Lucian Teo, Singapore

Standup to Improv; Storytelling to Story Co-creating; also applicable to the evolution of news. Can mainstream media and government afford to “fail gloriously”?

Transcribed from the video of the event. The audio on the video wasn’t great, so this is entirely done by ear. Apologies for any inaccuracies.

Mr Jørgen Ørstrøm Møller: My name is Møller and I work at ISEAS Singapore but I used to be the Danish ambassador from Denmark. And I can tell you that the Danes are very happy paying taxes. According to surveys the Danes are the most happy people in the world, and every political party in Denmark advocating a tax increase is wiped out at the election. But I think the description you gave, comaprison between the Scandinavian countries and Singapore was absolutely correct, and it shows the difference, that you cannot build an economic model without taking into consideration the societal structure. And that is the starting point.

But my question is not about the welfare system. My question is a short one about economic integration in Asia. In the last month or so, we have seen China, Korean and Japan agree to make a free trade area. And we have seen China and Japan agree to make direct payment mechanisms without using the dollar. What do you think would be the impact on Asia and on Singapore on these two things?

PM Lee: I think it’s part of a trend towards greater interaction between the Asian economies which has been developing across the last ten, fifteen years as China has become a more dominant, or much heavier player in the world. Trade amongst us has grown on the western side of the Pacific. There are many other free trade arrangements amongst the countries in Asia. ASEAN has agreements all over the northeast Asian countries. And Australia and New Zealand has also brought into the net. At the same time we have also been building networks that straddle the Pacific through the TPP, Trans-Pacific Partnership. And we also have been building networks that go further: the Koreans have a network with the EU; Singapore is negotiating an FTA with the EU, and we want to be part of this wider network. So I think as long as individual pieces fit into a broader quilt and pattern which is reasonably comprehensive, I think it is a good thing. If we had a bloc, and Asia has free trade agreements among themselves and America is on its own and Europe is on its own corner of the world, I think that would be bad. But arrangements to have direct clearance between the renmingbi and the yen, I think it reflects the desire of the Chinese for the renmingbi to play a wider role internationally. It is understandable that as their trade grows they want to see this happen. I think it is not so easy to do because a lot of trade happens in US dollars, and I am sure that much of the trade between China and Japan are also in US dollars. And even the Euro has not replaced the US dollar as the major currency for trade on a very big scale. So it’s a long term trend.

One factor which the Chinese have to consider carefully is that without freeing up their capital account, there is a limit as to how far you can go allowing trade to be settled in your currency. And there are valid reasons why they will take a long time to open up their capital account.

Mr Prasenjit Basu: I’d like to ask about two sacred cows if you don’t mind. One has to do with the fact that Singapore runs current account surpluses of 20% of GDP year after year, and has built up an enormous amount of foreign assets. Would the dividends from those foreign assets be a potential source of revenue in the future? And also potentially, would the dividends from land sales be a potential source of revenue that can be used in the future? So that is one sort of sacred cow which I want to discuss.

The other one is bonded scholarship programme. At a time when Singapore has universities that are very attractive to Asians from China and India, who are attracted to NUS, SMU etc, is there a conflict between the continuation of bonded scholarship programmes where the best Singapore students continue to go overseas rather than go to Singapore’s own universities?

PM Lee: On your first question, I think that our current account surplus overstates the situation because if you look at our basic balance which would include long-term capital flows, you will see that there is significant remittances normally out because the MNCs are here and they reasonably want to remit their profits and earnings, and if you don’t export you cannot, you won’t have earnings to be remitted. So the net is smaller. We do have reserves. We do tap on these reserves for spending. It’s not dividends, but it is investment returns. And the balance which we have to decide on, enshrined in the constitution is, well, 50% of the investment returns can be spent, 50% will be invested for the future and taken on a long-term basis so that you buffer the ups and downs, and in a down year you don’t have to starve, and in an up year you don’t go on a splurge. I think we will try and keep that 2% of GDP contribution to our budget of 17% spending is not small and I think is very welcome.

Land sales. It depends on what sort of land sales. If you’re renting out the land for 3, 4 years, well I’d say that’s fair enough, that’s current income. If it’s 99 years and you want to spend it upfront, I’d consider doing it over 99 years. So I would be hesitant of treating that as a bonanza. I know that Hong Kong treats land sales differently from us. But it is not something you can depend upon reliably from year to year, because in some years it can be very good in some years it can be zero. And you’re really bringing forward value which should be a continuing income stream which should be over the long term.

