Kevin Low

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.

My mum left her job recently. There were red flags about her employer early on but she ignored them. The employer didn’t pay her for the salary she was entitled to during her sick leave (she had a certain amount of fixed annual paid sick leave though it was a part time job); and that included some of the days when she was down with Covid. My mum, being a traditional worker just stayed on. Five years without a single increment, working on her tasks responsibly and keeping things in line when the management was not maintaining the structures and protocols laid down.

She knows the structure, the service and work she was supposed to deliver, and she believes someone needs to be doing the work. She can’t quite figure out who will if she doesn’t. So she does the work. This is a model of the responsible worker we were brought up to consider a believe in.

But there can be an alternative: Must the work be done? Are there other ways management can observe things besides having more employees filling out paperwork and doing reporting? Are there tools the company can adopt to automate the tasks? Can the boss write an email or text message rather than call for a meeting? Must the decision be made by the boss? Why can’t the staff be empowered to do so?

The industrial complex around all kinds of systems will not throw up such questions because it takes a human, a creative mind, one that cares and not one who ‘just do’ to ponder over these. We need to consider how to make the work of the future more human, more flourishing for workers, not just the shareholders.

What does success look like for a teacher? I heard a story about a school principal who realised that the Secondary school system was so good at drilling students for the O Levels exams that despite getting incredibly good grades at the national exams, they struggle when they rise to the next level (in Junior Colleges). She went to the teachers and wanted to do something about it but the teachers thought that their existing techniques worked to produce results, so why change things.

So she waited. And soon a former student approached her about this problem, having struggled in junior college despite having done well in O Levels. She invited this student to share at a staff meeting. And it woke the teachers up to the reality of what they were doing; they convened a committee to look into this. Was that a success? I don’t know. What does it mean for teachers to address this issue? Was it about making sure O Levels really gave a more truthful assessment of the students’ abilities? Or was it about teaching students higher level stuff to cope with A Levels? Was it to encourage them to truly learn and that it doesn’t matter if they didn’t do so well in O Levels?

I have no clue because the story ended there and it was all there was in a story. Teachers need to consider for themselves what they pride themselves upon and what is really the important thing for them. Was it really the grades of the students? Was it the attitude? Was it their ability to learn something on their own? As a culture, what do the education service really expect of our teachers? What kind of aspirations do we really desire, and how are these aspirations working out on the ground?

I’ve been very open and frank about one’s struggles in terms of working in public service. Should a public service officer be serving the people right in front of them based on what is possible, potentially stretching themselves dry and yet having to meet high level policy objectives or should they toe the policy line and just try to serve in accordance to what the policy allows and don’t? I think the truth is we are expected to be both, and they are often fundamentally at odds. The fact such political realities contaminate the work of public service officers feel really distasteful but so many people face it day to day.

They face it within the environment where there’s emphasis on company performance and yet also demands for managers to care about their people. How many companies hold management meetings on staff welfare metrics regularly? How often do shareholders ask the CEO how the employees or staff are responding to the new strategy to bring in new businesses?

And they face it again when they are under pressure to sell to clients but they are under-resourced to truly meet clients’ needs. There’s the question of who you should be serving? The clients, or your boss? In the case of public service; the people directly, or your management, or the political masters? Or the cabinet?

We are all sandwiched by these competing demands and tensions. They didn’t use to exist when we were building up the entire system and network with a more common objective. They appear less visible when diversity wasn’t the focus and people were just supposed to stay in ‘their place’ in society. They were not the point of policies when we could see the potential to grow and improve lives with clearly marked signposts of development. But we no longer do, and so we are sandwiched.

Thanks in part to the ongoing war and crisis in Europe, people are starting to look for ways to reduce their energy consumption. There is the argument of weaning off Russian gas and also reducing energy bills given the prices of natural gas. Yet it is such a bummer no one ever did it to reduce carbon emissions or to save the environment.

For the longest time we’ve been passive energy consumers and we didn’t really know with much precision where and what was energy consumed going towards within our houses, buildings and factories. Yet we already had technology to track that for many years; it’s just that we don’t think those are going to help us reduce energy consumption. We are too complacent, we want to think we’re already at optimal point. After all, why would we desire to pay hefty energy bills?

The company that needs a new machine tool, and hasn’t bought it, is already paying for it.

Charlie Munger

Unfortunately, economics does not work without the cost benefit analysis by individuals and I love the Munger quote here because it is exactly what energy efficiency investments are about. You are already paying for the new equipment that you need but did not buy. It is just a matter of who you’re devoting that cashflow to, and what you really get in return.

The Energy service company (ESCO) industry is growing thanks to rising electricity tariffs and greater consciousness about the energy transition. Now the marketing needs to keep up – are we putting that tension and pressure on our energy users yet?

I had this friend years ago who was brilliant in thinking strategically about things and he would be able to spend the minimum time studying but maximise his results. He would spot questions and take risks on exams in that way. The time he saved, he’d do many other things, participating in activities that beef up his profile, spending time with friends. Even then, he was good at focusing on more high profile activities such as those involving politicians, community grassroots – the shiny credentials that provides greater influence in time to come.

When I was in school, I didn’t find that particularly appealing; because I genuinely wanted to learn and wasn’t just trying to ace exams. In fact, I didn’t care if something was going to be on the test, I’d devour all the different knowledge and materials I found interesting. Yet as we leave school and enter our working lives and all, I cannot help but recognise how brilliant that friend of mine was. He was practising something that our system implicitly encouraged even if it was reserved for the somewhat elite-class. It was the same idea of asking what would be the highest value activity to spend our time and resources on.

More critically, it was also about asking, what are the others doing, whether I can adopt a strategy to achieve the results that I want without necessarily mimicking what others are doing? It wasn’t so much about how do I fit the bill or to fit in; but how do I convince others that I’m already the good fit. Most of us aren’t comfortable with that; and we often want life to be ‘simpler’. But if simpler life just means following clear instructions and being a cog, you might want to think twice.