Kevin Low

Some consultancies thrive on creating frameworks and processes and protocols. They sell, especially well to management. But the ops guys know some of these processes cannot be upheld. They are counter-intuitive, perhaps too onerous. Why is it so hard to convince the management to drop that sort of nonsense?

Because the management wants to believe that the operations are really so rational and systematic. They like to think that most of the things can be measured, quantified and put into a nice dashboard for visualisation. It is the same with a city authority, or even a government.

‘Statistics’ is derived from the latin word ‘status’ that means ‘political state’ or ‘government’. It was related to the ruler collecting data on the territories and the people in order to extract taxes, monitor their subjects, know how powerful their military is. Frameworks, protocols and all that stuff is naturally attractive to the corporate management, that derive most of its techniques from public and military administration. It should come as no surprise that managers who might think they are kings would love these.

Which leads me to ask, how did businesses and leaders learn to break out of that? To envision something entirely different, and to actually try to realise it in their organisations.

Is the responsibility of the sales team just to sell without interest of the client or regard for the claims that a product is making? To what extent does a salesperson have to perform sufficient due diligence on his/her own product before trying to approach clients or prospects about it? How convinced should he or she be? Is there a right or wrong when it comes to selling a product that may have been misrepresented?

What about following instructions of management? Especially in terms of instructions you may not agree with? Perhaps not because they are illegal or directly harming anyone in particular, but because you disagree with the management’s assessment of its effectiveness? To what extent do you exercise your own judgment to defend the interest of the company vis-a-vis your management?

What about following a policy; a company’s policy or even the policy stance of perhaps a ministry? The idea of a policy is really to reduce discretion and that is supposed to create some degree of fairness and predictability. But it can also serve to dehumanise the ones who are stewarding it because they are just ‘following the policy’ rather than being human, empathising with situations and recognising the policy intentions. As a staff, one should be free to question these; but unfortunately, if one disagrees and choose not to uphold, then one will have to answer to the consequences of it. Fully.

A monopolist who practice price-discrimination actually allows the economy to achieve an allocative efficient equilibrium. The problem is that it upsets distribution severely. Yet economics have little to say about optimal distribution in the economy. Besides, it doesn’t give a clear indication of the specific identities behind who should receive more, or less. Social policy however, needs to care about distribution to certain extent. It promotes a sort of well-being that keeps the society together to be able to continue generating economic fruits.

Now the social policy that cares about distribution will need to treat people differently; that there has to be some kind of discrimination. And this discrimination is going to be rather subjective to some extent other than being able to articulate the set of criteria. Being able to say the criteria beforehand can give a guise of objectivity to it. And of course, being able to articulate who falls into which category and why will bring the transparency up a notch.

However, policies can’t be all case-by-case, even if we are able to articulate and explain why it serves one person rather than another; or even justify why a particular party should benefit more from the policy than another. But at the end of the day, a policy cannot possibly serve everyone; and in fact, any policy that is laid down basically has its own defined set of winners and losers. The hope is that the aggregate gain is more than the aggregate losses (in whatever mysterious way one might like to work out the aggregate). So then when we uphold a policy, when we force people into the ‘standard’, are we clear about why we are doing so, and who are the winners or losers? I’d challenge public servants especially in the frontline to be absolutely clear about this – that they may uphold policies with a clear conscience.

As I mentioned from previous blog posts before, I recently finished watching The Dropout and it dawned on me how our culture increasingly pitting integrity against the risk of appearing incompetent, or failing. It is precisely the desire to appear successful, smart, competent that led to an escalating series of lies. And it is not just Theranos, or Silicon Valley, but all around us.

In our bid to convince others of our competence, are we overreaching in terms of how we represent our capabilities? Do we give in to the pressure from competitors, from imaginary rivals that we have to claim more, aim higher, push further, and hustle? Are our actions adding to the culture or detracting from it? Why do we want to take action to fuel a culture we don’t agree with? Or maybe we do?

Window-dressing of accounts, creative accounting, greenwashing, and to some extent many PR campaigns are all corporate techniques at maximising the short-term at the expense of the society, or the consumer, or the longer term corporate selves. We don’t have to choose between integrity and incompetence, we should not allow corporatism and capitalism to force that choice upon us.

Learning through your own mistakes is a vital way to survive; but learning through the mistakes of others is surely a way to go beyond survival and even to thrive. The reason for mankind’s success is manifold but surely one of the reasons we succeed is the ability to accumulate knowledge and that includes accumulating our learnings from mistakes, the ones that we didn’t make ourselves, and to be able to learn things beyond what other organisms can learn within a single lifetime.

Cultural artefacts, language, writing, all kinds of interesting designs and format of things are each a scaffold for us to scale above our limitations. And to that end, history is a gift to us because it is the sure way to learn from the mistakes of others, the experiences before us that we may never in our lifetimes get to encounter. They are all there! Recorded for us. Granted, there may be some biases in storytelling and I’m not here to champion ‘herstory’ over ‘history’. It is history as a concept that has so much value that we overlook.

Just because things keep on changing doesn’t mean that that what was experienced in the past is irrelevant. It just means there’s a bigger picture and a lot of creativity needed to interpret the implications of history for our lives today. But history is still relevant and it is a gift to us. Imagine being able to acquire experience without going through things; or getting a certificate without going through a degree. That’s how we should start looking at history. It’s a gift, and a waste not to learn it.

Patient consultations are at least 2 minutes longer per patient and the interactions less ideal because the system used to load medical records for the doctors are slow. The doctor tries to engage the patient but keeps glancing at the cursor to check if the records have loaded.

The website is down today so the electronic forms you were supposed to submit today cannot be filled in. You’ll have to wait till tomorrow and you’d be considered later in submission.

This form only has boxes for filling in Chinese characters for one’s name; so if you have an English name, you’ll have to try writing all the words within that small space and hope they accept the form.

You need to get the job experience, and put it on your CV so that the ones recruiting will select your CV while screening them. But how do you get the job experience in the first place then?

There are lots of systems put in place to improve lives, speed up processing, make things more ‘predictable’. In reality, they often are about trying to standardise, ignore idiosyncrasies, and reduce problem solving to ‘processing’. If you were brought up to think that life is about standing in line, obeying the commands to get your bowl of soup, then it can be hard to start being creative and seeing reality for what it is about rather than just what the systems are about.

For those working out the systems, ask ‘who is this for?’ It can’t be for everyone because if the system tries to serve everyone, it serves no one.