As for scholarships overseas and whether we should not encourage more of our students to come to Singapore universities, I think we should encourage more students to come to Singapore universities, and offer them in our universities, an experience close to something which they can get overseas. Maybe combine with what you can do overseas. Maybe you can do an undergraduate here and a post-graduate in US or America. You can spend a term on an exchange programme overseas or a year. Or we can build institutions which provide an approximation of that experience, like the Yale-NUS college, or the new SUTD where we are partnered with Yale in one case and MIT in another. And I think that it will bring our education system to another level.

But students around the world want to go to certain places where they see other very bright students. And if you’re getting into Stanford or Yale, or MIT or Harvard, or Oxbridge, then you are maybe in the top one-half percent of the population and you are with other students who are in the top one-half percent of the population. So the experience, the ferment, the excitement is different. We will try to approximate the quality of education, but then if we had that cutoff for our intakes - if we had instead of 10,000 students going to university a year, we might have 500 students go to university a year. And I think we can’t do that in Singapore.

So I think realisitically, some of our students will want to go abroad, and our challenge is to make sure that they get a good education there, they keep their roots in Singapore; one day they come home and they are part of the Singapore family.

Mr Benjamin Mark: I am Benjamin Mark, I am one of the essay competition winners. I was interested to find out what you think are the opportunities and challenges as we go forward in terms of the environment, in terms of what we can expect from the environment as an economic growth source or as a threat to our economic development.

PM Lee: I think the opportunities are also potential challenges, because whether China is a market or China is a competitor depends on whether we can stay ahead of the waves. And similarly with our neighbours in Southeast Asia. It’s good for us that they prosper, but if they move ahead and we haven’t moved ahead, then some of the business which are now in Singapore will say, “why should I stay here? If I go a few hundred kilometers, or a few kilometers away, well I can do much the same at a fraction of the cost.” And that means we will be hollowed out and we will lose business.

It’s a challenge which all countries face. Taiwan has seen this with one million of their people reputedly in China. A lot of their industries now, the mass of it, are in China. Maybe the headquarters still in Taiwan. And what must they do? Well they have to liberlise, they have to open up, they have to be able to attract talent back - their own as well as foreign talent - and they have to be prepared to engage with the mainland because cutting themselves off doesn’t solve their problems. You can’t prevent the mainland from propering by not doing business with them. And you can’t prosper by yourself without having China, India, Europe and the rest of the world as part of your markets and as part of your community. So we are going to be in that same situation, in terms of the external challenges.

The domestic challenge, which is a very considerable one, is how do I keep on growing without easily expanding? We have grown 6.7% a year since 2003. It’s been good, it’s more than we expected, but it’s also brought growing pains. We’ve had to expand our foreign workforce from work permit holders to employment pass holders to professionals, and we’re stretching at the seams. We can cope with that problem but we cannot indefinitely stretch at the seams at a 100 to 150 thousand new people per year in Singapore. It is not possible. At some stage it has to slow down, and gradually it will have to taper off, and you have to depend on qualitative growth, which means productivity improvements, which means upgrading, which means transformation, not just new things coming in and doing good, but old things gradually, through a process of creative destruction, being replaced by new activities and people being regularly moving from old jobs to new jobs, old skills to new skills. And in the process keeping our productivity up, 2, 2.5% every year for ten, fifteen years more, maybe. Not very many developed countries have done it. Can we do that? We have to try.

We have to get some growth. We have to get some inflow of talent and people because there is no country in the world where you can squeeze the economy, the size gets smaller and the incomes rise at the same time. Never happens. Well in principle you can say “if I do my sums right, I can achieve this magic”, but in practice you can only get incomes to rise if the economy is rising as a whole, if there are new opportunities and people come in and say “yes, this is the place where it is easy to start business, is exciting to be, and I can try new things.” We need to maintain that spirit of being exciting, of being welcoming, of being open and adventurous at a time where there are constraints to our size, and also at a time where our population is growing gradually less young, and therefore perhaps less adventurous. And that’s a challenge.

Dr Omkar Shrestha: I am from Nepal. This question is slightly light-hearted and frankly partly prompted by some of the TV programmes I watch on the Japanese TV stations. In your speech you were saying, “it is already happening, and perhaps more so in the coming ten, twenty years, that Singapore is running up against land and labour. The pressures to reduce the inflows of the foreign labour is intense. The ageing and shrinking population is a stark reality, and yet urgency to remain competitive defines our success and survival.” Against such a background, in the next ten, twenty years, do you foresee Singapore society going a robotic way, as like I said, in some of the programmes that I see on Japanese television. How do you see the robotic way [of doing things] playing in the coming twenty, thirty years in addressing the labour shortage problem?

