Such historic moments in the life of a nation challenge its people to make choices. Choices that would greatly shape the destiny and the path that a nation would take. Nations have fallen to disaster and nations have ascended to great heights of progress through the choices that it made. Bhutan today is challenged to make the choice standing at a momentous crossroad paralleled by very few in its arduous history of nation building.
Choices it must make because everything, all around is changing. Be it individual or a nation, one cannot stand still at the crossroad too long. Winds of change could blow you out for good. Pervasiveness of globalization, quantum advances in technology, integration of economies and proliferation of new knowledge have impacted individual, communities, societies and nations.
We must create new approaches to govern. Innovate ways to conduct businesses. Provide new services and goods that meet the new needs. Forge new alliances. Strike new equations. Change the way we educate our children. These challenges exact societies to have vision, to be creative, to be resilient and to preserver and above all else be responsive to change. After all “It is not the strongest species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the ones who are most responsive to change.” (Charles Darwin)
Decentralization, Good governance, public sector reforms, Geog based planning, position classification and draft constitution are the choice that we are making. Inspired from the throne, which has provided impeccable leadership, it is now the responsibility of the public service, the private sector, the community and every citizen to take the choices forward.
The 50 senior public servants attending Change Management workshop, who regarded themselves as change agents are perhaps bestowed a noble opportunity to influence the road that the nation takes from this crossroad.