Bust the Heroic Myth in Science

Posted on January 5, 2014 by Athene Donald

‘Paul Nurse believes in heroes of science’ was a line in my Twitter feed one morning recently ‘and so do I’ continued Roger Highfield, who gave the Wilkins-Bernal-Medawar Prize Lecture  at the Royal Society on this very topic last year. I don’t agree with Roger, as will be very apparent from uncoordinated articles he and I coincidentally wrote in the Daily Telegraph in successive weeks, also last year. Furthermore,  I think that this viewpoint has its dangers when applied in science education, for instance. However, reading the BBC story on which Roger based his statement, I don’t think the President of the Royal Society said precisely what was being attributed to him. It is yet another stage in myth making to translate Paul’s words

There are often big teams involved, but recognising individuals does have an impact that I’m afraid recognising groups or individuals does not.

into ‘believing in heroes‘.  I would interpret what Paul said as a translation of the reality that people want to believe in the heroic myth, not that he himself necessarily does. Maybe he would be happy with Roger’s rephrasing, but I wouldn’t count on it.

That is the trouble with myths: they evolve to suit the audience. They have a comforting feel-good factor (if they aren’t too blood-thirsty and revolting). Think of the Odysseus-like man (I fear they do tend to be male) who triumphs over adversity single-handedly and returns to claim the prize – in his case his wife of long-standing – slaughtering any inconvenient rivals in the process. That is the stuff of ‘heroes’. The fact that Odysseus couldn’t have achieved what he did without the help of the stray god or goddess along the way as well as a shipload of companions/crew conveniently gets forgotten.

That crewload of companions are the rest of the team who, in the scientist-as-hero myth get forgotten too. As often as not these will be the students who do the actual legwork  and who may (or may not) play a direct role in the whole creative process. My own view is that they almost invariably do. It is by supervisor and student(s) talking together, analysing, tearing up results, talking, pointing out the possibility of artefacts, discovering the hypothesis didn’t fit the data, talking, meandering along in the dark, talking (about the darkness), starting the process again, changing the parameters, talking….until finally the lightbulb moment occurs that is equally part of the myth. That Eureka moment is not a single act of switching on the light, it is usually a long drawn out process, with blind allies and half-truths the inevitable acquaintances encountered along the way.

It is too easy for the story being written up to be described with the captain as the only important individual on board, and the rest just a load of hired hands without a brain between them. Unfortunately this is almost exactly the analogy that Tony Hewish (winner of the 1974 Nobel Prize) drew when asked some years ago about whether it was reasonable that Jocelyn Bell Burnell was not included in the Prize. She was his student, the person who had actually spotted the traces of pulsars and who, after an extended period of observation, recognized them as not just noise. Being the ‘captain of the ship’ was the precise phrase Hewish used on the BBC’s programme Beautiful Minds about Jocelyn, leaving to the imagination what subordinate and unimportant role he felt the student had actually played. He did not, in my view, come well out of that interview.

As I mentioned in my last post, I have been reading Nicholas Harberd‘s lively account of a year in the life of a thale-cress plant, and the thoughts that accompanied his study in natural history as he struggled to unblock his creative mind (Seed to Seed). This book is not exactly written in Nicholas-as-hero mode, and I’m sure that’s not how he conceived it, but his students are curiously lacking as a source of inspiration, critique or even discussion. This I think is owing to the ‘conceit’ in which he has written his book as a diary of his own doings and the thoughts he had, coupled with the accompanying emotions along the way. Since the main focus is a single Aradopsis thalania plant in a graveyard somewhere near Norwich, it is perhaps hard to have a second focus based in his lab at the John Innes. Nevertheless this book, written as he himself says ‘to show how science can enhance our vision of the world‘ for the lay-reader is thereby potentially misleading about the way research is carried out. Harberd states in his introduction

My intention was to try to capture a sense of the scientific process within a more general picture of a mind that is engaged with it. Feelings are recorded – and feelings are things that we scientists are often overly constrained in expressing.

