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Black Box Thinking
- Why Most People Never Learn from Their Mistakes - But Some Do
- Narrated by: Simon Slater
- Length: 12 hrs and 14 mins
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Publisher's summary
Nobody wants to fail. But in highly complex organizations, success can happen only when we confront our mistakes, learn from our own version of a black box, and create a climate where it's safe to fail.
We all have to endure failure from time to time, whether it's underperforming at a job interview, flunking an exam, or losing a pickup basketball game. But for people working in safety-critical industries, getting it wrong can have deadly consequences. Consider the shocking fact that preventable medical error is the third-biggest killer in the United States, causing more than 400,000 deaths every year. More people die from mistakes made by doctors and hospitals than from traffic accidents. And most of those mistakes are never made public because of malpractice settlements with nondisclosure clauses.
For a dramatically different approach to failure, look at aviation. Every passenger aircraft in the world is equipped with an almost indestructible black box. Whenever there's any sort of mishap, major or minor, the box is opened, the data is analyzed, and experts figure out exactly what went wrong. Then the facts are published and procedures are changed, so the same mistakes won't happen again. By applying this method in recent decades, the industry has created an astonishingly good safety record.
Few of us put lives at risk in our daily work, as surgeons and pilots do, but we all have a strong interest in avoiding predictable and preventable errors. So why don't we all embrace the aviation approach to failure rather than the health-care approach? As Matthew Syed shows in this eye-opening audiobook, the answer is rooted in human psychology and organizational culture.
Syed argues that the most important determinant of success in any field is an acknowledgment of failure and a willingness to engage with it....
Critic reviews
"Mathew Syed has issued a stirring call to redefine failure. Failure shouldn’t be shameful and stigmatizing, he explains. Instead, he shows that failure can be exciting and enlightening - an essential ingredient in any recipe for success. Full of well-crafted stories and keenly deployed scientific insights, Black Box Thinking will forever change the way you think about screwing up." (Daniel Pink, author of Drive and To Sell Is Human)
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In this groundbreaking work, Tim Harford shows us a new and inspiring approach to solving the most pressing problems in our lives. Harford argues that today’s challenges simply cannot be tackled with ready-made solutions and expert opinions; the world has become far too unpredictable and profoundly complex. Instead, we must adapt. Deftly weaving together psychology, evolutionary biology, anthropology, physics, and economics, along with compelling stories of hard-won lessons learned in the field, Harford makes a passionate case for the importance of adaptive trial-and-error....
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Hidden Agenda
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By: Tim Harford
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Would You Kill the Fat Man?
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A train is racing toward five men, tied to the track. Unless the train is stopped, it will inevitably kill all five men. If a fat man is pushed onto the line, although he will die, his body will stop the train, saving five lives. Would you kill the fat man? As David Edmonds shows, answering the question is far more complex, and important, than it first appears. In fact, how we answer it tells us a great deal about right and wrong.
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Wonderfully Rendered Book...
- By Douglas on 01-25-14
By: David Edmonds
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In Defense of Troublemakers
- The Power of Dissent in Life and Business
- By: Charlan Nemeth
- Narrated by: Joyce Bean
- Length: 6 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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We've decided by consensus that consensus is good. In In Defense of Troublemakers, psychologist Charlan Nemeth argues that this principle is completely wrong: left unchallenged, the majority opinion is often biased, unoriginal, or false. It leads planes and markets to crash, causes juries to convict innocent people, and can quite literally make people think blue is green. In the name of comity, we embrace stupidity. We can make better decisions by embracing dissent. Dissent forces us to question the status quo, consider more information, and engage in creative decision-making.
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Outstanding! a must read for anyone who is breath
- By Kelley on 12-06-20
By: Charlan Nemeth
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Originals
- How Non-Conformists Move the World
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- Narrated by: Fred Sanders, Susan Denaker
- Length: 10 hrs and 1 min
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With Give and Take, Adam Grant not only introduced a landmark new paradigm for success but also established himself as one of his generation’s most compelling and provocative thought leaders. In Originals he again addresses the challenge of improving the world, but now from the perspective of becoming original: choosing to champion novel ideas and values that go against the grain, battle conformity, and buck outdated traditions. How can we originate new ideas, policies, and practices without risking it all?
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Interesting, but not science
- By Lloyd Fassett on 03-14-16
By: Adam Grant, and others
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Friend and Foe
- When to Cooperate, When to Compete, and How to Succeed at Both
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In Friend and Foe, researchers Galinsky and Schweitzer explain why this debate misses the mark. Rather than being hardwired to compete or cooperate, humans have evolved to do both. It is only by learning how to strike the right balance between these two forces that we can improve our long-term relationships and get more of what we want.
