There’s a quote by the management consultant W. Edwards Deming that I think about on a near-daily basis when it comes to making and marketing podcasts.
The quote?
“Every system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets.”
When it comes to growing your podcast, the implication is clear.
If your show is currently growing at a healthy 10% month-over-month growth rate, you’ll likely continue to grow at that rate into the future, tripling in size each and every year.
If, on the other hand, your growth is stagnant, you can be almost certain that—unless your approach to creating and marketing your show changes—it’s going to stay that way.
So what do you do about it?
Depending on your situation, Deming’s quote might be either demoralizing or empowering.
Demoralizing because when we’re not getting the results we’d like to be getting, our natural inclination is to shift the blame to external factors beyond our control.
This quote, however, suggests, that if your show isn’t growing, it’s because you’ve built a system to perfectly deliver that result, and will continue to get that result for as long as you stick with the current system.
But then there’s the empowering interpretation.
The one that suggests that you have the power to change your results simply by changing the underlying system that guides the creation and marketing of your show.
And once you change the system, it will perfectly and consistently deliver the results it is designed to produce, well into the future.
You might have heard podcast creators talk about how they produced their show for a year or two before suddenly—as if by some kind of magic—their growth exploded.
This is a common occurrence among podcast creators, with the reason for the sudden change in trajectory often being held up as proof of the value of consistency.
But this sends a dangerous message to other creators.
That they simply need to remain consistent, to carry on feeding their current system, and eventually, their show will begin to grow.
The reality is this.
When a show starts growing a year or two (or more!) into production, the reason is almost always because the creator or team behind it finally changed the underlying marketing system to deliver a result different than the one they’d previously been getting.
Sometimes, the results of a change are almost immediate.
More often, they take weeks or months to work their way through the system.
Either way, lasting changes in outcomes don’t result out of thin air.
You can’t run out the clock and simply wait for growth to arrive.
Which means there are two questions for you:
What is the system underlying your show currently optimized to deliver?
And if you don’t like the system’s current output, what can you change it to deliver something different?
You’re the architect.
Own the system.
Own the results.
