Dr Justina Tan, Director of Learning and Professional Development, Institute for Adult Learning (Moderator)

Ar Lim EeTiong, Studio Director, Gensler

Ms. Belina Lee, CEO, Mandai Global and Deputy CEO, Mandai Wildlife Group

Mr Lee Tze Shiong, Director of Transformation and Quality Assurance, Nexia TS

Justina

0:00.00

Thank you everyone for gracing the event. This is an inaugural speaker series on innovation and we're very, very grateful to have the three speakers with us, Belina, EeTiong and Tze Shiong.

Okay, I think for me personally, I have not been to the zoo for more than two decades. And to me, the zoo is a place where I just looked at animals in the past. I didn't know the zoo offered really a spectrum of, kind of, an initiative.

So I think probably, maybe I just sum up what I actually kind of heard from them. Innovation has a purpose. It's not good to have, it is a must have. It's never too early to start innovation. And also, last but not least, innovation involves a lot of tears, blood and sweat.

So I'm just going to direct one question to EeTiong. You have the luxury of space in your company to do things like [an] open office, connected kitchen, adaptive conferencing, and threshold. What advice would you give to companies that do not have the luxury of space? You know, if they actually go into this hybrid workplace. Because people are asking, why do I need to go back to office?

EeTiong

1:12.757

Thanks, Justina, for your question. It’s got to do with space, it’s something physical and I do understand there’s constraints for some offices, but otherwise, you know, some offices are going into a more agile mode. In a sense that what we're seeing is that even for big enterprises, if they've got like a head count of even a thousand people, they probably only provide 750 seats within the office. And the thing is that because they strongly believed that hybrid working is the way forward, so I think even for small enterprises, it should not let or allow space to inhibit the new way of working.

So, as I mentioned earlier, you know, it could be through, um, you know, very simple means of just ways to connect the team members. Uh, mobility is important so that, you know, any team members coming in, they literally can connect, plug and play, any one point of time. But the thing is that what I was talking about early on in my deck, was about experience.

So how do you foster the better experience? How do you bring people together? And the thing is that you do not need a big pantry space, you just need, you know, designated space for it. You don't need big office space in creating environment with landscaping, indoor landscaping, et cetera.

I think the small and medium enterprises shouldn't see that as, as an inhibiting factor to bring the team together. And I also mentioned earlier on, it’s like what about looking outside of your office? What about connecting the community? Getting the team members to bond, to get together. Be it sort of activities that is outside one's organization, be it charitable, et cetera. Or the thing is that, could it be sort of like doing activities in community spaces, maybe um, Zumba or et cetera. I think, really thinking outside of the box of how organizations can—be it small, medium, large organizations—bring the team together. Yeah, I think that's most important.

Justina Tan

3:24.620

Okay, thanks EeTiong.

Because what strikes me is, innovation is a very emotional journey, right? You talked about the connectedness of experience, and Belina talked about closeness, and Tze Shiong talked about the importance of actually keeping your colleagues appraised of what is actually happening. So I'm going to direct the next question to Belina and Tze Shiong.

Now, innovation being an emotional journey, I'm sure that you have experienced discouraging moments as you embark on this journey right. Six years, and I think about five years on your part.

So maybe can you share with us in more specific details, what are some of these discouraging moments that you have experienced? What you do take away from it and how do you actually overcome them?

Maybe we will start with Belina first?

Belina

4:10.303

Okay sure. So, I always say that innovation must have a bit of thick skin, you cannot take rejection or failure personally, right. And you almost need to go in expecting to fail. So, I gave a talk recently at the Innovation Week, which is that “please go in expecting to fail, knowing you will fail”. But more importantly, what you would learn out of it? I think that's really, important. The mindset, right? The second one is, please expect people are going to tell you no when you tell them to do something different. Please don't expect them to say yes, I have a record of 12 coffees. 12 coffees to change one process in a project that has of course, thousands and hundreds of processes, 12 coffees just to change one process.

So, it needs incredible resilience, incredible tough heartedness. And I think that's what I do and say when I'm hiring as well, like it's not a well-oiled machinery that you come in, you inherit a process, and you just do the same thing and make incremental changes. You are going to face rejection and failure and you need to have the heart for that.

So, I think the mindset is really important and I have many, many examples to share of some of these, but I would say that's really, uh, why it takes a unique mindset to enjoy it even. Yeah.

Tze Shiong

5:47.125

Okay, just to continue with the topic about failing. I think one thing that's important is that you must be prepared that there will be failures, but it's important to build, uh sorry, to experiment. And if you think it's going to fail, then do it quickly and then move on. Right. So, um, once you fail, you know which the things are to look out for in your next project or initiative, then I think it will help you along the way.

