Virtue & values

Virtues are qualities of excellence that may be moral or intellectual; and once, the pursuit of virtues was the making of a purposeful and good life. Yet increasingly, as we welcome new cohorts of adults into our midst, the pursuit of a good life had become more material – especially in the culture amongst the newly developed countries and markets. Despite all the talk about ‘woke’ cultures and all, there is this foundation of material that underlies the material ability (or even authority) to criticise. To the extent that virtue itself is even criticised as ‘bigotry’.

Yet if you really reflect upon what virtues really are, they can hardly be considered bigotry. Someone who values certain character doesn’t necessarily have to judge the lack of it. One who is constantly in pursuit of that excellence and tries to uphold a high standard knows more than anyone else how difficult it is. Bigotry is more the sense that high standards should come easy for everyone and hence look down upon those who do not exhibit those standards.

To those who quietly recognise that the good life is meant to be lived and not ‘earned’ through material possession or collecting achievements. Thank you for soldiering on and showing the way.

Training programmes

During my time in public service, I’ve attended lots of different training programmes. There were a lot of training on writing minutes, professional reports and trip reports, as well as some on professional etiquette in a wide range of situations including during presentations, business meetings, business meals, cross-cultural interactions and so on. I won’t say all of them stuck with me and in fact, the elements that stuck were the ones I found useful on the spot and decided to make it a point to adopt. If they didn’t stand out when I first received them, the chance of them being useful to me was really low.

So the notes I took during those courses were at best museum artifacts of professional training I had received. The greater learning was done actually observing how my seniors, my managers and bosses behaved in those various settings, what they deemed important and asked questions about in reports and minutes. Those standards and disciplines were cultivated in that manner rather than through a couple of hours of training. In fact even days of training won’t cut it.

So is training a good way to enforce standards and uplift them across the people in an organisation? I think it can be if it aligns well with what is being practised and expected in an organisation to such a level that the senior management is practising them already. As David Maister rightly pointed out, training doesn’t work if it’s designed to change the juniors or frontline staff while the senior management or middle management is allowed to be set in their old ways.

Expert vs advisors

I’ve been reading the ‘Strategy and the Fat Smoker’ by David Maister. I think very highly of David’s crisp thinking in the manner he approach strategy and the manner in which he cuts through issues and topics. He simplifies the concepts to the core of the subject matter without ignoring the human elements in them.

One of the interesting ideas he introduced is the idea of expert vs advisors when it comes to serving in professional services. A lot of consultants claim to desire to serve customers as advisors, as trusted partners but in reality they want to be treated as the expert, to have control and defend their expertise rather than to build strong trusting relationships with their clients.

In essence, from my perspective, the expert cares about the topic and the subject matter more than the client’s problem. And as a result, the client can benefit from the expertise but more as flat information or knowledge than actionable insights.

The advisor may not be the expert but he gains his authority to consult with the client through his deep understanding of the client’s problem. And that allows his synthesis of insights gathered from other parties, especially those who consider themselves experts.

A client can decide what he needs is an expert but he can never expect the bespoke synthesis to come from the expert. He or she will have to take responsibility for that.

Facts or opinions

I saw a pretty brilliant video of a mother trying to teach her child about facts, opinions and mindsets in response to social environments. It’s in Chinese so I paraphrase in English the approach she has taken.

She held up an apple as her daughter eats a cob of corn and asked, “This is an apple. Is that statement a fact or an opinion?”

“A fact” said the daughter.

“Yes. That is a fact. Now Mummy says that the apple in my hand is tastier than the cob of corn you’re eating. Is that statement a fact or an opinion?”

“An opinion” said the daughter, still happily chewing on her corn.

“So when the kids at the playground says that they don’t like you and don’t want to play with you. What do you think that is? It is an opinion.” the mother continues.

The mother than took out a mug with black coffee in it. She said, “Look, daddy loves to drink this black, bitter drink but mummy doesn’t like it. Whether someone loves it or don’t like it, the coffee is the same, it has the same color, smell and look. People liking or not liking it says more about themselves than the coffee.”

She went on to say, “So when those kids at the playground say they don’t like you, it has nothing to do with you being you. You are still the same.”

The wisdom extended from the simple analogies were really brilliant and the manner she brought it forth and contextualised it for the daughter really made for a great model in teaching these ideas.

Making the contribution

For first time in history but it’s already been a while, the world collectively seem to have abundance. The total amount of food produced could feed the entire world one and a half times over. If energy is used efficiently and excesses trimmed, the entire world should have decent amount of power to live normal modern lives. Of course that depends on what you mean by normal but I’m covering the same point that there’s enough in the world but the problem is distribution.

And distribution is not just a physical problem of course. Distribution can be an economic problem in itself. The fact that the market doesn’t really care that much about the distribution of resources, buying power / puchasing power is actually a problem. It skews the global economy towards what the people with means needs rather than producing for the best outcomes of the world. And this is perhaps why energy continues to be skewed towards the developed, high energy consumption countries or markets.

So making a contribution to this world isn’t really about production. If the world continues in the same fashion tomorrow, you can really make a greater impact on someone’s life – from an incremental perspective – by improving the distribution in the system. By bringing access to higher quality energy, better nutrition, bringing critical and vital knowledge to the communities which can use them properly. That sort of contribution is of unparalleled value. Probably not the kind of contribution involving helping companies break into new markets or keeping fossil fuel businesses alive to emit more carbon.

What is value?

