Survivorship bias

Survivorship bias is the reasoning error of drawing conclusions from survivors only: the companies, campaigns or strategies that made it, while the failures that used the same approach are out of view. Management literature is soaked in it: success formulas distilled from winners, without counting how many losers did exactly the same. In marketing the bias appears in case studies, award analyses and challenger-brand growth stories. The antidote is asking for the denominator: out of how many attempts does this success come, and what happened to the rest? Without that denominator a success story is not evidence but an anecdote.

Covered in