Mistakes and errors week

Authors
Affiliation

KIND Network members

Brendan Clarke

NHS Education for Scotland

Published

January 30, 2026

Mistakes and errors week

In the week commencing 9th March 2026, we’ll run a series of network-wide events about mistakes and errors.

Schedule

Call for speakers

Please get in touch if you’d be interested in contributing along the following themes:

Biography of mistakes - how mistakes shaped you

  • Kintsugi, mended with gold, how mistakes made you the person you are
  • Failure CV - tell us all the stuff that didn’t work out

Learning from mistakes

  • Turning mistakes into learning moments - not just saying “I’ll learn from this”
  • Using errors to make training work - basically KIND’s motto
  • Mistakes as an integral part of learning. Non-linear learning. Getting better is effectively just learning to make mistakes faster - so why shouldn’t mistakes be thought of as an integral part part of the learning journey?
  • Written in blood: mistakes that led to really good improvements in process
  • Move slowly and listen when you break things (slo-mo scream test/Chesterton’s Fence/onion in the varnish)

Sharing your mistakes

  • I broke that! Tales about confessing something wrong that you’ve done, and how that improved things
  • The chances of anything coming from Mars: never change guitar strings over an electrical extension socket and other freak occurrences
  • “he’s just like that” = vent-o-rama about persistently unreasonable people and how that’s not a mistake but something more sinister

Units of selection - do people make mistakes, or do systems?

  • You vs the system/safeguards: deleting prod means the systems broken rather than you
  • Processes that critically depend on something highly non-obvious (a single spreadsheet supports your entire EPR system or something)
  • Mistakes happen in the gap between front line and delivery
  • I am not a number: AfC banding, and similar hierarchies: mistakes happen because junior and senior people don’t communicate effectively

Just deserts (yes, it is spelled the sandy way when you’re talking about what you deserve, even though its pronounced like a sweet treat)

  • Small slips with catastrophic consequences (CC instead of BCC)
  • Moscow Rules (cover your back) vs London Rules (cover your a***)
  • Hurry up and wait: important stuff usually happens urgently, and that means we make mistakes precisely where we need them least

Causes and prevention

  • Preventing mistakes (second-checking, quality control, system alerts, using data to mitigate mistakes, feedback loops)
  • Let him have it: or the tone is taken wrongly
  • RTFM - why reading the flipping manual can be such a challenge
  • Perfectionism, the myth of error-free ball, unknown unknowns, failure modes, and brilliant failures
  • Not invented here: group of mistakes that are largely about doing things that don’t need doing

What to do about mistakes

  • Non-fault - apologies and solutions rather than excuses
  • Reflective practices
  • How to (whether to) promote non-blame culture
  • Reasonable adjustments (menopause brain-fog discussion and how hard that is to adjust to)
  • How to embed hard-won lessons institutionally
  • Only negative feedback exists

Acknowledgements

Especially thanks to Zoe Turner, Catherine McGrenera, Matthew Hooks, Ian Beange, Debs Calvin, Sarah Downie, Jenny Cuddihy, Julian Augley, Catriona Scott, Karen McKnight, George Patterson, Lucy Dixon, James Battye, Claire Medland, Carla Dempster, Steve Russell, Charmaine Blaize, Sophie Mackintosh, Kristi Long, Anne Thomson for the earlier discussion on the Teams channel