3 Reasons You Can’t Use Their Systems
Organizations—and individuals—are constantly trying to adopt systems built by others.
Best practices is what organizations call this. It often involves benchmarking, white papers, and consultant-led change initiatives. The goal is to learn what similar organizations are doing and replicate it.
Individually, it shows up in our Amazon orders and podcast queues. We read the books on productivity, habits, finance, wellness. We buy the apps, download the templates, and sign up for the workshops.
Then we try to implement.
Sometimes it works… for a while.
You hold onto a new morning routine for six months.
You reduce your expenses.
You follow the diet.
You meditate.
You even like it.
But then, something slips. Or nothing changes at all.
And yet, the books keep selling. The programs keep filling. The consultants keep consulting. The apps keep promising.
And results stay the same.
Here’s why.
1. You Have Different goals
The systems you’re borrowing were built in service of someone else’s goal.
That goal might be implicit or explicit, aligned or misaligned. But it drives the system—and every system is designed to produce specific results. If you adopt the system without clarifying the goal, you inherit unintended outcomes.
In organizations, the failure to change isn’t usually due to lack of intelligence, vision, or effort. It’s often the presence of an unexamined, **competing commitment**—a goal that conflicts with the one we say we want.
For example:
- You want a consistent morning routine.
- But you also want to stay up late and unwind.
Whichever goal is better integrated into your current system will win.
And the same is true organizationally.
It’s not that the borrowed system is wrong.
It’s that your hidden goal is more embedded than your stated one.
2. You’re Starting from a Different Place
You’re not building a system from scratch.
You’re modifying an existing one—with its own legacy, complexity, and friction.
Every individual and organization is starting from a different:
- History
- Culture
- Narrative
- Team
- Structure
- Technology
- Set of mental models
These contextual differences aren’t surface-level—they’re systemic. They shape how people interpret and interact with new systems.
That’s why change often fails: not because the new system is flawed, but because it doesn’t account for the reality it’s entering.
If you ignore context, your implementation won’t stick.
3. You’re Operating in a Different Environment
Your context is unique.
You’re not trying to integrate this habit, method, or strategy in a vacuum. You’re trying to do it while parenting, working, traveling, caregiving, and showing up for life.
- In 2015, I changed my morning routine not to optimize performance—but because I was already working from home, and it was the only quiet time to write before the house woke up.
- Today, our kids are older, evening routines have shifted, and mornings look different again.
The environment matters. So do your relationships, obligations, energy cycles, sleep rhythms, and responsibilities.
What works for someone in a different context—even one that looks “similar”—won’t necessarily work for you.
And, as your context changes over time, you must constantly assess your systems to ensure they continue to align to your most important goals.
How to Actually Learn from Others’ Systems
It’s not that you can’t borrow from others.
You absolutely can—and should. There’s value in studying systems that work.
Books, courses, consultants, and coaches can help you:
- Avoid unnecessary mistakes.
- Shorten your learning curve.
- Accelerate progress.
- Curate meaningful possibilities.
But to get those benefits, you have to stop copying and start integrating.
Here’s how.
1. You Already Have Working Systems
You’re not starting from nothing.
Whether you’re an individual or an organization, you already have working individual and collective systems:
- You have a way of starting your day.
- You have ways of managing energy, making decisions, and interacting with others.
- You have ways of delivering your work and getting paid for it.
Even if those systems aren’t ideal, they exist—and they’re generating your current results and experiences.
That’s why you can’t just plug something new in and expect it to “take.”
You’re not layering new onto nothing. You’re changing something into something else.
That means your design process must begin with awareness of what’s already there.
2. You Can Copy Elements, but You Must Design Interactions
Every system has three parts:
- Goals – What the System is for.
- Elements – The tangible practices, structures, or tools.
- Interactions – How those elements affect one another.
You can borrow someone’s elements. Their 5 a.m. wakeup. Their agenda template. Their budgeting framework.
But if you ignore the interactions—the system dynamics—you’ll miss what actually makes it work.
Take habit-building.
BJ Fogg’s Tiny Habits, James Clear’s Atomic Habits or other frameworks can all work—but only when you integrate the habit into the right part of your day, your energy cycle, your motivations, your goals, your context.
An element is generic.
An interaction is contextual.
And it’s the interaction that determines whether the habit takes root or fades.
This is why implementation must always be a design process, not just an adoption process.
3. You Need to Adjust as Your Goals and Context Shift
Systems don’t stay static.
As your goals change, your systems need to change.
As your context evolves, so must your structures, habits, and supports.
If you don’t consciously redesign your system as you evolve, your older defaults will run in the background—outdated and increasingly invisible.
And often, they’ll override your newer intentions.
Over time, mental models deepen. Behaviours become unconscious.
A pattern emerges.
And we stop questioning it because it becomes “just the way we do things.”
Unless you interrupt the pattern and update the premise, the old system will keep producing the same result.
Systems Require Conscious Integration
Here’s what you can do instead:
- Start with clarity – What’s your actual goal? What competing goals might get in the way?
- Study the elements – What from this book/program/coach is actually useful to you?
- Design interactions – How will this element fit into your life or organization? What else does it touch?
- Test and adapt – How will you know if it’s working? What feedback loops will you listen to?
Whether you’re doing this as an individual, team, or organization, the principles are the same.
Systems aren't plug-and-play. They're built and tuned, one deliberate interaction at a time.
Borrow tools.
Steal techniques.
Learn frameworks.
Get help.
But build your own system.
That’s how you turn insight into progress—and design a life or organization that actually works.
– Gerrett
This was originally published on Substack in my Human Systems Playground. But I’ve decided to bring all my writing home here.
