A certain Mr. Sadasivan commented the following:
1 ----- More fundamentally, the Government needs to come to terms with the fact that it “really does not have the monopoly of wisdom”.
2 ----- “We are not saying that the people in Government are not smart,” he said. “No matter how smart you are, no matter which best universities you go to, all of those things don’t count because of the complexity of the kind of problems we are going to be facing.
Without prejudice to the Singapore government, out there in the trenches trying to protect everyone of us, from the most undeserving lout to the most charitable billionaire, I really want to say that it...
a ----- It should not act as it it had the monopoly of wisdom.
b ----- Because we live in unprecedented times.
In the age of LKY, the pace of creative destruction was nowhere as frenetic as it is today. Amazon kicked Walmart out of the ballpark even though the executive teams in Walmart were staffed by some of the smartest and best educated people around. It was not stupidity that put Kodak, Blockbuster and Sears out of business. It was the inability to see and then fully embrace a new current reality.
Anyone who has ever lead a big organisation knows that the organisation has a mentality of its own. When a business is built around brick and mortar shops providing videotapes and DVDs for rental to the neighbourhood, every single cog in that machine is focused on making that business run. Every cog includes the top management, CEO and direct reports and everyone down the line. All within the organisation are locked in by the mores and practices of the organisation.
This is ok in bygone eras of slow change. Generations of carpenters inherit their skills from their forefathers. With these skills, come a consistent set of values. Carpentry has not changed for centuries. Hence, it is safe to learn the same skills and values of one's forefathers. In today's world where there is technological disruption everywhere:
- NTUC vs Redmart
- ComfortDelgro taxis vs Grab
- Amazon vs Borders Books
The world has moved beyond your ken every 3 years or so. The pace of creative destruction gets exponentially faster. A ruler of India asked the inventor of the chess game what reward he wanted for inventing the game of chess. He asked for a single grain of rice on the first square of the chess board, and then two on the second one, and four on the third one, doubling on each subsequent square of the chess board. The final tally was 18,446,744,073,709,551,615 grains of rice. At 0.029g per grain of rice, this amounted to half a trillion tonnes of rice.
I stress on the word, "exponential" in exponentially faster.
No matter how smart our government and we do have a very smart government (supported by very smart civil servants with the best education from Princeton, Harvard, Cornell, Beida, Stanford, Cambridge and Oxford... you name any top university in the world, and our civil service has young people graduated from there).... it cannot keep up with the exponential pace of creative destruction. We all are held prisoner by our own personal experience, and no matter how smart we are, we only live one life and cannot see things from mental perspectives that we have not ourselves experienced.
When I was in university, computing labs were powered by 2m tall mainframe computers that took up an entire room and still had less computing power than my iMac. There was no internet. When I started work, video conferencing cost $3000 an hour. Now, Zoom is free. The Husband and I lived in different towns 800km apart. I would wait every Saturday evening at 9pm at the coin phone at the ground floor of my apartment block for him to call from the coin phone at the ground floor of his apartment block. It cost quite a lot to make these intercity calls. Today, I call on Telegram for free anywhere that there is wifi.
Along with this technological change comes a set of new values, new ways of doing things, new habits. Gone are the days when the world moved slowly enough for the government to accumulate wisdom, drill and then implement.
The price organisations like Kodak, Blockbuster and Sears paid was to go from hero to zero.
One of the reasons why Singapore failed to manage Covid19 as well as Taiwan was that we allowed our thinking to be locked in by SARS and by what experts said. We failed to use common sense and to open our eyes to the current reality and see the current reality. SARS training and preparation was the backbone of our strength of response. SARS training and preparation was also the cause of our failure to respond.
I think we have come to a stage in the evolution of humanity and thus governance where we cannot expect our leaders to know it all. We must expect our leaders to have the data processing capability to take in views and see current reality and to develop solutions on the fly.
To be fair, once the worker dorms exploded in Covid19, our government did develop solutions on the fly. Our government did move swiftly and think clearly. Our government did use the top class brains that it possesses. Yet, that was because when push came to shove, the current generation of Ministers have humility.
I am so proud of them.
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