Now WE save the NHS

It's the morning after the night before, and you would be mistaken for thinking there are new saviours or messiahs in town.

We can sit back and relax because there are some new adults who will make things better.

Let's be clear, the last adults were nothing short of abusive when it comes to the NHS and other areas.

But these new masters seem a bit nicer, right?

They'll save us from the peril the NHS faces, right?

Let's look at how systems operate, because ours is a big one, to properly consider this assumption.

Complex human systems are not unilaterally controllable. Complexity is not controllable.

In my work with Chief Executives and other powerful leaders on transformation and change, I see a common issue: everyone expects them to have the answers, and the power to change reality, and the tools to sway and shift complex humans.

The most honest and authentically vulnerable admit, at least in private and relative safety, that they don't.

And that's scary. For them, and for us who put our (arguably false) hopes in them.

It's not because of them, but the story we tell ourselves about ourselves, the 'truth' we attempt to preserve that hierarchy is effective in 2024, and the slow crawl our forebears took into feeling that with the right capital allocation and the right benevolent institution above them everything would be tickety-boo.

Look around you, institutions are the problem, not the solution, and the much hailed leaders we look to, of course have mechanisms, buttons, cranks and leaders that can shift parts of the system, and influence change.

But they fail.

They're failing dramatically, and we know it.

More importantly they know it.

I speak to a lot of people in NHS England, and they are just as disenfranchised as we are with the institutions they're in.

The political masters, the civil service departments and the top down bodies will not save the NHS.

We will.

Or WE won't.

By we I mean our wider community, not just the 1.5 million people on the NHS headcount, but those who are honestly here to improve healthcare regardless of who pays their salary.

The biggest issue with our institutional mindset is that we either willingly grant our agency to others, or we feel that it has been taken away from us.

But the old or new SoS isn't the power, the CEO of the NHS isn't THE power.

WE are THE power.

"In the end, 100,000 Englishmen simply cannot control 350 million Indians, if those Indians refuse to cooperate." Mahatma Gandhi

Even as institutional leaders come and go, regardless of their intentions, many of us dedicate our lives and careers to the betterment and maintenance of this system.

Only with our realising the agency and power we hold, can we realise that we and the communities, tribes and guilds we form our could form will imagine and realise the system we wish to build.

Only with our taking hold of our collective agency can we nobly and positively disrupt the things that remain entrenched, toxic and problematic.

Only with our involvement, creativity and passion will we look at the new tools and technologies at our disposal and dare to dream and make real the very infrastructure that will nurture, and care for and support ourselves and those we care for.

This is our potential.

This is our power to wield.

Let's wield it, in partnership with the institutions, instead of quietly subject to them.

As our own proportionally represented community.

Let's save the principle of the best NHS we can build (and re-build), and not the institutions that are too often confused with the system itself.

FOOTNOTE

Tips and intelligence returns next week, along with silly jokes and more than vague references to tech. 💌