How to turn failures into success and reduce the risk of irreparable mistakes. Review of the book “The Black Box Principle”

Admitting your mistakes is not easy. Nobody wants to face failure, everyone strives for success. And when failure concerns work and status, the attitude towards mistakes becomes even more acute. When our professionalism is questioned, we often instinctively defend ourselves. We don't want to be perceived as incompetent or unable to solve a problem, and we don't want our reputation to be damaged in the eyes of our peers.

Society as a whole has a conflicting attitude towards mistakes. We can make excuses for our failures, but when others fail, we immediately begin to make accusations.

Partly because we tend to criticize others for their mistakes, we hide our own failures. We are aware of how others will react to our mistakes and cannot imagine them understanding our difficult situation.

We feel so strongly about our failures that we sometimes make our goals vague to avoid blame for not achieving them. We strive to save face without even starting the path to achieving anything.

We hide our mistakes to protect ourselves not only from others, but also from ourselves. Instead of learning from our mistakes, we erase them from our memory and delete them from our official biography.

If this sounds familiar to you, then You should definitely read Matthew Syed's book “The Black Box Principle. Why mistakes are the basis of our achievements in sports, business and life.”

The book offers a completely different perspective on mistakes and failures and is about how to achieve success by redefining the relationship with failure at the individual, corporate and societal levels.

Success in complex systems is only possible by admitting mistakes, learning from them, and creating an environment where mistakes are accepted as safe.

Who is this book for:

The book will be especially useful to those who manage teams, product managers, project managers, startups and innovation specialists, as it offers new approaches to analyzing mistakes and learning from them, which helps reduce risks and increase the chances of successful project implementation.

Through practical approaches and examples, you can learn how to use failure as an opportunity for growth and development.

Main topics

1. The logic of defeat and the paradox of success

To demonstrate the connection between failure and success, the authors compared aviation and healthcare.

In aviation, each aircraft is equipped with two “black boxes”. The first box records flight parameters, the second – crew conversations. When an incident occurs, the data from them is analyzed.

In addition, in aviation there is a rule to report your mistakes. Failures are seen as learning opportunities and, as a result, aviation safety has increased significantly: in 1912, half of American pilots died in accidents; today there is one in 2.4 million flights.

Unlike aviation, in healthcare, up to 98,000 Americans die each year due to medical errors. Errors are often hushed up here, due to the fact that the error threatens the reputation of the doctor and the clinic. Instead of analyzing failures, euphemisms such as “complication” or “unforeseen result” are used.

2. Closed and open loops

An example of a closed cycle: in medicine from the 2nd to the 19th centuries, bloodletting was used, which weakened patients. If the patient recovered, the doctor claimed that bloodletting saved him; if he died, it was explained by the severity of the disease.

Doctors did not test the effectiveness of the method, simply ignoring its shortcomings.

A closed loop is a situation where failures do not lead to progress due to misinterpretation of error data. Closed loops are ubiquitous in all areas: government, business, healthcare and private life.

On the contrary, an open cycle involves analyzing errors, taking appropriate actions and further development.

3. Why is experience valuable in some professions and useless in others?

In chess or medicine, mistakes are quickly discovered: a bad move or an incorrect diagnosis immediately leads to “defeat.” This is called deliberate practice.

However, for example, therapists rarely receive information about the long-term consequences of their decisions, which is similar to playing golf in the dark – it is difficult to understand where the ball is hitting and how close it is to the target.

To make progress, it is important to “turn on the light.” Without error analysis, you can work for years and not achieve results.

4. Learning from mistakes

For training you need 2 components:

• System:

  Mistakes are the gap between expectations and reality. Leading companies always strive to minimize this gap by creating a system that turns mistakes into learning opportunities.
  At Toyota, any employee can stop production if an error is discovered, which will be thoroughly investigated. Moreover, an organization's open culture allows the entire system to learn from mistakes.

• Training Opportunities:

  Aviation has developed protocols to allow all participants to quickly access new data. This facilitates instant assimilation of information.

  Unlike aviation, innovations in healthcare are slow to be introduced because new knowledge is not simplified or systematized. In aviation, disaster investigators isolate actionable information, unlike doctors who are faced with a huge volume of scientific articles.

5. Cognitive dissonance

In 1954, housewife Marion Keech announced that she had been in contact with an alien being who predicted the end of the world. When this did not happen, her followers did not reject her, but rather strengthened their faith, claiming that they had “saved the world.”

This example shows that when confronted with facts that threaten our deeply held beliefs, we are more likely to reinterpret the facts than to reject them.

Similarly, during the Iraq War, many politicians assured the public that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction. However, after 2003, when it became clear that these weapons were not there, supporters of the war chose to ignore the facts, even convincing themselves that the weapons had been found.

