It’s OK to have a Different Opinion – You Won’t Get Punished

 

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I’ve just finished participating in a medical workshop and one of the key moments in this workshop was when the moderator asked us if anyone had a different opinion to what was discussed. There was an awkward silence and then she told us, “It’s OK to have a different opinion, you won’t get punished.”

This incident brings back memories to one of the biggest truisms of working in Singapore, namely the fact that gatherings of any sort, particularly if it involves a government organization, are not discussion sessions but an opportunity for the institution or person calling the meeting to speak a lot. Ironically, one of the most prominent instances of this happens to be the “press conference,” where the person calling the press conference does a lot of talking and the journalist are inevitably quiet. PR people in other parts of the world spend their time preparing the client for all sorts to face a pack of reporters shouting all sorts of questions. In Singapore, our PR people are actually challenged to effectively get the party started (though to be fair, our journalist get a bit chattier in one-on-one interviews).

To be fair, this isn’t exactly limited to Singapore. As a rule of thumb, East Asians tend to be a little reserved in public. If you look at a cross section of Western Universities, you’ll note that the East Asians tend to excel in mathematics and the sciences, where speaking out is not required. Very few East Asians take up arts or humanities, where group discussion is a must (though having said that, the only who got a first in my anthropology class in university was the Japanese girl who didn’t say much in seminars but did what she needed to in exams).

A lot of Westerners tend to understand our reluctance to ask questions and disagree in public down to the concept of “losing face.” I believe that there’s some truth to it but would go further and point to the culture that was formed around Confucius’s teachings, which placed the scholar-bureaucrat the top of society. How did the scholar-bureaucrat get there? He (they usually were), got there by studying and therefore having a better understanding of the perfect past. Challenging and having different opinions is in many ways seen as a challenge to very reason for existence itself.

If you look at the way Singapore is constructed, you’ll notice that Lee Kuan Yew’s genius was to create a Confucius society with characteristics of a Westminster Parliamentary democracy, with himself and his family of scholar-bureaucrats at the top. Sure, we have elections ever five-years but our parliament has no equivalent of “PMQ’s” in the Westminster Parliament on which we’ve modeled our parliament on.

As with most things around Singapore, its hard to convince people that this isn’t exactly healthy. Everything in Singapore seems to work like clockwork and one is inevitably bound to be told off by Americans and Europeans for not appreciating how good the system is in Singapore.

However, whilst things may look rosy on the outside, cracks are appearing in the system and as anyone who has had to do repairs will tell you, cracks if not attended to and patched up have a way of turning into potholes and worse. If you want to look at things from a medical perspective “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”

Unfortunately, you’re not going to fix a crack or get the ounce of prevention of cure from people who aren’t going to challenge the opinion that the crack is there if your opinion is that there is no crack. Everyone keeps quiet because, well, its only a crack and it doesn’t affect me and if I point it out, I will displease the man at the top who will in turn do this bit of squash me.

I think back to my first guard duty in National Service. There was a sign that said that the Battalion Order Sergeant (BOS) is “Always Right,” and if he (usually) is wrong, refer to rule No. 1.”

 

This is, unfortunately, extended beyond the realms of the military. Many corporations work on the concept of the man on-top being perpetually right. This system works when the man on top is a wonderful leader. However, when the said leader ages and goes senile and leaves the show to helpless successors, things go wrong. Absolute monarchies failed in most places because for every wise and wonderful monarch who did great things, there were ten awful ones who screwed up so badly that people took to the streets.

If you look at Singapore, we had Lee Kuan Yew, who was by most standards a decent enough ruler. He was strict and got things done. Ministers who didn’t deliver or screwed up were dealt with. More importantly, Mr. Lee in his early days surrounded himself with people who were willing to have different opinions. In the funeral of S. Rajaratnam, Mr. Lee talked of “furious debates” in cabinet. Not all the decisions made were perfect but they were at the time ones that had debated and argued over to the point that everyone felt that they were the best possible ones.

However, things changed. Nobody questioned or dared voice a “different” (note, I said different not dissenting) opinion and so decisions are now made on the grounds that it’s the right one based on the singular onion without having gone through any form of test. Just look at what happened when Mas Selamat, an alleged psychopathic criminal walked out of a highly secured facility without breaking a sweat. The cabinet rushed to defend the Minister of Home Affairs for not doing his job.

Sure, when you have a system which does not tolerate a “different” opinion, you have a system where nobody will point out the cracks because its just not worth it. It’s a system where you will agree with whatever the man on top says as long as you keep getting paid well enough because having a different opinion isn’t going to make a difference or even endanger being paid well enough. Why bother?

Unfortunately, bosses are inevitably human and make the same errors that the rest of us make. Bosses who are willing to accept different opinions have the capacity to think before they act. Bosses who believe they know it all tend indulge their mistakes rather than learn from them.