Nobody Owns a Seam: My Lowy Institute Piece on Singapore's Crisis Inquiries

My commentary for the Lowy Institute's The Interpreter, "The split seams in Singapore's crisis controls", ran on 25 September 2026. Its argument in one line: Singapore's own crisis inquiries describe failures that sit between institutions, and recommendations struggle to fix them because nobody owns a seam.

Singapore's crisis machinery earns the praise it gets, and its inquiries are unusually candid. The reports on the 2018 SingHealth cyber attack, the Covid-19 White Paper and the 2013 Little India riot each named specific failures in radio links, approval layers, data and escalation, and each was addressed.

What is a seam failure?

Some gaps sit elsewhere. The SingHealth report found no written protocol for how staff at the central IT agency should assess and report a security incident to the hospital clusters, and responsibility passed to a technical manager instead of being escalated. The White Paper describes information about migrant workers with respiratory symptoms spread across employers, dormitory operators, doctors, two ministries and NGOs, with nobody holding the whole picture.

I call these seam failures. Each professional acts soundly inside their own institution. The next person holding relevant information has no authority to force it across the boundary. The failure belongs to the space between them.

Why do inquiries struggle to fix them?

Recommendations need an owner, so they fix the wiring: new protocols, clearer reporting lines. Acting across a professional boundary in a crisis, against your own institutional training, is something no protocol confers.

What should countries borrowing Singapore's model ask?

After an exercise, most ask whether the agencies coordinated. The better question is how often someone acted on outside information, against their own institutional instinct, before authority caught up. That behaviour is rarely designed for and almost never measured.

Read the full piece at the Lowy Institute. For what this means inside a leadership team, see crisis leadership and how to lead a team through a crisis.