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

by Matthew Syed

Pixar films are not good at first, and our job is to make them go . . . from suck to non-suck . . . We are true believers in the power of bracing, candid feedback and the iterative process—reworking, reworking and reworking again, until a flawed story finds its throughline or a hollow character finds its soul.

It is sometimes said that testing may be important for engineers and hard items like vacuum cleaners, nozzles, and curtain rods, but it doesn’t apply to soft, intangible problems like writing novels or scripts for children’s animations. In fact, iteration is vital for both.

Today education is conceived as providing young people with a body of knowledge. Students are rewarded when they apply this knowledge correctly. Failures are punished. But this is surely only one part of how we learn.

We learn not just by being correct, but also by being wrong. It is when we fail that we learn new things, push the boundaries, and become more creative.

“The problem with academia is that it is about being good at remembering things like chemical formulae and theories, because that is what you have to regurgitate. But children are not allowed to learn through experimenting and experience. This is a great pity. You need both.”

this is invariably how progress happens. It is an interplay between the practical and the theoretical, between top-down and bottom-up, between creativity and discipline, between the small picture and the big picture. The crucial point—and the one that is most dramatically overlooked in our culture—is that in all these things, failure is a blessing, not a curse. It is the jolt that inspires creativity and the selection test that drives evolution.

be wrong as fast as we can . . . which basically means, we’re gonna screw up, let’s just admit that. Let’s not be afraid of that. But let’s do it as fast as we can so we can get to the answer.

tinderbox.

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.

Proper investigation achieves two things: it reveals a crucial learning opportunity, which means that the systemic problem can be fixed, leading to meaningful evolution. But it has a cultural consequence too: professionals will feel empowered to be open about honest mistakes, along with other vital information, because they know that they will not be unfairly penalized—thus driving evolution still further.

we have to resist the hardwired tendency to blame instantly, and look deeper into the factors surrounding error if we are going to figure out what really happened and thus create a culture based upon openness and honesty rather than defensiveness and back-covering.

What should be crystal clear is that a desire to apportion blame, before taking the time to understand what really happened, is senseless. It may be intellectually satisfying to have a culprit, someone to hang the disaster on. And it certainly makes life simple. After all, why get into the fine print? It was clearly the fault of Israel/the crew/Egypt Control. What else needs saying? Instant blame often leads to what has been called a “circular firing squad.” This is where everyone is blaming everyone else.

often everyone in a circular firing squad is being sincere. They all really think that it is the other guy’s fault.

managers often feel that it is expedient to blame. After all, if a major company disaster can be conveniently pinned on a few “bad apples,” it may play better in PR terms. “It wasn’t us; it was them!” There is also a widespread management view that punishment can exert a benign disciplinary effect. It will make people sit up and take notice. By stigmatizing mistakes, by being tough on them, managers think that staff will become more diligent and motivated.

“Holding people accountable and [unfairly] blaming people are two quite different things,”

“Blaming people may in fact make them less accountable: They will tell fewer accounts, they may feel less compelled to have their voice heard, to participate in improvement efforts.”

In the worlds of business, politics, aviation, and health care, people often make mistakes for subtle, situational reasons. The problem is often not a lack of focus, it is a consequence of complexity. Increasing punishment, in this context, doesn’t reduce mistakes, it reduces openness.

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.

In management courses today, a contrast is often offered between a “blame culture” and an “anything goes” culture. In this conception, the cultural challenge is to find a sensible balance between these two, seemingly competing objectives. Blame too much and people will clam up. Blame too little and they will become sloppy. But judged from a deeper level, these are not in conflict after all. The reconciliation of these seemingly contradictory objectives (discipline and openness) lies in black box thinking.

if you make an honest mistake we will not penalize you. This doesn’t mean that blame is never justified. If, after investigation, it turns out that a person was genuinely negligent, then punishment is not only justifiable, but imperative.

giving professionals the confidence that they can speak up without being penalized for honest mistakes.

