Thinking Archives - Area 224 Ltd.

I’ve followed the work of Scott Adams for years. Decades, actually; as I just found this calendar in a box of stuff I’ve kept.

Flipping through it is actually quite illuminating, as 2000 marked the start of a six-year run at a large insurance brokerage (and human capital consultant) that you’ve heard of. And it’s inside the calendar that I’m finding a ton of evidence to one of Scott’s key messages: “Systems Over Goals.”

Creating the System

My time at Aon started in the human capital consulting arm, then known as Aon Consulting. For a young-ish guy like me, it was a tremendous opportunity: I had the chance to build a system that could best be described as “Marketing Communications.” It was also a system that had somewhat stagnated under my predecessor, and it needed a combination of a clear mandate and some good old fashioned hard work.

And, looking back at my calendar — which looked less like a journal and more like a combination of Post-It notes and birthday reminders and appointments and out-of-town trip summaries — I can see just how effective our “system” was.

Explaining Myself Further

One of the challenges of Systems Thinking vs. Goals Thinking is figuring out why you are building the system in the first place. I mean, it sounds counter-intuitive: you need to know the direction you’re headed and you have to have a general idea of what you’re trying to achieve. BUT…

To use our example, we were trying, as my then-boss was saying, to be “on the shelf of the mind” when companies — specifically, their HR leaders — were looking for an employee benefits consultant. (Back then, pre-ACA, “health and welfare” consulting was our bread-and-butter, with 401(k) consulting and pension actuarial work coming in second; HR outsourcing, a distant third, would take up a large portion of future revenues as the organization’s priorities shifted.)

To do this, we could have come up with any number of goals, but those would have had to change a couple times, at least, while we built the system.

In this case, the system needed to include a few things:

An understanding of the issues that drive buyer behavior
A sense of who in our company could speak to these issues; i.e. “thought leaders”
A full mapping of the products and services that we had in the pipeline that could help clients and prospects
And a cadence of messages — news releases, product brochures, speaking opportunities — airdropped throughout the calendar year.

We Did Pretty Well

I looked back at another Post-It that tells me that our little team actually produced 15 news releases that year; it was a variety that zig-zagged between product announcements and thought leadership pieces tied to a key piece of research that we conducted.

The news releases weren’t all, of course; and none of this was done in a vacuum. The company had a research arm in Ann Arbor, Michigan — the long-since shuttered “Loyalty Institute” — and their research was centered around what kept employees committed to their employer and what employee benefits and HR practices were (and weren’t) drivers of workforce commitment.

So we had research reports to share, and we had brochures that told our prospects how we could help them.

And we also had a bit of a chip on our shoulder; as an underdog, we were acting like a challenger brand. We were fifth- or sixth-largest in the market at the time.

Systems Are Better Than New Year’s Resolutions

There’s a point to this post: I didn’t see any New Year’s Resolutions — I normally don’t do them — and I didn’t see any goals, either.

I did see, however, the beginnings of a System.

The System for you and me today will of course be WAY DIFFERENT than the System I helped to build in 2000. So much has changed no matter the industry.

But my advice for you is to build that System for 2026:

What PROCESSES are you good at creating, or following?
What SKILLS can you use in order to build…A team? A business? An audience?
What TALENTS do you need a little help with?
What are the MARKETS where you can best find success?

You might find that you have a combination of ideas and you may be able to create a System that can set you up for success.

Go get ’em!

On reading the fine print, studying the scenarios, and thinking differently

A year ago, I was working on a project and started wondering about The Fifth Dentist. You know, from the gum commercials.

Ages ago, the idea took hold that “four out of five dentists recommend Trident,” a brand of sugarless chewing gum. Simple enough, right? A survey was conducted, dentists were asked about chewing gum, and, for some reason, Trident was the winner.

In fact, if you were to ask me what other brands of sugarless chewing gum are on the market, I don’t know what I’d say. I don’t give it much thought, I’ve accepted the claim at face value — Get it? Dentists? “Face” Value? — and I guess we’ve moved on.

But…not everybody has moved on. And you shouldn’t either.

Four Out of Five…

Yes, there’s a mini-screed over at a blog from Ideal Dental. Yes, they take it rather seriously. Yes, the claims are really misleading.

I highlighted the part that got me thinking — and the rest of it is a fun read, sure — and then I started looking into what Trident actually said. From Wikipedia:

The survey wasn’t about Trident, it was about the category of “Sugarless Gum.”

Which brings us to…

The Tenth Man

After a surprise attack by Arab forces led to the 1973 Yom Kippur War, the Israeli Army needed to come up with a system that would insure against overconfidence.

To put it simply, if nine people agreed on something, a tenth man needed to come up with an argument against the other nine.

It’s “Institutionalized Devil’s Advocacy,” as Chris Meyer tells us over at The Mind Collective:

Are These Two Things Connected?

We’re in the age of “Narrative-driven Journalism” so we’re often looking for facts when all the other side is doing is aiming to be “Directionally Correct.” In the Trident example, you can draw a couple conclusions:

Trident is in the business of selling sugarless gum
Of course no dentist in their right mind would recommend a particular brand of gum
It’s a win for the Trident marketing team to get you to think about their brand as tangentially recommended by a bunch of dentists.

Cynical, maybe, but…true. Trident is happy to be directionally correct.

And yes, you can make a connection between Trident and The Tenth Man:

Everybody seems to have accepted the connection between Trident and four out of five dentists, but should they?
Why DIDN’T the Fifth Dentist “cave?”*
What reasons would there be for a dentist to recommend gum at all?

Your Thinking Can Evolve

Cynicism needn’t drive your every move in business and in life, but healthy skepticism is often warranted.

The contrarian viewpoint — be it from a fifth dentist or a tenth voice in an argument — can be your friend.

Oh, and the * above? Well, IYKYK.

Systems Over Goals; And New Year’s Resolutions