To enact change without a budget or mandate, focus on empowering long-term civil servants. These often-overlooked employees possess deep institutional knowledge and, when given ownership, become powerful allies for creating sustainable, multi-year collaborations.
To overcome resistance in a large organization, avoid introducing new goals. Instead, analyze existing priorities and budgets, then position your initiative as a tool that helps stakeholders achieve what they are already tasked with accomplishing. This is the only workable model in a resistant environment.
To generate enthusiasm for new projects, create an event featuring a renowned expert like Nobel laureate Danny Kahneman. By making a completed project proposal the 'admission ticket' to the meeting, you can leverage the expert's star power to incentivize the otherwise tedious work of project planning.
When introducing experimentation, the most significant outcome isn't the initial metric lift but the cultural shift. Getting a department to run its first-ever randomized trial builds the technical apparatus and cultural buy-in for future, more ambitious testing, a victory worth celebrating regardless of the result.
Don't dismiss small-scale pilot projects with modest results. A small but successful intervention, even one yielding a minor percentage point gain, can generate crucial data and build institutional support. This momentum can then be leveraged to achieve larger, systemic changes, such as altering a program's default settings.
When building an initiative within a political or corporate structure, anticipate leadership changes. To ensure longevity, embed your team in a stable, nonpartisan part of the organization (like the General Services Administration) rather than a more transient, political office (like the White House).
To increase program participation, reframe the language from passive eligibility to active ownership. Reminding people they have 'earned' a benefit through their service triggers the endowment effect, making them more likely to value and claim it. This simple change led to a 9% uptake increase among veterans.
Tying your self-worth to a single job is risky due to what psychologists call 'identity foreclosure.' A more resilient approach is to build your identity around broader personality traits, mindsets, and activities you enjoy. This allows you to find fulfillment across many different roles and unexpected life changes.