Find the Schemers

And Run the Scheme

“One must have chaos in one's self to give birth to a dancing star”
Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

“People, ideas, machines — in that order.”
Colonel John Boyd

The one is printed in some little red book and anyone can easily read it up. It also remains constant. A general is always superior to a colonel and a colonel to a captain.
The other is not printed anywhere. Nor is it even a formally organized secret society with officers and rules which you would be told after you had been admitted. You are never formally and explicitly admitted by anyone. You discover gradually, in almost indefinable ways, that it exists and that you are outside it; and then later, perhaps, that you are inside it.
C.S. Lewis, The Inner Ring

…nothing makes an org chart obsolete faster than the unequal distribution of competence. Entire offices have fallen off the org chart due to this. It is difficult to quantify “inefficiency” from an org chart alone, without understanding the people behind the org chart.
“2 years at DOE”

A wise man once said, “the meaning of life can be found in a good scheme”.¹

In every large bureaucracy, there is a network of individuals who I call “the schemers”. They are the ones who push and believe in new ideas, who have a vitality and energy within them, a vision for how things should be, despite the best efforts of a vast bureaucracy to slow and drag them down.² Every novel government delivery program, every new successful product pivot, has its origins in a good scheme.³

Now, suppose you are a new leader, brought in from the outside over a large organization. Maybe you are a political appointee new to Washington DC or a newly elected mayor with no previous governing experience. You have an agenda you want to realize but you don’t know who you can trust to realize and actually implement it. How do you harness the energy and talents latent within the large organization you are now entrusted with?

1. Find the Schemers
   For any new leadership the number one priority should be to find the schemers. They will be the ones you can work with, who can help you understand and navigate the invisible org chart, not the corporate org chart you were given on day one.
   
   In a different world, DOGE might have set out to find the schemers buried in the civil service—those already pushing toward aligned objectives. They could have mass-emailed every federal employee asking for “three ideas to make government more effective”, using that as a starting ideas list and more importantly, to identify the schemers within a bureaucracy.
   
   Another approach is to identify and bring in schemers from outside the existing bureaucracy. Dominic Cummings misfits essay is perhaps the best public example of how to attract schemers into unsexy policy jobs. By disrupting the traditional political talent pipeline, he brought in technically skilled individuals and helped position the U.K. as a first mover in AI policy. This effort sparked a chain reaction: many of those original recruits—or their recruits—now serve across science and tech policy ministries, forming a second and third generation of “misfits” who continue to shape long-term government impact.⁴

2. Build Trust and Establish Credibility
   But it is not just enough to find them. Depending on their tenure, the schemers will have seen various waves of attempts at reforms, broken promises made by new leadership, and understandably have some degree of cynicism as a result. As a result, it is important to establish trust and credibility with the schemers. You must prove that you yourself are a schemer, that you understand how to play the game, and you play to win.
   
   There is no playbook for how to do this. The misfits essay is one example of how to signal exactly to the kind of slightly contrarian person you might be looking for, but there are other ways as well. For instance, Admiral Hyman Rickover’s rise as the Father of the Nuclear Navy began with a small group of schemers. When he was sent to Oak Ridge in 1946 to study nuclear energy, the Navy had no real plan—only a vague sense that it couldn't let the Army monopolize this powerful new technology. Acting on his own initiative, Rickover identified the four other Navy officers sent to Oak Ridge and brought them under his command. He tasked them with writing technical reports on nuclear science, drawing on the cutting-edge research happening at Oak Ridge. These reports quickly became the most authoritative publications on the state of the fast-moving nuclear technology. When Rickover was later sidelined at the Navy, this group became his eyes and ears in the bureaucracy. And once he secured his role leading naval nuclear efforts, they were the first people he brought in to build his new team.

3. Empower the Schemers
   The closer the actual org chart is aligned with the invisible org chart of schemers, the better.⁵ It is of no use to identify and build relationships with the schemers inside a bureaucracy if they remain stuck in their current positions. New lines of communication and new divisions of labor must be created to harness their talents and energy. In some cases, doing a re-org that demonstrates a new understanding of who is effective within a bureaucracy is also one way to establish credibility amongst schemers.
   
   Part of Elon’s success is his ability to dynamically manage SpaceX’s org chart. During critical periods of development on the Falcon 9, path-critical teams directly reported to him. These periods of intense work were trials by fire: some left, a few were fired, but those who remained were demonstrated leaders who ascended quickly in the leadership ranks. While government organizations may not be able to command the same talent premium SpaceX is able to, there is still value in senior leadership bringing attention and focus to critical teams and quickly elevating those who demonstrate success at executing schemes.

4. Run the Schemes
   Finally, it requires courage to actually run a scheme. To do anything new and different will provoke an immune response from a bureaucracy, particularly the autoimmune antibodies known as “lawyers”.
   
   As a negative example, one can only imagine the immense disappointment of civil servants across New York when Governor Hochul arbitrarily killed congestion pricing⁶, erasing literal decades of work by various civil servants slogging through overgrown thickets of regulations. It has since been re-implemented, though with an arbitrarily worse design imposed by a politician, to still immensely popular and effective outcomes.⁷
   
   It is important to bring some nuance to the intentionally vague, connotatively defined concept of a “scheme”. An illegal scheme is illegal. A scheme that invites partisan polarization and which is ultimately overturned or later repealed, is not an effective scheme. True schemes find unique ways to cut through stakeholder disagreement and lead to enduring wins, rather than the performative appearance of action.
   
   Today, there are too few high-agency, thoughtful people embedded in the machinery of government. And voters increasingly feel that their votes do not translate to meaningful, material improvements in their lives. I am convinced that at least part of the answer is to run more schemes.
   
   Schemes are by their nature illegible, their proponents and architects unknown except to those closest. But look closely, and even now you may spot schemers laying the seeds and obtaining their “hunting licenses” for the next grand adventure.

Find the Schemers. Run the Scheme.

For all the schemers in D.C. — the real ones who get stuff done.

1. That wise man wrote a substack called Rough Drafts

2. This is presented as a static, determinist view of people, which is in tension with the idea that effective leaders raise the ambition and agency of the people who work for them. As always, the optimum lies in believing some mixture of both at different times.

3. Similarly, every good YC startup and sometimes very good steakhouses, start out as schemes.

4. The story of U.S. Digital Service and how it was founded is another excellent example.

5. It is also the case that game recognizes game, and most of the schemers within a bureaucracy know a fair amount of the other schemers.

6. Note: Kathy Hochul is also a lawyer

7. A positive example is Oaklands adoption of “tactical urbanism”