Why you should have your own black box | Matthew Syed | TEDxLondonBusinessSchool

Matthew Syed makes the case for acknowledging failure and confronting our mistakes, a notion he refers to as “Black Box Thinking.”

Matthew Syed was the British table tennis number one for almost a decade, three-time Commonwealth Champion, and twice competed for Great Britain in the Olympic Games (in Barcelona in 1992 and Sydney in 2000). A columnist for The Times, he has also gone on to publish numerous bestselling books: "Bounce," published in April 2010, has been described as “one of the most intelligent and thought-provoking books about sport ever written,” and "Black Box Thinking," published in 2015, which has been globally acknowledged and translated into multiple languages.

This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at http://ted.com/tedx

I'd like, if I may, to talk
about high performance.

How does it happen?

And I want to argue

that the way we conceptualize success,
the way we think about success,

radically shapes the behaviors
that we deploy

in order to achieve success.

In fact, you can give a questionnaire
to any group of people -

and this has been given to undergraduates,
primary school children, fund managers,

Premier League footballers -

to probe the way they think about success:

How does high performance happen?

And broadly speaking, you get
two kinds of answer to that question.

Over here, people say,

"Well, to be really good at my job,
or a dimension of skill within the job,

you've got to have talent,

you've got to have the gift,
you've got to have aptitude;

there's no getting away from that."

This I want to suggest is a dominant view
in Western culture and beyond,

and it's often called "the fixed mindset."

Over here, you get a slightly
different answer, where people say,

"Well, talent isn't irrelevant;

talent is a real phenomenon,
but in a complex world, it isn't enough."

And they talk about hard work,
practice, the systems, resilience,

perseverance, collaboration.

People over here say things
like "You get out what you put in."

I want to emphasize this is a more
subtle distinction than it sounds.

Over here, they're not saying
that these ingredients are irrelevant,

but they think talent is dominant.

Vice versa over there.

The reason we know that
is on some versions of this questionnaire,

they're asked to rate

the relative importance
of these two things on a scale.

But having found out
where people sit on this spectrum

and what is effectively
their answer to one question,

you can go and measure behavior.

And it turns out that the behavior
is fundamentally different.

And I want to illustrate this
by contrasting the behaviors

of two different
safety-critical industries:

aviation and health care.

I want to argue that aviation
is a growth-mindset industry.

They hire talented people,

but they've realized
that talent is not enough:

they have to learn, they have to engage,
with the data, with the opportunities

that can drive them
towards a better safety record.

So, what happens when two planes
almost hit in mid-air,

what's sometimes called a near-miss event?

Well, both pilots
voluntarily submit a report.

The totality of these reports
are statistically analyzed to figure out

what are the systemic weaknesses
that are leading to these near-accidents

so they can make the relevant reforms

to avert an accident
before it's even happened.

And what happens if,
God forbid, there is a crash?

They don't skirt around it;
they don't cover it up.

They see these accidents
as precious learning opportunities.

Every single aircraft

is equipped with two
almost indestructible black boxes.

They're actually now
integrated in a single unit

and colored bright orange
to aid visibility.

But one of the boxes records
the electronic information;

the other records how the pilot
and co-pilot were interacting

in the build-up to the crash.

So the investigation branch can go,

recover the black boxes
from the rubble of the accident,

and deconstruct precisely what went wrong

to ensure that the same mistake
never happens again.

Can I just give you one seminal example?

In the 1940s, B-17 Boeings
were crashing inexplicably.

The industry commissioned
a Yale psychologist

to do an investigation.

And he found that the switch
linked to the landing gear -

that's to say the wheels -

and the switch linked
to the landing flaps were identical

and side by side on the dashboard.

So under the pressure
of a difficult landing -

snow, sleet, rain -

the pilots were pressing the wrong switch,

and the planes were belly-flopping
onto the runway with catastrophic results.

He suggested adding a small wheel shape,
like a little tab, to one of the switches

and a small flap shape to the other,

so they now have an intuitive meaning,
easily identified under pressure.

What happened?

Accidents of that kind
disappeared overnight,

and almost incidentally,

it was a birth of ergonomics
as a discipline.

But decades of institutional learning
driven by this growth mindset,

this responsibility to learn
in a complex world,

that "Talent isn't enough,"

has driven an incredible safety record.

