Now


*My work station setup with my [Moonlander keyboard](https://www.zsa.io/moonlander/), which is an absolute lifesaver for my hands and posture during this work-frome-home period. Also my ergonomic mouse and emotionally needy cat. 😉*

Work

I’m (still) an Assistant Vice President in the Customer Experience (CX) division, Singapore Economic Development Board (“EDB”): that is the internal design team within EDB. I serve as a service design lead.

Some of the projects we are working on currently:

• an economic strategy initiative. We are currently embarking on the internal outreach, through a series of brown bags. I can’t say much, but it might be interesting to talk about how we are addressing this in terms of facilitation & convening techniques: we are attempting to inject the use of Open Space/Unconference facilitation, together with a more in-depth [Lean Launchpad-like]() approach. The tricky part we are grappling with is how do we involve our colleagues overseas in both processes?

  • Right now, my thinking is that we should experiment with using Miro to create “digital twins” of the discussion flipcharts, and to also use our internal Microsoft Teams channels. This might involve creating a physical space for the Unconference participants to meet, which we then connect to the digital realm via a laptop logged into Teams, and also publishing an open schedule for different teams to use the space for discussions.
  • I won’t deny there are quite a few questions and concerns raised about bandwidth: heck, I am concerned about my own bandwidth! But I also think the questions being asked are super interesting and worth exploring. I’m also super excited to drive the Lean Launchpad process more like the CIID industry projects I worked on. 🙂

• an internal review of a division group. Again, can’t say much: most of this is led primarily by my colleagues YJ and WY, and I play a supporting role.

• supporting two other colleagues YJ & YN on a service design project to better support the remote onboarding of new joiners. This is a tool that they are working on, and we have already finished the bulk of the work and research: what’s left is a couple more follow-up presentations and workshops, in order to generate the grounds-up content needed for the tool to work.
  I’m super grateful to my colleagues for their support, otherwise I would have to do the work… 😉

In the supporting role, I primarily provide feedback, drawing on my understanding of interaction/service design and the organisational context. But can I just say that it still sucks up brain juice and time!! People are people, not fire-and-forget missiles: they need care, attention. Ultimately as a manager you do need to care. And care does take time and energy. Good management is a craft of care and love, because people are like plants: they need to be nurtured and given the right conditions. Just as you can’t take a seed, put it on an Ikea table without soil, light or water and expect it to miraculously grow, you can’t expect people to “just do it” and get stuff done if there are no supporting conditions from you the boss. Many managers forget that, especially when pressed with deadlines.

I also work as a digital product manager for EDB’s Connections Concierge, a listing of Singapore service providers to potential investors of Singapore, and our website.

• This work has been a bit crazy, since I took it on. Again, can’t share details, but on last count there were around 4-5 ongoing projects. Thankfully we have our vendors’ strong support, otherwise I think it would be insane! I am also super thankful for my colleagues’ support, IN and ML.

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Side Projects (28 Aug 21)

In addition to all the work up there, I’ve also been working on a few volunteering efforts.

1. I’ve been working on the Mental Wellbeing at the workplace initiative with Common Ground and Studio Dojo. The team I’m in is pretty awesome (we call ourselves Team Crazy, and our meetings & Whatsapp messages are filled with a lot of jokes, a lot of anime, and a lot a lot of memes). We have been working super seamlessly together, especially in the last few weeks after we had gotten past the initial adjustments. We completed a survey which got 400 responses (out of a company that has ~800-1000 pax), analysed the data & identified 16 interviewees, did 10 interviews in a week (!), and also just finished two days of workshops as part of the project midpoint check-in. Re the workshops, it was super lovely hearing the other project teams, and also listening to fellow CIID-graduate Yee Mun’s sharing on rapid service prototyping (which was super well received!)
2. I’m mentoring via Advisory, helping to guide R, a young lady studying programming and design, and who has her clear points of view (so rare, absolutely wonderful!)
3. I’m also serving as a mentor to three other people, via the Singapore Buddhist Mission/Buddhist Youth Network. This mentoring effort is more focused on the Dhamma/Dharma and its practice.

Speaking of the Dhamma/Dharma, I recently published a Medium post about my transformational meditation experience in 2010, which you can read here. I also gave a talk in the Buddhist Fellowship on how I practice as a lay person, which should be published on their YouTube soon.

I’m still learning coding. I initially tried to finish Angela Yu’s Web development bootcamp, but stalled at the EJS part of the course. I am also very bothered mentally by the untidiness of Javascript. I have come to appreciate its power, but also find it super arbitrary: just see this meme So it feels unsafe, a bit like a very powerful gun that can just go off anytime, and you don’t know why!

I had been eyeing Clojure for quite a while, so decided to take the plunge and pick up the language. I’m splurging quite a lot of money on this: I’ve paid for Eric Normand’s courses, and also bought a ton of books (Clojure for the Brave and True, Living Clojure, The Clojure Workshop which is a new and less well-known gem, Web Development with Clojure, just to name a few …).
There were definitely many moments of “OMG WHY AM I DOING THIS??” e.g. when I couldn’t get the Chlorine package to run a REPL on my Atom editor due to all the key-mapping conflicts.

But the Clojure community is really quite awesome: they are super welcoming (like when I posted a question on the Clojurians Slack about which editor to use, I got a ton of very helpful responses & recommendations in a day: my main takeaway was “don’t learn Emacs and Clojure at the same time; just use your current editor and figure out how to connect a REPL“) Tbh I still feel way out of depth, since I am a complete Clojurenoob. But just doing some of the exercises already hints at the tremendous power of the language, which is pretty awesome.

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Mulling Over (28 Aug 21)

I wonder if I’m doing too much. Just writing everything above makes me feel tired… At the same time, some of the side projects really are energizing. Maybe I should just find ways to drop work. :p

I have also been thinking a lot about market structures in the last few days, thanks to the book Working in Public: see below.

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Other Stuff

Reading


There are three books which I immediately started re-reading after I finished reading the first time: this book is one of them. (the other two books are [Black Swan](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Swan:_The_Impact_of_the_Highly_Improbable) and [Antifragile](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antifragile_(book))). Imo, this is one of those books that truly opens one’s eyes in seeing differently: I had previously thought of open source software (OSS) as this large community, but it seems that the **power-law distribution strongly applies**. The other big learning from the book is **being open & transparent does not mean the same as participation**: most “contributors” contribute once and never appear again (though they would often tout their open-source credentials). The author also draws a lot of parallels between the dynamics within OSS and the rest of the creator economy. Super worth reading imo.

Kant: A Very Short Introduction
Critique of Pure Reason
I Kant help myself with bad puns, but also I have been picking up these books occasionally over the years. I put them down when they don’t make sense to me (which is most of the time), but frequently when I am awake and not too tired (like this morning), then I pick them up again.

Meditating
30+ mins a day.

Working out
Back to Starting Strength Linear Progression, after taking a few months off with GMB. Progress is not very good, as work has affected sleep.

Updated as of 28 Aug 21