Michelle talks about survivorship bias, the LinkedIn newsletter craze, and how to sort through all your ideas so you can actually plan next year without feeling guilty about everything you’re not doing.
That list of ideas you’ve been collecting all year? A lot of it came from watching people who got lucky, and you never heard from the ones it didn’t work for. Michelle talks about survivorship bias, the LinkedIn newsletter craze, and how to sort through all your ideas so you can actually plan next year without feeling guilty about everything you’re not doing.
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Hi, I'm Michelle Warner and I'm a business designer and strategist, and in the 15 plus years I've done this work, I've noticed the same trend everywhere. Business owners are falling into the trap of centering strategies first, when they need to be centering sequence, because the reality is the steps you take in your business and the order in which you take them is more important than how well you implement any single strategy. On this show, my goal is to fix that by helping you find and trust your own sequence of actions rather than blindly following someone else's strategy.
Welcome to Sequence Over Strategy. And I'm going to start with a little bit of a confession here. If you have spent any time in the entrepreneurial world, let's be real, you've heard advice that you should batch your work.
And if you are a podcaster, you've probably heard the advice that you need to batch your episodes. You block off a day, you record a few months worth of shows and you're done. It's efficient, it frees up your calendar, and this is how all the productivity people tell you how to do things.
Maybe it's content, maybe it's anything. It doesn't have to be podcasting, but they tell you to batch your time. Listen, I don't disagree with them.
It works for a lot of people and it does make sense. It is the efficient way to do things, but it doesn't work for me. My best episodes happen when I'm reacting to what I'm hearing right now.
The questions that you're sending me a day or two before the episode, even if you don't know that you're sending them for a podcast episode, conversations I'm having with clients this week. And so when I record as I go in that way, my energy is better. I can't even collect questions for two, three weeks and then batch them up.
It's just different. I like thinking about what is happening right now. And I do have a loose structure, obviously, of what types of episodes I want to do.
But I like thinking about what are you thinking about right now? And then I record an episode about it. Even though everybody says I should batch, it just makes more sense to me.
And I believe you get a better product if I do it differently. And that brings me to today's episode, because like that tension, it works for them. So why not me?
It's something that is always coming up. And you guessed it, had a couple of conversations about it this week. So as we head into the end of the year, this also felt relevant because year-end planning is coming.
And so many of you have told me like a version of the same thing. And I know that this comes up again year after year at year-end planning and that I have so many ideas. I mean, as entrepreneurs, we have so many ideas all the time, but it's even stronger at the end of the year.
And you're telling me, like, I see this person doing this, this person doing that. Like, how do I fit it all in? This all looks so smart.
And then the second part is the part that worries me more is not even the reaction of I should be doing all of that. But it's like the guilt you put on yourself that you're not doing it right. I should be doing that.
I see all these people doing it. And you're applying that to 14,000 trends, right? And you're feeling like you should be doing all of that in order to be the best business owner that you can be.
And over the course of a year, you're collecting a list of all these should be doings. And that list, I guarantee you, is too long and I guarantee you it may be, again, making you feel guilty. And so I want to talk about why that list got so long in the first place and then what we should do about it and how we should think about those lists and how you can process those lists through a much more sequence over strategy approach so that they become a productive thing you can plan around and not something that feels like it's, you know, just hanging around your neck like you've got to get to it. One of the things that we look at to do this, like a foundational thing that you need to understand, is something called survivorship bias.
And I've talked about survivorship bias before, but we're going to start with a quick definition here. By the way, if you want to go back and listen to it, it's in episode 19 where we did like a full deep dive on survivorship bias. But a lot of you are newer here, so let's cover the basics.
I'm not going to assume that you've heard that episode. And survivorship bias, anyway, it's a really simple concept. It is that we hear the stories of the people for whom something worked.
What Is Survivorship Bias?
We don't hear it from the people for whom it didn't work. Think about all the business advice out there. People talk in absolutes all the time and they will say, here's what I did.
Here's what worked. Here's what you should do. Here's the exact 10 steps that I used.
Copy them. That's survivorship bias because they made it. And these people aren't doing this in an unethical way.
