Why like that?

In Singlish, there’s a question that typically stresses people out and has answers varying significantly based on the interpretation of the questioner’s purpose. But at the heart of the question “why like that?”, the questioner is questioning reality. And effectively trying to pit the answerer against the reality at hand.

In fact, implicit in the question is that the answerer should not be accepting reality as it is but to do something about it. That assumption is something worth some attention and awareness. For one on the receiving end of the question, bringing to attention is assumption takes a bit of courage but immediately resolves the internal tension and cast it back on the questioner.

So the answer becomes “why not?”, or “what did you expect?” Maybe just done a bit more politely.

Skipping steps

When I was in primary school, I have this problem of doing mental sums. Calculations done in my head that I didn’t write on paper in my answer scripts. When the teacher marks my script, she’d penalise me for “skipping steps”. Well, those steps were taken but just not on paper.

It is very different in the real world where we also get penalised for skipping steps:

  • Trying to submit an application without sufficient documentation
  • Rushing to give customer a proposal without first understanding what is truly needed by them
  • Booking your vacation without thoroughly checking your calendar for conflicting commitments

In all of these cases, steps were indeed skipped, intentionally or not. And there are going to be consequences to them. Often, the time or money saved may not be worth it to deal with the consequences.

However, if you are able to perform those steps through other means which is more efficient and brings other benefits, such as what I did in school with math problems, then you can still get to the results well and good. That’s actually useful in the real world. The nuance that we need to learn from this childhood lesson is that you can short-circuit a process only when you can address every step adequately.

Risk-taking culture

What do you find yourself risking?

  • Financial capital: either through passive investments or actively starting and reinvesting in a business
  • Knowledge: by pushing the boundaries of what you know and applying that towards your decisions (whether it is to challenge how things works or put your money on things you believe will work when others don’t).
  • Time & efforts: by spending time and effort to build something. Maybe it takes some money but mostly just your time and effort. And the value of what you build as a result is worth way more than the time and effort your put in. Or it may not be.
  • Reputation & connections: by selling or recommending people in your network and connection some product or services to earn some returns. The product or service might work out for them, it might not.

Whether you think of it this way or not, you are already taking risks in life. Being mindful of how and what you take risks on might be a useful skill you missed out in school.

Dealing with the delay

Seth Godin recently wrote about the delay; and basically the challenge of situations where there are no short feedback loops. I’ve written a lot about feedback in the workplace and how we all need to learn to be able to give feedback in order to improve the people and the world around us. Of course, one of the reason that we want to be able to do that is to help shorten the feedback loop.

After all, if you’ve bottled-up resentments against your colleagues, there’s going to be some point of time you express it through your action – whether it was some unjustified anger, or just quitting. So there is still some sort of ‘feedback’, except they become longer, looks less connected, and therefore make it harder to draw connections, even for yourself.

Recognizing the long loops requires a sensitivity to patterns and ability to draw the connections others tend not to. I’d suggest to:

  • Pay more attention to processes of how things lead on to one another
  • Make connections between trends and drivers step by step

The point isn’t to conduct sophisticated studies to establish the connections; it is more around reflecting more deeply in the flow of these processes, forward and backwards. And to also see how outcomes are driven by not just intentionality but also chance and circumstances. Identifying the role of chance and the environment will go a long way to learn more about the feedback loop.

Problem of resulting

In “Thinking in Bets”, Annie Duke identified this problem of “resulting” – that a bad outcome automatically points to bad decisions. I’ve written about how I dealt with regrets in the past and I think understanding our tendency to “result” (I’m using it as a verb to the word “resulting”), is going to help us deal with how we reflect, and consider our regrets.

Regrets always involves a strong dose of “I should have known” except you didn’t know and whether you “should” is a moot point by then. And because you had to make decisions under situations of uncertainty, the process determining the decision is more critical than the decision itself.

For example, due to some really tight scheduling and limited buffer time in our weekend plans, we ended up neglecting our dog quite a bit at home a particular day. It would have made sense in retrospect to arrange for it to go on a day care and we would have been happy to arrange. But we had thought it was possible to have more time in-between our commitments so it was fine.

Except of course eventually it wasn’t, as our commitments overran and gave us razor thin slice of time gaps to be back home with the dog! We could choose to say it was a bad judgment but we cannot think the decision not to arrange for day care was bad. There is a fine line between those thoughts but in terms of mental health and hygiene, it makes a huge difference. Resulting causes unnecessary stress, anxiety and afflicts pain on ourselves and others. It would have been better for us to focus on dealing with results rather than being caught up with whatever led to it, especially when there was a lot of uncertainties prior.

Infrastructure for centuries

Having spent more than the first years of my career deeply involved in infrastructure investments and looking at infrastructure developments in the emerging markets, I was incredibly moved by this video on the living bridges of Meghalaya on this BBC programme.

