The idea for an Agency of the Future was first mooted over tea with Meng Weng last week. I have been concerned with the huge generational gap between our decision makers and idea generators. I am also very jaded by the risk averseness that permeates our bureaucracy and stifles any meaningful innovation in policy formulation, interpretation and execution. Over Singapore’s 40-odd years of independence, our bureaucracy has gone from a small team of bold visionaries with amazing execution abilities that never says die – true entrepreneurs who founded a nation – to a 110,000-odd strong Civil Service that has gotten so used to status quo and top-down leadership that it has deemed fit to leave most of the heavy brain lifting and risk taking to our Cabinet.
Swapping Rags to Riches for a Reduced Appetite for Risk
Yet, our experienced and senior civil servants did not get to where they are today by being completely risk averse. They must have taken risks at various stages in their careers, lending their voices and iron rice bowls to opinions and policies that they believed passionately would work, for the good of our nation and its citizens. But those were different days – those were days when Singapore was poorer, where the man on the street could not bring home as much bacon to put on their home dining table as they can today. Those were tougher periods in Singapore’s history where more people within the establishment were willing to go out on a limb. We had less to lose.
Today, we Singaporeans aren’t faring too poorly. Almost everyone can afford a house, and more – it is not uncommon for middle-class housing agents to live in a HDB and invest in a condominium for rental yield. The poor are decently taken care of by Singapore’s expansive social net policies. And the rich, well, get richer. Beyond our shores, the Singapore Miracle spreads far and wide, to the Land of Black Gold and the Land of Mao. And if things couldn’t get any better, our ruling party continues to garner a vast majority of the population’s support come election time. Draw a decision tree and you’ll quickly realise there’s too much at stake and that it’s too late in the careers of our experienced and senior civil servants’ for them to keep up with their younger and headier days of risk-taking in the name of change and progress.
Of course, if one looks hard enough, exceptions can always be found, although these statistical outliers continue to be heavily personality-driven. Ngiam Tong Dow, Phillip Yeo, and in more recent times, Michael Yap are excellent examples of mavericks – people with unconventional viewpoints who are willing to challenge assumptions – that add much needed vitality and diversity to the service. For a brief moment in history, the Civil Service undergoes mini Golden Ages as bold, innovative policies get formulated and translated into reality. Yet, over time, these mavericks either quit the service, fall out of favour or stumble in the course of their crusade. Risk aversion rules.
Singapore, Utopia?
I quote Sam Wilkin of Countryrisk.com in “Maintaining Singapore’s Miracle” dated 17 Aug ’04:
In a single generation, Singapore has leapt from dire poverty to become one of the richest countries on earth. This month Singapore has a new prime minister – only the third in its history. Can the miracle continue?
Where to, Singapore? Will we go the way of the dodo bird, and be consigned to history books as yet another city state that has risen so dramatically, but ultimately lies fallen? Or will we be able to uncover The One, seeing as to how we citizens of Singapore continually reject a socially engineered and “perfect” Singapore, and reset/revitalize Singapore’s bureaucracy to its prime program?
Architect: Hello Neo.
Neo: Who are you?
Architect: I am the Architect. I created the Matrix. I have been waiting for you. You have many questions and although the process has altered your consciousness you remain irrevocably human, ergo some of my answers you will understand and some of them you will not. Concordantly, while your first question maybe the most pertinent you may or may not realize it is also the most irrelevant.
Neo: Why am I here?
Architect: Your life is the sum of a remainder of an unbalanced equation inherent in the programming of the matrix. You are the eventuality of an anomaly which despite my sincerest efforts I have been unable to eliminate from what is otherwise a harmony of mathematical precision. While it remains a burden deciduously avoided it is not unexpected and thus not beyond a measure of control. Which has led you inexorably here?
Neo: You haven’t answered my question.
Excerpt between Neo and The Architect, The Matrix Reloaded (2003)
An Agent of Change, a Promise for the Future
The Chinese often say, “财富不过三代”. As our political leadership enters its third generation (post-LKY and GCT), left unchecked, our risk-averse bureaucracy can potentially become the proverbial conservatives within an ailing but 4.48-million large patriarchal family business that is preventing visionaries within the family from effecting change quick enough. Top-down leadership would probably still work to push good yet risky ideas through the bureaucracy, but would not be enough to appease the growing needs of a fast-growing intelligentsia hungry for nimble change.
An Agency of the Future (AoF) could be the One; a small flat organisation (never growing beyond 50 people) within the government itself that is beholden to no ministry or statutory but the Cabinet/Prime Minister’s Office itself, tasked with examining the future of Singapore. A skunkworks operating with a start-up culture empowered to take risks in the form of pilot programmes and projects, as an outlet for creative policy formulation and execution. A catchment for the best of ideas generated by patriotic Singaporeans, but quietly canned by an equally patriotic but risk-averse service. An embodiment of the future of Singapore’s bureaucracy, that can really attract and retain our best and brightest. A reset button for an overly-comfortable establishment.