Like they think they're helping you and they may be helping some people. But what they're doing is they're telling you something that worked for them and they are assuming that it will also work for you. And that's what survivorship bias is, because the people for whom things worked tend to be the ones still standing.
So they tend to be the ones who are still talking. Some people will talk after it didn't work for them, but they probably don't have as loud of a voice and there aren't as many of them who are talking about it because they've moved on. They're trying something else.
So somebody else who may have tried that exact same thing and it failed. And in the most extreme version, maybe one person tried it and it worked and it like literally didn't work for anybody else. It may have been a one and done.
That's uncommon, but it could be true. And so, everybody, we want to make sure that we are paying attention to the full picture of things and making sure that ideas actually might work for you or a good idea for you. And we don't just want to fall prey to survivorship bias of saying, oh, all of these things happened, but we don't know about what didn't happen.
And there's a really famous story from World War Two about survivorship bias. And my family has a pretty deep history in World War Two. And so I've always known this story growing up.
It's an interesting story in that how it goes is that World War Two bombers would come back to base, right? And they would have been attacked and there might be holes in the planes. And the common thinking amongst the engineers at the time was, ooh, we better look at our planes and our plans and really make sure that we are taking care of these places that have been hit on their bombing runs.
The planes have been injured. The planes have been scarred. We should really solidify those spots.
And then there was a mathematician who pointed out that's actually faulty thinking. Like that's a little bit of survivorship bias, because why would we reinforce the places on planes that are returning to base? That actually means the plane survived despite being hit.
And so obviously we should do something about that. But our bigger concern should be reinforcing the places that planes are not returning from. If planes are returning with holes in them, that meant those are survivable holes.
And so that's survivorship bias. You look at that and you're like, ooh, you know, we should fix that. No, we should think about where are the holes on the planes that never come back.
And that's what we should reinforce. And so that's just a little famous example of survivorship bias, how we can get into this thinking of what's in front of you and focussing on that and not thinking about what's the other side. So here's how that shows up in business, right?
How Survivorship Bias Shows Up in Business
We look around, we see what our friends are doing, what our peers are doing, what our competitors are doing, what might be trending. And when we see something that's working, especially for one person or for a group, we assume it would work for us, too. And we tend to make those calls based on what's loudest, what looks like the most people are doing or what the smartest person in the room is recommending.
And all of that is rooted, again, in survivorship bias because we treat it like proof. Just because people are telling us stories about what worked for them, we treat that as proof that it can be extended to others. And I want to be really clear here, right?
Looking around and getting ideas from what other people are doing, it's not a problem. It's actually a good thing to do. I would never tell you to stop doing that.
All ideas are good ideas. The problem is when those ideas go straight onto your to-do list without passing through your own decision making. We skip ahead.
We don't go through the correct sequence over strategy because then you're just essentially throwing spaghetti against the wall. And it's actually worse than that because you're not even hoping that it sticks. You're assuming it will stick because everybody else is doing it, or at least in your perception, everybody else is doing it.
And so we see this extreme version and we say it worked for them, so it should work for me. And so what are you going to do about that? How can you start to unwind that so that you can look at ideas and you can become inspired and you can become a business owner who is trying to move forward without kind of getting stuck into this survivorship bias in ways that you are either thinking you should try every idea and it will guaranteed work for you, or you are just making a list of things that you should do.
I'll stress out that you're not getting to any of them because they're quote unquote what everybody is doing. And so to answer that, we're going to start by breaking it down in a couple of ways. And the first way we're going to break it down is just to look for the survivorship bias.
We're not yet going to make a decision about whether you should use this in your business or not, but we're just going to take two seconds and take a deep breath and look at these things that you feel like are working for everyone. And realise that you don't actually know that. And how can you figure out which one is true?
Is it working for the majority of people or is it something that may have been happening in some sort of a vacuum? And so the first one that you want to think about and ask yourself is, did they have some sort of unfair advantage? There can be unfair advantages out there where you're like, wonderful, I'm so glad it worked for them.
But what were the conditions? Did they get lucky with market timing? Are they like wildly charismatic in some way so that they're just somebody that people are drawn to and that helps them?
