5 Reasons to Be Against Better Leadership Lists

In an age of endless social media scrolling and algorithmic content optimization, the proliferation of leadership listicles, bulleted posts, and stepwise solutions offering “must-read insights” and “essential tips” has become inescapable. While the desire for accessible wisdom is understandable, and the attempted distillation of an ever-growing surplus of management ideas commendable, these oversimplified formats may be doing more harm than good to aspiring leaders and the broader discourse around leadership development.

In 2009, in The Infinity of Lists, the Italian critic and semiotician Umberto Eco examined humanity’s enduring compulsion to enumerate and catalog, positioning listmaking as a fundamental expression of Western culture’s desire to comprehend and contain the boundless. He argued that our shifting approaches to lists, from medieval catalogues of saints to modernist literary experiments, reflect changing attitudes toward infinity and completeness. The listmaker of any era confronts the overwhelming vastness of reality by selecting, ordering, and excluding, and, in doing so, reflects the era’s particular relationships with order, knowledge, and the infinite.

Social media lists may be one reflection of our efforts today to grapple with such absolutes. While varying enormously in quality, and appearing across diverse social media platforms, the majority of lists about leadership – for example, “5 Proven Steps to Better Leadership” – often imply a narrative: transformation and problem-solving through simple steps. The fuller implication is that these lists suggest (or, depending on tone, promise) a story of progress, efficiency, or self-improvement achieved while overcoming common challenges that readers can embrace, often oversimplifying complex realities. At the same time, underpinning many lists and the narratives they imply are contemporary cultural myths of leadership such as being charismatic, productive, or humane.

Beyond the typically unexamined narratives and myths they contain, here are five compelling reasons why we should resist the allure of reductive leadership lists:

1. The False Promise of Universal Application

The notion that leadership insights can be distilled into neat, numbered packages that work across all contexts fundamentally misunderstands the nature of leadership itself. Leadership is inherently contextual. What works brilliantly in one situation may fail miserably in another. When we reduce complex leadership challenges to generic bullet points, we strip away the very context that gives leadership its meaning and effectiveness and makes its practice worth improving in the first place.

Consider how different leadership approaches must be in a fast-moving tech startup versus a legacy manufacturing company, or how cultural contexts dramatically alter what constitutes effective leadership across global organizations. The “5 Breakthrough Ideas for Driving Innovation” or “The 7 Challenges Today’s Leaders Face” format implicitly suggests a one-size-fits-all solution or explanation that simply doesn’t exist in real leadership scenarios. While they may be helpfully suggestive, or directionally accurate, these lists typically lack framing that adequately conveys for who, what, and where they are most potentially relevant.

The danger becomes particularly acute when we consider the global nature of modern business. Leadership practices that prove effective in Silicon Valley might be counterproductive in Singapore, yet listicles rarely acknowledge such cultural nuances. And indeed, an argument could be made that disseminating how-to lists via globalized and social media has the effect of homogenizing leadership discourse and marginalizing many ideas and practices that are more locally and culturally valuable. This oversimplification can lead to failed leadership initiatives and, worse, ecompromised relationships across cultural boundaries.

2. The Dangers of Cognitive Oversimplification

Leadership listicles feed into what the late psychologist Daniel Kahneman famously called “System 1” thinking, our brain’s preference for quick, intuitive responses over slower, deeper, more analytical thought. While this may feel satisfying in the moment, and may also trigger the release of dopamine and activate the brain’s reward pathway, it can create dangerous cognitive shortcuts in how we approach leadership challenges and the wider world. While appealing, the reduction of nuanced leadership concepts into easily digestible lists that make quick sense of hypothetical or imagined situations may impair our ability is to engage more consistently in the slower, deliberate, and reflective thinking of System 2 that allows us to process the complexity of the leadership situations we actually encounter (Kahneman 2011).

Many lists, with titles like “The 4 Essential Leadership Skills for Being Future-Ready,” are premised as “either-or” summaries that are ill-suited to today’s world. When we become accustomed to consuming leadership wisdom in serial or bite-sized formats, we risk losing the mental muscles needed for deeper analysis, contextual thinking, and problem framing. Even more, the accumulation of lists and their consistent consumption may contribute to what Kahneman described in his later work as “noise” (Kahneman, Sibony, and Sunstein 2021). That an unpredictable variability in decisions can plague leaders over time when we are awash in irrelevant factors – potentially including those elements included in generic advisory lists – and don’t have reasoned rules or the habits of mind to build such rules and bring discipline to our decision-making.

This cognitive simplification often manifests in what might be called the “checklist fallacy,” the mistaken belief that leadership development is a matter of ticking off boxes rather than engaging in deep, reflective, and adaptive practices. In The Checklist Manifesto, physician Atul Gawande draws a crucial distinction, writing that checklists “are not comprehensive how-to guides … they are quick and simple tools aimed to buttress the skills of expert professionals” (2010: 128). The fallacy arises when brief lists of uncertain origin and reliability become a basis for would-be expertise rather than a tool expertly employed.

