I was having a retro moment recently, and I happened to hear The Mending Song from Bagpuss. It landed with me in a way that it hadn’t before. Many of us are ‘fixers’, that’s probably the reason we ended up working in healthcare. We are focussed on trying to make everything better, be that people, organisations, cultures or situations. There is no challenge that many of our ‘fix it’ nature’s won’t try to tackle.

This seemed especially poignant, as I posted last month about approaches when work life becomes challenging. A key aspect that struck me when I was writing that post was about really understanding what sits within our scope to impact and what doesn’t. There’s a really clear reason why it is important to understand this. If the thing you are trying to impact or ‘fix’ is outside your scope of impact or control, no matter how much you want it to be otherwise, you are setting yourself up for failure if your success criteria include change. You are setting yourself up for disappointment, stress, and frustration before you even start. This doesn’t mean that you can’t work to change your scope of influence or set a different set of success criteria, but that is really a different thing. If just just dive right in there, without first addressing this fundamental barrier, all you will impact is your blood pressure.

We will find it, we will bind it We will stick it with glue, glue, glue We will stickle it, every little bit of it We will fix it like new, new, new.

So, how do we understand what is in and out of our scope to impact or control. Well, there are layers to this, and it does truly depend on whether you are trying to influence or whether you are going as far as trying to control.

In terms of true control, the only person is we can exert that on is ourselves. Trying to control anything else sets us up for failure. So why did we try?

Impact and influence are a bit different. I think deep down we know the piece about control, but we are less good at having the conversation with ourselves about impact and influence. We start trying to ‘fix’ things and then see ourselves as failures when it doesn’t happen. The years during and since the pandemic have been a real life lesson in this area for me. So, in this post I’m going to talk about 6 areas where I’ve sought to undertake ‘the fix’, failed, and learnt why I’d set myself up with expectations that could not be achieved.

You can’t always ‘fix’ people

Throughout my life, I have been a somewhat collector of lost souls. From early boyfriends to PhD students who have had supervision issues, I’m a real believer that we should always be there for others and take situations as we find them, rather than judging based on hearsay or prior scenarios. Before I get started here, I’d like to say that I still strongly believe in this. What I have learnt the hard way though is that a certain percentage of time, the prior experiences of the person are so strong that patterns cannot be altered. If you take the open door approach, there will, therefore, be times when you can’t change the outcomes in the way you’d like.

When this happened to me recently, I wasted a lot of time agonising about what I should have done differently, where my flaws were in terms of response, where I had failed. I have come to realise that that time was wasted emotional energy that removed my focus from other important things. Don’t get me wrong, I think active reflection is always important, but there is a difference between that and entering into a self flagellation pity party. One is essential and productive, and the other leads to spirals and self recrimination.

Once I exited the spiral I realised I had fallen into thinking I had control rather than understanding my influence on another person, especially a person who is not a close friend or family, is always going to be highly limited. You can offer support, and you can change environments within your influence, but the person who actually has the control is the individual you are aiming to support. The work has to be done by them and not you. You can’t work harder as a surrogate for them.

As a result of this, I’m trying to be much more self-aware of where my control actually sits and using this to support my thinking in terms of boundaries and expectation setting. I’m giving myself permission to avoid entering into relationships that extend beyond support into ‘fixing’ territory. I’m also learning that this is important in maintaining my mental health and well-being. It is hard to see how badly those can be impacted until the situation is resolved, but I can’t help anyone else if I am not in a good space, and so sacrificing my mental well being is actually a short sighted response that leads to no one getting a good outcome in the end. It feels selfish, but sometimes you have to put yourself first.

You can’t always ‘fix’ situations

There are plenty of times when people come to you as someone in a leadership position and want you to ‘fix’ something. Sometimes, this is possible, often, more often than I’d hoped, you can make or help someone to make a step, but the ‘fix’ is out of your control.