PM Lee: Yes I do. Even without that background I see that happening. It is happening dramatically, in software, in hardware, in devices. It’s not just the little gizmos which go round the floor, cleaning, vacuuming the floor up or washing your dishes. Or one of these Asimov things which can talk back to you. Or Siri on your handphone, where you can ask the weather or tell them where you are. But very sophisticated systems which can do things which human beings used to be needed to do. So it is not just putting chips in a mechanical way according to a fixed program, but to be able to see the environment, assess, deal with uncertainty, adapt, move, recover from mistakes, learn. And that means they can read company reports and extract information, they can read legal reports and find out whether precedences are relevant. They may be able to read x-ray scans and spot tumours and patterns better than skilled human eyeballs. And one light-hearted example in the Wall Street Journal just recently: Scientists have made a tremendous breakthrough and they can now make a robot which knows how to debone a chicken. You may laugh, but it was a challenge because if you do it too hard, the bone chips go into the flesh, if you don’t do it hard enough you leave flesh on the bone. Human beings learned how to do this, robots found it difficult. Now a robot knows how to do that.

But the upshot of this is, pressure on the low-end workers which you have seen, is now going to become pressure on the middle. Your office staff, your people who make appointments, set up arrangements for you, gather data for you; twenty years from now many of that will be routine. Siri may well replace your personal secretary. Not this version, but some version still in the works. And if you look at human things - things which humans have to do, Google has been developing a driverless automatic car, not to drive on tracks or on monorail, but to drive in traffic, with human cars. And they’ve driven a hundred thousand kilometers or something, and the human has only had to intervene once. And Nevada, the next state to California, has now decided they will license driverless cars to drive on its roads. Twenty years from now, can you imagine that not happening? It will be available. It may be driving buses. It may be driving aeroplanes. In fact you can drive aeroplanes today, except that passengers find it safer to hear that captain in the cockpit, and so you still have two pilots, and therefore the pilots have a career and the airlines have to manage. But pilotless aeroplanes? I mean the Americans operate all kinds of unmanned aerial vehicles, so I think robotics will be a big part of the next twenty years and a big pressure on our society.

If we can adapt to that, now people can learn to be smart enough to operate the robots - program them, use them, and direct them. Then of course we rise one level and life is better. If you don’t make that change, then we have a problem. And I think we have to prepare our people so that they can learn to learn and operate in that new environment.

Mr Ei Sun Oh: I am Ei Sun Oh from the S Rajaratnam School of International Studies. I am wondering how can Singapore position itself even better between the two contending superpowers, namely the United States and China, in terms of, for example, addressing some of the domestic concerns, the domestic well-being of Singapore. Is there a way Singapore could position itself even better, to help, for example, in reducing the gap between the rich and the poor.

PM Lee: Well, we want to be friends with both the United States and China. And as long as they are reasonably friendly with each other, it is easier for us to do this. I think we have not done too badly. We have very good links with China at many levels, business as well as government. And we have very good ties with the US, the multinationals as well as the government, as well as academia, as well as personal ties. I think we will try to do that. As for how this will impact our economy and our rich-poor divide, I am not sure. Because whether we have good ties with them or not, we are going to have to address the economy and the rich-poor divide in Singapore, or the rich-poor gaps in Singapore. I think doing business with them creates more opportunities for us. Certainly taking advantage of what China has to offer enables us to prosper, enables our companies to prosper. And if our companies do well, then you have more tax revenues, you have more jobs that Singaporeans can do, whether the jobs are here or in China. And I think there are more resources you can use to invest in Singapore. So last week I had Mr Wang Yang here visiting us, or this week, on Monday, which is the party secretary of Guangdong province. And he was interested in how we work on social cohesion because Guangdong, having made economic progress now sees social stresses. And as Wang Yang explained to me, when you solve old problems and you think people have reach a new level and should be happy, new issues arise and you have to deal with them. And I said, “that’s our experience too.” And we can compare notes with one another.

So I posted this on my blog, on Facebook, and some people who responded on Facebook asked the question, “How does this help Singaporeans?” Well I think that I didn’t sign any contracts with Mr Wang Yang, but the fact that he’s interested in us and he finds us interesting to observe and to pick up some ideas from, and we have some mindshare with him, and some significant projects in Guangdong which our companies have invested in, I think opens up many opportunities for both countries to have win-win cooperation which I think is good for us and I am sure will also be good for our income distribution, indirectly in the long term.

