Ways we can prepare our young people to thrive.

As we face an increasingly volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous world, there are ways we prepare our young people to thrive in it. The Ministry of Education (MOE) has just completed their recent work plan seminar. In his opening speech, Minister for Education Mr Heng Swee Keat reaffirmed the core beliefs surrounding education, talked about the future landscape, and in that context, expounded on the new initiatives and new foci that the Ministry will take in the next few years to bolster the education of our children. Highlighting the need to see the future world through a framework called VUCA, he said, “To deal with the demands of a VUCA environment, good grades in school are not enough. In fact, they might not even be relevant.”

With the future world being seen as having the increased characteristics of volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity, individuals need to learn new skills to adapt. Mr Heng also emphasised a need for the young to keep a look out for one another, building commitment towards a collective future. Bob Johansen, in his book Leaders Make The Future, expounds heavily on the VUCA world. Originally a term coined by the US Army, the terms are defined as:

1. Volatility: The accelerating rate of change around competition, business, employ- ment, career and job challenges.
2. Uncertainty: Our biggest challenge and inability to cope with volatility as things change so fast and in unexpected ways. It overwhelms our ability to cope and understand what is going on.
3. Complexity: All the issues and chaos that surround us, that lead to confusion in making smart decisions in what we call the “fog of reality”.
4. Ambiguity: The difficulty and inability to solve complex problems and make clear decisions because of the “fog of reality”. It is where there does not seem to be a linear cause-and-effect relationship between problems and solutions, resulting in misreads, poor decisions, or more often, no decisions.

Yet, there is a response that we can adopt to deal with the challenges that the VUCA world presents. This is commonly termed as counter-VUCA:

1. Volatility yields to Vision: Vision implies that there is a clear understanding of the desired future state.
2. Uncertainty yields to Understanding: Understanding is the critical acceptance of the short and long term factors that can affect one’s career, work and personal life.
3. Complexity yields to Clarity: Clarity is the basis for understanding how to deliver personal value through staying flexible, keeping current with technology, learning new value-adding skills, being able to innovate, and being able to deliver increasing value.
4. Ambiguity yields to Agility: Agility is the ability to be nimble by responding to new situations with new ideas, new approaches and new skills.

As part of the INSPIRIT community, a National Youth Council and Singapore National Employer Federation collaboration to advocate for youth, I had the chance to visit the SMRT Depot in Bishan. One of the highlights for me was a discussion on transport issues where participants brainstormed over possible ways to solve problems of capacity and volume flow. It was facilitated by then Acting Minister of the Ministry of Community, Youth and Sports, Mr Chan Chun Sing. In his sharing, he explained that we need to look at the issues in the context of the whole Singapore ecosystem, and identify the root causes versus the manifested symptoms. The ecosystem consists of peak traffic flows, cost of land space, operating costs, population and the like. They are all intertwined; you cannot look at one issue devoid of the other.

That session left me highly enlightened on two counts. Firstly, our transport issues are not as bad as people make them out to be. Second and more importantly, our government does have a detailed understanding of the issues that they are tackling. The session highlighted the uncertainty and complexity of issues that had no clear-cut solutions (ambiguity), all these seemingly having stemmed from our population growth (volatility). It also greatly highlighted the need for us to have the capacity to deal with these VUCA issues through a counter-VUCA framework.

Having a better understanding of the VUCA world and how to deal with it also helps us frame our understanding of MOE’s new initiatives. Besides just being equipped as an education ministry to deal with a VUCA world, it is also about building capabilities in our children through education to deal with a VUCA world. How can we do that?

“It is also about building capabilities in our children through education to deal with a VUCA world” 

Help Our Young Have A Personal Vision

When we think vision, we often think of organisational or corporate visions. Leadership research has shown that people subscribe and commit to organisational and corporate visions only if there is a sense of alignment with personal values and vision. As we develop our young people for the future, we ought to also help them discover and arrive at a personal vision for their own life. How can personal vision be discovered?

Beyond values and passion, a strong sense of vision and destiny can only come when one is assured of his personal identity. When you do not know who you are, it is difficult to imagine who you can become. Drawing from studies of developmental psychology, we know that a child’s identity comes largely from his interactions with his parents.

Without the cornerstone of personal identity, exposure to different opportunities and platforms would do little to help a young person develop a strong personal vision. In that light, we see, together with MOE a greater need to engage parents to be supportive partners.

Help Our Young Develop Understanding

When we think about transport issues, many youths see it from a narrow point of overcrowding and capacity without understanding the other issues at large. One of the recurring thoughts I had after that enlightening INSPIRIT session was, “If every young person learnt how to see and understand our national issues through this lens, they would be a lot less critical about efforts to improve and more constructive in helping to resolve some of these issues.”

Understanding comes through taking an in-depth look at issues. It often begins with taking the humble and courageous position of acknowledging the problems at hand, and then delving deeper to identify the root issues rather than circling around the symptoms.

Help Our Young Develop Clarity

As noise increases in the world of digital media, discernment becomes increasingly difficult. Mr Heng talked about enduring values, timeless wisdom and immutable insights that educators need to impart. Some of these foundational values go against the grain of popular culture. Helping young people navigate such a climate as they grow up requires them to be deeply rooted and crystal clear about the values that they embrace – an objective that can be bolstered by the Learning for Life Programme. Yet, the clarity can only come about when there is sufficient understanding of these values vis-à-vis the values (or lack thereof) and consequences of popular culture. However, Johansen also cautions, “Clarity gets rewarded, even if it’s wrong, because people are so confused”.

There is a real potential to complicate matters when one is clear and wrong. And while youths yet have the experience and hindsight to make the right decisions, they will have to rely on teachers to guide their discernment as they navigate grey areas.

“As noise increases in the world of digital media, discernment becomes increasingly difficult. Mr Heng talked about enduring values, timeless wisdom and immutable insights that educators need to impart. Some of these foundational values go against the grain of popular culture.”

Help Our Young Develop Agility

With increasing complexities, solutions will no longer be straightforward. It is going to be a zigzag path. Failure is almost inevitable along the way, and it is important to learn how to fail early, and fail often and cheaply, as a way of developing a strategy as you go. That is the core of rapid prototyping. Agility compliments clarity in that you need to be very clear about where you are going, but being flexible in how you are going to get there. So is MOE headed in the right direction in preparing our youths and building in them counter-VUCA capabilities? We certainly think so.

The new initiatives like the Applied Learning Programme seeks to help students gain a deeper understanding of the real world by drawing relevance to lessons. The Learning for Life Programme seeks to help a young person discover and clarify his values, identity, empathy, care, passions and interests that will help shape his personal vision. Providing multiple pathways of success also helps them adopt flexibility in how they can achieve their dreams (agility).

While cynics and doomsayers will always paint a bleak picture of what the future might look like, we are positive about the direction that we are heading towards. In the past two years, Halogen has been sharing with educators and youths about VUCA and what they can do to counter it. It is our hope to continue to prepare our youths for what is to come. If all the stakeholders in youth education press on together, we will definitely prepare and position our children well to take on a VUCA world.