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 accessible to diners with dietary needs.

How can we not just design our programs, but also carry ourselves in individual conversations, in everyday moments, and lead our industry in a way that ensures that we are creating a standard of access and a standard of service that serves everyone, especially the people whose stories aren’t being heard in the rooms where leadership meets?

#curiousnow #healthcaresimulation #medicine #nursing

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 organization that isn’t?

Some organizations have leadership that is passionate about quickly squashing creativity. How do we help people to create change and create readiness in a new way without it feeling like we’re launching it at them from a consultant helicopter as we fly away?

Some advice from the talk that verged away from rah-rah and into the practical that we really liked:

1) Think about a limitation that you have at work, and consider how that limitation could actually be an opportunity for you;

2) Say what your job title is and then imagine a job title more accurate and appropriate to what you do.

More live reactions from Jenny Rudolph, Roxane Gardner, and Grace Ng coming in the next few days!

#daretobeready #healthcaresimulation #medicine #nursing

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 Lipshaw, both co-authors on the paper, to discuss how the AIR can be used to give effective, efficient feedback on questions in debriefing and feedback conversations. Our belief is that this tool can be used like the DASH to help educators improve their own performance in learning conversations, as well as the performance of others.

In addition to discussing the structure and use of the AIR, James presents a series of debriefer videos to Clement and Jenny, who then have to use the AIR to provide feedback to the debriefer. We hope to model how you can “see through the eyes of the AIR” to provide effective, standards-based feedback for educators.

Watch the Grand Rounds here:

Or listen on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-center-for-medical-simulation/id1279266822

#debriefing #healthcaresimulation #medicine #nursing

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 shared goal.

Workout of the Week: When you detect an implicit standard, say it out loud and make it explicit (but be sure to own that this is your perspective!). For example, “I believe that our standard in this unit is that if we need blood drawn from a patient, we start a new draw rather than using an existing IV.”

#healthcaresimulation #nursing #medicine #debriefing

Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-center-for-medical-simulation/id1279266822

Leadership Coaching from Jenny Rudolph: https://harvardmedsim.org/personal-leadership-coaching-with-jenny-rudolph/

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.

The KUMC team designed a new approach to exploration when they found that in simulation, learners were simply agreeing with the debriefer’s point of view rather than trying to contrast it with their own thoughts, especially when they were doing the right thing (i.e. “I did the correct thing because that’s the correct thing to do.”) A second major discovery was that learners at all experience levels were describing the same barriers to success, rather than having different needs at different levels. For example, both med students and attendings might describe the busyness of the code space as making it difficult to claim a leadership role during the case, often using the exact same words.

Bridget coaches Jenny on how to conduct better explorations of learner thinking, in this case in a faculty development conversation about classroom management and maintaining the attention of learners.

#healthcaresimulation #nursing #medicine #debriefing

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/72gzzWGegiXd9i2G6UJ0kP

Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-center-for-medical-simulation/id1279266822

Leadership Coaching from Jenny Rudolph: https://harvardmedsim.org/personal-leadership-coaching-with-jenny-rudolph/

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 really asking the learner to come to an answer with these kinds of questions—we’re asking them to read our mind, and then to agree with us once they do. There’s no opportunity for them to understand their own thinking better.

Today’s episode will try to get you ready to live with the discomfort of not knowing the answer you’re going to get for long enough to ask a genuinely curious question in debriefing.

Workout of the week: Every day, ask one truly open-ended, curious question—one you don’t already know the answer to.

Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-center-for-medical-simulation/id1279266822

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/72gzzWGegiXd9i2G6UJ0kP

Leadership Coaching from Jenny Rudolph: https://harvardmedsim.org/personal-leadership-coaching-with-jenny-rudolph/

#healthcaresimulation #medicine #nursing #debriefing #podcast

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 procedure.

During ECPR, there is not only the ICU resuscitation microteam but also the surgical team and the perfusion team, leading to potentially having up to 20 people working in the room when running an ECPR case.

We discuss how leaders can help connect seemingly imposed efforts like checklists and huddles to what it is that frontline workers are trying to achieve and are meaningful to them, and how simulation program designers must do the same in order to make sure that training is not a top-down checklist but rather a mutually owned process that gets teams where they believe they need to go.

Host & Co-Producer: Chris Roussin, PhD, Senior Director, CMS-ALPS (https://harvardmedsim.org/chris-roussin/)

Producer: James Lipshaw, MFA, EdM, Assistant Director, Media (https://harvardmedsim.org/james-lipshaw/)

Consulting and readiness with CMS-ALPS: https://harvardmedsim.org/alps-applied-learning-for-performance-and-safety

Dare to Be Ready on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/72gzzWGegiXd9i2G6UJ0kP

Dare to Be Ready on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-center-for-medical-simulation/id1279266822

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 with what’s happening in the debriefing room, classroom, or around the family dinner table.

Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-center-for-medical-simulation/id1279266822

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 they were thinking, the least I can do is be honest about what I’m thinking.”

Over the years training faculty in feedback conversations, we’ve run into many who ask, how is it helpful to tell my learner that I think they’re an idiot? But telling the person what you think honestly should not be your feelings or attributions about their character. It should be the impact of their actions, which exist at the level of concrete data.

Workout of the Week: Practice saying to people, “When you did x, it led to y.” One great feature about this workout is that you can use it for positive things! “When you stayed late to help me with that report, it lowered my stress level.”

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/72gzzWGegiXd9i2G6UJ0kP

Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-center-for-medical-simulation/id1279266822

Leadership Coaching from Jenny Rudolph: https://harvardmedsim.org/personal-leadership-coaching-with-jenny-rudolph/