Anna Karenina principle

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The Anna Karenina principle states that for success to occur in a complex endeavor, all key factors must be present and work correctly. The endeavor does not succeed when even one essential element is missing, meaning there are many different ways to fail. It is named for Leo Tolstoy's 1877 novel Anna Karenina, which begins: This line suggests that happy families resemble one another because they possess the necessary traits for happiness, whereas unhappy families may have any variety of attributes. The Anna Karenina principle has been generalized to several fields of study. In statistics, it is used to describe significance tests, as there are many ways in which a dataset can violate the null hypothesis but only one in which all the assumptions are satisfied.

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