Black Box Thinking by Matthew Syed

Black Box Thinking by Matthew Syed

variously subtitled:

Marginal Gains and the Secrets of High Performance

Why Most People Never Learn From Their Mistakes – But Some Do

and

The Surprising Truth About Success

Enjoyable and interesting, this book covers a fairly wide range of ideas including “cognitive dissonance” – blinding oneself to the evidence where it contradicts one’s own convictions. We all suffer from this, both in ourselves and in others, and the book is a useful stimulus in learning to stand back and look at how, where and why.

The main theme of the book is that mistakes and failures are to be seen positively, as part and parcel of the creative process. Of course, this brings to mind the familiar quotation from Edison about the invention of the light-bulb: “I didn’t fail a thousand times; the light-bulb was an invention with a thousand steps.” In some areas we may be happy to fail and take this positive approach to it; in other areas, we may react very differently.

Another useful theme is that of “incremental gains” – not expecting to succeed magnificently at the first attempt, but chipping away at a project little by little, for a whole chain of small improvements.

Good quotations: the “minimal viable product” (in the case of Dropbox), that can be launched, and then re-worked in response to real-life use.

“What is the point of preserving self-esteem that is so brittle that it can’t cope with failure?” pp. 291-2.

“A progressive attitude to failure turns out to be a cornerstone of success for any institution” p. 12.

However, there are some definite weak points in the book as a whole. On pp. 139-140 Syed happily quotes Richard Dawkins – not the most intelligent or objective of authorities – and his “wonderful” book The Blind Watchmaker, imagining that since Dawkins has proved to his own satisfaction that he doesn’t need to posit God as Creator, everyone else must be equally satisfied.

Similarly, while the book contains some very thought-provoking ideas, insights and suggestions, the overall impression is that it is two-dimensional. Just a couple of examples from the main part of the book:

Syed describes in detail Pixar’s creative process in developing its computer-animated cartoon films. Specifically, he looks at the development process of Finding Nemo, a massively popular box-office success. However, Finding Nemo was catastrophic for the clownfish that were its heroes. After seeing the film, parents and children wanted a clownfish as a pet. Thousands and thousands of clownfish were caught and sold as pets – into captivity!, devastating the clownfish population and doing a lot of damage to the reefs that were their habitat. And as they cannot survive for more than a few days in fish-tanks, capture was a short-term death-sentence for each fish.

The second example is Dyson’s vacuum-cleaners and hand-dryers. Syed explains how and why Dyson works on his inventions, as a prime instance of the inventive/creative mind at its best. Dyson vacuum-cleaners, working on the cyclone system, famously maintain their strong suction power (as bag-filter vacuum-cleaners cannot, getting clogged up with dust instead). What Syed never stops to consider is that the stronger the suction, the more of the actual carpet pile the vacuum-cleaner removes, meaning that it wears out an ordinary domestic carpet much more quickly (obviously this is not a problem when vacuum-cleaning hard floors). On carpets, Dyson vacuum-cleaners have much the same effect as constant tumble-drying has on clothes.

As for the famous Dyson Airblade hand-dryers, they are the most efficient way so far discovered of spreading bacteria and viruses. They blast bacteria-laden droplets of water from wet hands much further even than other electric hand-dryers. If children are around, the hand-dryers are at exactly the right level to blow the bacteria and viruses straight in their faces.

All of the above are well-known facts freely available. It is taking far too narrow a view simply to look at an invention and say it is efficient in its purpose and is a commercial success. Syed needs to step back and see the whole picture.

Indeed, the last chapter of the book is entitled “Coda: The Big Picture”. Here you might hope that Syed would set things to rights with regard to the questions raised above. Far from it; instead he launches on a survey of history... and as he is not a historian, the results are painful. His object is to show what happens when people lose the positive attitude towards mistakes and failure, as part of the creative process.

Unfortunately, the best he can do is parrot Francis Bacon (17th-century philosopher). “As Bacon wrote in Novum Organum (...), ‘The sciences which we possess come for the most part from the Greeks. [But] from all these systems of the Greeks, and their ramifications through particular sciences, there can hardly after the lapse of so many years be adduced a single experiment which tends to relieve and benefit the condition of man.’ This was a truly devastating assessment.” He attributes this to the (clichéd but imaginary) baneful influence of the Church smacking down on anything that questions dogmatic truths, and thus stifling creativity by making people afraid to make mistakes.

I am not using the word “parrot” to be rude: Syed appears to have no knowledge of history so he simply repeats what Bacon said, without taking the trouble to think any further. Bacon said that there were no scientific discoveries that benefited mankind between the classical Greek period and the 17th century. Syed unreflectingly takes this as fact. Strangely enough, though, he has already referred to the invention of printing on p. 213: “... this act of connectivity is another central feature of innovation. Johannes Gutenberg invented mass printing by applying the pressing of wine [Syed means grapes] (...) to the pressing of pages.” In fact, an interesting example of cognitive dissonance...

If he had thought a little, he would have realised that the Romans were, among other things, incredible engineers, and the Middle Ages were hugely creative and inventive, with the flourishing of sculpture, painting, poetry and other literature, architecture, textiles, law, stained glass and glassworking, and much more – even if he looked no further than Europe. So this is not all “science”? But it certainly falls within Syed’s own terms of reference and certainly benefited mankind. And as he himself is ready to recognise when it suits him, invention and creativity are an organic process.

The kindest thing to think about all this was that Syed was simply in such a hurry to get his book finished that he did not stop to think about what he was writing. As a concluding chapter, however, it leaves the reader deeply unsatisfied.