Category Archives: Life

I stood in line at the post office for my turn to mail out my parcel. I was early and so there wasn’t much of a line. It used to be that you have to book your own time in order to go to the post office because you’d never know how long the line there is.

A lady approached me; not too tall and probably in her early-forties. She asked if she could ask me a few questions – primarily about myself. I answered in non-specific vague terms but enough for her to make some flattering remarks about me and then asked me if I know about changes around the national health insurance policies that will commence 1 April 2021.

Sounds like an insurance person trying to pitch; she needed more information such as whether I had a private insurer already, which level of plans I was on and so on. It was my turn so I happily went to the counter to settle my parcel. And when I turned back, she approached me to try and continue our conversation. I thanked her for alerting me to the changes and shared that I’d like to read up myself first before talking about it for the day, then left.

I was in a hurry then but I wonder if it made sense for people to be pitching to those in line for products as complex as insurance. Maybe it makes sense for others – for sure, it saves a bit of time and people might feel like they are learning something (which is probably true). But I cannot help thinking that people might also feel a bit uncomfortable, somewhat cornered, as thought their time is held hostage. It reminded me of those high-pressure sales places that tour groups have to go through as part of the ‘compulsory itinerary’.

The old distribution methods of insurance is broken and I can see that it is slowly being disrupted as people start to look to apps they trust as platforms to possibly take up insurance coverage. This is going to be powerful because the distribution cost of insurance tends to be quite high going through the traditional channels. There are probably customers in the economy still reachable only by the traditional means but they are fast shrinking. Insurance companies needs to think how they can do better.

There’s two ways of framing this question; and it affects the way we answer the question when it comes to being a parent, a teacher, a boss or a friend. When we get ask this ‘WIIFM’ question (I realised there’s such an acronym when I googled), it is often when we are put into an active position of persuasion. Trust me, it is an opportunity to discover more about the person you are persuading and also more about yourself and your thinking.

The first way of thinking is that the person is selfish or self-entered so you have to appeal to his ‘benefit’ in the narrow sense of the word. So you have think of what are the direct rewards for him if he were to take the course of action you recommend. This is usually the approach that product advertising undertakes. They will try to create that target persona audience they are speaking to, and share the product benefits for this target persona. The thing about considering others to be the selfish one makes you think of it all as a zero-sum game where if you convince the person, you win, and if you fail to convince him, then he wins.

There is a second way of thinking about the person, and the question, which probably is a little less obvious. It is thinking of it not so much as a question of benefits but of personal context. That is, the questioner is trying to figure out the implications of the recommended course of action in his/her personal context. That means not just the good but the bad, the tangibles and the intangibles.

Answering the question this second way is important because it gradually puts you on the same side as the one you’re trying to persuade. It puts honesty and sincerity at the fore. It dispenses with window dressing and trying to do a show. And this is often the approach for brand advertising where you seed and put leverage in the culture. So the next time you try to persuade or answer this WIIFM question, be reminded of the potential of this different way of looking at it.

From an agrarian culture, humans have already somewhat developed the idea of a return on investment. From an agriculture standpoint it can be the value of a harvest expressed as a ratio over the cost, in terms of the seeds sowed, the resources exhausted up till harvest time. In nominal terms, it is about the money made or loss over time of investment expressed as a ratio against the money put in. But the real question is, whether this is an ex ante or an ex post concept. Whether it is used to assess performance that have passed or to foresee what lies before us.

I find it as a useful way of reflecting on what has gone before and to really help us assess the process that we have been through in order to get the return. But the world and the society seem to consider it more useful as a planning tool, to help make decisions on what to invest in, by collapsing all value into one dimension (usually money) and then instead of taking time as a resource as part of the investment, it becomes merely another parameter in the indicator (because returns need to be benchmarked against the time period as well).

I wonder if this puts us at the risk of glorifying the rosy planning picture over the actual execution. Where upfront reporting to investors and stakeholders seem more important than what happens later at presenting of results (either a credit-grabbing exercise or apologise-and-ask-for-forgiveness). Because we are so ‘forgiving’ in the back end, we may be concentrating the gains on most return on investment, and socialising its losses.

Is ROI your way of reflecting or a means of planning for you?

What happens if you’re in the classroom of one? Yes, you are the one person. You are the student. You are the teacher. You are responsible for setting the homework and for completing it, for grading it, and getting the feedback, etc. You will determine how to improve, what to learn, how to teach/learn. How would you approach it? What would you be teaching for?

