Book SummaryBlack Box Thinking, by Matthew Syed

1-Page Summary1-Page Book Summary of Black Box Thinking

In Black Box Thinking, Matthew Syed argues that learning from failure drives human progress. It’s how individuals and organizations develop, innovate, and improve. Airlines exemplify this in using black boxes—an in-flight recording system—to collect data, analyze airline crashes, and learn how to improve.

However, we still fail to learn from our mistakes in multiple key areas—from health care to criminal justice—and this endangers lives and resources. Overcoming the cultural and systemic barriers to learning from failure can prevent mistakes and create more effective organizations.

Syed is an award-winning journalist, author, and former Olympian for Great Britain’s table tennis team. His sporting career inspired the focus of his writing, which includes four books on mindset, performance, growth, and creativity. Syed also consults with organizations to build cultures and systems that enable them to learn from failure.

In this guide, we explain Syed’s argument that failure drives learning and explore two types of institutions: Those that learn from failure—including aviation, athletics, and science—and those that don’t—such as public hospitals and the court system. We then discuss how to shift mindsets and systems to turn an organization into a learning-oriented institution.

We Learn Through Failure

Syed argues that we can only improve by learning from our failures. This is because your mistakes reveal what you don’t yet understand, thus showing what you need to learn next. For example, revising an essay always reveals vagueness or unclear logic in the first draft, and those mistakes tell the writer how to improve the essay.

On the flip side, neglecting to learn from mistakes means that you can’t improve. Imagine a gymnast who gets flustered by mistakes instead of assessing how to avoid them—such an athlete would keep repeating the same errors.

On the institutional level, organizations that learn from failures iron out systemic flaws and improve their performance. For example, lean startups prioritize learning from what goes wrong, adapting from customer feedback and product failures. By contrast, organizations that ignore their mistakes will continue to make them, risking stagnation.

(Shortform note: In The Art of Learning, Josh Waitzkin argues that learning from your mistakes is the key to competitive success. When you make an error, note where you went wrong and shore up that weakness by training yourself not to repeat it. He also recommends actively seeking out opportunities to fail badly and repeatedly, because this humbles you and helps you approach learning with a beginner’s mind. In a way, this is what learning organizations do: They embrace that what they do know is less than what they don’t know.)

Two Institutional Styles

In modern society, some of our institutions progress by learning from failure, but certain major institutions neglect this opportunity and hinder progress.

1. Learning-Oriented Institutions: These organizations—including medicine, the airline industry, athletic organizations, and some businesses—use their failures to improve their operations and innovate solutions to tough problems. For example, a successful football team holds post-game retrospectives to review what went well and what didn’t, and they use that insight to improve their game plan.

(Shortform note: In The Fifth Discipline, Peter Senge outlines five disciplines to achieve a “Learning Organization”: 1) Create a shared vision to align leadership and staff, 2) Use systems thinking to understand your organization holistically, 3) Clarify your existing mental models and stay open to adapting them, 4) Create teams that learn together and embrace honest mistakes, and 5) Help employees develop personal mastery by training the subconscious mind to handle complexity.)

2. Failure-Averse Institutions: These organizations neglect to learn from their failure, and thereby miss out on opportunities to improve. Their failure-averse cultures preclude the acknowledgment and assessment of mistakes, and their systems lack mechanisms to process and learn from those mistakes. As examples, Syed highlights health care and the courts.

(Shortform note: In Too Much and Never Enough, Mary Trump, the niece of Donald Trump, characterizes his administration as failure-averse. Through analysis of Trump family history and her own experiences, she argues that because he’s never faced consequences for his mistakes or wrongdoings, he can’t conceive that he could be wrong about anything. Any institution with a leader who’s so apt to cast blame becomes failure-averse, since errors go unlearned from.)

Learning-Oriented Institutions Grow Through Failure

Syed explains that learning-oriented organizations have two things in common: Cultures that promote learning from failure and systems that make use of those mistakes.

Element #1: The Culture of Learning-Oriented Institutions

Syed explains that learning-oriented organizations view failure as an opportunity to grow. Individuals and teams feel comfortable making mistakes, reporting them, and learning from them. This mindset exists on two levels: the individual, and the organizational.

On the individual level, you need the desire to improve—to work hard, fail, and try again—plus the tenacity to persist through numerous mistakes and the humility to admit and learn from them. Think of a professional musician: A cellist...

Black Box Thinking Summary Shortform Introduction

In Black Box Thinking, Matthew Syed argues that learning from failure drives human progress. It’s how we adapt to an ever-changing world, how we innovate in science and business, and how individuals and organizations improve. While modern society benefits from this tradition of rational learning (inherited from the ancient Greeks and the European Enlightenment), Syed explains that we still need to apply rational, failure-driven learning to our social institutions.

Namely, our politics, courts, and hospitals stigmatize failure and perpetuate a culture of false exceptionalism that prevents them from improving. If we neglect to improve our stagnating institutions, they’ll continue to take the lives of innocents—whether it’s death due to preventable medical error or wrongful conviction that leads to life in prison.

Syed explains how certain organizations have distinct cultures and systems that promote learning, while others’ prevent learning. Fortunately, any organization can change its view of failure to transform its culture and systems, thus becoming a learning organization.

