Was Scott Robertson Set Up to Fail? What Healthcare Can Learn About Leadership and Systems

I came across a discussion recently about Scott Robertson and his time with the All Blacks, and like most of these conversations it focused on whether he was the right person for the role and whether he delivered what people expected. It’s an easy place to start, focusing on the individual, but it got me thinking about something I see all the time in the work I do around Human Factors.

We’re very quick to look at performance through the lens of the person. Was he the right leader? Did he make the right decisions? Did he get the best out of the team? But from a Human Factors perspective, that’s often the least useful place to start. A better question is what kind of system did he step into, and what did that system make possible for him.

He wasn’t starting from scratch. He was stepping into one of the most established high-performance environments in sport, with a strong identity, clear expectations, and ways of working that had been shaped over years of success. Those things are powerful because they create consistency and high standards, but they also come with constraints. Systems that are very good at maintaining performance aren’t always very good at adapting or reinventing themselves.

That’s something we see all the time in healthcare. Leaders are brought in to improve services, strengthen culture, or drive change, and they arrive with experience and a clear sense of what good looks like. But they also inherit a system. That system is shaped by existing processes, organisational history, cultural norms, and very real operational pressures. None of that is neutral. It all influences how people behave, what feels possible, and what feels too risky to try.

In Human Factors and HOP, we talk a lot about how outcomes are shaped by the interaction between people and the system they work in. If you want to understand performance, you have to look at the conditions people are working under. What does the system reward? What does it make difficult? How much space is there to challenge how things are done? What pressures are influencing the decisions people make day to day?

Without that, it’s very easy to default to a narrative that focuses on the individual. In healthcare, we talk a lot about learning cultures, psychological safety, and continuous improvement, and frameworks like PSIRF are built on those ideas. But at the same time, many systems still lean towards consistency, compliance, and doing things in ways that feel familiar. That creates a tension. We say we want change, but the system isn’t always set up to support it.

Over time, people adapt to that. Not because they lack capability or intent, but because the system makes certain behaviours easier than others. That’s a key Human Factors principle. Performance is shaped by the system. So when things don’t go as expected, it’s worth asking not just what the individual did, but what the system encouraged, allowed, or constrained.

From the outside, it can look like someone hasn’t delivered. But a more useful question is whether they were ever given the conditions to do what was being asked of them. Was there real space for innovation? Was challenge genuinely welcomed, or was it uncomfortable? Was change actually supported, or only when it stayed close to what already existed?

This feels particularly relevant in the current NHS context. Organisations are under pressure from multiple directions at once, but there is also a clear ambition to improve safety, culture, and outcomes. Those things aren’t in conflict, but they do require systems that are deliberately designed to support them. If we keep focusing primarily on individuals, we risk repeating the same patterns, changing people without changing the conditions they’re working in.

For me, that was the real takeaway from that discussion. It’s not really about whether Scott Robertson was the right or wrong person. It’s about whether the system around him was set up in a way that allowed him to do what he was brought in to do.

And that’s a question that applies just as much in healthcare. It’s not just about having the right people. It’s about creating the right conditions for those people to succeed. Because if the system isn’t aligned with what’s being asked of them, then the outcome was never going to be about the individual alone.