Khaldunian Trap: What June 25 says about leadership failure

Each year, the dates and times on calendars function as historic anomalies to leadership teams - as small fires to be extinguished, forgotten, or dealt with via strategic public relations. This is a deadly mistake because when a state collapses along these lines, it is not typically due to a lack of intelligence or policing but a failure of physics.

Ibn Khaldun, the philosopher engineer of the 14th century, as a macro historian mapped out the lifecycles of civilisations with the same clinical detachment as an engineer would. He noted that empires may not fall because of surprising shocks to the system; rather, they ossify from within. He described asabiyyah (Group Solidarity) as the invisible glue that binds people together through an identification with their shared purpose and a sense of social responsibility.

In the formative phase of an institution, asabiyyah is thick. That means the distance between the leadership and the populace is almost negligible; execution of strategies takes place at a high speed, and the feedback loop is instantaneous.

When any institution reaches this point in its lifecycle, there is a tendency for it to become complacent and lose connection to the community as Khaldun articulated. Leadership therefore becomes more rigid and begins to value conforming to the appearance of acceptable behaviour more than actual behaviour, mistaking ritual, table camaraderie and polished reports for stability.

Compliance does not equal peace; compliance is suppressed tension. A rigid institution does not maintain order but only guarantees a smooth rupture.

This rigid institution is a brittle vessel, and brittle vessels are rigid and do not bend easily at the time of their maximum rigidity yet will eventually succumb to the stress placed on them by a rapidly connected, instantaneously responsive generation.

Finding a solution to the current tensions affecting governance is purely architectural. On the one side is a young, instantaneously responsive generation that does not appreciate or abide by the bureaucratic delays inherent in an institution.

They perceive institutional delay to be an affront to their very being. Rather than waiting for a bureaucratic process to solve a problem, they crowdsource solutions and expect results within hours, not quarter years.

On the other side is a bureaucratic system created in an earlier time, originally designed for slow uptake, committee review and tactical deferral.

Trapping immense amounts of demographic pressure within a slow-moving institutional system results in a failure of physics' governing rules:

The Containment Illusion: Leaders often respond to demands through increasing surveillance, limiting public places, and using force. This solves the symptom (pressure), but creates a bigger problem of volume.

The Feedback Bogey: A rigid bureaucratic structure cannot process poor data and filters out all warning signals because its internal incentives reward only positive data at the top of the hierarchy. Thus, when the dashboard goes red, the function is already on the verge of critical failure.

The Performance Pivot: Facing a structural crisis, the reflex of the already distanced elite has traditionally been to simply perform, that is, hold a meeting, create a committee, make a symbolic gesture. However, one cannot manage a thermodynamic condition via a public relations firm.

The Khaldunian perspective on June 25 (protests) indicates that the only antidote to a structural break is structural elasticity.

Leadership does not see the crowd or dissenting citizens, and ask, "How do I clear the frame?" Rather, proactive leadership will ask, "How do I redesign the pipeline?"

There is often confusion between the concepts of doing something (activity) and accomplishing something (achievement). When the channels through which economic opportunity, civic involvement and institutional accountability are blocked by self-interests, the pressure created by all those blocked channels eventually has to be discharged through some other means, and that other means has always had to be found.

The street becomes a processor for the slow machine of governance.

Institutions must therefore abandon the pride of being a museum piece and instead adopt the discipline and fluidity of being part of a larger network. They need to reduce the time it takes to process actions internally and remove barriers to receiving real-time feedback from stakeholders and they need to learn that integrity is defined by how well and how fast actions are implemented, as opposed to how pretty a promise is made.

The calendar doesn't care about the politics of spin; it merely permits the measurement of these institutions' operational performance every time the same date reoccurs and demands that an audit be performed on them. The only question for those institutions going forward will be whether they are flexible enough to expand or will be rigid enough to require breaking.