Moving a Nation Forward

On this National Day, I pondered over my own ‘heritage’ and background as a Singaporean and how my aspirations for myself has been deeply rooted in one of our founding fathers, Dr Goh Keng Swee. I went to study Economics at the LSE because of him; and joined the public service of Singapore, focused on the economic sector because of him. In fact, during the most challenging times in my stint in government when I was helping to start the new office, Infrastructure Asia, I revisited his speeches and thought through the fundamentals of how we wanted Singapore to be positioned. I asked myself what are the economic factors and practical considerations he would be thinking about.

Today, I have moved out of the public sector, hoping to develop deeper expertise in Energy Transition and Sustainability, an area which I deem an important part of the future that our country and economy will be stepping into. I continue to ponder over topics of business, economic strategy and human capital development. This is after all, the cornerstone of Singapore’s development strategy. We always say that people are our only resource, given that we have hardly any natural resources nor sufficient land. It is the brain power, combined with the culture we create for this nation that will steer and determine our future.

And it continues to be so; which is why I continue my work of mentoring youths pro bono through the network that Advisory.sg has and also coaching young professionals.

Knowledge & Denials

“Ignorance is bliss” manifest itself in different ways in life. And very often ignorance is thought of as bliss when new knowledge does not conform with one’s world view. When for example, we have something on our bodies we do not want to get examined for fear we are suffering from some severe condition or the costs of addressing it. Or when companies resist more thorough internal audits for fear of what it might uncover.

Change often gets blocked because the changes will throw up new knowledge that challenges the prevailing paradigm. You might only discover you’ve been calculating a parameter wrongly when you use a different way to do it (which theoretically is supposed to produce the same result).

Are you learning new things everyday? Do you only learn things that fits your current paradigm? Are you allowing new knowledge to update your paradigm? How do you respond to information or knowledge challenging your world view? Is ignorance bliss?

Signages

Singapore may be small in terms of land space but when you actually do come to Singapore and experience the country, it will feel like anything but small. There are a lot of spaces built up and designed to be big – often it is through stacking, use of underground but also, there are tricks employed such as placement of elevators, escalators etc that requires you to walk a lot more in order to get to a location where the displacement from your original position isn’t that much. Likewise, sometimes public transport routes are convoluted so it takes much longer to get from one place to another than if you were to just take a cab, ride a bike or walk.

And maybe because of that, we seem to have a lot of signages. To point towards different directions, to make sure you know how to take the convoluted path to get to where you want to get to. And when the paths are diverted, it becomes frustrating quickly, especially when signages are wrong or obsolete as a result.

A recent trip to Changi Jewel was insanely frustrating for me. I walked towards Terminal 2 (according to the signages) from the MRT station only to be told that I had to go to Terminal 1/3 side in order to get to Jewel. Then, I was looking for a place where I could call a Grab to pick me up at. I was told to go to the taxi stand but the doors which are usually for Grab pick up are closed because of Covid measures. And I kept going between B1 and Level 2, figuring out where to board the Grab.

A signage is actually a design flaw because if things are well designed, it should be quite intuitive where to go for what and roughly how to go there. Relying on signages is a result of poor or lazy design. Yet when we do fall back on a sign, we need to be careful about the investment we make towards the sign – how permanent it is and how responsive it is to changes. We need to make signages serve the people rather than the development.

Calm Objections

I’ve been thinking about practising calm objections; as I grow older, I begin to see how we’ve been somehow conditioned by our culture, by the fast-paced modern life to think that objections must be done in an impatient, loud, angry manner. At the back of our heads we seem to think that otherwise our objections will be disregarded, or mocked as trivial and we would lose our chance, and the tide of whatever we are objecting to will just sweep over us.

How many times did that really happen? And how often does an angry objection really help us be better persons, build stronger relationships and make our work more meaningful. None. Being able to disagree calmly, without drama and then proceed to lay out your objections is a very important ability.

Staying calm and not rubbing off others in the wrong way sets you up to influence others and to win hearts over. Learn to be assertive and firm while doing so calmly and without being caught up with the emotions of the objecting.

Purpose at work

We might think if we are an accountant, then we need to be the best and our purpose at work is to deliver accurate numbers. If we make mistakes and all, that would be to fail our purpose. Or that all the organisation KPIs would be our purpose and if we get a poor performance grade, we fail our purpose.

Yet your purpose might be to support your colleagues who are in need of help or guidance. Your purpose can be to be an important friend of the janitor who feels outcast. Or to improve the culture of the workplace by the grace and manner you deal with people. Work does not just involve results and KPI; you may never get to work for an organisation or department whose business/purpose aligns with your values. And surely, you will need to look beyond for what is meaningful to you.

During this period of the pandemic, when everyone is working from home, you might see your true purpose at work taken away from you. Maybe you used to refill the snacks in the pantry or bring that box of doughnuts; maybe you used to have coffee with the janitor each day before you start work. And now all these are gone. We can feel empty and not know why – but if you cultivate that awareness of this purpose you are serving, you can take steps in the current context to continue fulfilling it.

And may you find that sense of purpose filling you again.

