Matthew Syed

What links the Mercedes Formula One team with Google? What links Dave Braisford's Team Sky and the aviation industry? What is the connection between the inventor James Dyson and the footballer David Beckham? They are all Black Box Thinkers. Whether developing a new product, honing a core skill or just trying to get a critical decision right, Black Box Thinkers aren't afraid to face up to mistakes. In fact, they see failure as the very best way to learn. Rather than denying their mistakes, blaming others or attempting to spin their way out of trouble, these institutions and individuals interrogate errors as part of their future strategy for success. How many of us, hand on heart, can say that we have such a healthy relationship with failure? Learning from failure has the status of a cliché, but this book reveals the astonishing story behind the most powerful method of learning known to mankind, and reveals the arsenal of techniques wielded by some of the world's most innovative organizations. Their lessons can be applied across every field - from sport to education, from business to health. Using gripping case studies, exclusive interviews and really practical takeaways, Matthew Syed - the award-winning journalist and best-selling author of Bounce - explains how to turn failure into success, and shows us how we can all become better Black Box Thinkers.

Black Box Thinking

Nobody wants to fail. But in highly complex organizations, success can happen only when we confront our mistakes, learn from our own version of a black box, and create a climate where it's safe to fail. We all have to endure failure from time to time, whether it's underperforming at a job interview, flunking an exam, or losing a pickup basketball game. But for people working in safety-critical industries, getting it wrong can have deadly consequences. Consider the shocking fact that preventable medical error is the third-biggest killer in the United States, causing more than 400,000 deaths every year. More people die from mistakes made by doctors and hospitals than from traffic accidents. And most of those mistakes are never made public, because of malpractice settlements with nondisclosure clauses. For a dramatically different approach to failure, look at aviation. Every passenger aircraft in the world is equipped with an almost indestructible black box. Whenever there's any sort of mishap, major or minor, the box is opened, the data is analyzed, and experts figure out exactly what went wrong. Then the facts are published and procedures are changed, so that the same mistakes won't happen again. By applying this method in recent decades, the industry has created an astonishingly good safety record. Few of us put lives at risk in our daily work as surgeons and pilots do, but we all have a strong interest in avoiding predictable and preventable errors. So why don't we all embrace the aviation approach to failure rather than the health-care approach? As Matthew Syed shows in this eye-opening book, the answer is rooted in human psychology and organizational culture. Syed argues that the most important determinant of success in any field is an acknowledgment of failure and a willingness to engage with it. Yet most of us are stuck in a relationship with failure that impedes progress, halts innovation, and damages our careers and personal lives. We rarely acknowledge or learn from failure--even though we often claim the opposite. We think we have 20/20 hindsight, but our vision is usually fuzzy. Syed draws on a wide range of sources--from anthropology and psychology to history and complexity theory--to explore the subtle but predictable patterns of human error and our defensive responses to error. He also shares fascinating stories of individuals and organizations that have successfully embraced a black box approach to improvement, such as David Beckham, the Mercedes F1 team, and Dropbox. From the Hardcover edition.

Black Box Thinking: Why Most People Never Learn from Their Mistakes--But Some Do

Cassandra Tang

True knowledge is not the absence of knowledge, but the refusal to acquire it.

To leverage the power of failure, you have to be resilient and open. In other words, you have to have the right mindset as well as the right system. If you run away from mistakes, you won’t get anywhere.

Practice is not a substitute for learning from real-world failure, it is complementary to it. They are, in many ways, two sides of the same coin.

Learn from the mistakes of others. You can’t live long enough to make them all yourself.

A progressive attitude to failure turns out to be a cornerstone of success for any institution.

Insightful concepts about embracing failure for learning well explained with real life examples, felt a bit repetitive in chapters, book could have been more concise.

The Surprising Truth About Success

Keven Wang

Well researched book. Too many examples. Stories are not that engaging. I had a feeling he was trying to write like “Malcolm Gladwell”. Not everyone can be “Malcolm Gladwell”

The Surprising Truth about Success (and why Some People Never Learn from Their Mistakes)

Juliana Matias

I got this book very cheap on a deal on audible, and I wasn't even sure what it was about when I first started on it, but it gripped my attention right from the start, and it didn't disappoint. I'm not a great non-fiction reader, but I always enjoy it when I found the odd non-fiction book that reads like a good narrative. This book does exactly that.

It starts by providing an example of an avoidable mistake, and comparing two very different approaches to dealing with it. It contrasts the way health care and aviation treat human error, and then it takes us onto a journey on understanding the human psychology and cultural biases towards failure. This book deconstructs cognitive dissonance, closed loops, marginal gains, applied evolution and natural selection and trial and error into easy approaches to actually learning from what went wrong so you don't have to keep repeating the same mistakes time and again.

All in all, this book highly surpassed my expectations. I highly recommend it.

Hugo Ahlberg

This book was recommended by Daniel Ek the founder of Spotify. I was skeptical at first. I made the mistake of judging this book by it's cover. It has that typical airport-best-seller-narrative-driven non fiction look— but I was happy to be proven wrong. It does have some of that feel to it in a few chapters, but overall it does have more depth.

Black Box Thinking

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