Tag Archives: psychology

Judging yourself

For some reason, despite not being particularly sporty or athletic, I’ve had the benefit of knowing good athletes and learning a lot from them about psychology, personal development, and mindsets. While not being involved in the sporting scene, I’ve come to recognise the many ways our attitudes or behaviours during sports can mirror some other aspects of our lives.

One of them shared a really good practice introduced by her coach in Australia. After each training, he would get the athletes to go down the line to describe how they thought they performed for the training and why. And he’d listen to them, and then tell them whether they are judging themselves accurately regarding the performance and reasons provided. Often, people could judge their own performance correctly, but they come up with the wrong explanation, which means they are not going to correct it properly. And the coach would then offer his thoughts. Compared to Asian coaches who typically just drops his feedback directly, this Australian coach was challenging because he required his athletes to develop their judgment of themselves.

I thought this practice is great because over time, the athletes are building up a stronger ability to judge their own performance and pinpoint why. That creates a strong ability to coach oneself and also develop the right approach towards improvement. Many aspects of sports is about psychology and even getting oneself to put in the effort to practice can be something psychological. By coaching this way, athletes can come to see sports as more than just about performance but learning about oneself and one’s body even more intimately.

This is important. In Asian societies, especially with strong examination cultures, we never learn to judge or discern our own performance in things nor develop that independent sense about our abilities. This is a shame because once you’re at work, you will need to form judgment about the quality of your own work before you make submissions, you’ll have to determine if coworkers are doing what you need them to do, and of course, you’ll need to do so on many different dimensions including the social performance aspect of things. We strengthen our mental resilience and fortitude when we can judge ourselves more objectively.

Paying for outcomes

As a consultant, we sometimes encounter clients who only want to pay for the outcome but not the inputs or the efforts. It is probably true that a client takes on the cost of the work and all of the risks when they are just paying someone for the efforts, but they do also get most if not all of the upside pertaining from the subsequent business success. Of course, the consultants get a track record or credential but that’s probably a win-win situation, not something you’d expect the consultant to be paying the client for.

But paying for effort, monitoring it and managing the risk continuously can sometimes be the only way to achieve success, rather than striking an agreement with someone whom you would only pay for success. You see, outcomes are often not a function of incentives, they are a function of effort, timing, chance and many things outside the agent’s control. By paying for success, you might not even be optimising the effort for success.

And that brings me to the payouts for Olympic medalists. A gold medalist for Singapore gets a payout of a million SGD, whereas an Australian gets a payout of $20k AUD, which is about $17.5k SGD at current market exchange rates. The point isn’t about whether that is a lot or little; and in any case, the Singapore government might say there are so many Aussie gold medalists that it would not be worthwhile paying them too much. The point is that Australia probably already spend a lot more money upfront in terms of public infrastructure for sports, supporting local sport teams, supporting talented coaches, and promoting a culture of sportsmanship. The ‘outcome’ of Olympic success is already ‘bought’ when they make those investments.

On the contrary, Singapore still thinks that sporting excellence and investing in sports is out of a desire to win. I think that’s a shame, because there are so many other great outcomes that comes from a strong sports culture. And I think the many years of ‘investing’ into Olympics thus far had been out of that desire to ‘buy outcomes’, which is probably why we are offering such a big payouts to the Olympic medalists for Singapore. It allows us not to spend taxpayers money if we don’t get the medal – but at what costs to our sporting culture?

If we are prepared to secure a gold medal, why not take 90% of that million dollars and spend it on something like paying coaches better so they can focus on coaching a one or two teams rather than two handfuls? And why not alter the education system so that civic values are also taught through sporting interactions? There are so many possibilities only if we are willing to put our minds to it, and think about the effort we want to pay for, rather than trying to buy an outcome.

Persuasion vs argument

I was having coffee with a friend yesterday, and the conversation went on about having disagreements at the workplace, particularly when there are also some kind of philosophical clashes.

I reminded her that too often, we try to get others to do what we suggest by being right, by arguing for why it is the right way, or how our proposed approach would be the best. Or why the alternative proposed is ‘wrong’ or suboptimal. The merits of the approaches in and of themselves can make for endless arguments. Because that exercise on resolving disagreements become one about tossing perspectives and viewpoints around.

There are a few key ingredients needed for resolution of such matters:

  • Some deadline for making the decision
  • Aligning expectations that the particular discussion outcome needs to be a decision and not just a plan to discuss more of it
  • Set aside time to argue for the other side; when you are forced to argue for the other side, you reset your thinking

Another thing we tend to forget is when there’s a disagreement, sometimes it is not about pointing out pros and cons about the approach or subject matter at hand. Often it is more of a persuasion, on how that approach of way of handling things would benefit the counterparty personally or their ‘side’ of the matter. The more we think of the discussion and conversation as a matter of persuasion rather than proving something, the more we allow ourselves to be flexible and think from the viewpoint of the person we are trying to persuade.