On a large scale, I have previously written about some of the decision-making  during the pandemic. It was a really humbling and eye opening experience to discover how quickly scope of influence can expand and contract, and how much that scope of influence changes based on whether you are currently acting in the role of decision maker or not. Having people come to you and advocate for vastly different positions, combined with actually having a time limited ability to influence, made me realise how important it is to face up to the reality of where your scope lies. It also made me realise how much you may need to review where those zones lie in rapidly changing situations. Relationships and scopes of influence are never static and so always require periodic review, but this is even more important in changing or high stakes situations.

On a one to one level, I often experience this, not about organisational but about individual situations. A common one is the ‘I want to do a PhD’ approach. This happens multiple times each year. Sometimes, people just want more information about the pathway or what the options are. I’ve written a blog about this as I get asked the question a lot. Other times, it’s framed more like ‘what can you do to get me a PhD?’. In these circumstances, I give the information, but I often get stared at towards the end as if I’m not delivering. I then have to enter the discussion that acquiring a PhD is a self driven process and needs the individual to drive it. The same is true with a lot of postgraduate training pathways or career opportunities.  I can help and support, but I can’t do it for them. I can’t ‘fix’ the holes on CVs that need filling. Only they can do that. I can open doors, but they are the ones that need to choose to walk through them.

You can’t always ‘fix’ injustice

Sometimes, when I’m approached, it is about a situation, but just on the surface. When you dig deeper, it’s not about someone not stepping up and doing the work. It’s about a whole bunch of barriers they didn’t know about or haven’t been able to fix. Individuals either then reach out or I become aware, and of course, what I want to do is ride into those barriers, sledge hammer swinging, and break them down to bring equity and justice to the situation. This is definitely one where I thought, and do, have more influence over as I get more senior. The sad news is that although I can do more, I’m discovering I still can’t ‘fix’ everything.

I have a great number of examples on this one, anything from male colleagues not having to apply for or be interviewed for roles when female colleagues are made to jump through hoops, to scientists getting paid a third less to do the same jobs as medical colleagues. I wish I didn’t have so many, but if I started listing, I would be here all day.

So if I can’t fix it, what are my other routes of action. Well, firstly, writing things like this blog enables me to shine a light and at least raise awareness of the injustices I can’t ‘fix’. Then there are a whole bunch of active positions I can take with my leadership, even if the issue is too big for me to ‘fix’ alone. Actions such as advocacy and saying people names in rooms where they are absent in order to increase access. Being brave enough to call things out as they happen, challenging that misogynistic, racist or homophobic comment in the moment, and taking a stand. Being accountable and actively demonstrating my values, and by doing so, hopefully offering a safe space to those who might need it. Being there to support, whilst acknowledging that no sledgehammer wielded by a single person is going to be enough, so you have to lift up others so you can hammer those walls together.

You can’t always ‘fix’ cultures

Organisational cultures bring with them different values and different aims. They are complex and act almost like living beings, in that they develop and change over time. If ‘fixing’ individuals is difficult, then ‘fixing’ cultures can come with mind-boggling complexity.

One of the things I’ve found challenging is when I’ve been part of a group or organisation which started off with values that were completely aligned with my personal value set, which is the reason I joined, and then morphed into something where those two things were far from the same. It is also complicated even further when the espoused values do match, but the values demonstrated by the group decision making tell a different story.

There are a few different choices I’ve made at various points in my life and career, depending on how much continued participation mattered to me. The big one is always do you stay or do you go. Do you stay and try to influence internally, or do you call it quits and move on to something that is better aligned. The right decision, for me, is based on a) how committed you are to the purpose of said group and b) how much influence do you have to affect the change you want to make?

