What happens when an aeroplane gets chicken pox…
If you’ve spent any time on social media, you’ve probably seen this diagram shared at some point, usually responding to someone in an argument, and often without any explanation. But where did it come from and what does it mean?
In World War II, allied bombing missions over Germany were particularly dangerous. Ground-based anti-aircraft guns shot at the bombers from below, and enemy fighter planes shot at them from every other angle. With bombers being much less agile than their fighter cousins, they had trouble dodging enemy fire. They also had to stay pretty steady to drop their bombs with any accuracy.
If you can’t dodge a bullet, you’ve got to find a way to take it without crashing. So bombers were armored, and that armor was heavy. You couldn’t put too much armored plating on the plane, or it wouldn’t fly. The allied engineers had to figure out the most essential places to add extra armor to.
The Obvious Solution Was Wrong
Abraham Wald, who learned to smile as he got older.
They started by making notes after every mission of where a plane got hit. Then they did something really clever (you can thank Hungarian-born American mathematician Abraham Wald for this insight). They realized that each of these hits could make a map for the strategic placement of armor. The key insight was this: each dot on the diagram showed a place where a plane could get hit and survive. So that meant the armor had to go in all the other spots.
This means that if you saw a plane return with its tail all shot up, the wrong instinct would be to put the armor there, even though that might feel reasonable in the moment. It’s a form of survivorship bias. That’s when you only look at examples of success without comparing to examples of failure. Business advice is absolutely lousy with survivorship bias.
Look at both winners and losers
A successful CEO says “this is what I did to grow.” He or she might be right. But we really need to look at what a bunch of successful businesses did, then compare that to what a bunch of failed businesses did. For example, successful business owners tend to:
- Be taller
- Be first-born
- Have a deeper voice
It won’t shock you to find out that plenty of tall, first-born men and women with deeper voices have run failed businesses. Maybe these qualities have some influence on things, but they’re not the primary drivers of success. You need to look at both the winners and losers.
The next time you meet a fellow owner-operator who gives you their secret to success, take a moment and think if you know any not-so-successful ventures that tried the same thing.
And if you need any help weeding out the good advice from the bad, we’re pretty good at that. We’d love to talk.