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#4 - Black Box Thinking by Matthew Syed
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A discussion of the book Black Box Thinking by Matthew Syed.
Black Box Thinking by Matthew Syed at it's core is about learning from failure. In aviation there is the idea of a black box, these are systems installed in planes that continually gather all kinds of information about the aircraft and its crew - from the altitude of the plane to the words spoken in the cockpit. In the event of failure, an abnormal landing or even a crash. The information gathered by the black box is analyzed to try and understand what went wrong. Rather than blaming this or that, the culture in aviation is one of learning from failure and improving based on what was learnt. In large part, it is this culture that is responsible for the incredible safety standards commercial aviation has today. This is where the book, Black Box Thinking, gets its name.
It covers a diverse set of stories about various people, industries, companies, policy makers, and more, looking at the different ways they deal with failure. There are those that repeat mistakes because they fear failure or can't face the reality of failure due to some traumatic circumstance - these are generally people with a fixed mindset, stuck in a closed loop system, not allowing feedback from the outside world, especially not allowing feedback from failure, and so not learning from those failures, repeating the same mistakes over and over. Then there are those are willing to learn from failure, taking in feedback, and adapting over time - these are generally people with a growth mindset, they are in open loop systems, systems that accept that failure is a normal part of life, take the feedback from failure, then learn and improve.
The books key insight is that success, even high performance, doesn't come from being a gifted genius, but from a willingness to repeatedly learn from failure, making marginal improvements that compound over time.
Hosted by Peter Banda & James de Klerk
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