It also takes the ‘I am right and you are wrong’ dynamic out of the room.

Compelling stories

I was reading Morgan Hounsel’s Same as Ever and one key claims he make is that compelling stories are probably more important than well-researched, time-tested facts or truths. The challenge is that people would find it easier to believe, and digest compelling stories than truth that might be hard to swallow.

And this probably comes from various different ‘incentives’ that are at work including socio-cultural incentives (relationships, perceived or otherwise), compelling financial incentives but also some kind of psychological incentives relating the way the pieces of information somehow resonates.

To some extent, it is beautiful that humans are wired this way. We are not some hard calculating machine that spits out answers in binary form or just goes into system error and choke up in smoke. There’s something poetic in the manner we appreciate and take in information, work them in our minds. Yet it is also responsible for crippling us and causing us to go down the wrong path in terms of decision-making, and coloring our behaviours.

The challenge is we can’t quite help ourselves. Even when we know we are biased, we somehow fail to control for it appropriately. The fact we managed to get as far as we did is rather miraculous. And probably stands testimony to the fact that while as individuals we might not be that successful, we’ve managed to develop systems larger than ourselves to deal with some of those issues. And those challenges are not as fatal as long as they are not being synchronized somehow.

The risk is when we all keep converging towards the same false compelling stories. Or when we collectively as a society discriminate or eliminate the outlier types who tend to be more capable at cutting through bullshit.

Room for charity

I love this recent article by Toh Yan Yun in Rice Media, it makes an important point about Singaporean’s perspective on inequality and also our perceived sense that our meritocratic system will continue to serve us well. I frequently question this point about how well our meritocratic system is working; but more than that, whether our overemphasis on the workings of the meritocratic system we have is squeezing out room for charity. So much so that government needs to use tax deductions as a means to further incentivize donations. Question then, is whether the tax department is the one being generous or the philanthropist?

In believing that we are entitled to the successes and achievements we receive, and seeing that as a system that works, we are also thinking that those who are down and out deserves to be so. Like what Yan Yun says in the article; the belief implies “So long as you play your cards right, your big break lies around the corner.”

Those who have been in reality will certainly respond, ‘Yea, right’. A society that does not see luck and chance playing a part becomes less forgiving for people’s mistakes and even for failures. And this has become so serious in Singapore that people are struggling even with being average. There is some obvious implication for mental health and our functioning as a society.

Do we want to start caring? Do we deserve it?

Positive cycles in systems

There are certainly some positive self-fulfilling prophecies in life, and they represent positive cycles in life that we can do more to encourage and harness. Students who have teachers believing in them tend to end up doing better than if they were left on their own; encouragement matters, and more importantly, the social dimension of love and nurturing has an impact on the learning outcomes of students. That is an input for teachers beyond pedagogy, but are we training teachers to believe in their students?

The industrial system works best when we can identify success factors and then invest in them to keep those positive feedback loops in the system. The tricky part is how the industrial system seeks to interact with that ‘scientific management’ koolaid about measurability and creating metrics and indicators. As a result, some of those success factors that are strictly unmeasurable get left out. After all, how do you make sure that a teacher can ‘believe’ in the students evenly in the class? But that question, which is precisely what standardisation and industrialism are based upon, misses the point.

Some of these unmeasurable success factors can generate power feedback loops. Consider the culture of graciousness in a workplace, gentleness, kindness, patience. Just because we cannot correlate the attributes with outcomes doesn’t mean they do not exist. And we all are worse off because we have allowed measurability and ‘big data’ to take such a dominant position in our systems.

Guidance & belief

A good coach puts some pressure on you to do better and demonstrates his belief that you can do better in you. But more than that, the coach makes sure that what is expected of you is clearly communicated so that you have a clear vision of yourself accomplishing it. The ‘video’ that can be played in your head is important. If the resolution of this video is poor, then it is harder for the coachee to perform. And putting pressure on the person by reminding him or her of the deadline or final prize is pointless.

A coach doesn’t review a race with the runner telling that him or her that at different point of the race, how far or near he/she is still from the finish line. He tells the runner about his or her gait to improve, the rhythm of breathes. The how is more important than the what; but the why even more so. The good coach then reminds the runner of why he or she is running.

It is not possible for managers to help a team thrive without these coaching capabilities. Most managers would just be churning output without developing the team or sustaining the right motivation for the team to go on. Often this could lead to burn-out and poor morale. This is where a strong individual contributor needs to learn new skills to move into manager position and not thinking that he or she can just keep doing what they are good at.

