Black Box Thinking: The Surprising Truth About Success

All aircraft are required to carry a black box, which records conversations and instructions to the pilot, so that, if something goes wrong, events can be analyzed and procedures changed. This is the black box thinking of the book's title.

In 2013, for example, there was only one accident for every 8 million flights. And in more than 36 million flights worldwide, 210 people died. In the US healthcare system, on the other hand, the accidental death rate is the equivalent of two jumbo jets crashing every day.

The evidence is clear. Given the different approaches of these two sectors, success is more likely to happen when we own up to our mistakes and learn from them.

So who's this book for? It's not a how-to guidebook for managers – there aren't any steps or action plans to follow. But it does offer a fascinating glimpse into the way we deal with our failures and the consequences of our actions. So anyone who's interested in learning from mistakes – and the dangers of ignoring them – will find this book an absorbing wake-up call.

The author, Matthew Syed, is a British journalist. His first book, "Bounce," described the importance of practice to achieve success, using anecdotes and examples from the world of sport. And he should know about that. He's not only an award-winning journalist. He's also a two-time Olympian and a three-time Commonwealth table tennis champion.

So keep listening to hear how the crash of United Airlines flight 173 changed aviation, why a young man spent six years in prison after he was proven innocent of a crime, and how a "nozzle paradox" transformed a struggling company into a global success.

Part One is titled The Logic of Failure, and it starts with a gripping story about a young wife and mother, who went to the hospital for a routine operation on her sinuses. Two hours later she was dead. What happened? As the author relays in great detail, she died from asphyxiation. The doctors couldn't get the breathing tube down her throat. A tracheostomy would've made breathing possible, but the doctors kept trying to insert the tube rather than performing the life-saving measure.

The husband of the woman who died asked the hospital to investigate what went wrong, with the sole intention of preventing this tragedy happening again to another patient. But the hospital refused to look into it, saying, "We don't do investigations."

For Syed, this attitude is characteristic of the healthcare sector. While a lack of trained staff, insufficient funding, and long hours contribute to the high rate of fatalities and complications in this field, the root of the problem lies in the attitude of many healthcare professionals, Syed says. And it's evident in other sectors, too. None of us likes to admit our mistakes or see ourselves as incompetent. We don't want others to see us this way either, because it reduces our credibility. So we defend our actions. We cover up our mistakes. We blame other people. We even keep our goals deliberately vague, so no one can blame us if we don't achieve them.

In the next chapter, Syed tells a different story. This one isn't about failure, but the success that can come from learning from our mistakes. He uses an example from the aviation industry to illustrate this idea. There are lives at stake in both healthcare and aviation, and mistakes are made in both. But these two industries demonstrate a radically different response to those mistakes, with significantly different results.

In 1978, United Airlines flight 173 was flying a routine journey from New York to Oregon. Approaching Portland International Airport, the pilot heard a strange noise and thought the landing gear had not descended properly. He circled the airport while he tried to figure out what to do so they could land safely. But in the meantime, they were running low on fuel and that became a serious issue. It turned out later that there was nothing wrong with the landing gear. But the pilot became so focused on that, he overlooked the fuel gage and continued to circle the airspace over Portland until they ran out of fuel and eventually crashed.

In the first story, the doctor became so focused on inserting the breathing tube, he forgot about the time and the safety of the patient. Similarly, the pilot in this example also lost track of the big picture. In both cases, lower-ranking colleagues noticed the danger and attempted to alert the senior officer, but they were intimidated by the hierarchy and failed to make their concerns explicit. At the same time, the people in charge ignored the warnings of their less senior colleagues, with disastrous results.

The difference between these two incidents is what happened afterwards. While the hospital moved on from the woman's death, telling themselves and her loved ones that they had done the best they could, United Airlines took a different approach. Airline officials looked at the black box recovered from the airplane to find out what went wrong. As a result of their investigation, they taught airline personnel communication skills, gave first officers assertiveness training so they could speak up about their concerns, updated checklists, and developed a new procedure for flights.

Any evidence recovered from black box investigations is inadmissible in court, ensuring those involved reveal information without fear of retribution. Flight crews have to file reports not only on crashes, but also on near misses, so potentially dangerous situations can be averted in future. Their reports are submitted anonymously, so there's no blame involved. The findings are also made available to everyone in the industry, so a wide range of people can learn from the mistakes.

Syed tells another story of a flight crew that used these techniques to avert disaster. The open communication between the pilot and the co-pilot, the checklists, even the advances in autopilot technology that helped prevent a crash were all innovations developed from previous incidents. The fatal mistakes that caused those tragedies led to later success and a safe landing for this flight.

