The Lindy Effect: Which HR Practices Will Survive the Next Decade — and Which Won't

60-Second Summary

Lindy effect: for non-perishable items, every year of survival adds roughly another year of expected future survival.
This is the opposite of physical things — because ideas that have survived have already passed many rounds of stress-testing.
In HR: 1:1s (100+ years), mentorship (millennia), apprenticeship (centuries). Very likely to persist.
New shiny practices — AI performance summarisers, current-year engagement platforms, VR training — have not passed Lindy tests. Bet accordingly.
Lindy is a heuristic, not a law. Combine with evidence — but as a bullshit filter for HR fads, it's under-used and very effective.

You have a $200k HR budget line. Option A: fund weekly manager 1:1 training (the practice is ~100 years old). Option B: pilot a Gen-AI 'performance coach' launched last quarter. Lindy says option A is far more likely to still be delivering value in five years. That's not conservatism — it's information about which ideas have been stress-tested.

What Lindy actually says

“For the perishable, every additional day in its life translates into a shorter additional life expectancy. For the non-perishable, every additional day may imply a longer life expectancy.”
— Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile (2012)

The Lindy effect originated as an observation about Broadway shows and was formalised by Mandelbrot and later Taleb. For non-perishable phenomena — books, technologies, methods, ideas — survival is evidence of robustness. A book still read after 200 years is more likely to be read in another 200 than a book published last year. The same logic applies to management and HR practices.

A Lindy audit of your HR stack

Age is not the same as evidence — but for practices without conclusive RCTs (i.e., most HR), it's a surprisingly good proxy.

Practice	Approx age	Expected persistence	Confidence
Apprenticeship / mentorship	1000+ years	Extremely high	Very high
1:1 conversations	80–100 years	Very high	High
Written performance review	60–80 years	High	High
Structured behavioural interviewing	40+ years	High	High
360-degree feedback	~40 years	Moderate-high	Medium
OKRs (mainstream)	~15 years	Moderate	Medium
Annual engagement surveys	~30 years	Moderate	Medium
Nine-box grid	~30 years	Moderate but weak evidence	Low-medium
Unconscious bias e-learning	~15 years	Weak — likely to fade	Low
AI performance summarisation	~2 years	Uncertain — probably reshapes	Very low
Metaverse / VR onboarding	~5 years	Likely fades	Low

Using Lindy as a design filter

Five ways to apply Lindy to HR decisions

1
When in doubt, favour the older practice
Between two options with similar evidence, the older one is likely to still be around in a decade.
2
Weight buying toward category leaders that have survived cycles
A vendor that has survived two recessions is a safer bet than the current unicorn.
3
Be suspicious of high-buzz, low-age practices
If it's in every conference deck this year and did not appear five years ago, apply extra scrutiny.
4
Invest in ancient first-principles skills
Coaching, listening, feedback, structured decision-making, mentoring. Millennia old. Under-invested.
5
Use Lindy alongside evidence, not instead of it
When RCTs and meta-analyses exist, prefer them. Lindy is the heuristic for the vast majority of practices that have neither.

The Lindy limit

Some new things do stick — email, spreadsheets, smartphones beat Lindy at some point. Lindy is about the base rate. Bet with Lindy, remain open to exceptions, never fund a full rollout of a two-year-old practice as if it were proven.

FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Isn't this just 'old = good'?

No. Lindy says 'old and still in use = has been stress-tested'. Bad practices die; long survival is filtered evidence.

What about progress?

New methods get funded — in the pilot budget, not the strategic budget. Lindy is about weighting, not banning.

Where has Lindy failed in HR?

Stack ranking survived decades, then died. Combine Lindy with evidence.

Takeaways

For non-perishable ideas, survival is evidence of robustness.
Coaching, mentoring, 1:1s, structured hiring, deliberate practice — millennia-old and chronically under-invested.
Be suspicious of practices with high buzz and low age.
Use Lindy as a weighting heuristic alongside evidence.