The Steady Middle
Every organisation knows how to run at an emergency. Almost none know what to do in the year afterwards, when the adrenaline is gone, the press has moved on, and the people who held everything together are quietly updating their CVs.
Drawing on 240 interviews across four sectors, Imogen Hale maps the terrain of the long middle: the repair conversations nobody schedules, the false recovery at month seven, and the difference between a team that is coping and a team that is quietly emptying out.
A practical, humane book about capacity rather than grit.
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PublisherVerrall & Boyd (fictional)Pages288 · Hardback, ebook, audioISBN978-0-0000000-0-0NarratorRead by the author
Dov Krainer
The Pellinore Review
Prof. Anneke Vos
Lowry School
Marcus Ilesanmi
Ward manager
One · The month the flowers stop arriving
Chapter one, complete. About nine minutes.
The first thing the ward manager told me, when I finally got her to sit down, was that she missed the worst week. Not the work of it — the clarity. For nine days in February everybody knew exactly what mattered, nobody asked her to fill in a form, and strangers left flowers at reception.
By June the flowers had stopped, the forms were back, and four of her best nurses had gone to an agency for a pay rise she could not match. Nobody called that a crisis. There was no name for it at all, which is part of why it went on so long.
This book is about that unnamed stretch. I call it the steady middle — not because it feels steady from inside, but because it decides whether anything you did in the emergency actually holds.
Excerpt fictional