Author Archives: Kevin L

Our system rightly considers language a fundamental and foundation skill. It allows us to communicate verbally and in writing, and it is also a means for us to acquire the norms of communication. Mainstream education puts us through formal acquisition of a language through practising through grammatical rules and often memorising vocabulary. Being literate also helps us learn to comply with rules – most of which are written down.

So of course language must be included in early education. In fact that is one of the key building blocks. But the way we teach language, is often as though it is mainly for us to be literate, to understand more of other subjects. Of course, there’s appreciation of the language through literature at higher levels, most of which are considered soft subjects offering limited practical value. I disagree with that, but more importantly, I want to highlight an opportunity we miss in teaching languages.

Languages moderate our thoughts and hence our emotions. How we feel is driven by what we think and what we tell ourselves. Once we acquire language, our thinking almost always become based on the language and the cultural norms – that is how much influence it has on us. And so when we are picking up vocabulary, means of expression and mapping that into reality, there is a huge opportunity to equip our next generation with some powerful life skills.

And one of them is empathy. We often think empathy is something innate, and at best to be cultivated by parents back at home. I don’t disagree, but schools have that opportunity to help. And it is through getting our kids to apply the vocabulary the learn and ways of applying grammar to string words together at different levels:

• to think how would they describe the pain someone else feel,
• to suggest ways of comforting someone in pain
• to express one’s emotions in a variety of settings.

It goes beyond the usual essay writing, beyond just writing descriptive essays or colourful narratives. It gets students to ponder, to develop that sense of wonder. And to be more human.

If we start from zero, what do we want to really teach our children so that they’d be able to create a future for themselves? To cover lessons that will help them be able to adapt to changes and be resilient? One of the things that is amazing about the human race is our ability to accumulate knowledge and that is in part the reason why our education system is now replete with so much content. We’ve accumulated a lot of them and we might think it is a waste not to teach – and we end up covering way too much and just throwing the kitchen sink at our children.

Heritage would be important – it’s something that we want to get right, to help our next generation find their bearings in their identity. To help them be aware of what heritage and identity is. For me, this was something I discovered only much later in life – how many of us Singaporeans actually know who our ancestors more than 3 generations above us were? Where did they come from? What were they doing during independence, during the time we were part of the Malaysia federation, when we were under the British colonial rule, or when we were called ‘Syonan’? These were things to teach as a subject in school, but more significant when they were stories told within the family.

I wonder how many of our history teachers got their students to ask their parents, or grandparents about experiences of the past? Of the wars? Or maybe it’s their great-grandparents now. Heritage forms part of our identity, part of what no one can take away from us. So equip our children with that and help them gain their bearings as adults.

In preparing our next generation for the future, we need to start re-thinking what are some fundamental skills (not content) that we must equip our people with that will allow them to adapt and deal with whatever comes along without having us trying to predict and then optimise for the future. It calls for a zero-base sort of reconstruction of our education system.

And one of the things I identify as really important for our people is the ability to develop visions for the future. We have gotten so bad at it because we have almost come to live only for the moment. We have become impatient, and our minds are constantly craving for the next thing to occupy it, without desiring the space and time to construct more elaborate scenarios and think about alternative futures.

The only time our minds tend to consider alternative realities is almost definitely when we experience regret, when we allow our minds to keep dwelling on some possibilities that would transpire when we ourselves made a different set of choices. That kind of visioning is counterproductive; which goes to show how important it is to teach our kids how to positively and productively develop visions.

Visioning is important because when kids can develop elaborate future possibilities and implant themselves in them, they are better able to motivate themselves. And they’d be able to see how many more things in life connects together and how they can be driven to take certain actions which may not bear fruits immediately but pay off within their vision. Being able to do positive visioning also helps to enhance psychological resilience and allow them to see the nature of ‘regret’ for what it is, and to develop the emotional strength to cope with them.

Yet when was the last time, from within the system, teachers or principals wake up and say, I have to teach the kids how to develop visions of the future and work towards them. We are too bogged down by legacy – we need to work on these things from a zero-base.

A few days back I wrote about ‘the pipe‘ and I called for all of us to practice not being a pipe. But there wasn’t so much clarity on what that really mean. We could think about the usual exhortations like ‘Don’t micromanage’, ‘Coach people’, ‘Troubleshoot problems and not people’. But I think it would be really helpful to study some of the work that came out of Google’s Project Oxygen. Some of the detailed guides and tools can be found here.

As a coach myself, I found some of the advice there to be rather useful, such as a quick reference guide on the GROW model. They even provided templates on 1:1 meeting agendas for you to prepare and think about how to use those sessions productively.

