Black Box Thinking

by Matthew Syed

  But this takes us to a prevailing misconception about the Growth Mindset. Won’t people in the Growth Mindset persevere in a futile task for too long? it is sometimes asked. Won’t they waste their lives on challenges they will never really accomplish?

  In fact, the truth is quite the reverse. It is those with a Growth Mindset who are more capable of making a rational decision to quit. As Dweck puts it: “There is nothing in the growth mindset that prevents students from deciding that they lack the skills a problem requires. In fact, it allows students to give up without shame or fear that they are revealing a deep and abiding deficiency.”

  Think back to the disposition effect covered in chapter 5. A rational financial trader should keep shares that are most likely to appreciate in the future while selling those likely to depreciate. But traders are actually more likely to keep the shares that have lost money, regardless of future prospects. Why? Because they hate to crystallize a loss. This is why people hold on to losing stocks for far too long, desperately hoping they will rebound. Even professional stock pickers are vulnerable, holding losing stocks twice as long as winning stocks.

  Now think about the Growth Mindset: it is about being able to see failure in a clear-eyed way; not as an indictment of one’s judgment, but as a learning opportunity. This is why evidence suggests that traders in a Growth Mindset are less inclined to the disposition effect; less inclined to blindly persevere with a losing stock. When we see failure without its related stigma, the point is not that we commit to futile tasks, but that we are more capable of meaningful adaptation: whether that means quitting and trying something else or sticking—and growing.7

  But now suppose that we have already made a rational decision to persevere: the Growth Mindset now has an additional significance. It helps us to deal with challenges and setbacks. It is no good spending an entire career cowering in fear of negative feedback, avoiding situations in which you might be judged, and thus preventing any chance of improvement. You haven’t given up; but you haven’t progressed, either.

  James Dyson worked his way through 5,127 prototypes while his competitors didn’t get through the first hundred, not because he was more intelligent, but because he was more resilient. Likewise, Beckham and Jordan may have been born with admirable athletic qualities, but these would have meant little without a Growth Mindset.

  And this is really the point. A growth-oriented culture is not a naïvely optimistic, wishy-washy, we-are-all-winners approach to business or life. And it is certainly not a trope of egalitarian sensibilities. Rather, it is a cutting-edge approach to organizational psychology based upon the most basic scientific principle of all: we progress fastest when we face up to failure—and learn from it.

  Chapter 14

  Redefining Failure

  I

  We have arrived at a conclusion that was hinted at in the opening pages: if we wish to fulfill our potential as individuals and organizations, we must redefine failure. In many ways, that has been the purpose of this book. We have taken a journey through the rich and diverse literature on failure in an attempt to offer a new perspective on what it means, and how it should be handled.

  At the level of the brain, the individual, the organization and the system, failure is a means—sometimes the only means—of learning, progressing, and becoming more creative. This is a hallmark of science, where errors point to how theories can be reformed; of sports, where practice could be defined as the willingness to clock up well-calibrated mistakes; and of aviation, where every accident is harnessed as a means of driving system safety.

  Errors have many different meanings, and call for different types of response depending on context, but in all of their guises they represent invaluable aids with the potential to help us learn.

  Can so much turn on the basis of a reinterpretation of error? Can a new approach to success emerge by flipping the way we think about failure? The evidence for such a claim is contained in every example we have looked at: the contrast between science and pseudoscience, between health care and aviation, between centrally planned and well-regulated market systems. It is revealed, too, in the differences that emerge from the Fixed and Growth Mindsets.

  When we see failure in a new light, success becomes a new and exhilarating concept. Competence is no longer a static phenomenon, something reserved for great people and organizations on the basis of fixed superiority. Rather, it is seen as dynamic in nature: something that grows as we strive to push back the frontiers of our knowledge. We are motivated not to boast about what we currently know, and to get defensive when people point to gaps in our knowledge.

  Rather, we look in wonder at the infinite space beyond the boundaries of what we currently understand, and dare to step into that unbounded terrain, discovering new problems as we find new solutions, as great scientists do. As the philosopher Karl Popper put it: “It is part of the greatness and beauty of science that we can learn through our own critical investigations that the world is utterly different from what we ever imagined—until our imagination was fired by the refutation of our earlier theories.”1

  Many progressive institutions have attempted to inspire precisely this kind of redefinition of failure. James Dyson spends much of his life working to reform educational culture. He wants students to be equipped with a new way of thinking about the world. He rails against the prevailing conception of education that overemphasizes perfection on exams while penalizing students for their mistakes. He worries that this leads to intellectual stagnation. The Dyson Foundation works, above all, to destigmatize failure. He wants youngsters to experiment, to try new things, to take risks.

