The Center for Medical Simulation

Agency is the Power to Act | CMS Book Club Live at #IMSH2026 Roxane Gardner and Grace Ng react to Shawn Kanungo’s keynote talk on innovation at #IMSH2026. Watch here: https://youtu.be/tbUfYHhM3kE Roxane and Grace both felt that the content of the talk was surprisingly supportive, especially for an ‘innovator’ who was speaking about the role of AI in the changing industry. Much in the way that we t...

Change Comes from Curiosity and Caring | Curious Now Live at #IMSH2026 Commenting on Kevin Brown’s “The Hero Effect” – How do we bring our presence to ordinary moments? Jenny Rudolph, James Lipshaw, and Jenny Bourque discuss Kevin Brown’s story of a chef using an encounter with his son’s specific dietary restrictions as the launch point for a higher standard which makes Disney’s restaurants more a...

Ready to Work Creatively Whether Our Organization Likes It Or Not | Dare to Be Ready Live at #IMSH2026 Chris Roussin reacts to Tania Katan Keynote Lecture at #IMSH2026 on The Dare to Be Ready Podcast “You need to be different from the status quo to make change.” What does it mean to be called to innovate and work creatively in an organization that is ready and asking for it, versus in an organizat...

Welcome to the Center for Medical Simulation’s Grand Rounds presentation of the new publication in Advances in Simulation, “The Advocacy Inquiry Rubric (AIR), a Standard to Build Debriefing and Feedback Skills”. Lead author Clément Buléon, an anesthesiologist based in Caen, France, joins CMS Senior Director of Innovation Jenny Rudolph and CMS Assistant Director of Instructional Design James Lipsha...

This week, Jenny and James discuss how organizations, not just individuals, can have hidden or implicit standards that are not spoken aloud. We look at how a tool like the new Advocacy Inquiry Rubric, or AIR, can help make excellent performance visible, learnable, and repeatable, and how explicit standards help us target what actually matters in performance and what we want to move toward as a sha...

We're taking this week off, but we'll have a new podcast on January 2nd, and the CMS media team will be in San Antonio from January 11-14 for IMSH 2026! We hope to see you there.

This week on Curious Now, we’re joined by an expert in the exploration phase of debriefing to help us better understand the “listen and explore” region of PAAIL. Bridget Van Gotten is a Learning and Design Strategist for the Zamierowski Institute for Experiential Learning at Kansas University Medical Center, and a 2015 alum of the CMS Healthcare Simulation Essentials: Design & Debriefing course. T...

Debriefings are often delayed and diminished by questions the asker already knows the answer to. “Wouldn’t it have been better to give epinephrine faster?” “Did it occur to you to have a family meeting?” And when asked why they don’t just share what they clearly think is the answer, the debriefer will often say something like, “It’s better for them to come to the answer themselves.” But we aren’t...

Dr. Catherine Allan, Director of the Cardiac Care Unit and Inpatient Cardiology at the Cleveland Clinic joins us to talk about readiness for teams to perform pediatric ECMO, a high-risk, high-complexity therapy that staff might only see a third as often as they see patients on ventilators. ECMO can also be called for during CPR, which greatly increases the time pressure and complexity of the proce...

Just in time for the Thanksgiving Holiday— the CMS Book Club reviews “How to Avoid Awkward Silences” by Patrick King! “You set the tone for how people react to this… when you act awkward and diffident, people feel awkward and diffident.” Join us as eight learning conversation experts debate the value of silence, and how we can get the conversation back to flowing when we feel like we’ve lost touch...

Why is it so hard for healthcare educators to share what they actually think in a debriefing or feedback situation? Jenny shares the story of a participant in an anesthesia clinical simulation who helped guide her to be more transparent: “I’m often talking to providers on the worst day of their career, after a medical error has occurred. If I’m going to ask them to be honest with me about what the...

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...