Government is most open to change in two moments: crisis and transition. The second has characteristics of a crisis you can plan for. And it’s an underused moment to bring best practices to American government.

When engineers dig a deep hole, they pump it full of a fluid called bentonite mud. It’s a non-Newtonian fluid that at rest behaves like a solid. You can lean on it and the walls hold. But add force and it stops behaving like a solid and flows. Shut the pump off, and it’s rigid again.

Government works the same way. Most of the time it’s solid. It’s rigid, resistant, and built to run the same way the day after an election as the day before. In a democracy, steadiness is a feature. Steadiness makes governance predictable. But during a crisis, the same machinery turns to liquid. Budgets worth tens of millions or billions can get reshaped and redirected. Contracts that determine how a state buys tech for the next decade get signed. It’s during a crisis that the human systems in government are open to change to deliver clear outcomes.

During transitions the same is true…and a critical mass of agency leaders get chosen along with their teams. Then the mixture settles back into its old rigidity, and decisions that were fluid in January, when new administrations are sworn in, are far harder to revisit the following winter.

It’s an underused moment, and with thirty-six upcoming gubernatorial elections, we can seize that moment to bring the best practices to our governments.

A moment when improving state capacity is possible

Imagine arriving on your first day to run a government. Everyone is telling you something different. Half the systems don’t work the way they’re documented. The people who actually know how they work are waiting to see what you really plan to do. Voters wanted results by last Friday.

It happens on a known date, to a known person, in every state and federal transition in the country, and almost nobody prepares for it the way they’d prepare for a crisis of that magnitude.

I’ve spent most of my career on one problem: how do you bring leaders with critical, specialized skillsets into government at the moments when change is actually possible?

I worked on it early in my career, moving experienced science and tech professionals into classrooms that needed them. I worked on it with the team at Fuse Corps, pairing entrepreneurial leaders with governors and mayors. And I worked on it at the United States Digital Service, which I helped build from three people into a team of more than two hundred.

The throughline, across two decades, is that government becomes more fluid and makes real change in two moments: crisis, when a problem becomes impossible to ignore, and transition, when new leaders arrive with a mandate and a lot of ideas and a limited time to deliver. Elections are high-stakes personnel decisions that come with sometimes hundreds of additional personnel decisions within a few months. Almost everything lasting I’ve watched get built was built in one of those two windows.

A transition is like a crisis you can plan for

This is not how we normally think about it. A crisis is a hurricane or an earthquake. Transitions begin with an inauguration sitting on the calendar two years out. But look closely at what actually happens during a transition and it has nearly every indicator of a real crisis, with one crucial difference: you can see it coming.

Mikey Dickerson, Matthew Weaver and Marina Nitze, in their work on crisis engineering, lay out what actually makes something a crisis and argue that those indicators, understood well, can be turned into momentum for positive change rather than just survived. Four of the five indicators – excepting fundamental surprise – also define government transitions:

1. Fundamental surprise
2. Failure of sensemaking: “perceptions break down, existing maps and models don’t work”
3. Disruption of core functions
4. High visibility: “either internal to an organization, external to it, or both”
5. Rigid deadline or timeframe

There is a failure of sensemaking and a disruption of core functions when new leaders inherit processes and systems they may not fully understand while existing staff hold off on making key decisions until they know what the incoming priorities are. Briefing books are built to tell you what a program is meant to do, budget lines tell you where the money goes, and org charts tell you who reports to whom. The thing is, none of these tell you which system is held together by one veteran staff member nobody has met. They don’t tell you which datasets can’t be trusted, or which “modernization” attempts have been failing under the radar for years. The maps often don’t match the reality on the ground. Transition briefing books describe the government people wish existed. The real government lives in the workarounds nobody discusses unless you know to ask.

All this happens at once during the period of greatest public scrutiny and highest visibility for government. For an intense few months, internal processes and systems are being recalibrated. Where leaders are focused and how governments do the work are shifting, creating an opening to deliver better for people.

Ultimately, inaugurations are immovable deadlines: governors are sworn in, followed by cabinet officials, the clock starts, and about a hundred days later the attention starts to move on. Deadlines build momentum because the first 100 days can set the tone, culture, and approach for the next four years. Much that matters gets decided during the period of greatest public scrutiny and least institutional knowledge.

But a transition doesn’t arrive without warning. A crisis forces its hardest decisions after damage is already done. A transition creates the same opening before any damage, on a date you’ve known for years. We can glean real lessons for government transitions from the way government and leaders work in a crisis. That’s why I’ve spent a decade building and supporting teams at Tech Talent Project that recruit and plan for executive transitions long before you know who won. And I still get told this can’t be done.

