Interview: Black Box Thinking with Matthew Syed

You're listening to Optimize with Bryan Johnson. More wisdom in less time. Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to the Optimal Living Interview series. Today I'm thrilled to be chatting with Matthew Syed who wrote the great book Black Box Thinking. That's his newest book. I read that in his first book, bounce in a 72 hour period of time. He's that captivating of a writer and he has a fascinating background as an Olympic athlete. He was the number one ranked table tennis player in England for the better part of a decade, represented them, I think in two Olympics and is also an award winning writer. So we'll cover Bounce another time. Today I'm excited to chat about Black Box Thinking Subtitle why Most People Never Learn from Their mistakes But Some Do Matthew, thanks for taking the time. I'm excited to chat.

Thank you. Looking forward to it very much.

All right, so let's start at the top. What is Black Box Thinking?

It's a metaphor, but it is a metaphor drawn from a real example, which is the way the aviation industry learns to build system safety over time. When there is an accident, there are two black boxes. Actually, they're not really black, they're orange to aid visibility, but they're still called black boxes. One of them records the information sent to the onboard computers, the other records ambient sound in the cockpit. So in other words, the way the pilot and co pilot are talking to each other in the seconds, the crucial seconds and minutes leading up to the crash. So the independent accident investigation team can deconstruct what went wrong. They can figure out precisely what systemic weakness led to the crash, or if it was human error. And whatever the explanation, they can try and come up with remedial action to try and make sure the same mistake never happens again. And it's not just the accidents that drive learning. So does real time data. If two pilots almost collide in midair or a pilot comes in too steep at an airport, again, they voluntarily file reports which are analyzed statistically to drive reform and adaptation and progress. So it's really aviation is a very good example of a learning culture. A group of people who recognize that they're very, very good at their jobs. But even though they are good, the world is very complex and so in order to continually improve, they have to engage with the data, the experiences and the learning that come along.

That's awesome. And then in the book you juxtapose that with another industry that doesn't have quite the same learning culture. Can you tell us about that and the differences that we See in performance as a result of the different mindsets.

Yeah. So healthcare, which I'm sure you're getting at, has a less open learning culture, particularly the institutional framework that surrounds medicine, both in the US and in the uk. Part of the reason for this is clinicians find it difficult to be open about their mistakes, the weaknesses in their assumptions, because they're worried about litigation. But there's also a real threat to ego. For a very long time. It's very deep in the culture that senior surgeons and clinicians are supposed to be clinically infallible. You know, these people really understand and know best. And so it's very threatening to them to have to admit to their mistakes and to try and figure out how they could improve. So when something does go tragically wrong, it's very well studied that health professionals often cover up their mistakes. They don't report them. They use a series of euphemisms to justify non disclosure. So instead of fessing up, they'll blame the patient. It was their unusual symptoms or there were complications, or it was a unique case, or classically, we did everything we could. What more is there to say? But of course, unless one is prepared to genuinely and rationally analyze where one went wrong, it's impossible to drive the improvements. And that's why, I mean, it's one of the key reasons why preventable medical error. So these are avoidable mistakes. In America, where there's good data, it's probably the third biggest killer in the country. 400,000 to 500,000 people dying each year through avoidable mistakes in hospitals alone. That's like two jumbo jets crashing every day or nine, 11 happening every few days, contrasted with aviation, where there's one accident for about every 8.3 million takeoffs for the major airlines with the best learning cultures. So it's a big contrast. And the key thing to realize is that the problem in healthcare isn't that the people there are not intelligent or professional or diligent, or that their IQs aren't high enough. The problem is the culture, and vice versa. In aviation.

Yeah, it's so powerful and you make the distinction so well through some great stories that kind of bring the wisdom to light in a very, very personal way. I want to talk about some of the ways that we deal with that, and I have some favorites, but I also want, I'd love for you to talk briefly about some of the things that get in the way. So what are we doing as individuals and organizations when we're learning vis a vis, when we're not?

