PNTV: Black Box Thinking by Matthew Syed (#268)

Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to Philosopher's Notes. TV Today, another great book, Black Box Thinking by Matthew Syed. Black Box Thinking Subtitle why Most People Never Learn From Their Mistakes But Some do awesome book just came out. Thanks for sending it my way. Penguin Random House. I appreciate it and awesome book. So Matthew Syed wrote another book called Bounce, which I had been meaning to read. And I read this book and that book in about a 72 hour period of time. And I don't do that with a lot of books. He's a great writer, a great storyteller. This book is packed with wisdom and big ideas. I'm excited to explore a handful of my favorites. So let's jump in. We've got a Philosopher's Note. Talk about some of that here. Let's start with Black Box Thinking. So what is black box thinking? Think of the aviation industry. What do they do when something goes wrong? We all know they have a black box in every single plane, in every cockpit that's collecting as much data as it possibly can, such that in the event of a tragic loss, they have this data in a black box that they can find and they can painstakingly go through it to figure out what went wrong so it doesn't happen again. They embrace failure and they learn from it. And as a result, safety in aviation is extraordinary. Something like only one plane in 2.4 million flights ends in tragedy. Now, that's nuts to think of the level of performance. And Matthew talks about where it started. Half of the pilots used to die when they'd go out in the early planes. Right now we're talking 1 in 2.4 million flights. Wow. They're doing something right there. Right. And he juxtaposes the aviation industry with the health care industry. And as a whole, all the professionals want to do the right thing. And they're working hard, they're passionate. Right. But as a whole, the industry doesn't approach failure the way the aviation industry does. They kind of sort of just say, well, that's just what happens. And it's one of those things, you know, that tragedy happens at times and they sometimes actively hide the failures. Right? And they're not engaged in black box thinking. And the consequences of that are profound. The stats are nuts. Something like 400,000 people die every year from preventable medical issues in US hospitals alone. That's the equivalent of, he quotes somebody saying two jumbo jets flying every 24 hours or something crazy like that crashing, right? So we have these two approaches to failure. One black box, the other Kind of ignore it, right? And we want to adopt black box thinking. Embracing failure is the cornerstone of optimizing a business, any organization, and of course, our personal lives. So that's the basic idea of what black box thinking is. Here are some ideas on how to actually go about embracing it. The book is not a self help book per se, but we can pull out a ton of wisdom for our individual lives. He talks about organizational applications and all that good stuff. £50 equals an A. Talks about some research done or a book rather, that talks about a art teacher who tells his class, hey, I'm going to split you into two groups. Half of you I'm going to grade on quantity of what you produce this year. And if you have £50 of pottery completed at the end of the semester, a year or whatever, you're going to get an A. If you have £40, I'm going to give you a B. On and on, right? So he's going to bring scales in at the end of the class and he's going to weigh how much work they did. It's pure quantity. And he said, the other group, what I want you to do is I want you to create the perfect piece of pottery. Bring that in on the final day, alright? Go. End of the year, the group that produced 50 pounds, they just got to work and hustle, right? They got in and they literally churned out all kinds of work to get to that 50 pound threshold. They alone produced the high quality work. This group that was trying to create the perfect piece just spent most of the time theorizing about what could be awesome, but they never actually did. The work lesson here is we need to embrace failure. You need to be in the game, doing the work. Coming up short, not doing perfect work, but getting a little bit better. We're going to talk about this more in the next idea. A little bit better, a little bit better. In the process, you create something great, you perform the reps and you're bound to get better. As you do that 50 pounds of pottery, think about that. You and think about these students who are told to create something perfect. And think, where do you fall on that spectrum? Are you in uber hustle mode and measuring your success not on whether you're doing it perfectly, but on whether you're doing it. Check the box. I did it is more important than I did it perfectly, because if you try to do it perfectly, you may not do anything. He talks about perfectionism in a really powerful way here. Get to work. 50 pounds of pottery equals an A. Second big idea is Marginal Gains tells a great story about the general manager for Team sky, the British cycling team, the guy who runs that turned around the Olympic cycling team for England, and they went on to dominate I don't know how many gold medals, but a ton. And then he said, hey, I'm going to do the same thing in road cycling in the Tour de