Loving Systems

Depending on who you are, you either love systems and are all in for making your life more efficient, or you might feel like they just put you in a box and limit your ability to love people.

I believe that systems can be loving, so if you love efficiency, you can use your gifts of creating systems to love people. And if you are someone who loves people, you can push into the hard things of systems to love people better.

What Is a system?

A system is a defined process created to reach a goal. So a good system always has a goal in mind. We should never build systems for the sake of building systems, but rather because they help us reach a goal. I think goals should be to love people.

Good systems free us to be available. They free us to be available to be used by God. they free us to be available to the people around us and to be available to ourselves to pursue our goals and dreams.

How Systems Love People

Systems show love to people in three significant ways, they alleviate the workload, build confidence and create safety.

Alleviate the Workload

Loving systems help everyone because they make tasks more manageable. Did you know that research says we make 35,000 decisions a day? That’s a lot. I don’t know about you, but whenever I am given a chance to offload a decision to someone or something else, I make that choice. Systems do that for us. They make it, so we don’t have to make as many decisions in a day and often streamline the process of accomplishing the tasks.

Build Confidence

Systems create expectations, and those expectations build confidence because we know the boundaries of our role. When we have a system for how things are done, our teams know exactly what is expected of them and how to win.

Create Safety

When talking about safety, I’m not referencing life-threatening things but the low-level anxieties throughout the day. When we start to feel stressed, our nervous system kicks in, and we start to respond not out of a place of health but a place of defensiveness, assertiveness, or withdrawal. If decisions can be made ahead of time, this allows us not to have to react from that place but make the choices ahead of time when we are in a space where we can thoroughly think through the situations.

When building your next system, look to the ABCs of a loving system, make sure you alleviate the workload, build confidence, and create systems.