Category Archives: Life

I’m honestly really glad that our government rhetoric has gone on the green bandwagon. And knowing Singapore, we want to be able to deliver on our goals and make a reportable difference. However, I think it is vital to really interrogate those plans and consider if on a overall scheme of things, the plan is actually really green.

Looking just at the key areas; beginning with parks and trees – City in Nature pillar. The setting aside of land for more parks and planting more trees is definitely welcomed – but I’m not too sure if the destruction of trees/grassland to make way for further developments is progressing at a faster rate than the increase in parkland and trees. Is there some overall measure instead that the government can hold itself accountable to? Or if actually it just serves to slow down the destruction, can we also be transparent about it and confess when will we actually be increasing rather than decreasing green land and green cover?

On the Energy Reset pillar, Singapore is rightly described as an energy-disadvantaged country especially when it comes to renewables so I think we can be forgiven for still having to resort to fossil fuel for most of our baseload power. However, I think the opportunity is really not in putting solar panels on HDB, or doing small things to optimise efficiency of our plants. The real opportunity is in improving the energy efficiency of our buildings and ideally banning completely individual air-conditioning units. There’s a real waste in having individual units stacked one on top of another in a single row as in HDB flats because the hot air from one compressor is just feeding the one on top of it and once you reach high floors like for my unit, I’m wasting a tonne of energy keeping my compressor working. And besides that, our vehicles is another huge opportunity – using the same principle of freezing our vehicle growth, can we simply not ban the internal combustion engine on passenger vehicles by 2030? Our COE system can just dole out the last COEs to ICE cars and from now on, only allow EVs for passenger cars to get COEs? Then by 2030, most of our roads will be EVs – never mind the charging infrastructure; once people who wants to drive buy the cars, the market incentives to bring about charging and all will come.

And there are industries whose energy efficiency can be improved further, not just buildings – which by the way is more or less pretty well managed by BCA’s green mark certification system. The government can and should take the lead by making sure all of their facilities are green. 30% of schools being carbon neutral by 2030 is a little slow in my opinion given that more schools can simply fit itself with solar panels (even for education purposes) and do a host of other things like composting food waste, doing grey water recycling. Yes, Singapore managed to close the water loop for most part but encouraging grey water reuse would be able to improve water efficiency further.

Talking about water – how about having potable water supply pipes vis-a-vis non-potable water? So that we can reduce the energy intensity of our water treatment? Well, maybe the cost doesn’t add up as well – but all of these decision making process and sustainability considerations can be made more transparent as well so that citizens can be more involved. Accountability is key when it comes to environmental governance and sustainability – not just voicing out of plans.

Singapore had too many budgets last year I kind of lost track. There was a lot of support from the government here and there; it was good the new leaders are demonstrating that they are able to draw from the reserves during times of need and try and direct it towards those who need them. This is very different from our government’s approach in the earlier years of managing the economy. Of course, there will be some people who think of these as dangerously populist.

This year we have 1 budget so far (to be fair the year has really kind of just started), and things looks pretty boring in my view. It is a very safe, ‘same-old’ kind of budget, which in my opinion, reflects once again a lack of imagination. There’s a lot of just recycling old materials, old scripts, and to a large extent, wishful thinking. Job supports/subsidy assumes that the economy will recover or that firms are not just taking advantage of them to keep zombie operations alive. They are also generally contingent on those sectors eventually getting an uptick by the time subsidies end. Government tried to signal that if needed, they’ll step in again (as DPM Heng mentioned during the CNA programme), which reeks of moral hazard.

There had been talks about the desire to make manufacturing a significant part of our economy; but somehow the budget doesn’t seem to be devoting much to that area. Little doubt we are still stuck with thinking we would just be using tax incentives to attract MNCs to position themselves in Singapore. How about developing the domestic sector? We do have excellent firms which are local firms part of the international semiconductor value chain – can we cultivate more of that? Are we doing any R&D necessary to help these firms? Are our polytechnics and university working with these firms? Are we developing a workforce that can enter jobs created by these firms? How is the government spending its budget to make these things happen?

There is more ‘enforced spending’ kind of stimulus in the form of vouchers again. This time it’s called CDC vouchers for heartland kind of spending – hawker centres and shops. Maybe that will help to ramp up digitalisation more; and you are also handing out small sums to many people so the marginal propensity to spend is high, and that can generate some multiplier effect. But what is the longer-term supply-side impacts of such measures? Likely nil. Why not use those funds to pay for all the digitalisation stuff in schools to facilitate more remote learning? Why rely on means-tested subsidies rather than blanket subsidies? In any case the rich people already get iPads and they can be given the chance to opt out of the free one if they already have one. That saves the hassle of the poor people making applications, going through means-testing, etc.

Then there’s the question of funding our budget – which of course is not exactly clear since we drew from reserves and there’s no mention of returning the funds to the reserves. How about enforcing our claims on intellectual property generated through our research grants and all the money that NRF has put to work? How about putting those IP to use in terms of commercialising something that we can manufacture domestically? Or if they are not yet ready, how about selling it to some private sector in Singapore at a concessionary price and then part of the upside income from the commercialisation of the IP goes to our national coffers?

I’m just throwing out new ideas and they could all be bad ideas. But to me, the problem I’m observing with our budget is that there’s insufficient bad ideas because there isn’t much new ideas. And that playing safe, that ‘it’s always been done this way’ kind of calculations in the background, is getting more dangerous in this brave new world.

For a while in my earlier work with Singapore companies in the Sustainable Energy space, I was looking at carbon credits and trading; and as an economist, I looked at it in very simplistic terms when I think about having a carbon market, or a market for carbon – especially when thinking about not just the credits to emit, but also offsets or basically net negative carbon projects that can help to zero out certain emissions elsewhere. By trading these tools, you could theoretically make the entire industry better off because the ones who are polluting less could benefit from lower cost of production if they are to purchase emission allowances or even the offsets from others; while those who are unable to switch to less carbon intensive technologies will have to pay more, thus raising prices, reducing demand for their goods and so on.