France. No British cyclist had won the Tour de France and he said, our team's going to win within five years. And people said, you know, you've done some great stuff, but that's absurd. I mean, come on, we haven't won in the history of the Tour de France. And you're going to tell us when you start. You're going to bring one home in five years. Not going to happen. You're going to look silly in a few years. Well, he won in two years. And Matthew unpacks. The key to his strategy was marginal gains. So he had this big vision of what he wanted to do. Bring home a title in a short period of time. But then he focused on the tiny little components involved in achieving that goal. He broke it down to the smallest little things, and he found marginal gains, tiny little improvements in each individual component that when aggregated together and compounded over time, lead to extraordinary results. Matthew also shares the story of F1, Formula One, the Mercedes team and what they do. It's crazy how they do this marginal gain approach where they're looking at every single facet of every single component of racing competitively and they just try to get a little bit better in aggregate. Compounded, and they just dominate. Right? So how do we apply that to our lives? 3. Think about your big vision. You want to do whatever it is you want to do creatively or optimizing your life and living with more happiness or abundance or whatever, right? That's awesome, obviously. But connect that to the smallest little components and be willing to experiment, be willing to test, have intellectual honesty, as Matthew says throughout the book, and see what's working and most importantly, what's not. And bring it down to the mundane. The Team sky cycling team, they would actually make sure they were sleeping on the same mattresses every night, so they had a marginal gain in quality of sleep. They'd make sure that the rooms were vacuumed before they showed up, so they'd have a marginal gain in less infection. Right? And then they'd make sure that their clothes were washed in detergent that was sensitive to the skin, so they'd have a marginal gain in comfort on and on and on and on and in your life, we need to do the same thing. How do you create marginal gains in your nutrition when you eat this? Do you feel a certain way afterwards or the next day when you drink or stay up late? Right. How do you feel the next day? Can you make marginal gains in that by turning down your computer or whatever a little bit sooner? When you exercise consistently, how do you feel? Look at all the facets of your Life. Find tiny 1%, 2%, 3%, 5% gains in all these little areas and aggregate them over time and extraordinary gains come out of those marginal gains. That's our second big idea. Third big idea 2003 plus 50,000. One of the chapters is called the Beckham Effect. David Beckham, one of the world's, certainly England's greatest soccer players, started out average at 6 years old. David Beckham could keep a ball up in the air, keep me ups, right? You could do that five or six times, right? But he had a very unaverage appetite for hard work. He shares stories of Matthew does of his interviews with Beckham's mom and dad. And apparently Little David at 6 years old would come home from school and he'd spend the entire afternoon hours in his little garden outside of London or wherever he grew up practicing this, making mistake after mistake after mistake after mistake. Black box thinking. And after six months, he got up to 50. He could keep it up 50 times. That's pretty good. After another six months, he was able to get it up to 200. And then by the time he was nine years old, he could keep the ball up 2,003 times. It's crazy. And then he said, okay, well, I think I've mastered this. I'm nine years old. Then he went to the field and he practiced free kicks, which is obviously what he's known for. Google Beckham free kicks and get your mind blown. And think about the fact that he practiced that as a kid. His dad estimates 50,000 times they'd go out to the field, his dad would stand up and he'd challenge him to learn how to score with him in the way, right? All the different things that he did 50,000 times, people would just stand and watch him do this and they thought he was just a genius. We're going to talk about this in our episode on Bounce. He calls it the iceberg effect. You just see unbelievable performance and you think it must be a natural gift and you miss the fact that he failed over and over and over again. As Jordan says that Matthew talks about 2003 is how many times he can keep that ball up after however many hours he put in and 50,000 kicks as a kid. And Beckham says that's what he thinks of when he thinks of free kicks. Most people think of his extraordinary goals. He thinks about that number. Fourth big idea is Galileo and cognitive dissonance CD cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance is a theme that Matthew comes back to brilliantly in the book again and again. Basic idea there is. Oftentimes we're so unwilling to look at mistakes that we make and failures we have in our lives that when new data comes in, whether it's a difference of opinion or whatever that challenges our current opinions, we do something that psychologists call cognitive dissonance. Right? Where rather than open our minds to the possibility, black