Ladies & gentlemen,

Good Morning

It is my pleasure to join you this morning for this first ever Organisation Learning Conference in
Singapore.

I was musing as I read the brochures and the invitation letter which I received on 25 Feb 2003 from the Chairman of the Steering Committee for this conference. This was of course, 3 days before SARs entered Singapore on March 1. In that calm before the SARs storm this is what the organisers were planning and hoping for. The theme for this two-day conference is, Leading and Sustaining Organisational Change". The brochure continues, "This conference is designed with the aim of leading you to: reflect on organisational CHALLENGES now and in the future; experience the realities of organisational learning in ACTION; discover some of the BEST PRACTICES in organisational learning; deepen organisation learning CAPACITY; CONNECT & COLLOBORATE with like minded organisations committed to leading and sustaining organisational change.

In any other time, their aims and this conference would have elicited the response typical of yet another conference on the Civil Service training calendar. But because we are in the thick of this SARs crisis, we are indeed astonished at how the organisations which we served and lead could respond as this conference had hoped, how each of us had to change and learn on the run. We marvelled and were elated when we could learn, adapt and overcome. We felt despondent when we to slow to grasp the moment and paid dearly for our inaction. Lives and livelihoods were lost.

Ironically, and certainly not by our design or wishes, SARs has emerged as the keynote speaker for this conference. Though uninivited, this keynote speaker did not come cheap! With a direct impact of 2% of our GDP and an estimated global cost of US$30 billion, we have paid an enormous premium, not counting the ultimate sacrifices of Health care workers like Dr Alex Chao and that of ‘ordinary Singaporeans’. Each death tragic evoking how we wished and what if’s. Every death a masterful and cruel teacher.

What lessons can we draw from Sars the keynote speaker on "leading and sustaining organisational change?" Many of you would have drawn your own take-home points. Let me share my few. First, that events like these do make a difference. It is axiomatic but remains true,: those that do no sweat in peace, bleed in war". Because of this crisis, we have had to devise policies on the run, sometimes executing them as they are formulated. I have had the good fortune to witness strategic brilliance followed by decisive implementation. Some of the talent to make good decisions in times of crisis must be innate but even so, we carried our organisations with us only because we spent time preparing them as we do now with this conference. I therefore commend the organizers for proceeding with the conference when various other events have been cancelled. Organisational Learning is ironically more important now than previously.

The second lesson I draw from it is that a crisis defines and differentiates. It defines our central mission and differentiates others into peripheral issues that impede and distract. It punishes or rewards us in real-time our right or wrong choices and actions. A stark example – a mask wrongly fitted or worn by a health worker quickly translates in disease for that person, his/her family and colleagues. But this crisis will end and the feedback or consequences of policy decisions make take much longer to manifest. When we return to normalcy, how do we maintain this clarity of mission?

In this crisis, staff differentiated themselves. Let me be blunt. This crisis should put an end to the notion that everyone can do a job if properly trained. This crisis showed us that some can and some cannot. As leaders, we cannot avoid and indeed it is a critical role for leaders to make correct judgements and match aptitude to responsibility, and a responsibility that will be tested by crises. It should make us all think carefully who we appoint or delegate authority to. It should also motivate leaders to pay greater attention to staff development, to expose them to appropriate challenges, to stretch them. Capability development is not equal to training. How you assemble your cast determines their potential to perform.

Third, and paradoxically crisis enables. Let me illustrate. Because we have may foreign workers coming to MOM, we had to institute protective measures for our staff to ensure business continuity. So, health declaration and temperature checks were required for every visitor – the lines outside MOM grew. My resourceful PS begged or borrowed a thermal scanner to cut the lines. It helped but we needed to do still more. So we said, let’s relook the processes - whatever can be done by mail, electronic filing, automatic renewals, automatic cancellations etc. to cut down visitorship, do it. But this process had been tried pre-SARs, and moved relatively slowly. The difference now was that the organization for self-preservation was much more responsive and receptive to change. What changed? – the capacity to change. Why did resistance lessen? – because the organization saw the need and understood the consequences of decisions. Why was vision more acute?- because leaders communicated their vision better. Can leaders continue to have both this clear vision and communicate effectively when this crisis is passed? Indeed, why not.

