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May 17, 2008
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PUBLIC SERVICE WEEK Print Edition 'We disagree with ministers on
Prime News many things...'
What black swans teach civil servants Singapore Your Insights
Asia
This week marks the inaugural Public Service Week, during which the service's 110,000 Money
officers will take a pledge to serve Singaporeans. LI XUEYING talks to civil service chief World
Peter Ho about what today's civil service requires. Review
CIVIL service head Peter Ho expects to Insight
see more birds in Singapore's future. Sports
Black swans, to be exact. ST Forum
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Black swans are his metaphor for rare, F.Y.I
extreme and hard-to-predict events that Podcast
may come out of nowhere to throw Video
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'One of the higher purposes of being a
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unthinkable, to plan for the unexpected,'
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Mr Ho says in an interview with Insight.
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The Black Swan happens to be the title Mind Your Body

of a bestseller written by a Lebanese Digital Life
American derivatives Urban
trader-turned-university scholar, Nassim Nicholas Taleb. News In Pictures
Photo Essays
Having made his fortune with the right bets when the stock market crashed in October 1987, Mr Taleb
decided to devote his subsequent years to studying 'the impact of the highly improbable'- the subtitle Increase font
of his book.

People used to assume all swans were white - until black swans were discovered in Australia in the
17th century.

'One single observation can invalidate a general statement derived from millennia of confirmatory
sightings of millions of white swans. All you need is one single...black bird,' says Mr Taleb.

In today's world, the unexpected will be on the increase, says Mr Ho. 'We are entering a period of
great change because the established order is being replaced by a new order, and I mean this in both
a political sense and economic sense.'

He explains why.

The bipolar world of the Cold War has been replaced by a multi-polar one, with countries aligned
according to issues and interests. 'It's a much more complex situation...it's sometimes very difficult to
predict the outcomes on any given issue.'

He gives an example of how one event can lead to unexpected knock-on effects in different quarters:
The rise of China and India.

In one direction, it leads to higher demand for energy, and rising energy prices.

In another direction, it results in more carbon emissions and thus climate change, affecting food
production and, therefore, food prices.

In a third direction, it leads to unexpected diseases as the equatorial belt moves north.

'We can expect more surprises simply because we do not understand how, in this interconnected and
globalised world, things really connect to each other,' he concludes.

Dynamic governance

PEERING into the future occupies a large part of Mr Ho's time. Indeed, the civil service in Singapore
seems to have made keeping ahead of surprises its mission in life, oxymoronic as that may sound.

Still, black swans or not, the definition of good governance is fundamentally unchanged, asserts Mr
Ho. This is still about 'delivering the goods to the people in a timely manner, at a cost that the country
can afford'.

The process, however, has become more challenging.

One critical skill today is the ability to innovate. 'I don't mean just incremental innovations. I mean
things that can change the rules of the game and can transform. The organisation that can discern a
pattern and identify an opportunity first will have the first-mover advantage,' he says.

Singapore did it in the past. In the 1950s and 1960s, at a time when others decried foreign
investments as a form of imperialism, it decided to woo multinationals here.

Today, says Mr Ho, the building of integrated resorts is another example.

He concedes that Singapore does not have first-mover advantage in this, but notes that it has
'energised' the country and transformed how investors look at Singapore now.

'We changed a long-held view about certain things...I think it got investors to look again at Singapore
and say, hey, something is happening here.

'So when you combine it with other things like F1 and all that, the aggregated effect is quite
transformational.'

So it is important that all civil servants are empowered to 'offer ideas and innovate', he says.

The PS21 movement started in the mid-1990s is one such avenue: under this, officers can offer ideas
and inventions to improve the service.

While these may be 'incremental innovations', they help create a mindset that will be more receptive

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What black swans teach civil servants http://www.straitstimes.com/Insight/Story/STIStory_238192.html

when 'big changes' come, explains Mr Ho.

A second skill set is the ability to manage risks and complexities. As part of this, the Risk Assessment
and Horizon Scanning Experimentation Centre was launched last year.

Run by the Defence Science and Technology Agency, it utilises technology to sieve through masses of
data for signs of danger - not only in traditional security areas like terrorism but also in other areas
like climate change and financial market instabilities.

The system 'spotted' the current food problem, but because it is still in 'a very experimental mode', did
not connect all the dots together, says Mr Ho.

More resources will be poured into the centre, he promises.

The global nature of many problems also means that individual agencies will no longer be able to look
at them in isolation, thus necessitating what is called the 'networked government' approach - a third
skill set.