box style, that there might be some truth we can learn from in another perspective, we get more rigid, we get more entrenched in our viewpoint. And he shares some funny stories about cults and how this happens in that context. Cognitive dissonance. He says the best possible example we can imagine of cognitive dissonance is the old school days. Imagine Galileo, right? He's invented the telescope. He's looking up at the skies and he sees evidence that proves that, gasp. The Earth isn't the center of our known world. He's got evidence that shows that in fact something else is going on. The Christian scholars of that era refused to look through his telescope. He said, hey, just look through. You're going to see evidence. It's going to be compelling. Just check it out. They literally wouldn't even look through his telescope. They shut their eyes to his new data. That's the heart of cognitive dissonance. I don't want to hear it. Don't say anything that would challenge me. That's the opposite of black box thinking that we want to deal with. So with you, is there anything in your life that's challenging you that you're kind of trying to ignore? And can you step back and take a more expansive perspective on it? Open your mind and let go of some of the cognitive dissonance. That's a good practice for black box thinking. Final big idea here, Pre mortems. Pre mortems. The idea is imagine a project that you're passionate about, right? This is what you want to see achieved. Most of us do the visioning and then we get to work. Well, a new powerful practice is to do the visioning and, and then to run a pre mortem, not a post mortem. After failure has occurred or a patient has died, a pre mortem where you imagine basically the project failed, the patient died, and then you imagine that you're on the other side of that and you say what went wrong? What happened. Pre mortem creates a perspective. What do they call it? Prospective hindsight. Prospective hindsight, where you can go ahead of the outcome and look back now, it's a really powerful idea. So when you think of what you're most passionate about in your life, fast forward, get your vision, get excited, then look at it from a perspective beyond its failure and then ask yourself what went wrong. Cultivate prospective hindsight. Now. It's very similar to what we talk about with Gabriel Oettingen's Whoop Process. Science is unequivocal. If all you do is visualize the ideal, you're going to be less optimal and ready to crush it than if you're willing to rub it up against reality. Whether it's via a pre mortem or her mental contrasting that we talk about a lot. Right then the if, then planning. Check out the episode on that. I'll put a link to it below. That's the basic idea pre mortem. So do that with your project and then you're not going to weaken the plan. The plan here isn't to and the point isn't to kill your ideas, it's to strengthen them. That's a super quick look at some of my favorite big ideas on how to get your black box thinking on premortems. Remember Galileo? Are you shutting your eyes to anything that could actually help you if you opened into it 2003? That's how much little 9 year old David Beckham could how many times he can keep the ball up from tons and tons and tons of practice. 50,000 kicks and again. All that was failure driven. He failed again and again and again and again and again and again. That's why he succeeded. Marginal gains. Gosh, that's so cool. What little things can you do to get tiny, tiny little improvements that in aggregate over time lead to extraordinary gains? And then the 50 pounds equals a quit trying to do something perfect. Get to market. We didn't talk about it, but Matthew talks a lot about the lean startup movement. Minimum viable product, shipping it. I'm going to do a class on Business 101 soon. This is one of my favorite ideas. Get to market. Don't be the perfect. It's got to be just awesome before I do anything. Get to market. See what people have to say and get better, respond to feedback and optimize over the long run. And you can only do that with a growth mindset. Matthew talks about it a lot. We talk about it a lot in these episodes. I talk about it more in the note, but there you go. Black box thinking Matthew Syed Awesome. I'm looking forward to interviewing Matthew and exploring the wisdom more deeply. If you enjoyed this, I think you'll love the book and have an awesome day. Alright, see you. Hi, this is Brian. I hope you enjoyed that PNTV episode. A lot of people don't know all the stuff I do beyond these free videos I share on YouTube. So I thought I'd do a quick video to give you an overview of our membership program that you can get access to and get a ton of other stuff. So here's a quick look. 10 bucks a month Join the Optimal Living Membership Program. You get Instant Access to 250 Philosopher's Notes on some of the best Optimal Living books out there. Old school classics, Positive Psychology, Modern stuff, Mindfulness, Peak Performance, Purpose Neuroscience, wealth, et cetera. What you may not know is that in addition to the PNTV episodes, I create PDFs on all these great books. So six page PDFs. Let's take a look at one of them. Joseph Campbell, you want to figure out how to live your hero's journey? Well, this is a great place to start. 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