Stephen ShapiroFAST Innovation® · Innovation made practical, personal, and playful—with lasting impact. Hall of Fame Speaker. Author of seven books on innovation. Creator of Personality Poker®.

e18 - The Undersampling of Failure and Innovation

Name: e18 - The Undersampling of Failure and Innovation
Uploaded: 2021-04-01T11:00:16+00:00
Duration: 47 s
Channel: Stephen Shapiro
Description: Stephen Shapiro explains why we hear mostly from successful companies about best practices: the many organizations that tried the same things and failed…

1 Apr 2021 · 1 min

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Stephen Shapiro explains why we hear mostly from successful companies about best practices: the many organizations that tried the same things and failed stay silent. This survivor bias means failure is drastically undersampled in what we learn from.

Chapters

The under sampling of failure basically means that we tend to focus on the winners, the successes. The cousin to under sampling of failure is survivor bias. And what ends up happening is the companies that were successful implementing a particular best practice are at conferences talking about their best practices. They write books about their best practices. But what about the hundreds or thousands of companies that did exactly the same practice and they failed? Well, we don't hear about them. They're not being invited to speak at conferences. They're not being asked by publishers to do a book. So the under sampling of failure says that we tend to focus on success rather than failure.