Quotes from Black Box Thinking: Why Some People Never Learn from Their Mistakes - But Some Do

“Learn from the mistakes of others. You can’t live long enough to make them all yourself.”
― quote from Black Box Thinking: Why Some People Never Learn from Their Mistakes - But Some Do

“Studies have shown that we are often so worried about failure that we create vague goals, so that nobody can point the finger when we don’t achieve them. We come up with face-saving excuses, even before we have attempted anything.

We cover up mistakes, not only to protect ourselves from others, but to protect us from ourselves. Experiments have demonstrated that we all have a sophisticated ability to delete failures from memory, like editors cutting gaffes from a film reel—as we’ll see. Far from learning from mistakes, we edit them out of the official autobiographies we all keep in our own heads.”
― quote from Black Box Thinking: Why Some People Never Learn from Their Mistakes - But Some Do

“Creativity is, in many respects, a response.”
― quote from Black Box Thinking: Why Some People Never Learn from Their Mistakes - But Some Do

“It is partly because we are so willing to blame others for their mistakes that we are so keen to conceal our own. We”
― quote from Black Box Thinking: Why Some People Never Learn from Their Mistakes - But Some Do

“Failure is rich in learning opportunities for a simple reason: in many of its guises, it represents a violation of expectation.6 It is showing us that the world is in some sense different from the way we imagined it to be.”
― quote from Black Box Thinking: Why Some People Never Learn from Their Mistakes - But Some Do

“The only way to be sure is to go out and test your ideas and programmes, and to realise that you will often be wrong. But that is not a bad thing. It leads to progress.   This”
― quote from Black Box Thinking: Why Some People Never Learn from Their Mistakes - But Some Do

“Michael Jordan, the basketball great, is a case in point. In a famous Nike commercial, he said: ‘I’ve missed more than nine thousand shots. I’ve lost almost three hundred games. Twenty-six times I’ve been trusted to take the game-winning shot and missed.’ For many the ad was perplexing. Why boast about your mistakes? But to Jordan it made perfect sense. ‘Mental toughness and heart are a lot stronger than some of the physical advantages you might have,’ he said. ‘I’ve always said that and I’ve always believed that.’ James”
― quote from Black Box Thinking: Why Some People Never Learn from Their Mistakes - But Some Do

“Everything we know in aviation, every rule in the rule book, every procedure we have, we know because someone somewhere died . . . We have purchased at great cost, lessons literally bought with blood that we have to preserve as institutional knowledge and pass on to succeeding generations. We cannot have the moral failure of forgetting these lessons and have to relearn them.”
― quote from Black Box Thinking: Why Some People Never Learn from Their Mistakes - But Some Do

“The reason is not difficult to see: if we drop out when we hit problems, progress is scuppered, no matter how talented we are. If we interpret difficulties as indictments of who we are, rather than as pathways to progress, we will run a mile from failure. Grit, then, is strongly related to the Growth Mindset; it is about the way we conceptualise success and failure.”
― quote from Black Box Thinking: Why Some People Never Learn from Their Mistakes - But Some Do

“These failures are inevitable because the world is complex and we will never fully understand its subtleties. The model, as social scientists often remind us, is not the system. Failure is thus a signpost. It reveals a feature of our world we hadn’t grasped fully and offers vital clues about how to update our models, strategies, and behaviors. From this perspective, the question often asked in the aftermath of an adverse event, namely, “Can we afford the time to investigate failure?,” seems the wrong way around. The real question is, “Can we afford not to?”
― quote from Black Box Thinking: Why Some People Never Learn from Their Mistakes - But Some Do

“When a culture is unfair and opaque, it creates multiple perverse incentives. When a culture is fair and transparent, on the other hand, it bolsters the adaptive process.”
― quote from Black Box Thinking: Why Some People Never Learn from Their Mistakes - But Some Do

“trying to increase discipline and accountability in the absence of a just culture has precisely the opposite effect. It destroys morale, increases defensiveness and drives vital information deep underground. It”
― quote from Black Box Thinking: Why Some People Never Learn from Their Mistakes - But Some Do

“Psychologists often make a distinction between mistakes where we already know the right answer and mistakes where we don’t. A medication error, for example, is a mistake of the former kind: the nurse knew she should have administered Medicine A but inadvertently administered Medicine B, perhaps because of confusing labeling combined with pressure of time. But sometimes mistakes are consciously made as part of a process of discovery. Drug companies test lots of different combinations of chemicals to see which have efficacy and which don’t. Nobody knows in advance which will work and which won’t, but this is precisely why they test extensively, and fail often. It is integral to progress.”
― quote from Black Box Thinking: Why Some People Never Learn from Their Mistakes - But Some Do

“Success is not just dependent on before-the-event reasoning, it is also about after-the-trigger adaptation.”
― quote from Black Box Thinking: Why Some People Never Learn from Their Mistakes - But Some Do

“Creativity is so delicate a flower that praise tends to make it bloom, while discouragement often nips it in the bud.’3”
― quote from Black Box Thinking: Why Some People Never Learn from Their Mistakes - But Some Do

“The Greek period inspired the greatest flowering of knowledge in human history, producing the forefathers of the entire Western intellectual tradition, including Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Pythagoras and Euclid. It changed the world in ways both subtle and profound.”
― quote from Black Box Thinking: Why Some People Never Learn from Their Mistakes - But Some Do

“Bacon identified in relation to the natural sciences: the mismatch between the complexity of the world and our capacity to understand it.”
― quote from Black Box Thinking: Why Some People Never Learn from Their Mistakes - But Some Do

