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Oh The Irony Of 'We'll Be Like Singapore' From A Brexit With No Plan

This article is more than 4 years old.

Brexit evangelists have consistently offered Singapore as a model for the UK’s future, suggesting a similar outwardly-oriented, pro-trade hub is the recipe for an “entrepreneurial, global” Britain. 

Leaving aside the wrinkle of how the model works for a country 10 times the population size, the sad irony in this aspiration is the Asian city state is a poster-child for careful long-term thinking and planning—much of which is informed by its Centre for Strategic Futures (CSF), a government unit.

Brexit UK consists of referendum promises underpinned by what Donald Tusk has called “not even a sketch of a plan.”

The CSF was founded 10 years ago as part of the Singapore Prime Minister’s Office, by senior civil servant Peter Ho. It collaborates with a network of organizations worldwide to provide structured future thinking, particularly by way of ‘horizon scanning’ that is, finding and interpreting signals of change.

CSF doesn’t predict anything. Nor does it derive long-term plans. It surfaces shaping events and trends and puts them on the leadership radar, and so helps decision-makers to act with future context in mind.

To celebrate its 10th birthday CFS has published a 100-page document

CsfCentre for Strategic Futures

that covers many of its key processes and issues, containing contributions it itself describes as “from the earnest to the whimsical, the historical to the imaginative, and the cautious to the optimistic.”

This is a self-aware contrast with standard-issue government and military foresight around the world, often just offices for extrapolating economic data or assembling technology roadmaps.

Good strategic foresight is a research-based, evidence-based, data-driven activity. But it is also more than that. It is not just about what the data “says” but whether we are viewing it with the right lens. Are we trading in comfortable preconceptions when we need fresh cognitive frames?

In the document’s signature essay, Ho remarks on this future-framing problem: “We face the same challenges as when we try to understand a foreign country: we cannot help but project our implicit assumptions on it.

“We assume there is proportionality between cause and effect—big causes only have big consequences, and so on.

“This linearity often means that planners and policymakers focus on major forces in the social, economic, technological, political and environmental spheres.

“But some future states of the world are difficult to anticipate because they emerge out of developments we may have overlooked,
or because of developments we know about, but whose interactions generate unforeseen outcomes.

“Thus, it is important to consider the world in all its dimensions; not just in politics and economics, but also society, culture, community, technology and the marketplace.”

So, this in fact is the Singapore model. Looking long-term even to plan near-term, with quantitative and also qualitative thinking methods to better recognize emergent contexts. All in service of a forward path that is optimised to external change, and robust to uncertainty and surprise.

Brexiteers have to date only shown seat-of-the-pants planning, flag waving, hoping and vacuously promising the future will turn out alright. Their model could not be further from that of Singapore.

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