The Vision Problem

I read a post in a chiropractic Facebook group last week that said, simply, I’m leaving. Not “help me love this again.” Not “give me a program or a coach.” Just: I’m done, and I need to know what’s next.

By the time I finished scrolling the comments, there were over two hundred of them. Most weren’t advice. They were confessions. Other chiropractors saying, in their own words, that they were barely hanging on too or they’d left and found fulfillment doing something else.

I’ve spent enough time in organizational development research now to recognize what I was looking at. It wasn’t two hundred individual burnouts. It was a profession stuck in a loop it doesn’t know how to exit.

Why we keep having the same fight

Here’s what nobody tells you in school: conflict inside a profession isn’t automatically a sign that something is broken. Sometimes it’s a sign that something it’s time for something new to be created.

One foundational framework in organizational change research describes dialectical change as rooted in the idea that existence is shaped by contradiction and conflict, playing out through a thesis meeting its antithesis and the two, eventually, producing something new (Van de Ven & Poole, 1995).

That’s the part that stopped me. Not conflict as dysfunction. Conflict as one of the real, legitimate ways organizations change and grow.

But here’s the catch, and it’s the part the chiropractic profession hasn’t figured out yet. Dialectical change only works if both sides are moving toward a synthesis. If nobody is looking towards what comes after the fight, the thesis and antithesis just keep colliding. That’s chiropractic. The old guard and the reformers, the philosophy purists and the musculoskeletal camp, round and round, because nobody has spelled out what we’re building toward. Everyone’s in the ring, and nobody called the fight’s purpose.

The other piece: who’s willing to step in

I think about the license board renewal I went through when I decided to get my license back after leaving the profession for 2.5 years. Money taken, then: months of silence, no explanation and inconsistent responses. I was furious, and I had every right to be. But a woman I interviewed for my master’s research, who’d served on her own state board, said something I haven’t been able to shake: if you don’t like it, join it and do something about it.

Most of us don’t. We vent in a group chat but don’t engage in the rooms where the profession’s actual mechanisms and trajectory get decided. There’s a reason for that beyond apathy. Research on burnout consistently links an external locus of control, believing outcomes happen to you rather than through you, with poorer wellbeing among providers (Maslach et al., 2001). When you’ve spent years feeling like a victim of the system, joining the conversation where the system gets built can feel pointless before you’ve even tried.

That belief is expensive. It keeps good people out of exactly the spaces where a shared vision could get built.

What this means for you

If you’re worn down by our profession right now, or thinking about aspects of our professional lives makes you want to run away and hide while questioning why it has to be so hard, the answer is another program teaching you to love it again from the outside in. And it’s not leaving without ever asking what you were fighting for.

The honest work is smaller and harder than both of those. It’s asking whether you’ve been treating this profession’s conflict as something happening to you, or something you have a hand and even in a responsibility in resolving. It’s asking whether you’ve ever said out loud, to anyone, what future you’d want us building toward, not just what you’re against.

We are not separate from the profession we complain about. What happens in our own practice, our own body, our own sense of worth, is tied to what happens at the level of the whole. Whether we like it or not, or agree with it or not, we’re all part of the same organization and system.

We don’t need less conflict. We need a synthesis nobody’s been brave enough to step out of the squabble and name calling to build yet. And we need people willing to stay long enough to help create it.

I’m not claiming to have all the answers. But I do know I’m done pretending the fight itself is the problem. Or that it’s not also my problem just because I’ve spent most of my career trying to avoid it.

What would it look like for you to stop watching this conflict from the outside, take responsibility for your role in where we’re currently at, and start asking what you want the future we’re living into to become?

As long as we stay stuck in this loop, we will continue to fight to barely survive, rather than find a path forward where we also thrive.

References

Maslach, C., Schaufeli, W. B., & Leiter, M. P. (2001). Job burnout. Annual Review of Psychology, 52, 397–422.

Van de Ven, A. H., & Poole, M. S. (1995). Explaining development and change in organizations. Academy of Management Review, 20(3), 510–540.