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Unexpected
- By Garron Rose on 01-05-16
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Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Third Edition
- Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts
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Renowned social psychologists Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson take a compelling look into how the brain is wired for self-justification. When we make mistakes, we must calm the cognitive dissonance that jars our feelings of self-worth. And so we create fictions that absolve us of responsibility, restoring our belief that we are smart, moral, and right - a belief that often keeps us on a course that is dumb, immoral, and wrong. Backed by years of research and delivered in energetic prose, Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me) offers a fascinating explanation of self-deception.
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If you're a liberal hater - this book's for you
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Irrationality
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Why do doctors, generals, civil servants and others consistently make wrong decisions that cause enormous harm to others? Irrational beliefs and behaviours are virtually universal. In this iconoclastic book Stuart Sutherland analyses causes of irrationality and examines why we are irrational, the different kinds of irrationality, the damage it does us and the possible cures.
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Excellent
- By Michael Carrato on 05-07-10
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Stronger
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Professional athletes, surgeons, first responders - all perform remarkable feats in the face of intense stress. Why do they thrive under pressure while others succumb? What separates the two is attitude. Resilient people meet adversity head on and bounce back from setbacks. They seem to naturally exude an inner strength - but studies show that resilience is something that anyone can build.
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Inspiring stories but light on the science
- By Antony on 05-23-16
By: George S. Everly Jr. PhD, and others
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The End of Average
- How We Succeed in a World That Values Sameness
- By: Todd Rose
- Narrated by: Fred Sanders
- Length: 6 hrs and 31 mins
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Are you above average? Is your child an A student? Is your employee an introvert or an extrovert? Every day we are measured against the yardstick of averages, judged according to how close we come to it or how far we deviate from it. The assumption that metrics comparing us to an average—like GPAs, personality test results, and performance review ratings—reveal something meaningful about our potential is so ingrained in our consciousness that we don't even question it. That assumption, says Harvard's Todd Rose, is spectacularly—and scientifically—wrong.
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Good intentions, terrible execution
- By Kristofer Jarl on 05-06-19
By: Todd Rose
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In Pursuit of Elegance
- Why the Best Ideas Have Something Missing
- By: Matthew E. May
- Narrated by: Malcolm Hillgartner
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In this thought-provoking exploration, Matthew May defines elegance as the elusive combination of unusual simplicity and surprising power, and pinpoints the four key elements that characterize it: seduction, subtraction, symmetry, and sustainability. In a story-driven narrative that sheds light on the need for elegance in design, engineering, physics, art, urban planning, sports, and work, May offers a surprising array of stories that illustrate why what's "not there" often matters more than what is.
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I love elegance, but this book isn't elegant
- By Oliver Nielsen on 06-26-11
By: Matthew E. May
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A Bigger Prize
- How We Can Do Better Than the Competition
- By: Margaret Heffernan
- Narrated by: Margaret Heffernan
- Length: 15 hrs and 48 mins
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From the cranberry bogs of Massachusetts to the classrooms of Singapore and Finland, from tiny start-ups to global engineering firms and beloved American organizations like Ocean Spray, Eileen Fisher, Gore, and Boston Scientific, Heffernan discovers ways of living and working that foster creativity, spark innovation, reinforce our social fabric, and feel so much better than winning.
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Margaret Heffernan is brilliant!
- By Eric Willingham on 06-09-16
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What listeners say about Black Box Thinking
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- Loren
- 11-16-15
A multi-level message, well written and well read
When you begin this book, it seems as if it will be a straight comparison between the airline safety model of reviewing and learning from accidents (open) and the medical system model for covering up mistakes (closed), and it does describe few powerful illustrative examples from each of those fields. However, it turns out to have quite a few more dimensions and lessons, For example, it also turns its focus on the criminal justice system (closed) and the political system (closed). These analyses alone would make it a good book and support a strong argument that learning from mistakes is hugely important.
However, the author takes it a step further and looks at some of the psychological reasons why all of us find it so difficult to admit mistakes (cognitive dissonance), and how we so naturally create narratives that support our original decisions. Like some of the best books in this genre, the book forces us to admit that we also are subject to the same kinds of biases that make it difficult to create and maintain "open" systems that encourage us to regularly test our ideas, even while it provides one example after another of why mistakes are essential to learning.
Simon Slater is a good narrator: pace, accent, and expression contribute to an excellent audio book.
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- Mark
- 04-04-16
Epic Fail
This book is all about failure. It’s about the fact that we hide and stigmatise failure when we should be embracing it - and using it to continuously improve all our enterprises by submitting them to trial and error.
He gives many excellent, moving and gripping examples of contexts where this approach was lacking and resulted in dire consequences: In the medical profession, senior doctors have very high status and self-esteem, and they don’t like to admit their errors. They use euphemisms such as ‘a complication’ or an ‘adverse event’. The author argues that the lack of openness about error means that we are deprived of the opportunity to analyse what went wrong and use this information to continuously improve our systems. He gives a graphic example of a woman who needlessly dies because a group of doctors are finding it difficult to pass a breathing tube during a routine operation. They become fixated with this task and they lose track of time, when they could have performed an emergency tracheotomy – a relatively straightforward lifesaving procedure. The nurse was there ready with the tracheotomy kit - but she only hinted instead of speaking up forcefully, because of the steep authority gradient between her and the doctors.
