There is a shipping vessel stuck at Suez Canal right now. And there awaits hundreds of container vessels, ships awaiting to get through the canal – on both sides. This canal was built in 1869 precisely to prevent ships having to sail down to the Cape of Good Hope, allowing the maritime journey between Europe and Asia to cut by almost half. And of course, it became a very dominant and signficant part of the global shipping route.
There are well trodden paths and shortcuts that we can use when thinking about our lives and careers but every now and then, a disruption occurs, and the landscape changes. It might mean we have to wait, or we can take that long circuitous path people used to take.
Unless you think you’re a piece of good that finds its meaning only in reaching the destination, as a person, the actual journey might help you figure out who you are, what you’re here for, and what you should be doing, a bit better than just trying to go down the paths and shoutcuts everyone is shouting at you about.
In school we are taught a lot what to do; and we are told what good awaits us when we are right (which is about doing what the system wants). On the contrary, they don’t really tell you what happens when we are wrong. It’s the “or else…” kind of subtle threat. And that’s because we want to keep the students, the kids thumbed down, we fear the demolition of the power hierarchy in place. Or maybe it’s just pride, the pride our system teach us to have.
What if we allow ourselves, and encourage everyone to ask “or else what?” And to really clarify what happens when we are wrong? Because there is value to it. It is easier to know what to study to get better in the next test when you go over what you did wrong in the previous one (assuming the tests are cumulative in the content they cover); it is better to know the consequences or worst case scenario before you embark on a mission. You can invest with more conviction if you know what is the residual value of a business when the venture fails.
So much of our lives actually depends on us surviving through times when we are wrong but we’re never quite taught to think that way. We are taught to daydream about being right and then we are penalised by our inability to take the right risks and make the right mistakes.
In the bible, Jesus talks about the parable of the sower and shared about seeds falling on different ground (Mark 4, Matthew 13 and Luke 8) and that gives different outcomes. The focus was on the grounds; the seed was the same across all of the grounds. But when the ground was different, it affected the growth and the development of the seed.
Yet it was what is latent in the seed that allowed that interaction with the ground to produce plants that bore fruits. And you know, all that crazy back-and-forth about nature or nurture is a false dichotomy at the end of the day. It takes nurture to bring out what is nature; and it takes latent potential to allow nurturing to do its work. What we need to do however, is to suspend judgement and not to allow tangible measures to overwhelm our sense of perception. We are better than that; teachers can see potential of students beyond just looking at their grades or getting them to take a test. But yet we prefer to fall back on the numbers.
In a society like Singapore where humans are the most important and valuable asset (read: not resource) that we have in our city state, we ought to start valuing people (not by their salary) and treating them as humans. We need to stop trying to measure potential and assume those potential will run its course to manifest in reality. Instead, we ought to be helping everyone grow to their potential without assuming what those potentials are. When we start believing in people, as opposed to mechanical systems; when we start empowering people to treat others as humans, to interact organically, we’ll place ourselves on a new growth trajectory.
Normalcy is overhyped. Wishing things were going ‘back to normal’ is basically hoping to return to comfort zone. But we all know if that really happens it means we declined or stagnated, it means the point of the changes were not really taken in, growth was forgone in search for comfort.
We talk about ‘new normal’ as if changes should be once off, and things settle back in an ‘equilibrium’. I think we are capable of handling dynamics way more than our economic equations would care to suggest. Some things I observe in the retail business activities out there at large is interesting:
Takeaways are increasingly important for F&B businesses outside; but a lot of them are still sub-optimal in the way they prepare food to be packed and then sent out for delivery or for self-collection. This might be an area ripe for some disruption though the gains from it is uncertain.
Self-service checkouts are increasingly usual and more sophisticated as the machines tend to be able to detect the entire shopping basket of goods when you put them into the sensor area. Packaging into shopping bags appears to still be a bottleneck. For non-food places, this can work nicely (people can chuck products into their bags or just store-sold totes/paper-bags) but for food outlets, new solutions might be needed.
Dinning outlets might have to rethink their desire for quick turn-around of customers because of cost associated with wiped-down, etc. It might pay off for them to keep customer around longer, feed them with increasingly high margin foods (smaller portions, higher priced) – which is likely the drinks and the desserts (prepare a menu for after-mains). Better queue-management systems like from Haidilao that really gets customers vested in the queue would help.
Given more work-from-home, there’s more on-demand food delivery but would food-subscription based business be more efficient? Especially when one already suffer from decision-fatigue while working.
None of these things were ‘normal’ years ago but now they kind of are. And they continue to be evolving and changing. So what does ‘back to normal’ really mean? Nothing.
When we approach our employment, we can take on a very pragmatic, transactional approach. And it is the same on the other side; the employers can be transactional. They can come up with a HR policy that is attractive, that provides a “return on recruitment” and with good “management of talents” that allows them to utilise the talents and generate the outcomes for the organisation.
Then the individuals in these system can maximise their career outcomes, their profiles, their remuneration while offloading as much of their individual risks and taking credit for outcomes as far as possible. There will be innovation for the sake of staking a claim, planting a flag for one’s profile rather than genuine client or industry interest. There will probably be some greenwashing to skew external perception. There will be a lot of gaming the system when people cannot tell apart commitments from actual outcomes.
The world could be different if HR was different; if we are collectively less transactional about employment. Where we make use of our surpluses- in terms of savings, inherited wealth and be able to say no to transactional employers. We can choose only those who invest in their people rather than milk them. We can refuse to play the game that people are setting up. We can maximise not our careers but our impact, and create a future we want for ourselves and future generation through our work.
