Matthew Syed on the importance of learning from our mistakes

Chesley Sullenberger is a hero to millions. I interviewed him following the release of the film about the incident that brought him to stardom: the flight of US Airways 1549. The movie, Sully, is directed by Clint Eastwood and stars Tom Hanks.

Sullenberger's heroism consists, essentially, of two aspects. First, he was the man in the cockpit of an Airbus A320 when a bird strike knocked out the engines shortly after take-off from LaGuardia Airport, leaving the multitonne plane without thrust thousands of feet above New York City.

How Sully and Jeffrey Skiles, his co-pilot, reacted to that threat – thinking calmly under pressure, interacting seamlessly as they brought the plane down to land safely on the Hudson River – is considered a model within the industry. Sully also demonstrated a tremendous sense of duty after the splashdown, walking the cabin twice to ensure all passengers had evacuated.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

But as we chatted, Sully – a self-evidently modest and decent man – didn't want to take credit himself. Instead, he cited the high-performance culture of the aviation industry, where every near-miss is painstakingly analysed so lessons can be learned and after every crash, the black boxes are deconstructed so reforms can be made to ensure the same mistake never happens again. Indeed, within minutes of the landing on the Hudson, investigators were figuring out whether engine design could be improved to cope more effectively with bird impact, whether checklists should be expanded in emergency situations and whether simulators should incorporate training for splashdowns. Aviation, in that sense, is agile, adapting and innovating in the light of experience.

Sully contrasted this approach with that of medicine, where fear of litigation often means that instead of learning from mistakes, clinicians conceal their errors. This, in turn, means the procedures and training methods are not reformed, so the same mistakes happen again. This helps to explain why preventable medical error is such a big killer. In the US alone, 400,000 people die every year due to avoidable error in hospitals – the equivalent of two jumbo jets crashing every day.

This analysis tallies with my book Black Box Thinking, which argues that successful organisations do not deny or evade their failures and weaknesses but actively interrogate them. This is not just true of aviation, but Google, Amazon, Pixar, Mercedes F1 and Team Sky. By having the intellectual honesty to see where they are going wrong, they are able to constantly improve and adapt.

In other words, success requires a healthy and empowering attitude to failure.

[[{"type":"media","view_mode":"content_original","fid":"104368","attributes":{"class":"media-image"}}]]

MATTHEW SYED is the author of Black Box Thinking: Marginal Gains and the Secrets of High Performance. Sully is in UK cinemas now.