Black Box Thinking: The Surprising Truth About Success

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Or maybe I just read lots of self-help books that I wasn't able to pick up lots of things from this book.

There is almost no human action or decision that cannot be made to look flawed and less sensible in the misleading light of hindsight.You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. When companies go under, other entrepreneurs learn from these mistakes, the system creates new ideas, and consumers ultimately benefit. It’s a very well weighted consideration of why we take failure at face value as a bad thing, and sometimes even ignore it, out of a need to delude ourselves into thinking that we are as good as we think we are. Indeed, many of the greatest thinkers of the last two centuries favoured free market systems because they mimic the process of biological change. However, you may visit "Cookie Settings" where you can manage cookies and customise your cookie settings and choose to accept or reject some or all of these cookies but rejecting some, or all, of them may affect your browsing experience.

Every aircraft is equipped with two almost-indestructible black boxes, one of which records instructions sent to the onboard electronic systems, and another that records the conversations and sounds in the cockpit. The explanation for success hinges, in powerful and often counterintuitive ways, on how we react to failure. Learning from failure has the status of a cliché, but this book reveals the astonishing story behind the most powerful method of learning known to mankind, and reveals the arsenal of techniques wielded by some of the world's most innovative organizations. I work in an "agile" software development company that places a huge emphasis on failing fast and learning from mistakes, so this book hit home for me.

What should be crystal clear is that a desire to apportion blame, before taking the time to understand what really happened, is senseless. Drawing on a LOT of examples, this book chose some particularly graphic and gruesome examples that really didn't sit well with me, and I won't repeat but just be aware this book does contain some triggering content, and I believe the authors points could have been equally highlighted with fewer examples and less graphic ones also. But for people working in safety-critical industries, getting it wrong can have deadly consequences. It is partly because we are so willing to blame others for their mistakes that we are so keen to conceal our own.