027: Mistakes Matter: What Great Veterinary Teams Do Next

In this episode of The Veterinary Culture Lab, Andi and Josh explore one of the most inevitable—and emotionally charged—parts of veterinary medicine: mistakes. Grounded in research on error management culture, psychological capital, job satisfaction, and wellbeing, this conversation examines why the way a team responds to mistakes may be just as important as the mistakes themselves.

Rather than asking how to eliminate every error, the research encourages a different question: What kind of culture do we create when mistakes happen? Through personal stories, practical leadership strategies, and evidence-based discussion, Andi and Josh explore how our responses to mistakes shape trust, learning, resilience, and the willingness to speak up in the future.

You'll hear:

• What the research reveals about error management culture and its relationship to wellbeing
• Why mistakes are powerful cultural moments that shape trust, learning, and psychological safety
• The difference between an error prevention culture and an error management culture
• Practical strategies to replace blame with curiosity, learning, and accountability
• How leaders and team members can create environments where people recover, grow, and continue contributing after mistakes

Whether you lead a veterinary team or simply want to help create a healthier workplace, this episode offers a hopeful, science-backed perspective on turning inevitable mistakes into opportunities for stronger cultures, better learning, and more resilient teams.

Resource Links

Episode Article:

Title Embracing Errors at Work – How Error Management Culture, Psychological Capital, and Job Satisfaction Relate to Individual Well-Being: 

Authors: Birgit Stephan, Matthias F. C. Hudecek, Dieter Frey, Eva Lermer

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s41042-025-00265-7

Flourish Academy - Certificate in Positive Veterinary Leadership

Florida Man This Week - Bank Mistake

Reef Retreat 

What Do You Think? Reach out to us and let us know at Info@flourish.vet

Your Hosts:
Andi Davison LVT, CAPP, APPC 

Josh Vaisman MAPPCP, CCFP

At Flourish Veterinary Consulting we renovate veterinary cultures. We diagnose what’s working, blueprint what’s next, and train every team member - blending positive psychology with real-world experience - so thriving becomes the norm, not the myth. 

Timestamps: 
00:00 Mistakes Shape Culture

08:42 Lessons From Leadership

16:16 Culture Gets Smarter or Scarier

17:16 Paper and Key Concepts

21:01 Study Design and Findings

24:32 Coddling vs Correction

26:17 Why Leaders Struggle

35:33 Curiosity Not Blame

40:33 Recovery Pathway After Errors

43:27 Choose What Teams Learn

43:57 Florida Man

 Headed to WVC Nashville this August? We'd LOVE to meet you! Andi will be speaking August 16 & 17, and Josh will be there too. Stop by a session and introduce yourself - we always love meeting members of the Veterinary Culture Lab community. Grab your boots, bring your curiosity, and come say hello! 

Transcript

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SPEAKER_00 0:04

Welcome to the Veterinary Culture Lab, where science meets real-world application. I'm Andy Davison.

SPEAKER_01 0:12

And I'm Josh Weisman. Together we'll show you an evidence-based blueprint for renovating culture in your veterinary team. One episode at a time.

SPEAKER_00 0:23

Every veterinary professional will make a mistake at some point in their career. The question isn't whether it happens, it's what happens next. This episode explores how our response to mistakes shapes trust, learning, and the culture we create together.

SPEAKER_01 0:40

Good afternoon, Andy Davison. How's it going down there in Florida?

SPEAKER_00 0:44

Um, it's going really well, super soccer fan Josh. How are you?

SPEAKER_01 0:49

Oh, there was a game in Miami last night. Did you not? I thought about you as we were watching that match. I'm trying to remember which one that was. That might have been New Zealand, Iran.

unknown 0:57

Ooh.

SPEAKER_01 0:58

No, I think they played in LA. No, I think it was a different game. Anyway, there are games in Miami. And I'm jealous because I live in Colorado and Denver was not selected as a World Cup host city. So we don't have any local games. The closest to us. Local.

SPEAKER_00 1:11

Come on. Local. Miami is like, oh God, I'm gonna get it wrong and someone's gonna correct me. But it's like a seven-hour drive from me. Like it is not local. There would be planes involved if I was going to Miami.

SPEAKER_01 1:23

Okay, that's fair.

SPEAKER_00 1:24

That's so if that makes you feel any better.

SPEAKER_01 1:27

Slightly.

SPEAKER_00 1:28

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:28

Slightly better. On to like cooler things. I recently got to do, so this is the second year in a row that I got to do this. You know about this. I call it adult saltwater reef keeping camp. Oh, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I went to reef retreat uh again, which was awesome. Uh, if there's any listeners who like are into keeping like saltwater tanks, saltwater fish, corals, things like that, cannot recommend enough going to reef retreat. It is amazing. It's the whole weekend. Uh, you stay on campus, like you sleep in a dorm, which was a whole experience for now almost 50-year-old Josh. So that like the food hall is open and all the food is taken care of the whole weekend. And this is like shockingly good college food. And they have like marine biologists and all sorts of scientists talking about the research that they're doing on like reef restoration and coral spawning and like all this stuff. And then you have really well-known hobbyists talking about stuff that they've been working on or that they do, and you just learn all this cool stuff, and you're you're there for the whole weekend with a group of like 150 super nerds that all love the same shit you love. It is so cool. It is so cool.

