The discipline is to stay human

The Discipline is to Stay Human. Or What Happens When No One Looks

Recently I've done some work in health and I've been reflecting on my first memory of a healthcare setting. I've been re-examining that experience through what I know now, after years working cross industry with leaders putting strategy into action.

I was twelve years old. Playing on the street. Right outside my house.

I jumped onto my neighbour’s skateboard, just for a go. Nothing fancy.

The wheels caught.

In a matter of seconds, I was airborne.

I saw my legs, in slow motion, fly above the boundary hedge. I think I blacked out after landing on my neck. Quite the angle. Only a few seconds.

I could move my head.

I scanned my body.

My left shin and foot were missing.

I scanned the top of the hedge. Surely my leg must be there.

It wasn’t.

I stared down at my brand-new khaki Chinos, brought just the day before from M&S. My mum was going to be mad, they were expensive.

The fabric hid any gore, but below the knee on my left, everything was freakishly small.

The memory jumps. Laughter behind me, maybe they saw the fall, not the aftermath.

I realised my left tibia and fibula were snapped in half, bent under my thigh, my ankle backwards, my foot flat against the floor.

Instinctively I grabbed my foot, pulled it out, and held my leg on. An impulse before I could consider whether it was a good idea. Terrifying. ‘How can I get out of this?’ kept running through my head.

Somehow (was I screaming?) the neighbours were out. My mum came running.

The ambulance arrived.

The break was an accident. What followed was not and cut deeper.

This was the first time I saw how systems, and the people in them, can shape an experience; for better or worse.

At a young age I saw how easily others were able to stop seeing me as human, just a set of burdensome tasks to complete. That stayed with me.

After the A&E drama and operation to set my leg, I found myself as an almost teen, on the children’s ward. In a room of four.

We had a torrid time.

There was a girl in the opposite bed, suffering horrific migraines. My mum noticed a flickering light making her pain worse and convinced the nurses to turn it off.

Relief. Smiles.

The end of the children’s corridor had a small barrier. From the noise, I imagined a wooden set of small swing doors. You could hear them close, and you knew the parents had left.

That day, the doors banged shut. My mum had gone. All the parents gone.

A heartbeat, two. Then the flickering light turned back on.

Screams on and off through the night.

The next thing that stands out is the day they wanted to change my sheets. Maybe it was the next day. Maybe later.

There was a triangle hanging from above my head. I had to lift myself up.  I’d never needed upper body strength before and didn’t have any. I could lift as far as my lower back. Maybe it the weight of the cast, or the inability to lift a leg that had been in two halves so recently. I tried so hard but couldn’t lift further.

This angered the auxiliary nurse. Brown-blonde hair, brown and cream uniform, a scowl. I knew she hated me. She said so. Shouted to the room how I made her late, how I caused her a problem.

She was properly angry that day. Had I been slow before? Had she been in trouble before? Was this the first day we met? I can’t remember.

I do know she scared me.

She lifted and dropped me, repeatedly, ranting in anger. The pain.

I had no voice. No agency. I couldn’t physically move from the bed and felt frozen in place, in constant risk of physical harm. I wasn’t allowed out until I could pass the test: using hospital crutches to walk down the steep hospital stairs. Having visited recently as an adult, those stairs are steep and long. Felt like a reckless request at the time and still does now.

Weeks later, my bones hadn’t healed very well.

An X-ray showed they were slightly out of alignment.  

They wondered: had I been clumsy again?

More treatment. More time.

Over time the body recovered. The nervous system remembered.

It sat inside. Visceral. Unspoken.

My visit was a snapshot in time. It wasn’t just happening to me. I wasn’t special. I wasn’t targeted. 

I doubt I never crossed their minds again.

What was clear, even at that young age, was this:

We were tasks, not people.

This isn’t about knocking the NHS, even in the 80s. The tasks here involved the care of children. It feels more visceral. But this is a familiar story, across industries.

I’ve seen the same pattern, in different industries, in different countries. It’s human.

Often, it starts simply.
Not knowing to look.
Not taking time to see.

How many organisations lose sight of their purpose, the reason they exist?

How many drift into a cycle of tasks and day-to-day operational rhythm, losing sight of what matters?

How often do performance measures become proxies, cold to the messy human reality people feel? Driving unintended behaviours?

You get what you measure. It may not be what you intend.

What was it about the way things were organised on this ward that made people look for agency, for power or control over others?

This matters. For strategic delivery. For resilience. For connection. It shapes whether people act in ways that connect to purpose or merely finish tasks.

What about the leaders?

Real leadership means seeing what's happening, not just what you want to see.

It means creating cultures where people feel safe, seen, and valued, not just processed through a system.

Even so, the individuals involved were adults and had agency.

What happened to these people, that they had disengaged from the room in front of them?

Caught in their heads.  Stuck in task mode.  Unable to see the impact they were having. A primal contempt written on their faces, unknown to them, though even a child could see it.

A wake-up call.

How many of us, head down, leave a path of destruction we’ve become unaware of, just like those nurses in the 80s?

If we don’t take time to notice, we rarely see the shadow we cast through the systems we create.

Whatever level of role we hold in an organisation.

My conclusion?

While doing the work, don’t lose the reason for it.

Or yourself.

The discipline is to stay human. The ambition is to do something that matters.