When I think about the type of investments made by private sector or by government into infrastructure meant to benefit communities and how these infrastructures were built and maintained, we leverage a lot on the power of markets, especially financial incentives, and various instruments. After all, IFC and World Bank had for a long time thought about maximising finance for development. Yet there are so many other instruments that various cultures have evolved which we miss out in our zeal to develop.

Coaxing nature to direct its relentlessness towards growth that benefit humans is perhaps one really important area that we as modern humans have not really adopted as a sort of proven innovation to develop ourselves. And I think the idea of nature-based solutions should be wrapping its mind around these sort of examples and innovations already present in the world right now.

Being Two

It’s almost been two full years since I started this website with my own domain name. Of course, it doesn’t look like it because this blog contains stuff I wrote as far back as 2009 (when I was nearing the end of my National Service); but most of those content were imported from my previous website. On my blog there is ultimately 3 sets of posts; the ones that were from 2009-2014, when I ran ERPZ.net, and then 2015-2020 when I had my own personal wordpress blog.

Then, about 6 months after I registered the domain, I started writing daily from 3 January 2021. It’s been more than a year now and it has been amazing how I’ve been able to keep up with this habit. Writing keeps me thinking and helps me to think clearly than if I had only held my thoughts up in my mind. This site have also been storing up resources I’ve created for my coaching practice.

So I’m glad to say that I’ll be renewing the domain and carrying on with this work.

Being a market leader

I’ve encountered many different kinds of clients who approach us to perform market studies. There are those who are more conservative and looking at studying the success of others, so they can replicate the success. They are not necessarily trying to outdo the incumbents, just recognising that the market is growing and they can get a slice of the pie.

There are others who are looking at markets that does not yet exists; areas where others believe doesn’t work, either due to lack of regulatory structure, some previous beliefs about costs. They will say ‘don’t tell me about it being impossible, I want to understand why it hasn’t work, and what is not working’. We would try and understand what are the missing pieces, what is within the control of the market players, what else needs to happen for the market to take off, for it to work.

In the areas of infrastructure and energy, people tend to look towards the government. So when there’s lack of regulation, they might think it’ll be a no-go. But market leaders think differently, they are looking not at the competition, but the problems at hand: what stands in the way of the market working? It is not about shortcuts through imitation, nor finding ‘success stories’; it is about solving problems and sorting out the fundamentals.

Are you thinking like a market leader? What is setting you apart?

Sense of mission II

So I’m rather interested in the Stuart Kirk saga not just by virtue of my job, my sense of mission and my interests but also because of another insight about the situation in financial industry through that presentation.

It reflects that the finance industry is still considerably dettached from the struggle on climate change. And regulations will have to bite them harder, or the pricing of externalities, and so on. The disclosure and reporting required by authorities is precisely one of the ways that allows the finance industry to influence climate outcomes; but I guess Stuart Kirk was actually deliberately being ironic about it.

If you go through this presentation closely, you’ll notice to some extent that he is actually mocking the traditional frameworks of analysis and approaches towards trying to convince investors to lend a hand to do something about climate by talking about the potential losses. Well, the sheer uncertainty around the climate impact (eg. various impacts cancelling each other out) will of course encourage skepticism, but that’s honestly missing the point.

The point is that finance has a role in shaping our future, one that involves a combination of climate change mitigation and also adaptation, and if we don’t start measuring these attributes and the impact of our financial decisions on these attributes, we are at risk – not financially but physically. A single war may not destroy the global economy, but it can destroy a single economy, and many lives. To measure and look at our lives through just the financial markets is a grave mistake.

Knowing it all

By the time I was in my late teens and in army, I was known around my friend circles to be a walking wikipedia. It was mostly because I retained so much random trivial information across a wide range of topics that people find it rather amazing. Practically, it was useless despite the impression people get. In fact, it only undermines you if you start believing that you actually know it all just because you retained random tidbits of useless information in your mind.

So by the time I went to college, I was trying to see how that can be useful. I found knowledge around pop culture, movies and all useful socially. It helps to establish some connection but most critically, within these tidbits, you distill the zeitgeist and start to be better able to anticipate and read people better through those lenses. Scientific knowledge themselves are of practical importance but more critically, the patterns of logical deduction rooted in those knowledge is what helps us discover new connections.

And despite the fact that most of education, I went through pretty structured learning, I realised that I was actually not good at structuring the knowledge or information which I picked up tacitly. So through work, I learnt a bit more how to organise and make those information useful. The ability to aggregate seemingly useless bits of info to form a big picture becomes more critical at this stage.

Knowing, is not a switch. It is a process. One that evolves, that deepens.