About the Author

Matthew Syed is a British journalist and author, as well as a former table...

Black Box Thinking Summary Part 1: Failure and Human Development

Black Box Thinking is about learning from failure. Syed argues that learning from failure drives the growth of large organizations, underpins innovation in business, and helps us become resilient, growth-oriented agents. Airlines exemplify this mindset and method, using “black boxes” to collect data, analyze crashes, and learn from them.

However, we still fail to learn from our mistakes in multiple key areas—from health care to criminal justice—and this endangers lives and resources.

Matthew Syed is an award-winning journalist, author, and former Olympian for Great Britain’s table tennis team. He’s worked as a journalist for over two decades, and he’s written four books focused on mindset, performance, and growth. Syed also works as a consultant to help organizations build growth-focused cultures and foster continual improvement.

In this guide, we’ll explain Black Box Thinking in four parts. Part 1 introduces Syed’s argument that success comes from failure and explains the history of humanity’s attitudes toward failure. Part 2 explores the institutions that learn from failure—how, why, and the benefits they reap—while Part 3 discusses institutions that neglect to...

Black Box Thinking Summary Part 2: Learning From Failure Is Advantageous

In Part 1, we explained that learning from failure drives progress, and that human cultures have moved from “divine knowledge” worldviews to a scientific, rational perspective that is developed through errors.

Now we’ll look at why adapting through failure is so effective, and how learning-oriented institutions learn through bottom-up adaptation. Syed explains that these organizations often operate in private, performance-focused areas—aviation, athletics, and business—with the exception of the scientific establishment. Further, these organizations have two things in common: a cultural attitude that enables them to learn from failure, and systems that make use of those mistakes.

In Part 2, we’ll explore why a learning-oriented system must arise from a culture that embraces errors, and we’ll discuss how to learn from failure. Specifically, we’ll lay out the basic process and three additional techniques that help deal with complex challenges: randomized control trials, incremental development, and insight generation.

Element #1: The Culture of Learning-Oriented Institutions

Syed contends that **to learn from failure, an organization’s culture must first view it...

Shortform Exercise: Reflect on a Recent Failure

Reflecting on our own mistakes can help us to course-correct and better understand how to achieve our goals. Here, consider a recent mistake and what you might’ve done differently.

Describe a recent mistake you made in your work or personal life—something notable that might have caused you to feel uncomfortable. For example, maybe you had an argument with a colleague or spouse that went a little too far.

Black Box Thinking Summary Part 3: Neglecting Failure Is Risky

So far, we’ve looked at how we develop through failure and examined the institutions that learn from their errors. Now, we’ll discuss the institutions that neglect to learn from failure.

In contrast to the learning-oriented cultures and systems in Part 2, failure-averse institutions have cultures and systems that prevent them from learning. (Shortform note: While Syed described these as “closed loop” systems, we describe them as “failure-averse” institutions to reduce ambiguity. For example, a “closed loop” is often a good thing, like a task or project completed, and feedback processed.)

In Part 3, we’ll explore these two barriers—cultural and systemic—and we’ll illustrate the problem using Syed’s description of failure-aversion in the US health care system.

Element #1: The Cultural Barrier

Syed explains that the cultures of failure-averse institutions stigmatize failure. In other words, they treat error as a terrible thing. In these cultures, you should feel deeply ashamed of mistakes—and you’ll be judged harshly by your peers.

This is because they’re cultures of expertise: The employees are well-educated professionals—such as doctors, nurses,...

Shortform Exercise: Practice Engaging With Complexity

One major barrier to learning from failure is oversimplifying the story. When we scapegoat, simplify, and distort the facts, we obscure what’s really going on and prevent learning. To overcome this, practice engaging with complexity.

Describe a situation in your personal life where someone close to you made a mistake and you jumped to conclusions.

Black Box Thinking Summary Part 4: Why and How to Embrace Failure

Having discussed the power of learning from failure—and the risks of neglecting to do so—we’ll now look at why and how to create organizations that embrace and learn from failure.

In Part 4, we’ll first explain why learning from failure is morally imperative. Next, we’ll unpack Syed’s redefinition of failure as positive, and we’ll explain his suggestions for changing an organization’s culture and systems to learn from failure.

(Shortform note: Tribal Leadership, by Dave Logan et al., explores how to change organizational cultures in more detail. Logan argues that we should view an organization as a collection of tribes and strive to level up the culture of each tribe. The goal is to reach a “Stage 4” tribal culture, where individuals learn from failure, work together, and achieve great things. Throughout this section, we’ll supplement Syed’s work with ideas from Tribal Leadership.)

Failure-Averse Institutions Waste Lives and Resources

In Part 3, we looked in detail at how institutions neglect to learn from failure—but why does this matter?

In short, **Syed argues that the institutional failure to improve is...

Shortform Exercise: Practice Viewing Failure as Positive

When we view failure negatively, it hinders our ability to learn. Practice seeing your mistakes in a positive light.

Syed explains that your view of failure determines how you respond to it. Reflecting on your own mindset, when are you hardest on yourself for making a mistake?