1-Sentence-Summary: Black Box Thinking reveals that all paths to success lead through failure and what you can do to change your perspective on it, admit your mistakes, and build your own black box to consistently learn and improve from the feedback failure gives you.
We’ve talked a lot about deliberate practice on Four Minute Books already. It’s the concept many books debunking talent and looking at world-class performance promote, some including So Good They Can’t Ignore You, The Talent Code, Talent Is Overrated and the very predecessor of this book, Matthew Syed’s Bounce.
If deliberate practice is the way to become world-class, then failure is the way to get there. Learning from your mistakes is the whole idea of deliberate practice, but doing so is hard. Why?
Because most people don’t like mistakes. They shun them, they hate making them and if they do, they hate admitting them. Black Box Thinking is about changing that, so you can do what’s necessary to get where you want to go.
Here are 3 lessons about failure:
- We hate admitting mistakes even more than we hate making them.
- Look for opposing evidence by treating your ideas as hypotheses.
- Develop a positive relationship with failure to stop avoiding it.
Are you ready to make failure your friend? Let’s do this!
Lesson 1: The only thing we hate more than making mistakes is admitting them.
What’s worse than forgetting to send off your monthly status report to your biggest client? Having to show up the next day and admit it to your boss.
Failure is never cool when it happens, even though the culture of entrepreneurship is trying hard to tell you otherwise. Having a failed startup has almost become a badge of honor, but what it really means is that you let too much small failures accumulate, until you eventually had to suck up a huge one: that your company’s not working.
Imagine having to tell your investor that you just cost them $3 million. Shouldn’t make for a good day. While the goal remains to avoid failure on a grand scale, this can only happen if you admit as many small mistakes as you can.
Case in point: Juan Rivera was falsely convicted for rape and murder in 1992 and spent the following 13 years in prison. Even though DNA testing had been used as early as 1984, it took until 2004 until police finally agreed to test the evidence from the case – and found he was innocent. Incapable of admitting their mistake (because it was a grave one), it took another 7 years until Rivera was finally released (and paid a $20 million settlement).
For the prosecutors, admitting their serious mistake would probably have meant they’d lose their jobs, on top of destroying their confidence – so they didn’t.
Admitting mistakes is tough, but it’s the only way to prevent making even worse ones. If you can start by admitting to yourself that you made one, you’re one step ahead.
Lesson 2: Treat all of your ideas as hypotheses so you can look for opposing evidence.
So how can you make it easier to admit your mistakes?
One way would be to treat all of your ideas and conclusions as hypotheses. The world is a scary and complex place, so naturally, we tend to oversimplify things. If we considered every problem in our lives all the time, we’d probably end up paralyzed and not doing anything. Simplifying is a way for us to survive everyday life and navigate the world. But sometimes, it doesn’t work.
For example, bloodletting was a common medical practice for centuries, but it actually ended up killing people, instead of curing them. Doctors never tested the validity of the practice, assuming that this “cleansing act” must be the right way. It never occurred to them that people might need their blood the most when they’re sick. Their view was flipped: If someone couldn’t even be saved with bloodletting, they were probably doomed from the outset.
Don’t be a bloodletting doctor. If you think of a new kind of faucet that you think is the best in the world, test it. Build a prototype and let people tell you if you’re right. Maybe it’s not as intuitive as you think, or your reasoning was faulty when designing it.
Seek opposing evidence instead of confirmation, so you can improve your hypotheses over time, instead of assuming what you know is a given fact.
Lesson 3: Change your relationship with failure to a positive one so you’ll stop avoiding it.
If being successful means living and dealing well with failure, then a positive relationship with mistakes is a precondition for success.
It’s the difference between a fixed and a growth mindset, only one of which allows you to accept mistakes, admit them and then take responsibility for them so you can change them.
For example, I’m sure when you were in school there were a bunch of cool kids who never studied before a test, or maybe even went out to party the day before. People like these are usually so worried about falling short of expectations that they deliberately sabotage themselves in advance. If they do fine on the test, then things are okay, but if they don’t, they can at least blame it on partying.
That’s a loser’s attitude and you know it. So try to see failure in a more positive light and take responsibility for it whenever you can.
My personal take-aways
Black Box Thinking goes one level deeper on deliberate practice and explains how you can actually make that practice work for yourself. For this reason alone, I can recommend it, because as many books as there are promoting the idea of deliberate practice, as little are there about actually making it work.
