A brief conversational clip (YouTube) where David Jenyns explains that business systems are "documented habits": documented, visible processes that standardize how tasks are done so team members can follow them step-by-step until they internalize them as habits.
Chapters
If you've got to explain stuff to other people all the time, that is probably a good indicator that you don't have systems.
Systems bring a lot of what is invisible and makes it visible. I'd like to think of systems as just documented habits. It's the things that you do in your business and you do them a particular way and you like them done to a certain standard where we capture that, we document it, that makes it visible for everybody. And oftentimes at the start, when you're learning something new, you can follow that step by step process. At some point, those team members will internalize those processes and they will just become part of their habits.