One of the key fundamental steps to take in order to move towards a low-carbon future is to re-assess our notion of value, economic value. Over the past decades, economic value had been increasingly important as more and more things in the world could be bought with money. This is what Michael Sandel calls the making of a market society.

This is worrying because the value of anything and everything used to be so much more. There’s richness in being able to evaluate and appraise value of various things in different ways. And this is why dollar values can never encapsulate all of that. In fact, there is no such thing as a market for single goods and services. The notion of a market price is just about as real as the notion of an average. The same good can be simultaneously sold at low and high prices depending on where, when, and to whom it was sold.

By defining this abstract concept of market values, we are trying to make a subjective valuation something objective. We are trying to abstract from specific context and circumstances and forcefully say that surely there is something about the good or service itself that has nothing to do with all that. And if we can gather the averages or have a large number of observations, we can use that statistic as something objective. In reality, the statistic is just a statistic – is it a market value? That’s up to whoever is reading the statement.

Beyond the market, the real way to appraise value continues to be subjective and that is okay because we all should be selecting the dimensions we all care about and build our decisions based on that.

Ready-made solutions

Just add hot water to instant coffee and you get your morning cup of coffee. Boil some water and pop the noodles and powder in, or even better, just rip the packaging and put it into the microwave, pressing just a few buttons then wait – and you get your meal. Bring a packet of ready-mix cement and mix in water, and you can have some of the bonding materials for your brick building. Or you can start paving the road.

So why can’t you just order a report and instantly know everything there is to know about a market? Or to pay someone to give you all the answers to entering a market for your business? Even better, pay someone to enter the market, run the business for you and then you just reap the business success benefits? The challenge of having instant, ready-made solutions in some parts of life is that we start expecting all parts of life to be like that.

And worse still, we allow the market to grow into crevices of our lives expecting it to deliver but it never does. Professional service can deliver a report but won’t be able to ensure you learn all about a market. You could get someone to develop a strategy to enter a market for your business but you’re the one who would eventually have to follow through with it. And moreover, the less you’re involved in co-developing the plan, the less you’ll be able to actually execute it.

There are just so much work that is better, more beautiful and meaningful because they involve co-creation and where you’re paying for someone to partner with you to make a new thing happen. The reason you’d pay them for it is because you will eventually reap the full benefits of the result while they wouldn’t have been working to partner with you otherwise. And in this domain, there are no ready-made solutions for you to purchase; you will have to do the work if you want the success. And it won’t be guaranteed.

Bridge to the future

Having been based in Australia for two months now and getting a better view of the overall energy landscape, I’d say that the greatest hurdle we need to overcome is developing an alignment in commitment, plans and action to bring bioenergy especially biomethane into the system energy mix in order to decarbonise.

We are trying to build a bridge to the low-carbon energy future. And there has been many announcement, efforts and plans around hydrogen hubs, hydrogen parks. In the year 2023, the prices of electrolysers didn’t seem to come down all that much as expected, renewable electricity in the form of wind and solar, while being cheap, is bringing about a degree of intermittency that challenges grid operations to the extent that overall cost of electricity or at least access to electricity remains high. As it turns out, we were building the bridge from the destination towards us when we were working on the hydrogen projects. They were good, at some point in the future but it seems that they are not being built fast enough to reach us today. We are still unable to adopt those solutions.

This means that as the decarbonisation targets and emission reduction dreams comes back to bite us, we need to start building the bridge from our side. And biomethane is a great solution that allows us to do that. It displaces natural gas on a one-to-one basis and does not require end-users of natural gas to change their appliances. Biomethane can be spec-ed properly in the biogas upgrading process in order to achieve the quality required for gas grid injection. Moreover, the production of biogas (precursor to biomethane) can be done in conjunction with managing our organic and agricultural wastes which were either being burnt, composted openly or sent to the landfill – all of which involves some kind of carbon emission (albeit short-cycle to a certain extent) that does not achieve extra work done. And don’t get me started on the potential of biogenic carbon dioxide as a future market to build.

Lots of clear work and action. Once we get the perception right and eliminate the misinformation around bioenergy in Australia.

Greenwashing label

Is the whole notion of ESG disclosure a massive distraction? In 2021, Tariq Fancy of Blackrock called it a distraction for climate action. And I tend to agree because it tries to pass on the responsibility of climate action into the hands of the market, that had continually proved incapable of generating endogenous climate action. Sure, you need the market to scale solutions, and drive the expansion of some of the good things that will benefit the climate. But to think that the market can drive change just purely from the realisation of climate change as a problem is naive.

By leaving the type of climate action and the labelling of what counts as green to the market will simply generate greater confusion and inaction as we have seen from the proliferation of funds that tout sustainability or impact, or both and often still trying to pair that with financial returns, etc. The extra cost that goes into reporting, emissions accounting and massive resources around disclosure standards and all simply drives activities for the big consultancies without diverting energies towards the direction of climate action.

The issue is that greenwashing is real and pretty easy. And that can take the form of superficial disclosures that tosses buzzwords around. Yet there are corporates taking genuine action drowning in this sea of sustainability marketing and PR nonsense, being accused of greenwashing when they are trying to make a difference. If it was all going to boil down to rules, regulations and laws, then there won’t be ESG funds and non-ESG funds or government having to regulate disclosures. There won’t be accusations of greenwashing because you are either green or just illegal/non-compliant.

Regulation is of course a complex topic for another day but it has to be worked on. Regulating disclosure is unlikely to be enough.