  Innovative school principals are engaged in precisely the same terrain. Heather Hanbury, the former headmistress of Wimbledon High School in southwest London, for example, created an annual event for her students called “failure week.” She was aware that her students were performing well in exams, but she also realized that many were struggling with nonacademic challenges, and not reaching their creative potential, particularly outside the classroom.

  For one week she created workshops and assemblies where failure was celebrated. She asked parents and tutors and other role models to talk about how they had failed, and what they had learned. She showed YouTube clips of famous people practicing: i.e., learning from their own mistakes. She told students about the journeys taken by the likes of David Beckham and James Dyson so they could have a more authentic understanding of how success really happens.

  Hanbury has said:

  You’re not born with fear of failure, it’s not an instinct, it’s something that grows and develops in you as you get older. Very young children have no fear of failure at all. They have great fun trying new things and learning very fast. Our focus here is on failing well, on being good at failure. What I mean by this is taking the risk and then learning from it if it doesn’t work.

  There’s no point in failing and then dealing with it by pretending it didn’t happen, or blaming someone else. That would be a wasted opportunity to learn more about yourself and perhaps to identify gaps in your skills, experiences or qualifications. Once you’ve identified the learning you can then take action to make a difference.2

  Other organizations have undertaken similar projects of redefinition. W. Leigh Thompson, the chief scientific officer at pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly, initiated “failure parties” in the 1990s to celebrate excellent scientific work that nevertheless resulted in failure. It was about destigmatizing failure and liberating staff from the twin dangers of blame and cognitive dissonance.

  But can these kinds of interventions have real effects? Do they really change behavior and boost performance and adaptation?

  Consider an experiment involving a group of schoolchildren who had shown difficulty in dealing with failure. In that respect they were like many of us. Half of these students were then given a course where they experienced consistent success. The questions posed during
these sessions were easy and the students were delighted to ace them. They began to develop intellectual self-confidence, as you would expect.

  The second group were not given successes, but training in how to reinterpret their failures. They were sometimes given problems that they couldn’t solve, but they were also taught to think that they could improve if they expended effort. The failures were positioned not as indications of their lack of intelligence, but as opportunities to improve their reasoning and understanding.

  At the end of these training courses, the two groups were tested on a difficult problem. Those who had experienced consistent success were as demoralized by failing to solve this problem as they had been before the training. They were so sensitive to failure that their performance declined and it took many days for them to recover. Some were even more afraid of challenges and didn’t want to take risks.

  The group that had been taught to reinterpret failure were quite different. They significantly improved in their ability to deal with the challenging task. Many actually demonstrated superior performance after failure and when they went back to class began asking their teachers for more challenging work. Far from ducking out of situations where they might fail, they embraced them.

  This hints at one of the great paradoxes about school and life. Often it is those who are the most successful who are also the most vulnerable. They have won so many plaudits, been praised so lavishly for their flawless performances, that they haven’t learned to deal with the setbacks that confront us all. This has been found to be particularly true of young girls. Female students who go through primary school getting consistently high grades, and who appear to their teachers as highly capable, are often the most devastated by failure.3

  In one famous experiment a group of schoolgirls were measured for their IQ and then given a task that began with a really challenging section. You might have expected the girls with the higher IQs to perform better on the test. In fact, the results were the other way around. The high-IQ girls, who had always succeeded in life, were so flustered by the initial struggle that they became “helpless.” They hardly bothered with the later problems on the test. The relationship between IQ and outcome was actually negative.4

  And this is why “failure week” at Wimbledon High School was such an enlightened idea. Heather Hanbury was trying to give her high-achieving students a lesson that would help them not merely at school or university but in later life. She was taking them outside their comfort zone and helping them to develop the psychological tools that are so vital in the real world.

  “Our pupils are hugely successful in their exams, but they can overreact when things go wrong,” she said. “We want them to be courageous. It sounds paradoxical, but we dare them to fail.”

  II

  Let us move beyond the classroom and consider some of the differences in attitudes to failure that exist in the real world. Specifically, let us take the issue of entrepreneurship, something that is widely regarded as crucial to success in the global economy.

  In the United States the culture is one where entrepreneurs take risks and rarely give up if their first venture fails. Henry Ford, the car entrepreneur, is a case in point. His first enterprise, the Detroit Automobile Company, collapsed, as did his involvement with the second, the Henry Ford Company. But these failures taught him vital lessons about pricing and quality. The Ford Motor Company, his third venture, changed the world. “Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently,” he said.

  In Japan, on the other hand, the culture is very different. For complex reasons of social and economic history,5 failure is more stigmatizing. The basic attitude is that if you mess up you have brought shame on yourself and your family. Failure is regarded not as an opportunity to learn, but as a demonstration that you do not have what it takes. These are classic Fixed Mindset attitudes. Blame for business failure is common and, often, intense.

