共享题干题【2017年真题】Embracing failure is a cliche of the business world. But as Matthew Syed, a journalist at The Times, shows in a new book, Black Box Thinkings in practice a "stigmatizing" attitude toward error” pervades everyday life. This has big implications.
Success brings its own rewards, but the world comes down hard on those who are deemed failures. The desire to avoid such opprobrium prompts people to cover up mistakes, argues Mr. Syed. Police fail to drop cases against people accused of committing a crime, even after clear evidence emerges of their innocence. Politicians plough on with policies even when it is obvious they are not working. All are psychological strategies to avoid admitting fault.
Fear of failure can have devastating consequences, as Mr. Syed shows in a story about United Airlines. In 1978, as a plane approached its destination, the pilot worried that the landing gear had not come down. Desperate, he tried to establish what was wrong, becoming blinded to the planed dwindling fuel reserves. Eventually the tank was empty, and the plane crashed. The worry of making a mistake — subjecting the passengers to a bumpy landing 一 blinded him to bigger problems.
The story is a metaphor. Investors hold on to losing stocks longer than they should. Unable to face the shame of a bad return, they end up with a much bigger loss. Fred Goodwin of RBS, a bank, fretted about the color of the carpets at head office while his firm collapsed under the weight of the financial crisis. The medical profession is especially intolerant of mishaps, says Mr. Syed. This means that mistakes are not scrutinized and people do not learn from them. Small wonder that blunders are pervasive. According to one study of acute care in hospitals, one in 10 patients “is killed or injured as a consequence of medical error or institutional shortcomings”.
What to do? One solution is making it easy for people to own up or speak up, as the airline industry has learned to do better than any other. Mr. Syed"s more novel suggestion, though, is the rigorous testing of business strategies. This forces people to make improvements. The gold standard is the “randomized control trial”（RCT)，in which a treatment group is compared with a control group. Capital One, a credit-card company, has used RCTs obsessively 一 over the fonts it uses, for example, and the scripts at its call- centers —to assess which initiatives fail and which do not. James Dyson, a technology entrepreneur, and Google are other cheerleaders for this hyperrational school of management.
This approach may also hold benefits for governments. David Halpem is the boss of the British government’s Behavioral Insights Team (BIT)，known as the “nudge unit，” which uses RCTs to improve policy.
Identifying points of failure and making small changes，he argues，reaps disproportionate gains. By including a message on a car-tax form appealing to people’s sense of humanity, the BIT sharply boosted organ donations.
Much still needs to be done. Between 2010 and 2012 the BIT saved the British government only ￡300 million ($457 million), a negligible proportion of GDP. Few businesses incorporate RCTs as extensively as Capital One. Much more could be done. Hospitals could subject doctors to RCTs, identify the mistake-prone and then help them. Civil servants could randomly test the economic impact of policies, such as changes to income tax, before rolling them out. It sounds extreme, but confronting failure rationally would bring huge rewards.