PVMA Keystone Veterinarian Summer 2020 - 28

Becoming
By Holly Sawyer, DVM

Human-Animal Bond Certified
Regional Veterinary Consultant | GuardianVets

If COVID-19 has taught us anything, it is that life can
be wildly unpredictable. Veterinarians tend to be
tidy, structured thinkers. That's not to say we are all
compulsive neat freaks. But our chosen profession
demands that we master the art of pattern
recognition. "Know your normal" becomes the
mantra of every lecture and clinical rotation, and the
aspiration of every new grad. So we gain expertise
in "normal" and work hard to maintain it-in our
patients and in our lives.

Duck and Pivot
The pandemic slammed us with a reality that was anything
but "normal." Overnight, we had to launch curbside care,
rely on phone consultations and telemedicine, enact social
distancing, and otherwise upend our historically stable
profession. Let's face it, a time-traveler from 1950 who walked
into your clinic pre-COVID would have ogled at your pretty
toys, but not the structure of the appointment, physical exam,
or general administration of treatment. In a world of industry
disrupters like Airbnb and Uber, consumer desire for choice and
convenience is clearly king. In this moment of inertia within our
profession, in which we are no longer the object at rest, but the
object in motion, let us stay in motion.
Just as the fighter in the boxing ring will fare better with quick
feet and nimble reactions, we too can capitalize on the left hook
that threw us off balance and now pivot into an upper cut that
transfers all of that energy against the status quo.

28 | Keystone Veterinarian

Change Your Perspective, Change the
World
What am I talking about here? You could call it a
fundamental change in thinking, a mental model
that embraces stressors and unpredictability
as a catalyst toward improvement instead of
detriment.
I am talking about becoming Antifragile.
This term, coined by risk analyst Nassim Taleb,1 has been
applied to systems as varied as bacterial resistance and human
psychology. To understand it, we must first look at the other end
of the spectrum.
Fragile systems are brittle. They have very little margin for error
because they maximize efficiency of time and resources to
achieve optimal outcomes. Our modern, globalized society has
steadily pushed us toward this ideal. We benefit from cheap
food, medical advances, and technological gadgets that rely
on tight tolerances of sourcing, shipping, supply, and demand.
Enter COVID, and suddenly dairy farmers2 are dumping milk at
huge economic loss because restaurants and schools are closed,
while pig farmers3 face euthanizing pigs before they can be sold
due to meat packing plant shutdowns. In our imperfect world,
even small stressors can break a system, like a porcelain plate
that shatters when dropped.
Resilient (or Robust) systems have built-in redundancies to
survive stress. They are the plastic food containers that bounce
on the floor. The system survives in its original form despite
PVMA Keystone Veterinarian Summer 2020

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