I read Black Box Thinking by Matthew Syed many years ago when it was released.
It was one of those books that just changed the way I thought changed the way I looked at things.
The first chapter from the Anaesthetic Room is an unforgettable piece of writing.
What that book taught me, reminded me, or showed me was that it's absolutely essential to stare the things that go wrong right in the face and try not to do the same thing again.
It's easier said than done that.
Just because it's difficult, though, doesn't mean we shouldn't try.
So after I read that book and many of us at the practice at that time digested it and the philosophy behind it, we decided to set up a little one-day event to see if anyone thought the same as us and wanted to share issues or problems or difficulties that they've had to help us all learn and maybe be a little bit better, both for us and for our teams and for our patients.
The Learning from Failure Conference was born, and the first one happened sometime around 2016 or 17 (I can't quite remember).
They were extraordinary days.
We used to alternate between the Learning from Failure Conference and our own version of a TED conference, but the Learning from Failure Conferences were profound, and people started to share some things that were quite extraordinary.
My friend Craig Wales, who is a head and neck surgeon in Scotland, provided the most extraordinary story of an oncology case, which was just a showstopper and a heartbreaker that allowed us all to look at things and learn how to compartmentalise the difficulties in our practice.
We had the chief safety officer from EasyJet to talk about aviation versus medicine, and myself and one of our patients, who had a significant complication, stood up together to give two different sides of the story of how complications affect both practitioners and patients.
We had a lecture from the founder of Confidental after he was charged with manslaughter, following a patient rinsing the mouth with chlorhexidine and dying from an anaphylactic shock.
We're doing this again because we lost our way with it, understandably, because we were building a practice and growing and having a pandemic and all sorts of illnesses and this and that, but it returns again on the 23rd of November.
We have already booked speakers for this to just share stories, which will go deeper and longer than even the title suggests, and I will do a little slot, too, perhaps about what was terrible about building a practice and why I would never, ever do it again until the next time.
We have a key headliner but the people who sit around that headline are at least as exceptional as the famous person.
We've tied this up so that it's on the same day as our charity ball, which is a fancy dress Christmas, 23rd of November night out type thing, and I really hope you'll have a look at this.
I realise it's too busy and you don't have time in your life, but you will learn much more for your day-to-day practice than how to cure a composite or how to cut a crown Prep on a learning from failure conference.
Oh, and the headliner is Eddie the f*ck*ng Eagle.
So for any of you and obviously bleep eye eagle of a certain age and you will know if you don't then watch the movie with Hugh Jackman and Tarren Egerton here and then come and here Eddie talk about how he did what he did at the same time as the Jamaican guys were doing Cool Runnings.
I really hope you might think about coming with an open mind and an open heart.
See you then.
Blog Post Number - 3799