As I ponder over the paradoxes of our society and nature, I begin to see more and more how our traditional linear paradigms about advancement and growth jars too much against reality.
There are many things that appears contradictory and yet continue to co-exist peacefully in the world without apparent conflict except in our minds. There are tyrants who are charismatic, loved and admired but also incompetent democratically elected leaders who could set a country back by decades. And there are both decentralised and centralised systems that appear to thrive, and also implode.
We ask ourselves if history proceeds through its course regardless of individual’s actions and it is just collective macro force created by the tiny actions of every individual that matters, or that it progresses through the agency of a few, put in the positions of power and influence? It’s not clear at all.
So when we think that progress in the system involves maturity of technology, of having regulation, standardisation, proper rules of engagement in place, we also recognise that these things stifles innovation and block new, emergent contenders from taking over incumbent structures.
Similarly, having contending standards or technology pathways look as though they are going to create a gridlock that prevents the industry from adopting a single unified approach.
The western, perhaps Anglo-Saxon, thought models make it difficult to hold those juxtaposing, contradictory ideas together because it supposes that there is just this one way that is the right way.
I sat down and listened to the National Day Rally speech with a break in between. In terms of delivery and finding the stories to tell, I’d say Lawrence Wong did well. He also positioned the 4G team well, and to a large extent, it almost feels like political campaigning. The election results this year have shown a good amount of trust in the PAP government and reduced tolerance for weak opposition candidates. So I’d expect that the ruling government would lead confidently and start working on rolling out a vision.
I think the elements of vision involve more of the old playbook, unfortunately: another committee to work on the economy, more new towns and spaces earmarked to be developed, and then programme funding or tweaks to support Singaporeans, in terms of reskilling or upskilling.
There’s this common thread that Lawrence Wong seem to have been emphasizing, but I’m not sure I observe much of it on the ground. He seems to be recognising that general sense that the government had been dominating decision-making, and so there are generally more attempts to involve the people, to gather feedback, or to listen in. If that was his diagnosis about the sentiments, it is correct. It is not something to be ‘fixed’ overnight however. And it will take time to create a culture where people contribute responsibly to policy-making, and to concern themselves with the needs of the wider society.
Over the years in Singapore, there had been more individualistic attitude – because the government’s approach to just about everything involves sticks or carrots, more often than not, there’s this general attitude of ‘what’s in it for me?’ From the NDR speech, I can see Lawrence Wong urging less of that individualistic attitude, more of the ‘we’, but I wonder what are some behaviours that the government or the civil service can lead with, in order to foster and encourage that.
As our nation crosses the diamond jubilee at SG60, people were putting down their wishes of ‘I want to…’ during NDP. The messages played on the videos for NDP were really inspiring and had nice stories from ordinary Singaporeans of diverse background. I felt genuinely moved and encouraged that we can be more than just ourselves and what we bring because Singapore is just a society that has been on the move, that has been developing and growing and thriving. It all feels good.
The stuff that doesn’t feel that good – how do we approach it though? The fact that places and spaces have been sacrificed, people uprooted to make way for development (as the Tekong story suggested). Or that sporting feels more like a lone wolf endeavour more than a national one, particularly during the ‘invisible phase’ of training, working towards Olympic qualifications, etc (story of Lloyd Valberg; though one can’t say this through that story since Singapore wasn’t yet a nation in 1948). Or that the big corporations often push around small businesses because that is ‘normal’ in our culture (story of Yanee; ‘but are you ready for an order of this scale’).
There is a choice to be made on how we see things. And whilst we have been told repeatedly there would be trade-offs, we haven’t yet learnt the real principles and intentions behind the decisions on those trade-offs. Why do we choose one over another? To the ones in places of power, it might be obvious. How could the sacrifice be made worthwhile for those suffering from its consequences?
What principles do we use to uphold our values – whether they are peace, justice or equality? Or perhaps progress? What happens when they are trading off each other? What if we cannot accomplish all of them at the same time? Often, ‘progress’ as the value seems to take centre stage. And is the kind of progress broad or narrowly defined?
