Public Leadership: The next 5 years

Public Leadership: The Next 5 Years

The thoughts of an uncertain, but hopefully reflective and thoughtful

“pracademic”

Erwin Schwella

• Professor of Public Leadership, School of Public Leadership, Stellenbosch University, South Africa

• [email protected]

• Professorial Fellow, Leiden Leadership Centre, Leiden University, The Netherlands

• [email protected]

mailto:[email protected]

mailto:[email protected]

The Key Observations

• Points of Departure:• What happened to Joe Di Maggio? – On why Steve Jobs is (perhaps not) a useful

leadership example for public leadership– “Prediction is very difficult: especially about the

future.” Niels Bohr


• Public leadership over the next 5 years will be:– Transitorial rather than transformative– More about contextual societal and institutional

conditions and constraints impacting on public leadership and action

– Less about individual or even collective public leadership and action impacting on societal conditions, constraints and action


• Less about visions, answers and final solutions• More about transitions, questions and

facilitation of learning to find solutions• More about exploring new global and local

institutional options and processes through facilitated complex adaptive methods

• Less about implementing visionary leadership plans and prescriptions


• Leadership will be determined rather than be determining

• Metaphor: – Leadership in a Fish Bowl – Perhaps even during an Earth Tremor– Is it about changing the fish or changing the water

and/or the fishbowl?


• The societal context, within which effective and ethical public leadership has to be practiced now, is best described by the famous Charles Dickens quote:– “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times; – it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness; – it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity; – it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness; – it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair; – we had everything before us, we had nothing before us;– we were all going directly to Heaven, we were all going the

other way."

The State of the Current Reality and the Current Reality of the State

• Uncertain Transitions/Transitional Uncertainty• Institutional Fatigue and Fatigued Institutions• Public leaders without publics and publics

without public leaders• Democratic governments without popular

support and popularly supported governments without democracy

Manifestations of Uncertain Transitions and Transitional Uncertainty

• Psychological reactions:– Anxiety, Stress, Anger

• Sociological reactions– Alienation, Radicalism, Uprisings, Revolution

• Concrete manifestations of reactions: – Arab Spring– London Riots– Occupy Wall Street– South African Service Delivery Protests– Global Financial Crisis– Global Climate Change

Base Dynamics of the Current Reality

• Inequality• Differential Access• Rising Expectations• Sustainability


• Global and local inequality– Inequality realities and trends

• Global Gini Coefficient 68-70: Milanovic (2005 and 2008)• Higher than the world’s most unequal countries: South Africa

and Brazil• Top 5 per cent of individuals in the world receive about 1/3

of total world income, and top 10 per cent receive one-half• Ratio between the average income received by the richest 5

per cent and the poorest 5 per cent in the world is 165 to 1• Richest earn in about 48 hours as much as the poorest in a

year.

– Inequality within countries? What are the trends?


• Differential access– Perhaps based on inequality and scarcity, too little

to go around– Mechanisms to control access globally and locally• Mix of political and economic measures for public and

private goods and services


• “Markets and/or military might”

• Rising Expectations and demands for equality and access– Increased demands for equality and access at the

highest increasingly “visible” level of the highest global standard

• Sustainability• This creates global and local public leadership

challenges

Public Leadership Challenges

• Angry and alienated demands to deal with the big issues related to inequality, access, expectations and sustainability

• Public leadership is being determined by the challenges rather than determining what is to be done about the challenges

• Three possible insufficient meta outcomes:– Malthusian collapse / MIT “Limits to Growth”


– Schumpeterian innovation / Joel Barker: Always Another Door Opening

– Applying less than adequate mere muddling through methods

• Rather than these inadequate, naïve or neglecting options there is a need to find ways to deal with wicked/adaptive problems


• Conceptual and strategic options in the approaches linked to dealing with adaptive or “wicked” problems

• Leadership as facilitating learning (Heifetz)• Leadership as adaptation and learning in

complex adaptive systems (Gunderson, Hartzog)

Public Leadership Options to Dealing with Challenges of an Adaptive Type

Contextual Challenges

Wicked /Adaptive Problems

Leadership Options

Leadership Actions

Transition and Change Strategies

Inequality Climate Change

Activist Leading as Vision

Leadership as building consensus

Access Poverty Transformational Leading as Action

Leadership as creating reconciliation

Expectations DifferentialDevelopment

Learning Leading as Learning

Leadership as power and enforcement

Sustainability WorldPopulation Growth

Complex Adaptive

Leading as Following

Leadership as facilitating learning

Global Financial Crisis

Leading as Forcing

Public Leadership Dilemmas

• Global governance deficit• Global, national, local conflicts of interest• Institutional deficit• Institutional fatigue• Scaling challenges • Individual / collective leadership capture• Leadership disempowerment and incapacity

Public Leadership Dilemmas

Do we need to replace the fish in the bowl, the water in the fish bowl, the fish bowl or all of the above? Merely replacing the fish in the same water and/or replacing the water in the same bowl, may not suffice.

Public Leadership: The next 5 years

Education

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