SPEAKER_00 2:36

It sounds delightful. What was like the thing that you learned that completely blew your mind?

SPEAKER_01 2:43

Um, there are some we'll call them pests in reef tanks. Um very commonly there's a family of bacteria called Vibrio, and there's several different species, and some of them can be pathogenic. There were three like well-known professionals, right, who told stories about getting infected by various things from their reef tank and like almost losing their life, almost losing their arm, like crazy surgeries. And so here's here's what I learned though. Most doctors have no clue what this stuff is, like zero clue. So you keep a reef tank and you get one of these weird pests or parasites or you know, infections. Chances are your doctor's not gonna really have effing clue what's going on with you, and they're not gonna know what to do. A group a group of these like reef people decided at the end of this long talk and like people almost dying from these things, um, that they're gonna put together like a a high quality written resource with like literature citations and case studies and things to just pass out to all reef hobbyists, so like you can have that to talk with you to the hospital if you ever run into this.

SPEAKER_00 3:52

Yes, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 3:53

The other thing, the other thing that this did is it um it it made me learn something about the ocean. Like, you know, do you know that oceans uh communicate? Like when ocean water, like one ocean, the other ocean like hits together, they have a way of like the ocean communicates. Do you have any idea of what they say to each other?

SPEAKER_00 4:12

No, no, I'm I have no idea what they say.

SPEAKER_01 4:15

Andy, they don't communicate verbally, they just wave.

SPEAKER_00 4:18

I I knew it was something like that. I felt pressure to like actually guess it.

SPEAKER_01 4:22

And I was like, no, you're not gonna guess it.

SPEAKER_00 4:24

Just let him finish this and exactly.

SPEAKER_01 4:28

Everything up until that terrible dad joke was true. Um that is not actually the purpose of today. Uh, the purpose of today, of course, is to talk about a cool paper. But before I share that paper, Annie, I wanted to tell you a little bit of a story. Um, I'm not gonna give names because I don't want to like unnecessarily bash people, but many years ago, um, I worked at a bowling alley. I was the assistant manager at a bowling alley for a number of years. And the guy who was the general manager and owned the bowling alley was difficult to work for, we'll say. Uh, and we had this like, I don't remember what the tournament was, but we had this big tournament coming in uh for this weekend. And the night before the tournament was supposed to start, I was working with him. He he kept this like calendar, it was like a big like eight by eleven calendar. So each day it had a block that was pretty big, and he would write in pencil everything that was happening on every day in pencil because then he could erase and make adjustments easy. But also, that was our Bible. We would look at that to see what was happening this day or the next day so that we could be properly prepared and make sure the bowling alley was like immaculate and ready to go. It was really important to him. This tournament was a big deal and it meant something to him. The day before we were working, and you know, we were talking a little bit about it, and he had sort of assigned the tournament we were going to need 16 of the 32 lanes. He had written like very bold in pencil the name of the tournament and lanes one through 16 in the calendar. And he had talked about, you know, questioning whether it was good to put it on the front half or the back half or this and that, but that was it. The end of the day, he left and he didn't change anything in the calendar. And the next morning, I was coming in to prepare the bowling alley for the tournament. Okay, so I came in with our lead mechanic hours before the tournament, hours before our boss came in, and we started preparing the bowling alley to really look great, right? One of the things that we had to do is the mechanic for tournament, you may not know this, so you're gonna learn something about bowling here. The lane is about 60 feet long. There is a layer of oil that is laid on the lane, varying distances and varying thickness across the lane. It creates a pattern. So bowlers, like really good bowlers, professional bowlers, they know what the pattern is on the lane and they try and adjust where they throw the ball, how much spin they put in, all that stuff to the oil pattern. Now that pattern is very important, especially for tournaments. So what you do is you strip the lane. There's a machine that goes down and sucks up all the oil that was already on the lane. So now you've got clean lanes. And then it goes back and it lays down whatever pattern you want. That takes a quite a bit of time. Um, it's a pricey machine. So we came in hours early. I was getting everything ready while the mechanic was going and stripping the first 16 lanes and laying down the new pattern. Just as he's getting close to the last lane, so he's on like lane 13 or 14. Our boss walks in, looks at the machine on that lane, and throws an epic fit. I mean, like screaming and yelling, what the fuck are you people doing? I said I needed this on lane 17 through 32. Why are you preparing the first half of the bullying? Like flipping out. And I remember like showing him the calendar. Like the only thing I think did was like, it's you wrote it in here. And his response was, Well, I changed my mind and you should have known it. Oh, yeah. I mean, obviously, like I didn't completely screw up in this situation, but you know, whatever. He did change his mind. We had a conversation about it, but he didn't change it in the calendar. I assume that was was written in the calendar because that's how it always been with Sakura Sangh. His response to me, though, like, not just the blow up and the yelling at me and the complete lack of ability to accept any role that he played in this. For the entire day, 10 hours of working together, I got the silent treatment from him. He refused to interact with me. He was so pissed off at this mistake that I had made that he just like wouldn't even talk to me anymore. The next shift that we worked together, he pretended like it didn't even happen. Oh, like just went on with our normal relationship, like nothing ever happened. And I was too chicken shit to bring anything up. And so things went on. That that was kind of the relationship I had there. You know, I I gotta tell you, looking back on this, I think that what happened in that situation was more than like an operational fault, right? This wasn't just like something went wrong or I made a mistake. It was actually a really important cultural moment and one in a series of those kinds of moments. Of course, the mistake that I made, it mattered in some way. And I learned about how I should probably communicate with my boss when big events were on the calendar and double and triple check things, so on and so forth. So I learned how to theoretically do my job better. But the bigger lesson that I carried forward was what I learned about what happens when something important to him goes wrong. And that I better not screw up like that again if I wanted to keep my job or at least keep the work environment pleasant. Essentially, I learned to protect myself from errors and to do what I could to hide mistakes when they were small enough to be inconsequential so I wouldn't get yelled at again. Annie, I'm curious, can you think of a time in your veterinary career when you made a like a mistake at work, big, small, anything in between? And what was the response to the error? Was like, did you get a supportive response from leadership? Or was the response you got maybe different than what you wish you had gotten?

