The Survivorship Bias Principal

podcast episode with speaker Adam Bahret

In 1942 the US Air Force needed to figure out a way to get more of their bombers home. They were losing them at an atrocious rate. They made a study of where the returning bombers were being hit, it was a great data set. But they made a big mistake in interpreting that data. It was Abraham Wald, a mathematician, who corrected their assumptions and created the “Survivorship Bias principal.” This principle has changed the way we look at data sets and trends. It is a concept that I apply to field failure data sets regularly. More than once it has caught evidence of core issues that would have otherwise been missed.

This webinar will open your eyes to this important perspective. its’ so simple and has made many heroes in the data analysis world since Abraham Ward. If you analyze data or even simply manage teams who use data, then this webinar is for you. Learn how your data sets are telling you much more about your field failures than you think.

This webinar is for anyone who works with or manages programs that use data. There are no math or statistics prerequisites. We are covering a philosophy.

This Accendo Reliability webinar originally broadcast on 21 July 2020.