I am a Singaporean. And one aspect about Singapore highlighted by many stories of its growth and early leaders is the notion of pragmatism. Yet I feel that this notion probably has been overplayed.
Pragmatism is used to suggest that the ends justify the means. Now within the context of school, it could mean that you can get your grades by rote memorisation as opposed to genuine learning. Or that you could simply find the right answer to copy than to solve a problem yourself on an assignment.
Same goes for the worker at work – just find the answer, don’t bother solving the problem. This may mean finding out how it was done before; or to figure out what others who had the same problem was doing. One could argue those are problem-solving heuristics. Maybe. But I call those “answer-finding”.
As a consultant, I cannot help but recall clients who are asking, “but have you done this same thing before with another client or somewhere else?” This is answer-finding, not problem-solving.
The Singapore today needs trail-blazers and problem-solvers; as it always had. But decades of overemphasizing pragmatism means we prefer to pay for answers than purchase problem-solving capacity. We desperately need to shift this culture and move towards real problem-solving than answer-finding.