The Center for Medical Simulation
Oct 23, 2026 · 18 min · 8 segments
In March of 2020, Jenny faced a crisis when it became clear that CMS would no longer be able to support itself offering the same in-person programs it had run for 25+ years…
Jenny RudolphHost
So as it became clear to me through April and then May that this pandemic was not going away.
I was really not sure what our organization could do to serve the Harvard teaching hospitals with the teamwork and clinical communication skills that we'd been teaching for years, or how we were going to be able to run our simulation educator, instructor, and leadership courses.
And I sat down one day with my colleague, Chris Rusin, who immediately saw a path forward for us, which was we were the people that helped simulation educators, simulation leaders and teamwork.
We were the people that helped them connect to themselves, connect to each other, know how to manage and get people ready to do things.
And he said, we have to get out there with some ideas to help people feel connected to each other and still be able to do their work.
This was an example of Chris Rusin not to be completely meta, not only having a vision of what we needed to offer our constituents across the globe, we had about 10,000 grads from all our programs and we worked with lots of people on consulting and other types of work, but also he had a vision that we needed to have a vision.
And as the executive director of the Center for Medical Simulation, His ideas completely galvanized me into action.
not only in the fact that he came up with the ideas, but that he was basically managing up.
He was helping me, his boss, the executive director, know what to do with our organization that touched so many clinicians and clinician educators across the world.
So having gotten this idea from Chris, then I was able to start executing on what is sometimes called the democratic leadership style, which is to elicit ideas from people about what we could do.
One of the great ideas that Chris came up with and worked in concert with some other clinicians around the world, as well as our own team, was to invent something called Circle Up, which basically turbocharged how do we huddle in the morning? How do we check in with each other throughout the day? And then how do we huddle at the end of the day? And this idea of Circle Up was incredibly visionary because in our own system, and we were part of Mass General Hospital at the time, all our colleagues were working in new spaces with new teams, with new equipment, facing a pathophysiology of COVID that they didn't really even understand.
And so helping them have a way to Orient and reorient every day and check in with each other about the emotional stresses of managing under COVID and then debrief and let go of the stresses at the end of the day was pure genius in my view.
The value of this vision of Circle Up that Chris came up with is that it not only gave us something to offer our colleagues across our own system, it allowed us to work together to figure out how to write about this.
And lest you think that's like dry and boring, At a time when you don't know what to do, having a goal of helping to promulgate these ideas globally is incredibly enabling and motivating.
But the other thing that was ingenious about Chris's vision here, in my view, was that it also started us enacting some affiliative leadership and helping others do the same.
So as it became clear to me through April and then May that this pandemic was not going away.
I was really not sure what our organization could do to serve the Harvard teaching hospitals with the teamwork and clinical communication skills that we'd been teaching for years, or how we were going to be able to run our simulation educator, instructor, and leadership courses.
And I sat down one day with my colleague, Chris Rusin, who immediately saw a path forward for us, which was we were the people that helped simulation educators, simulation leaders and teamwork.
We were the people that helped them connect to themselves, connect to each other, know how to manage and get people ready to do things.
And he said, we have to get out there with some ideas to help people feel connected to each other and still be able to do their work.
This was an example of Chris Rusin not to be completely meta, not only having a vision of what we needed to offer our constituents across the globe, we had about 10,000 grads from all our programs and we worked with lots of people on consulting and other types of work, but also he had a vision that we needed to have a vision.
And as the executive director of the Center for Medical Simulation, His ideas completely galvanized me into action.
not only in the fact that he came up with the ideas, but that he was basically managing up.
He was helping me, his boss, the executive director, know what to do with our organization that touched so many clinicians and clinician educators across the world.
So having gotten this idea from Chris, then I was able to start executing on what is sometimes called the democratic leadership style, which is to elicit ideas from people about what we could do.
One of the great ideas that Chris came up with and worked in concert with some other clinicians around the world, as well as our own team, was to invent something called Circle Up, which basically turbocharged how do we huddle in the morning? How do we check in with each other throughout the day? And then how do we huddle at the end of the day? And this idea of Circle Up was incredibly visionary because in our own system, and we were part of Mass General Hospital at the time, all our colleagues were working in new spaces with new teams, with new equipment, facing a pathophysiology of COVID that they didn't really even understand.
And so helping them have a way to Orient and reorient every day and check in with each other about the emotional stresses of managing under COVID and then debrief and let go of the stresses at the end of the day was pure genius in my view.
The value of this vision of Circle Up that Chris came up with is that it not only gave us something to offer our colleagues across our own system, it allowed us to work together to figure out how to write about this.
And lest you think that's like dry and boring, At a time when you don't know what to do, having a goal of helping to promulgate these ideas globally is incredibly enabling and motivating.
But the other thing that was ingenious about Chris's vision here, in my view, was that it also started us enacting some affiliative leadership and helping others do the same.
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