Nearly 1 in 4 People have Already Abandoned their New Years Resolution. Here's Why.

Every January, we promise ourselves change.

We’ll exercise more. Eat better. Communicate more clearly. Be more strategic. Make real progress on something that matters. And yet, 23% of people abandon their resolutions within the first week, and 43% by the end of January. 

This is usually where we blame motivation, discipline or an external force that may be involved.

But that explanation doesn’t hold up.

The real reason these changes fail is because we attempt to change results without understanding the system that produces them.

James Clear names this succinctly: “You don’t rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.”

What’s true for individuals is equally true for organizations. Both chase outcomes while ignoring the patterns that reliably recreate the current reality. A person resolves to exercise more without examining the habits, defaults, and trade-offs that make the gym optional when life gets busy. An organization declares a new strategic priority without understanding why previous priorities never gained traction. In both cases, the aspiration is genuine, but the system remains untouched.

Systems are nothing more than patterns of behavior repeated over time. And those patterns don’t emerge randomly. They’re sustained by the assumptions, beliefs, and mental models people carry, often unconsciously, into their daily choices.

The individual who keeps skipping the gym isn’t simply lazy. They’ve likely internalized beliefs about time, energy, or self-worth that make exercise expendable when pressure rises. Most of the time, they aren’t even aware of the competing commitments driving that choice.

In that same vein, an organization that can’t execute its strategy is not dysfunctional. In fact, no organization is truly “dysfunctional” at all. It is operating in a way that reliably produces the results it currently gets.

What’s far more likely is that the people inside the organization are unaware of the underlying assumptions and competing commitments sustaining the system. A more useful reframe is to ask who benefits from the way things currently are, and how they benefit from the status quo, consciously or (more often) unconsciously.

This is why the act of just trying harder rarely works. You can’t sustainably change outcomes without first understanding the system that produces them.

For individuals, systems change starts small. Not with sweeping resolutions, but with attention to everyday choices. What do I do when I feel overwhelmed? What gets deferred when time feels scarce? Where do I default to autopilot? What competing commitments might I be honoring when I behave counter-intuitively toward my goal? When those behaviors shift consistently, they form new patterns. And over time, those patterns become a new personal system.

If an organization wants different results, it must understand which behaviors are being rewarded, explicitly or implicitly.

For organizations, the same logic applies. Meetings, decision-making norms, communication channels, conflict avoidance, risk-taking; these are not just cultural buzzwords. They are observable behaviors that repeat until they become “just how things work around here.” If an organization wants different results, it must understand which behaviors are being rewarded, explicitly or implicitly. It must see which patterns those behaviors reinforce. And it must recognize how those patterns stabilize the current system, often in ways that actively resist the change leadership is asking for.

Here’s the counterintuitive part: you cannot change mindsets directly. Mindsets reveal themselves through behavior, not the other way around. Only after you understand the behaviors driving the system can you begin to identify the beliefs, assumptions, and mental models sustaining them. And while individual mindsets may vary, the patterns of behavior that make up systems are often driven by shared assumptions across the group.

This is where meaningful change becomes possible. Not through better communication or more compelling vision statements, but through seeing the system clearly enough to know where the real work needs to happen.

So perhaps a better resolution, whether for yourself or your organization, is this:

• Understand the system you operate in before trying to change it.

• See the patterns in behavior.

• Surface the mindsets that drive those behaviors.

• Name your role in the system and its undesirable outcomes—and help others do the same, but only after you lead with vulnerability.

• Name the system’s role and the processes through which it keeps producing the results you don’t want.

  
  

Only then can you and others in the system make an explicit, informed choice about what and how to change.