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Many data leaders obsess over the latest tech stack, yet struggle to deliver consistent value. The real obstacle isn’t the tools, but the timeless challenge of people and process. This episode cuts through the technology hype to diagnose why data initiatives often fall short: a fundamental misunderstanding of human dynamics and the absence of intentional structures.
Nicole Radziwill, a data leader with three decades in tech and author of “Data Strategy, Culture and Power,” joins James Winegar to expose the persistent human element behind data failures. They discuss how, despite 30 years of technological leaps, the core issues of team collaboration, power dynamics, and defining “good” work remain unchanged.
The conversation reveals how organizations get stuck in reactive “firefighting” mode, where artificial pressure and perverse incentives lead to burnout and misaligned outcomes. It offers a clear path to establish the critical processes that empower teams, foster genuine shared understanding, and ultimately drive business value that technology alone cannot deliver.
Key Takeaways
The data stack is stable; the human element is now the primary bottleneck.
Modern data infrastructure offers abundant tools, shifting the challenge from building pipelines to enabling business value. Organizations often overemphasize rapid feature delivery, creating artificial pressure and team burnout, instead of establishing sustainable processes that support thoughtful data work. The core problem now lies in integrating people and process effectively, rather than just acquiring more technology.
Intentional process creation prevents organizational decay and fosters high-performing teams.
Flying by the seat of one’s pants accumulates ‘nonsense’ that eventually grinds progress to a halt. Just enough structure, built with intention, creates peace, allows teams to focus on distinguishing work, and empowers individuals to perform better and enjoy their work. This strategic shift moves organizations from reactive firefighting to proactive problem prevention, boosting both efficiency and morale.
Shared understanding and clear expectations are built by restoring agency to individuals, not by “ticket-driven development.”
Engineers are disempowered when requirements are copy-pasted into tickets without real conversation, creating an environment of perverse incentives. This system leads to building the wrong things and eroding trust between technical and business teams. Leaders must create space for genuine dialogue, enabling engineers to engage, contribute, and take ownership of solving real problems with shared context.
Data teams hold unique visibility into organizational misalignments, making them crucial agents for driving cross-functional clarity.
Data is a political flashpoint because it changes power dynamics. Data teams often see clearly where different departments lack shared understanding—for example, sales and marketing looking at different numbers or product teams releasing features without analytics readiness. A Chief Data Officer’s role is not solely technical, but to leverage this visibility to facilitate organizational alignment through improved processes and shared definitions, transforming data into a tool for strategic consensus.
Related: CorrDyn helps organizations establish intentional data processes, starting with a comprehensive data assessment. If your internal teams face burnout from constant firefighting, explore how a managed data team can introduce sustainable practices. We also specialize in improving data quality and supporting broader digital transformation through a focus on people and process.
Full Transcript
Jason: Welcome to Data BS, the show dedicated to tackling the big questions impacting the world of data and ML AI without any of the BS. My name is James Winegar. Each week I sit down with guests from across the data ecosystem to unpack how they’re shaping their businesses or the businesses of others through their real-world application of data engineering, ML AI, infrastructure, analytics, and more. No fluff, unfiltered, but slightly edited due to low noise, this is Data BS, let’s get into it.
James Winegar: All right, Nicole, thanks for joining us today.
Nicole Radziwill: Thank you, James.
James Winegar: So tell us about Nicole and what Nicole does.
Nicole Radziwill: Yeah, absolutely. This is actually my 30th year doing real adult professional things in tech, which is scary because I don’t feel like I’m old enough to be that old. But since the mid-90s, basically what I’ve been doing is some combination of data science, data management, software engineering management, anything that brings together people who are doing software and doing data analytics and AI. In fact, the first-ever implementation of a machine learning model that I did was in 1997, which is really amazing to me. Since then, I’ve been helping other people, other organizations get their people and their process and their technology together so they can get the things done that they need to get done. I was a professor for about 10 years teaching graduate and undergraduate students in a department of integrated science and technology at JMU in Harrisonburg, Virginia. And then I came back into industry about seven years ago because the two things that I had studied were process and quality management and data, software, and AI. I figured it was a really good time to come back. There are a lot of companies that needed that kind of blended skill set, and so I’ve been advising companies since then, helping them get their ideas converted into reality.