A second example is criminal law. Since the invention of DNA testing, it has become apparent that our jails are full of innocent people wrongly convicted. But the legal system has been slow to admit its errors and to introduce processes to fix this. Again, high status people, such as investigators and prosecutors are reluctant to admit that they are error prone.
One industry that seems to get this right is aviation. All errors are investigated thoroughly and recommendations are made to change practice. For example, in aviation there have been many crashes resulting when junior members of a team wouldn’t speak up to alert the captain of a danger, because the captain was the commander and speaking up could have resulted in severe rebuke. So the aviation industry changed the culture to a teamwork approach and encouraged all crew members to speak up. This has been a great success, and lessons from this have now been adopted in many medical settings.
In the field of sociology, there was an initiative introduced called ‘Scared Straight’ - designed to put potential delinquents off serious crime by sending them to a prison for 3 hours to spend time with hardened criminals. It appeared to work, and was subsequently adopted Worldwide. But nobody actually tested it to see if it really did work, except to send out some questionnaires. Once it was subjected to rigorous scientific testing using a randomised controlled trial it was shown that this intervention actually increased criminality in the subjects by about 25%.
The point is, you don’t know if something is going to succeed or fail unless you test it. You can’t predict whether something will work or not purely by intuition or because it seems logical – the world is just too complex and there are too many unknown variables. So you should test your idea, then change it and test it again, and so on. This process works the same way that natural selection works in evolution. The entrepreneur who invented the very successful Dyson vacuum cleaner made over 5,000 prototypes and this resulted in an excellent product – he wasn’t afraid of failure, he harnessed it as a tool to drive continuous improvement.
As you have probably guessed if you’ve read this far, I enjoyed this book. It’s interesting and as well as giving an insight into how major institutions and industries could be improved if they embraced failure, it also shares some ideas that we can all apply in our own lives.
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- aaron
- 02-24-16
A Book so Incredibly Well-Researched it's Painful.
This is one of those books that, if I were God, I would force everybody to read. It describes the motivation (spoiler alert: cognitive dissonance) behind many of the dumbest decisions that human beings make.
One strikingly egregious example is criminal prosecutors, and their reluctance to immediately release someone from prison, after exonerating DNA evidence has been presented, post-conviction. Cognitive dissonance. It is the great destroyer of logic and rationale and the more you learn about it, the easier it will become for you to spot it and call people out on it.
Trust me, this is a book that EVERYONE should read. Women, Men, kids of all ages, EVERYONE will appreciate its science, research, and conclusions.
It opened my eyes nice and wide.
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- Logizomai
- 05-07-20
Great Book, Atheist Cringe
The principles and fundamental concepts talked about in this book are great and everyone should embrace. The author adds a bunch of atheist nonsense throught that doesn't assist any of the points. Book was published in 2013 at the height of the neo-atheist movement. likely pandering for reviews/money.
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- Q. G. H. Berk
- 12-24-15
What an amazing book!
I had no expectation of this book. I don't even know how I came by it. One day I just picked it up and started to read it. At the opening chapter I almost put it down. What a horrible story! But I stuck with it and soon I was unable to put it down. It is likethree books into one. The goodstuff just keeps on coming. So rich with information that it is too much to take in in one go.
Wonderful book! This must have taken the author ages to write.
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- Michael McDonald
- 10-30-20
Eye opening
Challenges many commonly held beliefs about failure. Helps to explain many of the issues society is currently plagued with.
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- Aditya Sen
- 09-12-20
A masterclass!
Anyone who thinks 'learning from failures' is just management cliche should pick up this book. Anyone who dosen't should also do the same :P
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- Damian Imel
- 03-23-16
Important topics and ties in other great books
I really enjoyed this book. The concepts are very important, innovative, and current 2016. I also enjoyed how the author ties in other great books I've been meaning to read (creativity inc, taleb, )
As an avid non fiction consumer I highly recommend this book
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- Bohican_
- 03-11-16
Well worth the listen.
Fascinating content, and extremely well narrated. I think everyone can learn something from this book. I was pleasantly suprised at how engrossing it was.
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- Craig C.
- 03-12-16
Nicely crafted
The cases illustrating the principles of blame game looking backward and the learning culture going forward were very powerful. It would have been useful to look at some other fields, such as law enforcement, who are more of a mixed bag, there are investigations from within the department, but there is still very much a blame involved with litigation overseeing the process. Learning from mistakes is a fundamental principle from science. Trial and error and Fire-Aim-Shoot are other ways to state the message.
The use of detailed accounts of football (soccer) players could have been shorter without throwing in all of the team names were a little more than was necessary.
The reader's voice was trying and a little difficult to understand. But, I enjoyed the effective narrative and recommend it.
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