Day One Doesn’t Exist

What California’s gubernatorial candidates still don’t understand about governing a $300 billion enterprise.

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I once stepped into a California city as its seventh city manager in two years. The city was California City, in Kern County, with a population of about 15,000 spread across more than 200 square miles of high desert, the third-largest land area of any city in the state. The mismatch tells you most of what you need to know. A small tax base, an enormous service footprint, and a council operating under a 2021 Kern County Grand Jury report that described the city’s governance as in crisis mode. By the time I arrived, the system had spent years avoiding adaptive choices, and it could no longer tolerate anyone who tried to make them. Seven managers in twenty-four months is what institutional avoidance looks like at scale, and it is the single most useful thing I learned about how government actually behaves under pressure.

I think about that experience every time I hear a candidate for Governor of California promise to be “ready on day one.”

Day one does not exist. Not in a $300 billion enterprise this complex, this expensive, and this misaligned with economic reality. The next governor will inherit a fiscal architecture that reliably generates deficits, a bureaucracy optimized for self-preservation, and a political culture hostile to the hard trade-offs required for course correction. California does not need another performer skilled at projecting readiness. It needs a governor who understands management, incentives, and results.

I have spent the better part of twenty years learning what those words mean in practice. I began studying systems thinking in 2007, during my first term on the Santa Ana City Council, and discovered Margaret Wheatley’s work in 2008. Toward the end of my council tenure I completed the Executive Leadership Program at the Harvard Kennedy School, where I picked up the formal vocabulary for what I had been doing imperfectly: adaptive leadership, the distinction between technical and adaptive challenges, the practice of treating organizations as living systems rather than machines. I have spent the years since testing those frameworks in the roles that came after, as a California Transportation Commissioner, as a Special Master, as interim city manager in California City, in other leadership work where the theory either holds up against reality or it doesn’t. Mostly it holds up. What does not hold up is the way we are currently discussing this race.

The distinction none of them are making

Ron Heifetz and Marty Linsky’s framework should be mandatory for executive candidates. Technical problems are problems where the knowledge to solve them already exists. You may need experts, you may need money, you may need coordination, but the path is known. Fixing a pothole is technical. Issuing driver’s licenses is technical. Building a bridge is technical.

Adaptive challenges are different. The problem itself is contested. The people affected must change, not just their behavior but their expectations, their loyalties, their sense of what is possible. There is no expert who can hand you the answer because the answer has to be built, in public, through the messy work of negotiating loss. Adaptive work asks people to give something up.

California’s core failures (housing affordability, homelessness, climate resilience, fentanyl deaths, the broken fiscal relationship between the state and its cities and counties) are adaptive. They cannot be solved with faster permitting, more dashboards, or another layer of oversight. They require accepting losses, renegotiating entrenched interests, and sustaining conflict long enough for new equilibria to form.

And yet the state defaults, year after year, to technical theater. New programs. Compliance regimes. Bureaucratic expansion. The machinery grows heavier. Outcomes stagnate. Housing production remains anemic despite massive spending. Homelessness persists amid record budgets. Costs per unit soar under the weight of regulatory friction we keep adding. This is not ideology and it is not bad faith. It is a category error, repeated for decades, by people who believe they are being responsible.

The question I want a candidate to answer: which of the challenges you have named are adaptive, and which are technical, and how will you tell the difference when you are in the chair? I have not heard one of them gesture at this distinction.

A system that rejects leadership

Back to those seven city managers in two years. Adaptive leadership theory predicts exactly that pattern. Prolonged avoidance of hard choices leaves an organization unable to tolerate the very leadership it needs. The system develops antibodies against people who try to surface what it has worked so hard to bury. The manager who asks the real question gets ejected, and the manager who arrives next learns from the body count what not to say.

Margaret Wheatley, whose work I first encountered in 2008, has been writing about this dynamic for forty years, and her central argument has aged into something close to prophecy. She insists, against the dominant management paradigm of her lifetime, that organizations are not machines. They are living systems. You cannot engineer them. You can only create the conditions in which they can be healthy, or fail to.

In Leadership and the New Science, and more pointedly in her later work, Wheatley argues that the obsession with control, measurement, and prediction, the entire managerial inheritance we got from Frederick Taylor and never quite outgrew, is precisely what makes large organizations brittle, demoralized, and incapable of responding to genuine complexity. Staff protect turf over mission. Information flow gets choked. Compliance replaces judgment. And compliance does not solve adaptive problems.

California’s state apparatus, vastly larger and more entrenched than any city I have worked inside, risks the same pathology at scale. A governor who arrives with slogans rather than a theory of change will not transform the system. The system will absorb the governor, the way it has absorbed many before.

Wheatley’s prescription is harder than it sounds. Build trust. Convene honest conversation. Let local knowledge actually shape decisions. Protect the people below you who are willing to tell the truth. Accept that you cannot know the answer in advance and that your job is to create the conditions in which the answer can emerge. Show me a candidate for Governor who talks like that, and I will show you someone who has actually done the work.

The systems thinking they claim but rarely practice

Candidates routinely say they “think in systems.” Evidence suggests otherwise.

