Survivorship bias: why “If I did it, anyone can” is such bad advice

“If I can do it, anyone can.” I am confident we have all heard this very misleading statement at least once in our lives. I have heard this narrative spun by successful athletes, entrepreneurs and motivational speakers.

Such a statement comes with good intention, but it lacks nuance, especially when we consider the stories of many others who have had similar journeys and didn't make it.

We see it in the heroic stories of the college dropout, the billionaire entrepreneur who beat the odds, the young men who have survived stabbings, the gambler on a winning streak. And yet, while celebrating these outliers, we often ignore that the darker side of survivorship bias is how this skewed view of the world can affect our logical approach to decision making or problem-solving.

What is survivorship bias?

Survivorship bias is the 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.

It shows up a lot in the business world. We hear stories of entrepreneurs who have been able to succeed “against the odds”. 

Jack Dorsey, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs, the obvious few paraded as founders who dropped out of college and succeeded despite it. The college dropout narrative is used here without ever considering that admission to somewhere like Harvard meant you were probably going to be OK, anyway. Furthermore, the narrative never questions what access and privilege their wider networks, independent of university, may have afforded them - such as access to funding or mentorship. 

This is what survivorship bias looks like in practice. While Jack Dorsey and co rightfully deserve their acclaim, to select just those few examples as a benchmark of success, without exploring all the other factors, is misleading and unhelpful.

When I was a youth worker, one of the biggest problems we had to tackle was intra personal violence, especially between young men. Those carrying weapons felt invincible and would often quote older role models who had been involved in some kind of conflict previously and had survived. The challenge for many of us was getting these young men to recognise and focus on the many incidents where people didn’t get away unmaimed (or alive).

But survivorship bias when ornately packaged is a hard habit to break.

The Challenge

The statistician Abraham Wald has been credited with bringing the issue of survivorship bias to the mainstream. When working with the US military, he noted that for planes that returned from combat,  the focus was reinforcing armour where there were bullet holes. Like the wings, body and tail. 

However, Wald suggested that the most vulnerable part of a plane was the engine and that if any part was going to be strengthened it should be there. The survival of a plane was more dependent on the health of the engine than the general state of the bodywork. The military was focused on the wrong things.

In any area of leadership, it is very easy to look at what works for others. Be it a widget, a hack, best practice or other approaches. Without fully understanding all the circumstances that contribute to the success of that business, product or process, it is easy to single out those few heroes as the template to follow - which does not bode well for leadership decision making as a whole.

The challenge for leaders is to understand what works for us. We cannot afford to skip the hard work of analysis, risk management and other approaches needed for problem-solving and decision making. It is that rigour and testing which allows you to embrace or eliminate what others have done. If a process from somewhere else does have alignment with how you work, then, by all means, embrace it. But test it and adjust it to your culture and way of working. 

Resolving survivorship bias

Like all cognitive biases or shortcuts, survivorship bias requires a specific series of actions to combat it when it raises its head. There are two key starting points for this.

Firstly, explore the data that has informed the bias. For example: 

• What were the factors that contributed to that person’s success?

• What were the factors that played a role in others in a similar space not being successful?

Examining the data where possible is a good way of making sure that you don’t take things at face value but rather base it on more concrete evidence.

Secondly, think about your feedback systems. 

• What is it that informed you that the information from this bias was ok? 

•  If you were to take this same information to your team, your leader or your direct reports how would your assumptions hold up to scrutiny?
  

The impact of bad decision making shows up in many personal and leadership spaces where our cogent decisions are needed. Business, Finance, Healthcare, Politics and Community Groups. It is our duty as leaders to make the space to really ensure that those decisions are not being hampered by the selective focus of a few success stories but instead have been informed by good data and feedback.