What If the System Isn’t Broken?

I’ve spent most of my adult life inside systems.

Health care systems. Government systems. Education systems. Organizational systems designed to serve, protect, optimize, and improve human lives. I’ve worked as a consultant, a change agent, a fixer. I’ve helped redesign processes, modernize tools, streamline workflows, and build bridges between intention and impact.

And for a long time, I believed deeply in the premise that sat beneath all of that work:

The system is broken. If we fix it, people will be better served.

Lately, something in me has shifted.

Not in a dramatic, burn-it-all-down kind of way.

More like a quiet click.

A loosening.

A recognition that arrived slowly, and then all at once.

I’m stepping away from my consulting contracts — not because the work doesn’t matter, and not because the people inside these systems don’t care. They care deeply. Many of them are exhausted from caring.

I’m stepping away because I no longer believe the systems I’ve been trying to fix are broken.

I’m beginning to suspect they are operating exactly as they were designed to operate.

This isn’t a conclusion I’m offering as truth. It’s simply the place I’ve arrived at after decades of proximity, participation, and sincere effort. And I’m still sitting with it. Still grappling. Still letting it rearrange me.

But here’s what I can see.

When a system consistently produces overwhelm, fragmentation, inequity, burnout, and disconnection — across decades, leadership changes, restructures, and reforms — we have to at least ask a different question.

What if these outcomes aren’t failures?

What if they are features?

What if the system isn’t malfunctioning…

but faithfully performing its original design?

Most modern systems were not built primarily for human flourishing. They were built for efficiency, control, predictability, risk mitigation, scalability, and compliance. They were shaped in eras that prioritized order over aliveness, standardization over relationship, and output over well-being.

When we judge these systems as “broken,” we’re often measuring them against values they were never designed to hold.

And so we keep trying to fix them.

We add programs.

We introduce new tools.

We reorganize reporting structures.

We ask people to work harder, faster, leaner, better.

And when it doesn’t work, we internalize the failure.

Leaders blame themselves.

Workers feel inadequate.

Communities are told to be more patient, more resilient, more adaptable.

But what if the exhaustion isn’t a sign that we’re failing the system?

What if it’s a sign that the system is succeeding?

This question has been deeply uncomfortable for me. My identity has been woven through being someone who helps, who fixes, who improves. Letting this inquiry in has meant letting go of a certain kind of usefulness. A certain kind of belonging.

It has also brought relief.

Because if the system isn’t broken, then maybe the problem isn’t that we haven’t tried hard enough.

Maybe the problem is that we keep asking systems built for control to deliver care.

That we keep asking structures born of empire to create wholeness.

That we keep expecting environments that reward disconnection to somehow generate belonging.

And maybe — just maybe — the invitation isn’t to fix these systems at all.

Maybe the invitation is to notice what they make normal.

What they make necessary.

What they make inevitable.

And to ask ourselves, honestly and without judgment:

What am I participating in?

What am I propping up?

What am I trying to repair that was never designed to love me back?

I don’t have clean answers yet. I’m not standing on a new platform offering a better model. I’m simply choosing to step back, to stop intervening in the same way, and to listen more closely to what life is asking of me now.

So I’ll leave you with the inquiry that’s been working on me:

What if the systems you live and work inside aren’t broken?

What if they are performing exactly as they were meant to perform?

And if that’s true —

what becomes possible next?

Not as a demand.

Not as a solution.

But as an opening.