3. The Erosion of Critical Leadership Discourse

The cognitive oversimplification driven by simple lists has a particular recent history in the handling and presentation of management and business information. If the listicle format degrades the quality of wider leadership discourse itself, this tendency preceded social and platform media. More than two decades ago, writing about “the cognitive style of PowerPoint,” Yale statistician and computer scientist Edward Tufte argued that widely used bullet outlines, for example, “failed to bring clarity, focus, or credibility to the presentations. On the contrary, the argument and evidence appeared broken up into small, arbitrary and misleading fragments.” Rather than bringing intellectual discipline, he observes, such formats “accommodated the generic, superficial, and simplistic” (2003: 11).

Tufte found that the very form of bullet outlines both “encourages us to be intellectually lazy” and dilutes the content being communicated. Drawing on earlier research, he identified three specific ways that forms of presentation, notably unelaborated lists and bulleted outlines, compromise content. First, these lists are typically too generic, offering a series of things to do that could apply to any business in any market conditions. Next, bulleted outlines leave unspecified the nature of critical relationships of the individual items, which could be sequential, priority-based, or pertaining to membership in a set. A third form of dilution involves leaving unstated critical assumptions about how a given business works (Shaw, Brown, and Bromiley 1998).

Today, amidst incomparably greater speed and volume, the emphasis on listicles and outlines reflects a desire to create ever-more-clickable headlines and shareable content and threatens amplifying the same effects. Even when lists or bulleted steps derive from more serious and thoughtful research, the lack of background understanding about how the various listed items have been generated deprives them of subtlety and sophistication. The metrics-driven nature of digital media means that nuanced discussions of leadership theory and practice are increasingly displaced by what performs well on social platforms. This creates a self-reinforcing cycle where superficial content breeds demand for more superficial content – which contributes to the erosion of wider popular discourse about leadership.

4. The Illusion of Actionability

While leadership lists often present themselves as immediately actionable, they frequently offer vague directives that provide little genuine guidance for real-world application. Bulleted items like “be authentic” or “embrace innovation” or “practice empathy” or even “be better listeners” sound compelling but offer minimal practical value without specific implementation strategies and deeper context. Take, for instance, the common challenge of building psychological safety in teams. While listicles might suggest simple steps like “encourage open communication” or “celebrate failures,” the reality varies dramatically between contexts: what works for a surgical team in a hospital requires very different approaches than for a product development team in a startup, or for a trading desk in an investment bank or the crew of a commercial airliner.

Beyond the immediate impact on content quality and integrity, this trend has broader implications for leadership education and development programs. When simplified lists become an increasingly prominent form of leadership discourse, even formal educational institutions feel pressure to adapt their content to meet learners’ expectations for quick, easily digestible information. For example, a complex challenge like managing hybrid work arrangements gets reduced to “5 Key Tips for Leading More Successful Hybrid Teams,” missing crucial nuances about industry-specific needs, team dynamics, and organizational culture that might make remote work highly effective at a software company but potentially problematic at a creative advertising agency.

The problem compounds when organizations build or contract for leadership development programs in which such oversimplified principles are expected. Valuable resources are often wasted on initiatives that emphasize quick wins and surface-level changes rather than the deeper, more challenging work of ongoing and substantive leadership development. Yet these quick fixes and simple solutions (and “the power of positive thinking” that complement them) typify a dangerous illusion of leadership development that Harvard leadership expert Barbara Kellerman argues in The End of Leadership (2012) prioritizes often fast-paced, entertaining, and motivational form over substance. This illusion of actionability can actually impede the genuine leadership development enabled by embracing the complexity of leadership journeys by creating a false sense of progress.

5. The Devaluation of Experience

Perhaps most fundamentally, the listicle format implicitly suggests that leadership wisdom can be transmitted through simple declarative or, again, motivational statements rather than earned through experience and reflection. This runs counter to decades of research on experiential learning and skill development. In American educational theorist David Kolb’s formulation, “Learning is the process whereby knowledge is created through the transformation of experience” (1984: 38). When we reduce leadership development to consuming lists of tips and tricks, we risk devaluing the essential role of lived experience, reflection, and personal growth in developing individual leadership capabilities.

Recent management studies reinforce this perspective. In a review of 25 years of leader and leadership development research, Australian management scholar David Day and his colleagues concluded that, more than programs, workshops, reading, or listening, it is through “day-to-day leadership activities where the crux of development really resides” (2014: 80). While it is possible to incorporate reflection on and application of online leadership lists into ongoing leadership practice, Day’s emphasis on experiential leadership development seems more generally to stand in stark contrast to the passive consumption model promoted by listicles and bulleted guides with titles like, “The 5 Steps You Need to Take to Lead AI.”

This devaluation of everyday leadership practice updates a problem that Stanford’s Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert Sutton described decades ago (1999). The “knowing-doing gap” has evolved beyond organizational walls into today’s social and platform media. While executives once substituted elaborate presentations for action, contemporary “thought leaders” flood platforms with decontextualized listicles, bulleted frameworks, and viral soundbites that prioritize “smart talk” over demonstrated experience and are habitually consumed by digital dwellers. This shift has amplified the original problem of complex ideas being reduced to easily shareable factoids and platitudes, while the messy reality of leading teams and driving change is glossed over. True leadership wisdom, earned through years of practical experience and learning from failures, risks being drowned out by a cascade of superficial hot takes and oversimplified formulas.

