Black Box Thinking: Why Some People Never Learn from Their Mistakes - But Some Do

by Matthew Syed

as with medieval bloodletting, observational stats do not always provide reliable data. Often, you need to test the counterfactual. Otherwise you may be harming people without even realizing it.

how often do we actually test our policies and strategies? How often do we probe our assumptions, in life or at work? In medicine, as we have seen, there have been almost one million randomized trials. In criminal justice, they scarcely exist. Policy, almost across the board, is run on narrative, hunch, untested ideology, and observational data skewed to fit predetermined conclusions.

Closed loops are not just an intellectual curiosity, they accurately (and sometimes terrifyingly) describe the world in which we live.

“It is about marginal gains,” he said. “The approach comes from the idea that if you break down a big goal into small parts, and then improve on each of them, you will deliver a huge increase when you put them all together.”

There is only one Africa. You cannot find lots of different Africas, randomly divide them into groups, give aid to some and not to others, and then measure the outcomes.

When it comes to really big issues, it is very difficult to conduct controlled experiments. To run an RCT you need a control group, which is not easy when the unit of analysis is very large.

This brings us directly to the concept of marginal gains. If the answer to a big question is difficult to establish, why not break it down into lots of smaller questions?

by looking at one program at a time, it is perfectly possible to run controlled experiments.

One way to see if aid spending is working would be to look at the correlation between the quantity of spending and the average grade score across the continent. The problem is that this wouldn’t give you any information about the counterfactual (what would have happened to scores without the funding).

economists wanted to know whether handing out free textbooks to schools would boost grades. Intuitively, they were pretty sure it would. In the past the observational data had been good. Schools that received books tended to improve their test scores. But the economists wanted to be sure, so they performed an RCT. Instead of giving the textbooks to the most deserving schools, which is the common approach, they randomly divided a number of eligible schools into two groups: one group received free textbooks and the other group did not. Now, the charity had a treatment group and a control group. They had a chance to examine whether the books were making a real difference. The results, when they came in, were both emphatic and surprising. The students in the schools that received free textbooks didn’t perform any better than those who did not. The test results in the two groups of schools were almost identical. This outcome contradicted intuition and the observational data. But then randomized trials often do. The problem, it turned out, was not the books, but the language they were written in. English is the third language of most of the poor children living in remote Busia and Teso. They were struggling to grasp the material as it was presented. Researchers might not have realized this had they not run a trial. It pierced through to one of the untested assumptions in their approach. Confronted with failure, the economists tried another approach. They conducted another random...

“If we don’t know if we are doing any good, we are not any better than the medieval doctors and their leeches.

Marginal gains is not about making small changes and hoping they fly. Rather, it is about breaking down a big problem into small parts in order to rigorously establish what works and what doesn’t.

Clear feedback is the cornerstone of improvement.

The secret to modern F1 is not really to do with big ticket items; it is about hundreds of thousands of small items, optimized to the nth degree.

Success is about creating the most effective optimization loop.

Creativity not guided by a feedback mechanism is little more than white noise. Success is a complex interplay between creativity and measurement, the two operating together, the two sides of the optimization loop.

Every error, every flaw, every failure, however small, is a marginal gain in disguise. This information is regarded not as a threat but as an opportunity.

tantamount

bluster

Users of Google Mail were randomly grouped into forty populations of 2.5 percent and, as they visited the site at different times, were confronted with different shades, and tracked.

This approach is now a key part of Google’s operation. As of 2010, the company was carrying out 12,000 RCTs every year.

nitpicking,

a willingness to test assumptions is ultimately about a mindset. It is about intellectual honesty and a readiness to learn when one fails. Seen in this way, it is relevant to any business; in fact to almost any problem.

This is the potency of marginal gains. By dividing a big challenge into small parts, you are able to create rigorous tests, and thus deliver incremental improvements. Each may seem small or, as Brailsford often says, “virtually negligible,” but over time, and with discipline, they accumulate.

There is an ongoing debate in the political, scientific, and business worlds about whether to focus on the bold leaps that lead to new conceptual terrain, or on the marginal gains that help to optimize one’s existing fundamental assumptions. Is it about testing small assumptions or big ones; is it about transforming the world or tweaking it; is it about considering the big picture (the so-called gestalt) or the fine detail (the margins)?

At the level of the system and, increasingly, at the level of the organization, success is about developing the capacity to think big and small, to be both imaginative and disciplined, to immerse oneself in the minutiae of a problem and to stand beyond it in order to glimpse the wider vista.

Progress is often driven not by the accumulation of small steps, but by dramatic leaps.

