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27-05-2014, 04:40 PM
An honorable member of the Coffee Shop Has Just Posted the Following:
Issues in the Civil Service:
Long Term Planning and Complacency in the Civil Service
17. But the problem is not just about our approach, it is also one of capabilities. As I mentioned earlier, we have spent the last few years trying to solve many problems and correct many wrongs, what we in Singapore commonly refer to as fire-fighting. But why did we even have to do this in the first place? The government in the early days of Singapore was well known for its long term scenario planning. They would plan such that they had considered all potential problems and would ensure that such problems are avoided. And even if these problems do crop up, they would already have thought of viable alternatives, which they could implement immediately. They certainly did not spend years fire-fighting to solve problems. So what happened to all our scenario planners in the government? Why are we fighting fires because of poor planning?
18. I suspect that there has been some amount of complacency that has crept into the system. Whether it is the MCE fiasco, or that of the lack of hospital beds or dealing with the Little India riot, the corruption cases in the many government agencies like The Singapore Civil Defense force, I detect a certain amount of complacency in our government agencies in dealing with these problems and the trend is not healthy and needs to be eradicated fast. If Singaporean loses confi-dence in these key institutions, we will face greater problems in nation building in the future.
19. Take the case of the bed crunch at hospitals earlier this year. With such disequilibrium, why then promote medical tourism for government restructured hospitals? I was shocked to discover last year that all our government restructured hospitals are involved in promoting medical tourism around the region. Shouldn't the services in our government restructured be for Singaporeans and residents first? That is one example of poor planning and complacency that bed demand will never exceed supply.
Policy Making and Implementation
20. The government, aided by a meritocratic system of scholarship, has recruited some of the most academically talented individuals to lead the civil service. Yet in recent years I have heard in-creasing complains from average Singaporeans about a growing disconnect between them and the elite policy makers. In 1967 Dr. Goh Keng Swee in an interview for a Straits Times article entitled “Stop Behaving like Computers, Goh Tells the ‘Egg-Heads’”. He admonished that, “If the intel-ligentsia want to make a contribution to society, they must first understand what kind of society they live in. By society, of course, I do not mean the high society of snobs and socialites, but the people at the grassroot level: how they live, how they work, what they do in their leisure time, what they think of the world, their hopes, their fears and aspirations…because the intelligentsia are puzzled over the nature of the society they live in, such views as they express from time to time relate to abstract principles in vacuo”
21. I am afraid that we may have reached the situation chastised by Dr. Goh, that today’s policy makers live in a different society from the average Singaporean. During my MPS sessions I encounter a fair number of residents who question the rationale of government policies. They feel that the government does not understand their needs and concerns but instead craft policy while seated in, what effectively seems like a different world, an ideal clean and sterile policy lab or an ivory tower perched high up.
22. I urge the government to look at reorganizing the policy making process. To encourage for policy inputs from all segments of society at all stages of the process. I spoke about this a couple of years ago and suggested a more bottoms up process in policy making instead of continuing the current top down process driven mainly by civil servants who have don’t have a good feel of is-sues on the ground.
23. We will need to remove this elitism from the policy-making process, to reverse it to make it more bottom-up and driven by the man in the street. This will change the ways our policies are shaped and changed and I am confident that it will also lead to ministers having to deal with less fire-fighting as the policies were developed from a different and diverse perspective.
Embracing Diversity for talent in Civil Service
24. The top echelons of the civil service and government has been populated by hand-picked scholars who were chosen primarily on their academic achievements. Having the most academically talented Singaporeans in these vaulted positions it does pose certain problems. Many scholars are parachuted into high positions at a young age. They may lack the experience or understand-ing of the ground sentiment to effectively craft and implement policies that affect the majority of the population. We also risk the problem of group think if the decision makers are effectively ‘cut from the same cloth’. Having a bit of diversity even in the policy-making bureau can actually be beneficial, just as it is desired in any other team.
25. Let me share an example from our uniformed services. In the late 80s and 90s, our armed forces and police force focused on promoting many of the returning scholars to very senior positions very fast while those with less academic qualifications did not get similar opportunities to take up higher ranks in the uniformed services. The result over the years was stagnation for many of those with lower academic qualifications and finally retirement as they did not see their career go-ing anyway. This led to a rapid depletion of very good ground commanders replaced with high flying scholars who got the opportunities because of their academic success. I feel this happened for too many such good ground commanders too quickly resulting in loss of experience and the ability to deal with ground issues. The preliminary findings from the Little India riots do seem to indicate that there the lack of experience was as an issue. I hope I am wrong in my assessment of the type of leaders we have in some areas of the civil service because if I am right, we will continue to see many more problems simply because the policy makers don’t understand the ground issues and are far detached from the reality of what is happening and what is needed to improve Singaporeans’ life. We need the best people for the respective jobs not necessarily the best aca-demically qualified for all the jobs. As the largest employer in Singapore, the Public Service should lead the way in talent management.
