You can’t solve a problem you aren’t willing to have.
Bill Burnett and Dave Evans
I know of a workplace a person close to me work at. They are essentially supposed to perform innovation and the staff are trained in design thinking. And yet the struggles of the staff there are unthinkable.
They spend some time hunting around for problem statements. And I think one of the biggest challenge is that they spend more time choosing the problems to solve rather than trying to deeply characterise them. As a result, they had a cohort of staff spending a lot of time and resources on problems which eventually appeared to be unsolvable. That then led on to the management trying to steer the team towards scoping down problems to smaller, manageable types.
What started out as a culture that was supposed to be more candid, fun and open became full of tension and sensitivity. People were afraid to voice real problems; and elephants started to appear in rooms, chats, and zooms. Issues were being skirted around. Indeed, if one is unwilling to have a particular problem, one will never be able to solve it.
One of the topics I was really interested in while doing my masters in economics was the impact of institutions on economic development. I looked at it from a few perspectives including the legal system, the existence of various policies or reforms and also studied the economic history of the US to see how the interactions between business and the orthodoxy of the day when it comes to big or small government.
There is no doubt the world operates on a lot of different systems and not one is right or wrong. There are systems better for deriving some outcomes rather than others but it is hard to say if a system is better overall. To begin, we have to agree on the principles; whose welfare to improve more of and what are the priority areas before others.
The market system which has been peddled around is not exactly the complete system. A market directs itself towards outcomes of those in power within the market. The politics and regulation are institutions above the market so they have a huge role in directing the market. While the government cannot be fully culpable of the outcomes of a market, they can help to coordinate the overall goal of the entire market: whether energies are directed towards production or gains diversion, whether one is working for one’s survival or some higher values.
History have proven itself that keeping people fed and with basic needs satisfied unlocks incredible boost to productivity and economic development. We need to enable more of that in all of our systems.
I find it funny how people would write articles about telling introverts they are not celebrated in the workplace because of certain norms and conventions, then conclude they need to be more like extroverts to succeed. Most strategies in the article aren’t really anything about leveraging on their introversion but overcoming them. Isn’t it discouraging for most introverts to hear that.
If you really look into the examples of famous introverts that Adrian mentioned in the article, you realise they do things differently. And I’d like to share some real strategies on how to actually leverage on introversion to achieve the kind of credit-taking, self-promotion and visibility Adrian is talking about.
First, when it comes to networking and making connections, introverts are actually extraordinarily good at going deep on common interest and common points. Therefore, they need to be particularly targeted and pick up a few key questions that they can ask almost like a template to new people they mean and use those to either continue the conversation or stay quiet and disappear quickly. This is great because it allows the introvert to steer networking in a very thoughtful and directed way that reduces less useful small talk.
Second, when it comes to self-promotion. It can be subtle so much so that one doesn’t even consider it any promotion. Introverts tend to dive deeply into work and go into details – when determining critical areas where they have worked on, they can set rule-of-thumb for themselves to always be presenting them to bosses and peers. These are subject matter they are intensely passionate about and would be more confident/comfortable to share details in. Start from these areas and allow your expertise/credit to emerge naturally from that intensity.
Finally, on visibility. Introverts can be quite visible when it comes to online platforms and even taking on a different persona. So for zoom meetings where one may prefer to turn off camera, make sure you put your favourite head shot photo of yourself as display. Also, use chat function, Q&A as well as other text-based functions to be vocal if you still find speaking up difficult. Create a rule to make at least 1 comment by text for online meetings or by speaking for face to face ones. Then dial it up.
Notice that my strategies generally suggest small rule-of-thumb that is about developing a practice rather than being motivated by climbing the ladder. The idea is to focus on personal growth and doing things the introvert way rather than bending oneself out of shape.
There had been a lot of talk about gamification and most of our social media addictiveness comes from idea of gamification. Where do you think the pull-down gesture for refreshing a page come from? Slot machines of course!
Even with lifelong learning, skillsfuture initiatives, there is a lot of gamification happening with the government trying to encourage people to go for courses. The design of the skills map in the skillsfuture dashboard even looks like a journey in a game, collecting various qualifications, etc.
The problem, as I pointed out in a previous blog post, is that we conflate certification with skills. So are you looking to acquire skills or certification? Are you keeping the skills you acquired by exercising them? Or busy collecting badges but actually discarding the skills as soon as you get the badge?
I was visiting a part of Singapore where there was a new MRT station but a small population of residents around that station. I expressed that it was such a waste of taxpayer’s money to build a station there when hardly anyone lived there and yet the cost of the station is borne by the population. On the other hand, there were amenities which were not built in more densely populated locations in Singapore where it would be needed and served way more people.
Then it dawned on me that if you have the transport node in place, the value of the land surrounding it would rise and any further developments in the area would be more valuable. The government being the main land owner around the new MRT station in this sleepy village would eventually benefit from the land sales. So in some sense, it was ‘investing’ in the taxpayer’s money for the future.