The question, according to Sidney Dekker, is not Who is to blame? It is not even Where, precisely, is the line between justifiable blame and an honest mistake? because this can never be determined in the abstract. Rather, the question is, Do those within the organization trust the people who are tasked with drawing that line? It is only when people trust those sitting in judgment that they will be open and diligent.8

The impetus that drives learning from mistakes is precisely the same as the one that aims at a just culture. Forward-looking accountability is nothing more and nothing less than learning from failure. To generate openness, we must avoid preemptive blaming. All these things interlock in a truly adaptive system.

“True ignorance is not the absence of knowledge, but the refusal to acquire it.”

Blame has other, more personal consequences, too, particularly in safety-critical industries. Professionals involved in tragedies, such as clinicians or social workers, frequently suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder, even when they are not to blame. They are emotionally scarred by their involvement in a tragedy.

when feelings of guilt are compounded by unjustified accusations of criminality, individuals can be pushed over the edge.

off-kilter.

For the kids in the Fixed Mindset group, with a static attitude to intelligence, failure is debilitating. It shows not just that you are not up to the job, but that you might as well give up. After all, you cannot change how much talent you have. For the kids in the Growth Mindset, everything changed. For them intelligence is dynamic. It is something that can grow, expand, and improve. Difficulties are regarded not as reasons to give up, but as learning opportunities.

It is when a culture has an unhealthy attitude toward mistakes that blame is common, cover-ups are normal, and people fear to take sensible risks. When this attitude flips, blame is less likely to be preemptive, openness is fostered, and cover-ups are seen for what they are: blatant self-sabotage.

if we drop out when we encounter problems, progress is prevented, no matter how talented we are. If we interpret difficulties as indictments of who we are, rather than as pathways to progress, we will run a mile from failure. Grit, then, is strongly related to the Growth Mindset;

if young people think success happens instantly for the truly talented, why would they persevere?

the mistaken idea that success is an instant phenomenon destroys resilience.

It is worth pointing out here that giving up is not always a bad thing.

At some point you have to make a calculation as to whether the costs of carrying on are outweighed by the benefits of giving up and trying something new. These are some o...

In the United States the culture is one where entrepreneurs take risks and rarely give up if their first venture fails.

“Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently,”

In Japan, on the other hand, the culture is very different. For complex reasons of social and economic history,5 failure is more stigmatizing. The basic attitude is that if you mess up you have brought shame on yourself and your family. Failure is regarded not as an opportunity to learn, but as a demonstration that you do not have what it takes. These are classic Fixed Mindset attitudes. Blame for business failure is common and, often, intense.

dearth

In mathematics, China and Japan rank among the best in the world.

The United Kingdom and the United States lag well behind,

In the UK and the United States, math is widely considered to be something you either can or can’t do. When children struggle they assume they are not cut out for it.

In China and Japan the attitude is radically different. Math is thought of as a bit like a language: as you persevere you become more articulate. Mistakes are held up not as evidence of a fixed inferiority, or as showing that you have “the wrong kind of brain,” but as evidence of learning.

Evolution, as we noted in chapter 7, is driven by failure. But if we give up when we fail, or if we edit out our mistakes, we halt our progress no matter how smart we are. It is the Growth Mindset fused with an enlightened evolutionary system that helps to unlock our potential;

blatant.

brittle

Self-esteem, in short, is a vastly overvalued psychological trait. It can cause us to jeopardize 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.

when you regard failure as a learning opportunity, when you trust in the power of practice to help you grow through difficulties, your motivation and self-belief are not threatened in anything like the same way.

This is not to say that narratives are not worth having; it is merely to suggest that they should be seen for what they are: rhetorical devices requiring empirical validation.

We recognize that creative people make great leaps in the natural sciences, but we also realize that this process is checked by experimentation.

But when it comes to the social world we often trust gut instinct. Political pundits range widely over various issues, making arguments on education one week, then criminal justice the next. The narratives are often powerful. But few journalists or commentators would feel entitled to argue about engineering or chemistry, at least without firm data. They would always subordinate narrative to evidence in these domains.