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

by Matthew Syed

But the crucial point here is that justifiable blame does not undermine openness. Why? Because management has taken the time to find out what really happened rather than blaming pre-emptively, giving professionals the confidence that they can speak up without being penalised for honest mistakes. This is what is sometimes called a ‘just culture’.

When we are dealing with complexity, blaming without proper analysis is one of the most common as well as one of the most perilous things an organisation can do. And it rests, in part, on the erroneous belief that toughness and openness are in conflict with each other. They are not.

It is not because they don’t think such possibilities are irrelevant, it is that often they don’t even consider them. The brain just plumps for the simplest, most intuitive narrative: ‘He’s a homicidal fool!’

It takes real discipline to probe the black box data without prejudging the issue.’

After all, we prefer easy stories; we all have an inbuilt bias towards simplicity over complexity.

As the philosopher Karl Popper put it: ‘True ignorance is not the absence of knowledge, but the refusal to acquire it.’

When we engage with our errors we improve.

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.

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.

When someone is given a new challenge, like giving a major presentation to clients, it is inevitable that they will be less than perfect first time around. It takes time to build expertise, even for exceptional people. But there are huge differences in how individuals respond. Some love the challenge. They elicit feedback, talk to colleagues, and seek out chances to be involved in future presentations.

And yet if young people think success happens instantly for the truly talented, why would they persevere? If they take up, say, the violin and are not immediately playing like a virtuoso, they are going to assume they don’t have what it takes – and so they will give up. In effect, the mistaken idea that success is an instant phenomenon destroys resilience.

A rational financial trader should keep shares that are most likely to appreciate in the future while selling those likely to depreciate. But traders are actually more likely to keep the shares that have lost money, regardless of future prospects. Why? Because they hate to crystallise a loss. This is why people hold on to losing stocks for far too long, desperately hoping they will rebound. Even professional stock pickers are vulnerable, holding losing stocks twice as long as winning stocks.

Likewise, Beckham and Jordan may have been born with admirable sporting qualities, but these would have meant little without a Growth Mindset.

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.

This hints at one of the great paradoxes about school and life. Often it is those who are the most successful who are also the most vulnerable. They have won so many plaudits, been praised so lavishly for their flawless performances, that they haven’t learned to deal with the setbacks that confront us all. This has been found to be particularly true of young girls. Female students who go through primary school getting consistently high grades, and who appear to their teachers as highly capable, are often the most devastated by failure.3

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.

If these students flunked their crucial exam, they could say: ‘It wasn’t me who messed up, it was the booze!’ It served another purpose, too: if they did pass the exam, they could still point to alcohol in mitigation for why they didn’t get an even higher grade.

You have to put questions to nature and be willing to change your ideas if they don’t work.’

When you have top-down approaches competing with each other, with a failure test to determine which of them is working, the system starts to exhibit the properties of bottom-up.

In high tech, as we have seen, the world is moving so fast that entrepreneurs have found it necessary to adopt rapid iteration.

As business leaders, teachers, coaches, professionals and parents, we have to transform this notion of failure. We have to conceptualise it not as dirty and embarrassing, but as bracing and educative. This is the notion we need to instil in our children: that failure is a part of life and learning, and that the desire to avoid it leads to stagnation.

No one can possibly give us more service than by showing us what is wrong with what we think or do; and the bigger the fault, the bigger the improvement made possible by its revelation.

If we are operating in an environment without meaningful feedback, we can’t improve. We must institutionalise access to the ‘error signal’.

The pre-mortem is crucially different from considering what might go wrong. With a pre-mortem, the team is told, in effect, that ‘the patient is dead’: the project has failed; the objectives have not been met; the plans have bombed. Team members are then asked to generate plausible reasons why.

A pre-mortem typically starts with the leader asking everyone in the team to imagine that the project has gone horribly wrong and to write down the reasons why on a piece of paper. He or she then asks everyone to read a single reason from the list, starting with the project manager, before going around the table again.