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!