Survivoriship bias in leadership, creativity (and my parenting experience)
“Beware of advice from the successful.” — Barnaby James, Principal Engineer at X, the moonshot factory
Have you ever experienced one of those special moments when it seemed that you had something figured out? Just the other day I was vividly reminded of that kind of moment, but with somewhat mixed feelings. It happened many years ago when my now teenage son was just a toddler, and we were visiting a friend’s house — who also had a boy the same age as mine. As my son quietly and politely ate his lunch, my friend’s son was loudly informing her that 1. he hated her, 2. did not want her to be his mother, and 3. was going to run away from home (I think she just refused his request to swap out the lunch offering for a bowl of popcorn and a family size chocolate bar). I felt sorry for her, but I also have to admit to feeling more than a little smug because my son never spoke to me like that. You see, I felt that I had this child-raising thing down cold. I had read all the books, attended the classes, talked to experts, and was reaping the benefits of my hard work and research — I literally had living proof that I had mastered the art of parenting…
Flash forward to the present day to the reason why that memory came flooding back… My 4 year old daughter is red faced, stomping her feet, and wailing that I’m (you guessed it) “no longer her mother” and as such she is “leaving us and the house forever” (interesting that she seemed to think she had the option of leaving us and not the house…). Needless to say, I wasn’t feeling so smug about my parenting skills at that moment — bewildered would be a better word. Why was this happening? I had reread all the books and added new ones before my daughter was born — and had countless YouTube videos and a vastly expanded Internet at my fingertips as well. Was my first parenting round just luck?
Considering one of my mottos is “Luck Is What Happens When Preparation Meets Opportunity” (who knew the Roman philosopher Seneca gave out parenting advice?), that would be pretty disheartening. So I expanded my research to cover topics in the field of “unexpected outcomes and dashed expectations”, and discovered that I had very likely had fallen victim to a phenomenon called survivorship bias.
The formal definition of survivorship bias is “the logical error of concentrating on the people or things that made it past some selection process and overlooking those that did not, typically because of their lack of visibility.” This can lead to some false conclusions in several different ways — like overly optimistic beliefs — because failures you can learn from are not experienced or ignored (I had only applied my parenting research to one child), or the false belief that the successes in a group have some special property (my being the world’s best parent), rather than just coincidence.
So basically my first experience with motherhood didn’t prove I had mastered parenting — it just showed that I had successfully survived it.
“The Misconception: You should focus on the successful if you wish to become successful. — The Truth: When failure becomes invisible, the difference between failure and success may also become invisible” — David McRaney, Journalist, Podcaster
Survivorship bias can affect all types of work and personal approaches and outcomes — projects, career choices, implementing ideas, strategizing, problem solving, etc., and recognizing it while you’re dealing with challenges and problems can save you a lot of time and disappointment. One of the most famous examples of Survivorship bias occurred during World War 2 when the US military was trying to find the best way to protect their bombers. Seeing that returning planes consistently had clusters of bullet holes near the wings, body, and tail, they decided to add extra armor in those areas. But a mathematician named Abraham Wald pointed out that they were looking at planes that had made it back (the survivors) and were seeing evidence that showed where the planes could take the most damage and survive the trip (the success stories). He explained that they should be looking at where the surviving planes were undamaged, because that’s where the bombers were most vulnerable — it was where the planes that failed to make it back were hit. Fortunately, our succumbing to Survivorship bias is rarely a literal life or death situation. But it might cause us to miss opportunities, make less that optimal choices, and produce less than stellar results.
A key aspect of survivorship bias is that success is misinterpreted as a validation that your solution will work in similar circumstances. This can be especially damaging when someone in a position of leadership has a “double dose” of Survivorship bias. When leaders believe (like I did with my parenting) that they have everything figured out, and could therefore not allow their team members to be creative — sticking to the “proven” success methodologies.
Another survivorship trap is misinterpreting or discarding less than successful solutions or results from past attempts when faced with similar challenges or problems further on down the road. This can lead to abandoning good ideas and discourage innovation. For example, a project manager may have tried using brainstorming sessions to generate innovative ideas, found that participation was low, and decided not to try brainstorming in subsequent projects. By basing her decision on the less than desired results, she missed an opportunity to learn from the failure; perhaps that particular team was full of introverts who needed more time and space to put forward some potentially great ideas.
From a professional development perspective, another well-known survivorship example is when someone pursuing a career in business learns that Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jack Dorsey were all college dropouts, and assumes that college is unnecessary to be successful in the technology business. But where are all the stories about the vast number of college dropouts who failed to even get a job in their chosen career? It’s a lot more instructive and helpful to learn from their failures than to create a strategy based on the exceptions to the rule. Also, people who narrowly focus on success stories often don’t take into consideration that each success story is made up of a convergence of factors (connections, experience, personality traits) and circumstances (luck, timing, demand).
This is not to say someone or something can’t achieve or repeat a great success by applying an age-old method — but before you apply it to your situation, be aware that there may be a lot of people that you don’t know about that tried the same method and failed. And if that successful someone was you, it doesn’t hurt to look at things through a new lens and to remember that investment ad disclaimer “Past performance is not an indicator of future results.”…
And in case you’re wondering about how I’m adapting to the new realities of parenting a cute but crafty daughter in a Covid world, I decided to cleverly deploy technology to calm her by letting her play games on my phone in return for a promise to be nicer. This worked great — she smiled and focused intently on the phone. But I won’t be using that ploy again — first of all it could become a Survivorship bias situation, and second, she didn’t really play the games — I know this because an Uber showed up 5 min later responding to a call from my phone to take my daughter to the airport…
