The Challenges of Governance in a Complex World

Peter Ho

• Publisher: WSPC
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9789813231849
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Public Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

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Peter Ho, former Head of the Singapore Civil Service, was the Institute of Policy Studies' 2016/17 S R Nathan Fellow for the Study of Singapore.

This book collects the four IPS-Nathan Lectures that he delivered between April and May 2017, and gathers highlights of his dialogues with the audience.

Ho surveys the increasingly complex world, and suggests what governments can do to prepare for the future — even as no one can predict it. He uses metaphors such as the "black elephant" and concepts like the "dialectic of governance" to explain how a systematic approach to thinking about the future can help countries in general — and Singapore in particular — build resilience and develop a comparative advantage in the face of uncertainty and rapid change.

The IPS-Nathan Lectures series was launched in 2014 as part of the S R Nathan Fellowship for the Study of Singapore. Its primary goal is to promote public understanding and discourse of issues of critical national interest.

--> Contents:

• Foreword
• Lecture I — Hunting Black Swans & Taming Black Elephants: Governance in a Complex World + Q&A
• Lecture II — Governing in the Anthropocene: Risk & Resilience, Imagination & Innovation + Q&A
• Lecture III — The Paradox of Singapore and the Dialectic of Governance + Q&A
• Lecture IV — The Future: Governance, Unintended Consequences, and the Redemption of Hope + Q&A

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--> Readership: General public, professionals, students, researchers, diplomats, and foreign visitors interested in knowing more about Singapore and what lies ahead for the city-state. -->
Keywords:Complexity;Governance;Government;Singapore;Singapore Civil Service;Technology;Risk;Resilience;Dialectic;Future;Futures Thinking;Innovation;Imagination;Scenario Planning;Anthropocene;Paradox;HopeReview: Key Features:

• Mr Peter Ho's ideas on governance and complexity are broad ranging and deep. However, it was mostly civil servants who had been able to hear him share his views prior to this lecture series
• Accessible academia The content is targeted at youth and the general public, and thus unlocks the knowledge of academia to be accessed by the public

Lecture II

GOVERNING IN THE ANTHROPOCENE: RISK & RESILIENCE, IMAGINATION & INNOVATION

LECTURE II

Introduction

This series of lectures touch on the challenges of governance in an era of growing complexity. But during Singapore’s early years, our founding fathers were seized with multiple critical and urgent problems of the day. They grappled with poor living conditions, political and economic uncertainty, and racial and religious tensions. For instance, Tuan Haji Othman Wok was instrumental in pushing for multi-racial and religious harmony in Singapore.¹

If he, and the rest of our founding fathers had not carried out their task as well as they did, we would not be here today — a peaceful and prosperous nation, invested with the privilege of thinking about and preparing for the future.

Welcome to the Anthropocene

We live in the Anthropocene. Preceding epochs, like the Holocene and the Pleistocene, more commonly called the Ice Age, were all periods in the Earth’s long geological history that date back four and a half billion years.

Humans have only existed in the last 200,000 years or so, from sometime in the late Pleistocene. This is just a blink of an eye in geological terms.

A view that is gaining currency in the scientific world is that human activity has begun to have a significant impact on the geology and the eco-systems of our earth. This is now often referred to as the Anthropocene, and many date its origin to the Industrial Revolution.

But what does the Anthropocene have to do with governance?

The Great Acceleration

In the Anthropocene, human activity is the prime driver of change in the earth’s eco-system. What is most striking is that since the 1950s, after the end of the Second World War, change caused by human activity actually started to accelerate. This phenomenon is sometimes called the Great Acceleration.² Changes are now taking place at a pace and on a global scale that is unprecedented in history. The evidence is made visible in a spectrum of global indicators, including greenhouse gas levels, ocean acidification, deforestation, and loss of biodiversity.

It is not difficult to understand why. Today, increasing urbanisation is driving up consumer demand. Globalisation has taken off because of airline travel, container shipping, telecommunications and the Internet. Tourism is booming, and even the number of McDonald’s restaurants increasing. As a result, the global economy is expanding, and the demand for infrastructure is growing. These combine to create a spiralling demand for resources — food, water and energy — that is straining the earth’s ecosystem. Climate change is one major consequence, but it is only one of many dangers that lie ahead as the Great Acceleration continues unabated.

