The document discusses the challenges of public leadership over the next 5 years, arguing that leadership will be more about facilitating transitions and exploring options within societal and institutional constraints rather than implementing transformative visions, as rising inequality, differential access, expectations, and sustainability issues will determine leadership responses more than leaders determining the solutions. Key dynamics include uncertainty, institutional fatigue, a lack of connection between leaders and publics, and the need to address "wicked problems" through complex adaptive approaches rather than inadequate options.

1. Public Leadership: The Next 5
Years
The thoughts of an uncertain, but
hopefully reflective and thoughtful
“pracademic”

2. Erwin Schwella
• Professor of Public • Professorial
Leadership, School of Fellow, Leiden
Public Leadership
Leadership, Stellenbosc Centre, Leiden
h University, South University, The
Africa Netherlands
• es@sun.ac.za • es@sun.ac.za

4. 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

5. The Key Observations
• 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

6. The Key Observations
• 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

7. The Key Observations
• 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?

8. The Key Observations
• 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."

9. 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

10. 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

11. Base Dynamics of the Current Reality
• Inequality
• Differential Access
• Rising Expectations
• Sustainability

12. Base Dynamics of the Current Reality
• 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?

13. Base Dynamics of the Current Reality
• 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

14. Base Dynamics of the Current Reality
• “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

15. 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”

16. Public Leadership Challenges
– 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

17. Public Leadership Challenges
• 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)

18. Public Leadership Options to Dealing
with Challenges of an Adaptive Type
Contextual Wicked / Leadership Leadership Transition and Change
Challenges Adaptive Options Actions Strategies
Problems
Inequality Climate Activist Leading as Leadership as building
Change Vision consensus
Access Poverty Transformational Leading as Leadership as creating
Action reconciliation
Expectations Differential Learning Leading as Leadership as power and
Development Learning enforcement
Sustainability World Complex Leading as Leadership as facilitating
Population Adaptive Following learning
Growth
Global Leading as
Financial Forcing
Crisis

19. 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

20. 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.