We Have Come to Confuse Leadership with Visibility
24 February 2026 · René de Baaij
Yesterday I walked past the Binnenhof, the seat of the Dutch government in The Hague. A father on his bicycle pointed at the building and asked his child: do you know what that is? The child shrugged.
Honestly, I understand that reaction.
That building is where a new cabinet begins tomorrow. But if you have followed the past few years, it does not feel like a new beginning. More like another attempt.
Three cabinets in four years. Not because the Netherlands is ungovernable. But because leadership proved too light for the weight of the decisions.
Nitrogen. Asylum. The housing shortage. Climate. These are not abstract files. They are choices that always affect someone. Disappoint someone. Cost someone money. Restrict someone.
And that is exactly where it grinds.
We have come to confuse leadership with visibility. With debating skill. With winning the moment.
A strong performance in parliament counts for more than a smoothly running execution. A sharply worded motion gets more attention than an implementation agency grinding to a halt. That may sound exaggerated. But look at the practice.
There is no shortage of plans. Nor of reports. Agreements in abundance. What is missing is the capacity to let decisions land, to let them work their way through into the lives of people who will never read a press release.
And that is where the real gap lies.
You often hear: they do not want to. But it is more honest to say: often, they cannot. That difference matters. Because unwillingness suggests bad intentions. Incapacity points to something else: a lack of administrative capacity, insufficient knowledge of how policy translates into execution, too little attention to what happens after the signatures are set.
Making decisions is relatively simple. Making sure they are carried out is work.
And work demands something that has become rarer: discipline, consistency, backing people up when it gets uncomfortable. This is where a cognitive dissonance arises that is rarely named out loud. We say we want decisiveness, but we mostly reward self-promotion. We say execution should be central, but political debate revolves around image. We say the Netherlands deserves stable governance, but we accept that coalitions fracture at the first real strain.
That grinds. And people feel it, even if they cannot put it into policy terminology.
You can blame the system. Too many parties. Too fragile majorities. A permanent campaign. There is truth in that. But it is too easy. Systems create incentives. People make choices. Leaders choose how they spend their time, on debates or on departments, on image or on execution, on short-term applause or on long-term support. Those choices seem small. But they accumulate.
And what accumulates becomes culture.
Culture ultimately determines whether a decision remains a press release or becomes reality. The price of continuing as things are now is not spectacular. It is creeping. More cynicism. More distance. More people shrugging at the Binnenhof.
That loss is bigger than one failed policy file. It is the loss of trust that decisions matter. And trust does not return with grand words. It returns through three simple, uncomfortable shifts.
Start with execution, not with vision. Ask first: who is going to do this, with what resources, within what timeframe? If that is not clear, the plan is paper, however ambitious it sounds.
Give backing when it hurts. Decisions that affect no one do not exist. Whoever backs down at the first headwind teaches their organisation that avoiding risk is safer than taking responsibility, and that lesson is learned faster than any other.
Measure what actually happens. Not what was announced. Not what was politically agreed. But what citizens notice in their daily lives, long after the cameras have switched off.
That sounds almost banal. But it is precisely what is missing.
You could say this is too unambitious. That the Netherlands needs major transitions. That there must be vision. That is true. But vision without the capacity to execute only widens the disappointment. Grand words make the gap bigger when they fail to land, because they raise an expectation that execution then cannot fulfil.
Perhaps that is the real choice every new cabinet faces. Not: how do we transform the Netherlands in a hundred days? But: can we show once more that the machinery of state can finish something? Make a decision. Execute it. Report on it honestly. And correct course without losing face. That is less spectacular than a historic change of direction. It is also harder, because it demands something rarely visible: administrative maturity. The willingness to score less and carry more. To react less and persevere more.
The child on the bicycle does not know what that building is. That is not the problem. The problem arises if, twenty years from now, that child still believes what happens inside makes little difference.
You can keep feeding the cynicism. Or you can prove that decisions have meaning. That choice does not lie with the system. It lies with the people who start tomorrow. And with what they then actually do.
Notes for further reading:
- Mark Bovens & Paul 't Hart, Understanding Policy Fiascoes (1996, Transaction Publishers). On the difference between political image-making and actual policy execution in democratic systems.
- Donald Kettl, The Politics of the Administrative Process (2020, CQ Press). On the tension between political visibility and administrative capacity to execute.
- Chris Argyris & Donald Schön, Organizational Learning: A Theory of Action Perspective (1978, Addison-Wesley). On the gap between stated intentions and actual behaviour within organisations and institutions.
- Mariana Mazzucato, Mission Economy: A Moonshot Guide to Changing Capitalism (2021, Allen Lane). On the necessity of execution capacity as a condition for realising major public ambitions.
- Francis Fukuyama, Political Order and Political Decay (2014, Farrar, Straus and Giroux). On how administrative institutions can gradually lose their capacity to function, even without formal democracy itself being at risk.