As a Business Analyst and transformation professional, I spend a great deal of time discussing role clarity, governance models, accountability structures, risk management, and KPIs.
And it has often puzzled me why we don’t apply the same organisational design thinking to national leadership roles.
We require financial certification to manage a pension fund and psychological screening to command a nuclear submarine. We put pilots through hundreds of hours of training on flight simulators before we let them fly 747, yet in most countries, we require none of this to manage a nation.
This is not a political argument. It’s a structural “what if” question.
A country is arguably the most complex organisation in existence. Its leadership influences trillions in economic activity, national security infrastructure, healthcare and education systems, legal frameworks, regulatory ecosystems, and long-term intergenerational assets.
In corporate settings, a CEO of comparable scale would typically go through extensive vetting, board-level scrutiny, track record assessment, financial review, performance-linked evaluation, and ongoing oversight.
Yet in most democracies, leadership selection primarily tests political viability, not executive-style capability.
Across political systems, whether presidential, parliamentary, or party-led, leaders are filtered first by political support, networks, and institutional pathways. Competence may emerge through experience, but it is rarely assessed through structured capability frameworks.
There is also the access dimension.
In theory, democracy is open to all citizens. In practice, entering top-level political competition often requires significant financial backing, strong networks, or party infrastructure. This does not invalidate democracy — but from a systems perspective, it shapes who reaches the starting line.
Before leadership is tested on capability, it is often filtered by access to capital, networks, party machinery, elite institutions, or influential endorsements.
This does not automatically produce poor leaders, but it may narrow the pool of potentially exceptional ones.
A Different Model: Leadership as Stewardship
Now, imagine a system where public financing neutralises excessive financial advantage, and candidates demonstrate baseline competencies before standing for election.
Citizens would still vote, but among candidates who have demonstrated capability, integrity, and resilience.
Before appearing on a ballot, candidates would have to complete:
- An 8-hour national crisis simulation (Storm Kristin, COVID or similar scenario)
- A budget trade-off exercise
- A systems-mapping test
- A public integrity audit
- A psychological resilience assessment
This would not replace democracy. It would strengthen the qualification layer beneath it.
And instead of focusing primarily on electoral cycles and mid-term election slogans, we might actually measure government performance across both short- and long-term indicators such as:
- Median disposable income growth (not just GDP)
- Productivity trends
- Public debt sustainability
- Education outcomes
- Healthcare performance and healthy life expectancy
- Public safety and rule of law
- Mental health and societal wellbeing
- Corruption trends
- Infrastructure quality
- Innovation capacity and future readiness
- Institutional trust
- Environmental sustainability
If a country were a complex enterprise, these would function like financial KPIs, human capital metrics, risk indicators, stakeholder trust measures, and sustainability dashboards.
No serious board would run a multinational organisation using only revenue growth as its success metric, so why should a nation be different?
Many of these indicators closely mirror the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals adopted by countries worldwide. The difference is this: the SDGs are aspirational. A governance KPI framework would introduce quantified accountability and executive-level performance discipline.
This is not about technocracy or about replacing democratic choice. It is about asking a simple design question:
In highly complex systems, should leadership selection rely purely on political momentum, or should it also reflect structured capability and measurable stewardship?
As transformation professionals, we know that system design shapes outcomes.
Perhaps it’s worth asking whether leadership architecture deserves the same level of intentional design as the organisations we build and transform every day.