26. Another example of poor talent management was shared with me by a senior grass roots leader who shared his daughter’s frustration when she tried for 3 years in a row to apply for attachment at our government restructured hospitals when she comes back for her summer holidays. She is in her final year studying medicine in a European university and has told her father she will not want to come back to practice medicine and that she prefers to stay in Europe. I did a check with a few more such Singaporean overseas medical students, most are among our top scorers at their A levels and our own talent and they gave me similar feedback about their unhappiness at the way they have been treated when applying for attachment in Singapore hospitals – many had their applications rejected and for some who got accepted, they were required to pay very high fees coming up to a couple of thousand dollars for a few weeks of attachment, which students studying at NUS don’t have to pay. Similarly, some told me they preferred to not come back to practice as they felt they would be treated as 2nd class citizens if they came back.
27. I would have done it differently – the right thing to do is to keep in touch with all our talented students overseas and have someone constantly communicating with them and guide them to make them feel more wanted and welcome to come back. If we had done things correctly, we would not have the need to hire so many foreign doctors if many of our young doctors who studied overseas had come back to practice medicine. There is a big disconnect in our talent management programme for our hospitals, that seem to favour of foreign talent and less on our home grown talent studying overseas.
28. I urge the government to tackle the issue of complacency in the civil service and bring in a good diverse group of people, not just academically talented, to focus the complex issues of long term planning and better policy implementation. This is an institution that should never lose the trust of all Singaporeans.
http://reflectionsofadisciple.blogsp...nimum-sum.html (http://reflectionsofadisciple.blogspot.sg/2014/05/thinking-about-case-of-cpf-minimum-sum.html#!/2014/05/thinking-about-case-of-cpf-minimum-sum.html)
Click here to view the whole thread at www.sammyboy.com (http://sammyboy.com/showthread.php?182548-Is-quality-of-the-Civil-Service-the-cause-of-all-our-recent-problems&goto=newpost).
Issues in the Civil Service:
Long Term Planning and Complacency in the Civil Service
17. But the problem is not just about our approach, it is also one of capabilities. As I mentioned earlier, we have spent the last few years trying to solve many problems and correct many wrongs, what we in Singapore commonly refer to as fire-fighting. But why did we even have to do this in the first place? The government in the early days of Singapore was well known for its long term scenario planning. They would plan such that they had considered all potential problems and would ensure that such problems are avoided. And even if these problems do crop up, they would already have thought of viable alternatives, which they could implement immediately. They certainly did not spend years fire-fighting to solve problems. So what happened to all our scenario planners in the government? Why are we fighting fires because of poor planning?
18. I suspect that there has been some amount of complacency that has crept into the system. Whether it is the MCE fiasco, or that of the lack of hospital beds or dealing with the Little India riot, the corruption cases in the many government agencies like The Singapore Civil Defense force, I detect a certain amount of complacency in our government agencies in dealing with these problems and the trend is not healthy and needs to be eradicated fast. If Singaporean loses confi-dence in these key institutions, we will face greater problems in nation building in the future.
19. Take the case of the bed crunch at hospitals earlier this year. With such disequilibrium, why then promote medical tourism for government restructured hospitals? I was shocked to discover last year that all our government restructured hospitals are involved in promoting medical tourism around the region. Shouldn't the services in our government restructured be for Singaporeans and residents first? That is one example of poor planning and complacency that bed demand will never exceed supply.
Policy Making and Implementation
20. The government, aided by a meritocratic system of scholarship, has recruited some of the most academically talented individuals to lead the civil service. Yet in recent years I have heard in-creasing complains from average Singaporeans about a growing disconnect between them and the elite policy makers. In 1967 Dr. Goh Keng Swee in an interview for a Straits Times article entitled “Stop Behaving like Computers, Goh Tells the ‘Egg-Heads’”. He admonished that, “If the intel-ligentsia want to make a contribution to society, they must first understand what kind of society they live in. By society, of course, I do not mean the high society of snobs and socialites, but the people at the grassroot level: how they live, how they work, what they do in their leisure time, what they think of the world, their hopes, their fears and aspirations…because the intelligentsia are puzzled over the nature of the society they live in, such views as they express from time to time relate to abstract principles in vacuo”
21. I am afraid that we may have reached the situation chastised by Dr. Goh, that today’s policy makers live in a different society from the average Singaporean. During my MPS sessions I encounter a fair number of residents who question the rationale of government policies. They feel that the government does not understand their needs and concerns but instead craft policy while seated in, what effectively seems like a different world, an ideal clean and sterile policy lab or an ivory tower perched high up.
