My reflections on the “Black Box Thinking” by Matthew Syed
Hi there. I just finished the “Black Box Thinking” book that was referenced by someone in the “Tribe of Mentors”. It was a fascinating reading full of revelations and I want to share my thoughts on it.
The funny thing is that I was misled by the title at first, specifically by the “black box” part of it. As a programmer, I used to employ that term when dealing with unit-tests: when creating tests for a function (component), we should treat it as a “black box”, meaning we should not verify implementation details, but rather focus on just external behavior of the function, its inputs and outputs.
Thus, I thought the idea of the book was about the way to approach complex systems.
But the author put a different meaning into the term. The term was taken from the aviation industry which uses so-called “black box” devices to record data and voices in the cockpit to facilitate investigation of accidents. So the book is basically about embracing the aviation industry’s attitude towards failures and adverse events.
The book is definitely worth reading. All the ideas are underpinned by lots of real examples and references to sources.
Below is a list of some of my revelations, reflections, and things that I will take away with me from this book.
Attitude towards failures defines the progress of people, industries and nations.
In healthcare personnel tend to hide mistakes, talk about them as one-offs or “one of those things”. Nobody puts effort into the discovery of mistakes and their investigation. Nobody learns from failures. As a result — a startling number of deaths because of the doctors’ mistakes — 250 000 people annually in US according to wikipedia.
Aviation has a different attitude towards failures. Every adverse event and every crash is being investigated thoroughly, personnel is encouraged to report all their own misdoings and all suspicious things they notice. The results of each investigation are published and become freely available to everyone. Lessons are learned and actions are taken to avoid facing the same problems in the future. As a result — the number of adverse cases has been steadily decreasing and aviation became one of the safest transports.
Fear of mistakes is ubiquitous and has a profound negative effect on a person’s wellbeing and progress
An important thing to realize is that you are not alone when feeling anxious about admitting being wrong and making mistakes. We fear that if we let others know about our failures then the picture that we have drawn in our minds about ourselves will change and our self-esteem will be damaged. That fear is entrenched in us.
As a result, when we face new information that contradicts our deeply held beliefs and knowledge we tend either to reject it or to reframe it in a way that the new facts start supporting our existing beliefs. That is what the theory of Cognitive Dissonance is about.
Fear of mistakes brings anxiety into our lives and makes us vulnerable. But there is even more significant consequence when we reject new facts or reframing them — we stop learning, we stop progressing, we stagnate.
The world is complex, mind the “Narrative Fallacy”
To help us deal with complex ideas and make sense of them we tend to come up, often unconsciously, with stories that put individual pieces of the concept into a single nice picture. The resulting story is always a simplified picture of the actual idea, missing some of the facts and traits. The problem is that the neglected facts and traits might be crucial for understanding the idea and thus the resulting story doesn’t resemble correctly the idea. That problem has a name — “Narrative Fallacy”.
We need to be aware that all our pictures and stories about the world might be wrong or incomplete in some way. And that’s fine. We need always to be ready to adjust our pictures of the world.
“Marginal gains” as an example of a healthy attitude towards failures
What can be achieved when embracing failures can be seen in the “Marginal Gains” approach. The approach is about small incremental improvements in different parts of a process leading to a significant improvement of the process as a whole. Break up the process into separate pieces, think about how each individual peace can contribute to a failure of the whole process and fix it. The more sources of failures you find and fixes you do — the more chances for success you get.
The Blame Game always leads to devastating consequences
The Blame Game is entrenched in many societies, cultures, and organizations. In case of a failure, there is an urge to find someone to blame, not to investigate the problem and to prevent it from happening in the future.
In such environments, people strive to cove-up their own and their peers’ mistakes in fear they or their colleagues will be blamed for it and it will ruin their carrier and/or damage their self-esteem.
The result is obvious - people continue to make the same mistakes over and over again, they feel uneasy about making mistakes and about experimenting, the progress is undermined.
Fixed Mindset vs Growth Mindset
People with Fixed Mindset believe that their skills and intelligence are fixed and can’t be changed.
People with Growth Mindset, on the contrary, believe that their skills and intelligence can be acquired and grow with time and experience.
The problem with the Fixed Mindset is that people want to think of themselves as intelligent and make an impression of being smart. Also, they become defensive and vulnerable and consider any critique as a threat to their intelligence. If they are not smart, then they are stupid, because of the belief that the level of intelligence is an inherited thing that can’t be changed.
Redefine your approach to failures and fulfill your potential
We need to realize that the fear of making and admitting mistakes is a huge handicap in our ability to learn and progress.
The world is complex, we can’t foresee every possible case and every possible outcome, our abilities are limited. It’s totally fine to be wrong and make mistakes. If we are open about our failures and can admit them, we will know the flaws in our beliefs and assumptions early, we will be able to fix them and adjust our stories early, we will learn quickly. We won’t feel anxious of making mistakes and talking about them. We won’t feel vulnerable.
Our mistakes and failures are our chances to learn and progress.
