Kevin Low

For the longest time since internet became really very much a thing towards the end of the 2000s; there were memes coming up about the additional layers within Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. So before food, shelter and health stuff, comes wifi and below that, battery power. Yes that seemed like the experience of a typical millennial.

Today, I’m musing about what is on top and it is typically labelled ‘self-actualisation’ but as Matt Davis would cover in this article, Maslow himself discovered a different pinnacle that we are all yearning towards. To some extent, this concept of self-transcendance is a bit complex and there’s a lot of spiritual considerations but I think the better description is what was first described by Victor Frankl and recorded in the APA Dictionary of Psychology:

The state in which an individual is able to look beyond himself or herself and adopt a larger perspective that includes concern for others. Some psychologists maintain that self-transcendence is a central feature of the healthy individual, promoting personal growth and development.

So basically the idea of promoting and looking to serve the needs of others rather than just oneself. To expand ones’ circle of care and concern beyond just oneself. I find it remarkable as a Christian, that at the end of the day, our deepest, greatest need extends in a large part for much more than ourselves.

My first lesson in Economics was about scarcity. It suggests that economics is needed and considered because there is scarcity. Likewise, in my first job, where I was involved in lots of strategy work, my boss told me, that scarcity is what underlies strategy. We need strategies because there’s no abundant resources. We need to pick how to allocate our resources to achieve our objectives.

And then one day, one of my junior consultants fantasised over lunch how great it would be when the world has the technology to provide us unlimited amount of energy and hence all that we need for everyone in the world. Well, I work for a strategy consulting firm that focuses on the energy transition – so in case you’re wondering why energy. I gently reminded him that scarcity is in part caused by our unlimited wants and desires – that abundance in the world is not going to solve that fundamental challenge.

I now realised that even more fundamental the incompatibility lies in the fact that we humans are limited in the ability to even consume our wants. Therefore, true abundance lies within our own minds and wants. Of course, there’s a minimum threshold of resources we all need to survive. But beyond that, the richness of our lives really depends on our own perception, perspectives and our beliefs about how our lives should be lived. Tell yourself the wrong story, and you are going down a dream of abundance; and with the right story, you’re heading down an abundant life itself.

A friend was introducing me to this concept of cognitive flexibility. I must say it is probably a concept I know of before I had the chance to put a name to it but it definitely is a very important skill. But before going further into it, I’d like to introduce the idea that really underlies the ability to be cognitively flexible. It has to do with recognising the probabilistic nature of the world.

We all struggle with uncertainty and the fact multiple outcomes are all possible at the same time. Life is fuzzy and things are subjected to chance; by realising that things are not all-or-nothing kind of binary, and recognising that decisions are bets, we give ourselves the chance for reality to deviate from our expectations. And we learn to react better emotionally, not thinking we have lost because the world went the other way. The world did not reject us; it did not leave without us. It’s just that we had held on to our expectations even when reality came by.

Cognitive flexibility requires that we drop those expectations once reality plays out; that we toss out the lottery ticket once the winning numbers are out. How fast are you able to discard your expectations?

When Singapore was a young nation, there was a recognition of the place for the market to operate and do its job in creating competition, enhancing quality of life but this was not done blindly. Regulations were in place to ‘distort’ the market in a way that benefit the society.

We have one of the highest amounts of taxes imposed on car ownership, through various revenue instruments and it has brought in a lot of revenue for the government. Likewise when we set out to liberalise the electricity market sector in Singapore, it was about discovering the marginal cost of electricity generation and being able to pass on the savings to the consumers. Yet when the market turns against the consumers during a period of gas shortage, it is important to recognise that the original intent of the market is to serve the consumers while sustaining the industry anyways so we can’t just throw our hands into the air and say it’s the consumers’ own issue.

The market can drive good outcomes within a narrow band and where we want the market to operate within and deliver. But it takes regulation and framework set up to ensure the market is operating within the right context. When policy is the main driver, one cannot be caught up with trying to leave as much things as possible to the market. It is necessary to look at everything about the market and its tendencies in order to guide it towards the outcomes we are looking for.

Organisations promote people who are good at their jobs until they reach their ‘level of incompetence’.

