THE CARDANO BLACK BOX THOUGHT-LEADERSHIP SERIES

The term black box comes from the aviation industry, where each incident and crash is investigated in detail. For organisations beyond aviation “black box thinking” it is not about creating a literal black box; rather, it is about the willingness and tenacity to investigate the lessons that often exist when we fail, but which we rarely exploit. It is about creating systems and cultures that enable organisations to learn from errors, rather than being threatened by them. 

Inspired by black box thinking, we decided to take a closer look at well-known disasters in different fields outside pensions. We will try to understand the series of events leading up to the disaster, but more importantly, study some of the lessons learned to prevent similar failures in the future. Many of the events leading up to the disasters can be traced back to our human nature and therefore we found the learning points highly relevant for DB pension schemes. After all it is a quicker and cheaper way to learn if we don’t have to make every mistake ourselves…

A report by the Pensions Institute that applies Black Box Thinking to the UK defined benefit pensions sector and looks at how adopting the framework has the power to improve the industry.