I’ve just finished participating in a medical workshop. One of the key moments in this workshop was when the moderator asked us if anyone had a different opinion of what was discussed. There was an awkward silence, and then she told us, “It’s OK to have a different opinion; you won’t get punished.”
This incident brings back memories of one of the biggest truisms of working in Singapore: gatherings of any sort, particularly if they involve a government organization, are not discussion sessions but an opportunity for the institution or person calling the meeting to speak a lot. Ironically, one of the most prominent instances is the “press conference,” where the person calling the press conference does a lot of talking, and the journalist is inevitably quiet.
PR people in other parts of the world spend their time preparing the client to face a pack of reporters shouting all sorts of questions. In Singapore, our PR people are challenged to effectively get the party started (though to be fair, our journalists get a bit chattier in one-on-one interviews).
This isn’t exactly limited to Singapore. As a rule of thumb, East Asians tend to be slightly reserved in public. If you look at a cross-section of Western Universities, you’ll note that East Asians tend to excel in mathematics and the sciences, where speaking out is not required.
Very few East Asians take up arts or humanities, where group discussion is a must (though having said that, the only one who got a first in my anthropology class in university was the Japanese girl who didn’t say much in seminars but did what she needed to in exams).
Many Westerners tend to understand our reluctance to ask questions and disagree in public due to the concept of “losing face.” I believe there’s some truth to it, but I would go further and point to the culture formed around Confucius’s teachings, which placed the scholar-bureaucrat at the top of society. How did the scholar-bureaucrat get there? He (they usually were) got there by studying and better understanding the perfect past. Challenging and having different opinions is, in many ways, a challenge to the reason for existence itself.
Suppose you look at the way Singapore is constructed. In that case, you’ll notice that Lee Kuan Yew’s genius was to create a Confucius society with characteristics of a Westminster Parliamentary democracy, with himself and his family of scholar-bureaucrats at the top. Sure, we have elections every five years, but our parliament has no equivalent of “PMQs” in the Westminster Parliament on which we’ve modelled our parliament.
As with most things around Singapore, it’s hard to convince people that this isn’t healthy. Everything in Singapore seems to work like clockwork. One is inevitably bound to be told off by Americans and Europeans for not appreciating how good the system is in Singapore.
However, whilst things may look rosy on the outside, cracks are appearing in the system, and as anyone who has had to do repairs will tell you, cracks, if not attended to and patched up, have a way of turning into potholes and worse. If you want to look at things from a medical perspective, “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”
Unfortunately, you’re not going to fix a crack or get the ounce of prevention or cure from people who aren’t going to challenge the opinion that the crack is there if your opinion is that there is no crack. Everyone keeps quiet because it’s only a crack, and it doesn’t affect me, and if I point it out, I will displease the man at the top, who will do his bit to squash me.
I think back to my first guard duty in National Service. There was a sign that said that the Battalion Order Sergeant (BOS) is “Always Right,” and if he (usually) is wrong, refer to rule No. 1.”
This has, unfortunately, extended beyond the realms of the military. Many corporations work on the concept of the man on top being perpetually right. This system works when the man on top is a wonderful leader.
However, when the said leader ages and goes senile and leaves the show to helpless successors, things go wrong. Absolute monarchies fail in most places because, for every wise and wonderful monarch who did great things, ten awful ones screwed up so badly that people took to the streets.
If you look at Singapore, we had Lee Kuan Yew, who was, by most standards, a decent enough ruler. He was strict and got things done. Ministers who didn’t deliver or screwed up were dealt with. More importantly, Mr Lee, in his early days, surrounded himself with people who were willing to have different opinions.
At the funeral of S. Rajaratnam, Mr Lee talked of “furious debates” in the cabinet.
Not all the decisions made were perfect, but at the time, they had debated and argued to the point that everyone felt they were the bestpossible.
However, things changed. Nobody questioned or dared voice a “different” (note, I said different, not dissenting) opinion, so decisions are now made because it’s the right one based on the singular opinion without having gone through any test.
Just look at what happened when Mas Selamat, an alleged psychopathic criminal, walked out of a highly secured facility without breaking a sweat. The cabinet rushed to defend the Minister of Home Affairs for not doing his job.
Sure, when you have a system which does not tolerate a “different” opinion, you will have a system where nobody will point out the cracks because it’s just not worth it. It’s a system where you will agree with whatever the man on top says as long as you keep getting paid well enough because having a different opinion doesn’t make a difference or even endangers being paid well enough. Why bother?
Unfortunately, bosses are inevitably human and make the same errors as the rest of us. Bosses who are willing to accept different opinions can think before they act. Bosses who believe they know it all tend to indulge their mistakes rather than learn from them.
A version of this article first appeared at beautifullyincoherent.blogspot.com