Handcuffing Ourselves: Why Government Doesn’t Innovate — and How It Can

By Nick Nicholas, Police Captain, Public Safety Executive, and PhD Student, Drucker School of Management

This article is adapted from Nick Nicholas’s TEDxClaremontGraduateUniversity talk, “Handcuffing Ourselves: Why Government Doesn’t Innovate (and What We Can Do About It),” delivered at Claremont Graduate University.

Most people will never carry a pair of handcuffs in their lives. I have carried them on my belt for years. They are heavy, cold, and built for one purpose: to restrict movement when safety is on the line.

Over time, I started noticing another kind of restraint, one that does not lock around wrists. It locks around ideas.

Now, as a police captain and executive leader, I think about safety differently than I did as a patrol officer. It is not just about responding to harm. It is about preventing it, building trust, and ensuring our organizations can deliver essential services when it matters most. Yet in the work of leading and improving public institutions, I often feel like I am carrying a different set of handcuffs: policies, processes, legacy systems, and cultural habits that trap good ideas, stall change, and quietly make innovation feel impossible.

That matters because the world outside government is moving faster. Public expectations are higher, challenges are more complex, and threats evolve quickly, while many of the systems we rely on are still calibrated for stability above all else. Innovation in government should not be rare. It should be routine.

The Experience Gap

Most of us have felt the gap between what we know is possible and what we actually experience when we interact with government. It shows up in everyday moments: renewing a license, applying for a permit, requesting a repair, navigating a form, or just trying to reach the right department for a basic question.

Too often, it feels slow, unclear, and fragmented, as if the process is designed for the system rather than the public. The biggest difference is visibility. In many public processes, people are left guessing what is happening, when it will happen, and who owns the next step. Timelines are vague, updates are limited, and the work feels out of reach.

That uncertainty is not just inconvenient. It erodes confidence, accountability, and trust.

Now compare that to how the private sector has trained our expectations. We can order a car in minutes, track a package in real time, and resolve many customer service problems in a few taps. When a system is designed around the customer, friction is treated as failure, something to remove through better design and clearer communication.

When a system is designed around scrutiny, friction becomes protection. The problem is that what government may see as safeguards, the public experiences as barriers.

Government does not compete against other agencies. It competes against the customer experience people live with everywhere else.

Inside Government, the Gap Feels the Same

From the inside, this rarely comes down to effort or commitment. Most public employees care deeply and want to do meaningful work. The problem is the structure they are trapped in.

Private systems are built to serve the customer. Government systems are built to survive scrutiny — and there are good reasons for that. Public money demands accountability. Public power requires transparency, safeguards, and consistency. Those guardrails protect people, especially the most vulnerable.

But over time, protections can harden into a default mindset that treats change as danger. The safest decision becomes doing nothing. And at that point, the institution is not protecting the public. It is protecting process.

A simple example illustrates the pattern. In many agencies, a procurement decision that would take days in the private sector can take months in government, even for a straightforward purchase. The delay is rarely about the product. It is about fear: moving too fast, being second-guessed, or what happens if anything goes wrong.

That fear carries a cost — not just in efficiency, but in morale, momentum, and whether the public experiences government as responsive.

Why Government Struggles to Innovate

It is tempting to reduce this topic to a single word: bureaucracy. But that is too simple. The causes are specific, and they overlap.

Layered accountability becomes layered paralysis.
Government is built on layers meant to ensure accountability, prevent corruption, and create checks and balances. The problem is that those layers can slow decisions to a crawl. When everything requires multiple reviews, approvals, and sign-offs, the organization becomes slower than the world it serves. Risk avoidance takes over. Innovation becomes secondary, then optional. Systems stagnate.

The headline problem.
In many public environments, mistakes do not stay internal. A misstep can become a headline, fuel political opposition, and jeopardize careers. That reality shapes behavior. Even leaders who want to improve systems learn to ask first: will this create controversy? If it might, the safer path is the status quo — a predictable response in a system that punishes visible failure more than it rewards meaningful progress.

