Predictable thinking can look right on paper, but end up being all wrong
The funny thing about mistakes, suggests Dr. Hashim Al Zain (in his review of Joseph Hallinan's book, Why We Make Mistakes) is that they often look right the first couple of times around. They fit established ways of thinking. The data seems to support them. And hey, everybody agrees with you. It often takes unconventional, counterintuitive perspectives to break through deceptive systems of seeing and interpreting to get to the truth. From Medium.
During World War II, fighter planes would come back from battle peppered with bullet holes that are found to be clustered around certain areas of the plane. The Allies sought to reinforce the areas where damage was found the most by enemy fire to reduce the number of planes that were shot down. That just seemed like the logical reaction to the data that was presented to the Allies, but a mathematician thought about it differently. This mathematician pointed-out a counterintuitive finding, where he postulated that perhaps the reason behind some planes not making it back to base was because they got shot in the areas where no bullets were found in the planes that made it.
In other words, the sections of the plane that got hit the most were the strongest, while the areas that seemed unaffected were the weakest because none of the planes that made it were hit in those sections. Had they been hit in the areas that seemed unaffected, they would’ve met the same fate as those planes that crashed and burned and never made it back to base. This seemed absurd at first, but if you think about it, it makes total sense in hindsight.
This finding resulted in the decision to re-enforce the sections of the plane that weren’t affected by bullets at all because the sections that got hit were strong enough that allowed both the plane and its pilot to survive.
This counterintuitive finding arguably suggests that the reason behind why we repeat some mistakes over and over again is because we miss certain clues about a given situation. We often don’t like to change the way we process information because we believe it to be reliable, which ends-up preventing us from paying close attention to the feedback in our environment. Thinking differently can save lives.
This book summary is my attempt to highlight how we can use mistakes as a valuable means of developing a Growth Mindset to achieve unimaginable success.
Read the whole thing here.
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