Copying Can Be Costly

Copying can be a costly mistake if you fail to appreciate the complex interactions that produced the result you hope to produce.

Knowing why something worked or didn’t work requires avoiding several biases including:

🚫 Availability bias: Basing decisions upon only easily recalled or accessed data, such as this month’s sales or recent news reports.

🚫 Selection bias: Data are not from randomly selected groups but are collected in a non-representative way, such as surveying only satisfied customers.

🚫 Hindsight bias: We believe past events are more predictable than they actually were. You say, “I knew it all along”, but did not take action on that supposed knowledge at the time.

🚫 Confusing correlation with causation: Drawing faulty causation lines between events. Two classic examples include increased ice cream sales leading to higher crime rates (lurking variable warmer temperatures), Children with larger shoe sizes exhibit higher reading abilities (increasing age drives both).

Believing that mistakes are your best teacher may simply be the result of one of several cognitive biases and the source of a random walk.

Purposeful, intentional learning is possible. When we chose a course of action, document an expected outcome and a method of evaluation, then act with the intention of learning (learning occurs when outcomes are predicted incorrectly), followed by study—comparing predictions to results—those experiences that we used to call mistakes become markers of new knowledge gained upon a learning journey.