In my experience, when things blow up in private companies, upper management gets pretty directly involved in decision making. Product teams get in a room with the C-level pretty regularly, at the C-level guys are involved to the point of looking in numbers in detail

This has a few effects:

- Upper mgmt has pretty direct control over process and outcomes
- The execution layer proverbially has a "fire lit under its ***" and acts with the requisite sense of urgency

The structure of the US govt -- separation of powers, large amounts of delegation to technocratic regulators, lawmakers/execution/etc -- seems to make this kind of thing harder to do. Org design seems to discourage these kinds of "scrum sessions"

And the fact that congress/president often have no, or limited, experience in the execution layer just means that it's impossible to put together a "scrum/hack" kind of culture

You really need a culture/org design with a clear chain of command and responsibility. A culture where the leader sends a clear message to the execution layer:

"Do X. If you do X and the outcome is bad, I will take responsibility. But if you do not get X done, your ass is fired"

Much of tech and I imagine most fast-moving companies seem to have such a culture. US govt seems to have exactly the opposite

Much inspired by this great thread: https://twitter.com/patio11/status/1345143416657649664