James Winegar: It’s really important because I think we kind of work in the same business basically. We were talking about how what’s the real problem you’re trying to solve and not just all the tech and all the details. You can get lost in all the technology pretty easily.
Nicole Radziwill: Yeah, totally, especially since it changes so often. When you’ve been able to watch the evolution over a long time, the tech changes, everything else stays the same. People are always the same.
James Winegar: Exactly. We basically got into the whole conversation when we were prepping about how psychology of people and how people were basically exactly the same. All the tools have evolved or whatever. We’ve learned new things, that’s really interesting, but at the end of the day, you’re still interacting with people. How do people interact with each other? All the pain points that has, all the bureaucracy that can make you or break you.
Nicole Radziwill: That’s right.
James Winegar: Over the last 30 years, what’s been the major things that have changed? We already said people haven’t, but what has changed?
Nicole Radziwill: Yeah, absolutely. The first job that I got as a chief data officer was in 2005, I think, so exactly 20 years ago. And the things that we were working on then were really different than the things that organizations are focused on now. What was important? Setting policies for data management, figuring out what standards you were going to use, developing standards if none existed. We spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to get people to reuse each other’s software because things were not as modular as they are now. Things were also nowhere near as shared. Those were the issues that we were focusing on. As we moved into the 2010s, it became more about infrastructure because all of a sudden we had access to what used to be research-grade file systems. Now, all of a sudden you’re able to access those and instead of having to move your data to where the compute was, you were able to make a more balanced decision about how to handle that. That was the beginning of cloud services available to everyone. It moved from policies, standards, that sort of thing into infrastructure. Then, by the time I went back to industry, the biggest change that I noticed is the infrastructure had become mainly stable. We had access to products. Before you had to build everything. You had to build all the components of your pipeline, your orchestration, and everything else. Now we’ve got unfortunately over 3,000 products to choose from, which is its own fresh hell. But where we’ve evolved to now is that organizations that have data, analytics, AI teams, it’s more of a services or consulting type of engagement. Being able to connect with people on the business side who have real problems that they need to solve in 45 minutes. That’s the name of the game. That’s what I’ve seen the biggest evolution to be. It used to be really, really slow and glacial, the pace of progress. Now it’s too fast. I think we’re at a point where overall we’re going to have to figure out how to break the bad habits of going so fast and breaking things.
James Winegar: When you worked at NOAA, when you were still in an academic environment, you had a good mentor or manager there who created a stress-free environment. Why do you think that enabled you to have this technology but also people-oriented focus and try to solve both sides of the problem?
Nicole Radziwill: Let me give you a little backdrop as to what this scene and scenario was. I was in my early 20s. I was out of college, at I think my second professional job, and it was at NOAA. My office mate was in his mid-30s. I thought he was old and knew everything. He was like 35, right? So totally looked up to him, was just so pleased that I got to work with him. He really cared about process. He’s the one who made me aware that there was a whole community around quality and process improvement and setting specifications that define, what does good actually mean and how can we get there? He’s the one who let me know that this existed and there was a little bit of a connection with tech and with data. But it wasn’t the subject matter that caught my interest. He was just totally Zen. Everybody’s running around with their hair on fire trying to get this thing in by the end of the month and get our initiatives done by the quarter. He was completely chill all the time. Not only did I look up to him as a professional, as an elder at that point, but he was just having a great time and he was always relaxed and he made other people around him relaxed. What I realized was he knew that process can bring peace. It can also grind us to a halt, and that’s the negative side of it. But if you achieve the right balance, if you achieve just enough structure so that you don’t have to worry about day-to-day things, you can just worry about the interesting problems, the things that are really going to distinguish and differentiate you, everybody is happier, no one is as bogged down in the day-to-day. I developed a strong appreciation for what process can do for people. It helps people be seen, be heard, enjoy what they’re doing, and ultimately perform better.
James Winegar: The way we do it internally is, if there’s anything that’s in the way of you getting stuff done, we need to look at the process. We need to say, is this process good? As a services company we kind of deal with our customers’ process as well. Sometimes that leads into, is there something we can do with the customer to alter their process so that it’s more efficient in how we all work together?
