Five shifts point towards a different model of local government leadership, writes Carl Davidson, Chief Curiosity Officer and Critical Thinking Champion at The Curiosity Company. Carl is speaking at the SuperLocal conference, which will take place from 14–15 October in Rotorua.
In the aftermath of the Cold War, the US military looked for a way to describe the new normal of an unstable world. The term they landed on was ‘VUCA’, combining notions that this new world was Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, and Ambiguous. The term escaped the military and today is commonly used to describe a world of geopolitical uncertainty, technological disruption, and economic shocks.
VUCA is an ugly word but it is an elegant concept. And it is a perfect place to start when trying to understand the forces shaping local government because it suggests there is no ‘new normal’ to look forward to.
Similarly, the Collins Dictionary chose ‘permacrisis’ as its word of the year in 2022. This is a neologism made by combining ‘permanent’ and ‘crisis’ to capture the idea that we are now in a permanent state of lurching from one crisis to the next.
To help explain the forces driving our VUCA/permacrisis world, The Curiosity Company has identified five megatrends to help local government understand and navigate this new abnormal. These megatrends reflect deep shifts reshaping New Zealand society and help explain the changing ways citizens think, participate, engage with institutions and judge leadership itself.
The first shift is The Rise of The Fragmented Self and shows how people increasingly define themselves through multiple identities rather than one shared community identity. Because identity becomes situational rather than fixed, it follows that consensus building and community engagement become much harder.
“We are now in a permanent state of lurching from one crisis to the next. “
The second shift is The Retreat from Metanarratives, which is just a fancy way of saying that we no longer have a common set of shared beliefs to explain the world. Those broad assumptions about how society should work have been replaced by multiple competing narratives, each with their own ideas about what is true and what counts as ‘proof’. This explains why so many debates can’t be resolved with more evidence, precisely because what is contested is the worldview people bring to the evidence.
The third shift is The Collapse of Trust and it is an inevitable consequence of the retreat from metanarratives. Trust in institutions of all kinds has declined, the notion of ‘expertise’ is hotly contested, and decisions are scrutinised more intensely than ever before. This matters a great deal for local government because trust will become rarer and harder to maintain.
The fourth shift is that a VUCA/permacrisis world has created an entire generation that is much more anxious than previous generations. Financial pressures, housing affordability, shifting job markets, social media and a raft of other changes have seen The Rise of an Anxious Generation. Optimism and faith in the future have waned, and this anxiety changes how people act as well as what they believe.
Finally, inevitably, artificial intelligence is changing what it means to be human. We have called this shift The Acceleration of The Extended Self. The ‘extended self’ is an old idea about how our possessions become part of who we are. But AI is no longer changing what we have or what we do but who we think we are. This shift has only just begun but it is already clear that AI will change what communities value as much as it will change how our organisations operate.
Taken together these five shifts point towards a different model of local government leadership. At the 2026 SuperLocal conference we are going to argue that these shifts really mean that the fundamental task of local government leadership is becoming profoundly human: creating trust where trust is fragile, creating meaning where shared stories have fractured, and helping communities make good decisions in a world where technology is changing faster than people can make sense of it.