The Peter Principle

This is an interesting concept about work and management which was a bit of curiosity for me when I was in school and when considering the organisation of firms from an economic perspective. Nevertheless, having started working, I find it hard not to take this principle as a matter of common sense from the structure our firms evolved.

Why this works at all to keep the firms doing fine was clearly due to the two forces that promotions have at play. Promotions actually serves two major purposes: one is that it provides a means to supply leaders for the teams and departments in a workplace; and the other is that it provides motivation for the best workers within the team and department. It doesn’t matter for firms that they promote capable and competent workers who happens to be pathetic leaders as long as it encourages and motivate good workers to do more and well enough to be promoted.

Never mind these workers then turned out to be bad managers, their previous track record serves as a model. Besides, their experience can allow them to share good practises with the team in an authoritative way. Clearly, when workers are really good, they will continue to deliver results – though bad leaders can be destructive, they might actually pose less of a risks than we think as long as they are not atrocious leaders – especially since they were good individual contributors.

However, the motivation effect only matters when the culture continues to think of moving into leadership and management as progress. If we can see progress in other dimensions of work, rather than the traditional idea of becoming promoted, then we can be part of creating a new work culture and system.

Is management the only way to progress in one’s career and life? That certainly appears to be the dominant narrative in society, including the public service. Broadly speaking, most of the time, success looks like managing a team of people and achieving results than just achieving individually.

This is all the more true for larger organisations because what matters to the organisation tend to be something that moves the needle for profit and loss. This would be incredibly difficult for an individual contributor to claim; however, the middle manager and CEO who can pass the achievements of a group of individuals they are managing as their own, are seen as the true success.

And of course this is the case especially for public service. What moves the needle for a country, for a district or large jurisdiction is going to be huge. So being competent and then getting promoted to a position where you cover larger and larger responsibility is naturally seen as progression. Even if genuine success is actually helping the people under you achieve greater success, as opposed to trying to achieve success yourself. This is a completely different set of skills; yet people who are promoted within these large organisations and public service has often more to do with their success as individual contributors or ability to deliver individual achievement rather than motivating the team to do better.

Worst, we all have been lulled into thinking that promotion is a reward when more often than not, we would prefer to keep getting better at what one does than to be given a completely different set of responsibilities celebrated but which we don’t care for. So do you still have the same kind of aspirations?

What I wrote about measure of progress is also a way to guide us to think about problem solving. What is the progress towards a problem solved? If the problem is to fell a tree, what amount of sharpening the axe is considered to constitute progress or does the progress only begin when the axe first strikes the tree. If you look at progress from that kind of visible, hole-in-tree kind of basis, then you obscure an important component of the solution which is to sharpen the axe.

If I had 1 hour to solve a problem, I’d spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and 5 minutes thinking about the solutions.

Albert Einstein

Psychologically, and also our training in schools, at exams does not impart this sort of wisdom to us because we are expected to know the solution at the snap of our fingers and get on to work it out. There’s also this tendency in teaching scientific enquiry to dwell on just designing and performing experiments to test different hypotheses rather than get into the thick of how a hypothesis comes about in the first place.

So perhaps it’d be worthwhile to look through a few pieces I wrote about solving problems (here, here, here and here).

There was this story going around social media where Einstein was writing some equations on a chalkboard and when he eventually list a final one, there was an uproar in the room because of a simple mistake he made. He mused that no one praised him for the first few equations that were correct but they were reacting harshly when he was wrong.

There is just something in our nature, even towards our loved ones, to dwell on mistakes – mostly that of others but sometimes that of ourselves. It is probably that the negative catches our attention more than the positive. After all, most of our ancestors survived because the negative things caught their attention enough for them to avoid it. Those other people who were not so sensitive probably lost their lives and failed to propagate. As a result, we tend to display that sort of anxiety and inclinations towards dwelling on mistakes.

Being aware of this can help us consider our responses more carefully and whether we are giving feedback or criticisms that are building up rather than tearing down. Instead of dwelling on mistakes, challenge yourself to link the corrective actions recommended to something positive that you’ve seen displayed by the person receiving your feedback. That will help create a positive loop.