Are they strong? Are they effective in observing and transmitting the right values, specifically the core values that our society must cling to, no matter what? Are they capable of reaching the appropriate standards, particularly those that law and the demands of social order, ethics, and social responsibility may set?

These questions need to be addressed to every crucial institution in our society. Are our families strong and united, or are family bonds fraying and weakening? What about our schools: Are they equipping our young with the wherewithal for facing up to the multiple challenges of life here in our land or anywhere else? How about our governance units: How able are they to live up to the straightforward demands of public governance?

Just posing these questions would already give us leads to answers. And the answers that factually come to the fore would naturally lay out the enormous task we have at hand. We do have to empower all the institutions that are crucial to our task of further building our nation! We have to significantly raise their internal capacity to perform the tasks entrusted to them!

In this regard, professional standards have to be set at a high level. These need to be aligned with global best practices and with generally accepted standards. All these require skills, knowledge, attitudes, as well as codes of proper and ethical practices. Moreover, the levels demanded of these professional requirements keep rising: These are in almost continuous process of being upgraded and renewed (and checked for consistency with core principles and values). Therefore, our different institutions need to provide continuing opportunities (let alone seizing these opportunities themselves) for catching up with higher and more demanding levels.

It is not enough, however, to keep up with higher professional standards. It is also necessary to ensure that at the end of the day, our different institutions deliver the outcomes expected of them. This would require constant tinkering with improvements in organization: How teamwork is actually lived; how coordination is tightly secured; how commitment to a common goal is deepened and spread; how performance is regularly evaluated; how resolutions for achieving higher levels of effectiveness are relentlessly carried out.

Thus, the internal capacity perspective highlights the professional and organizational dimensions of our key institutions in society. It points to the outcomes they are capable of delivering. It opens up a broad field where attention, efforts, and resources would need to be directed: This is the field where we can push actual use of existing internal capacity closer to the potential. More importantly, there is the even more important challenge of raising the potential itself.

In this field, there is no shortage of exhilarating possibilities, more than a few of which may well be realistic and well within reach.