When I first started out my career in the public service, it was always with an aim to raise the level of government websites, both from the design of aesthetic as well as the writing of code. It was bad enough that governments all over the world faced the prejudice of never listening enough to their customers, government websites also had the reputation of exhibiting no thought whatsoever for people unfortunate enough to use them.

So back then I redesigned the website of the Ministry of Education and hoped that it would start the ball rolling somewhat; that government agencies would pay more attention to the user experience their websites provided. To be honest, I started out hoping to change as many as I could, and the colossal effort needed to enact change one site at a time took its toil.

I am very, very heartened to find that there are others who have taken the same torch to much loftier heights. Charlotte and her gang at Digital Boomerang have been steadily working on site after site. Their latest launch for the Ministry of the Environment and Water Resources carries their trademark excellence, after their equally stellar work on the Ministry of Health’s website.

It is a wonderful departure from the very corporate, distant feel of most government websites and draws you in with its use of colour and illustration. They have also simplified the navigation a lot. Having worked in the government, I can testify to simplification being probably the hardest thing to achieve with a government client.

I’m very proud to have such amazing “co-workers” who share a similar vision, and possess the tenacity and strength of will to power through obstacles in order to realise it.

On the football field, everyone wants to play the striker. The striker is the scorer of goals, the winner of games, and the position that offers the greatest chance for glory. Very few people, on the other hand, aspire to play the role of the goalkeeper. The job of the goalkeeper is often regarded as a thankless one. The goalkeeper is the guardian against disaster. If he’s doing his job right, few would notice. But should he falter - or worse, falter continuously! - he will bear the brunt of the blame.

There are two matrices of assignment here: the assignment of responsibility, and the assignment of blame (I use it loosely to include even positive contribution). The first is objective while the latter deals with perception. In an ideal state, the two matrices ought to be one and the same, but it seldom is so.

The gap between these two is perceptibly large when we look at massively public-serving roles, primarily that of government or providers of public utilities. It doesn’t take a genius to see that short to medium-term public perception of public servants follow the goalkeeper model.

The loudest and most immediate public response to national crises have traditionally been “off with his head”, insisting that the person on the top take the blame and resign. It is not entirely unreasonable, but it may not be the most beneficial of responses. We need only look at many countries still suffering from endemic corruption despite many changes at the top. The assignment of blame is emotional and often driven by anger. It seldom solves any real problems.

When the public seems overly trigger-happy with assigning blame, there is a natural reaction from the public service. The operating environment within the public service clams up and the appetite for risk is reduced (there has never been much of an appetite to begin with, I can attest to that). A healthy appetite for risk is essential for innovation.

Why then, do you think that public service operators like SMRT speak of using social media as some esoteric, obscure art that requires rocket scientists and brain surgeons? Or why do you think the government seems slow to open up to more collaborative and transparent ways of decision making? It is because of a deep-seated fear that the public will come down hard on any mistakes made, real or perceived, so it is easier to perpetuate the status quo. Taking chances means a possibility of failure.

We need to be more objective about our response to failures.

When Minister of Transport Lui Tuck Yew said that he needed to investigate if the two lapses in our public train networks were symptomatic of a systemic problem or isolated incidences, the more vocal online voices among us blared, “of course it is a systemic problem!”. Without information on whether scheduled maintenance was carried out on par with international standards, or whether SMRT was operationally deficient, we assumed that it was common sense that bore no need for investigation, and our prescribed immediate response was to fire the CEO who made over a million dollars last year.

After we allow our emotions to subside, we need to ask ourselves if the CEO’s pay is directly related to the incidents, and whether her removal solves any problems. It is an evolutionary process of our maturation as citizens, but I believe it is time we develop a more robust spectrum of responses to crises.

We should be able to look at a problem and ask the right questions: how did this come about, where sufficient safeguards put in place etc. It is through careful study that we can resolve public issues.

I’ve been in the public service for a number of years now, and those of you who know me know that I’m in it because I’ve chosen to devote my energies to better working relationships between citizens and government. There are more like me - many more - who are passionate about serving others, and we need the support of the people we serve.

We need you to believe that we want to be the best at our work, like any other person in any other job. We need you to put aside the stereotype that we are in the public service because we are incompetent of holding down a private sector job; or that we work less than folks in other sectors.

Because if enough people believe it to be true, the public service will be unable to attract the right type of people to serve. Because if we insist on stringing people up to dry every time a mistake is made, very short-term painless solutions will be chosen over long-term visionary strokes that may incur some immediate pain.

