Читать книгу Leadership in Veterinary Medicine - Clive Elwood - Страница 23

‘There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How's the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, “What the hell is water?”’

David Foster Wallace

How many times have you been with a group of colleagues at the dinner table discussing the joys of a nice juicy cat bite abscess, only to realise the unfortunate lay person among you has dropped their knife and fork and turned an unpleasant shade of green…? [Insert alternative personal anecdote here.] There is a context to our work as veterinary professionals that we, inevitably, take for granted and that may even be out of our consciousness, at least on a day‐to‐day basis.

Whilst organisations may have publicly stated ideas about what they are for and ‘what they do’, there also levels of ‘what we really believe we are doing’ and ‘what is actually going on’ (Stokes, J. in Obholzer and Roberts 1994). The concept of ‘what is actually going on’ is encapsulated in the exploration of the hidden curriculum in veterinary teaching institutions and the enculturation of veterinary students as they develop into professionals (Mossop et al. 2013; Roder and May 2017).

In this chapter, I will explore the veterinary context, with some of its contradictions and paradoxes, and think about where leadership fits into the picture.