Ian D

I coach the connection between what you've decided and what your organization actually does day to day — and I've been accountable for that connection myself, at three different altitudes and in both the public and private sectors. I've spent as much time bringing government rigor into commercial work as bringing commercial agility back into government. Most executives I meet need one or the other: the operator who moves fast and can't show anyone why it worked, or the leader with immaculate process and no velocity. I've been on both sides of that trade and I know what each one costs. Where I've sat: Chief of Staff at a federal agency, appointed at the assistant agency director's request, concurrent with an operational role. GS-15 manager directing an interagency team of highly specialized officers spanning organizations with competing priorities and no common reporting chain. Making it function meant leading people I had no authority over — a skill senior leaders need whether or not the org chart hands them the authority. Vice President of a contractor supporting U.S. government programs, responsible for program management, software development, and compliance. That included taking a software team that was missing contract requirements to the second-highest output the company had ever recorded, and winning back the customer's confidence in our delivery along the way. And on the other side of the trade: embedded operating roles inside venture-backed startups, including a high-growth national security technology company, and inside a national retail enterprise. The translation isn't a theory I teach. It's the last decade of my working life. What I actually fix: the strategy is usually sound. What's hard is seeing where it stops connecting to the daily work, because in most organizations the reporting that would show it doesn't exist yet. I designed a 25,000-person workforce's phased transition to structured, tool-managed work processes with real-time OKR reporting to senior leadership — so leadership could see organizational performance instead of hearing about it in a status meeting running on last week's data. Building that visibility is where coaching starts. The AI part: you're being asked to adopt AI and be accountable for it. I build agentic systems that run in production, and I built their governance before their workflows. I'll coach you on where AI creates real leverage, where it creates unmanaged risk, and how to govern it against the goals you're already accountable for. What I work on with executives: OKR design, rollout, and tracking · annual and quarterly operating cadence · cross-functional execution and program rescue · KPI dashboards and real-time performance reporting · meeting rhythms, reporting structures, and accountability practices · workforce performance management systems · AI-enabled process and workforce system design · executive communication and influence without formal authority. How I coach: I've been doing it for twenty-four years whether or not it was called coaching — training analysts, building teams that anticipated what their customers needed before they asked, and preparing the material senior audiences act on. Translating up and down is the same skill whether the gap is seniority, expertise, or sector, and it's the one I use most. PMP · A-CSM · CSPO · Atlassian Certified