Abundance of Ideas

Why do you write everyday? I often get asked. And I’d reply, I just have something to say.

An abundance of ideas doesn’t come from just sitting there. It doesn’t even come when you’re doing things. You actually go into the recesses of your mind and reflect upon things to come up with ideas. They may be good, or bad. But ideas comes from the effort to ideate for sure. The surest way to get good ideas is to have many ideas and then fish out the bad ones.

How do you fish them out? You got to test them ultimately. And testing them means taking some risks. It could be small; like looking stupid. Or it could cost you a fortune. You have to decide on the risks to take to fish out the bad ideas.

The alternative is to just be the guy with no ideas – just because you think the risk and effort to get good ideas isn’t worth it. Or because you think ideas are magical things people are blessed with. They are not.

The Outcome Narrative

Imagine if you do everything right and then reach your goals, and everything is just as what you think it’d be.

Where will be the cat? What about the cockroach that’s been lurking around without your knowledge? Which part of your desk would your mug be on when you receive that trophy or certificate? Where would your parents be seated in that auditorium?

Wait how are all those questions relevant? They are there to show you that you can’t imagine everything. And you won’t know what are the actions that would really contribute to certain outcomes. In fact if the outcomes are the only reason we perform anything, we can’t move an inch – because we won’t know what’d happen because of that.

The narratives driven by outcomes can be taxing, vexing and ultimately toxic. Because you might get there and it wouldn’t be what you imagined.

The Purpose

I’m not sure if people recall this set of sticky notes. I kept this one from many years ago in one of the blog entries I wrote. And watching Soul (the movie) reminded me in part of these. That we’re so busy living in the past and future, that we think our purpose is in the future, or the past. That our spark is the one thing our life is for, so much we forget everything else in our life.

The recognition that being “in the zone” can be also about being a “lost soul” because of our obsessions can disconnect us from life. It’s being too caught up with something.

And we can interpret making the most of today as subjugating it to the future or trying to relive the past. But the spark, the personality we have, the ideals we might have had a glimpse of, are all not the purpose. The sense of purpose sometimes is not found to be lived out; but is found out in the living.

What are you protecting?

One of the most useful questions I discovered from my past work in public service is, “What is this for?”. It is important to be clear with out intentions and objectives before setting out to do something. If it’s for something we all can agree on achieving, it’s easier to get buy-in. It also helps remind us when we are trying to achieve too many competing objectives at the same time – how we might be setting ourselves up for disappointment.

Now I’d like to introduce a slightly different question and more for ourselves than for others. What are you protecting? Yes, when you determine to do one thing or another, what does it protect? Maybe it’s to clock some quick wins to cover your mistakes last week. Protecting your reputation. Perhaps it’s to keep your job by “justifying” your paycheck. Protecting your job.

You realise this is the “selfish” version of “What is it for?” And it is important for us to be aware of the selfish motives we have in proposing or doing something. That helps to recognise internal tensions and prepare us to resolve disappointments. Being honest begins with yourself.

Find and Replace

Does it always make sense to use a takeaway container or bring your own bag? Is it always sensible to replace every coal-fired power plant (which can sometimes last 50 years) with tonnes of solar panels which often only last 15-20 years. Are we producing too many reusable plastic cups and plastic bottles in a bid to reduce disposable ones?

Sometimes, using the ‘find and replace’ function in Microsoft Word and Excel can be costly. Likewise, if we often can’t just achieve sustainability with the standardised approach – finding that one substitute for each of the polluting, environmentally-unfriendly thing, and then replacing the unfriendly version.

It will take in-depth studies, more careful considerations, to find the right areas to invest, the loose brick to remove so that the old structures powering unsustainable practices would fall. All that is often worth it; to achieve long run sustainability.

Long run efficiency

I recently started working on excel modeling as part of my work. I’ve always been on the theoretical side of working on excel, having attended some trainings here and there but not really applying my skills to the fullest.

It was only in the hands-on of these things that I realise it takes a lot of creativity to model things simply and well. More importantly, being able to foresee how a user is going to approach the model or future expansions to the model required helps you do better.

Now the dilemma is often the trade off between being able to get the results quickly versus finding a more efficient way to arrive at the results. Most people who cares about only the outcome may not want to take detours around experimenting with more efficient methods. Once you perceive the clock ticking is for the outcome, you want to just trek down the path you know to that outcome, rather than take time finding shorter paths that may not bring you to your destinations.