Singaporean aspirations

The former China CEO of McDonald’s Kenneth Chan penned a recent opinion piece in Channel News Asia about Singaporeans not taking on leaderships in global companies. It was written in the “practical” Singaporean way that focused on the steps towards being ‘next-level’ and being ‘bold’ to be a leader. He described personal insecurities and his experiences on the ground to rise up.

Personally, I’ve had a host of regional experience within China, South Asia and Southeast Asia during my time with the Singapore government. At International Enterprise Singapore (IE Singapore, now Enterprise Singapore), I had the chance to work with Singapore companies on their internationalisation plans and follow them to markets you would not even think about as a man-on-the-street. Subsequently, I was in the pioneer team of Infrastructure Asia, engaging regional government bodies on infrastructure projects. That gives me the exposure, the open-mind and also the skills to communicate and manage cross-culturally.

As a Manager at the Sydney office of Blunomy today, I am leading teams of consultants across our Singapore, Hong Kong, Sydney, Melbourne offices. I often have to facilitate exchanges with our European offices as well. Insecurities or perceived inadequacies may hold me back but ultimately, it cannot be the fear of me losing my edge or competitiveness that drives me forward.

And that’s the issue I have with the way the article was framed. The opinions expressed in the article reeks of the same old fear-mongering about Singaporeans being comfortable and losing out. I’m not sure if this works for the new generations of Singaporeans nor if that is the right motivation to begin with. The challenge for Singaporeans is not so much the desire for comfort but the lack of worthwhile aspirations. It used to be that rising up to be a ‘GM’ or a ‘CEO’ was something worth aspiring towards. But that simply isn’t the case today with the new generation.

The ‘boomer’ aspirations are simply not worth fighting for. It is in dealing with the ‘why’ that we find our fuel to move forward. “Success” as is constructed in past generations might not work anymore. Instead of aspiring towards “senior leadership” of global corporations, Singaporeans should be desiring to lead the charge of changing the world. Leading global organisations are means to do this. And then it is no longer about remuneration and the practical barriers of relocation and incentives. Monetary incentives should not be the reason for taking up these positions because they are challenging, stressful and hard. There is only so much money can drive that sort of sacrifice. It is the inspiration and influence that counts.

Think about Kenneth Chan leading McDonald’s – you’ve the chance to change the diets of millions of people by making decisions on the menus of your outlets. By thinking more deeply about the toys and promotions on Happy Meal, you get to reshape the aspirations and fancies of a generation of children. That is why it is worth being the leader of a global company – not because of the recognition or being labeled a ‘talent’.

Likewise, if you’re heading up a technology company, it shouldn’t be about maximising shareholder value or aiming to enable investors to make more money. Those elements are important only to the extent they allow businesses to continue making a difference. It is the ability for the technology to grow, benefit people and shape the future into one that we want their children to be part of. That can tip the scale of our motivation no monetary incentives can.

Are we equipping Singaporeans with the right aspirations? It’s not about skills and all that jazz about leadership. Those are important. And yes, government incentives with relocation or settling back in Singapore after stints overseas can help. But what is it that is worth Singaporeans developing that leadership for? That’s what we should be developing.

Among us

There are imposters around us; they pretend to be doing their work but are actually creating problems for their coworkers to solve. They are starting fires around workplaces that we all have to put out. The only issue is that companies are trying to get people to practise teamwork and they are not trying to sniff out imposters who are just pretending to be teammates. Unless you start playing office politics and all that.

What this means is that if you have been doing well, and keep doing well even though you didn’t seem to have previous experience or built any credentials around it, you’ve already proven yourself. What this means is that if you have some suspicion about yourself as an imposter, consider your intentions rather than your qualifications. What makes you an imposter is when you have drastically different intentions from the rest of the team.

It’s not just your qualifications that gets you there. It’s your intentions as well.

Meetings and processes

As organisations grow, there’s inevitably a lot of time caught up in meetings and processes to keep people informed, to synchronise and align things. During my time in government I probably spend more than 40% of my week in large team meetings that quickly consume 5-8 man-hours just trying to coordinate activities or update bosses.

I experience that process of bloating as I journey with growing organisations I’ve been with. And I often feel helpless about it. It seemed to me as though the bureaucracy inevitably comes no matter how much we are able to delay it. Technology tools can help to a certain extent but it also creates the convenience and reduce the excuse of coordinating more frequently.

In my perspective, there is this continued struggle between coordination, management and actually getting things done. The bigger and more complex a project is, the more time and resources gets devoted to such work. The question is, what are big projects and such grand scale for? Why do we always focus on scale economies without recognising the downside it has on productivity of our people? Is scale really to capture economies or to feed egos.