Large-scale organisations are even more complex as they not only have an overall culture,  but they will also consist of a number of smaller subcultures, which may be easier to change or influence. I count myself fortunate to be part of a team that I feel is super aligned with my values and beliefs. It hasn’t always been that way however. I’ve been part of other teams that haven’t been the same. On one occasion, many moons ago, my then team mates and I even had to escalate that we would leave if a change in leadership did not occur as the disconnect was so pronounced.  This was one of the most powerful examples of collective action I’ve been involved with, and it succeeded because our point of escalation was also aligned to our values and purpose. Knowing your scope of influence and the landscape you are navigating can therefore be incredibly powerful,  but understanding that scope is key to success.

You can’t always ‘fix’ the way others see the world

Firstly, and I cannot say this strongly enough, just because someone holds a different opinion, view, or vision of the world to you does not automatically make them wrong. There is room for diversity of thought in this world, and the very presence of that diversity makes us stronger as a whole. This is especially true when that diversity of thought is not causing anyone harm and drives us to better evolve our thinking in response.

The ‘not causing harm’ component of this one is key for me. If that world view is harming others by restricting access to care or opportunities, for example, I will always endeavour to challenge, as already discussed. What I’m having to learn, though, is that that challenge does not necessarily lead to changes in behaviour, no matter how many facts you put behind the discussion. Human beings are complex, and they have both intrinsic and extrinsic beliefs. Sometimes, it’s not even those that are proclaiming their beliefs that are the ones who are most firmly set in their world view and then it can be difficult to even identify where to start your discussions.

I think accepting our scope of influence in these cases is crucial to understand in order to not get disheartened.  In a world of spiralling conspiracy theories and loss of faith in science, it is important to know that it is not just a case of sitting someone down with a bunch of evidence and having a single good discussion. Changing someone’s beliefs or understanding of the world requires you to understand where the origin of those beliefs lies, and it may be no where near as obvious as we’d like to think. Additionally, long-term change is usually not seated in facts but in emotion, and that’s a whole different ball game that we may not be equipped to play.

Interestingly, for me, this ‘not causing harm’ component also extends to harm to self and links nicely back to not being able to change individuals. I’ve had people I’ve thought of as friends, who were so locked into self-destructive patterns of behaviour, based on their view that the grass was always greener elsewhere, that they couldn’t stay in any one situation long enough to start to ‘fix’ those patterns. I discovered the hard way that no matter the presented evidence you couldn’t get them to see the world in a different way. Sometimes, an external lens is just what someone needs to see themselves enough to spark change. Sometimes, that view is just so alien that discover you are not even speaking the same language.

You can’t always ‘fix’ yourself

Talking about changing people, we are not ourselves above having the same light cast upon us, and in theory, this is the one area where our scope should include control and not just variable levels of influence. The problem with discussion about ‘fixing’ ourselves is the mistaken assumption that some form of perfection can or will be able to exist. I have to tell you, as a recovering perfectionist, there is no such thing, and this is one of the biggest lies we tell ourselves. Worse than that, by aiming for such a lie, we set ourselves up to fail, over and over again.

None of us are, or can be perfect, we are constant works in progress. Perfection indicates some form of static existence,  whereas that cannot be the reality. Life is change, and we need to change and adapt with it. We learn and grow, and with that comes failure and the ability to do better next time. So my view on this has become: accept your flaws, and own your areas for improvement. After all, we are humans, not machines. The most powerful thought that I’m striving to embed is that I need to acknowledge there is sometimes beauty in both the flawed and the broken. If it is necessary for me to ‘fix’ parts of myself, as part of striving for improvement and healing, it is because I am better for it rather than because of punishing myself with the myth of perfection.

The one thing I hope we all take away from this blog is to not confuse the reality that change is outside of our area of influence with powerlessness. We always have the power to change. To change ourselves, to change our scope of influence, and eventually, if it matters enough, to work towards collective bigger change. Until then, treat yourself with the compassion that you would offer others and learn to not set yourself up for failure and distress by understanding where your current boundaries and influence lie. Stop trying to ‘fix’ what cannot be fixed, and try learning to love the flawed and different when it is right to do so.

All opinions in this blog are my own