In this paper we summarize our preliminary findings from the questionnaire survey on changes in Czech public administration. The questionnaire survey was focused especially on public authorities that exercise state administration on national and subnational levels – i.e., on ministries, agencies existing on the central level, ‘deconcentrates’ (organizations existing within hierarchies of ministries on the national and sub-national levels). Because they exercise an important amount of state administration, we distributed the survey also to employees of all municipalities with extended responsibilities (i.e., those municipalities that according to law execute the largest among of state administration from all the municipalities in Czechia). In this paper we present our overall findings on changes in the public authorities based on data obtained from 1177 questionnaires. We focus on overall findings and differences in answers across different organizations and job positions.

In recent years, many European countries, including Lithuania, have encountered such transboundary crises (Boin, 2019) as the COVID-19 pandemic or the still ongoing crisis of security and energy. As these crises overlap in time and space and are characterised by negative complementarities and synergies, they can be analysed as a single poly-crisis. Although individual specifics of (national) crisis management are well known, our knowledge about interconnected transboundary crises remains shallow (Homer-Dixon et al., 2022; Anghel and Jones, 2023). Therefore, it becomes important to analyse not only the management of such crises in all stages but also their multiple effects on national administrations.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how governments and public sector organisations respond to poly-crises that entail multiple and overlapping events during all stages of crisis management. We are interested in matching new operational practices of public-sector governance with more long-term strategic decisions of national authorities (Ansell et al., 2022), as well as determining any differences across different policy domains.

Focusing on Lithuania, our research draws on a few case studies on the country’s response to the recent poly-crisis primarily encompassing the COVID-19 pandemic and the migration crisis. Our research is based on the methodology of process tracing to assess the effects of multiple and overlapping crises that took place in the fields of public health and migration during the period of 2020-2023.

The preliminary results of our research show that in reaction to different crises the Lithuanian authorities adopted a mix of operational responses and strategic decisions. When the individual crises amplified/accelerated and/or spilled into different domains, the Lithuanian authorities introduced more centralised and inter-institutional coordination arrangements. Also, during the crises and particularly in their aftermath the country’s authorities adopted some strategic decisions in the fields of public/personal health, as well as to the migrants’ infrastructure and their accommodation facilities. The main result of the poly-crisis in the country was the emergence of a new crisis and emergency management system, centred around a new National Crisis Management Centre (NCMC) within the Government Office.

Marin’s government (2019–2023) reshaped Finland’s regional government into a new kind of regional administration led by an elected regional council responsible for governing 21 well-being counties. This historic reform was carried out in reaction to the population's aging, the declining of the support ratio, the deterioration of the service system, and the financial crisis. The reform was implemented at a time when Europe was shaken by the Covid crisis and Russian invasion in Ukraine. However, the influence of turbulence and a complex operating environment on reform implementation was not considered during the reform's preparation, decision-making, and implementation.

The complexity of well-being counties can be structured by dividing it into four dimensions as follows: 1) structural complexity arises from the interaction relationships between public, private, and third sector actors, 2) functional complexity denotes to the need to balance between different institutional logics, 3) regulatory complexity stems from conflicting power and responsibility relations, accountability pulling in different directions, complex service processes, and the ambiguity in steering and 4) ideological complexity arising from the reconciliation of different and contradictory political goals and values. Due to complexities, it is not surprising that the reform is still in progress despite targeted investments. On the other hand, if we accept the idea of the well-being county as a complex system, it provides an opportunity for an interpretation where reform is seen both as a goal and as a characteristic of the system. Rather than being, what is perhaps more essential is the change.

The task of developing a complexity evaluation model for change management was assigned to the University of Vaasa in order to support the top-management of the Wellbeing Services County of Ostrobothnia (WSCO) (one of the new well-being counties) in evaluating and understanding the systemic dynamics of the transformation process and designing the complexity leadership model for guiding the change process.

In the paper, we discuss the main parameters of the Complexity Assessment Model (COMPAS), the model's design and testing processes, as well as the model's implementation and early adaption experiences. We link our research to the broader concepts of polycrisis governance and complexity leadership. Based on the most recent governance research, we also critically examine the model's limits and represent the tension between self-organization and complexity leadership.