Category Archives: Life

A friend was introducing me to this concept of cognitive flexibility. I must say it is probably a concept I know of before I had the chance to put a name to it but it definitely is a very important skill. But before going further into it, I’d like to introduce the idea that really underlies the ability to be cognitively flexible. It has to do with recognising the probabilistic nature of the world.

We all struggle with uncertainty and the fact multiple outcomes are all possible at the same time. Life is fuzzy and things are subjected to chance; by realising that things are not all-or-nothing kind of binary, and recognising that decisions are bets, we give ourselves the chance for reality to deviate from our expectations. And we learn to react better emotionally, not thinking we have lost because the world went the other way. The world did not reject us; it did not leave without us. It’s just that we had held on to our expectations even when reality came by.

Cognitive flexibility requires that we drop those expectations once reality plays out; that we toss out the lottery ticket once the winning numbers are out. How fast are you able to discard your expectations?

When Singapore was a young nation, there was a recognition of the place for the market to operate and do its job in creating competition, enhancing quality of life but this was not done blindly. Regulations were in place to ‘distort’ the market in a way that benefit the society.

We have one of the highest amounts of taxes imposed on car ownership, through various revenue instruments and it has brought in a lot of revenue for the government. Likewise when we set out to liberalise the electricity market sector in Singapore, it was about discovering the marginal cost of electricity generation and being able to pass on the savings to the consumers. Yet when the market turns against the consumers during a period of gas shortage, it is important to recognise that the original intent of the market is to serve the consumers while sustaining the industry anyways so we can’t just throw our hands into the air and say it’s the consumers’ own issue.

The market can drive good outcomes within a narrow band and where we want the market to operate within and deliver. But it takes regulation and framework set up to ensure the market is operating within the right context. When policy is the main driver, one cannot be caught up with trying to leave as much things as possible to the market. It is necessary to look at everything about the market and its tendencies in order to guide it towards the outcomes we are looking for.

Organisations promote people who are good at their jobs until they reach their ‘level of incompetence’.

The Peter Principle

This is an interesting concept about work and management which was a bit of curiosity for me when I was in school and when considering the organisation of firms from an economic perspective. Nevertheless, having started working, I find it hard not to take this principle as a matter of common sense from the structure our firms evolved.

Why this works at all to keep the firms doing fine was clearly due to the two forces that promotions have at play. Promotions actually serves two major purposes: one is that it provides a means to supply leaders for the teams and departments in a workplace; and the other is that it provides motivation for the best workers within the team and department. It doesn’t matter for firms that they promote capable and competent workers who happens to be pathetic leaders as long as it encourages and motivate good workers to do more and well enough to be promoted.

Never mind these workers then turned out to be bad managers, their previous track record serves as a model. Besides, their experience can allow them to share good practises with the team in an authoritative way. Clearly, when workers are really good, they will continue to deliver results – though bad leaders can be destructive, they might actually pose less of a risks than we think as long as they are not atrocious leaders – especially since they were good individual contributors.

However, the motivation effect only matters when the culture continues to think of moving into leadership and management as progress. If we can see progress in other dimensions of work, rather than the traditional idea of becoming promoted, then we can be part of creating a new work culture and system.

Is management the only way to progress in one’s career and life? That certainly appears to be the dominant narrative in society, including the public service. Broadly speaking, most of the time, success looks like managing a team of people and achieving results than just achieving individually.

This is all the more true for larger organisations because what matters to the organisation tend to be something that moves the needle for profit and loss. This would be incredibly difficult for an individual contributor to claim; however, the middle manager and CEO who can pass the achievements of a group of individuals they are managing as their own, are seen as the true success.

And of course this is the case especially for public service. What moves the needle for a country, for a district or large jurisdiction is going to be huge. So being competent and then getting promoted to a position where you cover larger and larger responsibility is naturally seen as progression. Even if genuine success is actually helping the people under you achieve greater success, as opposed to trying to achieve success yourself. This is a completely different set of skills; yet people who are promoted within these large organisations and public service has often more to do with their success as individual contributors or ability to deliver individual achievement rather than motivating the team to do better.

Worst, we all have been lulled into thinking that promotion is a reward when more often than not, we would prefer to keep getting better at what one does than to be given a completely different set of responsibilities celebrated but which we don’t care for. So do you still have the same kind of aspirations?

What I wrote about measure of progress is also a way to guide us to think about problem solving. What is the progress towards a problem solved? If the problem is to fell a tree, what amount of sharpening the axe is considered to constitute progress or does the progress only begin when the axe first strikes the tree. If you look at progress from that kind of visible, hole-in-tree kind of basis, then you obscure an important component of the solution which is to sharpen the axe.

If I had 1 hour to solve a problem, I’d spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and 5 minutes thinking about the solutions.