Companies are going out there and committing to carbon-neutrality, net-zero and all that catchphases. I wonder if they really know what it entails or it’s a case of talking first and sorting things out later especially when the guy on top may not be holding on to his job by the “deadline”.
When Bill Gates tried to exit fossil fuel from his portfolio, he began to realise how hard it was. I think we only start recognising the difficulty or the ease of certain things when we start doing them. If we keep putting them off then we will never discover the true extent of the difficulty.
Take action now. Refine later. Instead of promising now and doing later.
Does a society exist for its members or do the members exist for the society? Think of “significance” as the extent or ways in which members feel that appreciation and sense of being part of the group that they make up. The demand for significance have increased.
Wait, no the way significance is manifested have changed. Maybe it was an arms race after all, but maybe, it does not have to be. Members don’t have to be pit against one another for significance, they all can have significance.
So many of our systems have been built by drawing upon the resources and members of a society in order to help govern and maintain the society. These systems reward significance to those who are helping to lead and control (or maybe those people reward significance to themselves); but either way, the people who are ‘managed’ are often mere digits. They are called to work their way up to gain significance, to learn the skills to be a top dog, to lead and manage.
What about a world where all the members of society are rewarded with more significance by the leaders and so the members can themselves attribute more significance to the leaders? Where we as constituents don’t just say people are leaders because they make the cut in competence but above all, they care for the people.
Man are social animals and so it is natural that with the pandemic out there, social media is going to have a greater hold of us than before. The unique feature about social media is that fringe group can find more strength in numbers because distance is no longer a barrier. And with some kind of perceived veil over our identities (as an online digital avatar rather than our real physical self), our voice may be a bit more expressive.
That can be used positively or negatively; we can decide to amplify positive or negative voices each time we share, and every time when we post. We may try to punch above our weight in terms of voice by exaggeration or taking a more extreme stance than we actually do just as a tactical way of counterbalancing the voices. But it is our choice whether to do so.
Now that we have that awareness of how we come across, we are better positioned to think about how we are being influence. Thinking through more clearly about our stance on different things helps us give pause to what we are reading and consuming and consider whether we are relying too much on similar viewpoints and others who are in agreement with us. Social media algorithms have their patterns of keeping us hooked to them because they show us things that agrees with us. But what about those opposing views that are available out there which social media is not showing you? Does the algorithm make them less valid?
We have to start regulating our influences and also our influence, especially online. And make your contribution a positive one.
Regular readers would have discovered the rescued stray dog my wife and I adopted passed on last week. I’ve had friends who suffered greater loss of loved ones over the past month. And of course, there’s been quite a lot of bloodshed in the US stock markets as well and there are others mourning different kind of loss.
Before I came to faith in Christ, I actually had more problems with love than suffering. Life seemed to contain lots of suffering – and it can seem arbitrary when we just survey them randomly. So what was strange was that one could love – because it seemed even more meaningless than suffering if there wasn’t a God, or if we just spontaneously emerged in the world without purpose or intent. Love was more a mystery to me.
But as I came to understood love through what was demonstrated by God in Christ, I begin to see perhaps suffering was more a challenge. Faithful Christians suffered, perhaps more than others. And through the bible, whether it was the old or new testament, people who believed in God suffered – often greatly. Yet if one pays close attention, it is often through suffering that we ourselves experience the greatest growth, and we develop more depth in suffering. I’m not saying we should encourage or create suffering but I think we have to learn to see how God’s goodness and His perfect will allows for suffering. And there is meaning in it – yes, even with the misery, the angst, the grief, the pain.
Having gone through all that, the question is, how do you respond? Do you turn bitter against or do you turn to God?
I’ve previously wrote about my thoughts in HR (here too) as well as some stories about my brushes with them. I had never thought about eradicating them entirely though – but Greg Jackson from Octopus Energy actually did that, for his 1,200-strong company. I thought that’s beyond remarkable, and once I read the story, it made perfect sense to me.
Greg’s point about how HR and IT departments can infantilise the employees and end up drowning creativity in bureaucracy and process is almost definitely true. It doesn’t mean it is easy to manage a company without these functions though. He has placed that onus on the manager, which can be quite challenging. Though in today’s highly automated world, there are a lot of the traditional HR functions that is actually already automated or outsourced.
Unfortunately, in a bureaucracy, even when things are not automated, it can seem as though the human touch has been long lost. An anecdote to this is a true story I’d like to retell: an employee who was usually allowed to make transport claims when going from his home to client meetings outside the office had to first drop off his ailing dog at a friend’s place so that the dog would not be left alone at home. However, because the friend’s place was a detour from the meeting location, he paid out of his own pocket for transport from his own home to the friend’s place, then got a cab to the client’s place. When he tried to make a transport claim from the friend’s place, his claim was rejected because the origin location of the trip wasn’t his home address. Even when he appealed to HR on the nature of the situation, the staff (read: humans) were not able to make an exception even when his line manager was supportive.
I think the value here is really in empowerment of the employees and getting the management to do the emotional labour of managing remuneration, incentives, training needed for employees rather than leave it to some specialised department. The way I think about the future of HR is that it is no longer an administrative function but that of empowerment and improving productivity through watching out for mental health. And if that is all incorporated into management, it might actually give management the needed boost and reason to continue existing.