At the beginning of the last century,

aviation was one of the riskiest
forms of transportation.

In 1912, more than half
of U.S. Army pilots

died in crashes, in peace time.

Now, I don't know about you,
but that doesn't sound surprising:

when I look at planes, they look risky.

But decades of institutionalized learning
has driven the accident rate

to a place where,
in 2014, for the major airlines,

there was one crash
for every 8.3 million take-offs.

I want to suggest that is a cultural
and psychological achievement

driven by this empowering,
dynamic mindset.

And I want to submit to you
that this contrasts,

often quite tragically,

with health care,

which I think is in a fixed-mindset place,

where doctors have
long and expensive educations,

they have letters after their name,
some of them have knighthoods.

But in health care,
people think that talent is enough.

People who're at the top of the hierarchy
are supposed to be clinically infallible.

And so when there is a mistake
or a sub-optimal outcome,

that's quite threatening.

So instead of saying,
"How can we change the procedures

to make sure the same mistake
never happens again?"

over here, there is a tendency
to become defensive,

to try to cover up the mistake,
because you don't want to look untalented,

or to become self-justifying.

So doctors will often,
when somebody's been tragically killed,

say, "Well, it wasn't us;
it was the patient's unusual symptoms."

Or, "Well, that's just
a complication of the procedure."

Or a classic one in health care,
very well-studied,

"It's just one of those things."

But if it's just one of those things,

where is a motivational impetus
to make the reforms

so that future patients
are not harmed in the same way?

There is also a problem
in health care of high blame.

If clinicians think

they're going to be sued or litigated
or penalized for honest mistakes,

why would they be open about it?

The fixed mindset and high blame

create very specific cultural
and measurable dynamics,

the overall effect of which
is to suppress the information

that is a prerequisite
for learning in a complex world.

And you can see the consequence
of this in the hard data.

This is just one manifestation
of it, by the way.

Preventable medical error -

and I want to really emphasize
the first word in that formula,

preventable medical error -

these are the avoidable mistakes.

According to the Journal
of Patient Safety,

in the United States, every year,
in hospitals alone,

400,000 people are killed.

That's like two jumbo jets
crashing every day,

9/11 happening every four days.

The problem is not the intellectual
brilliance of the people in the industry;

the problem is when you're
in the wrong culture,

the intellectual and creative energy
does not go towards learning

but towards self-justification.

The statistics are also
very damaging in the UK.

Another example, I would suggest,
of a fixed-mindset culture, to an extent,

is economics.

And it's a very interesting finding
that the high reputation economists,

as measured by how often
they visit TV studios,

(Laughter)

make the worst predictions.

(Laughter)

Why is that?

The reason is when they make
an error of prediction,

instead of learning from it,

instead of enriching and revising
their theoretical assumptions,

they go on to television to come up with
those tortuous, ex-post rationalizations

for why they were right all along.

The low-reputation economists
can get their ego out of the way.

They can see the data in a clear-eyed way

and therefore make the adaptations
with a growth mindset

that makes them better in the long term
in terms of their predictive track record.

Over here, there is often
a negative correlation

between talent and performance.

Over here, the growth mindset
liberates our talent,

it enables us to engage with the world,

and to create that dynamic
process of change,

which is a distinctive feature
of all high-performance institutions.

When Virginia Mason Hospital in Seattle
created a growth-mindset culture,

it was always looking to learn.

Had talented people,

but they kept getting better,
continuously over time.

When a nurse gave the patient
the wrong medication,

instead of covering up
and self-justifying,

they did an investigation

that found that there were
two bottles, side by side,

containing drugs with different
pharmacological effects

but with virtually the same label.

You may say, "Shouldn't they have got
the right label and looked closer?"

but if you take too long,
the patient dies anyway.

So they changed the labeling
to make it clearer.

It's what you might call
a "marginal gain,"

an "incremental improvement."

They found that a patient
came into the ward

with a "Do not resuscitate" wristband.

It was the wrong color
because the nurse was color blind.

So they added text to the wristband -
another marginal gain.

They found that a clockwise
turn of the dial

with certain medical equipment
in one half of the hospital

increased the medication;

in the other half of the hospital,
it was anti-clockwise.

