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?
Organisational applications:
- Institutional knowledge preservation audit:
Assess what types of organisational knowledge survive versus what disappears. Digital formats, formal documentation, and quantitative data persist whilst conversations, informal practices, and contextual understanding vanish. This creates preservation bias toward easily documented activities over crucial but undocumented knowledge like relationships, tacit skills, and cultural understanding. Systematically identify knowledge types at risk of loss and implement preservation strategies before key individuals leave. - Exit interview archaeology:
Recognise that departing employees take irreplaceable knowledge that won’t appear in any documentation. What survives in company records after someone leaves represents a tiny fraction of what they knew. Implement systematic knowledge capture not just through exit interviews but through ongoing documentation of informal practices, decision rationale, and contextual understanding whilst people are still present. The most valuable knowledge is often the hardest to document. - Bias recognition in historical analysis:
When analysing company history, past decisions, or “what worked before,” recognise that available evidence represents what randomly survived rather than what was important. Formal meeting minutes exist whilst crucial corridor conversations don’t. Successful projects have documentation whilst equally valid failed experiments are forgotten. Email archives preserve some communications whilst others used ephemeral channels. Build this preservation bias awareness into strategic planning and avoid assuming that documented history represents complete history. - Format durability in strategic documentation:
Recognise that storage format determines what survives organisational transitions, mergers, and system changes. Documents in proprietary formats become unreadable; databases locked to obsolete systems vanish; physical archives in the wrong locations get discarded. Critical strategic documentation should exist in multiple durable formats with institutional commitment to migration. What seems permanent today (cloud storage, current file formats) may be tomorrow’s equivalent of floppy disks.
Further reading
On preservation bias and archaeology:
The Buried Soul: How Humans Invented Death by Timothy Taylor (Fourth Estate, 2002). Explores how burial practices and preservation conditions shape archaeological evidence, and why our understanding of past cultures reflects preservation accidents rather than historical importance.
Archaeology: The Basics By Brian M. Fagan and Nadia Durrani (Routledge, 5th edition, 2022). Introductory text covering how archaeologists recognise and account for preservation biases when interpreting material culture and reconstructing past societies.
Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle: Myth and Metaphor in the Discovery of Geological Time by Stephen Jay Gould (Harvard University Press, 1987). Though focused on geology, examines how incomplete physical records shape scientific understanding and the interpretive challenges of fragmentary evidence.
On what gets preserved versus what was important:
The Ancient Economy by Moses Finley (University of California Press, 1973). Classic examination of how material evidence biases our understanding of ancient economic systems, privileging durable goods over perishable items and formal transactions over informal exchanges.
Historians and the Living Past: The Theory and Practice of Historical Study by Allan J. Lichtman and Valerie French (Harlan Davidson, 1978). Explores how historical evidence represents biased samples and why historians must account for what didn’t survive.
On survivorship bias generally:
The Flaw of Averages: Why We Underestimate Risk in the Face of Uncertainty by Sam L. Savage (Wiley, 2009). Examines how analysing only surviving examples creates systematic misunderstanding of risk and probability.
How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking by Jordan Ellenberg (Penguin Press, 2014). Includes accessible discussion of survivorship bias with historical examples including Abraham Wald’s analysis of bomber damage in WWII.
Case studies of knowledge loss:
The Discoverers by Daniel J. Boorstin (Random House, 1983). Popular history including numerous examples of crucial knowledge lost through failure of preservation, from Library of Alexandria to vanished technologies.
Lost Discoveries: The Ancient Roots of Modern Science by Dick Teresi (Simon & Schuster, 2002). Documents sophisticated scientific knowledge from ancient civilisations that was lost and later rediscovered, demonstrating how preservation failures create false narratives about progress.
About the image
There are three images here. The background is a picture of an Egyptian sarcophagus which I took in the British Museum. The statue is in Herculaneum, and I took the photo on a holiday in Italy in 2019. The ship at the bottom is a 16th-century depiction of the ill-fated Tudor warship Mary Rose.
Photo montage Matt Ballantine, 2026 Photos Matt Ballantine 2017 and 2019
Drawing of the Mary Rose by Anthony Anthony from The Anthony Roll held at the British Library.
Random the Book 