Black Box Thinking!

At the end of last year, as a new year gift from office, we had each been given a book to read! There were two choices infact, between 'Team of Teams' and 'Black Box Thinking'. I chose the latter, because it sounded interesting and had something to do with developing a growth mindset.

Happy to report, I completed reading it :) It did take me a while, I agree... still, better late than never!

Black Box Thinking is written by Matthew Syed and talks about the importance of having a different approach to failure and re-imagining the concept of failures. The book talks about the healthcare sector in the beginning and the various slip-up's that plague it, in terms of the unreported failures of doctors or nurses, and how those failures, are not really followed up thoroughly as they should be, and used as a learning to get better.

It is followed up by analyzing the aviation sector and how every mistake and every crash has been thoroughly investigated to make improvements in the industry, by using the feedback mechanism of the black box (which is in fact quite orange in color!). Surely, that was not always the case, but over time, the aviation industry has improved by leaps and bounds, so much so, that it has become one of the safest ways to travel. The power of marginal gains.

The book also goes on to talk about some areas where a novice or an experienced person, does not add any value by either's involvement in the system, like for example psychotherapists, due to the lack of follow-up and long lead times, making it a poor example of a system that takes in feedback to make improvements and changes to get better and more refined outcomes.

The later chapters delve into the criminal justice system on wrongful convictions, and the scared-straight program, on cognitive dissonance issues, and blame-games. It introduces the method of RCT (Randomized Control Trials) to test a hypothesis, to be certain our conclusions on an approach to a problem is really working or not, and make changes without feeling frustrated due to failures. It talks about the pit-falls due to narrative fallacy's, intellectual contortions, and many other such errors of judgment which impedes learning, and therefore prone to stagnate the system, than improve it.

The book talks about complex systems, with its multitude of variables and their interactions, which makes it difficult to analyze and predict system behavior, and therefore advocates a fail-fast approach, in which, an evolutionary approach to problem-solving is taken up. This is an incremental change, test, develop, approach through experimentation rather than a grand design. The Nozzle Paradox is introduced and so is the Dyson design approach.

It does not concede that designs are not useful, only that the way to make change faster and learn from failures, far outweighs the achievements we can get by grand designs. In that sense, it advocates to accept the failures in a learning method in a bottom-up approach with a failure-averse approach in a top-down approach and marrying the two in a unified measure. What it really then says, is not to underestimate the power of feedback-driven designs. It gives many examples of Dyson and NetFlix and other such companies, and I can think of even Sony when they started off, having this approach.

Surely we would think 'break-through innovation' might not happen in this way, but it does, through failures again and being resilient to see the changes through till the goal is met. Infact, it goes on to say that you need not worry that you might be going up the wrong way, because those who follow the approach will know it sooner than those who don't!

Overall, it introduces and advocates concepts such as marginal gains, fail-fast, RCT's, pre-mortem's, which can be introduced in organizations and many industries, to make improvements and drive innovation. I found it a good read and there are many concepts to explore further!

Love in the time of Corona!

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.”

― Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

Its been a long long time since I got back to blogging, and apologies to my few, but dedicated followers for being patient about it (or did I do you all a favor?!😏). 

I did get many requests to restart my writing, as somewhere, somehow, some of you felt it interesting and related to it :) I thank you for it!

The world is living through a very different time, a time which is going to go down in history, due to its unprecedented nature and its sheer magnitude, affecting almost every country in the world. The covid pandemic has created almost a dystopic world, and a world where our imaginations and meanings of living, have gone through a sea change. 

The metamorphosis has been very quick, from being a busy outgoing world, into a more muted, careful world. Where our handshakes and open waves of laughter and smiles are now made from behind a mask or a screen. In fact, when I think about heterotopias, a world within a world, I wonder if this world was ever imagined, where things are seemingly as they were, and yet not as it was experienced so far. We have found new means of doing things, new means of interactions, new means of going about everyday life. A veiled world indeed. 

If VUCA as a concept was created to explain an increasingly volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous world, the pandemic that you and I are living through, takes it to its limit. There have been numerous statistics, data, facts, explaining it, and I hear there is already a movie getting made and a book being written. I suspect there will be many more books and articles written on this subject and with numerous narratives talking of how things worked, or how they didn't, how fortunes were made, or lost, how the best of humankind came to the fore, as did its worst. In short, it is no less a time, than when stories come out of a war's end. But I am going ahead of myself! We are still in the thick of things, and a vaccine or a cure is still nowhere in sight. So fingers crossed, that we live through this time to experience the other, brighter side, once again!

In spite of the lockdowns and the various restrictions, our work at the office still continues with great gusto, which by the way, included critical R&D equipment transfers between countries (going through customs and transport and the like) installations, and delivering our planned R&D programs on time and with good quality. It indeed called for a different kind of working and coordination, but it was never considered the end! If project management has taught us something, it is that risks need to have a mitigation plan, and those plans can be plan A, B, C...till we exhaust all options! If we need to live through this time, every event and a situation needs to be worked through like a project, covering all aspects & mitigations! And yet there will remain that 'unknown' that will always crop up! Did someone say 'black swan'?!

But talking about the best and the worst, it also brings to my mind the innumerable times we become self-defeating in our outlook, finger-pointing, and the like. We forget that we can't even handle our own matters with consistency or clarity, but want the world around us to be predictable and certain. When it is precisely in these times that we need to be introspective and really work through the problems by standing together (in spite of the social distancing!) and seeking solutions to problems, than become a problem ourselves! Since Gabriel Garcia Marquez wrote about love in the time of cholera, I am propagating love in the time of corona (sorry Marquez!). But indeed, what I do mean is to spread positivity, hope, courage and stand by the people who need it the most, and to do something, anything constructive, to get over this! It will never be right answers or wrong answers, only no answers, that will be our end.

Would close with just these words (our messaging through the workforce): Stay Safe, Keep Calm & Carry On. Maybe I would add, and spread the love!