Much though I have enjoyed the book, much though I applaud the fact that he is honest enough to discuss feelings, including at some length how he felt ‘stuck’ for so long with no new promising avenue of research in sight for much of the year, I do wonder if his students really were so irrelevant to his discovering the next exciting line of enquiry he was going to follow as is implicitly suggested. By doing this he omits so much of what makes research rewarding.

When I wrote my piece for the Telegraph last year, stimulated by watching Stephen Hawking’s Grand Designs on the Discovery Channel, I was very conscious of the mounting pressure that the Nobel Prize should be awarded to Peter Higgs. As I wrote then

But it’s not just theorists who contributed to the “discovery” of the Higgs Boson. None of them would be in the running for the prize if it weren’t for the multi-disciplinary, international teams that built the LHC. Such large teams are increasingly typical of the way the major breakthroughs are being made.

In the event Higgs did share the prize with another theorist Francois Englert and the prize stimulated much comment about the rightness or the wrongness of this pairing winning or whether some experimentalist such as Lyn Evans (or indeed the whole of CERN) collectively should have been included. This indeed was the question that Paul Nurse was in essence answering in the BBC piece I mention above.  The debate about whether theorists or experimentalists should be judged as the ‘winners’ of such a prize was excellently dissected in a piece on scurvy  by Vanessa Heggie – that is a different issue again. But in the case of Higgs I think it is important to realise how many people contributed to the eventual discovery, even if the Nobel Prize itself is not the mechanism to do this. Hence programmes about Peter Higgs should not, as they do seem to tend to, situate themselves at the hagiographic lone-man-has-great-thought-that-solves-everything end of the spectrum. That is not the way to inform the general public watching of how science is really done and we should not allow ourselves – or them – to fall into such heroic traps.

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Science, Poetry and Gender

Posted on January 1, 2014 by Athene Donald

Not so long ago I gave a talk in Oxford about why I believe it is important for the public not to feel so distanced from science and maths that they are comfortable saying ‘I never could do maths at school’ or ‘you must be so clever to be a physicist’. Why is that acceptable in society whereas ‘I never could read Shakespeare at school’ would be regarded as beyond the pale? One listener asked me afterwards if I had ever read any of Mary Midgeley‘s work. The answer at the time was no, but I followed up his recommendation and have just been reading her Science and Poetry.

Like Gaul, this book comes in three parts. Crudely speaking, the first I found illuminating, the second irrelevant and slightly dubious on the subject of consciousness and the third too full of pious hopes (largely focussed on Gaian ideas) for my taste. So I had better just concentrate on the first part, the part that deals most explicitly with the book title and with my own interests. Some of what follows will however have been influenced by the narrative throughout.

For Midgley, a philosopher of the Mary Warnock and Elizabeth Anscombe generation in Oxford, writing books came late in life. She was 82 when this particular book was published in 2001, but age has not dimmed her language or the forcefulness of her views. For her, poetry encompasses prose just as much as the stuff poets actually write and from which she clearly feels scientists cut themselves off.  Of the book, she says in her introduction:

In particular, it asks how we can bring together our ideas of science and poetry within a whole that has a place for both of them. It investigates the strange imperialistic, isolating ideology about science which now makes this kind of connection seem impossible.

Really? Most scientists I know would not subscribe to this view of imperialism in their work (or writings).  As it happens, in parallel with reading her book I was also reading Caspar Henderson‘s wonderful Book of Barely Imagined Beings, a book that beautifully mingles the poetic and the scientific in shimmering prose that yet is packed full of detailed facts (and numbers) about the organisms he chooses for his bestiary. His book strikes me as an immediate counter-example to Midgley’s position. The juxtaposition of these two tomes made for fascinating reading, but certainly weakened my willingness to accept Midgley’s views. To pile on the evidence, the next book I picked up was Seed to Seed, by Nicholas Harberd. This is a book-cum-diary (as it happens, recommended to me by the author himself after this same Oxford talk I mentioned above) examining the life cycle of Aridopsis thalania, that I would say also effectively repudiates Midgley’s view that scientists can’t reach beyond their narrow world to bring science and the wider world into happy conjunction.

