[seanhunter]

How do you account for survivorship bias in your chosen group of "good organisational builders"? Organisations which have been successful in their domain could have internal organisational problems but succeed in spite of them because of other exogenous factors (luck, overwhelming product/market fit etc). Are the people who built those organisations good builders? Conversely you could concieve a brilliant org design but the org itself fails. That would not make you a bad org builder.

[shadowsun7]

This is an interesting question! The answer is to hold conclusions loosely and test; always test.

One way to pick who to pay attention to is ‘believability’ — meaning that you listen to those with at least 3 successes, and a coherent explanation when probed.

Pointing out survivorship bias is a common rejoinder to this view. But when you’re trying to put things to practice (not get at some universal truth like a researcher would) you often cannot wait for perfect samples. So you pick certain practices from believable people and test them against reality, and then hold the lessons loosely, making sure to update based on further experiments (which is necessary because life is messy and full of confounded variables).

Over time, it becomes clearer what is useful and works for you, and what isn’t and is perhaps a quirk of the other organisation’s context. But I’m not saying anything new; this is how we learn from life.

Related: Brian Lui’s loose feedback loops https://brianlui.dog/2020/05/10/beware-of-tight-feedback-loo...

And the problems of learning from experience: https://commoncog.com/blog/the-hard-thing-about-learning-fro...