Author Archives: Kevin L

Too much of our notions around freedom and liberty is rather confused. We think that freedom is the lack of constraints but we forget that constraints are a source of freedom as well. By working within rules, we are free to play the games we enjoy. This is because the freedom of one entity can clash with the freedom of another entity. Complete freedom of speech cannot really co-exist with freedom from being offended. And so there is a balance we need to navigate. Freedom exists even when there are constraints.

Thinking about freedoms in a binary way where we either have or do not have freedom is naive. Because being biological, and physical, we are constrained in many ways physically and by natural laws. Does that mean we lack freedoms? If so, then what is the point of pursuing any freedoms at all since we are ultimately constrained.

And then comes the question of where are we on the spectrum of freedom when the option set increases. When you can choose from 10 products rather than 5, does your freedom to choose increase? In fact, one could argue it decreases because now there are more options screaming at you and crowding our your attention. In fact you might be more confused and waste more time to arrive at your choice than before.

So next time before you evoke the notion of freedom, consider what you are referring to.

About 1.5 years ago, I left my job. I had started work believing I was working for a cause. And along the way, the pressures to perform based on corporate or management KPIs mattered. Performance appraisals started to take hold. What your colleagues started to initiate matters as a benchmark. There were actions that my bosses explicitly wanted me to take so I took them. I ended up working for a boss instead of a cause.

It could have been different but at what costs? Working for a cause does take its toll on one’s career, popularity with colleagues and bosses. Whereas working for a boss promises better bonuses, relationships, recognition. After all, you might have parents to feed, expectations of friends and family to meet. But the model worker seemed to me a lot like a mediocre one.

Working for a cause to me is the only way to work contrary to what we have been brought up to believe. Too much of our education system is around the industrial complex and more about obedience or conformity than to think critically and independently. They might fit the needs of the masses, but how about you?

As we replace our lighting with more energy efficient LEDs, we’d expect the overall system to consume less power, perhaps proportionate to the energy efficiency improvements that LEDs bring to traditional lighting. But that doesn’t seem to be the case because two things happen when you introduce more efficiency into the system:

• Brightness of light bulbs or lighting increases with the same amount of energy input
• Keeping the brightness constant, the energy input required falls.

Typically, the result is a combination of these two phenomena; so we have got people using brighter lights that may consume a little less energy. Or, at the same time, people started installing more lighting now that the LED lights are cheaper and more common.

Overall, the energy consumption reductions is less than the energy efficiency gains. This is known as the energy efficiency rebound effect. We see similar issues potentially with the deflation of goods and services over the recent decades. People did not spend less but in fact they spent more, buying much more of those cheap things that their parents could not enjoy at the prices they had paid. Probably also spurned by the easy credit available.

Do you spot any other areas like that in your life?

I thought this document from our Ministry of Social and Family Development about Singapore’s social compact is really interesting. It neatly articulates many challenging issues and dilemmas that policy makers have, and also the challenge to try and articulate decisions made. I think our approaches in terms of communication has become more complex over time as Singaporeans demand more sensibility and sensitivity from our government.

Shanmugam’s conversation on BBC Hardtalk Podcast itself is probably a best practice for Singaporeans and politicians in Singapore representing our country and the social dimension of the approaches we have taken. At the same time, we must not shy away from asking these hard questions and to get an account of why we are doing things the way we do. We as a society cannot be relying on foreign countries to try and ask our government these questions; we ourselves have to be the ones asking that as a society.

Maybe sometimes we are afraid that there are no answers or solutions; but that’s not the point of the discussion. To bring up what is perceived as a problem is the first step to possibly resolving the knots that we have in our hearts. What our government cannot do is to say that they have better things to do than to answer the pesky questions of citizens. Or that these questions stand in the way of a better, harmonious society. Typically they don’t.

People who have known me for years will know that I’m incredibly passionate about education and I can probably speak for days what is wrong with the education system, and what is my vision the ideal system. Or at least just some elements of it.

And that is why I think Sal Khan of Khan Academy is incredible. How he came to find the Internet as a powerful medium and channel for learning and meaningful, educational interactions that allows us to deliver education at a fraction of the costs. He spent the years, resources, gathering support and building up Khan Academy, extended his philosophy and even announced a new collaboration with Arizona State University to set up a real school. He has indeed manage to attract a good following a lots of support to make his vision closer to reality.

I wonder if one day I’d be able to set up an alternative structure like that to mainstream education in Singapore; or perhaps I would be better off trying to do something like this in a developing country to help intelligent but underprivileged students gain access to the opportunities that better education can afford like how Mohnish Pabrai’s Dakshana.