But to a certain extent, this argument mean that there’s probably no point building or serving the places where you’re originally extracting taxes from because those taxpayers would be the ones benefiting disproportionately from the developments rather than the government. I wonder how this calculus works. Public finance is actually such a fascinating topic worth more public awareness and public education on.
I think it’s such a pity that when budget of the government is presented, the things that catches people’s attention is mostly about what sort of handout or welfare benefits are coming along and for who. There’s insufficient attention placed on how much is spent on what infrastructure, where they are going to be, who they are going to serve and why. The common man should know, and should be questioning these.
A few days back I wrote about my observations in Primark. There are simply products that needs to roll off shelves as soon as they are put on it for the business to work well and stay successful. And pricing contributes significantly to that.
Near my place, there’s always been a hot food stall that sells affordable hot breakfast food (for those who knows, it’s an economic bee hoon stall); they are incredibly successful with long queues every morning and they usually sell out right before or during lunch time. They start as early as 5.30am, and queues start forming from 6-6.30am. Unfortunately, some time late last year, they sold their business to another larger food company that runs multiple food stalls in neighbourhood coffeeshops. I heard it was because one of the proprietors fell sick.
In any case, after the company took over the business, they retained some of the previous partners but raised prices after renovating the stall. The food were not different but then because queues stopped forming, the food items were left on the display longer. As a result, they were less tasty, which reduced demand further.
Just by raising the price, the stall suffered a double whammy, the original model of selling made-in-time hot food broke down. The hot food stall became a mediocre stall in the coffeeshop. There are just some models of business that requires low prices; this is good for both the proprietor and the target pool of customers. When one considers raising prices, one must recognise that the pricing is part of the overall business model.
When I consult with businesses about various different new trends or emerging technologies in energy transition, there’s always the inevitable question of costs and when they will come down. For greener fuels in particular, there’s always the cost comparison against the usual fossil fuels. At the same time, for green electricity, there’s always the comparison against the grid.
I’d remind them that we have to be prepared that despite the learning curves and technological improvements, the cost may not come down sufficiently. In other words cost of the new greener technology may not be able to match the current cost of the traditional, more carbon-intensive technology.
But yet they might reach parity for other reasons. First, carbon price through taxes or emissions trading can raise the cost of the more traditional technology. Second, as players start switching towards the greener technology, there may be a reduction in scale economies for the traditional technology that also increases its costs. Finally, the producer of the legacy technology may also diversify their business towards the greener technology in face of public pressure which would make it costlier for those who need to find replacements for legacy components or parts.
Or there may be other problems and external issues that upset the current economics. The best example is the energy crisis around the world now with shortage of natural gas. It is almost artificially created but not any less real. And people are scrambling in fact to develop more solar capacity; and also faced with rising costs because of global supply chain bottlenecks.
Surprising but energy transition is being accelerated by rising prices.
It was interesting to frame an asteroid collision with earth as an analogy for climate change crisis in Don’t look up; but it is apparently a real potential disaster in itself and people at NASA are working on ways to deal with such crisis.
One of the points I learnt from the article is how it was actually difficult to realise there were pieces of rocks being hurled at us because of blindspots. And this mean we can discover them too late, probably in way shorter time frames than what was conceived in the movie.
And of course, if we are willing to spend that investment and work on defending earth from asteroids, let us also work out how to finance all that we need to do to defend earth from climate change as much as possible.
Real courage is being afraid but doing it anyways.
Oprah Winfrey
So there is really no such thing as really feeling brave; if anything it’s probably feeling some anxiety, and the tension of having to somehow suppress that and take action. And courage isn’t always about the big things or taking big actions. It can be just saying no. Or overcoming some internal resistance to take a small action.
But isn’t taking courage at odds with seeking security? Our desire to conquer nature in part stems from the desire to seek security. And so are the tendencies natural to us such as the desire for association, or even seeking some degree of security in social status. Where then would courage come from? How does it start? How does it form or take root? And how does it translate into action?
Courage probably isn’t exactly ever independent of the action taken that allows us to ascribe courage to someone. Courage is probably not something mustered within us as we describe in language. It exists not as a quantity but perhaps more as a description of the combination of action and circumstances. The thoughts and abilities to lead to courage then involves a story that we tell ourselves, one that takes down the desire for security, that disputes that instinct to be ‘safe’. A story that actually gives us something greater we yearn for in taking action.
There are shortcuts when outcomes and objectives are not properly articulated. Shortcuts can represent exploiting loopholes in terms of scoping the objectives. But they can also represent taking advantage of gaps in an establish system. Or perhaps, they are just a more direct path that is not yet obvious to the majority.
What comes to mind for you when you consider a shortcut? Is it about skipping steps? Or being able to achieve perfection on the first attempt? Or are you thinking about loopholes and how they are exploited? If a shortcut was offered to you, would you ask what’s the caveat? Or would you just jump at it?
So what are we trying to achieve when we even consider taking a shortcut? The shortcut is called that because it allows you to use less time, resources, energies to arrive at what you think is your goal, your objective. That can mean your original plan was sub-optimal, or that you’ve missed out something. Often the shortcut means some kind of savings. Or perhaps some kind of invisible (/deferred) costs? What is the catch? Is it really worth it?
