Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own. Let me tell you a quick story. There was a new town in Norway back in the 1990s, built by a rich oligarch who decided to create a new settlement and live there. For about five years after the town was created, houses there kept catching fire.
Firefighters would come, put out the fire, go home and come back the next time. They even hired more firefighters and extinguished more fires. Now, this was a cold town. Fires breaking out every other day made no sense.
Everyone was asking, “How do we fight this fire better?” Eventually, one of the residents got sharp and asked a different question: “Why does this fire keep breaking out, and how do we stop it from happening in the first place?” What they found: The contractor who built the town had used a thin, highly flammable material above the bricks for soundproofing in every room, including the kitchens. Every kitchen in every house was basically a fire waiting to happen. The fix was simple: Break into every kitchen and remove that layer. They also installed a device in every home that alerted the fire station the moment smoke was detected.
We know it today as a smoke alarm. After fixing the root cause, the fire outbreaks stopped entirely. That’s systemization thinking. The firefighters were working hard and thought they were killing it.
But working hard inside a system that could be fixed is not efficient. A sharp person sees the difference. That story is fictional, but you get the point. Systemization thinking is the habit of seeing things as systems instead of isolated events.
Instead of asking, “How do I solve this problem right now?” You ask, “What process, structure or mechanism can solve this repeatedly, with less effort, every time it comes up?” A normal thinker looks at slow customer support, for example, and says, “Let’s reply faster.” A systemization thinker asks why support is slow in the first place, then builds templates, routing rules and automations so that speed becomes automatic and doesn’t depend on anyone trying harder. Every repeated outcome, good or bad, comes from a process, whether you designed it intentionally or not. Employees always late? Customers always confused?
Same bugs recurring? Probably a systems issue. The instinct most people have is to blame the people. The sharper instinct is to ask what system produced this outcome, and then fix the system.
If you’ve fixed something manually three times, that’s a sign it needs a permanent solution, not a fourth manual fix. Don’t rely on memory or on someone being available. I spoke with someone who used to work at McDonald’s. On his first day, he was already making burgers, even though he’d never cooked before.
McDonald’s doesn’t rely on talented burger makers. It relies on a system and a simple checklist. The system produces the burger, not the person’s natural ability. That’s systemization.
A genius one-time result is less valuable than an average result that happens reliably every time. A few years ago, we were living somewhere far from the city, and finding a maid was nearly impossible. No public transport reached there, and no maid was going to take an Uber to work every day. Person after person came for the interview, saw how far it was and never came back.
Then one woman came in, started the job and kept coming. She’d gone on a Facebook group full of drivers and negotiated a deal: same driver, morning and evening, fixed monthly rate. She identified the problem, built a repeatable solution and executed it. We kept her.
That kind of thinking is what separates someone who survives a difficult situation from someone who just complains about it. When something goes wrong, don’t just look at the outcome. Trace it back. Bad app reviews?
Instead of “users are angry,” ask: What inputs caused this? Where did the process fail? What metrics would have revealed this earlier? Find where the system broke, not just where the pain showed up.
Busy means you’re always doing something. Efficient means what you’re doing actually produces the best result in the least amount of time. For example, if I had about 940 software programs to review, I could write a document on how they should be reviewed and assign someone to review them one by one. The person would be extremely busy.
Instead, that same document could become an AI skill that does the review 100x faster, and the assigned person would only review the shortlist manually for quality assurance. Busy feels productive, but if at the end of the day the output doesn’t match the hours, the hours don’t matter. A lot of what people call “hard work” is really just an inefficient system that nobody has bothered to fix. “Work smarter, not harder” is a cliché because it’s true. People think once you build a system, the problem is solved.
Not every time. A system itself has to be maintained, enforced, monitored and improved. SOPs are the most common form of systemization, and they’re genuinely difficult to keep alive. You’ll write a really good one and feel good about it, then six months later, realize nobody is following it, nobody has updated it and the team has quietly gone back to doing things the way they want.
A badly designed or poorly enforced system can create more work than no system at all. And a system that lives only in a document nobody opens is not a system; it’s just writing. This is why culture matters more than any individual system. Systemization requires proactivity: People have to see a problem before it becomes a crisis, care enough to build a lasting solution and resist the easier option of just handling it manually again.
Stop solving the same problem more than three times. When something keeps breaking, fix the system, not just the symptom. Build processes that work without a single point of failure. And remember, a system is only as good as the culture that maintains it.
Let me tell you a quick story. There was a new town in Norway back in the 1990s, built by a rich oligarch who decided to create a new settlement and live there. For about five years after the town was created, houses there kept catching fire. Firefighters would come, put out the fire, go home and come back the next time.
They even hired more firefighters and extinguished more fires. Now, this was a cold town. Fires breaking out every other day made no sense. Everyone was asking, “How do we fight this fire better?” Eventually, one of the residents got sharp and asked a different question: “Why does this fire keep breaking out, and how do we stop it from happening in the first place?”
