Matthew Syed

Who they are

Syed is a journalist, author and broadcaster. According to the biography published by Abertay University, which awarded him an honorary doctorate in 2016, he was England's top table-tennis player for almost a decade, competed for Great Britain at the Olympics and is a three-time Commonwealth Games champion. He writes a column for The Times and appears on radio and television. His subject as an author is the psychology of high performance.

His books are syntheses of other people's work, and this site treats them that way. They gather experiments, case histories and interviews into one argument, and the useful thing for a reader is to know which part of the argument rests on which primary source.

Black Box Thinking is the book this site draws on. It runs to six parts. The first sets the logic of failure, with a hospital death after a routine operation set beside the 1978 crash of United Airlines flight 173 and the way aviation turned that accident into learning through independent investigation, open reporting and crew resource management. The second turns to cognitive dissonance, wrongful convictions and the way senior people reframe evidence that threatens them. The third concerns complexity, trial and error and randomised trials. The fourth covers marginal gains and innovation, the fifth the blame game, and the sixth what he calls a growth culture. The vault's reading of the book is from the printed pages, and its audit finds the aviation contrast and the cognitive dissonance chapters on firm ground, with a number of figures that need the underlying studies cited in their place.

Syed also interviewed people for the book. In the passage this site uses, he reports a conversation with David Beckham in Paris in the spring of 2014.

Books

Syed has published further books that this site does not draw on, and it lists only the two it has read or can place from the text of Black Box Thinking.

Key ideas

Open loops and closed loops. In an open loop, information about error is acted on and performance improves. In a closed loop, failure does not lead to progress because the information is ignored, explained away or never gathered. Aviation is his example of the first and much of healthcare his example of the second.

Practice needs feedback. On pages 49 and 50 he writes that studies of experts have led to the conclusion that expertise is, at least in part, about practice, and he adds a condition with an image of a golfer practising in the dark. Such a golfer could carry on for ten years or ten thousand years without improving, because no shot returns any information. Chess players and nurses, by contrast, are told quickly when they are wrong. This matches the feedback element in Anders Ericsson's definition of deliberate practice, and the vault treats it as the most useful part of the argument. On the footnote to the same passage, he states the narrower claim himself: that extended practice seems to be a prerequisite for expertise in predictable environments.

A case that cannot test the claim. His longest example of practice is David Beckham. As a boy, Beckham managed five or six keep-me-ups at first, reached 50 after six months and 200 six months after that, and by nine could keep a ball in the air 2,003 times (pp. 270 to 271). The case shows patient, error-driven practice by one person who succeeded. It does not show how much of the success the practice explains, because it has no comparison with equally dedicated players who did not reach the top. The 2019 replication of the original violin study supplies that comparison, and its result is covered in Does Deliberate Practice Make an Expert.

Testing over intuition. Only a control group shows the counterfactual. He uses the example of Scared Straight programmes, which looked successful for years until randomised trials showed that they raised offending, and the harm finding holds in the Cochrane and Campbell review the vault checked.

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