SPEAKER_00 9:56

Um, it was definitely different than what I wish I would have gotten. This mistake is oh God. I still think about it, right? Like I still, it still shapes a lot of who I am as a veterinary professional. And it happened early on in my career. And I was in school. And while I was in school at Michigan State, I worked in the large animal hospital for a little while and I was um doing the equine thing, right? Like no big surprise. And I was a little bit new still, and I was doing something, right? I don't honestly, I don't remember exactly what I was doing, but it had to do with one of the equine patients in one of the equine wards. And I'd gone into the stall and I was either swapping up fluids or flushing a catheter. I was doing something with the patient. And I didn't close the door completely behind me. I left the door open, you know, enough. And I remember thinking, well, I should leave it open enough so that if I have to get out, I can get out because I don't know this horse and well, I didn't get out, but the horse sure did. The horse pushed the door open, ran out of the stomach, took off down the aisle, ripped out its catheter, ripped half of the fluids off of the um fluid hook, and ran down the center aisle of the hospital. Yeah. And there I'm standing in the stumble alone, freaking out because that just happened.

SPEAKER_01 11:26

Yeah, it did.

SPEAKER_00 11:27

Yeah, yeah, it did. And um, of course, I mean, it was no surprise, right? Like there was no, there was no hiding in it, there was no denying it, there was none of that. And so um, a couple of other people on the team helped me get the horse back, helped me, you know, put everything back together. And then, of course, after all of that was taken care of with the horse, my supervisor called me into her office and proceeded to lecture me about what I did wrong, why I made terrible decisions, what was I thinking? How could I possibly call myself a horse girl or a, you know, put a new technician of this is how I was going to handle myself. And I just got lectured for what felt like three hours. I think it was probably five or six minutes, right? But it felt like forever. And I remember distinctly trying to share my perspective and trying to share the fact that I thought I was trying to put safety first and giving myself an out because this horse was, you know, obviously nervous and I didn't want to get in the way and get hurt. And in my effort to try and explain myself, this particular person got very emotional about it and reminded me that I wasn't always gonna like what I was doing and I wasn't always gonna like what I was told to do by others, but that I needed to just suck it up and do it.

SPEAKER_01 12:51

Just suck it up and do it, jeez.

SPEAKER_00 12:52

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 12:54

Do you remember like what you were feeling in that moment? Like what happened to your nervous system as you were standing there being berated?

SPEAKER_00 13:01

Oh God, this was like young adult Andy. So there was a lot of um negative emotions, right? Um, I know that I felt very called out on. I felt like I needed to defend myself. The defense mechanisms were sharp and pointy and spiky. And I wanted to cry because I was so upset, right? Like I was so mad that I was getting screamed at that I was just overcome with the negative emotion. And like all I could think about was she's not listening to me. She's not listening to why this happened. Of course, I didn't do it on purpose. And like I didn't feel like a human. I felt like a teeny tiny horse turd in this corner of her office that was getting screamed at.

SPEAKER_01 13:50

And this this was an instructor that you you went on to have, like this was an instructor of yours for a while after this event.

SPEAKER_00 13:58

This was the um she was she worked in the large animal hospital. So no, she was not one of my instructors. Um but she worked in in the large animal hospital.

SPEAKER_01 14:09

And so I and you continued to work in that hospital?

SPEAKER_00 14:13

Um, for a moment, not for very long.

SPEAKER_01 14:16

Okay. If you had continued to work with that person, how would this experience have impacted your willingness to like go to them and and say, hey, I screwed something up or I need help with something?

SPEAKER_00 14:28

Oh God, I never would have wanted to go and and and speak at all with this person, let alone go to them and say, Hey, I've messed up, or hey, I have a question, or hey, I'm not, I'm not perfect. Can you please support me? That's that's terrifying. And honestly, that's why I didn't work there very long, because it was not the kind of environment that was going to allow for me to learn. And that's what I was doing. I was in tech school, so I was there to learn, and that just was not the environment that I needed.

