The unbearable lightness of promises

When reforms are judged by their plans rather than their impact, they risk drifting into the lightness of promises unmet. An “outcome reflex” mindset restores gravity—anchoring ambition in evidence, adaptability, and the lived results that endure beyond political cycles.

Milan Kundera once wrote that life moves between weight and lightness, the heaviness of what is declared and the lightness of what is forgotten. That image lingers when we think about public reform: how policies, conceived with great weight, can dissolve into the lightness of promises unmet.

In education, governments can deliver new national curricula, professional development for thousands of teachers, expanded access to digital learning platforms, or even longer school days to improve equity. They can measure the extent to which these reforms are rolled out on schedule and within budget. And yet the deeper question remains: Did it matter? Were students learning more, more equitably, with skills relevant to a changing world?

An “outcome reflex” approach would address this precise problem—an instinctive response to evaluate success not by the faithful execution of a plan, but by the results that matter for people. It is the mindset of treating every plan as a hypothesis, constantly testing assumptions against evidence, and being willing to adjust course in real time. It resists the optimism bias that tempts policymakers to assume elegant designs will inevitably succeed. It confronts sunk-cost bias by forcing leaders to adjust or abandon programs that are not delivering. It guards against present bias by focusing attention not on immediate visibility but on long-term transformation.

Using data as a compass

Consider international assessments. Too often Program for International Student Assessment or Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study data arrives like thunder every three years, a sudden reminder of where a country stands, and then the storm passes, leaving little behind. An “outcome reflex” mindset proposes a different posture: Tests should be less like tribunals and more like compasses.

What if a minister did not have to wait until 2027 to know how their 15-year-olds are performing, but could see every week what proportion of primary students mastered that week’s math lesson, and every term whether the gap in grade-three literacy between rural and urban schools had narrowed or widened? What if a provincial director could learn within weeks whether a new mentoring program was shifting classroom practice, rather than waiting years for evaluation reports? And what if this information were easily accessible to head teachers, district officers, and high-level officials, so they could be used to direct supervision and support resources to lagging areas, and inform adjustments to implementation guidelines and policy? What if these signals did not remain hidden in internal files but were available on a public dashboard, so parents and citizens could see in real time whether reforms were narrowing gaps or not?

Such transparency would alter the process and politics of reform. It would create a process for ongoing improvement, directing management focus to implementation adjustments that improve learning outcomes.  It would also create a constituency for outcomes, empower citizens to demand adjustments, and make it harder for governments to hide behind the comfort of plans when results were stagnant.  In Jordan, World Bank–supported reforms embedded such formative assessments, enabling teachers and policymakers to act long before international rankings arrived. In this way, the future does not ambush leaders from a distant horizon; it whispers through weekly signals that demand action now. The same spirit could be applied to public health, where governments need not wait years to see if prevention programs reduce illness, or to labor markets, where job-creation schemes can be tested against immediate feedback on employment quality.

Technology can help deliver results

Technology makes this immediacy possible. Across the world, front line providers have access to mobile phones. Platforms like WhatsApp are already widely used for ad-hoc communication and coordination. These devices and platforms can be harnessed when used as the nervous system of reform. In Punjab, a World Bank-supported initiative introduced android apps to verify that teachers show up during working hours, turning absenteeism into a visible fact, impossible to ignore. Realtime updates on an integrated education dashboard also provided data for immediate action. As a result, teacher attendance rates increased from 70% to a high of 94%. A dashboard light can be addressed instantly instead of being postponed to the next review cycle.

In more technologically advanced contexts, adaptive platforms use algorithms to track and analyze how students respond to lessons and tasks, generating real-time insight into each student’s learning journey and unpacking who is advancing, who is stagnating, who risks being left behind. Artificial intelligence can flag which teaching practices generate the strongest learning gains, demanding that ministries reconsider programs if they produce little effect. These signals are alarms that pierce complacency.

Empowering action

But evidence without the capacity to act is impotence. An “outcome reflex” also requires that every stakeholder capable of influencing results be empowered to respond. For example, a national minister can reallocate resources or reshape priorities. A province administrator can adjust programs midyear when dropout rises. A teacher can adapt lessons when classroom data shows methods are not working.

Politics remains the great test

Programs can be dismantled by the next administration; outcomes, once achieved, are harder to erase. Parents who see their children reading more confidently, or preparing more successfully for jobs, become constituencies that anchor reforms beyond political cycles. An “outcome reflex” therefore produces not only effectiveness but resilience. It grounds legitimacy not in promises announced, but in outcomes realized.

We return, then, to Kundera. The struggle of reform is the struggle of memory against forgetting: The insistence that results, once achieved, be neither obscured by rhetoric nor dissolved into reports. Plans are necessary, but without outcomes they risk becoming weight without meaning, the unbearable lightness of promises.