°Latitude Black Box Systems

Using the Power of Failure to Drive Innovation in Our Social Systems and Professional Practices

“There is no act too small, no act too bold. The history of social change is the history of a million actions, small and large, coming together at critical points to create a power that governments cannot suppress.”

Howard Zinn

What are Black Box Systems?

In the aviation industry, black boxes are built into aircraft to keep a complete view of all the technical decisions and operations made on a journey. But the aircraft industry looks at failure and mistakes in a profound way that reframes how error is experienced and shared, and saves thousands of lives by sharing what happens quickly and openly.

Black Box System characteristics

Feedback is quick
Everyone can contribute
Information is made available to everyone so they can learn and see patterns

These systems are beginning to find their way into new settings including health, care, justice and much more.

They have a lot to contend with. We are afraid of failure and their implications and will often do everything we can to deny it has happened.

The Approach.

Systems

We create and embed black-boxes into our social systems that help to bypass human flaws and help us to harness human ingenuity. They become systems that begin to harness errors for the common good and become self-correcting.

They become systems that test ideas until the best solutions are uncovered.

They are less reliant on “expertise, bias and assumption” and focus instead on evidence that searches for the best approach at any given time.

Culture

We challenge counter-productive mindsets and group-think that promotes openness to mistakes and errors rather than hiding them in plain sight.

We recognise that we possess a deeply-seated fear of failure. So we call them “miscalculations.” To say that someone has miscalculated rather than failed suggests they have attempted to do the right thing at the right time.