Moving Beyond Lists – or, at least, their Superficial Consumption: A Path Forward

The solution isn’t to abandon the pursuit of accessible leadership wisdom, or the distillation and illustration of relevant ideas and experiences, but rather to develop more thoughtful approaches to sharing, exploring, and consuming leadership insights. Indeed, and to be clear, some lists and bulleted outlines that appear on social are substantive, concrete, contextualized, evidence-based, and open-ended. Many of these include valuable reflections, elaborations, and extensions of the simple items included in the lists themselves. Yet for the many more skeletal outlines and listicles that proliferate on social platforms, we do well to ask basic questions like the following:

1. Where does this work – and, Who says so?

Before embracing the latest “transformational,” “agile,” or “human-centered” leadership advice, examine whether these appealing buzzwords actually translate to meaningful practices in your specific industry, team or organizational design, and cultural context. Beyond physical locality or geography, ask whether this advice apply to virtual, digital, and platform environments or do leaders need to adapt it. And be sure to query the source and their bases for sharing the ideas and advice. Be sure to ask, Are trending leadership principles universally effective just because they’re widely shared or come from a recognizable source?

2. What’s conspicuously missing?

Look beyond inspirational terms like “psychological safety,” “radical candor,” or “servant leadership” to identify critical gaps and complex relationships that simplified iterations or tips based on these ideas or frameworks conveniently ignore. Consider what essential but messier realities have been glossed over with attractive but generic terminology. View lists as ‘open-ended’ and ask, What contributions or critiques would you add based on personal experiences and diverse perspectives?

3. What’s the real substance?

Instead of accepting that stepwise directives about “emotional intelligence,” “growth mindsets,” or “authentic leadership” automatically lead to success, investigate the actual research, theoretical foundations, and documented case studies that either support or qualify these popular concepts. What empirical evidence or specific, messy, real-world experience exists behind the bullets outlining how to embrace these ideas?

4. How would this actually work tomorrow?

Transform vague imperatives about being “innovative,” “resilient,” or “inclusive” into concrete actions. Which specific behaviors, resources, and metrics would make these appealing but abstract concepts operational in your particular leadership context? And where may be gaps or exceptions that could help to apply your actions based on these ideas more effectively?

5. What does your own hard-won experience say?

Critically compare trending advice about “vulnerability,” “purpose-driven leadership,” or “digital transformation” against the insights you’ve gained through direct experience. Where do these popular frameworks align with reality? Where do they oversimplify the genuine challenges you’ve faced? What are ways to combine the reports and recoemmendations with your own experiences?

These questions encourage leaders to look past the seductive simplicity of contemporary leadership buzzwords and trending concepts to engage with the more complex realities of organizational life that lists often overlook in favor of shareable, relatable, but ultimately superficial advice.

The title of the original Italian edition of Eco’s catalog was La Vertigine della Lista – translated literally, The Vertigo of Lists. As we navigate an increasingly complex business landscape, and do so more and more via platformed and social media that feature AI-generated content, the leadership development community should resist the temptation to oversimplify or make superficial sense of the surfeit of ideas, opinions, and perspectives circulating today. Genuine and actionable leadership wisdom rarely comes in easily numbered and universally applicable packages, and our approaches to sharing and developing leadership insights, and developing our own leadership practices from active experiences, should reflect this reality.

References

David V. Day, John W. Fleenor, Leanne E. Atwater, Rachel E. Sturm, and Rob A. McKee (2014) “Advances in Leader and Leadership Development: A Review of 25 Years of Research and Theory,” The Leadership Quarterly 25: 63-82; https://doi.org/10.1016/j.leaqua.2013.11.004Get rights and content

Umberto Eco (2009) The Infinity of Lists: An Illustrated Essay, trans. Alastair McEwen, Rizzoli.

Atul Gawande (2010) The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right, Metropolitan Books.

Daniel Kahneman (2011) Thinking, Fast and Slow, Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Daniel Kahneman, Olivier Sibony, Cass R. Sunstein (2021) Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment, Little, Brown Spark.

Barbara Kellerman (2014) The End of Leadership, Harper Business.

David A. Kolb (1984) Experiential Learning: Experience as the Source of Learning and Development, Prentice-Hall.

Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert I. Sutton (1999) “The Smart-Talk Trap,” Harvard Business Review, May-June 1999; https://hbr.org/1999/05/the-smart-talk-trap

Gordon Shaw, Robert Brown, and Philip Bromiley (1998) “Strategic Stories: How 3M is Rewriting Business Planning,” Harvard Business Review, May-June 1998; https://hbr.org/1998/05/strategic-stories-how-3m-is-rewriting-business-planning

Edward Tufte (2003) The Cognitive Style of Powerpoint, Graphics Press LLC.