The Center for Medical Simulation

When we lead a conversation where we only bring our conclusions and inferences to the table, rather than the concrete data that helped lead us there, we are influencing (sometimes unjustly) what is even discussable among our teams. By going back down to discussing the data that helped us shape those conclusions, we can make conversations and meetings more fair, more equal, and more productive. Wor...

Too often, meetings and announcements, especially around policy changes and new ways of working, are a list of topics that fail to address the fundamental questions that matters to team members—why are we talking about this? Whose decision was it? And is that decision final? Leaders and team members need to understand how power is being wielded, especially when it comes down the line in seemingly...

This week, Jenny and James explore recent conversations that didn’t go as well as they could have, because of different types of failures in the words we chose to use or the things we chose to reveal. Building on the work of recent guest Amy Edmondson, we look at the way that people in fearless organizations can talk—using the conversations that you have to frame the work, emphasize shared purpose...

Christian Balmer, an anesthesiologist and critical care doctor from Switzerland, joins us to look at the readiness of surgical teams in his organization to recognize and deal with cases that have gone beyond the capacity of the peripheral center to handle. Far from being a readiness plan around technical skills, the team discovers that it is the gray areas between intersecting teams and intersecti...

In this special episode, Jenny Rudolph and James Lipshaw, producer of Curious Now, debrief our performance so far with the podcast, what we had in our original vision that we haven’t achieved yet, and where we’d like to go next. How can we rachet up the interactivity of the podcast, how do we make the experience of trying to do this work right more relatable and less of a lecture, and how do we tu...

We have an incredibly special guest this week on Curious Now! Amy Edmondson, Professor at Harvard Business School, and author of numerous books including Right Kind of Wrong: The Science of Failing Well, Teaming: How Organizations Learn, Innovate, and Compete in the Knowledge Economy and The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth...

This week Laura Rock and Janice Palaganas return to crack the code of team culture, map the blueprint underneath what we’re thinking. In the final episode of this chapter, we ask our guests what they’ve discovered about themselves with a Frames, Actions, Results test. Janice has a glitch with a student where their understandings didn’t match, and Laura shares how being honest about her own critica...

This week on Curious Now we’re introducing a tool to help us bring the approach of understanding why people did what they did and helping them change the underlying analysis that got them into trouble, called the FAR or Frames, Actions, Results tool. Where has your team gotten stuck or glitchy, and what were the underlying frames that got your team intro trouble or got the job done great? Spotify:...

Dare to Be Ready with Dr. Chris Roussin, founder of CMS-ALPS, the Center for Medical Simulation’s team and organization readiness consulting service. In this podcast, available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and in video form on Youtube, Chris will meet with a series of guests with specific readiness challenges in their healthcare teams. Each week we will approach the challenge of how to get teams re...

Laura Rock, Janice Palaganas and Jenny explore where they are currently struggling in their practice of sharing their point of view clearly and then really inviting the other person’s perspective. How does this go when your identity is more provisional, and you feel like to have to establish yourself and insert your point of view to be ‘strong’? Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/72gzzWGegiXd9...

Today we’re talking about transforming toxic culture, whether on your floor, in your unit, or in your department. How do we change unit culture via point of care conversations? You can teach people all the speaking skills in the world, but if they don’t care about the other people in the room or don’t think there’s a possibility they aren’t perfectly right, it won’t take. This topic was featured i...

Janice Palaganas and Laura Rock rejoin us to talk about their experiences of moving from mental rehearsal to actually asking the group, “What am I missing?” We explore what are the things we do or struggle with in terms of point of care conversations? Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/72gzzWGegiXd9i2G6UJ0kP Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-center-for-medical-simulatio...

This week on Curious Now, bring home the heart of this summer's work on internal resets, thought bystanding, communication, and teamwork. Our workout of the week is a simple one: go from mental rehearsal to actual practice. In previous weeks we asked ourselves, and this week ask the group: • “Who sees this differently?” • “What am I not noticing?” Learn more and get coaching from Jenny Rudolph at...

