How do I practice error detection?

The most direct way to practice error detection is through a focused exercise: Choose one recurring output in your life — a report you write, a meeting you run, a decision you make weekly, a conversation type you repeat. For the next three instances of that output, add a 5-minute detection pass immediately after completion. Do not try to fix anything yet. Instead, write down three things: (1) What specific errors, if any, did you notice? (2) At what point in the process did the error likely originate? (3) How confident are you that your detection is catching the actual errors rather than surface symptoms? After three rounds, review your detection log. You now have data about your error detection capacity — its coverage, its blind spots, and its reliability.

Common pitfall: Conflating the feeling that something is wrong with the detection of what is wrong. Vague dissatisfaction is not error detection. It is an unprocessed signal that something in the system has deviated from expectation, but without specificity about what deviated, where it deviated, and by how much. People who treat 'this doesn't feel right' as a complete detection step skip directly to correction — changing things semi-randomly until the bad feeling subsides. This produces the illusion of fixing while leaving the actual error untouched. Genuine detection produces a specific, testable claim: this variable, at this point, deviated from this standard by this amount.

This practice connects to Phase 25 (Error Correction) — building it as a repeatable habit compounds over time.