Latest Book Review: Black Box Thinking, by Matthew Syed

Many of you will know that I've been on a bit of a reading splurge recently and with a trip to the heart of Asia on my hands and a 13-hour flight to contend with, I put the time to use and worked my way through this blockbuster of a book.

Black Box Thinking had been on my "must read" list for a while but take my advice, don't read it on a plane. The opening chapter is largely about an air disaster and the book has at least three more that it references too. Great when you're 40,000ft in the air discovering all the mishaps and mistakes the airline industry made that were all perfectly avoidable.

My personal trauma aside, the basic proposition of the book is that humans have an allergic reaction to failure. And thats problematic! To be successful, we need to make sure we know where we are going wrong, so we can get things right. Here are a few lessons that stood out for me.

➡ We need to create a revolution about how we think about failure.  Praise people for trying, for experimenting, for demonstrating resilience and resolve.

➡ Failure is not inherently bad: it sets the stage for new ideas. By breaking a problem down into smaller parts, it is easier to progress beyond events and circumstances. You fail more, but you learn more.

➡ To leverage the power of failure, we have to be resilient and open. We need to have the right mindset as well as the right system. If you run away from mistakes, you wont get anywhere. Create systems that harness the power of adaptivity.

➡ Innovation cannot happen without failure. Aversion to failure is the single largest obstacle to creative change.

➡ Proper investigation into failure achieves two things: it reveals a crucial learning opportunity, which means that the systemic problem can be fixed, leading to meaningful evolution. But it has cultural consequences too: professionals will feel empowered to be open about mistakes because they know that they will not be unfairly penalised – thus driving evolution still further.

➡ If professionals think they are going to be blamed for honest mistakes, why would they be open about them? If they do not trust their managers to see what really happened, why would they report what is going wrong?

➡ Progress in most human activities depends, in part, on our willingness to learn from failure. Success is not a one-off or fluke, it is a method.

➡ Errors can be thought of as the gap between what we hoped would happen, and what actually did happen. Cutting-edge organisations are always seeking to close this gap, but in order to do so, they have a system geared up to take advantage of these learning opportunities.

All up, this is a book about change. About the importance of wanting to change things but also the importance of getting to the heart of an issue in order to make genuine progress. Its about creating a culture that is safe to fail and where failing fast occurs.