Success requires every one of several conditions to hold, while failure requires only one to be absent, so successes resemble each other and failures do not.
Tolstoy opened Anna Karenina with the observation that happy families are all alike and each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. Diamond generalised it in 1997 to explain why so few large mammals were domesticated: a candidate species had to satisfy diet, growth rate, breeding, temperament, panic response and social structure, and failing any one was sufficient. The structure is conjunctive, which is why the survivors look uniform.
In practice
- A functioning project looks like every other functioning project, and each failed one has its own story.
- A checklist where every item must pass will be failed by a different item each time.
- Further reading
- Wikipedia
- Subject
- Decision-making & Reasoning
- Essay
- Why reasoning works the way it does