It can be done: building the bench before the election

Since 2017, Tech Talent has been supporting government leaders who want to make sure government works for the people they serve, and who know that it cannot be done without a focus on outcomes and the human and tech capacity to reach those outcomes. We provide executive strategy and support, while recruiting top, public-service-oriented tech and delivery leaders for government on an ongoing basis. We do this so that when the opportunity arrives, government leaders are ready to deliver and public-service-focused tech leaders with the right skills are ready to say yes. Recruiting and hiring tech capacity in government is a real challenge, because the government and tech sectors have vastly different cultures, pay scales, expectations, jargon, and ways of attracting talent. That said, leaders want to say yes despite this, because they care deeply about their country and want to serve, so long as someone helps them cross the divide.

People are how change happens

Strip away the noise, and a government in transition does two things: it sets priorities, and it brings people in. Many a new administration has to produce a budget almost immediately, and that budget is its first real statement of priorities. The people seated in the first hundred days are the ones who will set the tone, ask the questions, and design what gets delivered for the next four years. A transition is a single moment when you can bring a group of capable tech and delivery leaders into government to support and partner with equally capable civil servants. And that’s the whole game, because people are how change actually happens.

We can argue all day about which tech modernization framework or operating model the government should adopt, and those arguments are worth having. But frameworks don’t deliver anything unless the right people are in place to implement them. Change comes from engaging and supporting people with a commitment to public service, the right skills and the right mindset, particularly in the roles that decide everything downstream: Secretaries, Undersecretaries, Directors, Chief Deputy Directors, Chief Data Officers, Chief Technology Officers, Chief AI and Privacy Officers. People who know how to build tech and how to buy it well, who can lead, who can set a vision and actually get it done, who can sit between a policy goal and the system that has to deliver it and knit the whole thing together.

A lot of what they bring can’t be written into a policy or handed off in a contract. As in a crisis, a transition is a window where the human parts of a system can be more easily changed than at any other time. It’s a time when leaders can make calls others have avoided for years and they can provide cover for hard decisions. During transition, they feel comfortable asking questions about how systems work, and they can focus resources and optimism that will dwindle over time. These determine how a team sets priorities and how it defines what success looks like.

What you can’t buy

The common objection is that a state can just buy all of this. They can hire the consultant, license the platform, or procure the AI. There’s a real and essential place for vendors – and government can only make use of the expertise it’s able to evaluate and guide. Evaluation requires in-house expertise. The fact is that vendors are in business and are pulled toward more scope and more revenue the way any business is. A state’s real defense is a public servant inside who understands tech well enough to know when that pull runs against the state’s interest in delivering for people. Otherwise, the state has no way to check the homework of the people it’s paying. The encouraging part is that the math runs strongly in the right direction. As Ann Lewis and Jen Pahlka have shown, a few million dollars spent on tech capacity can save billions in implementation costs down the line.

Senior leaders who understand how to responsibly deliver on a governor’s priorities using the tools available, and who are committed to public service, are rarer and harder to reach than most government officials expect. Senior private-sector technologists don’t read government job boards, and government job boards aren’t written in the language they’re used to applying to their work. If someone doesn’t go find them, they won’t know the job exists. The ones with the skills and experience to avoid the billion-dollar failures weren’t going to apply. They didn’t know the job existed, and the government didn’t know it needed them.

I want to be careful here. The easy version of this becomes a hero story, and the hero story is wrong and fragile and a red herring. One brilliant person dropped into a system that doesn’t give them a clear mandate, a team, or authority over decisions and budgets. It simply doesn’t solve the big problems. We know this because there are many brilliant people in the system already. Dropping in one person burns out a good person. Effective leaders have colleagues who are partners, authority, an executive who’ll back them, and real support to do the work once they’re in the building.

The biggest window in years

We’re heading into the biggest such moment in four years. Thirty-six states elect governors in 2026, and at least eighteen will seat brand-new ones. This is a kind of World Cup of transitions. And because so much of what’s possible nationally runs through the states, it sets the stage for the federal transition that follows. The non-Newtonian fluid is about to flow, and then it’s going to set. These states will make foundational decisions about technology and the people who lead it in their first hundred days, ready or not. The only question is whether we white-knuckle through chaos, or treat it the way you’d treat a crisis you could see coming, by planning for it. That’s the work, and explaining just what that takes is what we’ll explore in the coming months. In the meantime, you can read more about our work on government transitions here.