To take a specific example of Midgley’s pugnaciousness with respect to science and scientists, she has a long history of disagreement with Richard Dawkins. In particular she objects to his use of the word selfishness (as in The Selfish Gene) as being inappropriate to describe the motivations of complex organisms such as humans and their society.  This theme of scientists using language one-dimensionally to impose a view that she feels is (to quote her) ‘ludicrous’ and smacking of the imperialism she hates, permeates her text. But many scientists can also take exception to Dawkins’ rather black and white views: that in itself is not sufficient to distinguish the philosopher from the scientist. But I found it rather dispiriting to watch her paint all scientists with a single hue in this way. She seemed to feel we were all equally one-dimensional and stuck in our silos whereas she, and those of her ilk, were necessarily better capable (in her eyes) of taking a multi-facetted view of things. Well, maybe. But to dissect individual pieces of writing, each of which may be trying to convey one particular message, and to deduce from that that all scientists are unable to join the dots, strikes me as both untrue and not a sound deduction. It may be an interesting intellectual point to make, but not sufficient fodder on which to base a whole section of the book.

I also had a strong desire to direct her to physicists who are exhibiting an increasing interest in emergent phenomena and complexity.  These ideas of emergence seem entirely consonant with her desire for the whole to be seen as more than the sum of their parts. Although 20th century physics may have had much that was reductionist in it, there are increasingly whole swathes of it which are much less so. Speaking as a physicist who had to spend many years defending the idea that the research I did on biological systems was physics despite it being inherently complex, I know that in the not-too-distant past many physicists didn’t feel comfortable with that complexity. Maybe when she was writing the book that was still the prevalent view of those whom she spoke to or whose work she read. But it certainly isn’t so now, and that is not due to the philosophical drivers or virtues that she puts forward; it is simply that the field progresses. Maybe if she met some 21st century physicists she would feel that we were more in touch with her world view and less imperialistic than she feared.

She could also learn from 21st century physicists that coarse-graining, the process of analysing problems at different length scales as appropriate to the actual question in case leaving out the unnecessary details at other (smaller) length scales, is another key tool these days. This too seemed to be a concept she hadn’t come across as she repeatedly revolted against reductionism to the smallest component parts, which was what she equated with the physicist’s mindset. This she thought was a mindset that could only miss the cooperativity of how we ourselves, at all levels from our own cells and genes to our whole society, operate. Again, I just felt she hadn’t been exposed to the right physicists! She was damning us for a philosophy that is no longer rampant.

None of this is to say that I didn’t enjoy the book or find it stimulating. I did. The part that I found most interesting was her historical overview of the language of science from Bacon on, something she refers to as ‘The Baconian onslaught on Nature’. Her view of this dominance and the feud she identified between Feeling and Reason that started around the time of the founding of the Royal Society and to which she traces the ongoing divisions between science (equated with Reason) and the Humanities (for which read Feeling) make for enlightening reading. I also found her interpretation of the way this has led to the gendering of science – which echoes that of Evelyn Fox Keller in her much earlier book Reflections of Gender and Science (which I touched on in an earlier post) – highly relevant to many of the issues that underline much of what I write on this blog in general.  To quote Midgley:

…gendered opposition between intellect and feeling was the point of Bacon’s claim about a ‘masculine birth of time’ and of Henry Oldenburg’s boast that the Royal Society would ‘raise a Masculine Philosophy’.

So a book with much food for thought, even if I simultaneously was irritated by it and frustrated by her ability to lump all scientists together as a monolithic group who all thought in the same – and to her eyes the ‘wrong’ – way.