They didn't know that before,
because they hadn't learned.

So they made the ergonomic design
consistent - another marginal gain.

What happened?

Their openness, their honesty,
their commitment to continual improvement

drove the insurance liability premiums
down by 74 percent.

It's now one of the safest
hospitals in the world.

That is the culture
we need in all of our hospitals.

But it can only happen when you get
the psychological change first.

Let me give one quick example
from sport, if I may.

Great Britain wasn't terribly good
at cycling in the last century.

We're now the envy of the world.

It's not because the nation
became more talented;

there wasn't a genetic mutation
that hit the British nation.

It was because a coach came in,
Sir Dave Brailsford, who said,

"You know what? We can improve.
We can get better.

We're going to create
a growth-mindset culture."

And he broke the problem
of winning a bike race

into all of its component parts.

If we can improve every single one,

if we've got the curiosity,
the inquisitiveness, the tenacity

to improve every single one
by as little as one percent,

the cumulative effect
could be transformative.

So we're going to test
a bike design in the wind tunnel.

And he found that there were
certain inefficiencies;

he found the weaknesses.

And then he made the tweaks
for an aerodynamic game.

They changed the diet
for another marginal gain.

They figured out that some of the hotels
in rural France were quite ropey,

so they started transporting
the mattresses from stage to stage

during the Tour de France

for a marginal improvement
in sleep quality.

They started to use
anti-bacterial hand gel

to cut down on the risk of infections.

Now, that may sound pedantic,
but the cumulative effect

has meant that in the last century,
Britain never won the Tour de France,

but Britain has won
the Tour de France, Team Sky,

three times in the last four years.

They hire talented riders,

but it is the culture that has created
this extraordinary success.

I want to, maybe, finish
with the best example of all,

the most powerful one, which is science.

Is it not a striking thing

that between the time
of the ancient Greeks

and the early 17th century,

Western science did a bit,
but not very much.

Writing in 1620,

the great philosopher Francis Bacon said,

"Science has done nothing
in the preceding centuries

to improve the material
condition of mankind."

Isn't that a curious thing,

that since that time,
since the Scientific Revolution,

science and technology
has consistently changed our lives?

Why this watershed?

Was there a genetic mutation
that made the human brain bigger?

Was it an intellectual achievement?

I would argue that it was exclusively
a psychological achievement.

In short, the scientific community
moved from there to there.

That's all that happened.

For a very long time, scientists -
a bit like some senior doctors -

thought they were super talented
and they had all the answers:

"The Earth is the center
of the solar system.

It's 6,000 years old," and so on.

And if anyone came up
with some interesting data

that challenged those opinions,

an opportunity to improve
their model of the world,

these people were killed.

(Laughter)

This is a very extreme version
of a high-blame culture.

(Laughter)

When Galileo - it's exactly
the same psychological phenomenon

that you see in hospitals
and many other institutions.

When Galileo developed a telescope
that you could look through,

and simplify a little bit,

verify that it is the Sun
that is the center of the solar system

and not the Earth,

the existing scholars of that time,

instead of seeing
that as a wonderful opportunity

to enrich their knowledge of the world,

they didn't want to look.

And Galileo was forced to recant
his views under pain of death.

It was only when science moved over here

and recognized that in a complex world,
one's intellectual capacity is not enough,

one has to be willing to learn
to create a dynamic process of change.

And it was the anomalies
in the existing theories,

where they were failing,
that set the stage for change

in rather the same way
that the accidents in aviation

have created the biggest
improvements to system safety.

That's what led from Galileo to Newton,
from Newton to Einstein,

the incredible mysteries
of quantum theory,

and that is how science
will continue to improve

because when you realize
that you haven't got all the answers,

you start to do experiments,
you start looking for the data.

It orients the mind
individually and collectively

towards the learning experiences
that always exist out there

if we're open to them.

And that's the mindset revolution
I'd like to see in our schools.

At the moment, children don't like
to put their hand up in class

because it might look
as if they don't know the answer.

This, a great deal
of fear and defensiveness.

We need to liberate our children
to ask questions, to break the rules,

to find out more about this world
that is so infinitely interesting

and which we have to engage with.

Thank you very much indeed.

(Applause)