Justina

6:15.970

Any questions from the floor that you would like to ask the speakers? Any questions? Oh, you have a question, the gentleman there. Can I just offer him a mic?

Audience

6:24.429

So just wondering, when Belinda presented and architect Lim presented, you're connecting the indoors to outdoors. I have an interest in space. So, this could be a conceptual because this is an innovation discussion.

So can the buildings breathe? By that what I mean is, there is huge disasters, energy issues, costs going up. And if you study the 24 hours in a day in Singapore, early mornings are very pleasant, and some parts of the day are very pleasant. When you don't need the air con in these, say the Shanghai tower, linking to what she faced when she left the FinTech and joined Mandai. So far, so hot.

How can we, isn't it, time, high time that we all have the resilience to a non-AC environment? What are the benefits? We start breathing fresh air. Let's, I leave it at that? I don't know if there is some response from you, thanks.

Belina Lee

7:52.550

I think thermal comfort is a big thing. Recently I gave a talk at the Rotary club and the very first question I got was exactly that. Wah, Mandai is so hot, what are you going to do about it? You know. You should have more aircon spaces and all. Our solution in Mandai has always [been] to leverage mother nature, we plant more trees. The challenge is that the trees take time to grow. Right? Um, sometimes the trees are old, a lot of shade but for safety [reasons], you need to trim them or cut them down.

So, I think mother nature has provided for solutions for us. But we, as human beings are impatient sometimes, we take the easier way round, right? You build sheltered walkways then you put the fans and the air-cons. But I encourage you to come to our parks, you know, the walkways where it's full of the lush trees. Even in the peak noontime, it's quite comfortable.

So that would be my response, and of course you can't do that in every single environment. Especially in urban cities. But I do agree that we should try to minimize our reliance on the air-con.

EeTiong

9:13.889

Hi, thanks for the question. That's an interesting one. And the thing is that you look at buildings, regardless of if we are constructing anything, carbon footprint. The thing is, how do you reduce it or minimise it. It’s through its operations and that's what you're talking about. And operations, you know, you've got to start from day one, looking at sustainable, sustainable passive design.

As mentioned earlier, when I was sharing, it could be as simple as orientation of building, the shape, and the form of the building. The thing is that within Gensler we've in fact came up with a software that's called ‘G planet’. So literally what we do is that if you plant the building sort of like shape and form in 3D (three dimensional) digital space, a digital planet of Planet Earth, you know, it could in fact work out sort of like the sun path thus, the solar heat gain and then the primary wind directions. As such, we could then work out maybe what is the best angle in where the building fenestrations needs to be, you know, to allow natural ventilation, and the thing is that—kudos to Singapore government—in the sense [for] pushing it very hard. And I think that there are buildings in Singapore, that is at net zero carbon.

For instance, the NUS building. That's built. It's amazing. And it's not just through architecture, it’s through MEP engineering advances. And if you're talking about having a cool environment, it's not only about cool air. It's also about humidity. It’s about air circulation flow, and all these comes, you know, part and parcel. But of course, within even Gensler itself we are encouraging our team members, be it for any design to look at it from a sustainable perspective and to encourage our clients to engage sustainable designers for their buildings and their projects. And, it’s not just for now but [for the] long-term.

To be frank, is that interestingly, in 2007, when I was working on a China, merchant bank headquarters building, it’s a bank building, we were trying to push for LEED Gold. And then we were like, oh, this is sustainable. It's US credited, et cetera. The chairman was there, and he was like, so what benefit is it? So we got a QS and the engineers on board and worked very closely with them. We literally showed him a chart of increasing energy costs, increasing water costs.

And we’re like, this is a project whereby if you go towards a sustainable sort of like approach, that’s 3% additional construction costs, however, we approximately worked out, you know, even though desktop is that your payback period is 12 years approximate. For him, that makes sense. I'm saving money in the long term. You know, it's like, I'm going to be in this building for next 30 to 50 years. So, sustainability is not just about, you know, saving the planet, but the things are, what other sort of benefits does it give to potentially developers who are looking at a bottom line? Yeah.

Justina

12:36.742

Thank you. One last question for our speakers. Okay. No, I liked the very fact that the zookeeper app, and you mentioned something, Belinda, everyone is an innovator. It speaks to me because I'm involved in employee-driven innovation.

I believe everyone is capable of innovating and Tze Shiong you speak about a business transformation unit tasked to do the innovation, but you know, Belina wanted to give the ownership back to the ground, to the people. Right. And so, uh, Ee Tiong, your company is very involved in research, right? Getting everybody involved, weaving into practice, the innovation, now because we are actually competing with the demands of day-to-day work and a lot of employees will ask, how do I find time to innovate, to ideate when I don't even have time to finish what I'm supposed to do.

