Harry Guild, data strategist at BBH London, wrote an article called The Long and the Short of It Needs the Wrong and the Shit of It. “We’ve built a marketing culture that’s obsessed with aping winners and sweeps failure under the carpet.”
“Our industry’s effectiveness bible, The Long And The Short Of It, is a huge compilation of lessons from winners, yet it’s in the losers that we can best understand success.”
“This is known as survivorship bias: our tendency to construct faulty ‘learnings’ from winners at the expense of more complex contextual datasets.”
The article quotes Daniel Kahneman, author of Thinking, Fast and Slow: “A stupid decision that works out well becomes a brilliant idea in hindsight… If you group success together and look for what makes them similar, the only real answer will be luck.”
See also The Halo Effect.
Articles of Interest 