I know the model works – I was part of a 8-strong skunkworks-like agency within the system for almost 2 years, attempting to achieve the impossible. MINDEF has already implemented something akin to the AoF, through its Future Systems Directorate. I believe our leaders should consider extending such a concept into the civil sector in a larger way, via an Agency of the Future. Peter Schwartz calls it the DARPA for Governance. I look forward to hearing your views on this idea.
Update: So it would appear this post sparked off a ‘lil interest, even though it was heavy on rhetoric and vision, and light on implementation. My heartfelt thanks goes to Peter Schwartz, who was also kind enough to send my crazy idea along to “senior people who might act on some of (my) thinking”. I’ll remain hopeful for now, even though the response from a certain ‘senior person’ had seemed somewhat muted.
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{ 11 comments… read them below or add one }
The Public Service tried this to some extent in the PS21 Office and the Scenario Planning Office, mostly from an “innovating public policy and re-engineering the civil service” perspective. They got as far as cutting red tape, but didn’t quite work out beyond that.
I think “monkey wrench” rather than “The One” could be a more personable and less ego-centric metaphor for the AOF. Less empire-building, more “getting things done.”
Agreed
I just liked how the many themes within The Matrix mirrored much of what we’re going through in Singapore. ‘Monkey wrench’ is certainly more apt.
I’m sure this idea isn’t new. What’s new is in the greater degree of deviation from the yoke that I am proposing. Of course, the devil is always in the details.
I had dinner a few years ago with a bunch of bright young IDA technocrats, scholars every last one of them, educated at first-class universities with first-class honours in computer science and economics and management, and they asked me, “we give grants, we sponsor events, we have excellent broadband infrastructure. But where are the technopreneurs? The ones who are young enough to take risks and smart enough to change the world? What more can the government do to encourage our local IT talent to start companies?”
I said, “You guys ARE the talent. But you’re tied up by your government bonds. By the time you get out you’ll have kids and a mortgage and it’ll be too late. What should the government do? They should fire all of you.”
They said, “oh.”
Regarding risk appetite, see http://mengwong.livejournal.com/68858.html
There are plenty of countries that pay for tertiary education.
Singapore pays for tertiary education: NUS is cheap, compared to overseas universities. Singapore will even pay for an overseas university, but there’s a catch: you’re bonded for 4, 6, 8 years.
Not only do young men give up 2 years of their lives for NS, they’re now asked to give up another half a decade to do jobs they don’t want to. Last night I heard a story of a brilliant scholar coming back to Singapore and being assigned to work at one of our four national garbage incineration plants.
The Singapore government keeps telling us that our knowledge-worker citizens are our most precious resource.
If that’s true, then why aren’t we allowing a free market economy in human capital to efficiently allocate that resource? A command economy in human labour is as regressive as anything from the darkest days of the Soviet Union.
In the US there is a principle that you can’t make someone work against their will: employment contracts can only bind you so far.
In Singapore I would like to see banks offer loans to scholars to help them get out of their bond. These loans should be available and open and advertised. If a scholar applies for a job in the private sector and gets an offer letter, she should be able to take that offer letter to a bank and buy herself out.
In fact, I would go even further.
I would try something radical: give free scholarships to the top 15% of our JC students. If they get into a local school, great, no charge. If they get into a foreign school, great, no charge either. Four years, free ride.
What happens after that? Let them go wherever they want.
“Excuse me? That’s my tax dollars you’re spending,” you say. “I want to see them come back and pay back their debt. How? Bond them lor.”
But no. There’s a buried assumption there, and I don’t like it.
The assumption is that Singapore is inferior, that nobody who’s had a nice foreign education would live and work here if they didn’t have to.
Where does this strain of negativity and insecurity come from? It may have been true in 1972 but it’s not true today.
The facts on the ground are: plenty of people who’ve had nice expensive Harvard / Cambridge educations choose to come to live and work in Singapore. We call them “foreigners.” We give them visas. They become PRs and sometimes even citizens.
So let our best students go overseas. Don’t worry about the brain drain. Don’t impose a bond. That’s scarcity thinking, zero-sum thinking. We’re past that.
Heck, if the best students get jobs overseas, that’s a good thing. They’re building networks, gaining experience.
One day they’ll look at the world, ask themselves where they want to live and raise children, and they’ll find Singapore at the top of the list.
Then they’ll return.
It’s critical that AOF focuses on
- small but strategic projects both short & long term in nature
- ideally projects that have very little or no overlap with other ministries or agencies (this is a tall order)
Based on my past experience, the different ministries and agencies have the uncanny behavior of creating turf wars due to their leadership trying to get recognition from the higher ups. These turf wars may result in AOF being stuck fighting with other gov organizations instead of focusing on the executing the projects.
well said meng weng.