To move forward, we must also learn unravel more the principles worth learning about and keeping, which we can use to navigate the future. Our forefathers left them for us but if we don’t pick them up to use them, it would be squandering the success that they’ve worked so hard to build us.
I wrote about the government blunting their policies previously when it comes to SME grants, particularly in Singapore. The same applies to many countries where policy directions are not just unclear but constantly changing. In the energy transition world, so many projects and companies in the US were taking investment decisions on the basis of tax credits for production of renewable energy.
So when the fate of the tax credits was suddenly called into question, it massively derailed the plans of these companies and projects, resulting in a whole sector or industrial sub-segment seizing up. I have always thought it’s incredible that in Europe and US, you could build an entire business or project based on revenues that are only possible because of subsidies or government tax credits. That’s amazing to me because in Asia, companies do not rely on government subsidies to build their business cases. At least not the private companies who have no political influence.
The reason for that is that the private sector is unwilling to take a lot of the regulatory risks from the Asian government, and they are not sure about the longevity of those policies and incentives. They recognise that when leadership changes, these incentives could disappear (as it happened in the US most recently). In other words, those policy measures in Asia are actually pretty blunt because the private sector is not going to respond to it much. US government risk that happening and losing such a precious lever to influence the economy and coordinate the change that is required.
Likewise, in Singapore, one of the biggest advantage that the government have is the ability to coordinate change properly. Technically, they don’t need to use market-based mechanisms to do that, but decades of indoctrination about the need to use free-market capitalism to ensure efficiency have brought us to the approach taken these days. The topic of subsidies is tricky and often at the top level, the thinking is ‘who would not want subsidies and freebies for their business?’ Yet in practice, it is not so easy. But it is not the bureaucracy that companies are unwilling to engage with – it is the uncertainty around the discretion of agencies’ decisions on whether some company or activity merits the funding.
Often, if the government’s grants or subsidies are uncertain and criteria are flexibly applied to accept or reject applications, then companies would rather focus on dealing with the vicissitudes of the market than of the government. I’m writing these because I feel that our agencies could inadvertently undermine something precious that the government have built up in the past. The full implications can only be seen and experience when it’s probably too late.
While in the meeting rooms of policymakers, the discussion around green economy and creation of ‘green jobs’ is underway, there is a slightly different conversation about green jobs in the coffee shops and cafes.
“Good work-life balance. But limited impact.”
“We move two steps forward and three steps back sometimes when trying to drive corporate green transition.”
“We have no veto power on investment decisions, the company still needs to make money so the frontline business units have the final say even when the investment have adverse environmental impacts.”
“The corporate sustainability department primarily manages reputational risks, not environmental ones.”
The best way to create impactful green jobs is perhaps when the laws and regulations properly require compliance with stricter environmental standards. At the moment, a lot of compliance are around reporting requirements and yes you do get some kind of ‘green jobs’ but they are mainly the bean-counter sort. The solution-seeking sort will come when you begin to set up standards in environmental performance that companies have to meet.
There is no point propagating green jobs, trying to subsidise manpower for these jobs and using tax credits or other incentives to force companies to locate their sustainability or green functions in Singapore when there is no corresponding increase in environmental performance standards imposed on our corporates.
Better to spend the resources studying the suitable regulations to put in place. And then you can support the companies to meet them.
A few years back, I devoted a couple of blog posts to writing about ‘wicked learning environments’, a concept popularised by psychologist Robin Hogarth (see the posts here, here and here).
Some recent experiences working on various requests for proposals and tenders brought this concept back to mind. And I want us to think about it a bit more as we think about the culture that we are developing here in Singapore – in school, business and within organisations.
I ran into a situation where multiple organisations belonging to this larger mothership, who was originating various requests for proposals refused to entertain request for feedback on the proposals submitted. Basically joining the tender was a black box with rather binary outcomes; and when you fail, you couldn’t even take a lesson out of it. At times, non-constructive feedbacks were provided; such as ‘the competition was strong’, or that ‘we received many competitive proposals and decided not to go with yours’.
