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Singapore’s risk exposure: High turbulence, low visibility

Q&A | December 19, 2023

Navigating mixed market signals

Building a resilient corporate culture may be easier than you think

Diana Wu David has made resilience her life’s work. The author of Future Proof advises some of the world’s best-known companies how to build more effective and equitable workplaces that can withstand even the fiercest upheavals. We sat down with her to discover how leaders can plot a clear course through complex and mixed market conditions. This interview has been edited for clarity and length. 
 

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I’d say the most adaptive leaders I've worked with have a simple understanding of their own values. They’re constantly thinking on a fundamental level: this is why our company exists and this is the service that we provide. They're good at telling that story to themselves and to others, and that transcends the perpetual anxiety that you’d otherwise feel.

A set purpose and direction can feel scary in a complex world where things are interrelated, problems come from anywhere, and once you solve one piece it messes up another piece. Values and a clear sense of purpose act like a foundation. A constant organising principle in a world where you don't have a lot of command and control.

Diana Wu David Diana Wu David

It definitely crystallises how leaders think about risk. Even now, nearly 1 in 2 business leaders in Asia Pacific use past events to measure how well they are managing risk—which means they are basing risk management on outdated assumptions instead of the here and now. Leaders with clear purpose and values, however, find it easier to filter information and exercise foresight by asking: What is the signal I need to look for amidst all the noise? What is the impact that it might have on our business? And how can I test whether this signal is really important or not?


That kind of thought process helps you better insure against events that might seem unlikely but have potentially cataclysmic impact, like cybercrime or a global pandemic. It also gives you greater confidence to take risks that may teach you a lesson but won’t kill you.

What I’d like to see in Asia is people looking at risk management as an opportunity. The biggest threat I see in the region is a huge avoidance of failure. And if the company has a failure, it often ends up being massively downplayed. There isn’t a culture of learning around it—I broadly oversimplify, of course. 

But if you don't want to have failures, or tend to be risk averse, you're creating a culture within your organisation where nobody wants to or even knows how to take risk. And when that happens, the pressure tends to build up and ultimately blow up.

I’d say the most adaptive leaders I've worked with have a simple understanding of their own values. They’re constantly thinking on a fundamental level: this is why our company exists and this is the service that we provide.

One sports and entertainment company whose leaders I work with had what we might call a very rear-view approach to risk and as a result organisational culture. You had to be in by 9 am, you had to be properly dressed, you had to behave in certain ways to get things done—because the leadership believed that if people didn’t do that, then the whole place would fall apart. After the pandemic hit, they started holding monthly meetings where people could share the disruptive trends they were seeing—things like Blockchain, the metaverse, and NFTs—and come up with ways to go out and test the potential impact on the business.

Another example is a leader in retail who I know who had an employee come to her and ask to spend several days working on a side project doing digital marketing for an NFT brand. I think that it was fairly enlightened of that leader to say sure, let’s give it a try. And she said that her employee came back so much more energized to perform well. 

A more well-known example is Haier, the Chinese electronics firm. They use this well-documented model called rendanheyi (人单合一) which assigns immense amounts of freedom and control to employees based on values like customer centricity and co-ownership of the company’s resources. I would say giving employees the opportunity to test ideas, make mistakes, and learn from them has played a huge role in helping Haier sustain strong revenue growth in the face of major economic and geopolitical risks. 

The first thing leaders need to do is recognise that they face all sorts of risks when their people can’t keep up with change. Cyber risks, data theft—these come from inexperience or disengagement on the front lines, often from places and people you don't even know are in your organisation. So companies need to increase their attention on ensuring that staff are managing through this increased velocity of change.

The next thing is the how. My experience with a lot of different managers across Asia is that learning how to communicate is really important. If you're going to change your culture to be more risk-embracing, then you have to communicate that to people up and down the line. They have to live it. Ultimately you have to embed it in terms of who you hire, fire, and promote. If people who fail are ousted, then clearly this isn’t living the values of embracing risk.

The final thread is to really listen to your employees: creating feedback loops to understand what's happening on the ground and adapting in real time. The leader’s job is in many ways to synthesise that feedback with their own values and purpose—to create an organisation that thrives in any situation because it supports the needs for belonging, safety, relevance, and autonomy of its people. Technology is always changing, but those deeper human needs—they’re immutable. 

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