Dig Down Deep to Find the Encouragement to Befriend Failure
Get outside your limited thinking.
One of my earliest memories is from my first year at school. I recall turning back to see my mother standing on our doorstep, watching over me each morning as I walked to school. The truth is my mother's maternal drive irked me at times.
Why?
Because I wanted to find my own way in the world. On my terms. I wanted to stroll blindly into the unknown — stumble, fall, fail, and get up again. My courageous spirit demanded it.
This tug of war with my mothers’ innate parental motive caused conflict at times. I just wanted her to let go.
Not being allowed to screw-up was frustrating.
Despite my mother’s efforts, I screwed up, sometimes spectacularly. But I learned, picked myself up, and moved forward that little bit wiser.
Human Defects
The biggest human flaw is our inability to learn from past mistakes, beyond our early childhood. The root cause of this sabotage is grounded in society, parenthood, and leadership, or rather, poor leadership.
“It’s one of the single greatest obstacles to human progress.” — Matthew Syed
Matthew Syed wrote Black Box Thinking with this very human defect in mind. A book that explores human behavior with respect to success and failure. Our desire, willingness, drive, and commitment to devour valuable lessons from past failures is “a treasure-chest we rarely exploit.”
As a society, in most western cultures, we have “deeply contradictory attitudes” towards failure. Andrew Karlin wrote that “in Japan, the fear of failure and resulting social alienation pose a huge psychological barrier for would-be entrepreneurs.”
Social norms and false beliefs result in excuses for our failings. Or worse, arrest true progress altogether. According to Syed, we’re all too “quick to blame others who mess up”, a symptom of failure aversion.
This article discusses two valuable life lessons I learned from Matthew Syed’s book, Black Box Thinking.
Poles Apart
Syed contrasts two industries to convey his message from the outset. He cleverly entwines two reference points that are easy to grasp, namely:
- The Aviation industry, and
- The Medical industry
Allow me to summarise the logic behind Syed’s rationale:
- Aviation industry — An industry that goes to great lengths to reveal the root cause of a near miss, an accident, or a disaster.
- Medical industry — An industry that goes to great lengths to conceal the root cause of failure.
That’s it in a nutshell, two simple similarly sounding words — reveal and conceal — but polar opposites.
Are you a revealer or a concealer? — the choice is yours.
The book is about creating a culture, a system to “enable organizations to learn from errors, rather than being threatened by them.” A concept that entire industries have struggled to embrace for generations.
Syed’s reasoning is that we’re more than “willing to blame others for their mistakes” in order “to conceal our own.”
Read that again — in order “to conceal our own” mistakes.
In other words, blame.
Pathetic anticipation, “with remarkable clarity, how people will react, how they will point the finger, how little time they will take to put themselves in the tough, high-pressure situation in which the error occurred” is a trait of “high-blame” toxic cultures.
The Impact of the Blame Game
Syed noted that the “net effect”, the outcome of poor leadership (similar to Simon Sinek) is one that “obliterates openness and spawns cover-ups. It destroys the vital information we need in order to learn.”
Concealers are toxic-culture advocates.
We all make mistakes. The only thing that we can control is our response, which can make all the difference. Our response determines our success or failure mindset.
The ability to learn from failure influences whether:
- We repeat the same mistakes, or
- Use failure as a catalyst for progress
Syed indicates that success is heavily influenced by our ability to “harness the power of failure” for both personal and collaborative growth.
Syed Solution
Learning from failure requires two things: a) the right mindset, and b) a systematic process. Syed uses the aviation industry approach towards failure to drive this point home.
“Only by redefining failure will we unleash progress, creativity, and resilience.” — Matthew Syed
Aviation accident investigators search relentlessly for wreckage and both black boxes to collate data, connect the dots, to understand what happened. The impact is that the industry can undertake immediate corrective action to prevent repeat failures from reoccurring in the future.
Black Box Thinking saves lives.
The loop
Syed describes two types of systems:
- Open-loop: As described above data is collected and examined extensively to reveal insights, new knowledge for future improvements.
- Closed-loop: By contrast, mistakes are overlooked in a closed-loop scenario, a cycle of rinse and repeat continues over and over.
Failure is a vital building block for success. They go hand in hand. This is evident in a Startup or by Entrepreneurs who gain mastery from resilience, persistence, repeated practice, failure, and dedication to their craft or project.
Inventors systematically critique and test their performance, product or service, by inviting feedback from users at every opportunity.
Closed loops tend to be maintained to hide mistakes, misinterpret data to validate a false belief (confirmation bias), or simply to justify errors.
Final Thoughts
Black Box Thinking equips the reader with a clear solution. A roadmap. A two-fold strategy summarised as follows:
№1 — Cultivate the right mindset
People with the right mindset are at the heart of any solution. A paradigm shift in mindset is achieved by firstly understanding the following:
- The difference between a growth mindset and a fixed mindset
- The importance of traits like discipline and resilience
- Why failure is a key ingredient for innovation
- The importance of openness and transparency
- The importance of culture
Mindset is the main factor that sets apart the ordinary from the extraordinary.
“We like to think of our champions and idols as superheroes who were born different from us. We don’t like to think of them as relatively ordinary people who made themselves extraordinary.” — Carol Dweck
№2 — System and process development
Mistakes are guaranteed. So it’s important to build failures into any process. Planning, prototyping, and testing evolve from real-world user feedback; some examples of this approach include:
- Seek out real-world feedback, as often as possible
- Adopt a trial-and-error approach
- Undertake rapid-prototyping
- Conduct surveys — quantitative
- Conduct focus groups — qualitative
- Build and test variations to weed out flaws
- Instill data-led decision making
- Record tiny data and marginal gains, the sum of which can add up to much bigger gains down the line
A methodical process not only enables progress but can negate potential errors through early detection, saving time and money.
“When people don’t interrogate errors, they sometimes don’t even know they have made one (even if they suspect they may have).” — Matthew Syed
Takeaways
To conclude, allow me to leave you with three words to chew on, simple but powerful words underpinned by three quotes from Matthew Syed:
- Fail — “Only by redefining failure will we unleash progress, creativity, and resilience.” Failure is your friend, not your foe.
- Think — “Marginal gains is not about making small changes and hoping they fly. Rather, it is about breaking down a big problem into small parts in order to rigorously establish what works and what doesn’t.” Start with bite-sized chunks and build from there.
- Reframe — “When we are confronted with evidence that challenges our deeply held beliefs we are more likely to reframe the evidence than we are to alter our beliefs.” Pause and reflect so that your deeply held beliefs don't become an obstacle to your progress.
The next time you encounter a challenge, a setback in life, remember these three words:
Fail, Think, and Reframe.
Copyright ©. Paul Myers, Sept. 2020. All Rights Reserved.