Ultimately, we need to work together because there is no line between a public servant and a citizen. The two positions should be one and the same.

At the recent Singapore Govcamp, Professor Ashish Lall brought up the need to abolish anonymity from the internet.

I appreciated his point of view, authentication of identity has always been a bugbear for communications and tech professionals alike. Like Professor Lall, I’m also a proponent of open communication, but I see the need for anonymity on the web despite its warts and all.

I tweeted my immediate response at Govcamp, “Anonymity will remain necessary as long as there is unfair (real or perceived) repercussions to free speech.”

In an ideal world, where one can speak freely without fear of unfair repercussion, openness ought to thrive. We should not hide behind masks or alternate personas for nefarious motives, or make hurtful or insidious comments without bearing the responsibility of having made that comment in our own name. There should be a direct correlation between words that are uttered and the person who uttered them.

But many of us live in a less than ideal world. In some areas those who wield power do not take well to criticism, and brandish a heavy rod upon those who speak up against them. The options available to people in those places are submissive silence or anonymous speech.

That option should remain open.

But let’s not leave this discussion at this point of doom and gloom. For a great number of us live in societies that are generally accepting of open speech, but live in submissive silence or speak anonymously due to fear. There will always be this dissonance; we will always scrutinise those in power, and to varying degrees judge their reactions to criticism as apathetic, appropriate or alarming.

To move towards the ideal environment that allows for open identities and speech, we need both sides - speaker and listener - to be fair.

For speakers:

1. Keep speech constructive. Identify issues, recognise the tradeoffs, explore and suggest solutions where possible.
2. Speak as a collective. Offer the initial benefit of doubt to those in positions to effect change. The most effective change-makers are leaders. They need not be official in positions of power, but are able to gather people together to solve problems. Tone of voice is important here.
3. Be patient. We live in a complex world where there is an overload of information. Change might take time, but keep looking for signs of change. Be encouraged, however small those signs are.
4. But be creative. Look at innovative ways and angles to solve the problem. Set a threshold for persistently trying out a single approach. When the threshold is reached and the approach exhausted, try a different one.

For listeners, particular those in positions to effect change:

1. Listen. Give speakers time and space to voice things out. Be flexible and thick-skinned enough to overlook emotive responses, and insightful enough to draw actionable items from them. Wait for your turn to speak.
2. Educate as a collective. When you do respond, do not dumb it down. Speakers who are passionate enough to speak up are your greatest assets. Empower them. Arm them with facts. Allow them access into the dilemmas you face, that they might emphatise with the decisions that need to be made. They’ll come out of the exchange stronger activists and some maybe even advocates. You’ll come out of it wiser, trust me. You’ll realise you don’t know everything, and that’s very important given the power you wield.
3. Respond in a timely manner. While it is reasonable to expect some level of patience, this once common virtue has grown exceedingly scarce in the internet age. Provide cues that views are being heard, and wheels are in motion. Learn from user interfaces: progress bars, spinning hourglasses are all there to provide reassurance.
4. Take responsibility if you are in that position to effect change. Don’t pass the buck. Stay in the conversation, be part of the collective gathered to tackle the problem. Communicate authentically, human being to human being. Don’t hide behind organisations, acronyms, jargon, press releases or paperwork.

“Why? Because while the truncheon may be used in lieu of conversation, words will always retain their power. Words offer the means to meaning, and for those who will listen, the enunciation of truth.” - V for Vendetta.

And truth is, we all want a better world for our children.

A response to Fast Company’s post “The iPhone 4S’ Siri is the ultimate interface: none at all”.

The star of the show when Apple announced the iPhone 4S last week wasn’t the phone, it was Siri, Apple’s voice-activated personal assistant.

Voice-controlled interfaces aren’t at all new. Conceptually, they’ve been around for a long, long time. Just think HAL 9000 in Space Odyssey 2001, Jarvis in Iron Man, and countless Star Trek movies.

Back in the early 90s, I bought a solution from homegrown Creative Labs. (Can’t recall if the product was Phone Blaster). The whole idea was that I would be able to command my PC using voice commands. I spent many hours training the software, all in the hope I could do things like “minimise window”, “close program” and “shut down” using only the microphone provided. There was definitely a coolness factor.

What I failed to realise back then was that I used the computer mostly for gaming in the dead of night, hoping my parents wouldn’t wake up and discover my addiction for Doom 2 and its ilk. The voice-activated interface was mostly left unused.

