Page 7 - Winter 18

Adapt and thrive –
“Really....???”
Was the response I inwardly found myself giving when we learned a few years ago that the practice had just been bought out by one of the big corporate style veterinary groups. “Really” of course said with the intonation that all parents of teenagers will be familiar with.
We had been aware that the practice was potentially up for sale as the distant partners were consolidating their assets. We even had fantasies of some kind of buy out by the exist- ing workforce so that we could run it the way we thought best. The gods had other plans.
I realised fairly quickly that I had three basic choices:
• To pack my bags and move elsewhere
• To stay and keep on bitching about all the bad things
with the corporate approach
• To stay and somehow make it work
The first was not really an option. The practice is in Forest Row where pretty much every third establishment on the street was some kind of alternative practice. There was a ready made population of holistically minded pet owners
wanting the kind of service I was interested in giving. The second was not really my style. Great to grumble for a bit to get things off my chest. But staying stuck in a victim-think- ing mode of existence is never very useful or healthy.
So it was the third option I chose, at least to see where it led to. Several years down the line, I am still part of the practice and it has been an interesting journey.
Did any of you ever see an episode of Star Trek, where Captain Kirk was sent on a simulation training exercise?
The idea was to put the participants into a stressful situa- tion, where the only outcome was failure, to see how they coped. Captain Kirk, being the character he was, was not willing to conceive of a “no win” scenario. What did he do?
Once he realised the trick that the invigilators were playing, he hacked into the computer that was running the simula- tion and altered the program such that his chosen course of action could have a successful outcome. In effect:
He changed the playing field and re-wrote the rulebook.
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