Where the Bullet Holes Aren’t
The Perseverance Playbook | Ed. 55
In the defining days of 1943, Allied bombers grinding through flak over Europe were taking a beating from Nazi fire. The U.S. military wanted to add armor to better protect the crews but armor is heavy, so the question of where to add it landed with the Statistical Research Group at Columbia University and a mathematician named Abraham Wald.
In his book How Not To Be Wrong, mathematician Jordan Ellenberg reconstructed the pattern the analysts shared with Wald. Though many planes didn’t return at all, those that did averaged 1.73 bullet holes per square foot across the fuselage and just 1.11 over the engines. The officers saw an opportunity for efficiency, reasoning that the armor should go where the planes were getting hit the most. As Ellenberg tells it, that was not the answer they got.
“The armor, said Wald, doesn’t go where the bullet holes are. It goes where the bullet holes aren’t: on the engines.”
The reasoning was startlingly simple (and it turns out, statistically valid). Planes with shredded engines existed, they just were not around to analyze because they were the ones that never made it back. They were lying at the bottom of the English Channel or smoldering in pieces over the fields of France.
Wald understood at a visceral level that the military was studying only the survivors, and by mistaking them for the whole story they missed learning from those that weren’t in the room. And Wald knew something about counting only who is left in the room.
Born the grandson of a rabbi and the son of an Orthodox Jewish baker in Kolozsvár, Transylvania in 1902, Wald was homeschooled because his faith would not allow him to attend school on the Sabbath. He went on to earn a PhD in mathematics from the University of Vienna, but was stripped of his position when the Nazis took Austria. After he fled to America in 1938 all but one member of the family he left behind died at Auschwitz.
While his work on aircraft vulnerability would inform military thinking for years, in a cruel twist of fate the broader world would not get to appreciate it for decades. The eight wartime memoranda he produced proving the statistics of what we now call “survivorship bias” sat stored in a box for almost forty years. Wald unfortunately died in a plane crash in 1950, and the memoranda would not resurface and be published by the Center for Naval Analyses until 1980.
Think about that for a moment. The century’s clearest lesson about the impact of the unseen went itself unseen for a generation. No one clapped for Abraham Wald in 1943. The applause arrived four decades late, for a man who never got to hear it.
The Stories We Tell
The smallest patient I have ever treated weighed 360 grams at birth, about the same as a can of soda. Her wonderful family allowed me to write some of her story in Tiny Medicine: how she survived a pulmonary hemorrhage on her third night of life, how it took ten days before she was stable enough for her mother to hold her, and how her family spent four and a half months in a pod lit each morning by sunrise streaming over the Blue Ridge Mountains, running (in her mother’s words) “on caffeine and faith.” She went home, and years later we walked the Asheville March of Dimes together. She is a shining example of an incredible plane that made it back to base.
But the preface of that same book opens with a different baby, one who died in his mother’s arms at 2:37 in the morning, twelve hours old, in a room crowded with family and filled with love and heartache. There is no celebration on the return trip home, no photos from first days of preschool, no reunion picnic where his family stands in the sunshine holding juice boxes.
Yet the babies I’ve cared for who didn’t survive their time in the NICU and their families have shaped who I am as a physician, as a father, and as a person more significantly than I have words to share. They shape the science that drives the practice of medicine, so much so that today’s NICUs can save neonates whose conditions were a death sentence when I became a doctor nearly twenty years ago.
More importantly, they shape the connection that drives the heart of medicine. I can still see the faces of every mom-to-be (and the dads-to-be next to them) I had to tell were going to deliver their baby too premature for us to be able to resuscitate. I can feel the searing pain in their eyes when I look at my own children. And it reminds me how lucky I have been, and how precious and tenuous the world can be.
Both stories are true, but only one of them is visible. If you want to truly understand and appreciate survival, you have to learn from each of them.
Playbook
Eighty years later, most of us are still armoring where the bullet holes are and remain blind to the real, structural weaknesses that exist where they aren’t. We study the finishers, the promoted, and the funded, then wonder why the lessons we draw from them remain incomplete.
Here are three ways I’ve learned to look for the planes that didn’t make it back:
1. Treat every visible record as a filtered record. Results pages list the athletes who finished, not the ones who stopped at mile 17. Org charts list who got promoted, not who burned out, were trampled, took a leap out or were ejected on the way. Before you draw a lesson from any success story, including your own, ask what the record cannot show you.
2. Create the infrastructure necessary to learn from both the survivors and the non-survivors. Medicine institutionalizes this function in an M&M conference room every month, on purpose, with the whole team in the room. Many industries never formally revisit their lost deals, the outstanding team members who left, or the projects that died. That may be where your most valuable data is sitting.
3. Add the armor where the holes are not. The loudest problems in any organization tend to be the survivable ones, which is precisely why you can still hear them. Look carefully at how well you are protecting the unglamorous systems whose failure you never get to learn from twice.
Your Turn
Where in your work are you only counting the planes that made it back? And when did you last sit down, deliberately, with a failure everyone else has already moved past?
As always, I would love to hear about it in the comments.
Oh, and one more thing.
Wald’s story is not just this week’s edition. I am planning on using it as the opening of Chapter 1 of my next book, No One Claps at Mile 17. I’m writing it now, and some weeks I’ll test a bit of the material here to see how it resonates with all of you. If it landed, please tell me. And if it didn’t land, please please please tell me that too.
Featured Image Credit: Martin Grandjean, McGeddon, Cameron Moll from WikiCommons
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