Why good people get poor results: the systems that sabotage our best intentions

And the psychology behind our obsession with individuals

It is comforting to believe that good intentions will see us through. That if people are kind, principled and hard-working, success will surely follow. But this is wishful thinking. Again and again, we see decent, capable people trapped in systems that almost guarantee suboptimal outcomes.

The surplus model of school improvement offers a useful way to understand this failure. Instead of seeing school performance as a simple matter of individual effort or competence, it forces us to consider how the structures and conditions within which people work shape what is possible. The surplus model suggests that improvement is not driven by the heroic efforts of a few but by the cumulative effect of well-designed systems that create the space, the surplus, for good work to thrive.

The problem, then, is not that people do not care or are not trying hard enough. The problem is that the systems they work within strip away that surplus. If we want to understand why well-meaning people so often get poor results, we have to stop fetishising individual qualities and effort, and start looking at whether the system generates the capacity necessary for improvement. Yet, again and again, we default to personal explanations. Psychology offers clues as to why.

Fundamental attribution error

I’ve written recently about how the FAE means we are hard-wired to overestimate individual agency and underestimate context. We see outcomes and assume they reflect the qualities of the person in charge rather than the conditions they work within. The temptation is to assume that if a school is successful it is because school leaders are possessed of formidable attributes, not that they have been lucky. Likewise, if a school is struggling, we’re likely to assume leaders are deficient in some essential quality, not that the context they’re working is more challenging than in other, more successful schools. At the same time, we’re likely to interpret things we approve of as evidence of wise leadership, whatever the outcomes, and those things we are less keen on as the actions of misguided fools.

The just-world fallacy

We are also seduced into believing that we get what we deserve: success must be deserved and failure must reflect some personal shortcoming. It feels better to think the world is fair than to admit that good people can fail because the odds are stacked against them. When we see a school with excellent results, the easy story is that this is down to the vision, integrity and brilliance of its leaders. We like to imagine that the head is dynamic, the leadership team is cohesive and the staff are tireless in pursuit of excellence. We rarely stop to ask whether the school benefits from favourable demographics, generous funding or a supportive community that would allow almost any competent team to thrive.

Likewise, when we encounter a school that is struggling, the pull of just-world bias leads us to see this as evidence of weak or flawed leadership. We are quick to conclude that the head is ineffective, that the staff are lazy or poorly managed, that standards have slipped through neglect or incompetence. We find it far harder to entertain the possibility that the school is grappling with challenges beyond its control. Perhaps it serves a community hit by economic decline, where poverty, instability and trauma are daily realities. Perhaps it struggles to recruit and retain staff because of its location or reputation. Perhaps it is held back by insufficient funding or conflicting demands from above.

Melvin Lerner’s experiments in the 1960s brought this bias into stark relief. Building on the insights of Stanley Milgram’s work, Lerner showed that when participants witnessed what they believed was a real person receiving painful electric shocks, their reactions were telling. The victim had done nothing to deserve such treatment. Yet instead of sympathising, many participants began to denigrate her, convincing themselves that she must have brought it on herself. The alternative - that the world was random and unjust - was too unsettling to accept. We see the same pattern in schools. Rather than confront the uncomfortable reality that good people can fail through no fault of their own, we prefer to believe that failure reflects personal shortcomings. It reassures us that the system works as it should and that outcomes are fair.

Consider the school in an affluent suburb where parents can and do provide extra tutoring, where pupils have access to books, cultural capital and secure housing. If that school posts impressive exam results, we tell ourselves it must be because the leadership team is excellent. We overlook the structural advantages that make success more likely. By contrast, think of a school serving a community where families are in temporary accommodation, where English is a second language for many pupils, where food insecurity and social care involvement are common. If that school posts middling or weak results, we leap to blame the head or staff, rather than question whether the system gives them a fair shot at success.

Just-world bias provides a comforting story. It tells us that people get what they deserve, that effort and virtue are rewarded, and that failure is a kind of moral failing. But in doing so, it blinds us to structural inequality, systemic constraints and the sheer contingency of outcomes. Until we confront this bias, we will keep mistaking context for character and luck for leadership.

The illusion of control