Brilliant Mistakes” paved the way and now every business book has at least one chapter about failure. Black box thinking starts by storytelling the undeniable mistakes in the healthcare sector, particularly with the case of Elaine Bromiley's. It is human nature to justify our judgements after making the most obvious mistakes and to filter out contradictory evidence.

It is not just about sport, but has powerful implications for business and politics, as well as for parents and students. The way we have been conditioned and taught to view failure is wrong and, in Syed’s view, we should embrace failure as an opportunity to improve versus using failure to blame someone. The more we can fail in practice, the more we can learn, enabling us to succeed when it really matters.

He has written six bestselling books on the subject of mindset and high performance – Rebel Ideas, Bounce, Black Box Thinking, The Greatest, and his celebrated children’s books, You Are Awesome and The You Are Awesome Journal – and has worked with many leading organisations to build a mindset of continuous improvement. Other terms and methods like ‘Pre-morten technique’, MVP (Minimum Viable Product, ‘lean start-up’) or RCT (Randomized Control Trial) were new to me and thus, I was able to deepen into them through the lecture. We are so eager to impose patterns upon what we see, so hardwired to provide explanations that we are capable of ‘explaining’ opposite outcomes with the same cause without noticing the inconsistency.

Organisms with greater ‘fitness’ survive and reproduce, with their offspring inheriting their genes subject to a random process known as mutation. Black Box Thinking” should be required reading for anyone seeking to grow personally and professionally. He is also a multi-award-winning journalist for The Times and a regular contributor to television and radio.The most important quality I look for in people coming to Dyson is the willingness to try, fail and learn. If there is an accident, the boxes are opened, the data is analyzed, and the reason for the accident excavated.