Matthew Syed knows his stuff, go for it!
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Black Box Thinking Book Summary
The Book in Three Sentences
Success can only happen when we confront our mistakes
More people die from mistakes made by doctors and hospitals than from traffic accidents.
Aviation, on the other hands, has created an astonishingly good safety record because mistakes are learned from rather than concealed.
The Five Big Ideas
The single greatest obstacle to progress is failing to learn from mistakes.
A cornerstone to success is a progressive attitude to failure.
“Only by redefining failure will we unleash progress, creativity, and resilience.”
“When we are confronted with evidence that challenges our deeply held beliefs we are more likely to reframe the evidence than we are to alter our beliefs.”
“Marginal gains is not about making small changes and hoping they fly. Rather, it is about breaking down a big problem into small parts in order to rigorously establish what works and what doesn’t.”
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What is Black Box Thinking?
According to Syed, “[Black Box Thinking] is about the willingness and tenacity to investigate the lessons that often exist when we fail, but which we rarely exploit.” Furthermore, ““It is about creating systems and cultures that enable organizations to learn from errors, rather than being threatened by them.”
Black Box Thinking Summary
“A failure to learn from mistakes has been one of the single greatest obstacles to human progress.”
“A progressive attitude to failure turns out to be a cornerstone of success for any institution.”
“Society, as a whole, has a deeply contradictory attitude to failure. Even as we find excuses for our own failings, we are quick to blame others who mess up.”
“It is partly because we are so willing to blame others for their mistakes that we are so keen to conceal our own. We anticipate, with remarkable clarity, how people will react, how they will point the finger, how little time they will take to put themselves in the tough, high-pressure situation in which the error occurred. The net effect is simple: it obliterates openness and spawns cover-ups. It destroys the vital information we need in order to learn.”
“Only by redefining failure will we unleash progress, creativity, and resilience.”
“So, just to re-emphasize, for our purposes a closed loop is where failure doesn’t lead to progress because information on errors and weaknesses is misinterpreted or ignored; an open loop does lead to progress because the feedback is rationally acted upon).”
“In each case the investigators realised that crews were losing their perception of time. Attention, it turns out, is a scarce resource: if you focus on one thing, you will lose awareness of other things.”
“The problem was not a lack of diligence or motivation, but a system insensitive to the limitations of human psychology.”
“When people don’t interrogate errors, they sometimes don’t even know they have made one (even if they suspect they may have).”
“The mnemonic which has been used to improve the assertiveness of junior members of the crew in aviation is called P.A.C.E. (Probe, Alert, Challenge, Emergency).”
“[Black Box Thinking] is about creating systems and cultures that enable organizations to learn from errors, rather than being threatened by them.”
“In effect, practice is about harnessing the benefits of learning from failure while reducing its cost. It is better to fail in practice in preparation for the big stage than on the big stage itself. This is true of organizations, too, which conduct pilot schemes (and in the case of aviation and other safety critical industries test ideas in simulators) in order to learn, before rolling out new ideas or procedures. The more we can fail in practice, the more we can learn, enabling us to succeed when it really matters.”
“When we are confronted with evidence that challenges our deeply held beliefs we are more likely to reframe the evidence than we are to alter our beliefs. We simply invent new reasons, new justifications, new explanations. Sometimes we ignore the evidence altogether.”
“Cognitive dissonance occurs when mistakes are too threatening to admit to, so they are reframed or ignored. This can be thought of as the internal fear of failure: how we struggle to admit mistakes to ourselves.”
“The problem today, he says, is that we operate with a ballistic model of success. The idea is that once you’ve identified a target (creating a new website, designing a new product, improving a political outcome) you come up with a really clever strategy designed to hit the bullseye.”
“Professor Lane recommends an entirely different concept of success: the guided-missile approach.”
“Success is not just dependent on before-the-event reasoning, it is also about after-the-trigger adaptation.”
“In the absence of data, narrative is the best we have.”
“Marginal gains is not about making small changes and hoping they fly. Rather, it is about breaking down a big problem into small parts in order to rigorously establish what works and what doesn’t.”
“Creativity is, in many respects, a response.”
“If we wish to fulfill our potential as individuals and organizations, we must redefine failure.”
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Other Books by Matthew Syed
Bounce: The Myth of Talent and the Power of Practice