SPEAKER_01 15:00

Would would it be fair to say that what you learned from this experience is that this is a human being and a workplace I no longer wish to be around?

SPEAKER_00 15:08

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_01 15:09

So you didn't really learn how to be a better technician, you just learned how to like get away from shitty people. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So that's thank you for sharing that, by the way. I'm super sorry you had that experience. And I'm grateful that you stuck with it and became a technician and now work with me at Flourish.

SPEAKER_00 15:28

Honestly, that experience, um, it really it really motivated me, right? Because to hear somebody stand in front of me and say, You're never gonna like what you do. You're always gonna be told you're not gonna necessarily like it, and you have to just shut up and do it.

SPEAKER_01 15:45

There was, I mean, you know, listeners know, like here, here comes Andy Davison.

SPEAKER_00 15:51

Yeah, exactly. The rebel in me was awakened, right? And I thought, oh, like hell, I'm not gonna like what I'm doing. Like hell, people are just gonna tell me what to do. And that was a motivator for me, good, bad, or otherwise. That was a motivator for me. And there are moments where I think back on that and think, yeah, yeah, tell me again what it's like to not like what you do. Cause there you go. Boom. That's awesome.

SPEAKER_01 16:12

Well, I'm I'm grateful that that the rebel and you came out and you kept going. Um, and this is like this experience that you had, this is actually really a lot of what the today's episode is going to be about. So, like the the sort of big question that we're gonna talk about here is when something goes wrong in our practices and our teams and our organizations, does our culture get smarter or scarier? Because that's really the options when we have an experience like what you went through and like what I went through. Because mistakes are a lot more than just operational errors, they really are cultural moments that reveal what a team and organization believes about things like honesty, learning, accountability, leadership, belonging, all that stuff that really matters for how the organization goes forward. And that comes with real world consequences. So today we're going to talk about the difference between an error prevention culture and an error management culture. I'll describe those in a little bit, and why that difference may matter not only for patient care and hospital performance, but also for people's confidence, for their resilience, for job satisfaction, and as it turns out, for personal well-being. So the paper that I've brought for you and I to work through together, Andy, is uh it's called Embracing Errors at Work How Error Management Culture, Psychological Capital, and Job Satisfaction Relate to Individual Well-being. I feel like we should start counting like character amounts in paper names and see what the longest one is.

SPEAKER_00 17:33

Right, right.

SPEAKER_01 17:34

Uh the authors of this great paper. Yeah. Um, I think you might actually, I don't remember what episode it was, but you brought one that was like, okay, that might be the longest one ever.

SPEAKER_00 17:42

Yeah, there was one. I needed to like take multiple breaths in between. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 17:45

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 17:46

In between sharing the title. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 17:48