22. I urge the government to look at reorganizing the policy making process. To encourage for policy inputs from all segments of society at all stages of the process. I spoke about this a couple of years ago and suggested a more bottoms up process in policy making instead of continuing the current top down process driven mainly by civil servants who have don’t have a good feel of is-sues on the ground.
23. We will need to remove this elitism from the policy-making process, to reverse it to make it more bottom-up and driven by the man in the street. This will change the ways our policies are shaped and changed and I am confident that it will also lead to ministers having to deal with less fire-fighting as the policies were developed from a different and diverse perspective.
Embracing Diversity for talent in Civil Service
24. The top echelons of the civil service and government has been populated by hand-picked scholars who were chosen primarily on their academic achievements. Having the most academically talented Singaporeans in these vaulted positions it does pose certain problems. Many scholars are parachuted into high positions at a young age. They may lack the experience or understand-ing of the ground sentiment to effectively craft and implement policies that affect the majority of the population. We also risk the problem of group think if the decision makers are effectively ‘cut from the same cloth’. Having a bit of diversity even in the policy-making bureau can actually be beneficial, just as it is desired in any other team.
25. Let me share an example from our uniformed services. In the late 80s and 90s, our armed forces and police force focused on promoting many of the returning scholars to very senior positions very fast while those with less academic qualifications did not get similar opportunities to take up higher ranks in the uniformed services. The result over the years was stagnation for many of those with lower academic qualifications and finally retirement as they did not see their career go-ing anyway. This led to a rapid depletion of very good ground commanders replaced with high flying scholars who got the opportunities because of their academic success. I feel this happened for too many such good ground commanders too quickly resulting in loss of experience and the ability to deal with ground issues. The preliminary findings from the Little India riots do seem to indicate that there the lack of experience was as an issue. I hope I am wrong in my assessment of the type of leaders we have in some areas of the civil service because if I am right, we will continue to see many more problems simply because the policy makers don’t understand the ground issues and are far detached from the reality of what is happening and what is needed to improve Singaporeans’ life. We need the best people for the respective jobs not necessarily the best aca-demically qualified for all the jobs. As the largest employer in Singapore, the Public Service should lead the way in talent management.
26. Another example of poor talent management was shared with me by a senior grass roots leader who shared his daughter’s frustration when she tried for 3 years in a row to apply for attachment at our government restructured hospitals when she comes back for her summer holidays. She is in her final year studying medicine in a European university and has told her father she will not want to come back to practice medicine and that she prefers to stay in Europe. I did a check with a few more such Singaporean overseas medical students, most are among our top scorers at their A levels and our own talent and they gave me similar feedback about their unhappiness at the way they have been treated when applying for attachment in Singapore hospitals – many had their applications rejected and for some who got accepted, they were required to pay very high fees coming up to a couple of thousand dollars for a few weeks of attachment, which students studying at NUS don’t have to pay. Similarly, some told me they preferred to not come back to practice as they felt they would be treated as 2nd class citizens if they came back.
27. I would have done it differently – the right thing to do is to keep in touch with all our talented students overseas and have someone constantly communicating with them and guide them to make them feel more wanted and welcome to come back. If we had done things correctly, we would not have the need to hire so many foreign doctors if many of our young doctors who studied overseas had come back to practice medicine. There is a big disconnect in our talent management programme for our hospitals, that seem to favour of foreign talent and less on our home grown talent studying overseas.
28. I urge the government to tackle the issue of complacency in the civil service and bring in a good diverse group of people, not just academically talented, to focus the complex issues of long term planning and better policy implementation. This is an institution that should never lose the trust of all Singaporeans.
http://reflectionsofadisciple.blogsp...nimum-sum.html (http://reflectionsofadisciple.blogspot.sg/2014/05/thinking-about-case-of-cpf-minimum-sum.html#!/2014/05/thinking-about-case-of-cpf-minimum-sum.html)
Click here to view the whole thread at www.sammyboy.com (http://sammyboy.com/showthread.php?182548-Is-quality-of-the-Civil-Service-the-cause-of-all-our-recent-problems&goto=newpost).