Black Box Thinking: The Surprising Truth About Success

Reading Level
Grade 9
Time to Read
7 hrs 36 mins

Reading Level

What is the reading level of Black Box Thinking: The Surprising Truth About Success?

Analysing the books in the series, we estimate that the reading level of Black Box Thinking: The Surprising Truth About Success is 8th and 9th grade.

Expert Readability Tests for
Black Box Thinking: The Surprising Truth About Success

Readability Test Reading Level
Flesch Kincaid Scale Grade 8
SMOG Index Grade 11
Coleman Liau Index Grade 10
Dale Chall Readability Score Grade 7

Reading Time

7 hrs 36 mins

How long to read Black Box Thinking: The Surprising Truth About Success?

The estimated word count of Black Box Thinking: The Surprising Truth About Success is 113,770 words.

A person reading at the average speed of 250 words/min, will finish the book in 7 hrs 36 mins. At a slower speed of 150 words/min, they will finish it in 12 hrs 39 mins. At a faster speed of 450 words/min, they will finish it in 4 hrs 13 mins.

Black Box Thinking: The Surprising Truth About Success - 113,770 words
Reading Speed Time to Read
Slow 150 words/min 12 hrs 39 mins
Average 250 words/min 7 hrs 36 mins
Fast 450 words/min 4 hrs 13 mins
Black Box Thinking: The Surprising Truth About Success by Matthew Syed
Authors
Matthew Syed

More about Black Box Thinking: The Surprising Truth About Success

113,770 words

Word Count

for Black Box Thinking: The Surprising Truth About Success

336 pages

Pages
Hardcover: 336 pages
Kindle: 353 pages

12 hours and 14 minutes

Audiobook length


Description

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 that 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 book, 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. 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—even though we often claim the opposite. We think we have 20/20 hindsight, but our vision is usually fuzzy.Syed draws on a wide range of sources—from anthropology and psychology to history and complexity theory—to explore the subtle but predictable patterns of human error and our defensive responses to error. He also shares fascinating stories of individuals and organizations that have successfully embraced a black box approach to improvement, such as David Beckham, the Mercedes F1 team, and Dropbox.