in size — faster, and taller, and more athletic than the average football team (like a basketball team). He imagined how this system would work and then engaged his coaching staff to gain their buy-in and make it real, resulting in the revolutionary West Coast offense and three Super Bowl victories. Getting there requires people in the organization to re-wire their neurons around what the system is designed to produce, often requiring leadership to ignite both inside-out and outside-in analyses to find hyper-specific opportunities for improvement within the existing system. Finally, carefully articulating your envisioned system is what eventually gets you the culture you desire. People see it, believe in it, and want it. And without me quoting dozens of management thinkers, we all know that culture is everything.
Priority setting: in Essentialism, Greg McKeown reminds us how “priority” is a singular thing. By definition, you can’t have multiple “priorities”. If you pretend to, you’ll inevitably get distracted and miss out on being the best system possible. If you’re running an analytics organization at a Fortune 500, you’re likely feeling pressure to be “agile” across a multitude of use cases. But when you stretch yourself too thin, the analytics system you’re running is not going to be world-class. The idea is to crush it for a single priority, institutionalize that way of operating, and then move on to your new priority. Whether you’re fine-tuning social media analytics or doing context enrichment for edge device data, it’s critically important to set the priority and execute on it. That’s how systems (organizations) become world-class.
Continual refinement: The New England Patriots probably do this better than any other sports team in history (hello, Lombardi Trophy #6). They know when to prune what’s not working. Despite any sentimental or financial baggage, they know that sunk costs are part of this world, and they’re able to let go. It’s about the greater good. Like aging football players, businesses today will accrue technology debt — they’ll purchase software, hardware, and talent that eventually becomes stale or unscalable over time. The best systems today will continually analyze what’s best for the environment and make hard calls about the true resources required to help a business thrive.
Wrapping up, as Peter Drucker presciently foresaw over 50 years ago, our knowledge work society is forcing us to act and think differently about business today. We need to ensure our macro-level systems are constantly tuned to deliver the outcomes we desire. Despite your feeling on the Patriots dynasty, maybe it’s even work asking, “what would Belichick do?”
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