I believe that one of the principle roles of effective government is to protect and grow our common future. I believe progressive parties are the closest political affiliation for sharing this belief with me.
Breaking this down, a few key points emerge that need to be addressed.
Progress involves change, and change is inherently risky because political change cannot be predicted with absolute certainty.
This implies that rolling out a political change should be done with a lot of supporting evidence, or with other approaches like minimizing the impact of change by limiting the extent of the roll-out (only roll out to local governments). Also, change should require a roll-back plan. Similar to what's done with critical software
The future involves unpredictable catastrophic events and abject sociopolitical failure must be considered a real possibility.
This implies that states can fail. Since failure can propagate, and state failures have predictable consequences, this means that there must be a common means to identify and deal with failed states in order to ensure, in order of priority: 1) The failure does not propagate to neighboring states or localities, 2) The basic human rights of the constituents of the failed state are protected as much as possible, 3) The failed state is stabilized and given the resources to reach a minimum level of working governance as quickly as possible
Predicting the future is filled with uncertainty and requires expertise
This point has potentially drastic impacts to how we elect and evaluate our federal appointees. This needs much more thought.
Both of these points have a correlary that aids in the implementation of effective governance that can handle these points -- state size should be minimized, as this helps to contain the risk of failure.