Nicole Radziwill: Yeah, and that’s going to give you better results. It’s going to give the client better results. Do you know how few people, how few organizations look to the process first?
James Winegar: It’s like 1% maybe.
Nicole Radziwill: Shift your focus and all of a sudden things will get better, but you gotta shift.
James Winegar: Most people just fly by the seat of their pants. I was actually talking with an HR person the other day and they have this really interesting viewpoint. I was like, ‘See, that’s how everybody should do HR.’ Her whole point when she was talking was everybody just flies by the seat of their pants, because they don’t have a process and nobody gets trained on how to do X, Y, Z. The hair on fire example.
Nicole Radziwill: Yeah. Why is that? It’s because it takes time and it takes intention. You gotta get the people together, they’ve gotta somehow be convinced that this is important. Unfortunately, it usually works the other way. People discover that it’s important because they did it once or someone else made them do it once. They realized everybody is happier and getting more stuff done and the bosses are happier and the engineers are empowered. But unless you go through that process yourself, the hair on fire, by the seat of your pants, let’s just code the next ticket and put the band-aids on wherever we can, you haven’t seen the other side. The grass is not greener because you haven’t seen the other grass.
James Winegar: Yeah, and you just accumulate so much nonsense when you do that because nobody’s being intentional about the process. Without intention, it’s just this shit sandwich, basically. What are you going to do to clean it up? Nobody’s going to have intention to go back and clean something up anyway. Eventually it all grinds to a halt because you won’t be able to keep the wheels on the bus.
Nicole Radziwill: Exactly. I had this wonderful meeting with one of the most talented engineers I think I’ve had the pleasure to work with last week. We were going through his code. He built a pretty sophisticated network for communications to go across. He’s stepping me into his code, showing me the API endpoints. It was so clean and so easy to understand. He’s like, ‘Let me show you the developer documentation.’ It’s right there, and there wasn’t too much of it, there wasn’t not enough of it. It was this beautiful balance of just enough to make things absolutely clear. I told him, ‘Wow, this is really impressive. Usually you don’t walk into a situation and find this.’ And he said, ‘Look, I’ve been doing this for so long. I am tired. I just don’t want to have to redo things. That’s why I’m a clean engineer.’
James Winegar: That gets into the approach to doing work and what does iteration look like and agile versus waterfall and how we approach our problems. We already talked about how there’s the old way where you had to literally build every cog and put it all together. Then we have the move fast and break things, but really you can’t break stuff. There’s a happy middle ground. How do we get to that happy middle ground?
Nicole Radziwill: There was, probably about 20 years ago, a new vein of research that came out. You might have heard of it, about ambidextrous organizations. The idea there is, how can you introduce discipline, particularly to your technical organizations, without stifling innovation? How can we be innovative but also have the discipline to be able to deliver incremental value? The recommendations from the researchers and from studying organizations that had attempted this in smaller or large part, what they found out is you kind of have to keep them separate because the mindset is different. How people are evaluated and how you evaluate your people on the things that they’ve accomplished is totally different. At the same time, you had to make sure you cycle people in and out because nobody wants to be doing maintenance forever. It’s like a jail sentence. You’ve got to keep your teams excited about the work, and sometimes that means giving them space to be part of the innovation while they also have their day job of doing the regular boring operations and the maintenance. Where this gets back to process is, again, if you look at the past 30 years. You remember how it used to be. Slow development. You figure out what your requirements are, do a design, figure out what all the subsystems are, you start coding. Next thing you know it’s six months later and hopefully by the time that you put something out, by the time you have something to show, people haven’t changed. Well, what did we learn? Everybody’s gonna change. Now we know it doesn’t matter if it’s six months or a day or a week. People are going to change because everyone is always learning about the problem context all the time. The learning doesn’t stop. While we were very, very slow in realizing that there were those learning loops, we eventually got to where we are now, which is almost 100% of organizations that I work with right now when they’re doing the data and analytics and AI work, they’re caught in that mindset of I have to deliver incremental value by the end of the day or by the next hour. They’re caught in that loop of having to do things quickly because that’s how they’re evaluated. They’re incentivized to do this quickly because the business is convinced that the quicker you get features out, the quicker you’re going to realize revenue-generating opportunities. I think those are all flimsy assumptions. I think we’re just used to doing things that way at this point. How do you break the tension? I think what’s going to break the tension is organizations that have lots of engineers or data engineers burnout all of a sudden. When people burnout, organizations very quickly try to figure out, how can we make this not happen again? Because it’s expensive. One person burning out is problematic, a whole team burning out is expensive and it’s hard to recover from that. I think we’re going to have to encourage our teams and the teams of our clients to achieve that balance, to intentionally say, how can we take the time and the space to set up just enough design and then go into value-generating loops, but then revisit them, ambidextrously. Do that higher-level foundational work, make sure we have the shared definitions, the shared understanding, then go generate a bunch of incremental value, and then go back and forth. It’s not exactly agile, it’s not exactly waterfall. It’s a new thing that I’ve seen work in companies. I’ve seen it make people very engaged with their engineering work.
