Democracies today operate in a landscape that feels fundamentally altered. What once came as isolated crises has coalesced into overlapping waves of disruption. The polycrisis is not a slogan; it is the structural condition of contemporary governance. And the permacrisis, the sense of chronic instability, creates a world in which public institutions must absorb shocks while still projecting coherence, confidence, and direction.
The result is a paradox: citizens demand more from politics and administration than ever before, precisely at the moment when these systems are under the most stress. Trust fractures, disappointment accumulates, and expectations rise faster than institutional capacity. In this environment, the question of how we cultivate the next generation of public leaders becomes existential.
Preserving what has always worked
Before speaking of reinvention, we must recognise the deep value of traditions that built strong states and effective political cultures. Meritocratic civil services continue to be pillars of stability in every successful democracy, from Singapore to Germany. Youth political organisations, often underestimated, remain essential spaces where future leaders acquire the instincts and craft of politics. Their training academies remain essential, covering ideology, communications, strategy, as critical pillars. Exposure to international environments, cross-sector rotation, and rigorous academic training have shaped many of the world’s most resilient administrators and policymakers.
These classical elements represent continuity, discipline, and the professional ethos of governance. They have produced generations capable of navigating complexity. Abandoning them would weaken the state rather than modernise it. Reinvention must therefore begin with preservation: keeping the core, even as we redesign the surrounding architecture.
Why the old tools are no longer enough
However, the nature of today’s crises has outgrown the capabilities of traditional training. Public leaders now operate in an environment where uncertainty is constant, information flows at destabilising speed, and public opinion can pivot in minutes. The media ecosystem punishes hesitation; digital platforms amplify both real mistakes and perceived ones; and governing under pressure has become the rule, not the exception.
This means that the classical curriculum of political apprenticeship—law, economics, bureaucracy, public management—must be complemented by new competencies. Crisis literacy becomes as important as legal literacy. Psychological resilience becomes as essential as administrative skill. Digital awareness becomes inseparable from policy design. The public leader who cannot understand cyber risk, algorithmic influence, or the dynamics of misinformation will find themselves governing blindfolded.
In short, the capabilities required of leaders have multiplied, while the training paths have not evolved at the same pace.
The new competencies of next-generation public leadership
Reinvention begins with acknowledging what leadership now requires. Future politicians and mandarins must be comfortable navigating ambiguity, managing cascading crises, and making decisions under pressure without losing public trust. They must learn to communicate strategically in moments of crisis, not merely govern administratively in times of calm. This is valid for democracies but also for non democratic regimes, neither may be spared from Gen Z protests (as we saw in 2024-25)—and wider regime consequences—unless they reform to keep pace with the times.
Equally important is psychological durability. The emotional toll of polycrisis governance is enormous, and civil services around the world increasingly recognise that resilience is not a personal trait but a professional necessity. Leadership coaching, behavioural insights, and training for decision-making under stress should become embedded elements of public service development. You can’t have competent governance without competent political leaders and civil servants, one needs the other for policy acumen and smart decision making.
Digital and technological fluency must be non-negotiable. Governance now unfolds in a digital arena where citizens form identities, receive information, mobilise, or fragment. The leader of tomorrow must understand data, cybersecurity, AI ethics, platform dynamics, and digital opportunity—not as technicalities delegated to specialists, but as central components of statecraft.
Finally, next-generation leadership requires a comfort with collaboration. The age of hierarchical, siloed governance is fading. Today’s challenges demand polycentric solutions—alliances with the private sector, universities, local authorities, international bodies, and civic networks. The skill of orchestrating such ecosystems becomes as vital as the capacity to design laws.
Reinventing institutions
One of the most powerful lessons of this era is that stability does not come from resisting change, but from adapting intelligently to it. For things to stay the same, we must change, as a famous book line said. Institutions that cling to rigid processes lose relevance; those that embrace innovation and controlled experimentation gain resilience. Reinvention must therefore extend beyond individuals into systems.
Public administrations need spaces for experimentation—innovation labs, agile policy units, pilot programmes, and rapid feedback loops. Recruitment must valorise adaptability and curiosity, not only seniority. Training must encourage imaginative problem-solving, not rote conformity. And organisational culture must promote learning, not fear of mistakes. The goal is not to disrupt the state but to make it more capable of learning—thus more capable of leading.
The risk of doing nothing
If we fail to reinvent our political and administrative talent, the consequences will be felt not just in government performance, but in democratic legitimacy. Young citizens increasingly perceive politics as unresponsive and institutions as outdated. Faced with bureaucracies that cannot adapt and political actors who appear overwhelmed, they disengage. This is how democracies lose a generation. Once trust erodes, rebuilding it becomes a generational project. Preventing this decline is far easier than reversing it. Reinvention is therefore not a luxury, but a defensive action in favour of democracy’s continuity.
In conclusion, reinvention is an imperative. Political and mandarin upgrade is ultimately an investment in the future of governance: it’s about having countries run well despite of so many pressures, it’s governance with 21st century characteristics. We must keep the classical pillars that have always worked—meritocracy, early leadership formation, intellectual discipline—while adding the competencies the 21st century now demands. Crisis navigation, digital literacy, psychological resilience, collaborative diplomacy, and an innovative spirit must become part of the new DNA of public leadership.
Reinventing the next generation is not about producing flawless leaders. It is about preparing grounded, adaptive, capable individuals who can govern through turbulence without sacrificing legitimacy or trust. In the age of polycrisis, leadership is not simply an occupation; it is a form of democratic resilience. The future will belong to countries that understand this truth and act on it. And the next generation will remember not the crises themselves, but whether their leaders were ready for them.
Photo: Dreamstime.
