Nothing dies harder than a bad idea, wrote Julia Cameron in her 1992 book, The Artist’s Way. Unfortunately in the world of careers advice and human resources, bad ideas persist in the face of all evidence and reason to a degree that astrologers can only envy.

Four of the most obvious sources of bad advice are: the well-meaning but misguided and misleading; the stupid keep it simple stupid brigade; the one-trick pony consultants who flog that pony to any sucker they can; and people like me who reduce complexity to four categories and thus join the keep it simple brigade.

The next time you’re given advice at work, ask why you are being given it, and what advice are you not hearing.Credit: iStock

The well-meaning have insufficiently weighed up the risks of their advice, generally because their advice seems so commonsensical as to be obvious. Alternatively and worse they do not consider there to be any downside because “it worked for them”. In either case, they have long departed the rocky and tricky shores of evidence-based advice, for the Paradise Isles of the Anecdotes.

We are attuned to mimicking the behaviour of........

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