Questions for you:
- How much of what I know about my field relies on evidence that survived by chance rather than because it was most important?
- What assumptions am I making based on available evidence, without accounting for what might have been lost to time or circumstance?
- When forming conclusions, do I consider what’s missing as carefully as what’s present?
Questions for your organisation:
- Are our historical narratives or institutional knowledge skewed by what happened to be documented rather than what was actually significant?
- How do we account for survivorship bias when learning from our past projects, successes, and failures?
- What important information might we be losing simply because our current documentation practices don’t capture it?
Further reading
A timeline for the Preservation of Vasa https://www.vasamuseet.se/en/explore/research/how-we-preserve-vasa/preservation-timeline
About the image
There are three images here. The background is a picture of the Rosetta Stone which I took in the British Museum. The statue is in Herculaneum and I took the photo on a holiday in Italy a few years ago. The ship at the bottom is a 16th Century depiction of the ill-fated Tudor warship Mary Rose.
Photo montage and photos by Matt Ballantine, 2026
Drawing of the Mary Rose by Anthony Anthony from The Anthony Roll held at the British Library.
Random the Book 