How mission-oriented are we as a society? When Kennedy decided that America was going to send man to the moon, the economy and society responded. The government put in funds from taxpayers, the people supported the goal, the companies took risks to develop the technologies required, first with the government as customers but just having faith those technologies will find application in other areas. Research institutes, students’ aspirations were radically influenced by that sense of mission. Even if it just meant you were acting as a ‘calculator’ to make complex calculations for the space mission, it was a great deal. The Americans all felt they were involved in one large national project.

In many ways, Japan is a society that always seem to be on a mission. The government is able to come up with really long term plans and roadmaps and push funding to galvanise the society and people towards various different areas of technical and economic progress. I would say that growing out of “losing” World War II, emerging as the world’s third largest economy for most of recent history is still an incredible feat that Japan has pulled off as a country that is just a collection of islands. The fact that Japanese society was homogeneous helped but the kind of long term mission they have is equally admirable.

The question is what about Singapore? What is our mission? Can our mission be just about survival? Because it once seemed to be just that but we have not just survived but thrived, while being mindful also that we are always just really close to losing everything we had built. The only problem is that we now have so much more to lose. So we need a mission that is not about loss-prevention, not about avoiding being a laggard (though we indeed can’t afford to be); but it is about creating a future that we actually want to live in. Because, I don’t think I want to be living in an island economy powered by lots of carbon-emitting industries, or a society stubbornly maintaining internal-combustion based engines burning fossil fuels. More significantly, I don’t think we want to live in a future where mental health continues to be a great challenge with work being so stressful and schools being so competitive and education sector being such a nightmare for young aspiring teachers. We need to reimagine and envision our advantages, resources, and strength that we can evolve and create which would make sense in 2050 or 2100 as we move towards the first century of our independence as a nation.

What is your mission in this world? For me, I want to be part of creating a future we want to live in; and I’ve chosen to start in the world of sustainability and environment. This is not only because that is a ‘hot topic’ right now but because I am convinced that it is one of the greatest and trickiest problem confronting mankind.

I first learnt about global warming and carbon dioxide concentrations rising in the atmosphere when I was in secondary school. That was more than 18 years ago; and subsequently I learnt a lot more about it during Junior College days as part of my geography curriculum. This little geography topic came to the fore during my university days as I became the first official cohort for the LSE100. In that year, we actually had Nicholas Stern who published the Stern Review give us a lecture on why Climate change is such challenging problem to settle from multi-disciplinary lenses considering the politics involved, the social and economic sacrifices, etc. Apart from seeing it as a problem of coordination, I recognised it also as an opportunity for the world to work together, and for businesses to move beyond their obsession with profits and work for the society.

I probably would not have expected myself to end up taking on the role of a consultant with a strategy firm that focuses on accelerating the energy transition. What I love about my job is that I get to live out that mission – a large part of it – to be working with various organisations and stakeholders across the energy value-chain to create the future that we would like to live in. Your mission may not be lived out through your work, but it still matters that you know your mission.

I’ve written about first principles problem-solving before and what I want to share here is why that is a superior approach to a lot of our problems. There are a lot of work in the world today that is about incremental improvements and innovation. That typically involves isolating part of the difficulty or problem and then trying to deal with it by throwing different solutions. Often, you arrive at a solution by identifying a similar problem. That sort of tinkering on the edge of development, of management by exception is responsible for the solar panel costs to have fallen so much over the last decade it could be the cheapest source of electricity in many places (provided you have enough space); and for batteries to have become energy-dense and light enough to be powering ordinary cars.

But the challenge with such approach is that it gradually accumulates a lot of legacy issues in the overall system. There are parts of the system that developed solutions for problems of the past that might have gone away or there are clunky processes and work-around designed to solve problems created by another part of a system. This is why when Elon Musk set out to create Tesla or SpaceX, he ended up actually reworking a lot of supply chains for the existing products because the original supply chains had inefficiencies made what he was aimming for impossible.

A lot of our public systems have such legacy issues because they evolved by some measure of consensus over the decades or centuries and accumulate different constituencies and stakeholder groups. Which is to say that first-principle approach to problem-solving is very critical. I certainly welcome the exercise to refresh our social compact in Singapore and hope that it can be something we build from ground zero rather than be bogged down by past legacy issues. It is heartening that Lawrence Wong is actually taking time and intellectual bandwidth to ponder some of these issues; it will take decades to translate them into action but if we all can buy into the process, it’d be worth the effort to make the translation.