Related to a loose series on primitives for higher education. See The virtue of quick wins for the broader frame and The bundle is the challenge for the immediately preceding post on what primitives are and why they matter in higher education.

Institutions often talk themselves into waiting: waiting for consensus, waiting for the full plan, waiting until the politics are safe. In many cases the safer move is to start. A working program, even a flawed one, creates information, allies, and momentum that a plan on paper cannot. The underlying discipline is more trials per unit time, faster feedback loops, and lower ego cost per failed attempt. It can look like recklessness from outside, particularly to observers used to longer planning cycles.

Three examples show the pattern in different forms.

FDR and the Civilian Conservation Corps

In May 1932, roughly 9 months before he took office, Franklin Roosevelt gave a commencement address at Oglethorpe University in Atlanta that included the line: "The country needs and, unless I mistake its temper, the country demands bold, persistent experimentation. It is common sense to take a method and try it: If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something." Roosevelt was naming an operating discipline he intended to use, in plainer language than most candidates would risk.

The Civilian Conservation Corps is a small-scale demonstration of what the Oglethorpe speech meant in practice. FDR took office on March 4, 1933. He sent his CCC proposal to Congress within weeks. Both houses passed it quickly, and FDR signed it on March 31. The executive order creating the agency followed days later, and then the first enrollee was inducted. The first camp opened in April, less than two months after inauguration. By July 1, there were roughly 250,000 enrollees in more than 1,400 camps.

The administrative structure was a mess on paper. Multiple federal departments plus the Veterans Administration shared responsibility, with no clean lines of authority. A National Archives historian describes the approach as "pragmatic, flexible, try this, try that, make it up as you go along, and avoid too much straight-jacket precision in the drawing of lines of authority." Some of that was Roosevelt's instinct; some was the only way to launch at the speed required.

Opposition organizes faster than execution, and ideas are easier to kill before they exist than after. The speed was the methodology. A trial program with a visible camp in Virginia and 250,000 men in the field by July is harder to argue against than a position paper, even a flawed trial program. By the time critics had drafted a serious response, the CCC had constituents: enrollees, their families, the towns near the camps, the agencies running the work. Roosevelt understood that institutional momentum is built by shipping things, and that the political cover to keep iterating is something you earn by having something already running. Most of the New Deal's flagship efforts followed this pattern: messy, contested, partially flawed, but live and learning while opponents were still organizing.

The CCC ran for 9 years, until operations formally ended in 1942 after the labor force was redirected to wartime production. By then it had enrolled more than 3 million young men and built or improved hundreds of state parks on top of road, trail, and forest infrastructure that's still in use. The discipline of shipping fast didn't just produce a program; it produced a constituency that wanted the program to last, and physical capital that survived even when the institution didn't.

Operation Warp Speed

Almost a century later, the country faced another crisis in the form of COVID-19. To combat the virus, OWS took an unusual approach for governmental R&D: it backed 6 vaccine candidates in parallel, across multiple different platform technologies, with the explicit expectation that some would not work. (The support varied by candidate; Pfizer took an advance-purchase agreement rather than R&D funding, while others received development support. The portfolio framing held either way.) The portfolio logic was built into the program design: pre-purchase manufacturing capacity for candidates that might fail clinical trials, accept the financial waste, optimize for the chance that one or two would clear and could ship at scale immediately.

Two of the 6 cleared at the relevant time horizon: Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna both received emergency use authorization in December 2020. Johnson & Johnson followed in February 2021. The other 3 were costs the program had budgeted for in advance. The result was a working vaccine in roughly 12 months, against a typical development timeline of a decade or more. The methodological feature here is the willingness to spend money on candidates you expect to abandon, which is unusual in normal government procurement, where projects that don't ship are often treated as wasteful at best, scandalous at worst. Going into development, which of the 6 would be viable and which would be wasted was largely unknown, and the value of just a single success greatly outweighed the overall cost of the program. The pandemic's urgency provided the political cover to absorb visible failures, which is exactly the cover the FDR pattern depends on.

HealthCare.gov, before and after

A third useful example comes out of a crisis that was not sudden, but slow-moving and generally recognized: the growing cost of health care and the crisis of inequity in access to it.

The launch of HealthCare.gov, the most visible manifestation of the Affordable Care Act, came from a triumph of legislation but produced a disaster of implementation. The pre-launch period violated several critical implementation principles at once. According to the HHS Inspector General's case study, there was no clear leadership, no designated systems integrator, and a culture in which warnings were absorbed rather than acted on. Senate investigators wrote that CMS received 18 written warnings in the 2 years before launch and didn't postpone. Pre-launch tests with a few hundred users crashed the site; the launch went ahead anyway. There was no soft launch, no staged rollout, no fallback. One date, one bet, limited feedback loop.

