Black Box Thinking: Growth Mindset and the Secrets of High Performance

by Matthew Syed

Studies have shown that we are often so worried about failure that we create vague goals, so that nobody can point the finger when we don’t achieve them. We come up with face-saving excuses, even before we have attempted anything. We cover up mistakes, not only to protect ourselves from others, but to protect us from ourselves. Experiments have demonstrated that we all have a sophisticated ability to delete failures from memory, like editors cutting gaffes from a film reel – as we’ll see. Far from learning from mistakes, we edit them out of the official autobiographies we all keep in our own heads.

A quick example: in the 1940s the famous Boeing B-17 bomber was involved in a series of seemingly inexplicable runway accidents. The US Army Air Corps responded by commissioning Alphonse Chapanis, a psychologist with a PhD from Yale, to undertake an investigation. By studying the crashes – their chronology, dynamics, and psychological elements – Chapanis identified poor cockpit design as a contributing factor.29 He found that the switches controlling the flaps in B-17s were identical to the switches controlling the landing gear (the wheels), and were placed side by side. This was not a problem when the pilots were relaxed and flying conditions perfect. But under the pressure of a difficult landing, pilots were pulling the wrong lever. Instead of retracting the flaps, to reduce speed, they were retracting the wheels, causing the plane to bellyflop onto the runway, with catastrophic results. Chapanis came up with the idea of changing the shape of the levers so that they resembled the equipment they were linked to. A small rubber wheel was attached to the landing-gear switch and a small flap shape to the flaps control. The buttons now had an intuitive meaning, easily identified under pressure. What happened? Accidents of this kind disappeared overnight.

We noted earlier that we tend to overlook what happens before the moment of epiphany. But, if anything, we are even more neglectful of what happens afterwards. This is a serious oversight because it obscures the reason why some people change the world while others are footnotes in the patent catalogue. The eureka moment is not the endpoint of innovation, it is the start of perhaps the most fascinating stage of all.