Well, one of the psychological problems is cognitive dissonance. It's a fascinating phenomenon and it was first revealed by Leon Festinger, who's a sociologist, in a very famous study in the 1950s where he actually, I mean, this will sound like a wacky way out case, but it's remarkable just how real it is in the real world. This was a cult, a religious cult, where a leader called Marion Keach said that there would be an apocalyptic event, the world would be destroyed by a flood, and that the true believers would be salvaged from this through a spaceship coming and picking them up from her back garden. Now, Festinger took the view that it would be very interesting to try and infiltrate the cult and to find out in particular what, what happened when the prediction didn't materialize. Now, most of us are used to the idea that when our predictions are contradicted by the evidence, we revise our assumptions. So that's how science works. So one might have expected the members of the cult to say, well, obviously Keach isn't in touch with a supernatural being. After all, you know, the prophecy she's made wasn't divinely inspired. But Festinger predicted a different response. These people had given up their jobs, you know, they had gone and moved in with the cult leader. That put their egos on the line, their reputations. People have said, you know, what are you doing? And so Fistinger predicted that even when the prediction went wrong, it wouldn't affect their belief. And as it happens, when the spaceship didn't materialize, the faith of hardcore members actually increased. They reframed the evidence. They said, well, God has been so impressed with our faith that he decided to not send this apocalyptic event upon us. And what's interesting is in organizations when our expectations are contradicted by the evidence, instead of changing our expectations, changing our predictions, changing our models, our procedures, our behaviors, we actually just try and spin the evidence. And that is very, very damaging. So a good example is economists. You know, if the prediction doesn't work out, instead of saying, right, we need to learn from that, they'll say, well, it was, you know, they come up with very tortuous ex post rationalizations for why their models were right all along. And that's why there's an, interestingly, a negative correlation between the reputation of an economist and therefore the extent to which their ego is on the line and the accuracy of their predictions.

And you also, that story about the cold is just fascinating. And you also shared the story of Galileo, which I think brings the point Home. So well as well. Can you highlight that real quick? And then we'll jump into.

That's a better. Yeah, I appreciate it. Actually, that's a much better example. So through human history, when people reveal to us where we're going wrong, that's a great opportunity to figure out how we can put things right. But of course, in human history, there's often been wars when people have disagreed on ideas, not just on territorial disputes, but on ideas. The early church found it very threatening when people said, you know what? Some of the ideas might be wrong. And Galileo, perhaps the most intuitive example, invented the telescope. Looking through the telescope, he came up with what turns out to be the correct analysis, that the Earth circles the sun rather than vice versa. But when he went to the leading scholars of the day and said, look at this evidence that can help us to learn, they refused to look through the telescope. They were so threatened by the idea that their ideas might be wrong that they didn't. They were not prepared to adapt to the evidence. In fact, they weren't even prepared to look at it.

Then they excommunicate the deliverer of the evidence. Right?

That's right. That's right. And it's not just excommunication. I mean, in other highly ideological environments, people get killed.

Yeah. Well, I think this. This brings us to the real difference between learning organizations and those that don't embrace failure is the fact that this is neutral data. And you say that information is regarded not as a threat, but as an opportunity. So I'd like to talk about some of the examples you use of how we, as individuals in our own personal lives and in organizations, can look at neutral data neutrally. Right. And apply it as opportunities to grow. Just. Have you described a few of your stories? I loved the example of marginal gains. Can you talk to us about marginal gains and the different ways you've seen that brought to life?

Yeah, that's a really interesting one because it's had a huge effect on British sport. You know, we struggled as a nation at the Olympics. We only won one gold medal in Atlanta in 96. But now we're one of the most envied sports teams in the world. And this is because of a method, marginal gain. So a good way to think of it is through cycling, which is a sport now that Britain has come to dominate. The lead coach, Sir Dave Brailsford, broke down the problem of winning a bike race into its component parts. He wasn't prepared to trust the status quo. He wanted to look at the data that could drive Improvements. So he thought, okay, aerodynamic design of the bike. He tested it in a wind tunnel, found out that there could be marginal improvements to aerodynamic efficiency. That's one marginal gain. He changed the diet. Another marginal gain. They even started using antibacterial hand gel. All of the team, all of the staff, to cut down on the risk of infections. Quite a significant issue. They started transporting the mattresses from stage to stage during the Tour de France. A marginal improvement in sleep quality. This may all sound pretty obvious, but think about the relationship between, for example, diet, the kind of pasta you eat, cadence, that's the speed of the feet through the pedals and power output. Now that's a really complex interrelationship. If you change one, how will it affect the other two? But Brailsford started to probe these latent assumptions that were built into the models that were operating at the time and found new marginal gains. In other words, it's a willingness to admit that there may be weaknesses and to see those weaknesses as marginal gains in disguise rather than to see them as threats to ego. That is a model that has been incredibly successful.

