Tag Archives: attitudes

Crowding out

In economics, there is this concept of crowding out when government spending drives out private sector spending because it soaks up available financial capital and drives up interest rates.

In Singapore, I think there is some kind of political and psychological crowding out. We have grown to be a hyper-meritocratic society and we are proud of it, believing that it is the best way of organising ourselves and our systems. And we rarely talk about the injustice perpetuated by the system because we don’t want to undermine this part of the cultural fabric.

Yet we are confronted with the reality of inequality in the society, where students from underprivileged families are expected to be measured and assessed equally before an examination in school with their peers who had better backgrounds and well-resourced parents, tutors and even siblings. How do we respond to that? Do we just say, the system will take care of it?

In many other societies, private charities, foundations and many other organisations step in to help. In Singapore, we almost think that it should be the government’s role. How many of us would think it is a gap worth bridging? How many of us, would think it’s the problem of school teachers, and try to load it on to the public service?

During PM Wong’s National Day Rally speech this year, he talked about some ground-up initiatives and community organisations, giving great examples of how we want to nurture the Singapore Spirit and encourage Singaporeans to step forward to shape the character of our society. He acknowledged that the government cannot force or direct this, but to encourage, recognise and celebrate.

And then he talked about this tension between the government and the people sector:

In many countries, you see such ground-up collective actions because the governments are not working, the governments are ineffective. So people are frustrated at the lack of action and progress. And they step forward to take matters into their own hands.

Singapore is in a different position. No one wants the government to do less. No one wants the government to become ineffective. Instead, we strive to be more efficient and responsive. And there are areas where we believe the government can and should do more – especially to provide stronger social support for those in need.

But it is not just about what the government does – and we certainly do not want to end up as a society where people rely solely on the government. It is about all of us – government, businesses, workers and unions, community groups and civil society – doing our part. All coming together for the good of Singapore and our fellow citizens. And moving forward together as one.

I think there will never be a straightforward way to demarcate, ‘this is the government’s job, this is private organisations’ job, this is the community’s role’. In many societies, cooperatives and community organisations provide many services – especially in more rural regions.

These organisational forms and structures could supplant and take up ‘market space’ (as new businesses may not be able to compete or provide similar services commercially since these organisations are already providing them effectively), or even ‘political space’ because government cannot claim credit for having achieved some of those social outcomes.

As a society, thinking about the sort of soft cultural institutions and the hard organisations, we might have to decide what kind of mix we want to form a society where we all have a stake in it and not just rely on a formal government structure. The way we have developed, where people are constantly moving around, uprooting themselves to get on the property ladder, not having a particular sense of belonging to a geographical community has made it harder to foster a sense of ownership or belonging to a group. It has also encourage a lot of selfish-thinking where people are just figuring out what rules or tricks they could follow on the path to prosperity and self-enrichment.

How can we help our citizens reclaim that responsibility and stakeholdership towards the Singapore society? How can we do that in a manner that continues to maintain our unity as a nation, and strengthen our identity as Singaporeans?

Startup dreams

I listened to a couple of episodes of the Founders podcast, and also to a few episodes of The Knowledge Project podcast where Shane talks about the stories of different business leaders, founders and icons. There are some hallmark traits that recur in some of these people that I find are difficult to exists in many cultures and societies, and particularly challenging in Singapore.

And I particularly wonder if Singapore as a culture really celebrate the attributes that will really allow us to accommodate and nurture the sort of personality who will build the next unicorn or silent business giant that dominates entire sectors quietly. Or maybe Singapoeans are just going to be the sort of people who goes out to build the dreams of someone else who have taken the risks and put together that safe structure for them to navigate within and expend their energy and life into that other dream.

Honestly, I think it matters for us to learn to dream and to make mistakes on our way to getting there. The way our education system and culture are structured to accentuate mistaken avoidance rather than cultivate mistake management. The latter, I believe, is more important than the former, but never quite gets celebrated in our sensitivity, thin-skinned, conflict-avoidant culture here in Singapore.

In DBS’ latest report projecting the growth for Singapore up to 2040, they noted that a “culture of risk-taking” will be needed for the next phase of growth. What is going to drive that, I’m still unsure.

Advancement through dilemmas

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.

What if that is not reality at all?

Singapore’s 60th

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.

Trust in Singapore

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.

Blunting policies II

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.

Green jobs

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.

Learning from mistakes II

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.

All about energy transition

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.