If I am going to be honest, I was a little bit down about our learning from failure conference this year.
This is the third time we have ran things over 4 years (our DES conference is in between these) and almost nobody wanted to come.
It seemed like we had lots of interest in year one (80 or so) and steady interest the second year (60 or so) and this year 20 people paid to come and 17 other people came for one reason or another.
My ego told me that more people should want to do this because I thought it was a brilliant idea, but as I have said on many occasions, because I think something is a great idea doesn’t mean everyone else does.
How wrong I was, how stupid I was to be down on this, we had the most extraordinary day.
I learned from this, from this failure (oh, the irony of the failure conference) that I should stick to my own principles.
I openly said previously that we will use the “Frank Turner” analogy.
“If more people come, we will put out more chairs and if less people come, we will take more chairs away”.
Andy Legg reminded me of this quite clearly when we met at the start of the conference and although I had said that I didn’t want to do it again, he was pretty strong in saying that we should definitely do it again.
So it began and it was a gamechanger. Completely brilliant!
In the last couple of months, we were looking around for someone to be a keynote speaker at the start of the conference. We had some pretty big hitters lined up who were unable to make it and in the end Mike Sosin (former speaker at the conference and Consultant Cardiologist) recommended Lucy Gossage.
Lucy is a Consultant Oncologist at City Hospital in Nottingham three days per week. She is a cancer Doctor with a PhD in kidney cancer, undergraduate PhD from Cambridge. In the midst of becoming a brilliant cancer doctor she took three years out to be a professional triathlete and from humble beginnings of an overweight junior doctor having a go at triathlons when she was 26, she became one of the best female triathletes that the United Kingdom (and the world) has ever produced.
Lucy did an hour on learning from failure in triathlon and medicine.
It was quite stunning.
We got the chance to talk to her, to learn from her, to be inspired by her. What a way to start the day.
The rest of the speakers I deliberately knew little about except for my friend Dhru Shah who did a brilliant talk without any notes or slides on failure in business.
But the real surprises and showstoppers were yet to come.
Before my friend and fellow podcaster Shaun Sellars did a great talk on ethical fading, we had a talk by someone called Serdar Göksu on failures in dental implantology.
As I arrived at the conference that morning an older gentleman came up to me and spoke to me in broken English, he gave me a present of a book and said he was delighted to be there.
I had never met Serdar before and this was him. I asked him where he’d come from, how far he travelled to be at the conference and he told me he had come from Istanbul.
What?!
Serdar reads my blog and heard about the failure conference and travelled from Istanbul in Turkey to speak at the failure conference (funding this himself) and travelled home the next day.
He has provided surgical and restorative implant treatment for 32 years in Turkey. He is fed up that everybody in Turkey say’s that they have a 100% success and he wants to tell the truth.
It goes without saying that I was completely stunned and blown away.
His English was not perfect (but that is rich coming from me) but it was brilliant and the essence of his talk and the message was outstanding and massively appreciated by everybody there.
It summed up what the failure conference is about, about openness, honesty, togetherness and learning from things that go wrong to make it better.
Serdar had attempted to launch his own failure conference in Istanbul, only to have 4 delegates turn up, but he has kept going and kept at it.
Lucy left the conference after her lecture this morning to go and speak at a breast cancer charity event in London but asking if she could email me about setting up her own failure conference in medicine in Nottingham along with Mike Sosin.
These are the ripples that make it worthwhile, this is what it is about.
I had the most extraordinary and inspirational day and this is a not for profit event and it got even better when Hayley Fox (who had organised this masterfully along with Marie Price-Hood from our practice) told me that we had made a little bit of money from the conference.
This will be recycled in to when we do it again because we will do it again.
So when I thought the best had been and gone, Ian Hutchinson did a fantastic lecture on failure in orthodontics, with brilliant honesty and openness about a case that had gone wrong.
Then John stood up…. Then the show stopped.
(See part 2)
Blog Post Number - 2193
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