Yeah, that's so great. And again, the stories are so compelling where he dominated the Olympic sport of cycling and then he said he's going to get in the Tour de France and he'd win within five years. Although England had never won one race and he did it in two after people thought he'd be absurd by breaking it down, finding those tiny marginal gains. I love the example of actually transporting the mattresses from stage to stage, vacuuming before they arrived.

Yes.

And again, it affords the opportunity, if we're open to it, to find all the ways in our personal lives where we aren't quite optimized and there are rooms for tiny marginal gains. And a theme we're going to come back to, and I want to kind of wrap it up with, is the cumulative. Let's just go there, the cumulative adaptation. And you say it's incalculably potent. Can you talk to us about that? And kind of. We dismantled marginal gains now put them back together and see how when you aggregate them all and compound them over time, they're so huge.

Yeah. And I mean, a good example is we just didn't win any Tour de France's and Britain has won three of the last four years. That's a cumulative process of adapting to the data. But we also see that in biological evolution, it's a constant process of adaptation through time which has gone from single cell organisms to human beings. I think we see that in free markets, which is a cumulative adaptive process and it's what we need to integrate into our own lives. Now, that may sound theoretical and highfalutin, but I use an example in the book of something as everyday or as surreal, if you like, as speed eating hot dogs. Now this is an example I found from Super Freakonomics of a competition in Coney island where you have to eat as many hot dogs as you can in 12 minutes. And most of the competitors, you know, were super sized people stuffing their face with the hot dogs and, you know, drinking water as they went along. And the world record was 25. Then this Japanese student, a thin, slight guy, decided to approach it with a marginal gains mindset, Continual cumulative adaptation. So he started breaking the hot dogs in half, which improved loading. Then he started eating the the dog, the sausage and the bun separately. Then he started dipping the bun in water, then water sprinkled with vegetable oil. Then he started keeping a spreadsheet of how things were changing when he adapted different bits of the process. When he turned up, people were not expecting him to do very much. But it's not that he just beat the world record. He doubled it from 25 to 50. That is a staggering application of cumulative change. And my, I mean, it's scientific method really integrated into the eating of hot dogs. And, you know, why not apply it in our hospitals, in our schools and our public institutions, in our companies? A commitment to continual improvement. And I mentioned a hospital in Seattle, Virginia Mason, which has used marginal gains and has become one of the safest hospitals in the world.

Yeah. So fun and so good. And of course, how do we do that to our lives? You know, shutting down our Internet 20 minutes earlier, does that lead to a little marginal gain in sleep, which leads to a little more energy the next day? There are so many opportunities when we actually open up to them. Talk to us about you share the story of £50 for an A of the difference between quantity and quality with that ceramics glass. Can you talk to us about that?

Yeah, this is quite interesting because we've been talking about improving performance, but this is really about creativity, because we tend to think of creativity as something that happens to creative people sitting back and allowing their brains to reach out into the ether and discover these wonderful innovations. That's not how creativity happens. I mean, so this example is a ceramics teacher who comes into class and says, right, for half of the group, you have to create a pot. Well, both groups have to create a pot which is beautifully and creatively designed, but half of them he said, I'm going to grade you on the quality of your pot. For the others, he just said, I want to grade you on quantity. You have to bring in as many pots as you can and you're going to get an A if you bring in £50 of pots and a B if you bring in £40 of pots and so on. And of course, what happens is it's those who are being graded for quantity who come up with the most creative designs because they're putting their pots, they're making the pots, learning from their mistakes, finding out how to tweak and adapt and change the pots to iterate them over time. Whereas the ones graded for quality sat back and theorized about what is going to be the best creative pot and then just had what he calls a whole load of dead clay. And this is a very powerful metaphor for the creative process. It's a long term, iterative process where we put our ideas out there and learn from our mistakes. So James Dyson created the dual site loan vacuum cleaner. He went through 5,126 prototypes before coming up with a vacuum cleaner that changed domestic cleaning. Even when people do come up with very big paradigm shifts, it's often because the brain internally has been trying different combinations behind the scenes before the insight emerged.

Wow. And then 5,000 more after it emerges. Right. He had that epiphany that you share of seeing the, I think it was the Cyclone or whatever it was at the hardware shop. Right. And then combine the two and then 5,000 iterations later, he had something worth marketing. So good. And you talk a lot about both in bounce and black box kind of the fixed mindset versus growth mindset. I love to highlight that. And just a little bit more on, on peak performance via David Beckham, who again, you share some great stories on him and, you know, his keep me ups and then the number of free kicks he did with his dad and all that stuff. Can you, can you unpack that as it applies to us embracing our willingness to fail?

