分节阅读 Table of contents

• 1.Why this book?

  • Matthew Syed is a British journalist and broadcaster. He has worked as a columnist for The Times newspaper and feature writer since 1999. Based in London, he also frequently contributes to the BBC as a radio and television commentator.
    
    In this book, Syed argues that the most important determinant of success in any field is an acknowledgment of failure and a willingness to engage with it. Yet most of us are stuck in a relationship with failure that impedes progress, halts innovation, and damages our careers and personal lives. We rarely acknowledge or learn from failure. He shares fascinating stories of individuals and organizations that have successfully embraced a black box approach to improvement. The economist, Peter Orszag, of The New York Times said, "The most important book I’ve read over the past six months."

• 2.The logic of failure

  • What do Google and Jordan have in common? Failure.
    This is a book about how success happens. Unlike many other books which focus on analyzing their process of achieving success, the author of this book, choose another angle – the analysis of their failure and how they deal with failure before gaining success.
    
    Failure is something we all have to endure from time to time, whether it is the local soccer team losing a match, underperforming at a job interview, or flunking an exam. Sometimes, failure can be far more serious. For doctors and others working in safety-critical/safety-industries, getting it wrong can have deadly consequences.
    
    In UK, a report by the National Audit Office in 2005 estimated that up to 34,000 people are killed per year due to human error. Another study into acute care in hospitals found that one in every ten patients is killed or injured as a consequence of medical error or institutional shortcomings. French health care put the number even higher, at 14 percent.  Why, then, do so many mistakes happen?  There is something deeper and more subtle at work, something that has little to do with resources, and everything to do with culture. It turns out that many of the errors committed in hospitals have particular trajectories, subtle but predictable patterns. With open reporting and honest evaluation, these errors could be spotted and reforms put in place to stop them from happening again. It sounds simple, doesn’t it? But it turns out that a failure to learn from mistakes has been one of the single greatest obstacles to human progress.
    
    In this book, the author will examine how we respond to failure, as individuals, as businesses, as societies. How do we deal with it, and learn from it?

• 3.Change a little, achieve a lot

  • In this chapter, Syed introduced a concept called “Marginal Gains.” What does Marginal Gains mean? It means if you improve in every variable influencing your performance by just 1% then cumulatively you get a significant performance improvement. So how did this concept come from? Let’s look at a story.
    
    The legendary Sir David Brailsford joined British track cycling as an adviser in 1997. In 2000 Great Britain won a single Olympic gold medal in the time trial. In 2004, one year after Brailsford was appointed performance director, Britain won two Olympic gold medals. In 2008 they won an astonishing eight gold medals and, at the London Olympics in 2012,  repeated the feat.
    
    How did it happen?  Syed asked Brailsford over dinner at the team’s small hotel. His answer was clear: “It is about marginal gains,” he said. “The approach comes from the idea that if you break down a big goal into small parts, and then improve on each of them, you will deliver a huge increase when you put them all together.”
    
    It sounds simple, but as a philosophy, “marginal gains” has become one of the hottest concepts not just in sports, but beyond. It has formed the basis of business conferences, and seminars and has even been debated in the armed forces. Many British sports now employ a director of marginal gains.
    
    So how can you or your business adopt a marginal gains mindset and approach to build on your foundations of success?
    
    First of all, you should implant the marginal gains mindset into your team and business. Teams and businesses that want to collectively get better using a marginal gains philosophy would have a united mindset and attitude towards improvement.
    
    Next, Having adopted the “marginal gains mindset”, you need a marginal gains plan to take action. Identify all the things that impact on your performance and where the improvements could be made, for example, your technical capability; your creativity; the environment you’re operating in and emotional support of others around you. The next step, then, would be deciding what you could do better in each area to achieve the 1% marginal improvement. As you get experienced at doing this, you’ll be increasingly seeking out more peripheral things that can make a difference!

• 4.Avoid closed loops

  • In this book, Syed redefined a term “Closed loops”. The terms “closed loop” and “open loop” have particular meanings in engineering and formal systems theory. But Syed creatively applied this concept to human thinking. A closed loop is where failure doesn’t lead to progress because information on errors and weaknesses is misinterpreted or ignored; an open loop does lead to progress because the feedback is rationally acted upon. In the coming pages, Syed used medicine history as an example to show how he applied “closed loop” to analyze situation in the real life.
    
    In the early history of medicine, during which pioneers such as Galen of Pergamon propagated treatments like bloodletting and the use of mercury as an elixir. These treatments were devised with the best of intentions, and in line with the best knowledge available at the time. But many were ineffective, and some highly damaging. The doctors didn’t know this for a simple but profound reason: they never subjected the treatment to a proper test— and so they never detected failure. If a patient recovered, the doctor would say: “Bloodletting cured him!” And if a patient died, the doctor would say: “He must have been very ill indeed because not even the wonder cure of bloodletting was able to save him!” This is an archetypal closed loop.
    