Coming soon on the CMS Podcast channel-- The "Dare to Be Ready" podcast with Chris Roussin! Join us and a series of rotating guests as we examine readiness challenges across a broad swath of healthcare settings, and work with experts to solve their team problems in real time. Our first episodes include getting Boston Emergency Room teams ready to handle diabetic patients who are "safe" to be disch...

On this week’s Curious Now Listeners, Jenny, Laura Rock, and Janice Palaganas each share a recent time that they’ve struggled to be transparent with their own thinking as they rejoin us to discuss their experience with last week’s workout of sharing one vulnerable point of view in a conversation to try to work towards a collaborative inquiry rather than mystery and defensiveness. Spotify: https://...

In decades of faculty and clinician training at the Center for Medical Simulation, we’ve identified one element of our approach to Good Judgment learning conversations that people have the most difficulty with. This obstacle can take what should be an insightful, curious inquiry and leave it with a defensive or confused learner. Similar effects happen in negotiations at point of care and feedback...

Janice Palaganas and Laura Rock join us for our first Listeners episode of this new chapter! This week we are discussing how the mental rehearsal of asking “What am I missing?” worked out for them in situations where they were very sure that they were right. Emerging again is a theme where our listeners find that they experience the work of checking their emotions and getting curious very differen...

Join us for our third chapter of Curious Now, as we talk about words and mindsets that can transform toxic culture! Becoming skeptical of your own thoughts and beliefs, bystanding your own perception of events so that you can ask with curiosity: “What am I missing here?” We’re setting the stage for our third chapter of Curious Now, looking at how we can skillfully lead teams and scale up our good...

BJ So and Mel Barlow join us for the final time to discuss last week’s exercise of trying to come up with a frame to understand an action we saw that didn’t make sense in the moment. BJ shares the story of a near miss in a complex case, and how he tried to understand his junior doctor’s actions. • Get coaching from Jenny Rudolph at www.harvardmedsim.org • Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/72g...

Little Acts of Genius: In this week’s Curious Now, we’re introducing the idea of ‘Frames, Actions, Results’, an action science framework that CMS has used for many years to help advanced clinical and debriefing practitioners overcome the internal obstacles that are keeping them from being able to reach their goals. Here, we want to apply the framework to other people’s actions—what could the perso...

Mel Barlow and BJ So rejoin us to talk about the experience of testing using new listening styles at home and at work. Both noticed a similar trend of listening to respond with family and loved ones even when our professional practice is a conscious listening to understand. How do we bring what we know about being a better listener from our professional life back into our home life? • Get coaching...

This week on Curious Now we’re looking at new research on listening styles and how they impact our teams and cultures in the world of healthcare. What are we listening for when we listen to people? We’ll explore our default style, and notice how we can intentionally shift the way that we listen in order to lower our internal tension and work with others better. Get coaching from Jenny Rudolph at w...

In this week’s Curious Now, our two listeners examine the results they got using the Feedback Pre-Think Chart in preparation for a feedback conversation. In the first, BJ So describes being asked to supervise a more senior clinician learning a newer technique, while in the second Mel Barlow tries onboarding a new colleague from a less feedback-positive culture into an established team with good fe...

This week on Curious Now we dig into the central dilemma in all feedback conversations--how do I criticize your performance without hurting your feelings? On the podcast we've delved deeply into our own processing and understanding of our judgment and reactions to situations where someone else didn't meet our standard. Ultimately, though, for healthcare professionals we often have a final step whe...

This week on Curious Now, B.J. So and Mel Barlow return to share their experience with last week’s exercise on the generous inference. Get coaching from Jenny Rudolph at www.harvardmedsim.org Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/72gzzWGegiXd9i2G6UJ0kP Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-center-for-medical-simulation/id1279266822