Name: Imagining Government from the Ground Up | Li Hongyi | TEDxSingapore
Uploaded: 2026-03-25T21:38:46.000Z
Duration: 6 min 17 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

When you think about government, what do you think of?

Most of all, you probably think of frustration.

A form you had to fill in for the third time.

Or some process you got stuck in for weeks because of some stupid rule that just didn't make sense.

You probably know somebody who swears they will never work in government, and

without asking them another question, you know exactly what they mean.

But what if it didn't have to be this way?

A few years ago, I started an experimental team in the Singapore government.

The idea was simple: rather than the usual top-down decision-making, we will build small teams of skilled practitioners and empower them to seek out and solve problems all across the public sector.

The way this works is that every year, for the month of January, we put aside all non-critical work.

We go on field trips to schools, hospitals, meet social workers to understand their problems and prototype solutions.

At the end of the month, we see which projects are the most promising,

and we spend the rest of the year bringing them to launch.

The problem we are trying to solve is that government is traditionally based on a military structure.

Top-down, central decision-making, optimised for command and control.

It is designed for a small group of people to set direction,

and for everyone else to align quickly and consistently.

This is great when you already know what you need to do and just need to execute.

It is not so great when you need to figure out what needs to be done.

With central decision-making, you end up with an intellectual traffic jam.

Ideas get stuck as they flow towards the centre, waiting for attention from people with not enough time and even less context.

You literally run out of brainpower, so even if something gets enough political attention to get pushed through, that just means everything else gets pushed aside.

This is why government can do billion-dollar construction projects but still has to keep asking you for your birthday.

When decision-makers are overloaded, you can make the government bigger.

The limit is not money or even political will.

If we have a lot of problems to solve, we need the creativity and initiative of a lot of people.

This is the opposite of command and control, so we need to approach this from the opposite direction.

What if instead of a top-down structure, we design government from the bottom up?

Rather than giving orders and ensuring compliance, leaders would focus on supporting people to take ownership.

This would increase our intellectual surface area, giving us more ability to pay attention, build expertise,

and we saw how firefighters had to spend so much time every day just taking inventory of their fire trucks.

They had these big paper logbooks they had to carry around while they checked their equipment.

And so we built a simple app that let them do this more easily on their phones.

It is now being used by all the fire stations in Singapore,

and it saves thousands of man-hours every month that would otherwise literally have been wasted just ticking things off on paper.

Another year, a team visited some social workers,

and we learned that for every hour they met with a client, they had to spend another whole hour just typing up their case notes.

So we built a tool for them that does not just transcribe conversations,

but automatically generates usable case reports.

Another team worked with some ER doctors to implement a queue management system.

By intelligently prioritising cases, it is reducing emergency room wait times by 20%.

So far, we have done over 40 different projects, each of them an example of a small but important problem that would have likely never gotten the attention that it needed.

operation problems altogether in order to address real pain points faced by real people.

Similar government projects normally take years and cost tens of millions of dollars.

We are able to consistently launch new systems in just six months, with teams of just five people.

Because this works so well for government officers, we decided to open it up to the public.

There was no prize money, just some funding to bring promising ideas to production.

We honestly weren't sure if anyone would be interested because, after all, as a government employee, it makes sense that I would want to be empowered to do my job,

but why would a private citizen care about the public good?

We got hundreds of applicants, hundreds of ideas, machine learning to predict the best time for beach cleanups, tools to help senior citizens stay connected with their community, a system to track wildlife populations using audio recordings and AI.

For a tiny fraction of what a single government project would usually cost, we gave Singaporeans a way to not only express what they cared about,

It turns out there is something really natural about wanting to do good.

I think all of us here want to do something meaningful with our lives.

Government is frustrating because of how much better we wish it could be.

It feels like no matter how hard we try, we get stuck, expecting more and more from a system that is already choked by the scale of its responsibilities.

If we do not take a different approach, public service will fall behind while we get overrun by new problems, by crypto scams, disinformation campaigns, or just plain old AI nonsense.

Government can be less about control and more about empowering more people to do good.

We can increase our intellectual surface area by pushing for better structures, bringing visibility to problems,

and taking action where we can to solve the challenges we can see.

We can have a society that is not limited by the attention of its leaders, but

one that is driven by the imagination of its people.

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Imagining Government from the Ground Up | Li Hongyi | TEDxSingapore

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