All governments have to face the challenge of changing regularly. The world is moving so fast that what is a groundbreaking initiative one year, will have become everyone's orthodoxy within five years.
An example is Dubai's e-government drive, which a few years ago challenged all the government departments to deliver their services on-line. That meant they had to change their thinking, their way of operating, and their systems had to become transparent.
At the time it was revolutionary, and seemed to be almost going to such extremes that is became ridiculous. Suddenly everything seemed to start with an e-... Yet now it is clear it was essential. A government which has not moved to on-line interaction with its population is losing ground very quickly.
The danger facing a government which does not embrace change, is that it gets stuck in stale thinking, eventually condemning its countries to fading away into global irrelevance while also driving a large part of their populations into poverty as business moves to places which are keeping up.
Collaborative innovation
The world is changing very rapidly, and the only governments which will manage to keep abreast of developments are those who understand what is happening in the global economy, and then takes steps to get their people and economies ready.
I write this week from the Swiss village of Davos, where the World Economic Forum is having its annual meeting, attracting 2,500 political and business leaders.
The theme of this year's meeting is "Collaborative Innovation", designed to emphasise the importance of seeing what is happening around us in the world, and moving to be ready to take advantage of trends at best, and at the very least cope with them well.
Being Davos, the trends we are not just looking at advances in IT, or economic globalisation, but also how major environmental issues such as lack of water in many areas of the world, and global warming and its effects on people and economies, as well as more political issues like the steady rise of extremist violence, and how leaders whether in business or politics are failing to inspire people as much as they did before.
The world's megatrends feed back into our daily lives, and have profound effects on how economies and societies work. Some governments chose to ignore this, and they do so at their peril.
The doors to change cannot be closed any more, and new ideas will seep in through all sorts of routes if they are not allowed to come in openly.
In order to keep up with this, governments have to set themselves new targets regularly, as any business has to do. They will need new agendas, and also some manner they will also have to incorporate change in senior people, hopefully in some open and expected manner, without the unnecessary drama of a major upheaval.
One of the main virtues of a democracy is that the government has to submit to the possibility of being flung out in predetermined terms of years.
Everyone knows what is happening, including both the politicians and the population. As a result political change is institutionalised and made safe for society. Revolution and upheaval is not essential for bringing about change.
The classic examples of governments which have failed to change include situations such as Robert Mugabe's Zimbabwe, where the government has been in power for decades, is unaware of the requirement to change, and is failing its people terribly.
The problem in many countries is that the leadership does not change very much, yet it is important that political change is incorporated into the system, so that lazy thinking and the attraction of old habits will not remain government policy for years.
