Author Archives: Kevin L

In David Epstein’s book, Range, he mentioned a lot about kind versus wicked learning environments – terms introduced by psychologist Robin Hogarth. I think these are concepts that we should begin to incorporate into our minds when confronting problems and experience, because they help us make important judgments about whether an expert or experienced professional is important to the issue at hand. Quoting from the abstract of their paper:

Inference involves two settings: In the first, information is acquired (learning); in the second, it is applied (predictions or choices). Kind learning environments involve close matches between the informational elements in the two settings and are a necessary condition for accurate inferences. Wicked learning environments involve mismatches.

Maybe that’s a bit too much jargons. But in essence, wicked learning environments are where feedback is inaccurate, lagged, and where outcomes are difficult to directly associate with the driving causes/factors. This means that the ability to form theories about what is optimal, test them out and then use them, is extremely limited.

These are where being ‘expert’ or having ‘expertise’ should not so much be characterised in terms of experience in the field but having the grit and approach to hack at the problem instead. In these environment, most of those with experience will be severely overconfident about their abilities (vis-a-vis the results) and only serve to inject confused thinking.

So before you think about bringing in an ‘experienced guy’ or an ‘expert’ – consider the learning environment and what you’re trying to do.

“What is a bad manager?”

“A pipe.”

First, a little background, before I get back into the topic of managers: I used to work a lot on water treatment projects whilst I was supporting system integrators dealing with water treatment projects in the Asian region. For the smaller companies, we were looking at supporting the water treatment needs of pharmaceutical plants, semiconductor industry as they generally require water of extremely high purity and for countries where their central water supply plant do not produce good quality water, there has to be more processes added in the plant. Likewise, there were some projects which were more for effluent treatment. Textile industries were one of the biggest polluters and often the regulation requires them to pre-treat their wastewater before they can be discharged into the sewers.

Back to the topic: Middle managers are basically trunking in a bureaucracy to transmit information both ways. Instructions and directions from the top, and performance on the ground back to the top. They are either good, or bad – no middle ground.

A good manager helps to interpret the instructions and directions within the context of the section/division/department in terms that the ground staff can resonate with or relate to. He/she is able to support the ground staff with troubleshooting, motivate them to achieve the performance that the top cares about. He/she should also be able to guide the top to target the right things, and convince them to inject resources wherever needed.

The good manager is like a sophisticated treatment system for the streams of information that is being passed along in both directions. There’s value-add from purification, from separating out the good stuff from the bad, delivering what is necessary and needed. That is the work of the manager.

The bad manager is like a pipe because he takes what comes from the top and connects it to the ground without any filtering, value-adding or sorting. If the top spews effluent, the ground gets it all. He/she doesn’t care about delivering the right bits to the right people but simply pushes everything across, relevant or not. And if the manager is really bad, he/she tops it all up with emotions and confused thinking.

So before you accept that promotion to be a manager; make a conscious decision not to be a pipe. Don’t give yourself excuses that you’ll learn; this is not something you learn, but something you practice. Over and over.

While I was in school, there was a certain pride for those who did triple science. I was on that side of the team.

And there was also a certain sense of despair when people talk about studying the arts. I also happen to love the arts and humanities as well, so I did take those subjects. Unfortunately, there was a sense that those softer subjects are fluff because there’s no systematic way in which you can score well.

This lack of ‘scientific-ness’ to the approach of improving in arts and humanities makes it less clear what is the knowledge you are trying to grasp when you’re dealing with those subjects. It’s almost like I have no good way of telling why one of my essays happen to do better than another one. And to the system, that seem to be a problem even though the teachers were happy, the students were too.

But the joke of life is that reality is exactly that way. When we cannot pinpoint or figure an exact solution/answer, we say that such and such is more art than science. So is it really better to be good at sciences and think of the world in that manner all the time? The problem with overemphasising sciences at the expense of the arts is growing generations of people who seem to think that they can only live well in a world that is systematic, predictable and can be controlled. If most things that are really important in life, like how to manage your emotions, your relationships, even your own behaviours are complex and more like arts, why are we getting people to be less humans?