More often than not, an organisation’s culture and system is vital to prevent an over-development of plumbing in the organisation. When there’s too many layers of hierarchy than is operationally necessary, there’s efficiency in redeploying manpower. When you find yourself unable to locate and directly reach out to the frontline in charge of client-interactions, then the culture may be stifling or knowledge management is not being done right. The organisation itself needs to realign incentives so that being just a pipe will not genuinely get you far in the system. The issue with pipes is that, they actually can get far ahead in many large bureaucratic organisations.

I stood in line at the post office for my turn to mail out my parcel. I was early and so there wasn’t much of a line. It used to be that you have to book your own time in order to go to the post office because you’d never know how long the line there is.

A lady approached me; not too tall and probably in her early-forties. She asked if she could ask me a few questions – primarily about myself. I answered in non-specific vague terms but enough for her to make some flattering remarks about me and then asked me if I know about changes around the national health insurance policies that will commence 1 April 2021.

Sounds like an insurance person trying to pitch; she needed more information such as whether I had a private insurer already, which level of plans I was on and so on. It was my turn so I happily went to the counter to settle my parcel. And when I turned back, she approached me to try and continue our conversation. I thanked her for alerting me to the changes and shared that I’d like to read up myself first before talking about it for the day, then left.

I was in a hurry then but I wonder if it made sense for people to be pitching to those in line for products as complex as insurance. Maybe it makes sense for others – for sure, it saves a bit of time and people might feel like they are learning something (which is probably true). But I cannot help thinking that people might also feel a bit uncomfortable, somewhat cornered, as thought their time is held hostage. It reminded me of those high-pressure sales places that tour groups have to go through as part of the ‘compulsory itinerary’.

The old distribution methods of insurance is broken and I can see that it is slowly being disrupted as people start to look to apps they trust as platforms to possibly take up insurance coverage. This is going to be powerful because the distribution cost of insurance tends to be quite high going through the traditional channels. There are probably customers in the economy still reachable only by the traditional means but they are fast shrinking. Insurance companies needs to think how they can do better.

There’s two ways of framing this question; and it affects the way we answer the question when it comes to being a parent, a teacher, a boss or a friend. When we get ask this ‘WIIFM’ question (I realised there’s such an acronym when I googled), it is often when we are put into an active position of persuasion. Trust me, it is an opportunity to discover more about the person you are persuading and also more about yourself and your thinking.

The first way of thinking is that the person is selfish or self-entered so you have to appeal to his ‘benefit’ in the narrow sense of the word. So you have think of what are the direct rewards for him if he were to take the course of action you recommend. This is usually the approach that product advertising undertakes. They will try to create that target persona audience they are speaking to, and share the product benefits for this target persona. The thing about considering others to be the selfish one makes you think of it all as a zero-sum game where if you convince the person, you win, and if you fail to convince him, then he wins.

There is a second way of thinking about the person, and the question, which probably is a little less obvious. It is thinking of it not so much as a question of benefits but of personal context. That is, the questioner is trying to figure out the implications of the recommended course of action in his/her personal context. That means not just the good but the bad, the tangibles and the intangibles.

Answering the question this second way is important because it gradually puts you on the same side as the one you’re trying to persuade. It puts honesty and sincerity at the fore. It dispenses with window dressing and trying to do a show. And this is often the approach for brand advertising where you seed and put leverage in the culture. So the next time you try to persuade or answer this WIIFM question, be reminded of the potential of this different way of looking at it.

From an agrarian culture, humans have already somewhat developed the idea of a return on investment. From an agriculture standpoint it can be the value of a harvest expressed as a ratio over the cost, in terms of the seeds sowed, the resources exhausted up till harvest time. In nominal terms, it is about the money made or loss over time of investment expressed as a ratio against the money put in. But the real question is, whether this is an ex ante or an ex post concept. Whether it is used to assess performance that have passed or to foresee what lies before us.

I find it as a useful way of reflecting on what has gone before and to really help us assess the process that we have been through in order to get the return. But the world and the society seem to consider it more useful as a planning tool, to help make decisions on what to invest in, by collapsing all value into one dimension (usually money) and then instead of taking time as a resource as part of the investment, it becomes merely another parameter in the indicator (because returns need to be benchmarked against the time period as well).

I wonder if this puts us at the risk of glorifying the rosy planning picture over the actual execution. Where upfront reporting to investors and stakeholders seem more important than what happens later at presenting of results (either a credit-grabbing exercise or apologise-and-ask-for-forgiveness). Because we are so ‘forgiving’ in the back end, we may be concentrating the gains on most return on investment, and socialising its losses.

