Black Box Thinking By Matthew Syed: My associations within my blog

Black Box Thinking - The name implies everything

This may be one of my top list of recommended books (that is well accepted by public) for anyone to read, as it meshes up well together with the executive paradox book. In some sense, if the executive paradox book talked about the topography of the executive mindset like a class of geography while adding how each component part of the executive mindset is important to triumph successfully to problems like a class that teaches the nature of our world's food chain, then black box thinking in essence gets your feet under the water like a lecture that teaches you architecture, physics, chemistry, technology - how those foundations glue together best in practice.

Black Box thinking is an attempt I already did in my previous blog posts when I analyzed the executive paradox book, which was intertwined from the mental symmetry "transformation", the concept of god from Lorin Friesen. And in most cases, both explain the same conclusions just each explained in a different context.

Note also how I make metaphors on my first paragraph. I try to underpin the personal mindset challenges that we need to overcome with similarities of the already objective external world that we learn through our school curriculum that has boasted to the advanced efficient civilization we live today. But what improvements have we done to ourselves? The author at some point said that science in certain periods did not do anything to improve the "condition of man". That was because science was condemned by blind faith. However, he does not only uncover that, but he goes further on, by quoting "We notice that creative people make great leaps in natural sciences...but when it comes to the social world we often trust gut instinct". This implies that science so far has solved the external conditions of man, but we never applied it to our internal self, to the aspects of topic that are applied internally (social sciences) instead of externally (natural sciences). This book in some respect gives the solution to that problem. It gives the solution how to apply science in social sciences, something that has been overlooked by mostly all science books that teach science through natural sciences. It is assumed that natural science and social science are the same, when in the actual fact it is not. There is an element that distinct both very substantially: subjectivity and objectivity. Many repress subjectivity as an ill effect of our mind instead as a tool for our learning experience (the key point the author tries to make) , but how can we repress something when that is a foundation component in the way we are able to grow ourselves?

The author uses a word very often. The word he uses often is "evolutionary". The author tries to integrate all his conclusions as part of our "evolutionary" process. He is talking a theory about a theory of how evolution has emerged, and the evolution he is talking about, is not a dead end one, but a potent one that will make ours and the world a better place.  I do not know what, but he nailed the theory straight up. I am pretty sure his insights might came deep from his career as an athlete (concrete experiences) and a journalist (abstract experiences) while reading a lot of books and connecting the dots, such as the Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn. These are all speculations and I may be wrong, but whatever the reason, he brings a lot of topics in his book with a lot of detail and examples that were already discussed in mental symmetry and this blog.

The best impressions is how remarkable and fitting the title of the book's name is: "Black Box Thinking". In some sense, that is how an executive mindset actually works, through black box thinking. I am pretty sure that what he really represents is the "black box" airplanes contain. However, in real life, do all of our situations allow us to have a "black box" within us? And if we "do" have a real replica of a black box like airplanes do, should we still have no doubts that we didn't miss anything? And most importantly, how can we judge that our individualized event applies at a collective level, how does it "correlate", how can we know that the culprit is this variable and not another variable that we didn't notice? After how many tests can we be sure we are confident? These questions may sound we are having a compulsive obsessed disorder, but in many ways, it is not that we have to diligently evaluate in very much detail whether our speculations are correct or not, but we do not put enough effort or evaluate it only in only an individual case that we may set a wrong "theory" of the whole process. But regardless, the word can have another definition: "black box testing". Black box testing is the act of testing a thing many times out to find a bug out of a software. Black box as opposed to white box represents explicit uncertainty: it does not give us the key on how all things work together, instead, we have to figure by experimentation how all things work together. In real life, problems are like that, it is not like we get the actual parameters, replace them on our formula and get the correct result. Instead, it is actually trying to figure what the actual parameters are as most accurate and fast as possible. In the end, we have to act, make a decision, and either fail or succeed through that decision. Only through that way we will have a better clear picture what to do next. It is going from gray thinking to creating a recipe, following and not looking back in a white or black style. However, in most cases, the first iterations will fail and we have to go back to gray thinking. However, as the author Matthew Syed incorporates as his main message of his book, people instead of accepting their mistakes cover their mistakes due to their sensitivities, their ego, or only looking through their individualistic experience, resulting a cognitive dissonance to themselves. If you don't understand what I mean, let us start with the associations of my interpretation of mental symmetry + executive paradox on how it fits with the context message of black box thinking in my next section bellow.