Technology is a major factor in propelling the Great Acceleration. Moore’s Law says that computing power doubles every two years. It is still holding more than 50 years after Gordon Moore, the co-founder of Intel, made the observation. But it is not just computing power that is growing at an exponential rate. In his latest book Thank You for Being Late, Tom Friedman presents evidence that other technologies are also changing at a similar breath-taking rate, and he writes of “simultaneous accelerations in technology, globalisation, and climate change, all interacting with one another.”³

The Fourth Industrial Revolution

If the Anthropocene started with the Industrial Revolution, Klaus Schwab, the founder of the World Economic Forum, argues that there have actually been three industrial revolutions since the 18^th century, and a fourth is upon us. He explains thus:

The First Industrial Revolution used water and steam power to mechanise production. The Second used electric power to create mass production. The Third used electronics and information technology to automate production. Now a Fourth Industrial Revolution is building on the Third, the digital revolution that has been occurring since the middle of the last century. It is characterised by a fusion of technologies that is blurring the lines between the physical, digital, and biological spheres.⁴

But he goes further to argue that the Fourth Industrial Revolution has no historical precedent because:

When compared with previous industrial revolutions, the Fourth is evolving at an exponential rather than a linear pace. Moreover, it is disrupting almost every industry in every country. And the breadth and depth of these changes herald the transformation of entire systems of production, management, and governance.⁵

Singapore and the Great Acceleration

Singapore has experienced its own version of the Great Acceleration. In less than half a century, we moved out of the Third World and entered the First World. Furthermore, by most indicators, we are now in the top rank of the First World. Life expectancy has shot up, from 65 years when we gained independence after Separation, to around 83 years today, an astonishing achievement given that it happened within less than two generations. No other country has achieved so much in so short a time.

But an implication of this remarkable transformation is that change in Singapore has not occurred at a sedate pace. Unlike most countries that have tracked a more gradual path to the top, change in Singapore during this period has the lurch of an acceleration, rather than the gentle sensation of a velocity.

Within less than two generations, societal demands have moved from the basic needs at the bottom of Maslow’s hierarchy — such as food, shelter, water and security — towards the more complex psychic needs at the top of the hierarchy, such as self-esteem, self-actualisation and transcendence, which are needs that governments find very difficult to service.

One could argue that this is a happy problem to be tackling, instead of dealing with a hardscrabble existence as a Third World country. But acceleration gives little time for government and society to adapt. Decision cycles are compressed within shorter and shorter time frames. But it is a treadmill from which we cannot get off, unless we are prepared to give up the quality and way of life that we enjoy today.

Consequences of the Anthropocene for Governance

Among other things, the Great Acceleration increases the complexity of our world, a challenge that I discussed in my first lecture two weeks ago. As a result, the Anthropocene today is characterised by growing Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity — or VUCA, leading to an increase in the frequency of black swans and unknown unknowns. In other words, we will face bigger shocks, more often, but with less time to discern causes and respond.

With increasing VUCA, governments face two particular challenges:

•The first challenge is how to deal with inevitable disruptions that are the effect of rapid change. New technologies can disrupt, massively. Such disruptions could be black swans, but mostly, and luckily, they are not. Instead they are disturbances to the normal flow of life — a terror attack, a cyber-hack, a new virus, a flood, civil unrest, economic turbulence, and so on. They have a disruptive effect because we live in a highly interconnected and complex world. As the Great Acceleration causes interconnections to intensify, the frequency of disruptions will increase and the amplitude of their impact will grow.

•The second challenge is how to manage risk, which is the effect of uncertainty, and in particular, how to manage its impact on national aims and objectives, plans and policies.

I will now deal with each of these challenges, and how governments respond.

Disruption Is a Certainty

If disruption is a constant in our VUCA world, then it behoves us to spend time thinking about how individuals, organisations, societies and countries can respond. The pre-emption and prevention of disruption, despite our best efforts, cannot be guaranteed. The name of the game is not imperviousness to disruption, but recovering, and even growing, after being disrupted. This is resilience.

Resilience

Judith Rodin, the President of the Rockefeller Foundation and who launched the 100 Resilient Cities⁶ initiative of which Singapore is a part, provides a good definition of resilience. She writes:

Resilience is the capacity of any entity — an individual, a community, an organisation, or a natural system — to prepare for disruptions, to recover from shocks and stresses, and then to adapt and grow from a disruptive experience.⁷

The SARS Case Study

On 25 February 2003, the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) virus entered Singapore through three women who had returned from Hong Kong with symptoms of atypical pneumonia. The virus then spread with frightening speed through the hospital system in Singapore. It confounded our medical authorities in the beginning. They did not know how the virus spread, and why it spread so aggressively. The fatality rate was shocking. By the time the SARS crisis was declared over in Singapore, 33 people had died out of the 238 infected.

SARS was not just a disruption — it was a big black swan for Singapore. It was also a very frightening time for Singaporeans. Then Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong described it as a “crisis of fear”.⁸ Overnight, visitor arrivals plunged and the entire tourism industry came to a grinding halt. SARS severely disrupted the Singapore economy, leading to a contraction during the second quarter of that year.

