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

by Matthew Syed

When we take a step back and think about failure more generally, the ironies escalate. 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.

success can only happen when we admit our mistakes, learn from them, and create a climate where it is, in a certain sense, ‘safe’ to fail.

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

In each case the investigators realised that crews were losing their perception of time. Attention, it turns out, is a scarce resource: if you focus on one thing, you will lose awareness of other things.

the moment when we grasped the fact that “human errors” often emerge from poorly designed systems.

It is about creating systems and cultures that enable organisations to learn from errors, rather than being threatened by them.

The reason . . . is not usually laziness or unwillingness. The reason is more often that the necessary knowledge has not been translated into a simple, usable and systematic form. If the only thing people did in aviation was issue dense, pages-long bulletins . . . it would be like subjecting pilots to the same deluge of almost 700,000 medical journal articles per year that clinicians must contend with. The information would be unmanageable. Instead . . . crash investigators [distil] the information into its practical essence.

I met with Alastair Campbell, Blair’s former head of communications and one of his most trusted lieutenants. We talked at length about the phenomenon of cognitive dissonance. Campbell was characteristically thoughtful, talking about the build-up to war and the pressure-cooker atmosphere in Downing Street. I asked him if he still backed the decision to go to war. ‘There are times when I wonder about it, particularly when news comes through of more deaths,’ he said. ‘But on balance, I think we were right to get rid of Saddam.’ Do you think it is possible that you could ever change your mind, I asked? ‘It would be difficult, given what we have been through, but it’s not impossible,’ he said. And what about Tony, I asked. ‘Think about what it would mean if he admitted he was wrong,’ Campbell replied. ‘It would overshadow everything he had ever worked for. It would taint his achievements. Tony is a rational and strong-minded guy, but I don’t think he would be able to admit that Iraq was a mistake. It would be too devastating, even for him.’

In their book Art and Fear David Bayles and Ted Orland tell the story of a ceramics teacher who announced on the opening day of class that he was dividing the students into two groups. Half were told that they would be graded on quantity. On the final day of term, the teacher said he would come to class with some scales and weigh the pots they had made. They would get an ‘A’ for 50 lbs of pots, a ‘B’ for 40 lbs, and so on. The other half would be graded on quality. They just had to bring along their one, perfect pot. The results were emphatic: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group graded for quantity. As Bayles and Orland put it: ‘It seems that while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work – and learning from their mistakes – the “quality” group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.’

One of the ironies of charitable spending is that the one statistic many donors do tend to look at can actually undermine the pursuit of evidence. The so-called overhead ratio measures the amount of money spent on administration compared with the front line. Most donors are keen for charities to keep this ratio low: they want money to go to those who really need it rather than office staff. But given that evidence-gathering counts as an administrative cost rather than treatment, this makes it even more difficult for charities to conduct tests. As Ord puts it: ‘You might think that organizations would know the most effective treatment. But often they don’t and one of the reasons for that is because they don’t do as much program evaluation as we would like because they’re trying to keep the overhead ratio low. Also, they just generally aren’t aware of these figures.’

The problem is that when many of us free associate, we come up with rather boring associations. If someone says ‘blue’, most people reply ‘sky’. If someone says ‘green’, we say ‘grass’. This is hardly the stuff of inspiration. In her free association experiment, Nemeth showed slides to volunteers. As expected, they came up with conventional, banal associations. But then she had a lab assistant call out the wrong colour as part of the experiment. When a blue slide was shown, the assistant called out ‘green’. And this is when something odd happened. When Nemeth then asked these volunteers to free associate on the colours that had been wrongly identified, they suddenly became far more creative. They came up with associations that reached way beyond tired convention. Blue became ‘jeans’ or ‘lonely’ or ‘Miles Davis’.

there is a different and altogether more subtle barrier to meaningful evolution: the internal fear of failure. This is the threat to ego; the damage to our self-esteem; the fact that many of us can’t admit our mistakes even to ourselves – and often give up as soon as we hit difficulties.

But it also explains why some people learn from their mistakes, while others do not. The difference is ultimately about how we conceptualise our failures. Those in the Growth Mindset, by definition, think about error in a different way from those in the Fixed Mindset. Because they believe that progress is driven, in large part, by practice, they naturally regard failure as an inevitable aspect of learning. Is it any wonder they pay attention to their mistakes and extract the learning opportunities? Is it any wonder they are not crushed by failure? And is it any wonder they are sympathetic to bottom-up iteration? Those who think that success emerges from talent and innate intelligence, on the other hand, are far more likely to be threatened by their mistakes. They will regard failures as evidence that they don’t have what it takes, and never will: after all, you can’t change what you were born with. They are going to be more intimidated by situations in which they will be judged. Failure is dissonant.

You’re not born with fear of failure, it’s not an instinct, it’s something that grows and develops in you as you get older. Very young children have no fear of failure at all. They have great fun trying new things and learning very fast. Our focus here is on failing well, on being good at failure. What I mean by this is taking the risk and then learning from it if it doesn’t work.

At the end of these training courses, the two groups were tested on a difficult problem. Those who had experienced consistent success were as demoralised by failing to solve this problem as they had been before the training. They were so sensitive to failure that their performance declined and it took many days for them to recover. Some were even more afraid of challenges and didn’t want to take risks.

I first saw self-handicapping in action during my final year at Oxford University. We were about to take our final exams and we had all prepared well for the big day. Most of us were apprehensive, but also relieved that the waiting was finally over. Over the previous twenty-four hours the majority of us spent our time going through our revision notes for a final time. But one group of students did something very different. They sat outside in the garden area frolicking and drinking cocktails, didn’t take a single look at their notes, and made sure that everyone knew that they were going to a nightclub later that evening. They all looked pretty relaxed, joking about the coming exams. To me, it didn’t make sense. Why jeopardise three years of work for the sake of a night on the town? What could they possibly hope to gain by arriving at the first exam, one of the most important days of their lives, with a hangover? The most surprising thing of all was that many were among the brightest students, who had worked diligently for the preceding three years. It was only years later, when reading about cognitive dissonance and the Fixed Mindset, that the pieces fell into place: they were so terrified of underperforming, so worried that the exam might reveal that they were not very clever, that they needed an alternative explanation for possible failure. They effectively sabotaged their own chances in order to gain one.

As one psychologist put it: ‘One can admit to a minor flaw [drinking] in order to avoid admitting to a much more threatening one [I am not as bright as I like to think].’

Similarly, the criminal justice system has long been infused with an almost religious air of infallibility, particularly when it comes to wrongful convictions. As we noted earlier, one district attorney said: ‘Innocent men are never convicted. Don’t worry about it. It is a physical impossibility’.

Take Bacon’s criticism of medieval science: that knowledge was handed down from authority figures. This tallies directly with the dogma of top-down knowledge in the social sphere today. We see this phenomenon when politicians talk about their pet ideas and ideologies – school uniform improves discipline, delinquents can be scared out of crime through prison visits, and so on. They don’t see the need for experiments or data because they think they have reached the answer through conviction or insight.