The Campbell Academy Blog (84)

Learning from failure (again)

Before I got around to trying to build and open the practice that we are now sat in, we had some years of organising amazing and cool minor mini-conferences locally to try and inspire all of us to be a little bit better and to share and collaborate.

We had two formats for those conferences.

The first one was called the DES (dentistry, education, scones) because, for trademark reasons, we weren't allowed to call the conference by the name of the style that it was of the three-letter conferences that have 18-minute talks, but it was the same sort of style, and we had tonnes and tonnes of fun.

I remember vividly the James Russell lecture on align, bleach and bond, which almost got airhorned off the stage as he tried to complete his last five slides in about 15 seconds while the timer was clicking down.

The second type of conference, though, was learning from failure, and I think this was probably the best of the two.

We set up a system where people could come and present and talk and share things that had gone wrong both in dentistry and outside of dentistry and just be honest about how hard it was to do some of the stuff we do.

We had the chief safety officer for EasyJet talk about pilot safety and the black box thinking concept.

I presented the case with a full arch patient who had serious complications, and we presented side on side on stage about why he didn't send me to the GDC following the complications that he suffered from.

The showstopper at those conferences was Craig Wales, my friend, the head and neck surgeon in Scotland, who lectured on an orbital carcinoma, which absolutely shut the room down for minutes when people could hardly speak when he reached the 'punch line'.

And so, we do it again.

Learning from failure is back at The Campbell Academy and The Campbell Clinic on November 23rd this year.

It ties up with the charity ball, which is Christmas fancy dress the same night so that adds up to an amazing day out if you fancy it.

What I'm looking for from this blog is two or three people to put their hands up to say they're happy to share a story, probably from here, something dental or clinical, but it doesn't have to be.

But if you could hit reply to this and send a little email with a summary of what you would be prepared to talk about, then we would be delighted to host you here to help share your story.

I promise this is a safe environment and for anyone happy to share stuff like this; I also promise that you make a massive difference to the rest of us by your honesty and your humility.

So, hopefully, there are two or three willing volunteers out there who will give us a boost.

If you don't want to speak, then come along anyway.

Contact us here if you're interested!