In a Nutshell: Black Box Thinking (Matthew Syed)
No matter what your career or hobby is, mistakes are inevitable. This book defines how different people and industries respond to their mistakes.
Type 1: Closed Loop
Closed Loop thinking is the fixed mentality, it is the voice in your head that says, “don’t worry, it’s a one off.” Upon making mistakes, closed loop thinkers will blame, make excuses and throw things under the rug to protect their status. This leads no where. Syed uses examples with health care where hospitals covered up their mistakes by calling the errors “one offs” in hopes of not scaring away patients. No improvements were made, the mistakes persisted, and lives were lost. Closed Loop thinking will fail in the long term because the truth will reveal itself and the cost of cleaning up will grow over time.
Type 2: Open Loop
Open loop is the opposite, once you or your team make an mistake, you chose to be open about the failure and find the metaphorical “black box.” (Black Box: A device that stores data when a plane crashes) This black box is the lesson from a failure that is scavenged and learned from. Once it is found, you must embrace the failure and change based on the Black Box. This will improve decisions and create a new and improved loop. With each mistake, the marginal improvements will inevitably lead to a high level of mastery. As an example, Syed used the air travel industry. Many decades ago it was extremely dangerous to travel on an airplane. With an Open Loop mindset and countless crashes and learning iterations, it is now one of the safest ways to travel. You are now more likely to get hurt from driving than flying.
TL;DR.
When you mess up, be open about it, acknowledge it, and figure out exactly what you did wrong, improve upon it and try again.
You don’t practice golf at night because you don’t see where the ball goes, make sure your actions are documented and are “in the light” so you can learn from them.
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