I have seen this capacity to change increase in other ministries too. The two clusters within our health care system and other entities came together as never before against a common enemy. The result? The Singapore SARs Clinical Consortium which provided the urgently needed ability to get a laboratory confirmation of the corona virus infection. It helped turn the tide in this global battle. This group recently sequenced the genetic code of the SARs coronavirus (SARS-CoV) from five local patients and compared these sequences to other SARS virus sequences from labs around the world. They showed that the virus has mutated and for instance that the strains in Guangzhou and Northern China, have developed their own signature. GIS is now developing sensitive diagnostic tests to identify the different SARS virus by virtue of signature sequences. These tests will help clinicians to trace the spread of SARS. This collaborative work between various agencies will help others in their fight against SARs. Recently their work got accepted and published in the leading medical journal, Lancet, adding to our reputation as a research powerhouse

Other ministries have also had to come together to solve problems. The Pasir Panjang Wholesale Market precipitated and galvanise plans that were just only on the drawing board. After all, think of the complex mission requirements which our organisations have never been tasked to do alone. Whose job is it to know the operators and customers? How do you communicate with clarity and compassion, the need and reasons for a Home Quarantine Order to the thousands affected? Where have staff had such training? Despite these uncertainties, it was accomplished because organisations that were involved in it - whether the Singapore Police Force, MOH, MND, or People Association, the Hawker’s Association. – had to transformed their traditional roles to do what was necessary to accomplish the mission. They evolve their core capabilities, manage the complex human relationships, and together met the challenge. This was a good demonstration of organizational learning, which involved reflecting on the lessons and the mistakes, and using these lessons to improve on how we did the work the next day.

Another example. This time on thermal scanners, thermometers and contact gadgets. When the mission and strategy was clearly defined, and artificial barriers across agencies brought down, it allowed real solutions to flourish. In this battle with SARs, we had two weapons – temperature detection and contact tracing. Detecting that someone has fever with SARs allows us to isolate the infected. But this is behind the infection curve because it stops this generation of transmission. But to get ahead of the infection curve and break the next generation of transmission we have to identify the contacts and isolate them before they become infectious. That was the strategy MOH identified. It was the correct strategy but one which the parent organisation was not structured for and therefore did not have the full resources for implementation. The hard-ware resources was to come from DSTA – thermal scanners and contact tracing gadgets. But the software, the human touch and psychological battle needed the resources of NEA, Mindef, PA, grassroots, etc. The shared purpose enabled people across multiple agencies to work together without barriers, as one team.

One can argue with some merit that we can only do this in crisis where lesser objectives are subsumed -when the urgency of the tasks at hand enables us to disregard other aims. This is true and indeed this cannot be the modus operandi as a new equilibrium will have to be set in calmer times. But the important lesson is that we have seen that our organisations do have a great capacity to change and perform. We have seen how some barriers and restrictions are often self imposed and many times self-defeating. How we motivate, mobilise and synergise the capabilities within and across our organisations is the challenge, and it can be done with or without SARs.

When this SARs crisis is over, I would not wish for a similar occurrence. It would be too painful. But if there is one, I know now that we have the ability to overcome. Because, this SARs would have taught us all that we do have the capacity and wherewithal to learn, adapt and change; that all of which you will be discussing and hearing over the next two days is not theoretical. Let me return to the brochure where it speaks of limiting processes which, "are most often from within – the deep-set assumption, beliefs and practices at the personal and organisational levels". Well, SARs has tested those assumptions, beliefs and practices and our organisations have performed credibly, some magnificently. SARs was like the raging bull that helped us realize that our organizations could do the 100m dash in 10 seconds, if the need arose. Would you as leaders be changed by this new perception? It needed clarity of mission and motivation to channel creative energies. But it can be done as we have all witnessed.

Crises that don’t kill you, they make you stronger. Our organisations have become stronger. If as leaders we can harness that energy which we have seen in this crisis to fulfill other important goals and objectives, then the price which we paid to learn these lessons would have been lessened. I wish all those attending this conference every success in this endeavor.

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