I was reminded of a story from a friend who had a really non-supportive reporting officer (RO). When she requested feedback on her performance, the RO said she was doing okay, but when the performance reviews came back, she was placed at either average or slightly below. The response she got from her RO about why she was placed in that performance grade was that her grade was ‘already not bad’.
Feedback is so important, but in Singapore, we are so conflict-avoidant that we refuse to think about it more thoroughly. We might even have experienced defensiveness during exit interviews when employees felt more free to voice out concerns or areas of improvement. The fear of mistakes borders on being completely irrational and the desire to run from the shame or perceived humiliation supersedes the willingness to learn from those mistakes.
This is a massive problem for our culture. And Singapore is worse for such behaviours – where juniors are expected to silent dissenting voices, sometimes to the extent of surrending their thinking ability in exchange for harmony and masquerading that as ‘respect for elders’.
How can we move faster and progress if we want to enable Singapore to make the leap towards a better future?
I wrote another post with the same topic but from a different angle 2 years back. You can find it here.
I’ve been fighting against the prevailing culture for the past decade of my career. And for those who blame things on culture and act like it cannot be changed, they are being delusional. I have a few examples to show:
How did we get from flagging for a cab on the street to punching our mobile phone screens to hail a cab?
How did we get from ‘solar power’ is too inefficient and there is not enough space in Singapore to targeting a 2GWp solar by 2030?
How did we get from being in kampongs where we helped each other and lived for generations in a house to thinking that our financial lives depend on getting BTO, then selling it after MOP and then upgrading non-stop over our adulthood?
While it takes time, culture can be changed. It also takes identifying some loose bricks in the existing edifice to overhaul the structure of our prevailing culture. Energy transition is one tough one to crack, but that said, our region in Southeast Asia has already moved quite a bit from the days of coal-fired power generation. Yes there was a bit of attempts to catch on with the hype around hydrogen but the dollars and sense prevailed at least for now.
So I’ve been toying with the idea of doing a lot more content to teach all of us about energy transition and to be able to learn together. There is a whole lot of de-stigmatising, trying things out, and unlearning our previous biases to be able to move the culture a bit and accelerate the transition. There’s a question of format, level of engagement, how to manage and nurture a community and so on. I guess I’ll have to dive in head first.
I realise I’ve never written on artificial intelligence. GenAI swept the world quite a bit over the past 2 years and of course, the consciousness of it in the market since ChatGPT was made available for public use had driven Nvidia’s stocks up insanely.
I had realised that since I’ve got a collection of writings in the public domain from since 2009, it would not be hard for me to train an LLM to be able to almost think and write like me at least to the extent of views, ideas and information I have expressed.
The truth is I’ve somehow avoided using AI to do my work; rather, I’ve been using it more to gather and synthesize information, help me identify blindspots and figure out perspectives I might have missed. I know that what we have observed in the publicly available tools is just displaying a fraction of their potential and capability but I feel that ultimately, we are still hitting back at the same constraints that holds us back as humans. Resource.
AI continues to suck up computing power, materials and energy in order to work. This is almost silly to the extent that we are feeding machines copious amount of energy in order to produce output that pale in comparison with a human being. ‘Biological energy’ so to speak, is far superior and we already have the human brain that allows all of us to perform at a far higher and more meaningful level. Of course there are lots of ethical and safety issues confronting us as we develop AI further, and I’m not decided whether we should necessarily stop the developments – all I can say is that we are getting distracted by AI.
We are embarking on an almost insane hype in the market for AI while ignoring the greater problem that confronts mankind today – climate change. And we ignore it at our peril. AI, like the many other engineered geopolitical crises, are chipping away at our attention, energies and resources to deal with the things that matters much more.
I really believe we can do so much better with the struggles and challenges in this world if we had not been distracted by these things. I have no doubt AI is going to be important and influential, but along with a lot of other innovations that have radically changed our lives, it may only serve to exacerbate problems that are still not well appreciated by us, while taking away resources to solve the problems that are apparent today.
