Mistakes, there's been a few

"On those stepping into rivers staying the same other and other waters flow."

Heraclitus

It's a serious fuck-up. How do we prevent this very same mistake happening in the future QT?

Well, we could exceed the speed of light, achieve infinite mass - warping space and time in the process - to bridge the gap between the present and the future in order to determine what, if any, future mistakes we are likely to make.

I want to see a position paper on my desk by yesterday. Noon.

Of course this is not exactly a solution ...

Yes ...

... it depends on whether the future is preordained in the sense that it is already fully determined as proposed by the “block” theory of time: that being the notion that all things, events and whatnot already exist, only we are, by dint of our of psychological make-up, capable of perceiving them in successively orderings - or “temporal slices” of the "block", so-to-speak.

Meaning ...

We are doomed to make the future mistakes we have, in one sense, already made, only we are unaware of our destiny to do so, however, even with the aid of future travel, even if we knew our own destinies, we could still do nothing about it.

How do we place a positive, robust and reassuring spin on this to the client?

If two things – in this instance the two things being mistake-making events – are the same in respect of all their properties, then, according to Leibniz Law, they are identical. From this we can deduce that mistakes made at different points in the spatial-temporal order of things cannot be the same, as they are numerically different and, therefore, not identical, merely similar.

Will the client swallow that?

Does it really matter?

What kind of response is that?

It's called "managing expectations".