Right. So what is your take on this? And what is your advice on this?

Belina

13:34.637

Okay. So, the classic. You know, you don't get the behaviour as it is not part of the KPI. Sorry, very practical. So, somebody needs to whisper to the CEO because the CEO has to decide what culture he or she wants in the organisation. So, in the zoo, we've got a huge range of profiles. We've got the animal caregivers, we've got F&B frontliners, we've got retail sales staff all the way to, you know, your consultant, analysts, data scientists, and digital strategists.

So, we had to keep it right at the lowest common denominator, as I call it. A nd it became a KPI to ensure that X number of departments will participate. And that number will continue to grow.

We created our own innovation engagement index. We embraced the ADKAR model, ADKAR model for change management where you measure awareness, desirability, knowledge, actionability and repeatability of change. We created our own innovation engagement index and that is being monitored every quarter and reported yearly. So, with that, the behaviour change.

But I would say that it's difficult. So practically what we've done is we create, like, for example, short, intense periods, like a hackathon, we go to the aligned department and say, can you please release the staff for two to three days, intensive[ly]. So they go off, they do the hackathon and they come back.

We find that more impactful than involving them in a project, like very long-term. Every week they have to come and then you realize that initially they come, then they start to miss one session, two sessions, and then suddenly disappear. So, I think that’s our own, uh, experience one, the KPI across the entire organization and two, short, intense periods, uh, rather than long long-burn projects, so to speak.

Tze Shiong

15:29.116

Yeah. Yeah, I'll go next. So, I think I also shared earlier our journey that it's impossible for you to get everybody to embrace change. Right. But it's good to have some people who are willing to embrace change.

And in fact, those usually are the people who have either have not been involved in the process long enough, or that they have been in the process but they're not happy, so they want to change. So, once you get these people engaged and then you get their buy-in and get them be the ambassador. I think that will work a lot.

And to address the other category of people who are resistant to change, they will perpetually be resistant to change, right? Given more time, they will still not want to change. So, other than KPI I would think that, culture from the top is very important because over time they will realize that if they don't change, they will be left behind. And when they [are] left behind, they may be perceived as they are being ostracized. So they will either change or they will leave. So I guess you, you can't change everybody. You can’t get everybody to embrace. But, important to have a journey where you get people to kick-off. And then after that, get other people to buy-in.

EeTiong

16:43.443

So, within Gensler itself. It's um, just by starting from research, we've spent about, we invest about 15 to 17% of our profits. And how do you invest these profits? Because the things that every, everybody needs to clock time to their timesheet. I need to clock it on a project. I need to clock it somewhere, but if I clock it on project, while I'm doing research, I'm killing it. So, what Gensler does is that, uh, we've got this fund, that's put aside every year, there's 30-40 over sort of like research funds put aside.

So, if there's a team of, it depends on the team members, how do you want to set it up? It could be 3, 5, 10 people that they will was set up sort of like groups based on their passion and their interest. Maybe even for some of them is because the work that they're doing is triggering interests and they want to know more, the firm would literally invest time.

Like you can clock X amount of time on a project. And the thing is that it can even go up to like 10,000 US dollars per head, per person over a duration of anywhere between a one to one and a half years. So, there is a first step at such that they do understand that there is time allowed for, but it's them having the passion.

How do you generate this?

It's not through silos. We never, interestingly the office doesn't see ourselves as Singapore is in silo, Bangkok as a silo, Mumbai as a silo. We see ourselves as all being connected. And of course, you're talking or the building industries, there's so many various sectors. We literally broke it down into 28 different sectors.

So there's people who are specialists or we call them champions in, let's just say aviation, they are passionate about airports. So the things that we've got a monthly sort of like, um, session whereby so-called practice area leaders set up calls and sharing sessions, which means that it's open to anyone in the office. As long as you're interested, you'll be in. You can pick up the invite and can join in the calls.

I think innovation requires a drive. It requires something to trigger you to want to find out more, to do better. And the things that this is only through sharing of knowledge and knowing that “Hey, there is more to it”. You do not know what you do not know. So that's how we do it within Gensler. It's very transparent. Very, very open sort of platform. So internally you we've got a website, you click onto it, you can put in a name of any project. You could literally see the stats, GFA, gross floor area, how much it costs to do it, who are the team members and through that, ah, this is the project lead, I’ll connect with him or her. And it really is having channels that allows people to connect with others.

Justina
19:41.585

Okay. I think I just wrapped up this session. I think, in summary, we need clarity in what we are doing. We are not doing innovation for the innovation’s sake. It could be a problem centric. It could be some issues. And I think it goes beyond ideas.

Actions must take place and is packed with challenges. And then the last parting words I have for everyone is never give up because innovation is the way to go. Thank you everyone.

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