People think of creativity as a mystical process. The idea is that creative insights emerge from the ether, through pure contemplation. This model conceives of innovation as something that happens to people, normally geniuses. But this could not be more wrong. Creativity is something that has to be worked at, and it has specific characteristics. Unless we understand how it happens, we will not improve our creativity, as a society or as a world.

the solution seems rather obvious in hindsight. This is often the case with innovation,

the fact that it emerges in response to a particular difficulty, has spawned its own terminology. It is called the “problem phase” of innovation.

Without a problem, without a failure, without a flaw, without a frustration, innovation has nothing to latch on to.

The groups with the dissent and criticize guidelines generated 25 percent more ideas than those who were brainstorming (or who had no instructions). Just as striking, when individuals were later asked to come up with more solutions for the traffic problem, those with the dissent guidelines generated twice as many new ideas as the brainstormers.

those who dissent rather than brainstorm produce not just more ideas, but more productive and imaginative ideas.

The problem with brainstorming is not its insistence on free-wheeling or quick association. Rather, it is that when these ideas are not checked by the feedback of criticism, they have nothing to respond to. Criticism surfaces problems. It brings difficulties to light. This forces us to think afresh.

Removing failure from innovation is like removing oxygen from a fire.

“Creativity is just connecting things.” If failure sparks creativity into life, the moment of insight invariably emerges from the attempt to bridge the problem with previously unconnected ideas or technologies.

epiphanies often happen when we are in one of two types of environment. The first is when we are switching off: having a shower, going for a walk, sipping a cold beer, daydreaming. When we are too focused, when we are thinking too literally, we can’t spot the obscure associations that are so important to creativity. We have to take a step back for the “associative state” to emerge.

The other type of environment where creative moments often happen, as we have seen, is when we are being sparked by the dissent of others.

“Questions from colleagues forced researchers to think about their experiments on a different scale or level.

The ground zero of innovation was not the microscope. It was the conference table.”

innovation is highly context-dependent. It is a response to a particular problem at a particular time and place.

The failures of Newton’s Laws created a specific problem. It invited particular solutions. It wasn’t just Einstein and Poincaré, but also Hendrik Lorentz and David Hilbert who were working on a possible remedy.12 Indeed, the so-called relativity priority dispute is about who invented what, when.13 And that is why the seductive idea that if Einstein had been born three hundred years earlier, we could have had the benefit of the theory of relativity in the seventeenth century is so flawed. Relativity couldn’t have happened back then, largely because the problems that it responded to were not yet visible. Einstein may have seen further and deeper than his contemporaries (there is still a large role for individualism: Einstein really was a creative genius), but he wasn’t pulling insights out of the ether.

we tend to overlook what happens before the moment of epiphany. But, if anything, we are even more neglectful of what happens afterward. This is a serious oversight because it obscures the reason why some people change the world while others are footnotes in the patent catalog.

When you file a patent, somebody is almost always there before you. A lot of your argument with the patent examiner is to say: “Look, they may have had the eureka moment when they came back from the timber yard. They may even have created an early prototype.” But none of my forebears had made their prototypes work. Mine is statistically different. That was my decisive advantage.

Creativity, then, has a dual aspect. Insight often requires taking a step back and seeing the big picture. It is about drawing together disparate ideas. It is the art of connection. But to make a creative insight work requires disciplined focus. As Dyson puts it: “If insight is about the big picture, development is about the small picture. The trick is to sustain both perspectives at the same time.”

It is often said that in a rapidly changing world innovative companies will dominate. But this is, at best, only partly true.

What was the key ingredient that characterized the winners, the companies that may not have come up with an idea first, but who made it work? The answer can be conveyed in one word: discipline. This is not just the discipline to iterate a creative idea into a rigorous solution; it is also the discipline to get the manufacturing process perfect, the supply lines faultless, and delivery seamless.*

It is no good creating the most beautiful products if you produce them shoddily. It is no good having the most innovative engineering solution if the consumers can’t be certain it will be delivered on time. It is no good if inconsistent production means that a great idea is not translated into a polished product. The original idea is only 2 percent of the journey. You mustn’t neglect the rest.

We concluded that each environment has a level of “threshold innovation” that you need to meet to be a contender in the game . . . Companies that fail even to meet the innovation threshold cannot win. But—and this surprised us—once you’re above the threshold, especially in a highly turbulent environment, being more innovative doesn’t seem to matter very much.18

Winners require innovation and discipline, the imagination to see the big picture and the focus to perceive the very small. “The great task, rarely achieved, is to blend creative intensity with relentless discipline so as to amplify the creativity rather than destroy it,” Collins writes. “When you marry operating excellence with innovation, you multiply the value of your creativity.”