The following article is a summary of a paper presented by the author to a meeting of the Liverpool branch of the Institute on 26 January 1968.

Many people believe that there is a compelling need to discuss much more seriously than we do the whole way ahead into a new era in the conduct of ships; to scale the heights that lie above the chaos of detail and the log-jams of orthodoxy, and to discover where the truth is most likely to lie in this respect, for obsolete thinking is far more harmful to progress than obsolete equipment and this thinking, therefore, can often become a dominant factor.