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SMART goals, five-year plans, KPIs and performance reviews all aim to keep a leader's eyes "locked on a finish line", but they don't lead to personal growth, a leadership coach says.

Instead, leaders should be adopting an approach that turns information into lived, repeatable transformation, so they can stop chasing growth and start creating it, Tamsin Simounds says in her new book, The Experiment Mindset.

Drawing on neuroscience and behavioural science to show why goal-setting often fails, she says that when leaders chase end-goals, they tend to: double down on the wrong thing, trapped by the sunk-cost fallacy; beat themselves up for missing the mark – they "label it failure instead of feedback"; and disengage and abandon the goal – it either feels "too big to start" or "too small to care".

According to Simounds, "having an experiment mindset ends that madness"...