So the authors of this wonderful paper are Stefan, uh, Hudisek, Frey, and Lermer. This paper was published in 26, 2026 in the Journal of Applied Positive Psychology, which gets a big yay as positive psychology people. Uh, these authors, they were interested in something that I personally think is really important, and I bet, Andy, that you will agree. So I'm gonna explain some of the key concepts in the paper before I talk about how the study was done and what they found. The first one is error management culture. An error management culture is not a culture where mistakes don't matter. Okay. It is not a culture where people shrug and say things like, oh, well, Andy, it's okay. Everyone makes mistakes. That is not an error management culture. An error management culture is a culture where errors are communicated about openly, where people share what they learned, where others help in error situations, and where the team gets better at detecting and handling errors quickly, moving forward and learning from them. That's the error management culture. It's a very healthy approach to the inevitable mistakes and errors that will happen in human systems. We can contrast that with an error prevention culture. Now, I bet if we took a hundred veterinarians and said, Would you like to prevent errors in your workplace? You're gonna get a hundred vociferous agreements, right? Like, of course, it sounds good. Error prevention sounds really good at first. Because of course, we want to prevent mistakes, especially in healthcare. But in this literature, an error prevention culture, uh, it's one where the focus is so heavily on avoiding mistakes that when mistakes do happen, uh, people feel like they have to hide them. They're fearing being blamed, they need to protect their reputation, or worse, they will feel legitimately condescended and ashamed. To use your words, Andy, they will be made to feel small. That's what an error prevention culture gets us. So it's it's important that we differentiate error management culture from error prevention culture. So the difference here is not do we care about mistakes or not. The difference is when mistakes happen, do we respond in a way that creates learning, repair, and future safety, or do we respond in a way that creates fear, silence, and self-protection, or in some cases, tucktailing and running, right? Like I'm not gonna work in this hospital anymore for these people. The second concept that's important for us is psychological capital. You'll hear us often refer to this as psychap. Scicap is made up of four psychological resources hope, self-efficacy, resilience, and optimism. To put that in like normal people language, this is really a measurement of if people feel that they can find a way forward, do hard things, recover from setbacks, and believe that their efforts can make a difference in the workplace. That's really what scicap is. And then the third concept is job satisfaction, which is exactly what it sounds like. It's just how people generally feel about their work and the place that they do it. Are they happy there? Finally, we also looked at well-being in this study. Now, well-being is an interesting construct because we all think we know what it means, but there's like a thousand different definitions of it. Here, well-being, this was just like personal, overall subjective sense of how people felt they were doing as whole human beings in life. Okay. Let's talk about the study. The study used two cross-sectional online survey samples of employed participants. Altogether, there were about 1,300 people in the study across two different survey runs. Participants answered questions about their workplace's error management culture, their psychological capital, their job satisfaction, and their personal well-being. And because this was cross-sectional, we do have to be a little careful here. The study can show relationships or association, right? It cannot prove that error management culture causes something. It just shows the relationship, the statistical relationship. So that this is an important limitation. Having said that, I would summarize the findings basically this way error management culture does seem to matter when it comes to personal well being, but probably not in a simple, like direct magic wand way. It's not like if we create a great error management culture at work, everybody's well being will magically like go through the roof. The strongest value for error management culture might be in that it helps create the conditions. Where people in the workplace feel more hopeful, more capable, more resilient, more optimistic, and more satisfied at work. And then those things are more strongly tied with well-being. One way that I sort of came to think about this is like soil in a garden. If you're keeping a garden, you could think of the error management culture as the soil itself. The soil does not directly produce fruit, right? But healthy soil does create the conditions for stronger roots. The stronger roots are likely to grow into healthier plants. Those healthier plants are likely to produce better fruit. So in these studies, those roots is psychological capital and satisfac and job satisfaction. That's hope, that's efficacy, resilience, optimism, and job satisfaction. That's what helps people keep growing after the storm passes, right? So in a veterinary hospital, you can think of like the mistakes, the errors, the near misses. Those are the storms that will occur. Like everywhere we go, weather systems change and we get storms. Same with a veterinary practice. That's the mistakes, the errors. Those storms, they can damage trust, they can damage confidence and safety. But if you have healthy soil, you're likelier to have healthier roots, stronger plants. That team then can absorb the storm. They can learn from it, they can recover and grow stronger. However, if the soil is toxic, that's error prevention culture, the same storm can end up leaving people quite afraid, ashamed, hidden, and just really less willing to speak up next time. So that's the study. Let's talk about some of like the things that really emerged from here. Uh the first thing that really stands out to me from this, Andy, is that mistakes are cultural moments. I didn't really think about that before the study, but mistakes are really key cultural moments. That's because everyone's watching. Everybody's watching and learning from what it means to be honest here. Hey, I screwed up. What it means to be human here. They're learning whether leaders are going to seek truth or whether they're going to seek someone to blame. They're learning whether it is safe to surface, discuss, lean into near misses or mistakes, or whether accountability means improvement or humiliation. An error prevention culture, it often teaches people to avoid being associated with error. When we have an error prevention culture, essentially the lesson we're providing is if something goes wrong, find someone else to blame so that you don't get in trouble. Mistakes in your misses, they're gonna happen. Okay, that's inevitable in any human system. The only question then is whether we find out about them early enough to learn something, to repair them, and to prevent the next one, or if people move to protect themselves and withhold. Andy, as I was thinking through this, I started to like put most veterinary hospital leaders into like two categories. This might be a little unfair, but I think that generally speaking, the sense I have is that veterinary hospital leaders tend to respond to mistakes in one of two ways. I call them coddling or correction. Right. So coddling can look like, oh, Andy, it's not that big a deal. People make mistakes. Don't worry about it. I'm sure you'll do better next time, right? It feels like a lot like I care about you and not at all like I'm gonna hold you accountable and help you get better. Right. So it's all human, all care coddling. I think the other way that I see people respond to mistakes in the team is what we call what I call correction. And that can look a lot like sending the message that the only thing that matters to me is results. The only thing that matters here is that that damn horse got out of the stall and you are the one responsible, right? To the team, though, what it looks like is results matter more to me than you do as people. A coddling approach basically teaches people that you don't actually have to learn. You don't have to grow, you don't have to stretch yourself, you don't have to improve here. Everything will always be forgiven. Not helpful. A correction approach teaches people that it's better to hide mistakes, also not helpful, right? I think a healthy error management culture kind of lives somewhere in the middle of that. And I'm really curious to see what do you think? And why do you think so many veterinary leaders seem to struggle with really striking a good balance?

SPEAKER_00 26:39

The path forward is definitely somewhere in the middle of those two reactions. I don't know. This one, this one honestly was complicated because I thought a lot about the two different styles. I've experienced the two different styles. I um have done the two different styles one more than the other, and have thought about what it would look like to balance that, right? And like what gets in the way. And so many possibilities come to mind. I mean, I think that there's the underlying fact that nobody teaches us how to do this, right? Nobody teaches us how to work through mistakes. Nobody teaches us how to communicate with our team through mistakes. They it's just not something that we're necessarily taught to do. So we're once again left to our own resources to try to figure it out one way or another. I think the pressure that we feel as leaders comes into it too, right? We are in a medical field. Mistakes can be life-threatening. That's a lot of pressure. Um I also think that um it's worth mentioning or considering that everybody sort of responds to mistakes differently, and everybody wants to work through them in a little bit of a different way. And so, you know, while quote unquote coddling might work well with, you know, team member A, it's not gonna work well with team member B, who might like a little bit more of a direct um correction type of conversation, which is then gonna send team member C over the cliff because they don't know what that means and they're not real sure how to, you know, process all of that. So I think the human component comes into play as well. And that's that's a lot, right? That's a lot coming at you when you're already dealing with a high stress situation of a mistake that happened.

