Learning from mistakes

Your speaker at this session was once consulted by a major reinsurer, which had paid out more than £70 million to a frontline insurer when the claim was for around £7 million. Of course, they got the money back, but at a substantial cost to their reputation and finances and they wanted to know how to stop something like it from happening again.

Mistakes waste time, cost money and harm reputations. Yet we all make them. Fortunately, our competitors make them too. We can gain a significant advantage by making fewer mistakes than our competitors and we can lose clients and income to our competitors if they do better than we do.

All human beings make mistakes. And no amount of checks or system complexity can eliminate them. But whereas human beings have a natural tendency to learn from mistakes, organisations do not. In fact, many organisations respond to mistakes in ways that make it more likely that they will happen again. Without a conscious effort to build a culture that supports learning from mistakes, organisations are doomed to keep making them.

In this masterclass, hear about some of the wrong things organisations do in response to mistakes and learn practical tips and techniques for ensuring that you and your team adopt strategies to turn mistakes and near-misses into powerful learning experiences. Learning from Mistakes means getting ever closer to the ideal of zero errors.

Learning from Mistakes will include a mixture of practical activities and short presenter-led discussions covering:

· Reviewing mistakes that have actually happened

· The importance of learning from ‘near misses’

· Understanding why mistakes happen

· Where to focus attention to achieve the biggest ‘wins’

· The danger of accepting mistakes as ‘one of those things’

· “I hope nobody saw that” - learning from mistakes not hiding them!

· Creating a culture that is resistant to mistakes

Hugh Murray FCIPD

Hugh Murray is an accuracy skills pioneer. With his work in developing people’s accuracy skills dating back to the 1980s, Hugh is acknowledged as a leader in his field and is a popular speaker on the topics of learning from mistakes and reducing the cost of error. Hugh’s early career included management positions at McGraw-Hill and Gower and in 1988 he set up learning resources company Fenman, where he published the magazine Training Journal (now TJ). In 2003, Hugh co-founded the specialist training company Scott Bradbury, which delivers its flagship programme ‘Developing an Eye for Accuracy’ to thousands of participants each year. Hugh is also author of the book ‘Preventing Mistakes at Work’, published in 2016.

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