Siri will face similar challenges, least of which is the ability to accurately decipher voice commands. Apple has amazing engineers, and if need be, they can always buy the massive database of voice commands Google collected with its Grand Central Project (known now as Google Voice, I think) and also the now-defunct Google 411.

The greatest challenge is the shifting people from visual + kinesthetic (touch, for example) as the primary means of interface and manipulation to audial + voice. Over the last few decades, the computing age has entrenched a hierarchy among our senses. The eye has established itself as the primary sense for information ingestion, while touch has become our main means of expression to a machine (keyboard, mouse, touchscreen). Even the way we conduct face-to-face presentations has changed, and we are often told to have more impactful slides because people rely so much on the visual that the presenter’s voice almost plays second fiddle.

Our sense of hearing has been relegated to a secondary role. Millions plug into their iPods (yes, there’s some irony) to their customised playlists. By plugging in we decided that we find no need to be audially cognisant to our surroundings, whether the honking of a car or the crash of a tree branch.

Most telling, we designate irrelevant information as “noise”.

Using voice as a means of manipulating a device might be hard, probably for the same reason I encountered in my gaming days. With the population density of urban cities we live in, we have learned to suppress our voices. In some cultures like Japan’s, even speaking on the phone while on the train is frowned upon; what more speaking to the phone.

The brilliance of Siri lies not in its ability to decipher commands - we’ve had that for a long time - but in its natural language processing, if we assume Siri flawlessly does everything the demo shows. Personally, I’m not sure we can reinstitute hearing back to a main source of input in the immediate future, nor voice be used effectively in a crowded, barely-tolerant-of-each-other environment we live in.

There’s a lot of criticism over Facebook’s new layout. Kevin Rose astutely points out that “everyone will love/accept it in a few days…watch.”

It’s been the common Facebook refresh refrain: Facebook doesn’t care about us, oh now we need to relearn everything. And it all quietens down in a couple of days, like Kevin said.

People are amazing at adapting to new stuff, despite how much they prize familiarity. But it is foolhardly to say that users will always adapt to whatever the designer creates. You need only look as far as Kevin Rose’s own Digg, which ironically enough, lost the majority of their users when they redesigned.

We designers are faced with a conundrum: great design is timeless, and yet we are told to always be innovating.

It is much easier when we speak of designing physical objects. You’d design a great chair, and it is sold. While in the owner’s possession, the chair remains as it is. It is not so for websites. Every next iteration affects all existing users, and it destroys the relationship the user has formed with the interface over time.

Back when I designed the Ministry of Education website, I did away with the 4-year mandatory revamp, opting instead for iterative realignments. A lot of effort was made to recreate the underlying code to make it flexible enough to accommodate tweaks and adjustments.

Facebook’s massive redesign efforts regularly places an undue burden on their users to relearn the user interface without offering significant additional value. I haven’t tried out the new Facebook timeline profile, but I hear that it’s awesome.

It’s a fine line between boldly innovating, and realising that a design is complete: nothing more ought to be added, and nothing more can be subtracted from it.

Innovation is the exception rather than the rule. Innovation isn’t mainstream, or “the way it’s usually done”. It is the process of finding the shorter, more efficient road less travelled.

Because of its very nature, innovation will always outpace the crafting and writing of rules. Innovation will always be ahead of legislation.

“Oh so you’re the guy in charge of innovation”, my then-new boss said during our first introduction months ago. It’s not my official job title, but being in the technology department and having a reputation of shaking things up, the label sticks. Innovation is so much more than technology, though technology has been its most visible arm in the last few decades.

You see, this is the first time I’ve been in a technology department, and it comes with challenges rather foreign to me. Where I’ve spent most of my career in the front lines battling monolithic IT departments through various means, the new job requires me to play both innovator as well as the enforcer of rules.

The application of law is an essential for good governance, but we live in an age where innovation severely outpaces our ability to enact new rules. As such, it is not the letter of the law we ought to live by but its principle. This is the leap Singapore desperately needs to make if she wants to explore possibilities outside of her very small comfort zone. The inertia to extract patterns from the obvious and act upon it is probably the largest obstacle preventing Singaporeans from being the shrewd and creative entrepreneurs our forefathers were.

It is this fear of departing from established methods - of innovation! - that I am tasked to address on a day to day basis, even within myself. Ralph Waldo Emerson puts it most eloquently when he said:

Without ambition one starts nothing. Without work one finishes nothing. The prize will not be sent to you. You have to win it. The man who knows how will always have a job. The man who also knows why will always be his boss. As to methods there may be a million and then some, but principles are few. The man who grasps principles can successfully select his own methods. The man who tries methods, ignoring principles, is sure to have trouble.