Yeah, that's great. Because Beckham, it's another long term process of trying and failing. You know, when he started doing keep me ups in his back garden, he could only do three or four. But he practiced, he made mistakes, he learned, he adapted. And after two years of relentless practice, he got up to 2003. That's a lot of keep me ups. Then he started practicing his free kick and there were a lot of failures along the way, but he gradually honed his technique and it was very striking. I spent a Lot of time with David that people often said he was a complete natural when it came to taking free kicks. But we only see the performance. We see him kick the ball. What we haven't seen is what went into its construction. And my worry is that a lot of young people, they watch X Factor. They think success happens instantly and effortlessly. For the super talented, that means that when they try something new, if they're not naming it straight away, they give up because they assume they've not got what it takes. We need both students and leaders and scientists and technologists to realize that success in creativity or anything else is a long term process of immersion in a particular domain and a process of cumulative adaptation. That means that people are much more resilient. They try things and then they learn from them rather than being demotivated. That's where the growth mindset comes from.

Yeah, it's so good. And in bounce, you describe it as the iceberg effect. I think it was in bounce or you described that, that, you know, we just see the tip of the iceberg. And I love the way you said that. Beckham, when he thinks of free kicks, when people see his free kicks, they think of the goals. When he thinks of free kicks, he thinks of the unbelievable number of attempts he made. I think you said 50,000 kicks or something his dad estimated he took at the park. Just so inspiring to realize that it's about effort, not about that inborn talent. What have we not talked about that you want to make sure we highlight as it applies to individuals looking to optimize their lives?

I mean, I think just picking up. Well, just one other thing, really. It's a really interesting thing that you were saying there that, you know, we often think of success through the prism of talent, aptitude, innate predispositions. Now, of course, talent has a role, but it's just one ingredient. One ingredient. And there's a much bigger picture of how success happens that we need to be acquainted with if we're to become successful. That's a great irony. There's a strong interrelationship between the way we conceptualize success and our willingness to, as it were, have the behaviors that create success. And I think that's what we want our young people to have. That's what we want our organizations and institutions to have. Just to go back to that thing I said right at the beginning. In the wrong mindset, our talents often take us in the wrong direction. Instead of learning, we spin. Instead of building new experiences, we become afraid of testing and challenging ourselves. In case we look untalented, we become fearful and paranoid and defensive. So the growth mindset is about unleashing our talent. It's not saying that talent is irrelevant, but it's about unleashing it.

That's great. I'd love to continue the chat just on bounce and talk more about that at a separate time. There's so much more wisdom we can drill into there. Can you give us a practical example of how you've applied this black box thinking to your life?

Well, interestingly, when I played in my second Olympic Games in Sydney, I had a bit of a meltdown. I got very nervous and lost in the table tennis competition to Peter Franz, a German player. I was expected to get a long way in the competition and of course that was pretty devastating. And, you know, I just flew home, didn't think about it, pretended it had never happened. If people talked about it, I changed the subject. And I think I realized when, when writing Black Box, thinking that was a massive learning opportunity. Why did I get so nervous? What mechanisms could I use to help myself perform under pressure? And that threw me into, I'm actually right about this. In bouts, figuring out psychological techniques that could help me deliver that would take the pressure off. And, you know, that's one of, to be absolutely frank, a whole range of examples where when your mind is in a state of wanting to continually improve, you're just always finding the feedback and the data that can help you to do so.

That's awesome. Well, Matthew, I know that you have a lot going on today. I appreciate you taking the time to chat. Where can people learn more about you? And obviously black box thinking, Find it on Amazon or wherever you buy your books. Highly recommend it. And then generally speaking, going forward, where's the best place for people to connect?

Yeah, I'm. I've got a website which is Matthew, I think it's matthewside.co.uk black box thinkings on Amazon. Any feedback on the book, any weaknesses in the book, I would be a very grateful recipient of. And also if people have any other ideas or any context in which it can be used effectively, love to hear it.

Fantastic. And Matthew spells his last name S Y E D, which will be in the kind of show description, but. Matthewsia.co.uk Matthew, thank you so much.

Thank you. I've really enjoyed it.

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