David Gilbert was formerly Director of Patient and Public Involvement for Croydon Primary Care Trust. He is now Director of InHealth Associates.

When I was ten, we had a competition to design the ‘school of the future’. My friend and I drew a huge picture and wrote accompanying stories of us flying to school with jetpacks, amongst flying friendly purple alien space vehicles. Teachers had been banned and we taught each other things we knew about collecting conkers or Action Man. There were underground tunnels between rooms that housed vast computers where we could talk to people on the screen in Australia and find out what the weather was like.


At least the last of these came true.


I was in a meeting the other day. We talked about our ‘vision’ for the future. The best we seemed to be able to do was to talk about strategies for dealing with health inequalities. I only realised afterwards that our language was dull, our thinking stale and that our ideas were abut as related to a Vision as an Aardvark is to a snail – they are both animals, but…


It was all process, process, process, despite our facilitators stressing that we should be ‘outcome-focused’ - whatever that might mean to people like my mum.


What is it about meetings that reduce our capacity to be creative and imagine? What is it about our current (adult) state of mind that reduces us to process-numbed automatons? What is it about the way we do things that reduces us to defeat and acceptance of limitations? Have we been so hit by the ‘reality’ of what can be done when we work in huge organisations, that we have minimised our expectations? What room is there for personal dreams in professional organisations?


What if the Croydon of the future was taken over by kids going to school with jet packs? What else would happen? If we don’t dream of the stars, we will never hit the moon.


Best wishes,


David

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