Hostility, resistance, complexity, anxiety: these are the four forces that obstruct anyone innovating inside a complex organization, and that I group in the book under the acronym O.R.C.A. Here I focus on the last one.
A necessary premise: the anxiety I'm describing has nothing to do with the clinical kind. I mean the uncertainty and unpredictability that come, by definition, with doing something that didn't exist before. Eliminating them is impossible; being prepared for them is not. In small doses that apprehension is even useful: it keeps attention high, pushes you to prepare better, reduces mistakes. The trouble starts when it becomes chronic and eats into your ability to decide — which may be the most valuable skill an innovator has. So I distinguish two kinds:
Functional anxiety. The kind that helps you assess risk with clarity, prompting critical analysis and careful planning.
Paralysing anxiety. The kind that freezes you: inaction, and decisions taken out of fear of consequences rather than for the value of the innovation.
If we're going to feel anxious — and in innovation we will — better the sort that pushes us to do better than the sort that stops us.
In the public sector the pressure has a quality all of its own. Every decision touches a great many people — tens of millions, in the most nerve-wracking cases — and when something fails the bill isn't measured in lost revenue, as it would be in a private company, but in concrete problems in people's lives. Add a culture built to minimise risk, where any deviation from the status quo must be justified simply for existing, plus the permanent magnifying glass of media, politics and public opinion. Do well, and your work is minimised or taken for granted; get it wrong, and you're in the stocks. Across my projects at INPS I met this apprehension in three precise forms.
First form: public exposure
When the Sirio design system was released, INPS was in the thick of deploying its share of Italy's Recovery Plan funds: dozens of digital services being redesigned simultaneously, all funded, monitored, high priority — and all meant to use Sirio as their foundation. In parallel we were working on the new institutional portal: the most criticised and most closely watched touchpoint in the entire public system, and in practice the living illustration of the very problems Sirio set out to solve. The decision was to adopt the design system there, immediately. Sirio, in other words, was launched in the middle of the arena, at the most delicate moment and under the brightest lights.
There was a further layer: the personal one. Sirio had a recognisable author, and plenty of people — inside and outside the Institute — knew who was driving it. In the private sector, when a project fails, the company pays the price along with a few customers. In the public sector the institution answers for it, and everyone piles on: citizens, media, colleagues, political stakeholders. When you put your name on a project like that, you're standing in the town square — knowing there will be no indulgence.
In the rebranding, exposure had a different flavour: fear of judgement on a project perceived as non-essential. The worry was being brushed aside with a "does INPS really have time to waste on a logo?". The real risk wasn't operational failure but narrative failure: that the project would be labelled useless, and that the label would stick, killing off any chance of a different idea of public identity taking root.
Second form: isolation
I don't mean lack of operational support — Sirio had a very broad base of contributors. I mean the solitude that comes when the people above you don't fully grasp what you're doing, and therefore can't appreciate its weight, its scope, its risks. Sirio was a cross-cutting transformation of design, technology, governance and communication; at the top it was often received as a technical initiative, a "tool for developers", a "graphics project". During the rebranding, the corridor version was being "the logo guy" — while the work on identity was deep and systemic, and the shorthand pulled attention away from the heart of the problem.
Carrying a change of that scale, knowing you may be the only one seeing it whole, is one of the strongest sources of anxiety for anyone genuinely innovating.
The result was a paradoxical isolation: the energy of the teams on one side, the absence of full recognition from above on the other. With two concrete fears: that the project wouldn't be protected enough the moment someone challenged it, and the daily effort of driving a systemic transformation on a mandate that, on paper, covered only a fragment of it.
Third form: discontinuity
The subtlest one: the fear of doing everything right and watching it vanish. A systemic project like a design system or a rebranding builds long-term infrastructure, but it lives in a context of frequent changes in priorities, counterparts and leadership. Every step forward carried the same question: how long will this window stay open? During the rebranding the fear materialised: the project had begun with the explicit backing of a leadership that understood its strategic value, and just as delivery started, that leadership changed. The new leaders — for entirely physiological reasons — didn't know the project deeply and struggled to recognise it as their own. We carried on with an implicit mandate and no real cover. It wasn't the fear of being left alone: it was knowing that we already were.
The strategies
Eating the elephant one bite at a time. Against the apprehension of large-scale change, the first defence is breaking the problem into its constituent parts and focusing on small, measurable increments — the principle underpinning agile culture. You avoid decision paralysis and keep motivation up, working on manageable steps instead of being crushed by the idea of one monolithic project.
A precept I'm very fond of, drawn from Eastern culture:
Face big problems lightly, and small problems with extreme care.
The wisdom lies in this: a big decision is by its nature too complex to be weighed in detail — there are too many variables, uncertainty is inevitable, and dissecting it endlessly is a sterile exercise. Better to trust instinct and the overall view. Small decisions, on the other hand, are entirely within our control, and deserve maximum care: they're the ones that determine success over the long run. And there's a bonus: making small decisions deliberately trains your ability to choose "from the gut" in the big situations. Yes, instinct can be trained.
Citizens as super-sponsors. Government exists to serve people, and keeping the public benefit in focus reduces the fear of failing, of being challenged, of being left unsupported. Measuring the benefits and — above all — communicating them publicly turns citizens into a genuine super sponsor: a kind of natural sedative against organizational resistance and pressure. When the value of an innovation is clear and acknowledged outside, it becomes much harder for anyone inside to delegitimise the work or throw sand in the gears. It helps against discontinuity anxiety too: sponsors change, citizens remain.
Closing
Hostility, resistance, complexity, anxiety: at the end of this series, the picture from my experience is clear. These obstacles are recurring, structural, partly predictable — and therefore navigable. Anyone expecting a linear path in public-sector innovation will be disappointed quickly. Anyone who sets off knowing what they'll meet can get through it.
The difficulties aren't incidents along the way. They are the way.