Blog Post

There’s a line from Atomic Habits that I come back to often:

New goals don’t deliver new results. New lifestyles do. And a lifestyle is a process, not an outcome.

It’s a powerful reminder — especially in organisations.

Most companies are very good at setting goals. They define strategies, publish objectives, cascade OKRs, and track progress diligently.

And yet, real change remains elusive.

Why?

Because goal setting is not the same thing as behaviour change.

Goals describe intent. Habits determine reality.

Goals tell us what we want to achieve. Habits determine how work actually gets done every day.

Organisations don’t fail because their goals are unclear. They fail because the daily behaviours required to achieve those goals are inconsistent, invisible, or left to individual interpretation.

Priorities drift. Operating rhythms vary. Execution depends on heroic managers instead of repeatable systems.

In other words: the organisation has ambition, but not discipline.

And discipline is not a personality trait, it’s a design choice.

Strategy execution is a habit problem

When leaders talk about execution challenges, they often describe symptoms:

lack of accountability
poor follow-through
misaligned teams
late visibility into risk

But underneath all of these is a simpler truth: the organisation hasn’t scaled the right habits.

Good execution is not driven by moments of focus at planning time. It’s driven by consistent behaviours embedded into how work happens — week after week, team after team.

That’s why strategy execution can’t be fixed with another goal-setting cycle.

It has to be fixed at the habit level.

Brilliant Basics: scaling habits, not heroics

This is the idea behind Brilliant Basics in Zontally.

Brilliant Basics are not about adding process for the sake of control, they are about making good execution habits unavoidable.

Clear ownership. Visible priorities. Consistent operating rhythms. Shared definitions of what “good” looks like.

When these basics are present, execution stops relying on individual effort and starts working as a system.

Habits scale. Heroics don’t.

And when habits are consistent, outcomes become predictable.

From outcomes to operating systems

The most effective leaders I’ve worked with don’t obsess over targets alone. They obsess over the system that produces the targets.

They ask:

Are priorities clear enough to guide daily decisions?
Do teams know what to focus on - and what to ignore?
Is progress visible early, or only after it’s too late?
Are we reinforcing the behaviours we actually want?

Because when the system is right, results follow.

Not immediately and not magically, but reliably.

The quiet advantage

There’s nothing flashy about execution habits. They don’t make headlines. They don’t fit neatly on a strategy slide.

But over time, they create a quiet, compounding advantage.

Organisations that master the basics:

move faster without chaos
adapt without losing alignment
and deliver results without burning people out

They don’t just set better goals. They live better execution. And that’s where real change comes from.