One thing I learned the hard way at PACOM, and that no one tells you when you’re put in charge of transforming an organization, is how to use your knowledge and experience to get everyone moving in the same direction.
Nobody hands you a manual for that part. You can be handed a mandate, a budget, a modernization roadmap, and a stack of slides explaining why change is necessary. None of it matters if the people doing the work don’t believe in where you’re taking them. Strategy is the easy part. Alignment is the hard part.
I’ve had time to reflect on what worked, what didn’t, and what I’d do differently. What follows are the five biggest lessons I took away from changing culture and modernizing an organization at PACOM. I earned them the hard way in a military context, but I’ve found they apply just as directly in the private sector, and I lean on every one of them today at Shield AI.
Transformation Is a People Problem First
Every organization, no matter the size, has stakeholders across Finance, Operations, Legal, Human Resources, and a dozen other functions. Each group has its own priorities, vocabulary, pressures, and way of measuring success. When you set out to transform the organization, you aren’t transforming one thing. You’re transforming all of those things at once, and they’re all connected.
That’s why I’ve come to believe transformation across departments has to be three things at the same time: fair, sequential, and simultaneous.
Fair, because if one department feels it’s carrying the burden of change while another gets a pass, you lose trust immediately. People will tolerate a lot of disruption if they believe everyone is in it together.
Sequential, because some changes depend on others. You can’t modernize a planning process if the underlying personnel, logistics, and budget processes are still broken. Order matters.
Simultaneous, because you can’t afford to fix one department, then move to the next, then the next. By the time you finish, the first one has drifted back to its old habits. The organization has to move together, even if individual pieces land in a deliberate order.
Holding those three ideas in tension is a transformation leader's real job. And it only works if the entire organization believes in the direction you’re heading.
That last point is critical. If you want people to move in a certain direction, they have to buy in, not just comply. Compliance gets you through an inspection. Belief gets you through the hard months when the new system isn’t working yet, and the old one is gone. Detractors are the enemy of change. A handful of influential skeptics can quietly stall an initiative that looks great on paper. The goal isn’t to steamroll them. It’s to understand them well enough to bring them along, or at least ensure their concerns are heard and addressed.
This applies whether you’re in the public or private sector. A combatant command and a fast-growing defense technology company look very different from the outside. From the inside, the human dynamics of change are remarkably similar.
Lesson 1: Understand Your People and What Each of Them Does
You can’t modernize what you don’t understand. Before you introduce a new tool or rewrite a process, you need a clear picture of how work actually gets done today: the processes, procedures, and business rules that govern every handoff. That understanding is the first step in modernization, and most leaders rush it.
At PACOM, we aggressively studied how three directorates operated: J1 (manpower and personnel), J4 (logistics), and J8 (resources and assessment). We looked at how each of them affected the back office, the front office, and ultimately military operations. Most importantly, we looked for bottlenecks: places where a request sat waiting, approvals stacked up, or two offices waiting on each other.
We fixed those bottlenecks first.
Think of it this way: people, gear, and money. If you can’t get the right people in the right seats, can’t get them the equipment they need, and can’t fund the work, nothing downstream runs smoothly. Every operational plan depends on those three foundations. Once we addressed the people, gear, and money problems, improving current and future operations became much easier because we weren’t fighting the plumbing anymore.
The broader lesson for any organization is this: flashy transformation work, such as new platforms, AI, and automation, sits on unglamorous foundations. If you skip the foundations, the shiny new tools will simply help you do the wrong things faster. Take the time to map how work flows through every function. Talk to the people who own each step. Find where things get stuck. Then start there.
Lesson 2: Know Your Vision and the Metrics You’re Trying to Meet
A vision without metrics is a slogan. A transformation leader has to be able to say, in concrete terms, what better looks like and how everyone will know when they’ve achieved it. Those measures have to be detailed and accurate. Vague goals like “increase efficiency” or “modernize operations” give people nothing to aim at and give skeptics an easy way to claim the effort isn’t working.
At PACOM, we defined our output in very specific terms. Using AI and data tools, we measured how many quality concepts of operations (CONOPs) we could produce per operations and planning cycle with minimal staff churn.
Every part of that metric was deliberate:
Quality CONOPs, not just CONOPs. More plans mean nothing if they aren’t good enough to execute.
Per ops and planning cycle, tying the measure to the rhythm the organization already worked in rather than an arbitrary calendar.
With the least amount of staff churn, because output that burns people out isn’t sustainable. If you hit your number by exhausting your best planners, you haven’t transformed anything. You’ve just borrowed against the future.
Once the metric was clear, we mapped the process end to end and established tight controls around it. That gave us a way to see exactly where time and effort were going, and to tell whether a change we made actually moved the number or just felt productive.
Good metrics also do something less obvious: they depersonalize disagreement. When a team debates whether a new approach is working, a shared, trusted measure lets the conversation focus on the data rather than whose idea it was. That alone removes much of the friction that slows change.
If you’re leading a transformation, ask yourself whether everyone on your team could state the goal and the measure in a sentence. If they can’t, that’s your first fix.
Lesson 3: Be a Really Good Listener and Observer
Sometimes the best thing you can do as a leader is shut up and listen before offering solutions.
That’s harder than it sounds. When you’re brought in to drive change, there’s enormous pressure to show momentum right away. You want to prove you have answers. But solutions proposed before you understand the problem are often wrong, and even when they’re right, they rarely get buy-in. People can tell when someone who has never done the job designed a fix in a conference room.