 

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Seasonal Lists (and the REF)

Posted on December 28, 2013 by Athene Donald

The end of the year is, by custom, the time for lists. Lists of best (or worst) photos, opening book sentences, or celebrity fashion faux pas; lists of those who died or those who made their film/book/TV/sporting debuts. Think of a category and there is probably a list somewhere on this planet in print (or about to appear). I’m afraid I’m guilty of appearing on a handful of these end-of-year compilations.  I was asked to supply my favourite science joke to one newspaper, although I haven’t seen this appear yet*. I really struggled as I am not a good joke-teller and tend to forget the punchline or jumble up things up. I had to resort to soliciting jokes by email from an email-list to which I belong to. I also turned up a few days ago on the Daily Telegraph’s list of ’42 awesome’ female tweeters, much to my astonishment. Not being an avid Telegraph reader I only discovered this fact via, of course, Twitter and the sudden upsurge in the number of my Twitter followers.

The THE asked me to nominate a couple of books, one from my own field, one from outside (fiction or non-fiction) that had been published in 2013 to contribute to their collection of suggestions. This brought me up short since I discovered, particularly in the latter category, how few books I had read which fitted the bill. Although I had read many books outside my field during the year, fiction and non-fiction, their publication dates were rarely 2013. The oldest dated from exactly 150 years ago.  It was Aurora Floyd by Mary Elizabeth Braddon, a powerful book I had first come across and read a long time ago when laid up on the sofa with complications during pregnancy. Unfortunately its name got sufficiently jumbled in my head for me not to be able to track it down to buy until, this year, I had come across a reference to it in a book about women and marriage in Victorian literature.  Rereading it was a pleasure, although it seemed a very different book from when I’d read it first time around – a not unfamiliar sensation on rereading a novel in my experience.

At least for the science-related one I knew exactly which book I wanted to nominate: Project Sunshine, co-written by my friend and long-time collaborator Tony Ryan in conjunction with the writer (and dot com enterpreneur) Steve McKevitt.  Its sub-title ‘How science can use the sun to fuel and feed the world‘ gives the plot away. It is no coincidence that the project that Tony and I currently collaborate on is involved with organic photovoltaics nor that he spearheads a project entitled Shine at the University of Sheffield. If you want ready access to facts and figures about past and present aspects of our ever-increasing energy consumption, the consequences of our profligacy and possible ways out of this dilemma of the modern world, I’d thoroughly recommend this highly accessible text.

The most extraordinary list I ever found myself on was in fact not an end-of-year list but one that appeared in Psychologies Magazine a few summers ago. There I was listed in their ’58 people who have changed our lives’. I knew about this because they wrote to tell me I had been so honoured. My curiosity piqued by the letter I received I went out and bought a copy of the magazine and sought the list out, only to fail to spot my name: they didn’t have a science category so I looked at the Promoting Women group. Not there.  Society and activism? No, not there either. I started to be somewhat baffled and scanned other categories getting more and more puzzled each time: Digital Technology and Media? Health, Wellbeing and Food? I eventually found myself where I probably would least have expected it, under the heading of Psychology/Therapy/Self-help.  I felt I ought to be flattered, but as a physicist it was more than a little startling to find myself there.

As I have been metaphorically flicking through the recent spate of lists on the web, I was contemplating their prevalence and the reflection they provide on the year just past. The space they take up in the papers arises in part because this a quiet time for ‘news’, leaving aside genocide, floods and the like. It is also an obvious accident of the calendar since a full year should provide a good spread of new books, debuts and deaths without the need for the same optimistic guesswork involved in the closing days of the REF (will it appear with a date of 2013 even though it hasn’t appeared by November or not?). However even given that, a fashion faux pas on December 31st might not make it into the lists.

