‘Black Box Thinking’ by Matthew Syed revisited

We recently reviewed the book Black Box Thinking by Matthew Syed. 

Two unrelated events have encouraged us to write a little more about this excellent book. 

Firstly an article in the Times on 4^th April, which I read on a plane to Texas as I travelled to run two weeks of training for a client.  The article by Syed ‘Blame doctors’ egos for these disastrous errors’ continues his criticism of the medical profession in failing to admit errors and therefore to condemn patients to poor outcomes (including premature death) that could have been avoided.  He claims that an estimated 8,000 people die every year in English hospitals due to avoidable mistakes.  This is more than the number who die in traffic accidents.  

He repeats the argument, made lucidly in his book, that the medical profession can learn a great deal from the aviation industry, by being more open to admitting to mistakes and learning from them.  He also focusses on the ego of senior clinicians, who are revered by their colleagues and use their considerable intellectual ability to draw attention away from any errors they may have made. 

He also points blame at economists who, in a similar way, use their intellectual ability to justify why they were right all along rather than learning from their mistakes.  

I attended what was, I believe, the last lecture of the eminent economist Professor Nicolas Kaldor at Cambridge in the 1970s.  He had argued for some time that to improve the performance of the UK economy what was needed was a ‘selective employment tax’.  

This would tax jobs of those in service businesses more highly than those in manufacturing to encourage exports and improve the, then dire, balance of payments.  The rationale was that you can export manufactured goods but can’t export services.  It appears that Microsoft, Google and Facebook, amongst others, have missed the subtlety of that argument.  If Kaldor’s advice had been followed we would now have more steel manufacturing in the UK and fewer service businesses – hardly a recipe for unbridled success. 

The second event which made me reflect on Syed’s book again was a discussion I had with a client about how to conduct effective brainstorming.  The client wanted to run a brainstorming exercise using well recognised techniques.  There were to be no challenges, no criticism of others’ ideas.  Negative feedback is a sin.  This was certainly the received wisdom when I taught at a business school in the 1980s. 

However, in his book Syed refers to an experiment by Charlan Nemeth at the University of California, Berkeley.  Three groups were assigned different ways of working: 

• The first, was to brainstorm.  No negative feedback. 

• The second were given no guidelines. 

• The third group were encouraged to point out flaws in each other’s ideas. 

The surprising results were that the third group was the most successful, producing more and more productive and imaginative ideas. 

Syed challenges the received wisdom that creativity happens through contemplation and the free flow of ideas.  He argues that the problem with brainstorming is that ideas are not checked by the feedback of criticism:  ‘Removing failure from innovation is like removing oxygen from a fire.’  Pages 210 to 212 in chapter 10, if you want to read more.  We are still in discussion with our client on the best way forward. 

Back to the article in the Times.  Syed ends the article with a quote from Karl Popper ‘True ignorance is not the absence of knowledge but the refusal to acquire it.’   

Chris Goodwin

Read the article in full here