At PACOM, I spent very little time at my desk. I spent most of my time where the work actually happened, asking questions and watching how people did their tasks. I wanted to see the workarounds, the spreadsheets people kept on the side, the steps that existed only because “that’s how we’ve always done it,” and the steps that existed for very good reasons nobody had written down.
Observation teaches you things that no briefing will. Processes on paper and processes in practice are almost never the same. The people closest to the work usually already know where the problems are. They often have ideas for fixing them. They just haven’t been asked, or they haven’t been listened to when they've spoken up.
Only after that time on the ground did I propose solutions. Because the staff had helped identify the problems, getting them bought in on the fixes was much easier. They recognized their own input in the plan. It wasn’t something being done to them. We were doing it together.
A few practical habits that helped:
Ask open questions like “Walk me through how this works” or “What slows you down most?” rather than leading ones.
Watch the work, not just the output. The friction is usually in the steps between deliverables.
Close the loop. When someone’s observation shapes a decision, tell them. Nothing builds trust faster.
Listening isn’t passive. It’s one of the most active things a transformation leader can do, and it’s the foundation that makes every later decision credible.
Lesson 4: Be Confident in Your Capabilities and Willing to Take Risks
People follow conviction.
In any transformation, there will be moments when the path forward isn’t obvious, when the data is incomplete, and when reasonable people disagree. In those moments, the team looks to the leader. If you hesitate, hedge every statement, or wait for perfect certainty, the organization will stall right along with you. Momentum is fragile, and indecision kills it.
So believe in your skills and your plan. You were put in the role for a reason. Your experience, your judgment, and the work you’ve done to understand the organization (Lessons 1 through 3) give you a foundation to act on.
But confidence is not the same as certainty. The most effective leaders I’ve worked with hold two ideas at once: “I believe this is the right plan” and “I might be wrong.” Confidence lets you commit and move. Humility keeps you watching the metrics and listening to the team so you can course-correct when the evidence says you should.
Own the outcome
The other half of this lesson is accountability. If something doesn’t work, don’t blame your peers or your subordinates. Take the blame and the consequences yourself.
This matters more than most leaders realize. Transformation asks people to take risks: to try new tools, abandon familiar processes, and put their names on unproven approaches. They will only do that if they trust that you won’t pin a failure on them. The moment a leader throws a team member under the bus for a plan the leader approved, every person watching learns that the safest move is to do nothing new.
When you take the hit yourself, the opposite happens. People see that it’s safe to try. They become more willing to raise problems early, propose bold ideas, and push through the uncomfortable middle of a change effort. Publicly owning failure and freely giving credit for success goes a long way. In my experience, it’s one of the fastest ways to earn the trust transformation runs on.
Lesson 5: You Don’t Have to Be Perfect
Be willing to fail.
When you’re transforming an organization, you won’t always know where to start. You’ll probably feel behind schedule most of the time. Some days, it will feel like every problem you solve uncovers two more. That’s normal. It isn’t a sign you’re doing it wrong. It’s a sign you’re doing something hard.
Many leaders respond to that pressure by trying to get the plan perfect before they launch anything. They run one more study, hold one more review, and wait for one more data point. It feels responsible. In practice, it usually just delays the moment when you find out what really works.
The earlier you test a plan, the sooner you learn what works and what fails. A small pilot that fails in week three teaches you more than a flawless plan that sits on a shelf for six months. If you never try, you can’t adjust. If you can’t adjust, you can’t iterate. And without iteration, you can’t ultimately succeed.
That’s the mindset I tried to bring at PACOM: start somewhere sensible, measure honestly, and treat every early result, good or bad, as information. Some things we tried didn’t work the way we expected. Those weren’t wasted efforts. They showed us which approaches did work.
One more point here, because it ties everything together: understanding your team matters far more than being right all the time. You will be wrong about plenty of things over the course of a transformation. If you’ve invested in knowing your people, listening to them, and owning your mistakes, they’ll forgive the misses and help you fix them. If you haven’t, even your correct decisions will meet resistance.
From PACOM to Shield AI: Why These Lessons Travel
It's easy to assume lessons from a military command don’t translate to a technology company. The structures, pace, and incentives are different. But the more time I spend at Shield AI, the more convinced I am that the human side of transformation is universal.
Every organization still has functions that depend on one another, whether that’s Finance, Operations, Legal, HR, Engineering, or something else. Every organization still has hidden bottlenecks that only show up when you watch the work closely. Every organization needs a clear vision and honest metrics. And in every organization, people still follow leaders who show conviction, own their mistakes, and are willing to try things before they’re perfect.
These lessons matter even more in a fast-moving company. When you’re growing quickly, processes that worked at one size break at the next. The temptation is to bolt on new tools and hope they fix things. The better path is the same one that worked at PACOM: understand the people and the work, define what success looks like, listen before you prescribe, lead with conviction, and iterate fast.
Bringing It All Together
This isn’t an exhaustive list. Transformation is messy, and every organization will teach you something new. But these five lessons were key to modernizing PACOM, and they’re proving just as valuable at Shield AI:
Understand your people and what each of them does. Fix the foundational bottlenecks first.
Know your vision and the metrics you’re trying to meet. Make them detailed, accurate, and shared.
Be a really good listener and observer. Go where the work happens before proposing solutions.
Be confident and willing to take risks. Lead with conviction and take the blame when things go wrong.
You don’t have to be perfect. Test early, learn fast, and keep iterating.
At the heart of all five is one idea: change happens when an entire organization believes in where it’s going. Your job as a leader isn’t to have every answer. It’s to get everyone moving in the same direction, and to keep them moving together when the road gets hard.
I’d love to hear from others who have led change in the public or private sector. What lessons did you learn the hard way?