I’ve been watching the early seasons of the ER television series recently, and watching the actors work at pretending to be in the emergency room around the bed brought back some memories. What I noticed, though, and what I remember most are the dance.

No, not a cheesy dance in a cheesy musical about cheesy things – something that almost sounds like it’s trying to attract a certain Disney mouse. No, what I mean is the way in certain situations, everyone works together just right for a common outcome. The patient.

When patient’s lives are on the line there’s a bunch of trained professionals that do everything that they can to save a life. The untrained eye may see absolute mayhem, but it’s controlled chaos, it’s a pattern that evolves as the patient’s needs evolve. There are lots of things that happen to stabilize that person, they happen in order and priority, and if you’re not a part of that dance around the bed – gurney, really – you’re in the way.

It doesn’t always work out. There are losses. Yet if you’ve ever been in that dance, you know that there’s a loss of the self as the team works on something, and the leader of the whole thing is not anyone around the gurney. The real leader of the dance is the health of the patient, and everyone around them tries to meet those needs.

It doesn’t just happen in medicine. It happens everywhere when people have a common goal and a focus that isn’t themselves. I’ve seen and been part of it when it comes to production lines in industrial compounds, I’ve seen it during disasters, in software projects, and even in families. Everyone pitches in and gets things done to assure a ‘good outcome’, or at least minimize a bad one. I’ve seen it on the Internet a few times, but not as much. Open Source started off that way, and to a degree it still is so.

I don’t see it as often as I used to since social media began. Maybe it’s because you always have some “influencer’s” face stuck on the screen. Maybe it’s because everyone is trying to impress everyone else. Maybe it’s because values have shifted. Or maybe it’s just me and what I get stuck looking at.

It seems to me though that people are divided and when they are, they don’t find the common things to work on. It also seems to me that people who do want to change things feel powerless because they are, and to find people with common goals seems an insurmountable task by itself. People don’t believe that they can have an effect as they hop in their cars during the week to sit in traffic to get to an office or worksite to do something that someone else wants them to do so that they can pay bills for a home that they barely see.

I don’t know. I just know it seems to me like people aren’t working together as much on common goals, instead fighting artificial conflicts for others.

Or maybe it’s always been this way.