The absence of competition.
Unlike businesses, government does not face competition in the same way. A company that fails to innovate can lose customers quickly. A public agency can remain stuck because people cannot simply choose a different provider for essential services. That does not mean government should chase profit. It means improvement requires deliberate leadership.

Misaligned incentives.
At the core, incentives often work against innovation. Stability is rewarded. Change is punished. Budgeting can become defensive, because unspent dollars can be treated as proof they were unnecessary. Fear is not a strategy, but it can quietly become one.

These patterns are not accidental. They are structural. And they are exactly the kinds of management challenges Peter Drucker spent his life studying — how institutions drift, how incentives shape behavior, and how leaders must deliberately redesign systems if they want different results. The issue is not whether government cares. It is whether it is designed to adapt.

Drucker’s Planned Abandonment: The Discipline of Letting Go

Government is also vulnerable to sunk costs. Once something is funded and established, it tends to continue, even when its value fades. When you ask why a policy or workflow exists, the answer is often: because that is the way we have always done it. The result is a system that defends the past more easily than it designs the future.

My time at the Drucker School has not just given me theory. It has given me language and discipline for what I have lived — a way to analyze institutions systematically, not just experience them operationally. It has forced me to step back from the urgency of daily leadership and examine the architecture behind it.

This is where Peter Drucker offers something government needs more of: a disciplined way to let go.

Drucker’s concept of planned abandonment is straightforward and uncomfortable. It asks leaders to evaluate what they do and discontinue what no longer serves the mission. It treats time, attention, and resources as finite, and it forces clarity.

A helpful way to visualize planned abandonment is the closet problem. Most of us keep things we no longer wear because we are attached to what they once represented, or because we think we might need them someday. But if we do not make room, we cannot bring in anything new.

Public institutions face the same dilemma. Programs, policies, and systems can remain long after they stop serving the public effectively, often because keeping them feels safer than ending them. Planned abandonment shifts the question. Not how do we keep this alive, but why are we still doing this at all?

Why Patching the Future onto the Past Does Not Work

Patching the future onto the past rarely works. In government, “modernization” often means layering new tools onto old frameworks: a new portal, app, or better-looking form — a digital wrapper over workflows designed decades ago.

Those changes are not useless. They can reduce friction at the edges and feel more modern.

But they do not fix the core problem if the structure still prioritizes control over service. A clean interface cannot compensate for a process built on multiple handoffs, unclear ownership, and policies that treat delay as protection.

Real innovation requires deeper work: permission to rethink the workflow, leadership that rewards clarity over caution, and guardrails that ensure accountability without freezing action. This is not mainly a technology challenge. It is a leadership challenge.

Government cannot and should not operate exactly like a business. It carries constitutional obligations, public scrutiny, and equity responsibilities that private firms do not. The goal is not speed at any cost. It is disciplined redesign — protecting accountability while improving outcomes. Innovation in government is not about removing guardrails. It is about ensuring the guardrails do not become walls.

What Government Innovation Looks Like When It Works

Despite the challenges, government innovation is real — and the best examples are not cosmetic. They produce measurable outcomes by redesigning how services are delivered.

Denver’s approach to chronic homelessness has increasingly emphasized permanent supportive housing and strong partnerships with nonprofit providers, treating housing stability as the outcome, not simply shelter capacity as activity. When government designs around long-term results, the benefits ripple outward, easing strain on emergency systems, public safety workloads, and overall community well-being.

Chicago’s CARE program applies the same logic to certain 9-1-1 mental health calls by shifting response from police to trained public health teams when appropriate. That alignment is both more humane and often more effective: it reduces escalation, connects people to services, and allows police to focus on emergencies that truly require a police response.

San Francisco’s shift from physical parking permits to virtual, plate-based permits is a more operational example, but the impact is real. It reduces paperwork and delays, limits fraud, and improves the customer experience.

