5x1: The Best System You Never Built | Wednesday, September 23rd, 2026

by Monti Pace

The​ 5x1 newsletter​ is a concise and insightful resource around a simple concept: systems achieve goals.

sys·tem [ˈsistəm]
a set of things working together as parts of a mechanism or an interconnecting network.
a set of principles or procedures according to which something is done; an organized framework or method.

1 x Principle of Systemization

For a number of years before I started working for myself, I worked at a think tank surrounded by people who were very into economics. One concept in particular might as well have had its own fan club: spontaneous order. Nearly eight years later, I still think about it more than the average person. What's mostly intriguing about it is how often it reveals that the best answer is to do nothing.

The idea is that some order gets made and some order grows. Made order has someone behind it, designing it and answering for how it turns out. Spontaneous order has no one behind it. It's the result of a lot of people acting on what they individually know, and it produces coordination nobody could have planned.

I see it often at Hera Hub DC, the community I run for female business owners in the DC-area. I was at one of our lunches a number of months ago with maybe 8 - 10 women. One of them mentioned she was moving to Germany for her husband's job. Three women at that table had a Germany connection (one had lived there, one knew someone running a business from there, etc). I couldn't have engineered that, but I create the environment that fostered it. Mostly by setting the conditions and then getting out of the way.

Give people a reason to be in the same place. Make it easy for them to see each other, not just you. Keep the rules few enough that there's room to improvise. Then watch what forms before you formalize anything. The first question isn't "what's the simplest system that gets me there?" It's "does this need a system at all, or is something already forming here?" Money, legal, and anything irreversible should have a well-thought-out design. Most other things should have a lot less orchestration than you'd think.

1 x Systemization Quote

"Not to shape the results as the craftsman shapes his handiwork, but rather to cultivate a growth by providing the appropriate environment, in the manner in which the gardener does this for his plants." — Friedrich Hayek

1 x Reflection Question

If you disappeared for a month, what would organize itself without you?

1 x Personal System Idea

Don't. The next time your instinct kicks in to step in, to fix something, to intervene to keep this from happening again, just don't. The group chat that needs someone to make a decision. The thing at home nobody's dealt with yet. The volunteer role nobody's taking that you can see needs filling. The friend whose situation you can see a fix for that they haven't asked you about. Just watch it for a while. Some of it will resolve without you. Some of it won't — a ball drops, something goes undone. Notice whether the outcome is actually as costly or disasterous as you thought it would be.

1 x Business System Idea

The Subtraction. We're not going to hand you a system to build this week. That would rather miss the point.

Instead: find one you can delete. Look for the process you set up for a problem that only happened once. The approval step where you're the only approver. The tracker nobody's opened since you made it. The form that asks for information you never use. Pick one and kill it. Don't replace it. Simply notice what happens.