  Now take a look at the data on entrepreneurship. According to the World Bank, Japan has the lowest annual entry rate for new enterprises among the OECD nations. As of 2013 it had slumped to only a third of that in the United States. On the OECD Science, Technology and Industry Scoreboard in 2008, Japan had the lowest quantity of venture capital invested: American investment was twenty times higher as a percentage of GDP.

  Other studies reveal similar findings. According to the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor only 1.9 percent of adults between the ages of eighteen and sixty-four are working actively to establish new businesses in Japan. In the United States, the figure is more than 250 percent higher. According to the Kauffman Foundation, nearly one in every eight American adults (11.9 percent) is currently engaged in “entrepreneurial activity.” This is near the top of the developed world.

  It goes without saying that these differences have real effects, not only on entrepreneurs, but on the wider economy. As a paper for the Wharton Business School put it: “In Japan, the relative dearth of opportunity-driven entrepreneurship has contributed to the nation’s economic malaise over the past two decades.” As for America, entrepreneurs are considered a cornerstone of the nation’s success: “Empirical research has shown that ‘opportunity-driven’ entrepreneurship is the wellspring of growth in the modern market economy.”6

  But can these differences in the hard data really hinge on something as soft and intangible as differing conceptions of failure? In 2009, the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor carried out a major survey to find out. They looked at attitudes toward entrepreneurship in twenty innovation-based advanced economies. The results were emphatic. Japanese citizens demonstrated the highest fear of failure. Americans, meanwhile, displayed one of the lowest levels.7

  Five years later the same attitudes prevailed. In a survey of seventy different countries, at different stages of development, and facing different challenges, Japan had the highest fear of failure of all of them with the exception of Greece, which was going through the trauma of an externally imposed fiscal consolidation. The United States remained among the lowest.8 In a 2013 survey Japan was rated the lowest in the world in terms of believing that the skills associated with entrepreneurship can be improved over time.

  Fear of failure is not an inherently bad thing. It is smart to consider the risks and to exercise caution if they are deemed severe. Fear can also spark great creative energy, a point that the entrepreneur Richard Branson has made.9 The problem arises, though, when opportunities exist and it remains psychologically impossible to even engage with them. The problem is when setbacks lead not to learning, but to recrimination and defeatism.

  This isn’t just about entrepreneurship; it is about life. Let us take a different example that reveals the same underlying truth, but in the opposite direction. In mathematics, China and Japan rank among the best in the world. In the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) league table, which measures attainment among fifteen-year-olds, China rates first and Japan seventh in math. The United Kingdom and the United States lag well behind, in twenty-sixth and thirty-sixth positions, respectively.10

  Now, consider the differing attitudes toward mathematics between these nations. In the UK and the United States, math is widely considered to be something you either can or can’t do. When children struggle they assume they are not cut out for it. At schools up and down these nations, you hear youngsters say things like: “I just don’t have a brain for numbers.” As the Stanford academic Jo Boaler put it: “The idea that only some people can do math is deep in the American and British psyche. Math is special in this way, and people have ideas about math that they don’t have about any other subject.”11

  In China and Japan the attitude is radically different. Math is thought of as a bit like a language: as you persevere you become more articulate. Mistakes are held up not as evidence of a fixed inferiority, or as showing that you have “the wrong kind of brain,” but as evidence of learning. Some individuals are better than others at math,
but there is a presumption that everyone has the capacity to master basic mathematical concepts with perseverance and application.

  Boaler talks of a visit to Shanghai, the area of China and the world that scores highest in math. “The teacher gave the students . . . problems to work on and then called on students for their answers. As the students happily shared their work the interpreter leaned across to me and told me that the teacher was choosing students who had made mistakes. The students were proud to share their mistakes as mistakes were valued by the teacher.”12

  Again and again, differences in mindset explain why some individuals and organizations grow faster than others. Evolution, as we noted in chapter 7, is driven by failure. But if we give up when we fail, or if we edit out our mistakes, we halt our progress no matter how smart we are. It is the Growth Mindset fused with an enlightened evolutionary system that helps to unlock our potential; it is the framework that drives personal and organizational adaptation.

  III

  For one final insight into how our misguided attitudes can undermine progress, let us take one of the most astonishing behaviors of all: self-handicapping. This has been studied in businesses, in schools, and in family life. It reveals just how far people are prepared to go to protect their ego at the expense of their own long-term success.

  I first saw self-handicapping in action during my final year at Oxford University. We were about to take our final exams and we had all prepared well for the big day. Most of us were apprehensive, but also relieved that the waiting was finally over. And the majority of us spent the previous twenty-four hours going through our revision notes for a final time.

  But one group of students did something very different. They sat outside in the garden area frolicking and drinking cocktails, didn’t take a single look at their notes, and made sure that everyone knew that they were going to a nightclub later that evening. They all looked pretty relaxed, joking about the coming exams.