Syed goes on to describe "open loops" and "closed loops" to explain this divergence in thinking. Open loops lead to progress, because feedback is accepted and people act on it. Closed loops are patterns of mistakes when people fail to learn. Why does this happen? According to Syed, people deny they've failed so they can appear faultless. It has nothing to do with intelligence. Anything that feels like a threat to our self-esteem can trigger this response. And the more prestigious, famous or powerful we are, the more we've got to lose, and the more we'll want to protect our position.

In Part Two, Syed discusses cognitive dissonance, a thought process that creates tension between our beliefs and the evidence. We often unconsciously block out our awareness of our mistakes by denying they ever happened. When we adopt this strategy, learning is impossible. The key is to develop a system and a culture that allow mistakes to happen without blame, so people can learn from them.

Without this kind of system in place, terrible mistakes can ruin lives, as shown by the death of the young woman in the first example – and worse still, the same mistakes can happen again and again.

Later in the book, Syed gives another memorable illustration of what can happen when we don't own up to our mistakes. In 1992, a young man was sentenced to life in prison for the murder of an 11-year-old girl. After DNA evidence proved he didn't commit the crime, the prosecutors in the case refused to admit they'd made a mistake, and he spent another six years in jail before he was released. According to Syed's research, we're more likely to reframe the facts than change our beliefs when we're confronted with evidence that forces us to admit we were wrong.

Throughout the book, Syed refers to lots of research studies and real-life stories. He provides so many examples it's impossible not to get the point he's making – success comes from learning from your mistakes.

It's all interesting but, if readers are hoping for some practical tips on how to do that, they'll be disappointed. That's not what this book is about. Rather, it's an examination of the ways we deceive ourselves, and the dire consequences of those actions. That said, there are some broad tips for capturing learning, as you'll hear later.

So, what happens when there's a system in place that allow you to be open about the mistakes you make? In the next chapter, we find out about a company that encouraged mistakes – and its people kept making them until they succeeded.

Unilever discovered the nozzle in its soap powder manufacturing system was clogging up the process and slowing down production. The company needed a new nozzle. But instead of hiring designers and engineers to design a new one, it tested its nozzle to find out how and where it was going wrong, and then made changes to it and tested it again. In all, the company created 449 failed nozzles until it came up with a design that worked. Invention isn't always based on great ideas, Syed says. Trial and error can create real change too.

One way to ensure you're heading in the right direction is to create a control group, like you find in clinical trials. In a chapter called Scared Straight, Syed tells us about a program by the same name which brought troubled teenagers into prisons to scare them into avoiding a life of crime. At first, no one questioned the reliability of the data, which showed impressive results – lots of delinquents turned off a life of crime. But years later, researchers discovered that the data was incomplete. One of the problems was the lack of a control group, so it was impossible to draw reliable conclusions about the effectiveness of the program.

Another technique for learning from your mistakes is called marginal gains. Syed describes this in Part Four, called Small Steps and Giant Leaps. You achieve marginal gains when you break a big goal into small parts, and then improve each of those parts one by one. What's most significant is not the changes themselves. Rather, it's the process of analyzing what works and what doesn't, in great detail, and then adapting what you do.

This is part of what distinguishes successful people from the ones who simply come up with new ideas. You need to be disciplined enough to keep trying, testing, failing, and trying, again and again. At the same time, you need to think big to see where you are now and where you're headed.

In Part Six, Creating a Growth Culture, Syed offers more tips on how to overcome the barriers to success. One of the obstacles, he says, is having a fixed mindset. If you believe your intelligence is fixed, and your failures are proof you don't have what it takes to succeed, you're not going to progress. Fear of making mistakes and avoiding challenges also prevent us from learning and growing. But the key to success is not the absence of failure, but the willingness to persevere through failure.

Packed with fascinating, and sometimes shocking, stories and statistics, this book reads like a thriller at times. At other times, it's frustratingly repetitive. And while Syed doesn't offer many practical tips, the stories he shares are inspiring. There's a wealth of information here and lots of ideas, and Syed writes in a clear, comprehensible way which makes it easy to absorb. He often starts chapters with real-life anecdotes that draw you in. He also provides signposts along the way, reminding you of what was discussed earlier and how it all links together.

So, whether you're eager to reform the prison system in America or you just want to do a good job, we think Syed's insights are well worth reading.

"Black Box Thinking: The Surprising Truth About Success," by Matthew Syed, is published by John Murray Publishers.

That's the end of this episode of Book Insights. Thanks for listening.