The push and pull of innovation and legality surrounds us, its prize and hazard the possibilities of a better world. Copyright laws, obsolete in a digital world obstruct the free-flowing creation of a global cultural tapestry; creative greed-driven complex financial instruments adhere to the law, exploiting loopholes and bankrupting millions; intellectual property laws put life-saving medication out of reach to the poorest communities in the world. The list goes on.

It’s not that laws are an evil in themselves. No one would dispute the right to fair remuneration, or that reward is essential to the sustainability of innovation. But we are all personally responsible for choosing and exhibiting the principles by which we live our lives and make our decisions. It is easier to leave this to legislators, or adopt a “I pay taxes, you solve the world’s problems” approach, but it robs us of the ability to think, and even more importantly, to care.

We need to put aside the fear of departing from the tried, tested and documented if we are to explore the possibilities that innovation brings. But we need to hold fast to the principles and values that define our organisations, and ultimately, ourselves.

Cloud computing is a very natural step in the evolution of all things communal. In the dawn of civilisation we moved away from self-sufficiency, aggregated demand, and some of us took on roles as gatherer of berries, others became fishermen, and others makers of clothing, of spears, of tools. This shift has brought us to present day civilisation, where mass production is made possible by specialisation, rather than differentiation.

So the move away from organisations handling all different facets of information technology into one where, like before, demand is aggregated, and different parties concentrate on what they do best, seems extremely logical. There is a dilemma of trust, which I suppose existed back in the day as well.

“Can I trust the guy assigned to be a fisherman to bring me my fish? I used to have relative success in catching a few by devoting a few hours a week. If I’m in charge of cooking the food, and the hunters decided to skive off, my whole livelihood would collapse.”

Being a cog in a supply chain requires a leap of faith. But it’s not a leap we’ve never done, given that it is more the exception than the rule to see organisations own the entire supply chain these days.

But that said, we cannot make a blind leap of faith either.

At a recent gathering of fellow peers from a mix of private and public sector organisations, I mooted the question: “How do you guys deal with the fact that for the most part, legal jurisdiction still abides by geographical rules, while data in the cloud doesn’t?” Sure, contracts with cloud providers can define things down fairly well, but there’s always that fear, given that the global legal framework isn’t nearly nimble enough to adjust itself to the change in paradigm. It is still ridiculous that media sold on iTunes is geographically segregated. Or that DVDs are still being region-locked.

In response to the my question, the group shrugged.

We can’t afford to not know. And we can’t afford to stay still. Defraying the cost of maintaining servers and building systems from scratch - the cost of self-sufficiency in a connected world - could give corporations a strong competitive advantage, or subject them to greater risk.

There is no denying that large clouds are more lucrative targets for ill-meaning hackers who mean to play for all the marbles. It is also true that cloud providers have a much greater economic impetus to ensure the security of their clouds, and given that it is what they specialise in, most of us assume that they are better equipped to deal with these threats.

The traditional way of keeping IT operations in-house (or employing a dedicated vendor) offers 2 things:

1. Greater knowledge. It’s easier to know what’s being done, and what’s not being done to protect your data. It is also easier to apportion responsibility (aka who to blame when the shit hits the fan).
2. Security through obscurity. If your organisation is small enough, you present a smaller target that hopefully won’t interest hardcore hackers.

To address #1, study up. Cloud providers need to provide a great deal of transparency (ironic to demand transparency of something named “cloud”) and tenants need to have a firm grasp of their operations.

To address #2, we need to dispel the myth that being obscure provides security. It is not responsible to rely primarily on “let’s not put our eggs in the big basket of eggs” to protect our data, especially in an increasingly technologically-savvy world where we can expect fledgling technologists to look for softer targets to practice their hacking. I would even go as far to say that we ought to encourage responsible hacking. Security through proliferating general ignorance is infinitely worse than putting blind faith in obscurity.

As with all things, the decision on whether to put your data on a cloud isn’t a binary one. Tradeoffs abound. Private clouds provide some restitution, but forgo the cost-savings of aggregated demand. Hiring very competent vendors would close the gap between the offerings of the cloud specialist and the in-house solution.

Ultimately it boils down to the basic risk assessment, and just as much as we need to counter the dangers of data loss with due diligence, we need also to counter the fear of the unknown through the active acquisition of knowledge.

