Book Review: Black Box Thinking by Matthew Syed

Blackbox thinking is a book on another aspect of psychology - of learning from mistakes. Surprisingly enough, there are some parts of society where this is encouraged, and some where its not. And this difference in attitude can change the whole course of a person's life. Or a profession...

Some interesting observations and learnings from the book:

• Learning constantly from failures, to improve your performance and systems is consistently and rigorously followed in the airline industry. This is done using the recordings from the blackbox installed in flights which is then used to add new guidelines given out to pilots and other airline staff. The opposite happens in the medical care profession though. Mistakes are not even acknowledged as their occurrence is assumed to be a weakness. And since no one even accepts the mistakes, there is no opportunity to correct it going forward, and so thousands continue to die as learnings are never taken.


• The mind naturally deals with mistakes through cognitive dissonance. It never accepts one's own mistakes and creates a story behind it to prove it wasn't a mistake. E.g., A well-known example of this is the Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) theory that was supported by Bush and Blair to justify the war on Iraq. Even though proved wrong, till today they hold the belief that it was the right thing to do, and WMDs did exist. Similarly examples of wrongful convictions in US which were corrected after DNA technology were never fully accepted by the police or the prosecutors who were convinced of their initial convictions and judgments even when faced with new evidence that proved the earlier convictions were wrong.


• Having an open mind and learning by trying is the best way to learn. Also isolating effects by controlled group experiments is the best way to test the impact of something.


• One way to improve a process is by breaking a problem down and improving its individual parts. E.g., In F1 racing, each small process of the race is optimised individually. Even in cycling, like in Tour de France, small parts of the race are optimised. Also, sometimes failure is what drives real innovation, e.g., Dyson vacuum cleaners was developed after numerous failed attempts. However, companies which stifle failure and don't support their employees on this journey, which may involve mistakes will never learn and eventually collapse.


• Blame game is very common across companies when something fails. But it ends up stifling learning from mistakes too and does not help any company in the long run. Open organisations where mistakes (which are different from negligence) are accepted perform better.


• There are two types of attitudes in people. Fixed mindset and growth mindset. And the difference between them is resilience. Fixed mindsets don't learn from failure but give up easily. While people with growth mindset continue to learn and evolve, and eventually perform better.

The book is very simply written and a light read. Its very interesting and you will finish it in very few sittings. A must-read!