For me personally, the Christmas holidays also offer a welcome moment of calm when the email deluge desists (on the whole, although clearly not everyone packs up work at this time of year) and the office is officially shut. It is a moment when I allow myself the pleasure of not feeling obliged to keep an eye on things. My 2014 lectures can wait till, well, 2014 for me to cast an eye over last year’s offering to check they are still fit for purpose. I am not required to nip up and down to London as if I was almost a commuter because of an excess of committee meetings. I am free to let my mind wander where it will or to read all those books I’ve been promising myself to consume (but that won’t qualify if the THE comes back to me in a year’s time for my 2014 delectations). I can put my personal world in order metaphorically and literally.

Unfortunately the latter hasn’t happened yet with the piles of books, papers and general detritus still occupying my floor around me as I write. This year, my department is shut for a full two weeks and I am not even distracted by the depressing variety of family health issues which have overwhelmed and consumed my last three Christmasses. All I have to contend with is a damaged leg due to an incident involving my bicycle and some ice last week, and this even more securely ties me to the home fires and my rocking chair. I am enjoying my mental space; a rare time to catch breath – or do I just mean to vegetate? All this is a luxury in the life of an average academic and one to be savoured (although I admit some of my reading is serious enough to prompt future posts).

Lists – who needs them? The answer, I am afraid, is all of us. I may be free of an email deluge but I have spotted one or two poor blighted souls mentioning on Twitter that they have just got their list of REF submissions  that they have to score. We will all be waiting, with more or less bated breath, for the REF lists at the end of 2014. Love or hate the REF, it’s there and it will affect us in a myriad ways. Faux pas of a non-fashionable kind in our submissions will be being judged and the outcome waiting for us at the end of the long, dark tunnel that those individuals who did not manage to say ‘no’ firmly enough to the invitation to serve from HEFCE are about to enter.

Despite this, a good 2014 to you all!

*Added 29-12-13: The list of jokes can now be found on The Observer pages here but clearly mine wasn’t considered good enough to  make the grade to be included. I shall have to keep that list in case I need to start telling jokes in after dinner speeches when I move to Churchill College next year…

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Party Time

Posted on December 23, 2013 by Athene Donald

Since it’s the festive season, at least in my part of the world, it seems appropriate to post about parties, but what follows is far from confined to Christmas, or the associated office party. It could just as well be a midsummer gathering of the neighbourhood or your great aunt’s 100th birthday (though my great aunt’s happened to fall on Christmas Day). People are basically the same, and if I use the appellation Dr below as I name my cast of characters, it is simply to avoid any gender implications. Most of these individuals’ characteristics are unisex; all these characters should be avoided if you want to enjoy the party. After all, there will be some ‘normal’ people present won’t there?

Dr WrongDecibelLevel

There are two variants of Dr WrongDecibelLevel: the one whose speaker level is set too high and the one whose is too low. Both are maddening. The former booms out their anecdotes so that the entire room can hear them willy-nilly; it’s cringe-making if you’ve just been discussing health issues and suddenly everyone hears ‘you poor thing, you mean you had shingles for months!‘ The latter whispers so that not even you, standing as close as you can, can hear more than one word in three or four. This latter makes it hard to hold up your side of the dialogue since rarely do you have any idea of what is going on. A perfectly rational sentence like

It has also been suggested in previous reports that women might be “less ambitious” in their applications and apply for more modest amounts of funding for their research

(a sentence I’ve taken at random from a recent article by Wellcome’s Jeremy Farrar regarding a recent apparent gender gap in funding) comes across as very different if you only hear the words in bold and try to extrapolate the thoughts behind this ‘It suggested women ambitious applications more funding‘. The conversation could go badly off the rails in this case, as you assume the opposite of the sentence’s intent is what has been said.