Excerpt from longer post:
An Agency of the Future sounds remarkably like the ambition for the present incarnation of the UK’s NESTA, the National Endowment for Science Technology and the Arts, with which I have a long working association (although I comment here entirely in a personal capacity).
NESTA has set itself up as a champion for innovation in every field of UK national life, for example hosting an event last week entitled Reboot Britain. In practical terms, its work translates into three broad areas of work: a think-tank policy division; an investment division and a division that attempts to pioneer new ways of working, particularly in the public sector (with a view to then handing over the new ways that work to agencies who can roll them out nationwide).
The intentions of NESTA are good and it is too early to tell what the long-term impact will be but, as a semi-outsider, I do see several learning points.
The policy and investment divisions seem like poles of a spectrum that runs respectively from Macro- to Micro-economic policy. Each has a relatively clear mandate and modus operandi: producing research papers and conferences, and backing growth businesses respectively. One could argue that these divisions rather duplicate what already exists elsewhere (in the Higher Education, Consulting and Finance sectors respectively) but they seem to do good work.
Running the programs division seems to have proved a much harder challenge, for all sorts of reasons that I have discussed with its staff on numerous occasions, without being able to suggest a magic answer:
* What’s the mandate? Acting with the best of intentions, in the past the division has seemingly bitten off more than it can chew, trying to solve global warming, re-invent the national health service and re-define economic value chains linking established businesses, all at the same time. Picking a small range of achievable priorities would seem to be the answer to that one.
* How do you scale up and roll-out? In a risk-averse public sector, the last thing that a civil servant suppressing the fear that they are running a mediocre department wants is to be shown up by some bright idea or some new-kid-on-the-block organisation. The instinct to protect established empires is very strong and again and again you hear the questions asked: “Who do these people think they are?” and “This idea was not invented here.” In parallel with the bright ideas, there must be an appetite for radical change to push it through against resistance from the old guard. If it survives, NESTA may find itself with just that appetite in an incoming UK government of whatever party, faced with an acute need to cut costs.
* Where’s the exit strategy? It’s one thing to prove a brilliant new way of doing something when you have an endowment, but quite another to create economically sustainable solutions that don’t just represent another drain on the taxpayer. “Starting with the end in mind” and only taking on projects where a realistic exit is planned seems to be emerging as the best way forward.
I am not sure that something like NESTA transplanted whole to Singapore will bear the fruits desired from an Agency of the Future. However, I do see that somewhere that it’s OK to take risks and pioneer pragmatic solutions could be valuable in Singapore. The ‘not invented here’ syndrome would remain but perhaps the small size and interconnectedness of Singapore’s elite could help to overcome that.
The word ’skunkworks’ is maybe a little too malodorous-sounding in a country legendary for its cleanliness, but it could just be what’s needed.
I once heard Anthony Tether (ex director of DARPA) opine that a good project manager in DARPA should have a healthy rate of failure. A 0% failure would suggest that the project manager had been too “safe”. So in an agency like AoF, people need to be mentally prepared that its ROI is going to be probabilistic, if not accidental. Something like insurance? And we might need to compromise efficiency for effectiveness (in the long run).
I think several government agencies are already quite forward thinking in setting up some internal unit to be their “strategic thinkers”, “Devil’s Advocate”, etc. Perhaps the AoF will be a Yoda for all the Jedis out there.
interesting idea but what exact does this AoF do?
if it’s suppose to ‘think’, it will become an all-talk think tank with no real impact. if it’s suppose to review policies and make new-gen recommendations, it will end up being red taped because there is no way to really empower them to begin with, if it’s suppose to support entrepreneurs without the current bureacracy, it will end up either (1) not have the muscle/money to, or (2) get shot by the AGO a year later.
(look at IDM, not that i think it made the best choices but at least they tried)
I say forget policy and governance, people who want to change the world will do it with their two hands regardless of their government. (supportive environment helps, but not neccessary) its abt individuals, one at a time to go out and whack at something until something works. who say we dont have enough of them, i think we got plenty. and who say scholars cant take risk, check out ex scholars @ hungry go where, totally ditched their iron rice bowl and going at it.
The facts on the ground are: plenty of people who’ve had nice expensive Harvard / Cambridge educations choose to come to live and work in Singapore. We call them “foreigners.” We give them visas. They become PRs and sometimes even citizens.
If the bright young locals were offered the same salary and benefits as such ‘foreign talent’, more of them would come back.
The government uses bonded scholarships to tie people down because it’s too cheap to pay local talent what they deserve. (But when it comes to FT, frugality concerns seem to go out of the window.)
At least one stat board even refuses to offer locals who return voluntarily to take up jobs there a moving allowance. As long as you hold a Singapore passport, you will be treated as inferior goods, even if you have the same qualifications as the FT they are so eagerly lapping up.
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