In a world where things happen with absolute certainty, all we need to do is make detailed plans on what we need to do to achieve our intended outcomes, and then invest all our energies and effort into perfect execution on our plans.

In such a world, all we need to do well in a school examination or a client presentation at work is to simply develop a comprehensive study plan or a work project Gantt chart and fulfil all the required tasks on time and to a high level of standard. However, as we all know, this never happens in real life.

At best, such plans and effort increase the probability of success, but it will never be 100% nor guaranteed. Many factors like health, what exam questions are set, key assumptions such as what the teachers or clients actually want from us versus what we think they want from us, managing nerves during the examination or client presentation, mood of the client, etc all have an influence on the outcome.

At the heart of planning is the assumption that events occur in a linear predictable fashion.

Doing A will lead to B which in turn leads to C and so on, until we get to the assumed wonderful resulting outcome we want. All we then need to do, is to follow the plan to perfection in a timely manner and the heavens will deliver the chained reactions as destined and foretold by our excellent plans.

Of course, as we know, the best plans are only as strong as the assumptions underlying them. This becomes particularly tricky when our assumptions involve factors that are not within our control, such as the involvement of other people, and inherently have less than 100% certainty. Worst still, there might be factors involved that we are not even aware of – the unknown unknowns.

Even if plans really do pan out the way we expected, there is also a chance that other ripple effects might occur and the plan triggers other unplanned events which result in unintended consequences.

In the mid-1990s, an anti-inflammatory drug, Diclofenac, was widely used to treat sick cattle in India. This worked well as planned and helped address widespread disease. However, vultures feeding off cows that died despite the drug treatment were poisoned by the drug and died in droves. The decrease in vultures meant that wild dogs had more food available when scavenging. This resulted in a boom in wild dog population which brought with it more cases of humans being fatally bitten by rabid wild dogs.

While plans have their usefulness, we need to be fully aware of the limitations of plans and not to have misplaced confidence in thinking that the outcome is guaranteed.

The Illusion of “Best Practices” and “One Size Fits All Solutions”

In Australia, mindfulness is a very popular programme of choice with more than half of all teachers applying some form of mindfulness training with their students, backed by millions of dollars in government funding. Such efforts are done in the belief that this could improve mental health.

However, a massive 8-year research project undertaken by 100 researchers across six universities including Oxford and Cambridge, working with 28,000 teenagers aged 11-14, and 650 teachers in 100 schools found results to the contrary.

They found that school-based mindfulness training does not appear to boost wellbeing or improve the mental health of teenagers . Ironically, some students felt worse after practising mindfulness with higher self-reported hyperactivity/inattention and higher panic disorder and obsessive-compulsive scores.

THE GROWTH MINDSET

Psychologist Carol Dweck’s “growth mindset” theory which exhorts having a growth mindset with a core belief that one’s talents and abilities can be continuously developed, instead of a “fixed mindset” with a belief that one’s talents and abilities are fixed, has also become a popular adopted programme in many schools for all ages. However, many studies have since been conducted which found no improvements arising from any form of growth mindset training:

• A randomised control trial in the UK had 4,584 Year 6 students across the whole of England from a mixture of high, medium, and low performing schools undergo a 8-week programme on growth mindset. The study found that growth mindset failed to increase grades or non-cognitive skills with the difference between the control group and the intervention group on 7 measured outcomes to be… zero.
• A Czech Republic study on 5,653 university students found that students with a growth mindset actually got slightly lower test scores than students with a fixed mindset!
• A Scottish study tracking 832 students across their 4 years of university found that students with a growth mindset compared to other students didn’t relatively have higher grades before entering university, or in any year of their university.
• In the USA, researchers studying 438 participants concluded that current bold claims about the benefits of growth mindset are overstated as they found no strong evidence to validate the six supposed “evidenced” claims that people with a growth mindset:

1. Care more about learning
2. Are less concerned about proving themselves to others
3. Are less concerned about possible failure
4. Believe effort is import not just talent
5. Have more perseverance
6. Have more resilience

The above are by no means isolated examples.

Many more abound where professionals and organisations jump on the bandwagon for the latest and hottest fad touting to help them become smarter, better, and more successful than their ignorant peers who don’t know these “secrets”.

A quick glance at the self-help section of any bookstore reveals a proliferation of books touting ten steps to success in various areas of life, how to get rich quick, how to think smarter, how to make friends with anyone and more. A logical conclusion to this assumption is that if a person manages to studiously read, learn, and practise every one of these books, then this person will be the richest, smartest, and most successful human in the universe.

In reality, we realise that there is no silver bullet quick shortcut to success and these fads are sometimes not very different from mere superstitions.

The underlying reason for this is that given the complexity of our lives and challenges, it is extremely unlikely that our path to realising a better life is identical to any other person’s.

We all have different personal characteristics such as backgrounds, experiences, strengths, skills, circumstances, beliefs, values, fortitude and more. What might work very well for one person based on his or her unique set of personal circumstance and characteristics, might not work well for another. Having “best practices” or “sure-win” solutions are simply not possible in complex situations.