SPEAKER_01 28:33

Yeah, that's fair. And I think that's probably true. Second big thing that I took away from this is that error management culture is not about being nicer in response to mistakes, it's about helping people learn, recover, and stay engaged. Listen, Andy, I think that people who resort to the correction or error prevention approach do probably need to be a little bit nicer in their approach. But being nicer isn't actually the full picture. That's like just too soft of a word, or it just misses the point. This isn't actually about lowering standards. It's about raising the standard for how we respond when standards are not met. Like when somebody misses our expectation, we have to then increase the standard uh for our response to it. That's what this is really about. I think in a strong error management culture, we do still care deeply about patient safety, about client trust, medical quality, team reliability, all those performance outcomes. But instead of using fear as the tool to get those outcomes to work better, we use transparency, we use a learning mindset, we use support, and we use process improvement. The study's findings are helpful here because they suggest that error management culture may matter partly because of its relationship with psychological capital and job satisfaction. So, in other words, when people work in a culture where mistakes can actually be discussed and learned from, they're much more likely to feel hopeful, capable, resilient, optimistic, and happy to continue working there. And that matters because veterinary medicine does not just need people who avoid mistakes, it needs people who can recover from mistakes, who can stay engaged, and who can continue learning so their career improves over time and what they're able to deliver in our practices improves as well. A shame-based culture that might actually get short-term compliance, but it often damages long-term learning. You never learned another thing from that uh that person working in that hospital. Like that was it. That one interaction was all it took for you never to have an opportunity to learn from her again. That's what a shame-based culture gets us. People become more careful about image management than they do about patient care improvement. That's where impression management comes in here. They ask, people end up asking whether they're aware of it or not. How do I make sure this doesn't come back on me? And that is replacing the question they should be asking, but they the environment doesn't allow them to, which is how do we make sure this does not happen again? An error management culture helps shift the question from who messed up to what happened, what contributed to it, what did we learn, and what will we change? Okay, Andy, I'm I'm gonna we're gonna try something here. Imagine I put you in a time machine, okay? Okay, Bill and Ted's adventure. It's Bill, Ted, and Andy.

SPEAKER_00 31:17

Oh, back to the future. Come on, come on.

SPEAKER_01 31:20

Back to the future. Okay, that works. That works. It's Marty McFly and Andy Davis.

SPEAKER_00 31:23

Doc Brown, come on.

SPEAKER_01 31:25

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So imagine I put you in the time machine, you're in the Delore, and I send you back to Andy Tech Manager days. All right. So you're literally like you're you're in the hospital and there she is. It's you from you know a number of years ago. Okay. The goal of this mission is you're gonna go coach her. Okay. The first thing I want to ask you though is when you when you go back and you watch Tech Andy, do you think she's more likely to be a coddler or a corrector when uh her technicians make a mistake? Just pick one. Which one do you think she's more likely to do?

SPEAKER_00 31:58

A coddler.

SPEAKER_01 31:59

Okay, so she's gonna be more coddling. So if you wanted to help her better balance accountability, learning, recovery, and keep the humanity piece when she responded to team members' mistakes. So we're trying to get her to move a little bit more towards the center between coddling and and correction. You get to give her one piece of advice and then poof, the time machine brings you back. What advice do you give her?

SPEAKER_00 32:22

Be curious. Be curious with that other person about what happened and be curious enough with yourself to have that conversation and figure out what can change for the better for the next time.

SPEAKER_01 32:41

I love that response. And here's why. Because I think when we go into a coddling approach, we're in fix it mode, right? Like we're trying to fix the emotional load for the person, make them feel better. And fix it mode pushes us to do a lot of things that end in period. Andy, don't worry, it's gonna be okay. I'm not mad at you. We're gonna get through this. Period, period, period. And you're saying one way to help get out of that is to start thinking in terms of question marks. And that curiosity can help us balance a little more accountability, um, helping people learn, helping us learn while still maintaining the humanity piece uh that we're striving for as a coddler. Love it. I think that's great advice. I hope that you get to go into that time machine someday. All right, let's let's shift this uh error culture stuff from prevention correction to management, learning, and resilience. Okay, let's talk about culture renovation here. For us to do that, I think the first thing we need to do is to recognize that this is going to take time. This is not a light switch thing. You don't listen to this episode decide, oh, I've had an error prevention culture. I'm gonna turn it into an error management culture tomorrow. That's not how this works. We're gonna have to think about how we treat mistakes. We're gonna have to shift the response to be healthier. We're gonna have to persist with that for a long time for it to really get sticky. But here are a few things that I think can help. Okay. The first one, become a mistake paramedic, right? You're not a mistake detective, you're not a mistake like architect or handyman, you're a mistake paramedic. So you're gonna change your first response. The first response after a mistake is a critical culture-shaping moment. So before you go into investigating mode, correcting mode, teaching mode, problem-solving mode, just pause. Like literally force yourself to pause, take a few breaths, and challenge yourself to respond, not react, in a way that keeps the person engaged and the information flowing. So I really like language around these things. So here are some sample language things that people can do. So um, somebody on your team just had a screw up, you're sitting down to talk with them the first time. Pause, take a moment, breathe, and then just say, Hey, thank you for bringing that to my attention. Or to your point, curiosity. Uh how are you doing? Are you okay right now? Right? Like check in with them. Uh, is the patient safe right now? What do we need to do first to stabilize the situation so we can then talk through it? Or hey, you know what, Andy? Listen, let's just sit down and understand what happened. Uh so then we can work on how we make sure something like this doesn't happen again, right? All of these are ways to like shift our first response from blame to openness. It does not erase accountability, though. It keeps the person from going into panic mode or shame uh or self-protection before the team has the information that it needs. And here's the really cool part everyone on the team can do this. You don't have to be the manager, the medical director, the hospital owner, the executive. Everyone can do this. You're a tech assistant who's been working there for three months, and the senior technician just had an oops. Andy, are you okay? Do you need anything right now? Like, that's it. That's all it takes. And anybody, this is accessible to anyone. Andy, I'm curious when you have the courage to admit a mistake that you've made at work, which it is an act of courage, what kind of response helps you personally shift from self-protection and fear to okay, I'm ready to talk through this and learn and recover?

