Chrome

Had an appointment with Dr Y (the psychiatrist currently responsible for my treatment) today. He has referred me for psychotherapy and asked if I’d heard from the Consultant Psychotherapist yet. Nope – still waiting.

I took along the DVLA’s letter refusing to renew my driving licence and showed it to him. Dr Y encouraged me to re-apply. He will support my application. Came home and got onto that straight away.

Today I’ve been thinking about agents for change. There was a TV programme recently where an archaeologist was talking about the Iron Age and demonstrated a method of extracting metal ore, smelting it in a clay pot and casting it. The final piece was flawed and he went on to say that the techniques used by Iron Age man were vastly superior to anything he had managed. He couldn’t replicate the quality of their work. It set me thinking about the early days of apprenticeships – how knowledge and experience were passed on in the days before reading and writing were commonplace. Later another interesting snippet caught my eye from an advert for Dyson vacuum cleaners where it was demonstrated that a typical vacuum cleaner with a fixed four-wheel system was ok if you want to move the hoover backwards and forwards, but was rubbish at cornering. Dyson had stepped back and looked at the design and innovated a new design feature using a ball to carry the cleaning head. His ball design permits greater manoeuvrability.

I thought about this and the paradoxical needs – when you first enter a field of endeavour it seems to make sense to explore what’s already known, perhaps to serve an apprenticeship to an established master in that field – but then it takes energy/intention to step back and review that knowledge, spot an area ripe for improvement and be an agent for change. It seems to me there is evidence of us having moved on as a race, in that whereas in the past it was perceived that knowledge = power, and men working at the forefront of their field often cloaked their work in secrecy, there is more openness these days. As George Bernard Shaw said, “If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange these apples then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas." It’s great to hear of examples of collaboration, for example Google acknowledge open source programming projects have contributed much to the development of their new web browser, Chrome. Have you tried it yet, by the way? I’m struggling to find my way around the new-look Facebook so I haven’t risked switching browsers, tempting though it sounds.