I have been working with these tools since 2007, when I first encountered Donella Meadows and Peter Senge during my early years on the council. Genuine systems thinking, in their tradition, confronts uncomfortable mechanics. Structure drives behavior. Delayed feedback produces overshoot and collapse. Local optimization destroys overall value. The actor who appears to be the problem is usually responding rationally to incentives the system itself created.

Applied to California state government, this means understanding that CalHHS, HCD, CDSS, and Cal OES are not a team. They are nodes in a network with their own histories, their own legislative champions, their own union relationships, their own data systems that do not speak to each other. A fifty-point plan unaccompanied by a map of real decision rights and leverage points will generate executive orders that vanish into institutional sand.

When I served as interim city manager in California City, the first thing I learned was that the org chart was a fiction. The real decision rights lived somewhere else: in long-tenured staff who had outlasted three managers before me, in the union steward who knew which grievances were worth filing, in the department head who had a private line to a particular councilmember and would route around me when it suited them. Until I mapped that actual network, every directive I issued was wasted breath. The same dynamic operates at the state level, only the network is bigger, older, and more entrenched, and the consequences of failing to see it are correspondingly larger.

A systems-literate governor would ask where actual decision rights sit, where the leverage points are, which incentives produce persistent dysfunction, who profits from the status quo, what losses each adaptive challenge demands, and what is realistically achievable in a high-cost state facing structural deficits. These are operational questions. Few candidates are engaging them, because operational questions do not poll well and do not generate soundbite clips.

The fiscal reality no one is discussing

California faces a fiscal reckoning beyond cyclical noise. The nonpartisan Legislative Analyst’s Office projects an $18 billion budget problem for 2026–27 even after recent revenue gains, and structural deficits approaching $35 billion annually starting in 2027–28. Much of the recent upside is tied to volatile capital gains and an overheated stock market, which the LAO has cautioned will not persist.

This is not a temporary shortfall and it is not a pandemic artifact. It is structural. Spending growth has outpaced revenue capacity, locked in by commitments and constitutional mandates. Meadows would call it a system producing exactly the behavior observed. Conventional responses, including cuts, freezes, and reorganizations, fail because the culture has grown brittle. Leaders who dodge necessary losses get ejected.

There is no credible path through pure cuts without harming core services, no credible path through pure tax increases without accelerating the out-migration of high earners and businesses, no credible path through endless borrowing without mortgaging the future. The only durable option is redesigning incentives, obligations, and architecture, which is, by definition, adaptive work.

No candidate I have heard articulates a management philosophy capable of operating inside these constraints. They are running on the language of an era of abundance that ended several budget cycles ago, and the electorate is being asked to choose among visions that the fiscal reality cannot fund.

What day one should actually mean

Serious readiness for this role would look nothing like campaign choreography. It would look like a transition spent mapping the actual decision rights and power centers across the agencies the next governor will inherit, not the org charts. It would look like a candidate who can already distinguish, in public, which of California’s challenges are adaptive and which are technical, and who has a theory of how to lead each kind of work differently. It would look like a quantification of losses and trade-offs for each major issue, especially housing, where regulatory accretion drives the cost curve, and a willingness to name those losses out loud, before the election rather than after.

It would look like a team assembled for candor over loyalty. A chief of staff who will tell the governor the truth. A cabinet that knows the difference between a technical fix and an adaptive intervention. A management philosophy articulated clearly enough that the people who will execute it can recognize whether they are doing it or not.

And it would look like a candidate who has made peace with the fact that the things they most want to be remembered for will not be finished by the time they leave office. Adaptive work runs on a longer clock than political careers. The governors who matter most in retrospect are the ones who started something the next three governors had to keep building.

The question voters should be asking

If I had thirty seconds with a debate moderator before the next forum, here is the question I would hand them.

You have all said you will be ready on day one. Describe your management style in one sentence. Then name one challenge facing California that you believe is genuinely adaptive, meaning the answer is not yet known and will require Californians themselves to change, and tell us how you will lead that work differently from how you would lead a technical problem.

I do not expect a good answer. I would settle for evidence that the question has been considered.

Because here is what I know, after nearly two decades of working with these frameworks, twelve years in elected office, and a series of leadership roles since that have tested the theory against the practice: the gap between our public conversation about governing and the actual work of governing has become dangerous. We are electing people to steward living systems and evaluating them as if they were running campaigns. The two skill sets are not the same. They are barely related.

California does not need a governor who is ready on day one. It needs a governor who understands that day one is the day the real work begins, that the work is harder than the campaign, and that the people doing it deserve leadership that can tell the difference between a problem with a known answer and a problem we will have to learn our way into together.

Marty Linsky, who shaped much of my thinking on this work, put it more plainly than I can.

“In the face of adaptive pressures, people don’t want questions; they want answers. They don’t want to be told that they will have to sustain losses; rather, they want to know how you’re going to protect them from the pains of change”.

That is the trap. Every candidate in this race is offering protection from change in a state whose fiscal and structural reality demands the opposite. The voter who understands this, and who chooses on that basis rather than on which candidate sounds the most ready, will have done more for California than any campaign will.

That is the standard. I am still waiting for a candidate to meet it.