Different topics, different scale — same thread: leaders chose to redesign the system instead of maintaining it. They treated innovation as a responsibility, not a bonus.

Making Government Innovation Routine

Imagine a government that is responsive, agile, and community-centered — designed around outcomes and the lived experience of the people it serves.

That vision is achievable, but it requires leaders to confront a hard truth: the tools exist. The bigger question is whether we have the courage to let go of what is familiar, abandon what is outdated, and rebuild around people instead of paperwork.

A Practical Agenda for Public Sector Leaders

Government leaders do not need a new slogan. They need repeatable practices.

Build a culture of evaluation.
Normalize routine reviews of programs, processes, and policies as stewardship: what is working, what is not, and what consumes time without producing real value. Planned abandonment only works if leaders answer honestly and act.

Create psychological safety for improvement.
Innovation requires people to speak up. If employees believe ideas will be punished, dismissed, or buried, they stop offering them. Leaders have to protect people who challenge outdated systems and reward initiative, not just compliance.

Measure outcomes, not motion.
Outputs are easy to count. Outcomes are what the public feels: problems solved, services delivered, trust earned. If leadership measures impact, priorities become clearer, and waste becomes harder to justify.

Treat caution as a tool, not a virtue.
Government should be careful. But caution becomes harmful when it turns into paralysis. Design processes that protect accountability while still enabling action. Being careful is not the same as being stuck.

Why This Matters to the Drucker Community

Drucker’s ideas are often associated with business, but they were never meant to stay there. He saw management as a social function — the mechanism through which institutions serve society. Public agencies are among the most consequential institutions we have.

Planned abandonment is one of Drucker’s most practical contributions because it forces focus: what matters, what works, and what should end so something better can begin. In government, that is not just useful. It is necessary. Public trust is fragile, needs are complex, and resources are finite. If we do not intentionally modernize, the system will default to what it does best: protect itself.

For those who study management, government is not a side case. It is a living laboratory for values-based leadership, organizational design, and strategic clarity. The question is not whether government can innovate. It is whether leaders will make innovation routine instead of rare.

A Call to Action

If we want public institutions to earn trust in a world that is changing fast, we cannot treat innovation as a special project. It has to become part of the operating system.

If you work in government, run Drucker’s logic through your own organization. Look hard at the programs you fund, the workflows you tolerate, the committees you rely on, the reporting requirements you have normalized, and the legacy systems you keep patching. Ask whether they still serve the mission in the present tense. If they do not, ask what it would take to make space — and who needs permission to act.

If you do not work in government, remember that public institutions respond to expectations. When communities demand services that are human-centered and outcomes-driven, leaders gain the cover to modernize. When friction is accepted as normal, it becomes permanent.

And for anyone who leads — public or private — stop defending systems simply because they are familiar. Design for people, not administration. The future will not wait for our comfort, and the key is already in our hands. We have to decide to unlock the handcuffs we put on ourselves.

Watch the Talk

Nick Nicholas expands on these ideas in his TEDx talk, “Handcuffing Ourselves: Why Government Doesn’t Innovate (and What We Can Do About It).” He explores how outdated systems, fear-driven policies, and institutional inertia are handcuffing progress — and how Peter Drucker’s concept of planned abandonment offers a way forward.

 

About the Author

Nick Nicholas is a police captain, adjunct professor, and PhD student at the Drucker School of Management. His doctoral research focuses on city pride and what drives it, examining the antecedents that shape how residents feel about their city and what, if anything, public institutions can influence. In 2025, he was named to the International Association of Chiefs of Police 40 Under 40 list. He serves on several advisory boards, including the California Peace Officers’ Association and the Drucker School Advisory Board. Nick is passionate about helping public institutions lead with clarity, trust, and human-centered values.

Learn More

At the Drucker School of Management, we believe the future of management begins with better questions — and the courage to lead human-centered systems that serve real people. The Drucker School’s PhD in Management prepares scholar-practitioners to rethink institutions and redesign systems that shape society.

Explore our programs and human-centered approach.