Did they have a network and a series of connections that made this work so much better, right? That's a common one in relationship marketing. What is that edge that won't carry over to everyone else?
Almost nobody asks this and it matters because if the success came from that advantage and they haven't been able to repeat it like with clients or you haven't seen other people able to repeat it, then you need to question whether that strategy will work for you. And then even if there's no unfair advantage, you need to ask if it's a fit for your business, right? We do this all the time.
Is It a Fit for Your Business?
This is like classic sequence over strategy. So you look at it and you decide, no, like this is a real strategy they're using in a sustainable longterm way, then great. Then that is something that could be applicable to others.
But you still have to ask if it fits you because we all have different businesses. And I talk about this all the time. And this is where the three levers come in.
You've heard me talk about these, that every business has three levers, your customer mix, your product mix, and your marketing mix. And those three need to be in alignment with each other. And when you change one, it affects the other two.
So for example, let's talk about relationship marketing. You could look at relationship marketing and we'll take it through the two questions, right? You could look at relationship marketing and you could say, oh, Michelle is doing it.
So does that mean she is a survivorship bias? That means she has some sort of unfair advantage. Well, no, because if you look at it now, I've been teaching it over 10 years and people have been able to replicate what I've done.
So relationship marketing, that's a real thing. Right. And I wouldn't even say it's only the 10 years I've been teaching it.
Like since the dawn of time, relationship marketing is how people have sold things and is how people have done business. It's more of the traffic marketing that has come in as we've had more access to technology over the last 50 years. And so relationship marketing, that is a real thing.
That is not some sort of unfair advantage that can work. And so then you want to ask, OK, but is my business a fit for it? Even though it's the way people have been doing business since the dawn of time, does my business, given the current landscape, does my business make sense for it?
And again, you've heard me talk about this. If you are a service based business, yes, most likely relationship marketing makes sense for you. If you are selling products, if you need to sell at a high volume, well, then relationship marketing probably doesn't work for you in its purest form.
You're going to be looking at traffic marketing, which still involves relationships, but in a little bit of a different way than I talk about it. And so that's what you want to say here. And that's what you want to think is, number one, like, is this a nonfair advantage?
Is this like a one off situation? And if it's not and I want to consider it, then does it actually fit for my business? And so those are two questions right there that can probably syphon off a tonne of your, you know, should do list that you've been collecting.
And then you want to think through and realise, oh, what are these ideas? What do they make sense for my business? But before we get into kind of the next steps of what you do after that, let me give you a real example of question one in action, because it's one of my favourites and it's probably one that we still all remember.
A Real Example: LinkedIn Newsletters
Because do you remember a couple of years ago when LinkedIn newsletters were the next big thing? If you don't remember, here's what happened. LinkedIn test newsletters on a small group of active users first, and then they rolled it out to everybody.
And for one of my clients, they reached out and said, like, would you like early access? Would you like to try this thing that we are rolling out? And that's a normal testing process.
There's nothing wrong with that, right? Startups and tech companies do it all the time where they kind of roll out a beta version to some of their users. But some of the people who got early access have loud voices in their industries, which would also make sense, like LinkedIn's rolling out newsletters.
They want people who can use newsletters. And guess what? Like that newsletter on LinkedIn, it was new.
It was fun. It was a pattern interrupter. So when they first rolled out, people who saw them really paid attention.
Everybody signed up. So for these people who had early access to LinkedIn newsletters, it was quite the opportunity. Because it was this pattern interrupter, because it was this thing people hadn't seen before, they saw that if they rolled out a LinkedIn newsletter, their people would respond, not only their people, but they were able to reach a bunch of new people.
And it was a really valuable marketing tool. And it was interesting in that moment to watch this kind of survivorship bias play out, because one of my clients, like I said, was one of those early people. So I kind of got to see it from the inside.
And it was wild, because predictably, within a short time, like the majority of newsletter subscribers that were coming, the majority of the new crowd were from LinkedIn. But what happened next? Everybody sees these newsletters taking off.
People start talking about them. People want access, like exactly what LinkedIn wanted to have happen, right? But we could kind of see that, hey, once all these roll out, it's probably going to run out of steam and like be a little annoying, frankly.
