All to often it is easy to assume that personal conflict is a destructive force. However sometimes people with a different approach can spark off each other and create  incredible positive energy. As a young lawyer I remember exactly this with a senior and very smart lawyer in the practice I worked in almost always disagreeing with one of his colleagues, a more junior lawyer who had come up through the ranks the hard way having missed out on university. The debates between them almost always improved the end product they were working on at the time. They were actually good friends and ran a law firm together. So conflict be a good thing, though probably only in a controlled environment where the people concerned trust each other and in effect "permit" these contentious exchanges.

I learnt a new expression this week. "Happy forms". They are feedback forms but with this positive title. How often are we asked for feedback these days, The waitress who has taken ages to serve you, but two minutes after your food finally arrives she's back with a "How's everything?" And how rarely do we do anything except mumble OK in response. And the conference where all the speakers have indulged in "death by PowerPoint  - "I know this slides a bit busy but I am now going to read it all out to you". And then at the end we get our Happy form. By that time you just want to escape. How much better to get feedback via Twitter as you go. "#tag boring" might wake a speaker up.

David Attenborough is 86 years old and has worked for the BBC for 60 years. On Wednesday this week I sat down to watch the series Africa on the television, not expecting much. How wrong could I be. This new documentary series the first of which was set in the Kalahari desert went from hippos who turn out to everybody's surprise to be very sociable animals at the water hole after dark, to underground blind gold catfish and then to an amazing fight in a dry river bed between an old bull giraffe and a young pretender over a female. The old male was down and out but then ducked under a vicious blow and knocked his opponent over by a head swipe to the stomach. Both survived and the younger acknowledged defeat this time and went off  perhaps looking for easier victims. It struck me so forcefully as I watched that we just must never cease to wonder and to question, as David Attenborough has done over a long and illustrious career. In our work or personal life look every day for the new and unexpected.