Learning from successful projects: what missing cases conceal
Before selecting a partner or a development method, managers often turn to projects that reached completion. The more useful question is narrower: how should those references inform a decision when comparable failures are less visible?
What the literature establishes
Jerker Denrell (2003, Organization Science) uses modelling to show that an underrepresentation of failures can distort the lessons drawn from organisational experience. A risky practice can appear beneficial when observation focuses on organisations that survived, even if it offers no such advantage in the original population. The problem therefore concerns the selection of observed cases, not merely the quality of their analysis.
When a remarkable case stands in for evidence
James G. March, Lee S. Sproull and Michal Tamuz (1991, Organization Science) examine how organisations learn from a very limited number of events. Their analysis distinguishes, in particular, lived experience from the interpretations and alternative histories an organisation can construct around it. A success can therefore support several plausible explanations without establishing whether the method, context or circumstances made the difference.
The premature conclusion
It is tempting to conclude that studying failures instead of successes is all that is needed. Yet replacing one selection with another does not produce an appropriate comparison set. To examine a practice, managers need comparable cases in which it was present and absent, selected without relying solely on their outcomes. (our executive and employee training programmes)
What the available references cannot establish
These papers offer theoretical mechanisms and an analysis of organisational learning, not an estimate of the size of the bias in Basel-based companies. In practice, records of discontinued projects may be incomplete, confidential or classified differently from completed projects. Even a comprehensive register cannot, by itself, isolate a causal effect: projects may differ in difficulty, resources or regulatory environment.
A practical check in Bâle
Within SHR’s « Prise de décision » programme, one exercise is to examine a recommendation based on previous projects: selecting a pharma partner, a life sciences method, a Rhine logistics provider or an international R&D structure. Before reviewing outcomes, define the scope of comparable cases in writing and identify them in an internal register, then record their status and whether they appear in the recommendation dossier. Calculate separately, for completed and discontinued projects, the proportion of registered cases actually cited in that dossier. A difference does not prove that the recommendation is wrong, but makes reference selection verifiable and calls for an explanation before the decision. To go further: explore the Decision-making training in Basel, or browse our executive and employee training programmes in Switzerland.
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