In 2010, I joined Macquarie University Hospital, Australia’s first fully digital hospital. It was meant to be a beacon of innovation, but while the equipment was new, the thinking behind it wasn’t. Instead of bold ideas, we got boilerplate rollouts. Instead of passion for doing better, we got a belief that shiny tools would fix systemic issues.

And yet, for a moment, it felt like something else. Amid the chaos - unfinished buildings, no desks, and only the vaguest of plans - people pitched in wherever they could. It felt like a startup, but it was something much rarer: a brief moment in a large, complex, heavily governed organisation where mission, urgency, and belief temporarily overcame bureaucracy.

This is the story of what happened next. Not a blueprint, but a lived experience. A journey from frustration to momentum, from disengagement to advocacy; and from seeing users as consumers to recognising them not just as collaborators, but as leaders.

I’ll share how we turned a disillusioned clinical workforce into passionate advocates through an internally branded movement called MUH on Tap, an initiative that reframed everything from login times to lunch payments around a single, unifying idea: make it seamless, and make it work for them. It marked a shift from “we must show off our technology” to “our technology should be invisible.”

This isn’t a story of technical heroics. It’s about listening, iterating, and reframing. It’s about how internal product thinking, trust-building, and a bit of endo-marketing changed the relationship between IT and its users. And it’s about how, in trying to change a system, I changed the way I work, the way I think, and the way I view technology's place in the world.