In recent years I have noticed that many social work colleagues seem to be narrowing their horizons. Their focus seems to be increasingly on their own area of practice without seeeing it as part of the broader picture of social work as a diverse profession. From my experience of running training courses with social work staff from various specialisms I get the impression that there is far less interest in our prfession as a whole. So many people want to look at, and talk about, their particular branch of the social work tree and seem to have relatively little interest in looking at the tree as a whole (let alone the social policy wood it forms part of). Thankfully, there are also many people who do want to see the big picture and maintain an identity for social work across the various specialisms. I just hope that we are not seeing a trend towards 'silo thinking' - that is, people seeing the significance of only their part of the social work world and losing sight of how it fits into the broader whole.