Do you know the “positive results bias”? This is a very common cognitive bias, which pushes us to believe that good results are necessarily the outcome of good decisions or of a superior performance.

Rasmus Ankersen alerts us on this form of blindness using the example of soccerclub Newcastle United. He shows how one season’s good performance led the management to want to replicate its “winning” configurations the next one. The disappointment was great! Indeed, the management had insufficiently analyzed the reasons of the success and totally underestimated the role that luck had played. A very common mistake.

Thus, let’s not satisfy ourselves with post-mortem returns of experience! We need to analyze our successes with as much rigor and critical mind as we do our failures…

Source: How to outthink your competition — with a lesson from sports, Rasmus Ankersen, TEDxManchester, October 2022.