The whole snobbishness about scientific education needs to stop; and we must learn to appreciate the creatives more, both in our lives (as we learn to consume more artisanal stuff, and experience products). We may be skeptical and still prefer our mass produced, industrial stuff. But up to a certain point, we need to reconnect with craft, and the idea of it.

There’s been a huge push amongst some of the big corporates in Singapore towards sustainability. Keppel announced their decision to exit the rigs business while DBS claims they have overshot their sustainability financing business and will more than double their target for 2024. One thing clear here is that we are gradually seeing that business forces are playing a big role in forcing the hands of big corporates rather than just concern for climate change.

Climate change might be the main flag that sustainability activists fly but it is not the only driver of sustainability trends. Besides, the climate is merely a global version of the kind of damage that humans have wrought on the planet for centuries. There had destruction of natural habitats for commercial agriculture, which in turn can reduce biodiversity, and set of further chain reaction.

And of course, there’s use of plastics, resulting in excess waste in the environment that is damaging wildlife and their habitats as well (think ocean plastics). It is interesting that we found this amazing material that can last so long without degradation but then only choose to use it for such a short time over its entire potential lifespan – allowing it to stay in the environment as waste instead for most of its life.

So yes when we embrace the fact that we are all an open system rather than necessarily just trying to optimise our own imaginary closed system, we learn to see how we can make things better by making better things. Not things that pollute, encourage bad behaviours or generate more waste, but things that really can change many lives. Here is the chance for responsible corporate leaders to try and channel all of these market, social and political forces together to create a future that we want to have. Not the future we would passively receive by continuing the mistakes of those who came before us.

What are you competing with others for? People say life is about competition, and that is what survival is about. But what are you really preserving yourself for? What are you contributing to this world, what difference are you making?

Too often people are saying they are competing to be better, to move up the ranks, the leaderboard, to get higher scores, better grades. Than yourself? Or than others? What happens when you are better than others? Are you becoming a better version of yourself? In Brene Brown’s podcast episode with Simon Sinek, she said something that struck me: when you’re better than others, your ego grows; are you able to do better?

So we have to ask ourselves what is the work we are doing? Is competition really just about self-improvement? Or have we skewed it to appeal too much to our ego, fed our obsession with our status and sow the seeds to some of the destructive behaviours (eg. Toxic work cultures, lack of sustainability in corporate practices).

For our mental health, and a better future, let’s change the culture of competition wherever we find ourselves by first practising it differently.

While building up my coaching practice, and spending more time with my dog, I was half-expected to pack for the upcoming Chinese New Year. So when work started getting busy, and my work study remains somewhat messy with packaging materials (read: cardboard boxes) accumulated through online shopping in 2020, I drew some flak from within the family.

On one hand there’s always the naggy feeling that those cardboard boxes can be reused or if I can put some of those stuff back into original packaging I could potentially sell it for a higher price when I do need to resell them (which by the way, is environmentally friendly and economical). But on the other hand, my house has its limits with carrying capacity (hint: extremely limited capacity) and I don’t want the reputation of being a hoarder.

We really need to do this better – this whole packaging thing. Making them more sustainable, more reusable, more re-deployable. There is really way too much packaging being used, especially with gifts – think about the amount of ‘value’ that is extracted from mooncake packaging. We need to start telling each other the story that we appreciate rustic packaging-lite (or even non-packaged) gifts. We need to deploy technologies to reuse the packaging so that delivery guys just have to press a button, reveal the product you ordered and have you grab it off him and he can reuse all the other stuff that carried the product and keep it safe. Because it we don’t, capitalism and all of these commercialisation is on this ratchet that sucks up resources for trivial things, that squanders valuable resources, and ignores sustainability.

