There is a form of anxiety that anyone innovating in the public sector knows well, and that rarely gets told. In a context where leadership changes often and abruptly, following the political orientation of the moment, every long-term project lives with a question that never goes away: how long will this window of possibility stay open? A design system, a rebranding, a new organizational function are infrastructures that take years. And it takes very little for the energy to dissipate: a key person changing role, a political line redirected, a board renewed almost entirely.
Not the anxiety of failing to build, but that of building — and then watching all the work come undone.
I have gone through more than one complete change at the top of the Institute with projects open on the table. From that, a few concrete strategies — none infallible, all replicable.
The launched ship
When governance changes, a project that received the direct endorsement of the previous leadership becomes instantly suspect: to the new leaders it can look like an expression of the "previous crowd", to be eyed with suspicion or, more simply, ignored. This is exactly what happened to the INPS rebranding, at the worst possible moment: the project was explicit, visible, potentially divisive, and had no spontaneous internal momentum to sustain it.
The strategy we adopted was pragmatic, on two tracks. On one side, showing that much was still to be done — and therefore steerable according to the new directives: the project could be modulated, adapted, made their own. On the other, highlighting the quantity and, above all, the quality of the work already delivered: nobody could have started from zero and achieved a comparable result in a reasonable time. In other words, the ship had already been launched and was in the water:
You could repaint it a different colour, but you certainly wouldn't haul it back into the shipyard.
It worked. A potential disengagement turned into continuity. The lesson: when you smell a change at the helm coming, push the project past the point where redoing it costs more than finishing it — and always leave the new leadership something real to decide.
Seeding: the Missionaria Protectiva
The second strategy works even further upstream: seeding a project's principles into the strategic documents before the project even exists. With the Institute's first leadership there was a direct, informal relationship, and that closeness made it possible to contribute to the drafting of the steering documents — such as the three-year ICT Plan — writing the principles of the Experience Authority into them while the Authority was still just an idea. So when the proposal finally reached the table, it emerged as a need already recognized in the official texts: the natural concretization of priorities the Institute had already made its own.
For science-fiction lovers, the comparison is with the Missionaria Protectiva in Dune: the religious force that seeded myths and beliefs across the Empire's planets far in advance, so that one day they could be "activated" in support of a larger design. The principle is the same: prepare the context so that, when the moment comes, what you propose finds fertile ground already waiting. One caveat: an operation of this kind is possible only when the leadership already shares, at least in part, the vision you intend to propose. And when the chance to contribute to those documents shows up, seize it decisively: being recognized as a competent, reliable contributor to steering documents means building consensus in advance for every future initiative.
Beware, though: seeding has its limits. In large organizations, a radical change of leadership tends to reset even strategic lines that have just been launched. The prepared ground loses part of its force — never all of it, but part of it, yes.
Sponsorship, conquered twice
And indeed, at the crucial moment — just as the Experience Authority proposal was about to receive formal authorization — the leadership changed. A clean break, which wiped out in one stroke the whole history of relationships and months of patient groundwork. The new leaders did not know the journey, had not taken part in its genesis, and had no sensitivity to the subject yet.
With the new setup, the playing field changed too: the direct, informal relationship had given way to a more articulated decision chain, made of steps, filters and new priorities. This demanded a mediated sponsorship, built through bridge figures who were already recognized and authoritative. The goal was to create the conditions for the project to be perceived as useful, mature and consistent with the new direction — plugging into the existing mechanisms of trust, rather than attempting a personal contact that no longer existed.
There was also an intelligent compromise: the IT area feared a new layer of control capable of slowing down releases, so the proposal was reframed as a support and coordination service. The directorates involved were able to present it jointly, as a collaborative initiative. That internal alignment made the difference: a project perceived as shared — rather than divisive — gets heard far more easily.
A precious side effect: the Authority's approval worked as a "foot in the door" for the rebranding itself. If the new leadership authorized a function in charge of writing and enforcing the guidelines, it was implicitly accepting the new brand as the foundation of those rules. A personal sponsorship converted into institutional recognition: from that moment on, the project could walk on its own legs.
Maintaining the support
Sponsorship — the fuel, in the terminology of the three tools for crossing the desert — has another inconvenient property: it burns off. Once the founding act is obtained, the work starts again: periodic updates on results, backed by numbers, to show leadership that the function generates value. In a context where priorities shift quickly, numbers anchor the perception of value to something objective and hard to dispute. Periodic reporting looks like bureaucracy; it is maintenance of support.
The price, and why it is worth paying
One last thing, the hardest to accept. Winning back support may mean sacrificing part of the project's integrity, or of its initial vision, for the sake of the goal that matters most: bringing it to completion and guaranteeing its continuity. To those who object that this betrays the innovation, I answer that it protects it from the worst possible risk: remaining unfinished and going back to square one — into the drawer. Doing without a sponsor is possible only in rare cases, when a project has grown roots so deep that it moves on by inertia — it partly happened with Sirio. For everything else, surviving the change at the top is a competence to be designed in from day one.