A Resilient Response to SARS

When the normal flow of life is disrupted, as was the case during the SARS crisis in Singapore, societies need resilience to cope. Singapore’s response to SARS is well documented. One of the most critical early decisions was to designate SARS a national crisis, and not just a public health problem. This meant that all the resources of government — and in fact of the nation — could be harnessed in a Whole-of-Nation approach to tackle the wicked problem of SARS. The Singapore Armed Forces (SAF) put an entire Army division at the disposal of the health authorities. The Singapore Police Force did likewise. Within weeks, MINDEF’s Defence Science & Technology Agency (DSTA) and DSO National Laboratories developed a contact tracing system, as well as the infrared fever screening system now adopted around the world. Such innovations epitomise resilience during a crisis.

Efficiency vs Resilience

But this could not have been achieved if the government had been organised with an obsessive focus on efficiency and optimisation. These are well and good if everything goes according to plan. But things rarely go as planned. Most times, we cannot predict when disruptions will occur. The ability to quickly and decisively respond to crises and disruptions helps to manage uncertainty arising from our VUCA world.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, who first coined the term “black swan” as a metaphor for strategic shock, notes that when disruptions occur in overly optimised systems, “errors compound, multiply, swell, with an effect that only goes in one direction — the wrong direction.”⁹

But, as Taleb notes, “Redundancy is ambiguous because it seems like a waste if nothing unusual happens. Except that something unusual happens — usually.”¹⁰

So, to deal with disruptions, governments must go beyond a rigid and unthinking emphasis on efficiency. Lean systems that focus exclusively on efficiency are unlikely to have sufficient resources to deal with unexpected shocks and volatility. There should be some fat or contingency capacity in the system.

Futures Thinking

This is not an argument for establishing bloated and sluggish bureaucracies. Indeed, it is worth recalling that in 1966, Lee Kuan Yew said that, “Societies like ours have no fat to spare. They are either lean and healthy or they die.”¹¹ That maxim rightly articulated and reinforced the scarcity-vulnerability narrative, which was appropriate for a time when Singapore was hardly in a position to be profligate in its spending. It reinforced the need to be prudent in the use of our resources, and to save what we could for a rainy day.

But one thing that governments ought to have — as indeed should any large organisation that is concerned with its survival over the long term — is a small but dedicated group of people to think about the future. Their job is to look for challenges and opportunities emerging over the horizon. This is why I spent a good portion of my first lecture on the importance of this capacity. In Singapore, the government set up its own think tank for foresight, the Centre for Strategic Futures.¹²

The skill-sets for thinking about the future, which is inherently uncertain and unpredictable, are quite different from those required to deal with short-term volatility and crisis. Also, those charged with thinking about the future should be allocated the bandwidth to focus on the long term, without getting bogged down in the minutiae of day-to-day routine.

Of course, one could argue that it is the business of all government agencies — and the government as a whole — to prepare for the future. But even if they try to do that, it is not always easy for the planner or policy-maker to challenge the official future, especially when that future is consistent with an organisation’s biases and preconceptions. Those who articulate a radically different future are at danger of being branded as subversive or lacking a sense of reality. So they will have a real incentive to make their scenarios more palatable for their audiences. But in so doing, they also inadvertently reduce the impetus for the organisation to confront uncomfortable alternative futures and to prepare itself for them. That is why Peter Schwartz, one of the most important of Shell’s scenario planners, once said those whose job is to think about the future should also be court jesters — who can say the most ridiculous things and get away with it. They are supposed to help us suspend our beliefs, and maybe our disbeliefs.

Of course, this will not eliminate shocks. But by improving the ability to anticipate such shocks, we can reduce their frequency and impact. In turn, this will help make governments and nations more resilient.

Maintaining Reserves

Another part of the answer is the availability of reserves — if not reserves in natural resource, then other kinds of national reserves built from prudent policies and forward planning, or saving for the proverbial rainy day.

The SAF and its supporting organisations like DSTA and DSO are part of the reserves of the nation in the sense that they are an insurance policy, and a large one at that, for a contingency that will hopefully never occur. But without that fat in the system, it is doubtful that Singapore would have been able to respond to the SARS crisis as it did in 2003.

Singapore’s government is also committed to building ample financial reserves from the savings and surpluses of the government budget, giving the country a buffer to draw on in times of crisis. This is a reason why Singapore has one of the largest reserves in the world, at least on a per capita basis.

The utility of the nationa...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• The S R Nathan Fellowship for the Study of Singapore
• Contents
• Foreword
• About the Moderators
• Lecture I Hunting Black Swans and Taming Black Elephants: Governance in a Complex World
• Lecture II Governing in the Anthropocene: Risk & Resilience, Imagination & Innovation
• Lecture III The Paradox of Singapore and the Dialectic of Governance
• Lecture IV The Future: Governance, Unintended Consequences and the Redemption of Hope
• Bibliography