SPEAKER_00 36:09

It comes back to that curiosity, which is why that is the advice that I have for past Andy, because that curiosity to understand more uh from the mistake maker is reminding them that you want their input and that their input is important and you care about their perspective and you want to know what happened so that you can move forward. It's a step away from the blame game, right? Like, don't make me feel worse about whatever happened because I promise you I feel terrible about it. So finding ways to continue to judge me or, you know, twist the knife in deeper into my heart, you know, it's already in there because I didn't do it on purpose. And so inviting me into the conversation through curiosity to understand more about what went wrong, how I'm feeling, what we might need to do to stabilize the situation is absolutely going to open my mind up, help me approach that conversation in a way that makes me want to learn and want to recover and want to do better next time.

SPEAKER_01 37:18

Yeah. Andy, um, is this curiosity? Wait, the horse got out? What the hell happened?

SPEAKER_00 37:26

Josh, there's technically a question mark at the end of that sentence. Oh, that is that is weaponized curiosity.

SPEAKER_01 37:33

Yeah, that is weaponized curiosity.

SPEAKER_00 37:34

Yeah, how about this? How could you let this happen?

SPEAKER_01 37:36

Yes. How could you let this blonde? Yeah. Oh, God, okay. So what what about this? Wow, Andy, not at all excited that the horse escaped. Help me help walk me through what happened there.

SPEAKER_00 37:48

Yep. Yep. I I love that because the horse got out. It happened. Like there's no, there's no denying that happened. There's no covering up that happened that it happened. Okay. And what do we do now? How do we move forward? What does that look like? Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 38:04

Awesome. I appreciate that. I it's excellent advice. I'm going to remember that the next time you screw up here at Flourish.

SPEAKER_00 38:10

Yeah. Just kidding.

SPEAKER_01 38:11

Andy and Andy never makes mistakes everywhere.

SPEAKER_00 38:14

Sure, sure. That's cute.

