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Black Box Thinking by Matthew Syed
Black Box Thinking by Matthew Syed
₨499.00
An eye-opening, Gladwellian look at the power of a positive attitude toward failure and its profound impact on our success in any field.
In the airline industry, failure is taken seriously. Every aircraft is equipped with an almost indestructible black box. When there is an accident, the box is opened, the data is analyzed, and the reason for the accident excavated. This ensures that procedures are adapted so that the same mistake doesn’t happen again. With this method, the industry has created an astonishing safety record.
For pilots working in a safety-critical industry, getting it wrong can have deadly consequences. But most of us have a relationship with failure that impedes progress, halts innovation, and damages our lives. We don’t acknowledge it or learn from it —though we often think we do.
Moving from anthropology to psychology and from history to complexity theory, Matthew Syed explains why even when we think we have 20/20 hindsight, our vision’s still fuzzy. He offers a radical new idea: that the most important determinant of success in any field, whether sports, business, or life, is an acknowledgment of failure and a willingness to engage with it. This is how we learn, progress and excel. This approach explains everything from biological evolution and the efficiency of markets to the success of the Mercedes F1 team and the mindset of David Beckham.
Using a cornucopia of interviews, gripping stories, and sharp-edged science, Syed explores the intimate relationship between failure and success, and shows why we need to transport black box thinking into our own lives. If we wish to unleash our potential, we must diagnose and break free of our failures. Part manifesto for change, part intellectual adventure, this groundbreaking book reveals how to do both.
Matthew Syed
320 pages
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2 reviews for Black Box Thinking by Matthew Syed
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admin –
Nancy:
What a great book! For a nonfiction, it would be remarkable easy to read for those who don’t usually read nonfiction. It’s filled with so many examples from so many industries that I can’t even remember them all; from medicine, aviation, Unilever detergent nozzles, DreamWorks movies, law enforcement, vacuum cleaners, and even child welfare social workers.
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. In order for the human brain to understand this complexity, we all use the narrative fallacy to simplify things so we can better understand. Another aspect of the situation is the need for marginal gains through repetitive testing, much like the evolutionary process. Marginal gains occur through bottom-up testing, as opposed to top-down analysis and planning which is what many of us do. We look at a problem, think about it, arrive at a logical solution, then apply the solution only to find it doesn’t work for some unplanned for reason or due to complexity that we don’t understand. Iterative testing instead will yield marginal gains with each iteration until the desired result is reached.
Blame is another very important aspect of failure. Professional athletes don’t look back on years of practice as a string of failures. Practice is what drives improvement. In all things. When blame is assigned, it undermines openness and learning in a field. However, when the professional has an internal fear of failure (either due to the corporate climate where blame is assigned or whether it is tied to the ego due to years of experience or education), we sometimes can’t even admit our mistakes to ourselves.
One of the most helpful ideas I discovered in this book is the idea of the pre-mortem. Prior to beginning a major project, assemble everyone together and assume the project has run its course and is now a huge embarrassing failure. What are some ways we could have prevented this outcome? How did the failure come about?
And my favorite tongue-in-cheek list in the entire book:
The 6 phases of a project
1. Enthusiasm
2. Disillusionment
3. Panic
4. Search for the guilty
5. Punishment of the innocent
6. Rewards for the uninvolved
admin –
Mario Tomic:
How do some learn from mistakes and become better while others never seem to improve? What if the problem is that no one has taught us how to deal with failure? This brilliant book reveals a framework for how to use mistakes as learning tools and transform short-term failures into long-term success. The book is full of engaging stories and interesting anecdotes on how the human psyche has the potential to deal with failure in a variety of ways. 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. Becoming a “Black box thinker” will undoubtedly make you more successful in life. Overall, Matthew has nailed it once again! His previous book Bounce is one of my personal favorite personal development books. And as for Black Box Thinking, I highly recommend the book as it will give you powerful tools to deal with mistakes and make you a lot more aware of what’s going in your mind and the minds of people around you in high-pressure situations.