When cognitive dissonance occurs, we have two options:

1. Admitting mistakes: It threatens our self-esteem because it makes us realize that we might be wrong.

2. Negation: We filter and interpret facts to maintain confidence that we are right.

Cognitive dissonance is especially noticeable among those who occupy high positions: top managers tend to justify their decisions, even if they are wrong. This hinders their ability to learn from mistakes.

As the philosopher Karl Popper said, uncritical thinking leads to the fact that we find only confirmation of our beliefs, ignoring everything that does not agree with them.

6. Finding a Scapegoat

The desire to find someone to blame is a natural reaction to failure. We simplify the situation by blaming someone instead of understanding the reasons.

The search for the culprit often leads to “shooting in a circle,” when everyone blames the other. In simple systems, blame can work as a control technique, but in complex environments, errors are more likely to have situational causes.

Severe punishments reduce the openness of employees, forcing them to hide mistakes, which only increases the likelihood of their repetition.

7. Natural selection

Unilever faced a problem with the quality of its washing powder due to outdated sprayers. Mathematicians spent a long time developing a complex strategy, but it did not bring results. Then the management attracted biologists who, using trial and error, after 449 experiments, found a solution.

This approach resembles the process of evolution: through many attempts, the best options are identified.

A market economy also works on the principle of natural selection – successful companies survive, and the rest leave the market.

8. You create the perfect gun

One of the reasons for failure is underestimating the complexity of the world. People tend to come up with explanations for events in hindsight. Economists, for example, can talk convincingly about the reasons for market behavior, but if everything is so simple, why don’t they predict the future, but only catch up with events?

You create the perfect gun, calculate the bullet's trajectory, taking into account wind and gravity, and develop a strategy.

But the gun doesn't fire.

The real world is much more complex than it seems, and accounting for all the variables in advance is almost impossible. By the time you are ready to act, the goal may have already shifted. Like a bullet that encounters wind, rain and other factors when it hits reality, your original plans may change.

Success depends not only on planning, but also on the ability to quickly adapt as new information becomes available. The faster you correct course, the closer you are to your goal. This metaphor emphasizes that precise planning is useless without flexibility and a willingness to change.

9. Failure and Perseverance are the Drivers of Innovation

One day, Dyson noticed that his vacuum cleaner was losing power and realized that the bag was becoming clogged with dust. This gave him the idea to create a bagless vacuum cleaner. Only after three years of deliberation did he see a cyclonic dust collector that separated dust from the air and was able to assemble the first prototype, which worked successfully.

However, between the first prototype and the final version, Dyson created 5,127 variations before his vacuum cleaner went on sale and made him a £3 billion fortune.

Many famous inventions also arose as responses to specific difficulties. The theory of relativity emerged as a solution to the limitations of Newtonian mechanics, masking tape was created to protect walls while painting, ATMs made it easier to access cash, and Dropbox was born when Drew Houston forgot his flash drive with important files.

But one creative leap is not enough. The hardest part is bringing the idea to perfection through iteration and testing.

Какое ключевое свойство объединяет всех победителей – компании, которые не обязательно придумывали что-то первыми, но при этом заставляли идеи работать? Ответ можно уместить в одном слове: усердие.

10. How to create a culture of growth. Beckham effect

David Beckham, one of the best football players, started with failures like everyone else: he could not hold the ball, losing control. But after six months of daily training, he had already successfully completed 50 touches, and by the age of nine he set a record of 2003 touches. After that, he focused on free kicks, practicing his technique with his father and taking about 50,000 shots.

Successful people often approach failure differently than our intuition tells us.
They, like all of us, want to succeed, but at the same time they know how valuable mistakes are in the learning process.

If we cannot achieve success without learning from mistakes, how can we overcome both internal and external obstacles that prevent us from doing so?

People with a growth mindset believe that abilities can be improved through work and persistence. They accept mistakes as an important part of the process and learn from them.

In contrast, those with a fixed mindset see mistakes as evidence of their weaknesses, which creates fear of criticism and uncertainty.

Research shows that children with a fixed mindset quickly lose confidence after failure and choose less effective strategies, while children with a growth mindset remain optimistic and seek new solutions.

In corporate environments, a similar pattern occurs: employees with a fixed mindset fear mistakes and hide them, while in companies that reward growth, mistakes are seen as a learning opportunity.

When an employee faces new challenges, his reaction varies: some learn from mistakes, others avoid them, which hinders development.

In science and aviation, mistakes are seen as valuable lessons.

Implementing this approach and culture in a company changes the concept of success: competence is a constant process of learning and empowerment.

Cons of the book:
At the beginning of the book, the authors give numerous examples from aviation and medicine and spend a long time analyzing famous plane crashes and doctors’ mistakes. After reading a third of the book, you might even get a little bored, but then you understand why all these examples were there and how it all changes perception.

Pros of the book:
The book changes your thinking and attitude towards failures, there is a desire to analyze and move on, try again and again to achieve results.