The idea is for the price signals to reflect the environmental cost of carbon so to speak. But reality is simply so different from what textbook economics contains. What exactly counts as a carbon offset is really not that clear. We could say that power generated using solar power is generally avoiding carbon emissions from power generated by carbon-dioxide-emitting power but that is not an offset of carbon-dioxide (which should be negative). Besides, if the solar farm was built on land by clearing primary rainforest, then the project is actually reducing the environment’s capacity to absorb carbon – that is surely a net carbon positive project over its lifespan or even more.

Of course, the way these things are accounted is different from the way I’m speaking of this because there’s an industry out there which is built around generating these credits/offset. We are still a long way to go in terms of trying to align the incentives in these things so that our economic system is well-aligned with principles of sustainability. But it’s great that the journey has started. Let’s just hope the counterproductive, harmful kind of greenwashing won’t eradicate us before the alignment takes root.

I’ve been writing about education in a series I call ‘Zero-base Reconstruction’. And I probably will continue to write in this series. Why? Because I have plenty of ideas what can make education better for our future generation in a manner that will result in a better future, that will help us make better use of what we as humans accumulate as knowledge. Mass education was created for an Industrial Age to train people for industrial jobs in factories and to manage bureaucracies where corporations reign.

The future will not be one dominated by industrial factories or full of corporate bureacracies (even if there are still giant tech companies). The workers of the future will not be succeeding through complying to corporate policies or norms but trying to win by generating and executing on good ideas – for products, and service. And many new industries will open up that is about making human connections. Coaching one-to-one and in groups will become important; they will form core parts of HR in organisation. Mental health care will grow – in terms of developing new apps, services that help to deal with stress, train our minds to deal with the newer challenges of the world. Caregiving sector will also grow as people survive to older age and younger people will have to learn to serve them and make genuine connections.

All these will take place in parallel with increasing automation of significant parts of jobs which we used to think of as respectable: accounting, lawyering, audit, even PR. Hence the human connection aspects of most jobs will become more important because ultimately, the consumer is still human, and the most important decisions are still made by humans. The ability to think, to be creative in new contexts, new environments, under new constraints will be way more important.

The world needs teachers who can prepare our next generation for such a future; who can cultivate empathy, help people learn to make connections with others (and not just abstract concepts). And that’s why I chose to be a coach. How about you?

I wrote about teaching mistakes. And I thought it was more important than problem solving because for most part of the mass education system, we are not learning to specify problems properly. This is just about one of the most important skill in life but we realise that in schools, it is the teachers learning how to specify problems clearly while students are only trained to find answers to problems.

Over time, because the system is gamed, students merely learn to recognise the signals in the problem statement that will prompt certain responses or answers without necessarily making the genuine connection between the problem and the solution. The trick to change this, I believe, is to teach ‘mistakes’ – ie. problem specifications and then for people to learn to be able to look at the problem through many angles.

This approach more often than not eventually leads to problem-solving more than when one just jumps into a situation trying to solve some vaguely-specified problems. The issue with getting people to try solve problems without even teaching them how to identify one means we get people entering the workplace learning to create new problems to solve rather than looking for the right problems to solve. That creates those bullshit jobs that I’ve previously commented about. And also career-maximisers who would be happy to start fires which they put out and then get themselves recognised for putting out the flames.

Equipping our next generation with problem-solving capabilities is about diagnosis of problems, tracing and investigating the root causes and then taking a bigger, open mind approach to finding a solution rather than being anxious to take the hammer in the toolbox to strike just about everything thinking they’re all nails.

This is part of a series that ponder over what we should be teaching in schools and to our children to prepare them adequately for life. We covered ideas like visioning, heritage, empathy – all of which relates both to life and also suggest how these things can be more consciously infused into what we teach and the way we teach.

Today I want to cover teaching about mistakes. And I don’t mean generically the concept of mistakes. I mean like real things that we have done in the past which constitutes mistakes: decisions made about regulations, country policies, failure to detect wrongdoing, making wrongful arrests and so on. Like sharing about the lead-up, the events from various perspectives and calling out the mistakes made, analysing them.

And the reason I put up the sustainability banner for this article is because any unsustainable practice we apply in our economy is a mistake (and there are many examples to draw from). And it is important to understand what are the kind of conditions and incentives that create that. It is also necessary to appreciate that mistakes are often controversial in that it may seem right in certain dimensions and wrong in others. The idea is to examine the perspectives and the conditions driving these perspectives.

For example, the use of coal-fired power is a mistake; but we acknowledge that it was what brought the world to a level of production and technological advancement that allows us to understand the problem better, and figure out how to deal with it. Calling out a mistake is the first step in trying to understand problems better and work towards solving them – which is yet another skill we want to equip our next generation with. Uncovering ‘mistakes’ of mankind, of national governments, of organisations can be worked into the subjects of Economics, Business, History – even the Sciences. Some may wonder what are the merits of teaching about mistakes but remember once when we thought the earth was flat? That was a mistake made in the past that we don’t want to repeat. Yet there’s now so much misinformation that there seem to be a resurgence of people believing in the flat earth. So let’s not take mistakes for granted – sometimes it is not obvious something is a mistake and often people making mistakes would want to cover it up and make tonnes of excuses for them.

Now while we try to normalise calling out on mistakes, we want to be able to learn to move forward together regardless of who made the mistakes. We need to help one another overcome that playground instinct of putting blame on people as though eliminating someone would make the world a better place. But I’d probably write another post about it.

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.