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

by Matthew Syed

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 refu...

If learning from failure is vital to success, how do we overcome both the internal as well as the external barriers that prevent this from happening?

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.

if someone had persuasive evidence revealing the flaws in your beliefs, it was an opportunity to learn, to revise your model of the world.

competition has favored entrepreneurs that take bottom-up learning seriously rather than those that do not.

create a revolution in the way we think about failure.

For centuries, errors of all kinds have been considered embarrassing, morally egregious, almost dirty.

This conception still lingers today. It is why children don’t dare to put their hands up in class to answer questions (how embarrassing to risk getting an answer wrong!), why doctors reframe mistakes, why politicians resist running rigorous tests on their policies, and why blame and scapegoating are so endemic.

As business leaders, teachers, coaches, professionals, and parents, we have to transform this notion of failure. We have to conceptualize 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.

praise each other for trying, for experimenting, for demonstrating resilience and resolve, for daring to learn through our own critical investigations, and for having the intellectual courage to see evi...

intuitive judgment improves when it is given a chance to learn from mistakes.

we are operating in an environment without meaningful feedback, we can’t improve. We must institutionalize access to the “error signal.”

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. By making the failure concrete rather than abstract, it alters the way the mind thinks about the problem.

“Your strength and courage has educated at least two if not three or more generations of anesthetists. The lives saved or altered because of your work are incalculable. We refer to this event everyday.”