Black Box Thinking: The Surprising Truth About Success

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Small changes in every area of our life doesn’t make a difference at a time, however, add over the long term. Its main thrust concerns the articulation of two different cultures in dealing with this complexity. He goes on with other stories like unjust justice system which blames an innocent suspect, discovery of dropbox through failures and flaws of the business model of other companies, and so forth.

Syed uses the metaphor of black boxes from the aviation industry that capture crucial data in a disaster that can explain what happened and inform future practice. Riddled with real life stories, examples and scientific evidence this book really breaks down the psychological issues and games we play not only as individuals but as organizations to avoid, deny and even penalize failure and how much it hurts us to do so. The Black Box Thinking mental model was outlined by Matthew Syed in his bestselling book Black Box Thinking: Why Some People Never Learn from Their Mistakes - But Some Do. The man who welcomes and acts on criticism will prize it almost above friendship: the man who fights it out of concern to maintain his position is clinging to non growth. Sayed tells horrifying stories of the US justice system and the extent of mistrials and refusal to admit mistakes which effectively destroys one of the most precious learning experiences.Black Box Thinking” should be required reading for anyone seeking to grow personally and professionally. The encouragement of debate – and even criticism if warranted appears to stimulate more creative ideas. We are so eager to impose patterns upon what we see, so hardwired to provide explanations, that we are capable of explaining opposite outcomes with the same cause without noticing the inconsistency. And cultures that permit and even encourage such expression of differing viewpoints may stimulate the most innovation.

While most people tend to blame others or circumstances when something goes wrong, a powerful alternative is to have a progressive and open attitude towards failure. It was good that the author did some further emphasis as why we really have to embrace failures and how to learn from it 100% of the time to minimize redundant failures along the way.Matthew is also co-founder of Matthew Syed Consulting (MSC); the company has worked with an impressive portfolio of clients to build growth mindset cultures and drive higher performance in individuals, teams and organisations.

This blind spot is not limited to science; it is a basic property of our world and it accounts, to a large extent, for our skewed attitude to failure. Black box thinking is a mental model that helps to reframe failure and design systems that support continuous improvement. I work in an "agile" software development company that places a huge emphasis on failing fast and learning from mistakes, so this book hit home for me. When someone’s livelihood or ego is affected by the admittance of mistakes, they will avoid failure to win on the short term, neglecting long-term consequences. Success is always the tip of an iceberg…Beneath the surface of success—outside our view, often outside our awareness—is a mountain of necessary failure.The overall concept of this was really interesting, I especially enjoyed the focus on how mistakes are reported and acted upon to inform future events! It undoubtedly gives me a moment to reflect my own belief having to do with mistake as well as related to my profession. Not too scientific, therefore ideal for general readers who want to get introduced to the topic: “why people repeat mistakes again and again and seem not to want to learn from them”. We often assemble fragments of entirely different experiences and weave them together into what seems like a coherent whole. For me, one of the most interesting parts was the one on how the ego has the potential to make us completely oblivious to life-threatening mistakes happening right in front of our eyes.

The book tackles a number of important aspects of failure, such as the idea of complexity and how the world we live in is an immensely complex place making it difficult if not impossible to account for all variations and/or conditions. The approach comes from the idea that if you break down a big goal into small parts, and then improve on each of them, you will deliver a huge increase when you put them all together. Black Box Thinking helps to reframe failure and help to design systems that enable continuous improvement — in that sense, it is aligned to Double Loop Learning as a process of continuous learning and Agile Methodology as an iterative approach of improvement. If you have had recent experience of a medical situation where mistakes were made then maybe this book should come with a warning as you could find some of the situations described uncomfortable.If we edit out failure, if we reframe our mistakes, we are effectively destroying one of the most precious learning opportunities that exist. Starting with using the difference in attitude to failure between the medical sector and the airline industry. It’s an extremely well written and engrossing examination of a simple concept, that failure is valuable because it helps us get better. In “Antifragile”, Nassim Nicholas Taleb shows how the linear model is wrong (or, at best, misleading) in everything from cybernetics, to derivatives, to medicine, to the jet engine.