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Earlier this week, I joined the kickoff meeting for the second cohort of California’s Governor’s Innovation Fellows Program. I already knew about the fellowship program. But, it was the first time for me seeing how the program runs internally. The team at the California’s Office of Data and Innovation (ODI) ran an informal and collaborative workshop. Just see how staff are represented on the website. This is not a regular government team. What stayed with me was the program’s underlying theory of change. There’s a growing narrative that government becomes more effective and impactful by becoming smaller, by cutting staff, automating judgment, or assuming efficiency will follow from fewer people (think of DOGE). It’s a familiar logic: move fast, cut deep, simplify. The Innovation Fellows Program also wants to increase the government impact. But, it is built on a very different premise. Instead of shrinking government, it invests in the people already inside it. Fellows remain embedded in their agencies, working on live priorities while learning new ways to define problems, test ideas, use data responsibly, and collaborate across silos. This isn’t about disruption for its own sake. It’s about strengthening the capacity of government to learn and deliver. Listening to reflections from the first cohort, a few patterns kept surfacing. First, clarity. Fellows talked about getting sharper on what they were actually trying to change. That is moving from broad intentions to more precise outcomes they could design and measure against. Second, trade-offs. Progress required naming hard choices explicitly: speed versus rigor, ambition versus feasibility, innovation versus institutional reality. Not avoiding those tensions, but working through them, and, making hard choices. Third, trust. Again and again, Fellows pointed to relationships — with colleagues, leadership, partners, and communities — as the condition that made implementation possible. Trust wasn’t a soft add-on; it was the infrastructure that allowed ideas to move.
None of this works without an enabling environment. The fellowship (and ODI) provide leadership support, protected time, shared language, and permission to learn. I’m grateful to be supporting this year’s Fellows as an executive coach, and just as grateful for the chance to learn alongside them. While I am still learning about my own role, I hope to help create space for reflection, sense-making, and honest conversations about impact, constraints, and choices. At a moment when many argue that government needs fewer people, this program is testing a different bet, which I appreciate: That better government comes from better-supported public servants, equipped with clarity, trusted relationships, and the ability to navigate trade-offs. The program is improving government from the inside out.
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