Having worked in consulting across cultures, I have begun to recognise some cultural behaviours when buying consulting across different countries and the attitudes towards consultants. Having advisors is nothing new; the monarchs of ancient times have had advisors to support them for as long as they existed. These advisors offered more than just advice, insights or knowledge that leaders did not possess (or did not think they possessed).
They offered assurances when it was scarce. Soothsaying, contrary to what people might think, actually means telling the truth; with ‘sooth’ being an old English term that meant truth, as opposed to ‘soothe’, which means to calm. And the advisors also provided perspectives that during times of wiser monarchs, could contradict the conventional wisdom or call out the folly of the leaders.
So if we distil it down to the value that consultants provide today:
Knowledge of what may not be known to the client: this is when consultants are selling their expertise, and familiarity with a topic area that clients are not familiar with
Assurance of a particular course of action, decision, or information: this is when the client needs something verified, checked, validated and confirmed. The confidence and conviction of the advisor matter here as well, compared to those who hide behind jargon and ‘expert lingo’.
Sparing partner or challenger to ideas: consultants can be valued in bringing new perspectives, especially an outside-in view of things thereby co-creating more valuable solutions or decisions with the client.
I begin to recognise that Asian firms especially with rather paternalistic leadership tend not to use consultants the way the West use them. So for example, when it comes to knowledge, the Western clients may appreciate specific subject matter expertise that comes through years of experience and in-depth research. In contrast, Eastern clients may value knowledge of implicit/unwritten local rules and norms rather than expertise in a more technical subject. The more institutionalisable the knowledge set is, the less likely an Eastern client would appreciate it as worth paying for.
Western clients see assurances from consultants as important while Eastern clients prefer to take the risks of not having check through things by themselves. This might have something to do with the way trust is formed. In Asian societies where getting things verified can be read as a sign of mistrust, it is challenging to value such independent checks and perspectives. The very deed of using independent validation can almost be an insult.
Finally, when it comes to having a sparing partner, the typical harmony-loving, and conflict-avoidant Asian culture would really struggle with the idea of paying someone to challenge you. In fact, leaders might instead assert the power of their wealth/influence over people so that they would not be questioned.
In this sense, Asian cultures tend towards getting advisors who can provide knowledge that is undocumented and unavailable in the public domain, and are often independent individuals with the specific gifts of being able to reveal ‘truth’ to the client. They also prefer that the knowledge advisors gain about the client cannot be easily disseminated. And as far as possible, they only care about knowledge that cannot be institutionalised.
This means that it is incredibly challenging for most professional, western-chain consultants to survive solely from serving a pool of Asian clients. If anything, they usually have to ‘survive’ off the big multi-nationals who are growing into new, and perhaps opaque markets, or needing more capacity support. In other words, consulting has grown out of an increasingly international market, yet not overly uncertain because surely some stability is necessary for consultants to be deemed to have accumulated enough lessons and experience to share.
Random musings as I continue to build up my knowledge and capability of managing a consulting practice.
I am a Singaporean. And one aspect about Singapore highlighted by many stories of its growth and early leaders is the notion of pragmatism. Yet I feel that this notion probably has been overplayed.
Pragmatism is used to suggest that the ends justify the means. Now within the context of school, it could mean that you can get your grades by rote memorisation as opposed to genuine learning. Or that you could simply find the right answer to copy than to solve a problem yourself on an assignment.
Same goes for the worker at work – just find the answer, don’t bother solving the problem. This may mean finding out how it was done before; or to figure out what others who had the same problem was doing. One could argue those are problem-solving heuristics. Maybe. But I call those “answer-finding”.
As a consultant, I cannot help but recall clients who are asking, “but have you done this same thing before with another client or somewhere else?” This is answer-finding, not problem-solving.
The Singapore today needs trail-blazers and problem-solvers; as it always had. But decades of overemphasizing pragmatism means we prefer to pay for answers than purchase problem-solving capacity. We desperately need to shift this culture and move towards real problem-solving than answer-finding.
