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

by Matthew Syed

a closed loop is where failure doesn’t lead to progress because information on errors and weaknesses is misinterpreted or ignored; an open loop does lead to progress because the feedback is rationally acted upon).

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.

As Eleanor Roosevelt put it: ‘Learn from the mistakes of others. You can’t live long enough to make them all yourself.’

Taleb has pointed out that you could observe a million white swans, but this would not prove the proposition: all swans are white. The observation of a single black swan, on the other hand, would conclusively demonstrate its falsehood.

Feedback, when delayed, is considerably less effective in improving intuitive judgement.

‘You can have the best procedures in the world but they won’t work unless you change attitudes towards error.’

Systems that do not engage with failure struggle to learn.

The more we have riding on our judgements, the more we are likely to manipulate any new evidence that calls them into question.

Defective systems create errors even when procedures are followed.

Tetlock put it: ‘Ironically, the more famous the expert, the less accurate his or her predictions tended to be.’

In his seminal book, Why Smart Executives Fail: And What You Can Learn from Their Mistakes, Sydney Finkelstein, a management professor at Dartmouth College, investigated major failures at over fifty corporate institutions.11 He found that error-denial increases as you go up the pecking order.

the higher people are in the management hierarchy, the more they tend to supplement their perfectionism with blanket excuses, with CEOs usually being the worst of all.

We do not encode high-definition movies of our experiences and then access them at will. Rather, memory is a system dispersed throughout the brain, and is subject to all sorts of biases. Memories are suggestible. We often assemble fragments of entirely different experiences and weave them together into what seems like a coherent whole. With each recollection, we engage in editing.

All those rejected designs were regarded as central to their strategy of cumulative selection, not as an indictment of their judgement. They knew they would have dozens of failures and were therefore not fazed by them.

if he can launch ten features in the same time it takes a competitor to launch one, he’ll have ten times the amount of experience to draw from in figuring out what has failed the test of customer acceptance and what has succeeded.’12

It is pre-closed loop behaviour. You are so worried about messing up that you never even get on the field of play.

‘If I want to be a great musician, I must first play a lot of bad music.’ ‘If I want to become a great tennis player, I must first lose lots of tennis games.’ ‘If I want to become a top commercial architect known for energy-efficient, minimalist designs, I must first design inefficient, clunky buildings.’

Clinging on to cherished ideas because you are personally associated with them is tantamount to ossification. As the great British economist John Maynard Keynes put it: ‘When my information changes, I alter my conclusions. What do you do, sir?’

Closed loops are often perpetuated by people covering up mistakes. They are also kept in place when people spin their mistakes, rather than confronting them head on. But there is a third way that closed loops are sustained over time: through skewed interpretation.

‘If we don’t know if we are doing any good, we are not any better than the medieval doctors and their leeches. Sometimes the patient gets better; sometimes the patient dies. Is it the leeches or something else? We don’t know.’

Bob Crandall, the former chairman of American Airlines, removed a single olive from every salad, and in doing so saved $500,000 annually.

This is marginal gains on turbocharge. ‘You improve your data set before you begin to improve your final function; what you are doing is ensuring that you have understood what you didn’t initially understand,’

Every error, every flaw, every failure, however small, is a marginal gain in disguise.

Standing still is tantamount to extinction.’

This aspect of the creative process, the fact that it emerges in response to a particular difficulty, has spawned its own terminology. It is called the ‘problem phase’ of innovation.

Further studies have shown that those who dissent rather than brainstorm produce not just more ideas, but more productive and imaginative ideas.

Criticism surfaces problems. It brings difficulties to light. This forces us to think afresh. When our assumptions are violated we are nudged into a new relationship with reality. Removing failure from innovation is like removing oxygen from a fire.

innovation is highly context-dependent. It is a response to a particular problem at a particular time and place. Take away the context, and you remove both the spur to innovation, and its raw material.

We live in a world of experts. There is nothing particularly wrong with that. The expertise we have developed is crucial for all of us. But when we are trying to solve new problems, in business or technology, we need to reach beyond our current expertise. We do not want to know how to apply the rules; we want to break the rules. We do that by failing – and learning.

if our first reaction is to assume that the person closest to a mistake has been negligent or malign, then blame will flow freely and the anticipation of blame will cause people to cover up their mistakes. But if our first reaction is to regard error as a learning opportunity, then we will be motivated to investigate what really happened.

The more unfair the culture, the greater the punishment for honest mistakes and the faster the rush to judgement, the deeper this information is buried. This means that lessons are not learned, so the same mistakes are made again and again, leading to more punitive punishment, and even deeper concealment and back-covering.

Penalising these mistakes has a simple outcome: it destroys innovation and enlightened risk-taking.

In a sense, blame is a subversion of the narrative fallacy. It is a way of collapsing a complex event into a simple and intuitive explanation: ‘It was his fault!’

‘The six 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.’

‘True ignorance is not the absence of knowledge, but the refusal to acquire it.’

This is what people think accountability looks like: a muscular response to failure. The idea is that even if the punishment is over the top in the specific instance, it will force people to sit up and take responsibility. As one pundit put it: ‘it will focus minds’.

But trying to increase discipline and accountability in the absence of a just culture has precisely the opposite effect. It destroys morale, increases defensiveness and drives vital information deep underground.

When we engage with our errors we improve.

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.

One of the problems in our culture is that success is positioned as something that happens quickly.

‘There is nothing in the growth mindset that prevents students from deciding that they lack the skills a problem requires. In fact, it allows students to give up without shame or fear that they are revealing a deep and abiding deficiency.’

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.

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.

Fear of failure is not an inherently bad thing. It is smart to consider the risks and to exercise caution if they are deemed severe.

The problem is when setbacks lead not to learning, but to recrimination and defeatism.

It is the Growth Mindset fused with an enlightened evolutionary system that helps to unlock our potential; it is the framework that drives personal and organisational adaptation.

But self-handicapping is more sophisticated. This is where the excuse is not cobbled together after the event, but actively engineered beforehand. It is, in effect, a pre-emptive dissonance-reducing strategy.

‘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].’13

Self-esteem, in short, is a vastly overvalued psychological trait. It can cause us to jeopardise learning if we think it might risk us looking anything less than perfect. What we really need is resilience: the capacity to face up to failure, and to learn from it. Ultimately, that is what growth is all about.