Every time someone says “but the reality is…” or “the actual situation on the ground is…”, amateur philosophers have a field day explaining how there is no such thing as reality because everything goes through a lens of some kind. Everything is biased, and democracy, to some extent, is the act of normalising these biases.

A dichotomy has always existed between our own experience of what life is, and what people tell us life is. The dilemma a teenager faces when given parental instruction that goes against instinct, or when a sales rep is forced to sell something he knows won’t pick up from folks on the ground are but a few examples. When mass media hit us with radio, tv, movies and magazines, we were subscribing to “life as it is told” while living “life as it is lived”, often spending our entire lives trying to match the two.

The reach and oddly homogenous message of mass media is, in my opinion, the most powerful force that has defined the lives of individuals all over the world. While the aspirations for a better life is universal, we have been fed with the notion, now so engrained it seems irrefutable fact, that the “better life” equates with a lifestyle of excessive consumption. We see this everywhere around us: more money, bigger cars, private jets, larger and more opulent homes, an endless string of women or the fawning adoration of the one alpha male.

Our endless pursuit to survive and thrive in this projected reality has led to a discontent that is the defining characteristic of our generation.

The proliferation of access to the internet has been monumental - the production of media is no longer guarded by the few who could afford the means. The massive amount of content being created and communicated has created an environment where attention has become the new currency. When audiences have so much content to choose from, producers (even the stay-at-home adult putting up videos of his overfed cat) adapt their strategies to grab their share of the attention pie. Verbosity is out, brevity is in. Dour discourse is out, and humour becomes a very necessary lubricant to maintain the intellectual connection between audience and actor.

The new content-producing paradigm added a new punch to the Hollywood-projected reality we were feeding ourselves and our children.

Highlight reels, movie trailers, ideas distilled to 140 characters or less. Because producers had to keep things brief in order to keep their audiences, they now communicated a new message that rode on the old one: we want the better life, and we want it now.

I’ve played basketball for a little more than 20 years now and its evolution is symptom of the larger malaise that plagues us. Youngsters that take the court these days were brought up on short youtube-sized highlight reels of Kobe Bryant hitting the impossible shot, or Allen Iverson embarrassing another player with his crossover dribble, and it shows in their game. They attempt ridiculously difficult shots with absolute belief that the ball will sail through the net, even when passing to a teammate would mean a much higher chance of winning the ballgame. And I fear that as sports imitates life, we may have developed an addiction to dramatic finishes while ignoring the tenets of basic probability; focused more on short-term waves of emotion over long-drawn protracted periods of extensive effort.

Unable to summon the attention span needed to define what winning the game entails, we may have settled for the dopamine boost, hoping that we’re judged on style over substance. This attitude seems to have crept into our workplaces, our voting booths and even the personal chamber in our minds where we perceive who we are and what we can contribute to the people around us.

I am personally convinced that we need to start on 2 things:

Firstly, we need to redefine what “winning the game” is. We need so much to break away from equating happiness (my definition of a universal end-game outcome) with securing the top rung of the corporate ladder and relooking at what really matters in life. While we have started demanding that our schools stop using purely quantitive academic metrics to assess the worth of our children, there has not been as strong a move to change the social mindset of what makes a successful person. We need to restore the dignity to the recently marginalised: the independent artist, the teacher, the social worker and most importantly, the homemaker, if only to name a few. These used to be highly regarded positions in society. Today, in their place we have bankers and lawyers who have skimmed off millions of vulnerable people, and we celebrate their lavish lifestyles, golden parachutes and gigantic paychecks.

We need to restore dignity to serving our fellow man.

Secondly, there is a need to develop a resilience within ourselves; an understanding that things worth doing take time and effort. We live in a world where most solutions to the societal issues we face take more than 140 characters to explain, where failures happen more frequently than successes, and the pivotal decisions to change the world for the better are more often made in tears than in punchlines.

I say all this as someone in the middle of a personal journey. As my wife starts her no-pay leave this July, I need to accord her the dignity and respect that I say a homemaker deserves.

As I’ve made up my mind to devote my time to improve the life of citizens through work within the government, I stand often on the verge of pulling my hair out while trying to work through government bureaucracy, and I need to remind myself to dig in because transformative agents are always disruptive agents. It is always easier to look for places “more ready and ripe” for change, but running away wastes valuable time.

I always tell the younger folks that my generation, those born in the 70s and early 80s, lie in between 2 very different generations: the stoic, survivalist mentality of the older, and the younger which might carry the false assumption that life can only go up. The role of our generation is to carry the steely determination of the past and help define and address the challenges of the future.

This, in my opinion, is the real awakening we need.