That is the world you are in. That is the world whenever you find some time on commutes, when you are scrolling through the phone, when you determine what texts to answer and what materials to read or to consume. Because you are constantly learning, teaching yourself, setting homework for yourself. And grading yourself: thinking about how productive you are, whether you used your time well or wasted it, judging your own performance.

You are in that classroom of one. What is the rubric you’ll give yourself? What is the metric you want to grade yourself against? Why?

I think this topic is worth exploring sufficiently that I’m devoting yet another blog post to it. I did some thinking about what it means for us as humans when more and more domains of our lives are turning into wicked learning environments. What are the implications for parents, educators, corporations trying to find, hire and nurture talents?

For parents, I think the good news is that some traditional domains like music, certain sports, and intellectual games (eg. chess) are going to remain as kind learning environments with fundamental rules that don’t change – where children can gain mastery with the right set of motivation and dedication towards practice. But to prepare them for the world of wicked learning environments requires you to continually support them through adversity they will encounter in life and teaching them principles of picking themselves back up and hacking away at problems that comes along, learning how to determined what and when to give up. The most important lesson to teach is really to help them recognise that there’s a full spectrum of different kinds of intelligence which matters and they need to be open-minded and open-hearted towards that diversity of ideas.

For educators, I’d think one have to learn to break free of that military-industrial complex that all education systems are entangled with. There’s just this desire towards having the education system and mainstream schools as cookie cutters; as products of a factory. People involved in management are going to deny it, and I do think they have good intentions – but the fact is that when you’re trying to do these things at a national level, with standardisation, with ‘scientific management’, you’re going to be saddled with things like KPIs, focusing on what can be counted rather than what really counts.

In education, you don’t need managers, you need community organisers; you need people who bring everyone together, get them to share and practice their ideas, and then exchange with one another, persuade each other to adopt good attributes, refine and sharpen one another. It is not a competition, it is a community, and the objective is not to be better than one another but to be better as a whole.

How about corporations? There’s no easy answers but I think it boils down again to recognising what the corporation is really after. If it’s profits, then you will forever be just trying to optimise it according to the rules of the day, you’ll be trying to compete in the kind learning environments and commoditise things. But if serving the customer is at the fore, where the rules of the game to maximise profit for the hour does not matter, then you will become the one who push everyone into a wicked learning environment. And that can be a great thing.

Then you’ll be one who don’t hire experts. You’ll be someone who hire professionals, newbies, mavericks – and it doesn’t matter because you’ll be doing something new. You won’t be doing silly competitor analysis because in the category of one, there’s no competitors. Then you’re always going to win.

Previously I described what wicked learning environments are and introduced the idea of when we can rely on someone with experience. In domains which are marked by fundamental technical knowledge; where that is mostly what is at stake, then having the experienced expert helps. Those are kind learning environments where what they have experienced would sufficiently inform us enough to refine our approach and optimise the outcome.

The problem with the world we reside in now is that things change; and big shifts are happening that can turn kind learning environments into wicked ones. This is especially true for the marketplace. I have previously written about how disruptive startups are changing cultures and that changes the dynamics of the marketplace – it adds new parameters for the competition to consider into the mix.

When that happens, the originally ‘kind’ learning environments turn a bit different. Using back the example of Grab; all of a sudden, being a cab driver isn’t about knowing where to pick up passengers at different times of the day, or knowing the shortest route from point A to B anymore. The driver now have to actually pay attention to the pricing they can get at different times of the day and on the platform vis-a-vis the metered fare. This is way different from the past when they just needed to be able to roughly estimate of the metered fare from one place to another and quickly judge whether they want to take on the job. During the transition, the learning environment quickly turns wicked and as the Grab app algorithm is refined, the learning keeps changing, the old rules of thumb stop working and the players have to adapt. The same happens when new ride-hailing app entrants enter the market.

For someone who prides himself/herself as one who have developed experience and deep expertise, we need to recognise that how much those are valued really depends on the context of the environment, whether things are changing so rapidly as to render those experience/expertise obsolete quickly. This can also happen suddenly (eg. when the world forsake crude oil then rig-building expertise becomes less valuable); so as individuals trying to create the future, we have to think about how we want to really equip and invest in ourselves.

Human capital accumulation is going to shift quite a fair bit.

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.