For Your Approval, Please
The trials and tribulations of getting a written submission approved, summed up in a cryptic poem by Challenge contributor Annabelle Ng from the Smart Nation and Digital Government Office.

Many public officers would be familiar with all the nuts and bolts of writing a submission or policy paper. We would likely have attended courses on writing and perhaps even memorised the typical structure of a submission: the aim, background, problem at hand, solutions to address the gaps, and so on. There are also many tools we need to get this job done, from the fundamentals of a laptop and email to Excel sheets and PowerPoint presentations.
Beyond the technicalities of writing a submission, I’m sure many of us also feel many different emotions throughout the whole process of getting written work approved. I’ve tried to capture these feelings in a poem below.
This poem seeks your approval to have fun figuring out what each line represents. (read till the end for answers)
Lines after lines, of
Dreams, padded with some history of what has already been
Done
A few gaping holes, or perhaps none
But we can always reach for the horizon, grasp water that gives
Oil to our overture
Yet this means we must make
Promises, to the public
Flip open a spread of tiny prisons
Where I enumerate numbers
We hang ourselves on
A storyline framing my artboard
A growing line or two, cobbled
From my prisons
Shall success be to my successor
Unbeknownst to him the hoops
I stumble through
To play the thousand keys
For that one high
Note
Rolling off the digital post
Into my veins
A shot of
Ok

Annex: “Answers” to the Poem
- Dreams - aim
- History - background
- Gaping holes - gaps
- Horizon - solutions to address the gaps
- Promises - KPIs
- Spread of tiny prisons – Excel cells
- Hang ourselves on - common expression for committing to KPIs
- Storyline framing my artboard - how our PowerPoint slide titles need to have a narrative
- Growing line - graphs drawn by Excel (prisons)
- Hoops - clearance chain
- Thousand keys - laptop keyboard
- Note - submission
- Digital post - email
- Ok - approval
- POSTED ON
Nov 1, 2021
- TEXT BY
Annabelle Ng
- ILLUSTRATION BY
Mushroomhead
-
Out of Office
Budget Lunches Below $10 For The Budget Season