What becoming a patient taught me about leadership

Last Saturday, while changing my bandages, I noticed the wound on my wrist was not healing as it should.

I called the ER, thinking I’d be in and out with a fancy new bandage or maybe a couple of stitches. Instead, they found a nasty infection and told me I was staying. Just like that, our weekend plans disappeared into thin air. Life has a way of rewriting your schedule when you least expect it.

That evening, I shuffled into a dimly lit four-person hospital room, feeling a bit like the new kid at school. Mrs. Scrumpy came to the rescue, bringing clothes and bathroom essentials from home and helping me settle in. Meanwhile, I was making friends with my new companion for the next few days: an IV stand on wheels.

The next morning, I met my roommates. Three kind women, each ten to twenty years older than me, each dealing with nasty fractures seriously hindering their mobility. Moving around was a battle against pain for them. They were dependent on the nurses for the most basic daily tasks.

With just two tubes and a drip stand, I almost felt like an imposter in the land of real patients.

Hospital rituals

At 7:30 each morning, cheerful nurses made their rounds, checking blood pressure, oxygen levels, and temperature. And yes, they always ask about your latest trip to the bathroom. Nothing like a little hospital honesty to start your day!

Medication rounds followed. Wound inspections. Bandage changes. Coffee and tea are served twice a day. A tablet is provided for entertainment and to order your own meals, drinks, and snacks. The food is pretty good, actually, way better than I expected.

I was very happy that my wife was able to visit me twice a day during visiting hours. Each visit was a welcome break from the routine. And oddly strange, because we live together, we see each other every day, and suddenly she was a visitor coming to see me in a place I didn’t belong.

In between all of that, there was nothing much to do.

My bed became my whole world. I had books, my phone, my laptop, and the company of my roommates. As the days passed, we swapped stories about our injuries and our lives, slowly growing closer in our little hospital bubble. Some of their stories were truly heartbreaking, and it reminded me how much we all carry beneath the surface.

A subtle shift

By Monday morning, I noticed something had shifted. I felt tired and unmotivated, like staying in bed was the only thing that made sense. I had no urge to get up, no energy to move, and nothing in particular pulling me forward. There was no physical reason for it. The IV stand, which was supposed to help me move around, suddenly felt more like an anchor. What was going on?

The system had happened.

Without even realizing it, I had surrendered to my surroundings. The hospital treats you as a patient, and before you know it, you start acting like one. Everything is provided, everything is managed, and you are monitored, measured, and cared for, sometimes a little too well. The environment, though built with the best intentions, quietly takes away your sense of control. And when you lose that, motivation just slips away. I was in full patient mode before I knew it.

It wasn’t that I chose to feel apathetic. The environment just made apathy the easiest path to take.

There is a quote I come back to often as a Scrum Master: “Don’t fix the people; fix the system.” I have written this on whiteboards. I have said it in meetings with management. I’ve taught it in training. I did not expect to need someone to say it about me.

When something is going on in a team, the instinct is to focus solely on the team’s members. But behavior does not emerge in a vacuum. It emerges from an environment. How are people being treated? What are people rewarded for? What examples are being set? What does the system make easy, and what does it make hard?

My hospital stay turned out to be a surprisingly vivid lesson in exactly this.

I wasn’t lazy or weak. I was just a fairly healthy person placed in an environment that treated me as dependent, and so I became dependent. Once I realized what was happening, I could start to push back. But without that awareness, I would have stayed in bed and called it recovery.

Now what?

So before you focus on people who seem disengaged or stuck, at work or at home, take a look at the system around them. What’s made easy? What’s made difficult? What’s encouraged, and what’s quietly discouraged?

Often, the real issue is in the system, not the person. If you’re part of that system, start there. That’s where real change begins.