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I once read a book on writing by Orson Scott Card. I'm not a big fan of Card's writing per se, Ender's Game being the one glaring exception along with his book How to Write Science Fiction & Fantasy, a how-to guide to writing.

In his writing guide, Card makes the argument that mistakes and accidents in writing, and I'll add in gaming to this, should be used, not corrected. By accidents and mistakes, I'm not referring to grammar or spelling and neither was Card. In fact, Card's example was a hand drawn map of a city.

Card likes to draw maps. It's a relaxing creative hobby that he can do whenever he's alone with some free time. In this case, he drew a map of a large fantasy city with seven gates in the city wall. Each of the gates had large streets that lead straight to a large plaza in the center of of the city. One gate was different. Somehow, while he was doodling the city into existence, Card had overlooked one gate and had filled in buildings all the way up to it, just like he did with the rest of the wall.

Card could have erased those buildings and drawn another road leading up to that plaza easily enough, but he decided to leave that gate as is and try to come up with a reason why the gate would have been blocked off instead.

He decided that each of the gates represents a god. The blocked gate was for a god who had fallen out of favor and become forbidden over time. Thus the gate was blocked off, and I assume that all of the churches, shrines, and whatnot for that god were either destroyed or abandoned as well. When the gate was blocked off people started building and before long it was hard to tell that section of the wall from another section.

Card later used this city along with its blocked gate and the reasoning behind it as inspiration for a novel which he then wrote and made a lot of money from. Don't ask me which novel; like I said before, I don't read most of his work.

...instead of fixing mistakes, you can incorporate them.
If we bring this idea of using mistakes into the realm of role-playing games one could make the determination that instead of fixing mistakes on adventure design, NPC interaction, and running games, you can incorporate them into your game, thus enhancing your game instead of detracting from it.

I know that no matter how good a GM you are, you are gonna mess up sooner or later. I am a rather absent-minded fellow myself and I tend to forget small but vital pieces of information at inopportune times. Stupid things like introducing an NPC three times without that NPC remembering the characters, adding a dot signifying something important on a map and then forgetting what it was, leaving clues that make sense to me (the GM) but not to anyone else, and having an evil NPC get away and forgetting to bring them back when I meant to.

That forgetful NPC could have been controlled by someone else, have no short term memory, have someone following them, or they could have other reasons for not openly recognizing the characters.

That dot may have been the ancient ruins that I wanted the players to explore, a nice campsite, or a place where I accidentally rested my pencil and pressed too hard while thinking when I was drawing the map.

Forgetting that Evil NPC means that there is a different reason that bad things are happening to the PCs. I can always bring that NPC in later.

Instead of giving your players an oops accompanied by a sheepish look, you can act as though you MEANT for these things to happen. Instead of backtracking your game and redoing things, save what happened until that session is over and then figure out a way to add it into your campaign.

For Example

In my world elves were originally complete pacifists. Their world was invaded by a demon army and some of the elves started fighting back. Over time, most of the pacifist elves had been killed off and the remainder fled to a small island where they began construction of a machine that would end the war.

The elves who chose to fight allied themselves with the slaves who fled from the demon army. This allied army managed to forcibly close the portal that connected the demon army with supplies and reinforcements. The portal exploded when it was closed, wiping out the main fortress for the demon army in this world. Thus the war ended.

5,000 years later the portal has reopened. A new demon army poured through and the characters had discovered ancient writings hinting at a lost isle of elves with a machine that could destroy the demon army. They found out that the elves in question were the last of the pacifist and highly learned in the magical arts. The characters immediately set out to find this lost isle.

When the adventure was well under way, the characters had narrowed the location of the isle to almost a hundred square miles, had a ship fully stocked and a captain and crew ready to go, one of the players made an off-hand remark that showed me a major glaring problem with the final resolution of this THREE YEAR CAMPAIGN.

If this machine was built by pacifist who were willing to die and to leave everything that they knew and who had let everything that they loved be destroyed without ever fighting back, how could it stop a demon army? What did the machine do? It couldn't just kill the demons, it had to do something else. Closing the portal wouldn't work either, the demon could either reopen it or open a new portal later.

I realized then that I had no idea what that damn machine did. I had the vague thought that it would kill off the bad guys but now I realized that pacifists wouldn't build a machine that killed or hurt anything. Figuring out what the machine did had been so far in the future that I had never worked it out. Now here I was, within a session or two of the characters getting to the machine, and I HAD NO CLUE WHAT IT DID. Talk about procrastination...

I did eventually come up with the idea that the machine would transport the entire solar system to a different region in space (crafty little elves, weren't they?). This would cause the demon to have to find the planet again before he could open up another portal and no one left alive had the capability to create a portal leading into hell.

And the machine was reusable. Handy.

...even a glaring mistake can be rectified without the characters ever having known.
So you can see that even a glaring mistake can be rectified without the characters ever having known that you had made a mistake in the first place. These players thought that I had the machine, what it did, and how it was activated worked out months in advance when I didn't have a clue until a couple of days before our last session, which was a doozy I might add.

The NPC who I reintroduced to the PCs three times was a young scholar in the making, a highly intelligent scribe translating texts in the library. He was originally just a generic NPC contact that the characters can use to gather information or to translate things on occasion.

However, I now had to come up with a logical but fun reason that he didn't remember the characters. I didn't want a young absent minded genius or some other cliché and I love psychology and studying the criminal mind.

I ended up making him a serial killer based loosely on the Zodiac Killer and Ted Bundy. He never remembered the PCs because he was focused on only one of them, a bright intelligent beauty named Serendipity. The other characters didn't really exist for him, thus he forgot who they were.

This character changed the flavor and direction of my entire campaign and made it MUCH darker and gobs more intense than most of my work. The players loved it and it was extremely easy to throw in plot twists random encounters, weird notes and clues, and to turn everyone in the city against the PC's (because they were suspected of being the killer(s).

In Closing

So keep your mistakes. Make them fit within your world and use them. Never back-track and say things like "We're gonna have to replay last session because I forgot to add some things that you're gonna need". Your players will know that you messed up and that's not something that you want to have happen very often. Your players want to have confidence in their GM.

Keep your players in the dark. Adapt your mistakes into your game and see where it leads you. Journey into the unknown and flex your creative muscle. See what you come up with and only admit defeat when you have to.

Your players will thank you for it.