A Jerry Macnamara term
What does it mean to control the inputs, not the outputs?
Control the inputs, not the outputs means the only things genuinely yours are your preparedness, your attitude, and how much you care. The result is downstream of those and is never fully in your hands.
Where it comes from
I gave this to a room of coaches at the Jacksonville Football Club Coaches Symposium on August 8, 2026, because coaching makes the point unusually clear. You do not control the scoreboard. You control what your team walked in knowing.
It transfers directly to business, where leaders routinely hold themselves and their teams accountable for outputs they could not have determined.
How to use it
Three inputs, all fully yours:
- Preparedness. Did you do the work before the moment arrived?
- Attitude. How did you show up, especially on the day you did not feel like it?
- Care. Did the people involved know you were invested in them and not only in the result?
The practical use is in how you run reviews. Judging people purely on outputs teaches them to manage the number rather than the work, and it punishes whoever drew the harder assignment. Judging inputs alongside outputs tells you whether a miss was a process failure or a luck failure, which are two completely different conversations.
This is not permission to stop caring about results. It is a statement about where your leverage actually sits. Outputs are what you are measured on. Inputs are what you can move.
Questions people ask
Does this mean results do not matter?
Results matter enormously; they are just not the lever. Every result you want is produced by inputs, so the fastest way to change a result is to change what goes in rather than to talk louder about what came out.
How do I hold someone accountable for inputs?
The same way you hold them accountable for anything: make the expectation specific enough to accept. “Be prepared” is not an input, it is a hope. “Walk into Thursday having read the file and having talked to the customer” is an input.
What about someone who does everything right and still misses?
Then you have a person worth keeping and a plan worth fixing. Distinguishing that case from a genuine miss is the entire reason to look at inputs at all.
This runs through Creating a Culture of Accountability, and the essay Accountability Is a Learned Skill puts it in context. If your room needs it, start at speaking.