SPEAKER_01 38:16

That's that's what I'm gonna tell people till the day I die. Um, the second big takeaway for me is that uh replace blame seeking with learning reviews. I know that no one actually calls them like blame seeking expeditions, but that's often what it actually feels like. That's what it felt like to you with that uh with that person in that hospital, right? Something goes wrong in the hospital, and yeah, something goes wrong in the hospital, and suddenly people turn into the error pathologist, putting everything under the microscope, trying to find that one malignant cell to blame the screw up on, right? And man, does it suck to feel like you are the malignant cell? Uh the goal here is to find out who is at fault. That's what happens with these blame seeking expeditions. We're trying to find out who is at fault, whether that's our intention or not, that's how it is perceived. A healthier approach is to replace that with what I'm calling learning reviews. So the goal with the learning review, it's not to find the villain, it's to understand and improve the system in which people work, to identify what we can all learn so that we can all perform better together. This is what real accountability looks like. So here's some sample like questions for a good learning review. Andy, if we watched the video of the horse getting out, what would we see? Right? Like, so not that we assume that the people were thinking, we're not, we're trying to try to assume like why you did what you did or what's just like literally on video, describe in black and white what we would see, right? And so you would probably describe, you would see me walk into the stall, you would see me mostly close the door, but leave it open a little. You would see me go do this with a horse, you would see me turn around and you would see the horse run out, right? Great. I'm gonna learn something from that. I'm gonna learn something, and then I can ask the next question. Andy, what made this mistake possible? Well, I left the door open and I wasn't paying attention to the horse. Oh, okay. So what would make this mistake likely to happen again? Well, if I keep leaving doors open in the stall, oh, okay, so what have you learned from this? That I should probably always close the the door. Andy, how would that make you feel to be in a stall with an unknown horse and the door completely shut behind you? Right? Like that's what a learning review helps us do. Ultimately, what happened with you? This is my guess. I might be wrong. My guess is that it was just a training issue. No one ever explicitly told you every time you go into a stall, you shut the door completely. Here is why, and here's what you do to keep yourself safe. Like you probably just weren't trained explicitly on that. That doesn't make you a bad person. That makes the system in which you worked flawed, which every human system is. And the only way we can make them better is if we have a way to learn from them. The third piece of advice is what I call building a recovery pathway for the human being involved. You made a point earlier, Andy. You said you felt just as shitty, maybe even shittier, about this mistake than the person who was yelling at you. You already felt bad about it, right? That's the reality. So here's a statement that I say a lot that always gets a bunch of agreeing nods, but doesn't always show up in real life when things go sideways or someone screws up. This is a version of the statement. I think that just about everybody in veterinary medicine, like I'm talking 99.9999999% of people in this field are good humans with good intentions, doing the very best they can each and every day with the tools that they have. And I say that, and you're nodding. And that's what always happens in conference halls and on virtual sessions, and like everybody always nods. But if we really embrace that, we're gonna view the vast majority of mistakes as visible evidence of good humans working in imperfect systems, not flawed humans screwing up. That is a key critical difference, but I really think we need to learn to embrace that. So the truth is when someone on the team messes up, there is a nearly 100% likelihood that they did not do it on purpose or out of negligence, and they probably feel super shitty about it. How we respond to them in the near and medium future is going to determine if that shitty feeling lingers and worsens like a festering wound, or if it dissipates like the smell of anal gland being expressed. What people need after a moment of falling short is not judgmental correction. They need a path back to confidence and contribution. They need space for their feelings to breathe. So here's an example of a recovery pathway that you know you could provide. It's up to everybody to decide what works well for you and your hospital and your system with your team. But, like, you know, first of all, a private well-being check after the acute issue has been handled. So, this recognition that, like, listen, what we're gonna do right now, Andy, is not figure out why you screwed up or what we need to learn from it. The first thing we're gonna do is check in on you as a human being. You can rest assured every time you make a mistake here, because you will make mistakes because you're not perfect. Nobody is. The first thing that I'm gonna do is check in on how you are doing, right? Then I'm going to offer you encouragement and reassurance that you are valued here and that I'm here with you through this process. Then we'll do a short review of what happened, what led to it, what made it possible, what kind of changes we need to do, right? And then you're gonna be a part of helping us improve the process so that no one else ever has to go through this again. The message here should be you are human, you are accountable, but you are not disposable. I believe in you. That's at the heart of what I think of as an error management culture. So ultimately, my big takeaway from this whole study is this mistakes will happen, period, in your hospital. And when they do, the team is going to learn something. You get to choose what they learn. Will they learn to protect themselves, to stay quiet and hide the messy stuff in the future? Or will they learn to prioritize patient safety, fast learning, and repair? That is the difference between a culture that's scary and a culture that gets smarter over time. And in vetmed, I think that really matters. Now, I know someone who has absolutely no fear about speaking up and being themselves, regardless of what errors or mistakes they make. I don't know if they always work in vetmed, but they're definitely out there. Andy, I think maybe you can tell us a little bit about this person.

SPEAKER_00 44:34

Um, I this person definitely also does not get smarter over time. Fair. And yes, that is Florida Man. Florida Man's headline this week is it made me giggle because a lot of times you notice like trends, right? In Florida Man headlines. Naked Florida Man is a trend that we have had the pleasure of experiencing kind of recently here. Another trend that shows up in Florida Man is Taco Bell. Taco Bell is like a big cool place for Florida Man to Florida man. And this headline uh reiterates that. And it's one of many that involve Taco Bell. So Florida Man really wanted a burrito, and he was arrested for a DUI because he mistook a bank drive-thru for a Taco Bell. He pulled up to the bank drive-thru, tried to order a burrito, thinking it was Taco Bell, was clearly intoxicated, and was arrested for a DUI.

SPEAKER_01 45:33

Oh my god.

unknown 45:34

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 45:35

I'm sad he never got his burrito.

SPEAKER_00 45:37

Right? Right, yeah. The food in prison is probably not as good as the food at Reef Retreat, so too bad.

SPEAKER_01 45:43

Yeah, yeah, fair, fair, fair point. Oh, Florida man. I'm so grateful for Florida Man. He keeps me laughing. Dang.

SPEAKER_00 45:51

Oh, yeah. Never a dull moment.

SPEAKER_01 45:53

I'm also super grateful that I get to have these conversations with you, Andy. I'm sure we could have talked about this one for hours. Unfortunately, we have to bring things to a close. So, to all the listeners out there, thank you for being here with us today on this edition of the Veterinary Culture Lab. Don't forget to hit subscribe, to like the episode, share it with people. That really helps us get more visibility and helps keep Andy and I excited to continue delivering these episodes for you. And uh be well out there, keep doing your thing. We see you, we love you.

SPEAKER_00 46:20

Bye, everybody. Thanks for hanging out with us in the Veterinary Culture Lab, covered by the science of workplace well-being, and brought to you by Flourish Veterinary Consulting. If today's episode sparked an idea, made you smile, or got you thinking, hey, I should totally try that. Let us know. What do you think? Be sure to subscribe, share, and remember a thriving veterinary culture is impossible. And you don't have to build it.