Albert Einstein

Psychologically, and also our training in schools, at exams does not impart this sort of wisdom to us because we are expected to know the solution at the snap of our fingers and get on to work it out. There’s also this tendency in teaching scientific enquiry to dwell on just designing and performing experiments to test different hypotheses rather than get into the thick of how a hypothesis comes about in the first place.

So perhaps it’d be worthwhile to look through a few pieces I wrote about solving problems (here, here, here and here).

There was this story going around social media where Einstein was writing some equations on a chalkboard and when he eventually list a final one, there was an uproar in the room because of a simple mistake he made. He mused that no one praised him for the first few equations that were correct but they were reacting harshly when he was wrong.

There is just something in our nature, even towards our loved ones, to dwell on mistakes – mostly that of others but sometimes that of ourselves. It is probably that the negative catches our attention more than the positive. After all, most of our ancestors survived because the negative things caught their attention enough for them to avoid it. Those other people who were not so sensitive probably lost their lives and failed to propagate. As a result, we tend to display that sort of anxiety and inclinations towards dwelling on mistakes.

Being aware of this can help us consider our responses more carefully and whether we are giving feedback or criticisms that are building up rather than tearing down. Instead of dwelling on mistakes, challenge yourself to link the corrective actions recommended to something positive that you’ve seen displayed by the person receiving your feedback. That will help create a positive loop.

Now to the final way of solving problems in this 4-part blog post. Like I mentioned, the first step to problem-solving is always understanding a problem deeply enough. Too many of us rush to find solutions without understanding the problems we are trying to solve. Consequently, the problems are not exactly dealt with when the solutions are developed.

This final way of solving a problem has to do with understand what is the blockage. Too often, things are going on fine and people have found ways to cope with it. Then it’s more a circumstance rather than a problem. People will coexist with it and there is no blockage. Management tends to see problems where there aren’t to justify their own intelligence or activities.

So when there actually isn’t any blockages, you solve the problem by telling a story. By basically reframing that problem into something that is either worth solving or worth ignoring.

Next up in the suite of problem-solving options, is the one that we are probably most familiar with. Based on ‘reasoning by analogy’; which some thinks is the lesser way and consider it ‘copy-paste’. I disagree because while it is slightly lazier, it can be efficient and especially for cases where things are urgent and you’re not solving a very innovation-intensive new problem, that is the best way.

Again, you do really need to understand the problem a bit more, and then you need to gather brains in the room to recall various experiences. More often than not, someone in a big-enough team would have seen similar problems before. Or even dealt with them. For these people who had the benefit of hindsight, they might be able to offer ideas on some solutions or the team can brainstorm for new options based on their understanding of how it was handled previously.

There will be idiosyncrasies to account for. That’s why it is not a lazy method. The difficulty is when you start having to develop convoluted ways of adapting the solution to your particular problem. Those are the sure signs that you might have used the wrong analogous problem as a starting point. Restart your search for a similar problem.

My favourite way of solving problems; and I still find it hard though it is probably the most satisfying, is to deal with them from first principles. It involves interrogating the problem, and boiling it down to the most core assumptions and principles you can. And that allows new ideas and solutions to be revealed. The most important thing is that first principles relies more on ground-up reasoning than to try and ‘copy-paste’ solution (which by the way, will be the next blog post).

We can ask why is the problem presented a problem; and seek out the more fundamental bottleneck present. A lot of times, we can be solving a derived problem rather than the actual problem itself when we don’t think from first principles.

For example, when you have a job vacancy where there’s a particular role that you envision involving a lot of different tasks and from your understanding of the tasks the prospective staff is expected to perform, you derive various requirements such as 2-3 experience in this, and versed in particular software, having had particular paper qualifications and so on. Now you created for yourself a new problem: finding a candidate who will be a match for those requirements you just created. But are they truly the requirements for the job?

Thinking from first principles would probably involve working out a proper way of assessing candidates for the job rather than rely too much on those screening requirements. It will involve what the job really is about and what you want this role for. The ultimate solution may be surprising. It might not involve hiring at all! In some instances, it might involve parceling out the work to existing team members, automating them or using other tools to finish the work.

When thinking from first principles, you’re better at problem solving than others not because of your experience or having dealt with the same problem before. Rather, it is precisely your ability to understand and probe a problem more deeply than others ever did which helps.

Put half-baked ideas into a poorly resourced team lacking buy-in and getting them to produce results is the surest way for you to ensure the conclusion that ‘this idea doesn’t work’. What are we really trying to achieve here? How intentional are we about making something work? Or are we just in a hurry to do something? Who are you actually serving? The people who benefit from the results? Or the people who want to see the numbers? Do you care more about the numbers or actual work involved?

If we don’t have the time, the capacity and the heart for something, let’s not waste the resources we have on it. Let our intentionality drive the results.