“Scientific ideas should succeed or fail according to rational argument and evidence. It is about data rather than dogma.”
― quote from Black Box Thinking: Why Some People Never Learn from Their Mistakes - But Some Do

“United Airlines 173 was a traumatic incident, but it was also a great leap forward,” the aviation safety expert Shawn Pruchnicki says. “It is still regarded as a watershed, the moment when we grasped the fact that ‘human errors’ often emerge from poorly designed systems. It changed the way the industry thinks.” Ten people died on United Airlines 173, but the learning opportunity saved many thousands more.”
― quote from Black Box Thinking: Why Some People Never Learn from Their Mistakes - But Some Do

“Cognitive dissonance doesn’t leave a paper trail. There are no documents that can be pointed to when we reframe inconvenient truths. There is no violence perpetrated by the state or anyone else. It is a process of self-deception. And this can have devastating effects, not least on those who were the subject of chapter 4: the wrongly convicted.”
― quote from Black Box Thinking: Why Some People Never Learn from Their Mistakes - But Some Do

“This, then, is what we might call “black box thinking.”* For organizations beyond aviation, it is not about creating a literal black box; rather, it is about the willingness and tenacity to investigate the lessons that often exist when we fail, but which we rarely exploit. It is about creating systems and cultures that enable organizations to learn from errors, rather than being threatened by them.”
― quote from Black Box Thinking: Why Some People Never Learn from Their Mistakes - But Some Do

“Remember that for a man like Tony Blair, this was the biggest decision of his political life. He was not just a voter who supported the war, he was a prime minister who had gambled his career on the conflict, committing troops on the ground, of whom 179 would lose their lives. His political reputation, to a large extent, hinged on the decision. If anyone would be motivated to defend it, he would. So, let us explore the contortions. On 24 September 2002, before the conflict, Blair made a speech to the House of Commons about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction: ‘His WMD programme is active, detailed and growing,’ he said. ‘Saddam has continued to produce them, . . . he has existing and active military plans for the use of chemical and biological weapons, which could be activated within 45 minutes . . .”
― quote from Black Box Thinking: Why Some People Never Learn from Their Mistakes - But Some Do

“Memory, it turns out, is not as reliable as we think. We do not encode high-definition movies of our experiences and then access them at will. Rather, memory is a system dispersed throughout the brain and is subject to all sorts of biases. Memories are suggestible. We often assemble fragments of entirely different experiences and weave them together into what seems like a coherent whole. With each recollection, we engage in editing.*”
― quote from Black Box Thinking: Why Some People Never Learn from Their Mistakes - But Some Do

“Twelve months later, when the Iraq survey group, Blair’s inspectors of choice, couldn’t find the weapons either, he changed tack again. Speaking to the House of Commons Liaison Committee, he said: ‘I have to accept we haven’t found them and we may never find them, we don’t know what has happened to them . . . They could have been removed, they could have been hidden, they could have been destroyed.’ The evidential dance was now at full tilt. The lack of evidence for WMD in Iraq, according to Blair, was no longer because troops had not had enough time to find them, or because of the inadequacy of the inspectors: rather, it was because the Iraqi troops had spirited them out of existence.”
― quote from Black Box Thinking: Why Some People Never Learn from Their Mistakes - But Some Do

“Learn from the mistakes of others. You can’t live long enough to make them all yourself.’ And”
― quote from Black Box Thinking: Why Some People Never Learn from Their Mistakes - But Some Do

“I have spoken to dozens of pilots, investigators and regulators about the November Oscar incident and, although perspectives vary, there is a broad consensus that it was a mistake to pin the blame on Stewart. It was wrong of British Airways to censure him and for the lawyers at the CAA to put him on trial. Why? Because if pilots anticipate being blamed unfairly, they will not make the reports on their own mistakes and near-misses, thus suppressing the precious information”
― quote from Black Box Thinking: Why Some People Never Learn from Their Mistakes - But Some Do

“But even if we practice diligently, we will still endure real-world failure from time to time. And it is often in these circumstances, when failure is most threatening to our ego, that we need to learn most of all. Practice is not a substitute for learning from real-world failure; it is complementary to it. They are, in many ways, two sides of the same coin.”
― quote from Black Box Thinking: Why Some People Never Learn from Their Mistakes - But Some Do

“These witnesses were not necessarily lying. They were not making it up. But then neither was Neil Tyson when he talked about Bush’s stars speech. When the witnesses said they remembered seeing the suspect at the scene of the crime, they were telling the truth. They did remember seeing him there, but they didn’t actually see him there. These are two quite different things.”
― quote from Black Box Thinking: Why Some People Never Learn from Their Mistakes - But Some Do

“This is not to say that eyewitness testimony is worthless; quite the reverse. In certain circumstances it is invaluable in order to secure convictions. Rather, it is to say that memories should be coaxed out of witnesses with sensitivity to the biases that might otherwise contaminate the evidence. The tragedy is that the techniques used by police, until recently, had little of this sophistication.”
― quote from Black Box Thinking: Why Some People Never Learn from Their Mistakes - But Some Do

“The practice of “drive-bys,” for example, has been used and abused for decades: this is where an eyewitness is taken by police to see a suspect on the street, or at their place of work. Given that the witness knows that the police have suspicions about the person—why else would they be going there?—the technique is dangerously suggestive.”
― quote from Black Box Thinking: Why Some People Never Learn from Their Mistakes - But Some Do

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