Dr Obsessive and Dr Bore

These two are closely related, the former possibly having a more focussed and specific topic on which to bore you. We all know a handful of Dr Obsessives. At a departmental party they might corner you to discuss their latest theories of three dimensional photonic band gap materials or their infallible method of extracting money from some funder. Dr Bore is more likely to focus on smaller matters: the iniquities of the assignment of car parking permits, or in a more domestic setting their very fine collection of porcelain thimbles or their latest trick to ensure the cat flap always only lets in the cat it’s meant to and not any waifs or strays from the neighbourhood. Either way, the chances are they are determined not to let you get a word in edgeways. If you want to snooze the night away or get completely sozzled then just standing there and letting the torrent of words flood over you may not be a bad way to proceed. You at least look like you’re being a good guest and maybe even convey an impression of enjoying yourself.

Dr Invasive

Dr Invasive has no idea of the size of your personal space. They stand too close, nose essentially to nose with you, leaving you barely space to lift your glass of cheap red to your lips. If you back slowly away, you will be followed. This isn’t a wise strategy as you’ll eventually find yourself backed against the wall unable to escape. Better to extricate yourself before this fate befalls you. Make a dash for it.

Dr Spittle

Oh dear, you certainly don’t want to end up nose to nose with this one. I don’t know if there is some scientific reason, associated with the relative shapes of palette, tongue, teeth and/or jaw that render the spittle particularly projectile, but some people do seem more prone to this failing than others. Sometimes it is simply associated with a degree of excitement in their communications, or possibly the timing of the sibilants in the sentence relative to when they last had a swig of their wine, but this person is one to make polite noises to and then run away from, unless they really, really are so interesting their conversation is worth the fluid assault.

Dr Charismatic

At first sight this person is delightful company. They scintillate, are full of bonhomie and have an endless supply of amusing tales to tell. It may take you a while to realise this is Performance Art. They have no interest in you, your doings or those of your nearest and dearest. You could be a Nobel Prize winner and they would probably not even notice. The stories may be amusing but after a while they pall. If you meet this person several times you will soon realise that in fact you’ve heard all the stories before. Charming on first meeting; a bore by the third encounter.

Dr LookOverYourShoulder

This one is always on the lookout for a more important person to talk to. Perhaps more likely to be met in a professional setting, they are only interested in you in the absence of anyone better. Otherwise it’s a case of ‘oh look, there is Sir Harrumphing Harrington‘, who just happens to be Chair of the local NHS Trust or ‘must just say hello to Dame Jemima Puddleduck‘ well-known as CEO of the latest gazelle to open its doors in the neighbourhood. Either way it’s a case of ‘must dash old chap‘ and they’re off. One consequence of this behaviour is that they rarely make eye contact with you, since they are constantly horizon scanning for the next VIP entering the room whom they wish to intercept.

Dr PettyMinded

This character is full of minor gripes: be it about the frequency of rubbish collection (or lab waste disposal if in a laboratory situation) or the state of the pavements, peeling wallpaper and/or lack of paint marking out the designated parking bays (apply as appropriate to the type of party). Government bureaucracy is another favourite topic. You may agree with each of the issues raised, but you probably didn’t set out for the party wishing to discuss these topics for the nth year running. Unless of course you have come armed with your own list of gripes which you’re looking forward to sharing.

Now you are equipped with a handy identification guide, enjoy your parties…..

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You Don’t Know the Rules? You Are Not Alone!

Posted on December 18, 2013 by Athene Donald

Are you one of those people who think there must be a ‘right’ way of doing every task, or are you prepared to muddle through making it up as you go along? A reader of my recent post on Being Feisty and Unconventional put a link in their own post to mine. Their post explored how they always felt as if they didn’t know the rules, what was expected of them and how to behave in different situations.

The politics of how and what and when I am supposed to speak to others about their work, about my work, to ask for help, to collaborate – it escapes me. And of course there are no written rules, no induction course, nothing to go by except what observation you can…

I wish there was a little more guidance available on navigating departmental and intra-lab politics….

But what I’d really like is a local female mentor to help me tread the line between ‘difficult’ and ‘impossible’. Between ‘feisty’ and ‘rude’. Between ‘confident’ and crossing boundaries.