And that's exactly what happened. When LinkedIn rolled out these newsletters to everybody, very, very quickly, the newsletters became just another piece of noise and they didn't stand out. They weren't that pattern interrupter.
So that flow of new people coming in stopped really quickly. And I'm sure these newsletters still fit into some marketing plans, but it was such a great example of somebody having an unfair advantage. And if you were one of those early adopters, you had three or four months.
I don't remember exactly how long it was, but you had this limited amount of time. That was a very powerful marketing tool for you. And by the time it rolled out to everybody, very quickly it became not so powerful for everyone because everybody was used to it and nobody wanted to sign up for all these other newsletters, right?
They realised it was just another newsletter hitting their inbox. And so what did we do as, you know, for my client was somebody who has that unfair advantage. Like, we're not going to change the overall marketing strategy because we had access to this, but we were going to take advantage for that moment in time.
And we were going to recognise that, hey, we have an unfair advantage for a minute. So let's grab it. Let's use the newsletters.
But then let's also recognise that this is quickly probably going to diminish in effectiveness. And that's exactly what happened. And that was an appropriate choice since you had that unfair advantage, but everybody coming afterwards needed to recognise that.
Anybody coming afterwards was like, whoa, that newsletter looked popular. You wouldn't want to think that and translate that into your own business. And by the way, this is like a little bit of an ethical thing that I want to throw in here.
A Quick Ethical Note
This client that I'm talking about was not somebody who spoke to people who had other businesses. So it was not one of these like, you know, business education situations where they were using a method that, you know, their people would follow up with. Their people were not going to be people who were starting LinkedIn newsletters.
And so we were just able to take advantage of that opportunity. Whereas if you were a business coach or somebody who knew that your clients were probably watching what you were doing, I would think that there's an ethical moment in there. Not that you wouldn't use that advantage to yourself, but you would want to explain and you would want to make clear like, hey, this is happening.
Like, I don't know if this is a sustainable thing or not. Just so you know, if people are copying you, that you won't lead them astray because we never want to leave our own audiences astray. So just a little ethical break in the episode there to point out what was happening here.
But my overall point with LinkedIn newsletters was this was a really great illustration of if you were someone who did not have early access and you were just watching these things roll out, you were like, wow, that looks powerful and effective. And if you would have just blindly followed suit without breaking down and thinking through, hey, is this some sort of survivorship bias? Do they have some sort of unfair advantage?
You would have jumped into that and it probably would have been a waste of your time. And so we just want to be thinking about that. That's an example of how some of these things can happen.
How to Sort Your List of Ideas
So now that we know this, now that we know that if you're looking around at all the ideas and you've kind of collected a list of things that you should be doing and a list of things you're excited about, and now you're starting to get to the end of the year and you're like, oh, haven't gotten to any of these. How do I think about this in terms of planning for next year? That's what we want to talk about.
How do we sort these ideas? That's the point of this episode, right? What do we do with these things?
How do we take that burden off of you and get into a sequence over strategy method so that you can start to process this stuff? Plus, here are it's like almost all of you have too many ideas. I have too many ideas as well.
So totally fair. But we want to make sure that one of two things doesn't happen, because what tends to happen is that either you're going to try to try them all and you can't try them all well because you don't have the time. You don't really can't really tell what's working.
You don't have the resources. And so it just turns into throwing spaghetti against the wall, even if these are, quote unquote, you know, ideas that we have vetted. If you don't have the resources and you try to try them all, they're not going to go anywhere.
So you have to prioritise in some way. Or the other flip side of that that I also don't want to happen to you is that you try them and you live in guilt about it, right? Because you don't get to them all.
And so you're like, why am I not doing that? That looks like a good idea. My friends, none of those are right.
Those are not the right ways that we want to do them. Both of them jump way ahead in your sequence and skip the whole sequence over strategy. And so here's what we're going to think about doing instead.
These are the steps how you do this in order, how you think about it. Number one, you need to gather everything. You need to get all of your ideas out of your head and onto one list.
And this is the ones you picked up from watching other people, ones you came up with yourself, all these things. It doesn't matter. Get your ideas down on paper.