Lastly, but not least, leadership lately has become a very important aspect in our daily life that I never thought it would have led so much light into these days. It may all be help with the emergence of big data in our lives as well, as we can amplify the use of our Perceiver mode more than we can imagine these days. It seems that the example all we should resemble is to have a leadership style. In other words, contributor mode and using it correctly is the key to make ours and the rest a better place. Executive paradox and black box thinking are popular public books in the press that glues those two things together well for anyone to start digging in.

Many people will be baffled and they will say is that all life is? And I would say "yeah, that is all life it is". Many people are in disbelief because they don't want to believe there is any existing answer to life as it won't be a mystery to what life really means. Only when you want to stop making life as a mystery and believe the actual purpose of life is to be what we are supposed to are, great and correct leaders, then the next step will be more clear, much better than not knowing what next step to take.

Associations of Mental Symmetry + Executive Paradox And Black Box Thinking

This is a remarkable book, maybe through iterations and some patience, instead of tackling one tree within the forest like Revolutionary Feedback, this tries to give the big picture of the forest in practical context (actually, the epilogue is titled as the "big picture").

The main message of the book is to admit mistakes as a learning process instead of burying them down due to our ego. That will result in cognitive dissonance and not the ability to grow ourselves.

The same message is applied in mental symmetry. It discusses in length of the mercy mode being the one subject controlling the teacher mode. The mercy has an ego that tries to self defend itself with hyper pain within its mental networks. It is very hard to remove the sensitivities of individuals that create an obstacle for people being transparent and looking at a collective (teacher mode) instead of an individualistic (mercy mode) level of things.

In my illustrations, I mentioned that if mercy rules what teacher mode to do, it will always guide teacher to a wrong results, creating bad emotions (teacher mode has emotions), which the mercy mode will "spin" them around by substituting with alternative explanations (theories) that can fit within the "values" of the mercy mind. This in result creates cognitive dissonance and the individual will never grow by ignoring their mistakes. This intersection of whether to accept or reject mistakes is immediately after performing an action in server mode, which results an input to the mercy mode whether to bury or use it as a humble experience where the perceiver mode can use it to create a better theory. The latter will impose the teacher to rule over the mercy mindset over what are the best values that will compliment as an individual. In other words, it is auto correcting ourselves by the external part of the world.

Beyond that being the most important message of the book, it brought topics, such as top down and bottom up thinking (visionary versus detail oriented) and the ability to re-iterate both cycles often. It is no much different than what my illustration tried to achieve with combining the map of mental symmetry and executive paradox diagrams and creating a flow within them. He illustrates with an example that people who operate  bottom up are better than people who work top down for a problem that has no real applicable solution yet. It is always useful to use top down thinking for problems already solved before, as it is a waste to re-invent the wheel. However, most of the problems we are hired to face are within a context that you cannot solve it by applying mostly a top down thinking, it requires some bottom up thinking, to refine for that specific context.

But the most important of all is how to distinct blind faith and facts. He starts with the most easiest and obvious blind faith - authority, which you can see in upper management and professionals that have a high level of scrutiny if they make mistakes (i.e. doctors). They have to obscure the truth and their mistakes with authority. This comes at a sacrifice at the collective (and also individualistic level) that nobody learns from those mistakes. He further goes into areas that look like facts, but they are not. He illustrates the example that simple trials are not effective because they do not tell much the effectiveness without comparison. Simple trials in essence is just a sentence, a fact, twisted as a theory, with no other fact (other trial that does it differently, like the opposite), that supports the theory. A single trial is like saying "A", whose value is 10, is greater than X, which represents the opposite of A, without testing whether X is greater than 10 in the first place or not. The emergence of A/B testing came due to the fallacy of single trials. But even if that is not enough, he goes and sees evaluating facts in different perspectives: If the vision is correct, then marginal improvements is the correct way to do. If the vision is not correct, leaps of connecting the dots to new creative ideas is the correct way to approach things.

All of those associations are done through extensive depth of different industries in our world today - from aviation to the health industry, to criminal justice. The clarity, simplicity, details, and narrative - all wonderfully mesh up to bring up a topic in the most provocative and influencing way. A must read and I will definitely be writing a review for this book soon.