The recovery, led by Mikey Dickerson and a small team of engineers from Google and the Obama campaign, looked closer to standard continuous-improvement practice, installed retroactively in a war room in Columbia, Maryland. First task: build a dashboard, because there was no way to see whether the site was up. Second: convene every contractor in one room twice a day to identify what was broken and assign ownership. Third: stop launching everything to everyone at once. Mike Abbott, who served as project manager during the surge, named the underlying mistake directly: "You never open a service like this to everyone at once. You open it in small concentric circles and expand, so you can watch it, fix it and scale it." Dickerson's own summary: "The solution to the lack of monitoring was to install monitoring. The solution to nobody being in charge was to make everybody come to the same room where we could coordinate."

The site was working by December 1. By the April enrollment deadline, 8.1 million people had registered, beating the original target of 7 million. Some code was rewritten and infrastructure rebuilt during the surge, but the larger change was in operating discipline: learn quickly from launching and improving.

The harder problem

Each of those examples is grounded in a crisis that provided some form of cover for a different type of action. The harder argument, but one I think holds frequently, is that the cover doesn't actually require an emergency.

What the cases actually share is the willingness to get started: to choose a particular objective, communicate it plainly, try multiple different approaches, and let the methodology refine the rest. That's the same move quick wins ask of institutions at a smaller scale. Don't wait for the perfect formulation of purpose. Pick something defensible, start, and let the trials sharpen what you're optimizing for. To be clear, the claim is that speed is a way of testing judgment against reality before planning becomes its own form of avoidance. Speed is not a substitute for judgment.

Primitives matter here because they make this operating discipline easier to practice when there's no emergency forcing the issue. A fully bundled institution has to make big bets. To try something new, it often has to design a whole program, secure broad internal agreement, allocate staff, defend the budget, and then wait long enough for the results to become visible. The cost of any single experiment is high, which means the institution naturally conducts fewer experiments, waits longer before launching them, and treats failure as a referendum on the whole strategy.

A primitive changes the size of the bet. A course, an exam pathway, a voucher, a tutor, a credit-transfer tool, or an advising workflow can be tried independently, combined with other pieces, and replaced if it underperforms. That makes the "take chances, move fast" posture less heroic and more operational. The institution doesn't have to predict the entire final architecture in advance, just the overall shape. It can ship one useful piece, watch how learners and partners use it, improve the piece, and then compose it into larger pathways. Primitives, in that sense, are the infrastructure that lets institutions run more trials per unit time without betting the whole system every time.

For Modern States, this is a theory of why the work can spread. A college, state system, library, employer, or learner doesn't have to adopt a complete Modern States model all at once. They can start with one primitive: use a course, promote a credit pathway, add human support around an existing CLEP route, or use the acceptance database to make options visible. Each small deployment creates information. Some versions will work better than others. Because the pieces are modular, the cost of trying is lower, the feedback loop is faster, and the path from quick win to durable pathway becomes easier to see.

Sources & references

On FDR and the CCC

• Franklin D. Roosevelt, Address at Oglethorpe University, Atlanta, Georgia, May 22, 1932. The American Presidency Project, UC Santa Barbara. Source for the "bold, persistent experimentation" quote.

• Joseph M. Speakman, "Into the Woods: The First Year of the Civilian Conservation Corps," Prologue Magazine (National Archives), Fall 2006. Source for the "37 days" framing and the "pragmatic, flexible" quote on administrative design.

• "Civilian Conservation Corps," Wikipedia. Source for July 1, 1933 enrollee count, the 9-year operational window through June 30, 1942, and the cumulative figure of more than 3 million enrollees.

On Operation Warp Speed

• GAO, Operation Warp Speed: Accelerated COVID-19 Vaccine Development Status and Efforts to Address Manufacturing Challenges (GAO-21-319, February 2021). Source for the 6-candidate, 4-platform portfolio design.

• NPR, "Pfizer's Coronavirus Vaccine Supply Contract Excludes Many Taxpayer Protections" (November 24, 2020). Source for the Pfizer advance-purchase versus R&D-funding distinction.

On HealthCare.gov, before and after

• HHS Office of Inspector General, HealthCare.gov: Case Study of CMS Management of the Federal Marketplace (February 2016). Source for the leadership, systems-integrator, and warning-absorption findings.

• Senate Finance Committee, "Senators' Report Sheds New Light on HHS' Botched HealthCare.gov Rollout" (June 2014). Source for the 18 documented warnings between July 2011 and July 2013.

• Bob Brewin, "Behind the Scenes at the HealthCare.gov Tech Surge," Nextgov (February 2014). Source for the dashboard, the contractor stand-ups, and the Mike Abbott "concentric circles" quote.

• Mikey Dickerson, "Mikey Dickerson to SXSW: Why We Need You in Government," U.S. Digital Service on Medium. Source for Dickerson's "install monitoring / same room" summary.

• Steven Brill, “Obama’s Trauma Team,” Time (February 2014). Source for Dickerson’s summary quote.

On the broader frame

• The virtue of quick wins. Institutional legitimacy as a function of delivery.

• The bundle is the challenge. Why bundled institutions struggle to run trials, and what a primitive is.