Change the human condition, or the conditions humans work in?

March 31, 2025 Published by Sharee Johnson

If we can’t change the human condition, but we can change the conditions they work in …what should we do? 

Specifically, what should we do to improve healthcare for those who work in it and for those who as patients and clients need our help?

Last week I attended the Human Factors and Patient Safety Conference in Melbourne. I highly recommend you go next year. We were shown incredible transformations of systems within health and outside health. 

There seems to be two schools of thought about whether healthcare can learn from other industries, or whether healthcare is in fact unique, and those other industries are irrelevant for our learning.  I am definitely of the first school of thought, having often been frustrated by what I believe to be the myopia of health. 

I was interested to hear one of the speakers refer to healthcare’s innovation and noticed, in that moment, my own unconscious certainty that healthcare systems were unchanging. In that moment, with that word, innovation, I realised that my thinking about healthcare had got stuck. 

Healthcare is of course incredibly innovative and at the same time frustratingly slow moving. Both are true at the same time. 

My own stuck thinking was not remembering all the innovations that happen every day in healthcare so much, that I was literally surprised and thrown into some internal conflict when I heard that word innovation.  I was preoccupied, selecting data to support my not moving conclusion. The marginally changing rates of physician burnout, trainee bullying and patient safety errors for example.

We see what we look for. Our brain is constantly selecting the data it pays attention to. In healthcare the noble certainty that the system is complex might be getting in our way. My noble certainty that healthcare is myopic might be getting in my way.

This idea of noble certainty was first used by William Isaacs and introduced to me by coach Dr Paul Lawrence¹. A noble certainty is a belief, value or judgement we might hold that prevents us from truly listening. To me this is a kind way to say assumptions! And critical to notice because listening is how we get to understanding and I agree with many scholars, we need to seek first to understand.

It is normal for humans to want to simplify complexity and to be oblivious to our unconscious assumptions, it is the human condition. To know this and to build habits that help mitigate these human factors, is to raise our awareness and capacity to lead change. Without this awareness the risk is endless frustration and confusion as our change efforts make little impact.

What noble certainties are you holding that are getting in your way when it comes to change, hope, and leadership in healthcare?  

Discovering our unconscious assumptions and biases can open up a whole field of learning and choice in our lives. I don’t know about you, I want to live in the open field, not the town square. 

Coaching is a powerful way to attend to your human factors, to see how you are contributing to your internal and external environment, to get unstuck. Raising our awareness of the human condition can help us change the conditions we work in, for our benefit and the benefit of others. 

1.  Paul Lawrence Principal Coach at Leading Suystemically, William Isaac’s book is Dialogue and The Art of Thinking Together ↩︎

Sharee Johnson is the Founder, Managing Director, Principal Coach at Coaching for Doctors. She is the bestselling author of The Thriving Doctor: How to be more balanced and fulfilled, working in medicine and a Registered Psychologist. She has written extensively about doctor wellbeing, performance and coaching, delivers workshops to doctors and speaks at medical conferences. You can connect with her on Linkedin and Instagram. The best way is to subscribe to the Coaching for Doctors monthly newsletter

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Sharee Johnson’s book The Thriving Doctor is available in all good bookstores or online.

Sharee has been coaching doctors since 2014, find out more about her work