    In the two hundred years since the first use of clinical trials, medicine has progressed from the ideas of Galen to the wonders of gene therapy. Medicine has a long way to go, and suffers from many defects, but a willingness to test ideas and to learn from mistakes has transformed its performance. This is “open loop,” which made medicine evolved rapidly.
    
    How can you tell that you are trapped in a closed loop? Syed said, “If it is intolerable to change your mind, if no conceivable evidence will permit you to admit your mistake, if the threat to ego is so severe that the reframing process has taken on a life of its own, you are effectively in a closed loop.”
    
    Taking a very common example to teach us transferring a closed loop to an open loop. Question: What is your attitude towards your kids’ exam grades? What would you say to them? For many modern parents, they completely understand the significance of praise and encouragement. They, even though, see that grades are not ideal, parents still encourage the kid by saying, “You’ve done very well! Keep doing this!” Or, “I am so proud of you, and I believe you can do even better in the next exam.” It seems like parents are conducting appropriately in staying positive to kids. However, these parents and kids are in a close loop. Why? By only saying these words, parents make their kids feel satisfied with the grades and would not go back to the paper and really study those mistakes. Parents would never know if the kids learned the knowledge from this exam.
    
    So let’s try to change this close loop to open loop.  First of all, both parents and kids should change the attitude towards exam and grades. It is important to gain a good grade and even better one next time, but they’d better understand how to achieve a better one – by studying the mistake we make this time. Next time, when parents receive the exam grades from their kids, try to add one sentence after those praise words, “Don’t forget to study the mistake you made this time. It’s ok to fail.” Learn from our mistake is essential to engender success.

• 5.No blame, no shame

  • This basic perspective— that failure is profoundly negative, something to be ashamed of in ourselves and judgmental about in others— has deep cultural and psychological roots. The typical country penetratingly taking shame into culture is Japan, because of complex reasons of social and economic history, 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. Blame and shame for business failure is common and, often, intense in Japan.
    
    Mistakes are made at businesses, hospitals, and government departments all the time. It is an inevitable part of our everyday interaction with a complex world. And yet if professionals think they are going to be blamed for honest mistakes, why would they be open about them? The truth is that companies blame all the time. By stigmatizing mistakes and by being tough on them, managers think that staff will become more diligent and motivated. According to one report by Harvard Business School, it was found that executives believe that around 2 to 5 percent of the failures in their organizations were “truly blameworthy.” But when asked how many of these mistakes were treated as blameworthy, they admitted that the number was “between 70 to 90 percent.” This is one of the most pressing cultural issues in the corporate and political worlds today, despite the fact that blame is a dangerous obstacle on the road to success.

• 6.Try, try again

  • Have you heard of the Beckham Effect?
    David Beckham is one of England’s finest modern soccer players. He holds the record number of caps for an outfield player with the England team with 115 appearances. He captained England for six years and fifty-nine games, and scored goals in three World Cups. People said he was born to be a soccer star with world-class skills. Isn’t he? Let’s rewind to Beckham’s youth to see how he built up his legend.
    
    As a six-year-old he would spend afternoons practicing keep-me-ups in his tiny back garden in East London. This is the way that most youngsters develop ball control: trying to keep the ball in the air by kicking, kneeing and heading. It is one of the most popular training techniques in the game. At first little David was pretty average. He could do five or six before the ball would elude his control and land on the ground. But he stuck at it. Time after time, he slipped up again and again, but with each mistake learning how to finesse the ball, sustain his concentration, and get his body back into position to keep the sequence going.
    
    Slowly, Beckham improved. After six months, he could get up to 50 keep-me-ups. Six months after that he was up to 200. By the time he got to the age of nine, he had reached a new record: 2,003. In total the sequence took around fifteen minutes and his legs ached at the end of it.  When Syed interviewed Beckham in 2014, Beckham said, “When people talk about my free kicks they focus on the goals,” he said. “But when I think about free kicks I think about all those failures. It took tons of misses before I got it right.”
    
    It is striking how often successful people have a counterintuitive perspective on failure. They strive to succeed, like everyone else, but they are intimately aware of how indispensable failure is to the overall process. And they embrace, rather than shy away from, this part of the journey. This is called “Beckham effect.”
    
    In a famous Nike commercial, Michael Jordan said, “I’ve missed more than nine thousand shots. I’ve lost almost three hundred games. Twenty-six times I’ve been entrusted to take the game-winning shot and missed.”  This is also an epitome of “Beckham Effect.”
    
    In many areas of life, we have to fail a lot before we come up with a good solution. So please be patient and resilient. Failure does not stand for the end, the game would only be over if you give up. After listening to this book, why not thinking creatively when facing failure? Failure gives you an opportunity to make another correct attempt.

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