The truth however, is that finding the new paths can have really great long term payoffs because if you’re going to repeat the same kind of tasks or model, you now know how to do it more efficiently. Yet how many of us invest in that? We prefer someone else to do the hard work and meanwhile we will just take the tedious way out.

Pathfinding for long run efficiency is in itself somewhat “inefficient” only when you perceive the clock ticking for the short run outcome. The story to tell yourself is that you’re looking at the long term efficiency. A good life is not made of a series of short term optimisations.

Defaulting Sustainability

What are your defaults in life? What do you fall back on?

Google announced (at least for the US) that they will show you the greenest rather than the fastest route when you search for directions on Google Maps. That’s powerful; and that’s also the method that companies including banks which are switching to ‘paperless’ statements are doing to their customers. First they made it an opt-in to have paper statements (ie. by default, you get electronic statements), and then they might even put a fee on paper statements down the road.

Maybe if we are not cutting plastic bags yet, we could make it default for shops not to give bags. Just pass the customer a product after check-out. Let the customer ask for bags. If they don’t ask, they don’t get the bags. Don’t let your staff ask if they need; let the customer know politely if they want bags, they need to ask. Use signs to tell them that.

Defaulting to the green option rather than the most convenient option works and is important. Make ‘bring your own containers’ default for takeaway by always asking customers if they have their own containers, then reminding them there’s a fee for the takeaway containers.

Change the defaults, save the planet.

Better appraisals

We can make appraisals better. Less personal, less likely to be emotionally charged. It should not be about you, it should be about the role, the responsibilities assigned. The reframing will help us approach it more objectively and use it more wisely.

Appraisals should be about identifying fit for a role/responsibility package that comes with the job. It works both ways. When hiring, the bosses or supervisors do not have perfect foresight what the role and work will entail and so they might be shooting blindly in the way they write the job description or qualify the candidate. Likewise, when applying for the role, one can’t quite really know if the job is what he or she expected it to be like.

The appraisal should be done quarterly or half-yearly, focused on looking at the contents of the job role and package of responsibility, then discussing the fit, and direction it should move. If the role is too big, responsibility too heavy, then there might be a need to reduce the load and role. People grow, they step into new stages of life, and they deserve to be in roles that match those needs. Let’s stop restricting ourselves to that unidirectional notion of ‘career progression’ and force everyone to climb the ladder a workplace lays down.

Abuse of Power

So a manager was serving quarantine in a hotel on an island off the mainland of Singapore. She just returned to Singapore from abroad and had to comply with the pandemic measures. She wanted to attend her yoga class via zoom but didn’t have her yoga mat.

So she called her staff to go to her home, pick up the yoga mat and bring it to the hotel on the offshore island. Her staff could have said no. But she didn’t. She was concerned about being loaded with unnecessary work, or being picked on, or worse, getting an unfavourable appraisal.

The culture of compliance in our workplaces is reinforced by the continued use of one-way appraisals. This breeds cronyism and favouritism unless there is sufficient checks on the power of bosses.

Why check their power, you ask? Because the cronyism can breed mediocrity and the culture reduces productivity, encourages hypocrisy. Beyond adopting 360 appraisals, a different attitude and approach to appraisal is needed in the workplace.

Kevlow.com turns 1

Yes my blog have existed for quite some time and I’ve imported quite a fair bit of writings I did from previous websites I ran (eg. ERPZ.net) on this blog so there’s a fair bit of content you can look back to. But this domain, and the website in its current form has only been running for 1 year!

And this website really started because I launched my coaching practice, and decided that I want to help the people around me learn to write their own stories. This site is also a personal endeavour to keep myself engaged with writing, to share my ideas, with the world. And since the beginning of 2021, it’s been great. I’ve been writing every single day, sharing random thoughts and ideas but all converging towards the idea of creating a future that we want to be part of.

The thing is that we can only either create something for ourselves, that we want, or to create something to serve someone else. Like Seth Godin mentioned in The Practice, you can choose to do one or another but if you try to do both, you’re basically forcing everyone to like what you like. I don’t pretend that the future I’m trying to create is one that everyone will like; but I do welcome all on this journey with me, for yourself, to care about the future, to care about serving others and our future selves enough. That humankind can even have a future, and to move forward.