Is ROI your way of reflecting or a means of planning for you?

What happens if you’re in the classroom of one? Yes, you are the one person. You are the student. You are the teacher. You are responsible for setting the homework and for completing it, for grading it, and getting the feedback, etc. You will determine how to improve, what to learn, how to teach/learn. How would you approach it? What would you be teaching for?

That is the world you are in. That is the world whenever you find some time on commutes, when you are scrolling through the phone, when you determine what texts to answer and what materials to read or to consume. Because you are constantly learning, teaching yourself, setting homework for yourself. And grading yourself: thinking about how productive you are, whether you used your time well or wasted it, judging your own performance.

You are in that classroom of one. What is the rubric you’ll give yourself? What is the metric you want to grade yourself against? Why?

I think this topic is worth exploring sufficiently that I’m devoting yet another blog post to it. I did some thinking about what it means for us as humans when more and more domains of our lives are turning into wicked learning environments. What are the implications for parents, educators, corporations trying to find, hire and nurture talents?

For parents, I think the good news is that some traditional domains like music, certain sports, and intellectual games (eg. chess) are going to remain as kind learning environments with fundamental rules that don’t change – where children can gain mastery with the right set of motivation and dedication towards practice. But to prepare them for the world of wicked learning environments requires you to continually support them through adversity they will encounter in life and teaching them principles of picking themselves back up and hacking away at problems that comes along, learning how to determined what and when to give up. The most important lesson to teach is really to help them recognise that there’s a full spectrum of different kinds of intelligence which matters and they need to be open-minded and open-hearted towards that diversity of ideas.

For educators, I’d think one have to learn to break free of that military-industrial complex that all education systems are entangled with. There’s just this desire towards having the education system and mainstream schools as cookie cutters; as products of a factory. People involved in management are going to deny it, and I do think they have good intentions – but the fact is that when you’re trying to do these things at a national level, with standardisation, with ‘scientific management’, you’re going to be saddled with things like KPIs, focusing on what can be counted rather than what really counts.

In education, you don’t need managers, you need community organisers; you need people who bring everyone together, get them to share and practice their ideas, and then exchange with one another, persuade each other to adopt good attributes, refine and sharpen one another. It is not a competition, it is a community, and the objective is not to be better than one another but to be better as a whole.

How about corporations? There’s no easy answers but I think it boils down again to recognising what the corporation is really after. If it’s profits, then you will forever be just trying to optimise it according to the rules of the day, you’ll be trying to compete in the kind learning environments and commoditise things. But if serving the customer is at the fore, where the rules of the game to maximise profit for the hour does not matter, then you will become the one who push everyone into a wicked learning environment. And that can be a great thing.

Then you’ll be one who don’t hire experts. You’ll be someone who hire professionals, newbies, mavericks – and it doesn’t matter because you’ll be doing something new. You won’t be doing silly competitor analysis because in the category of one, there’s no competitors. Then you’re always going to win.

Previously I described what wicked learning environments are and introduced the idea of when we can rely on someone with experience. In domains which are marked by fundamental technical knowledge; where that is mostly what is at stake, then having the experienced expert helps. Those are kind learning environments where what they have experienced would sufficiently inform us enough to refine our approach and optimise the outcome.

The problem with the world we reside in now is that things change; and big shifts are happening that can turn kind learning environments into wicked ones. This is especially true for the marketplace. I have previously written about how disruptive startups are changing cultures and that changes the dynamics of the marketplace – it adds new parameters for the competition to consider into the mix.

When that happens, the originally ‘kind’ learning environments turn a bit different. Using back the example of Grab; all of a sudden, being a cab driver isn’t about knowing where to pick up passengers at different times of the day, or knowing the shortest route from point A to B anymore. The driver now have to actually pay attention to the pricing they can get at different times of the day and on the platform vis-a-vis the metered fare. This is way different from the past when they just needed to be able to roughly estimate of the metered fare from one place to another and quickly judge whether they want to take on the job. During the transition, the learning environment quickly turns wicked and as the Grab app algorithm is refined, the learning keeps changing, the old rules of thumb stop working and the players have to adapt. The same happens when new ride-hailing app entrants enter the market.

For someone who prides himself/herself as one who have developed experience and deep expertise, we need to recognise that how much those are valued really depends on the context of the environment, whether things are changing so rapidly as to render those experience/expertise obsolete quickly. This can also happen suddenly (eg. when the world forsake crude oil then rig-building expertise becomes less valuable); so as individuals trying to create the future, we have to think about how we want to really equip and invest in ourselves.

Human capital accumulation is going to shift quite a fair bit.