Then you're going to bucket them, right? They probably fall into one of five buckets, like it's probably a customer segment idea, a product idea, a marketing idea, an operations idea, maybe a team idea. So maybe I should add a new product, goes into the product bucket.
Maybe I should start a newsletter, goes into marketing. You know, maybe I should hire assistant, goes in team. We can see how this is.
All of your ideas can get bucketed. And then you think about, and you know your goal for the next year. That sounds simple, right?
It actually takes some work. But that is the next step in the process where you're actually like, what do I want next year? And then once you know what you want, you can start checking all of your ideas against your three levers.
You can start checking them against product mix, customer mix, and marketing and understanding how these ideas might impact your levers. Are they going to keep those things in alignment? Are they going to get it out of alignment?
This is starting to be where it becomes a little bit more of a strategic process of, hey, all these ideas, how are they going to impact my levers? And then from there, we can kind of sort into yes and no ideas. And it goes a little bit, there's some more prioritisation that happens there.
There's a little bit more, you know, how you sort these things into yeses and noes in terms of the levers. Like that takes a little bit of work, but ultimately then you're sorting these ideas into yes and noes. And then as a final step, now you have your yeses and so you put them in order.
So now that you've found your ideas that fit, in what order do you go after those? Because you can't do them all at one time. Based on my goal, what comes first, what comes second?
That's, you know, the end of the sequence over the strategy. And that there is the difference between the two kinds of business owners, right? The ones who understand that you will need to make decisions in a certain order and ones that just have a bunch of ideas.
Because we end up having those two groups where one is steadily pushing your business forward. You're plotting through it priority by priority. And then the other one just says all these great ideas, feels overwhelmed and is not sure what to do with any of them.
And the end result is throwing spaghetti against the wall and one is moving forward in an intentional way. And so the difference isn't necessarily the quality of their ideas. At least once you filter it for survivorship bias, it's kind of that second one that we want to sort and get going in the right order.
Putting It All Together
So let's sum this up. Survivorship bias means you mostly hear from people for whom something worked, which means a lot of the ideas that you end up generating on your list by looking around and seeing what happened. Those ideas got there because someone loud made them look like a sure thing.
And again, this is not that person being intentionally misleading. They're just sharing with you what worked. It's just the voices of what worked tend to be a lot louder than the voices of what didn't work.
And so we hear the voices of what worked, but that doesn't mean it's going to work for us. And so before that idea kind of gets a spot on your plan, you want to make sure you want to run it through the survivorship bias filter, right? Do they have an unfair advantage?
And then is it a fit for my customer mix, product mix, marketing mix, right? Is it a fit for my business? And when you've got that whole list, you don't want to try it all.
You don't want to feel guilty about all those things that you didn't get to. So we need to take that list and we need to gather it, bucket it, name your goal, check for fit, throw out the nose and then put the yeses in order. And then we move from that, should I be doing that feeling into an actual plan that makes a lot of sense and is going to move your business forward for the goals that you have.
And listen, I know that this was a lot, like I just rattled off that order, right? Gather it, bucket it, name your goal, check for fit, throw out the nose and put the yeses in order. I'm not going to leave you out on a limb with just that.
This has actually inspired me and I am going to put together a brand new workshop. It's coming in December where we're going to do this together. It is going to be a paid workshop, but it's going to be very affordable, but I'm going to walk you through this whole process so that you can be planning and seeing how I think through all this stuff at the year end to come up with different plans.
So I'm going to be announcing that in the next few weeks. Keep your eyes peeled for that. I'd love for you to join us if that's a fit for you.
And as always, my friends, thank you for being here today. If this episode helped you, I'd be so grateful if you shared it with someone else that might help, or if you left a review, which helps other people find it. And remember you can always head to michellewarner.com, jump on the newsletter list, even drop me an email or a message, letting me know you'd like to hear more about on this podcast. I always love being inspired by your ideas. As I said at the beginning, these episodes come from a place of who is asking me what in the moment and me wanting to respond to what you have going on right now. So never be afraid to throw an idea out at me.
And if it is a fit, I will be happy to cover it on this podcast. We'll see you back here in a few weeks