Lazy Perfectionist

We are all people with high standards; and very often, we want things to be perfect. And we would accept nothing less from ourselves. So when we know we can’t get things perfect, we decide not to do them. What is the point of getting in-between results? You penalise yourself twice: first when you produce imperfect work, and second when you get upset with yourself for producing it. And then maybe even a third time when you realise you could have spent all that time and resources just dwelling in the realm of ‘potential’, of possibly achieving the perfect result. Now you’ve just burst your bubble.

Except you don’t. Except that when you take that first step and produce something imperfect, you’re making a statement to yourself that you’re capable of starting. Of taking the first step. And you get out of the identity of being a lazy perfectionist, of just being a dreamer. If you take a larger step to collect feedback on your work – worthy feedback that is – then you could learn even more, and grow towards the potential you’ve been dreaming of.

So stop relishing in the thought that it is effortless to gain perfection when you are the right kind of person or with the right kind of mastery. That is a myth. There is no magic to perfection or achieving high standards beyond working hard, and consistently. Forget about others, work on yourself.

Problem Spotting

There is a big difference between problem spotting and problem solving.

John C Maxwell

I would like to think of Singapore as a nation of problem solvers. But the reality is that a small group of people are the ones focused on solving while the majority are just spotting problems and trying to broadcast them. Why have we generated such a culture? This is in part because we have somehow given ourselves a social compact that the government will solve problems and the job of the people is compliance.

And this implied transaction plays itself over and over again when people complain about various different things in society and yet simply sit back and wait for things to happen. There’s this sense that “I’ve played my part, I’ve complied by the rules of the game and so now can you please give me my share of the [fill in the blank] that I deserve.”

So problem solving becomes someone else’s responsibility whereas our responsibility is to comply with the ideas that eventually comes along. One can see how this narrative disempowers us all and sucks the life out of us. Little wonder our mental health takes a big toll. Same on the end of those who are holding on the heavy burden of problem solving. Part of the challenge of this mental health crisis we live within will involve dealing with this culture of problem-spotting we’ve generated.

Opportunity of Exams

During the period before I went to university more than 10 years ago, I gave Math and Economics tuition to students at O and A Levels. If there was one thing I would like to think I help to change their thinking about, it is towards exams.

Students I encounter tend to look at their exam papers and results as though it was water under the bridge and so toss out the papers and channeled all their emotions, energies towards the single grade or score they achieved. Yet the largest opportunity is actually in the marked script of the paper. Not because you can dispute the scores; but because it contains way more precious feedback than the single dimensional score or grade can tell you.

Reflecting upon the experience of the exam-taking, the way you approached each question, the manner by which you recall important details to answer the questions matters. That exercise allows you to work on the right aspects of your knowledge gaps or approach to test-taking.

It is a shame that exam scripts are not distributed back to the students. I mean the national exams and the important ones. Maybe they are afraid of showing tabulation mistakes or opening themselves to grade disputes. But I think it is a missed opportunity; it conveys the wrong messages that the grades were the only things that mattered in the whole exam process.

Feedback is important, and we should be clear to our students that exams are about getting the feedback to work on the right gaps. You can tell yourself the story that it is a measure of your ability; or you can have the story that this is a tool to increase your ability.

What kind of impact?

At Enea Consulting, we sometimes look at impact reporting, and also frameworks that help to govern business decisions to consider the impact it is making (positive and negative). And we have done this since more than 14 years ago when we were founded.

Our relationship with measuring impact goes beyond regulatory compliance. It goes beyond ticking checkboxes and telling people you’ve fulfilled your part for the world. We enjoy working with companies who care about what they are doing to the world and how their business is seeking to create the future.

In fact, we devote part of our consulting resources annually to the Energy Access Booster programme in collaboration with parties like Total Energies and SEforALL, in order that we are making impact ourselves. We’ve been doing that to expand Energy Access in Africa and increasingly in Asia as well.

But we do need more talents to support our work. We are hiring across many of our office locations. Even if where you’re hoping to work doesn’t have a vacancy, you can always check back some time or just submit an application in the portal anyways!

Industry of Sustainability

When I was in government, there was a growing momentum in the recognition of the importance of sustainability as an economic sector. Partly because we see that the world is trying to rise up to the challenge of climate change, partly because we do care about the environment and our decarbonisation commitments; but more significantly, we also think about the good jobs that the sector would create for people.

When we take the lens of the economy, we may not be too strict about greenwashing versus a genuine push towards sustainability. We want to create more jobs, we want to replace those accountant, audit, IT roles that might have been lost to other markets. At a high level, we think perhaps that the skillsets will match – at maybe just with minimal training it will do. And of course there are lots of young people passionate about sustainability and the environment.

But I think we should care that we are creating good jobs that supports the global agenda to mitigate climate change. And we probably need to get into the thick of what all these jobs means and what are the outcomes we are moving towards. If we continue to go by the metrics of GDP growth and economic opportunity it’s hard for us to get out of the traditional sectors. Of course you can take a view that eventually sustainability will take an important share of GDP; of course you can think of growth potential but these are in the dangerous territory of crystal-ball gazing.

Better to consider new metrics. Maybe we can look at the decarbonising potential of each job or role. Perhaps we can look at how specific work deals with the set of problems we are experiencing globally across climate, environment, culture and biodiversity.

Just as the best companies may be focused on profits for the sake of driving excellence in service, product innovation and thought-leadership, as an economy we need to put the driver in the right place. Money or economic prowess is the cart that carries us; but our ideals, purpose and principles is the horse that pulls our cart.