Yesterday, I read an article that stopped me. Rachel Wells, a writer and technology entrepreneur, publicly shared that her family is facing the loss of their home. She described continuing to write, build, pitch, and speak about artificial intelligence (AI) and the future of work while privately confronting a far more immediate question: Where will my family live?
Her story stayed with me because it exposes something larger than one family’s crisis. We have become remarkably comfortable celebrating people’s capacity to endure systems that are failing them. Health care knows this pattern well.
We call clinicians resilient while asking them to function amid staffing shortages, administrative burden, moral distress, and increasing technological demands. We praise caregivers for their strength while they coordinate appointments, medications, transportation, employment, children, aging parents, insurance disputes, and bills. We admire patients who follow treatment plans while sometimes overlooking whether the economic and social conditions surrounding them make adherence sustainable.
And when people continue functioning, their performance can become evidence that everything must still be manageable. That is where resilience becomes dangerous.
Real physician voices, twice a week
Free, and one click to unsubscribe.
Competence can conceal crisis
Some of the people most at risk of being overlooked are precisely the people who continue performing. They show up. They meet deadlines. They care for others. They solve problems. They remain composed.
Organizations may interpret those behaviors as indicators of capacity. But continued performance does not necessarily mean adequate capacity remains. Sometimes a human being is absorbing the difference between what a system requires and what the system actually supports.
That distinction matters in health care because organizations routinely measure what is visible: productivity, quality, patient experience, turnover, utilization, and outcomes. Human strain can remain less visible until something changes.
A clinician leaves. A caregiver can no longer manage the load. A patient misses treatment. An employee burns out. A family enters crisis. What eventually appears as an individual outcome may have developed within conditions accumulating for months or years.
The problem with celebrating resilience
Resilience is valuable. Adaptability is necessary. But neither should become a substitute for institutional responsibility. When organizations repeatedly rely on people to compensate for structural deficiencies, resilience can become an unofficial operating model.
The nurse covers another shortage. The physician finishes documentation after hours. The manager absorbs another responsibility. The caregiver misses another day of work. The patient navigates another fragmented process.
Everyone adapts. Until someone cannot. Then we risk asking what happened to the person without also asking what happened around the person.
That is why conversations about workforce well-being, burnout, patient experience, health equity, and technological transformation cannot stop at individual coping. We also have to examine workload, resources, incentives, workflow design, psychological safety, accountability, and whether the organization has the capacity to support the changes it continually asks people to absorb.
Technology can move faster than human adaptation
Rachel’s story introduces another dimension that health care cannot afford to ignore. Technological transformation can alter livelihoods, workflows, professional identities, and economic security. Health care is already navigating these questions with artificial intelligence.
The question is no longer simply what AI can do. The harder question is: Who absorbs the disruption created by what AI can do?
If an innovation produces efficiency for an institution while transferring additional workload, uncertainty, displacement risk, or adaptation burden to workers, technical performance tells only part of the implementation story. Human consequences are part of the outcome. That is a governance question. Health care leaders should be asking it before technological capability outruns organizational readiness.
Sometimes the strongest person in the room needs help
People accustomed to being the resource for everyone else may find it extraordinarily difficult to become the person asking for resources. Professional success can make the need harder to see. We assume the accomplished person has connections. We assume the physician is financially secure. We assume the executive has options. We assume the caregiver knows how to navigate the system.
We assume the person who has always figured it out will figure this out too. Sometimes they will. Sometimes that assumption helps conceal the moment when they cannot.
Leadership is not only the capacity to carry responsibility. Sometimes it is the willingness to tell the truth when carrying it alone is no longer sustainable. Community cannot merely admire that vulnerability. It has to know how to respond to it.
From sympathy to infrastructure
Rachel’s article reached me because someone shared it. That matters. We may not personally possess the resource someone needs, but we may know someone who does.
Health care depends on this principle constantly. We refer. We consult. We coordinate. We escalate. We connect people with expertise and resources beyond our own capacity. Perhaps our understanding of community should work the same way.
If you cannot solve the problem, you may still be able to move the problem closer to someone who can. That turns support from sentiment into infrastructure.
Rachel has publicly said her family needs safe housing before August 10, 2026. She has asked for financial support, credible housing leads, paid work, speaking and consulting opportunities, partnerships, investor introductions, and amplification of her story.
I do not know where this article will travel. But I know her story traveled through someone else’s network before it reached mine. So I am carrying it one network further.
Reader support information
Rachel Wells has provided the following information for readers who may be positioned to help:
- Crowdfunding support: Donate to support Rachel Wells and family secure a safe home
- Partnerships and speaking engagements: Work20 Media
Rachel provided these resources directly and asked that they be shared with readers who may be able to assist.
Tiffiny Black is an organizational governance and change strategist, scholar-practitioner, and author whose work examines how governance, organizational systems, policy, technology, and human behavior shape implementation and sustainable change. She holds a Doctor of Management with a specialization in organizational development and change.
Across more than eighteen years in health care, government, regulatory oversight, compliance, and organizational improvement, she has focused on the gap between institutional intent and what systems and people can sustain in practice. Her work spans organizational readiness, psychological transition, governance and accountability, health care systems, artificial intelligence and data governance, privacy and compliance, and the human consequences of organizational and technological change. She is the developer of Human Systems Readiness™, an emerging framework examining whether organizations and their people are structurally and psychologically prepared to absorb change.
Black is the author of Leader’s Edition: The Psychology of Change, Safety, Resistance, and Real Accountability and The Change They Didn’t See Coming: Why Psychological Transition (and Safety) Matter More Than Strategy, both published by Bold Moves Press. Her doctoral research at Colorado Technical University examined the psychological transitioning that leads to change resistance in law enforcement. Her writing on KevinMD addresses institutional trust and scientific dissent, clinician burnout and health care governance, psychological safety, payment integrity and fraud detection, and the difference between implementation and readiness. She shares updates on LinkedIn.