Thanks for reading my rant.

No I have not read the book by David Graeber though I’ve been told by friends more than once to read it. I did take a read of the essay he published in 2013, which was the precursor to the book and I think right at the point of identification of the phenomena, he already struck at the heart of some of the source of it. It is deep and it entangles a whole host of complexity.

I think getting people to accept the phenomena is a good start; tracing it to our socio-economic systems is a good next step. But we ultimately need to work on moving forward, changing this toxic culture. David Graeber of course was pushing for Universal Basic Income ultimately to deal with the problem but I think there’s a huge narrative around our lives, around the world that supports this whole culture of bullshit jobs that we need to work around. If we fail to change this narrative, then bullshit jobs are here to stay, and to perpetuate.

Given the mess our world is now in, there’s a whole lot of problem-solving, of cleaning up, of undoing the old system that our new generation have to do. And we need to construct the right narrative around creating a future that can contain the solution to these problems, or avert the disaster that awaits. If we continue adopting the narrative of the generations coming before us who fail to appreciate the oncoming disaster, then we are just going to repeat the same results.

There are so many problems we need to solve – we need to get people talking about these problems. Whether it is climate change, the massive inequality, the ills of financialisation of the economies and the world. We need to get the attention of people who might eventually commit themselves to the cause, to spend their own resources dealing with it so they can make a difference as opposed to just making money.

And when we realised how we are spending our time at jobs just targeted at helping people save ‘face’ or to free up their time so that they can do more things that stoke their own egos, we know that we ought to be going out there and creating that new future that we envision, not the one that our boss had that is blurry in our eyes but that we still conform to.

I really love how Seth Godin thinks about marketing as ‘changing a culture’ and how he defines culture as ‘people like us, do things like this’. And in light of that, every startup, every ‘disruption’ is about changing the culture. We ought to recognise that culture is temporary, and regardless of how you think they are entrenched, they are continuously being assaulted, dislodged by various forces in the world.

Every single startup trying to enter a marketplace is trying to change a culture to some extent; and those successful ones managed that change so well we are quick to forget that it happened. More importantly, sometimes the change is so gradual that it is almost imperceptible. Think about Grab and what they did to quite a few different cultural norms that are supposedly so entrenched:

• Flagging taxis on the streets or queuing at taxi stands
• Not wanting to call private hire cars for fear of untrustworthy drivers or companies
• Having to call cab by ringing a number and then getting to the operator and trying to describe where you are, get the license plate number from the operator and looking out for the taxi
• Having different numbers to call different brands of cab because they all have different call centers
• Not being able to call the taxi driver you’ve booked directly to ask him where he is when he is on the way to you

How many of these ‘norms’ still exists today and how much have we taken Grab for granted? The new behaviours they introduced includes:

• Calling for grab even when there is taxis waiting for passengers at the taxi stand
• Going down from the building only when your grab has arrived or about to arrive
• ‘Grabbing’ as a verb to mean you’re using grab to call a cab to get to your next destination

And the list goes on; you get my point.

Likewise Alibaba changed the culture of the Chinese internet where online merchants were not seen as trustworthy and scams seem to abound. They convinced users to buy from listed merchants, and persuaded merchants to use them as a trusted intermediary, then introduced escrow services to hold on to payments so that both sides can trust each other, effectively mastering the two-sided market in China.

When we think about a startup in terms of the culture they are seeking to change, the norms they are looking to dislodge, we discover how difficult a challenge they have. Yet it is also a way of thinking about their marketing, the story they tell themselves and everyone else, as well as the manner they design their products. All of these will feed somehow into the forces gradually dislodging the current power structures and cultural norms.

On a separate note, if you’re a startup that is just following the culture or feeding off the norms, it is quite likely there can be a dozen of you around to do minor variations of the same things. Of course, it need not always be about making big bucks; and as Seth Godin would say, it’s about making the difference.