The reality is, as far as I can tell, most people feel there must be a correct, uniquely right way of behaving, but the trouble is that they don’t know what it is. What differs is the extent to which individuals let this affect how they cope.

In Victorian days young gentlemen were blooded (ie taken out hunting and had the blood of their ‘first fox’ rubbed on them) to show they knew those particular hunting ropes and later, possibly even introduced to a brothel by some older male relative so they knew how to perform on that front; their debutante sisters spent weeks learning how to put their elbow length gloves on neatly and to curtsy appropriately elegantly and deeply when presented at court (and to walk away backwards thereafter) without wobbling or falling over. We have, I hope, moved on.

However, the feeling that there is some set of rules that everyone except yourself has mastered remains a common sensation. A task as simple as how to introduce yourself when you first attend a meeting can feel like a minefield: how much are you meant to say about who you are and why you are there? If you are the first person asked to speak it is particularly alarming, but even if that isn’t the case you may indeed be thinking ‘why am I here?’ and so be fazed as to how to respond. I assure you that that is a worry from which I can still suffer in passing. The first time I sat on a Cambridge Board of Electors for some Professorship, the Chair thought it was amusing (or so it felt; in all honesty he probably wasn’t thinking about it at all) to ask me to kick off the discussions. I was given no clue as to whether I was supposed to go through each candidate in great detail or merely report that I thought Dr X was the strongest candidate. You can end up feeling stupid if you get such actions wrong.

So why do I think everyone feels like this? It’s because of what other people say to me. I come out of a meeting and someone or other may come up to me and say ‘did I say enough?’  (or alternatively too much) or perhaps ‘was I too forceful?’ Maybe they’ll ask me if they could have done a better job of putting their argument across or tell me how worried they had been in advance because they hadn’t understood the underlying interpersonal dynamics. I know senior professors who confide that they hate poster sessions because they aren’t good at going up to strangers (however junior) and talking to them and would rather be wallflowers. Referring to social but professional situations, there are people who admit that they still get confused as to which is the water tumbler amongst a collection of glasses on the table at fancy dinners or who are anxious about how to introduce guest speakers, including the correct form of address (and, in case you’re wondering, calling me Dame Donald is just plain wrong, though it happens pretty often).

One form in which this anxiety can manifest itself is in assuming that what someone else does is obviously ‘right’. I know I sometimes feel, when listening to someone answer a tricky question or when I watch them handle a difficult situation ‘wow, I couldn’t have done that’. In reality that sentence should probably read ‘I wouldn’t have done that’ and that is of course the point. I wouldn’t do things that way, but I could probably have found a different way of handling the situation that would have worked, but it would have been a way with which I personally felt comfortable. Difference does not mean what person A does is inherently right and Person B is therefore necessarily wrong. It’s too easy to forget that.

It is still the case that, time after time I continue to feel that I don’t know what to do in some specific situation. The difference that comes with age and/or experience is akin to that the feeling, described in the same blog I mentioned above:

a part of me says sod convention, whatever it is around here, and speak…

Unlike Victorian ladies and gentlemen, I don’t expect to be socially ostracised or to lose my job if, metaphorically, my curtsey is inaccurate. There may be a momentary embarrassment if I ask a question out of turn or find I’ve misunderstood my instructions, be they explicit or implicit, but the damage is in general short-lived. My advice is therefore by all means try to find out as much as you can in advance about any situation. There is no need to be afraid to ask for help or guidance. Formal mentors may be in short supply, but many people slightly higher up the food chain are often keen to show off their knowledge and so more than willing to help you, the novice. Sometimes it can come across as patronising, sometimes it’s brilliantly useful – and sometimes both.

The more serious problem is when you don’t know what’s going to hit you until it does. But, remember, most people feel uncertain at least some of the time. We are all in this mysterious world together. There are far fewer rules than you may believe.

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