An example of this was during Singapore's recent bid to host the inaugural Youth Olympic Games in
2010.

The International Olympic Committee had doubts about whether the Athletes' Village in Singapore
could be constructed in time. To assuage its concerns, the 11 government regulatory agencies
involved - ranging from the National Parks Board to the Manpower Ministry - banded together to get
the task done.

Coordinating them is the Building and Construction Authority (BCA), which will ensure that the
technical requirements of all the other agencies are complied with. For instance, if project consultants
have problems involving multiple agencies, the BCA will step in to coordinate meetings.

'The 'networked government' approach was essential to our bid effort,' says Dr Francis Chong, a
director at the Ministry of Community Development, Youth and Sports. He chairs the multi- agency
secretariat.

To be sure, such a team approach does not come naturally to agencies used to their own narrower
turf. There had to be what Mr Ho terms a 'culture change', a willingness for horizontal, cross-agency
exchange of information.

'I think it's beginning to happen. We're getting our permanent secretaries to sit down together more,
and share and talk about cross-agency strategic problems,' he says.

Close observers of the public service note other ways that it has evolved over the past four decades.

For instance, it has become more decentralised, observes public policy academic Neo Boon Siong,
co-author of Dynamic Governance which was published last year.

Personnel hiring has been freed up, so statutory boards have their own pay scales. 'This is an attempt
to get the talent needed, and be more responsive to the market,' he says.

Today's civil servants are also better educated, more cosmopolitan, and more self-assured, notes Mr
Ho. 'This gives me the confidence that this generation has what it takes to confront the many and
complex challenges ahead.'

The shifting profile of Singaporeans also means that the way the service interacts with the public has
changed, notes Mr Tan Yew Soon, 54.

Twenty-five years ago, he was a rookie at the publications department in the then-ministry of culture.
Today, he is director of information policy in the Ministry of Information, Communications and the Arts.

'In communicating policy, we have to be more explanatory and more persuasive,' he says.

Questions that remain

FOR all the recognition of the issues at stake and the steps that must be taken, some questions
remain.

First, is there a disconnect between the head and the body?

While top civil servants espouse principles such as innovation, creativity and culture change, does the
message filter all the way down? Are rank-and-file officers truly empowered?

'Sometimes, yes,' concedes Mr Ho, when asked if such a disconnect may exist.

'When you've some big idea, there's a limit to how far you can go round explaining. So you leave it to
the individual permanent secretary to explain to his people why they do it.'

One solution is to introduce key ideas into courses run by the Civil Service College. Another is to
increase communication. 'Communication is a very important part of culture change and persuading
people that this is the way to go,' says Mr Ho.

More can be done, says Mr G. Jayakrishnan, 36, an assistant director at IE Singapore. 'We need to
work on empowering officers of all ranks. This is already happening, but we have to do more -
empowering them to mobilise the resources and sometimes let them run the show without interfering
too much.'

Second, is the service changing fast enough? As a public entity utilising public funds and under public
scrutiny, it has an inherent conservatism that is unlikely to go away.

Says Prof Neo: 'I think they would like to move faster and I think they have to move faster, just to
keep up with how the world is changing.'

But the faster one moves, the higher the chances of mistakes, given that it is a big organisation of
110,000, including some 500 in Singapore's overseas missions.

Sometimes, it's about timing, says Prof Neo. He notes, for instance, the Government's 2000 decision
to restructure the public hospitals into two clusters in order to introduce competition. 'But costs went
up, and people felt that it was unfair,' he says. 'Now the Government is relooking the idea of
competition in the health sector.'

The service can move fast when it needs to - as in 2003 when there was the 'clear and present danger'
of Sars.

Says Mr Ho: 'When there are priorities like Formula One and the Youth Olympics, the service will move
mountains to make available the resources to ensure their successful implementation. But clearly, we
cannot do this for everything.'

Therein lies the biggest challenge: In a world expected to show more black swans, will we know when
the biggest and blackest of them all is round the corner?

xueying@sph.com.sg

'We are entering a period of great change because the established order is being replaced
by a new order, and I mean this in both a political sense and economic sense.'

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What black swans teach civil servants http://www.straitstimes.com/Insight/Story/STIStory_238192.html

CIVIL SERVICE HEAD PETER HO, who said the unexpected will be on the increase in today's world

SMS, e-mail us your views

WHAT 'black swans' do you think Singapore will have to grapple with, looking ahead? How should the
civil service evolve to meet these challenges? E-mail stpol@sph.com.sg or send an SMS to
9827-7514. For SMS messages, type stpol followed by a space and then your views.

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