James Winegar: One of the things that I think about is artificial pressure. There’s a lot of artificial pressure that comes—
Nicole Radziwill: Fake deadlines.
James Winegar: Yeah, deadlines because we got this thing that’s happening on this date, blah blah blah. Sometimes that’s real. Most of the time it’s not real. Most of the time the real deadline of the thing that they actually care about is some point in the future. But it’s manufactured pressure, because if I apply pressure then people are going to be more efficient with their utilization and things like that. What I find, most of my job is to identify what the actual need is.
Nicole Radziwill: Yeah, that’s a good focus.
James Winegar: When do we actually need these answers to be crisply defined? When do I actually need to be able to provide you, how are you going to do X, or what is the information I need to make this decision? Not every business has a clear-cut definition or there’s artificial pressures that exist outside the organization as well.
Nicole Radziwill: Yeah, and also different people are pressured by different things. Every time you have two people working in an organization, there’s a power dynamic between them. You have power dynamics between people within an organization and their clients or their customers. All of those forces are competing all at the same time. I’ve become convinced that when one person feels a pressure, that pressure is legitimate to them. But unless you have the discussions about why those pressures are existing, it can be really easy to just get into the mindset of person X needs Y, let’s just get it to them without balancing all those perspectives.
James Winegar: I’m thinking about people on my team even when they get amped and I’m like, why are you working late tonight? Work on it on Monday. It’s not a big deal. You think it’s a big deal because you didn’t ask. How do we navigate these types of things?
Nicole Radziwill: Have you heard of the Many Worlds theory of quantum mechanics?
James Winegar: I did physics, so yeah.
Nicole Radziwill: Okay. There’s an analogy. It took me many, many years to realize this. But all of us, engineers, data engineers, people on the business side, customers, clients—every single person is living in their own completely unique reality.
James Winegar: 1,000%.
Nicole Radziwill: Yeah, completely. I’ve come to the realization that there’s no way we’re ever going to fully understand each other, so we have to accept that imperfection and just deal with it. It’s not going to go away.
James Winegar: Or you just say, you’re good at this, I’m good at this, how do we work more effectively together? I have people on my team, they’re much more organized than I am, and I rely on their organization to keep me organized. What they rely on me for is how are we going to do the things that help us continue to pay for our house and things like that. I think a big part of an organization is how to build teams that are able to work effectively with each other and hold each other accountable in a reasonable way. I’m trying to tie it back to the iteration cycle. Accountability across groups is very hard typically because a lot of people don’t know what the other group’s mantra is. What are they supposed to solve for? Some groups don’t even know their actual goal, they’re just building.
Nicole Radziwill: It boils down to three forces. Clear expectations, a shared understanding of the problem, and functional feedback loops to make sure everybody stays there in that understanding over time. We’ve got to prioritize that for it to happen. Clearly in your organization, in your company and for your clients, you do prioritize that. Which is why you get more robust solutions that you deliver. But it’s a choice you made.
James Winegar: The functional feedback loop is what I consider to be the hardest there, because it requires intention.
Nicole Radziwill: It does. And time.
James Winegar: It’s very hard for people. When you’re going into a new organization, how are you trying to establish that intention? There’s something you’re trying to attach to to drive that intention.
Nicole Radziwill: At the core, I think it’s restoring power to people, restoring power to individuals. There’s an analogy there with the reason why agile methods were so—why we had an agile renaissance back in late 90s to 2010 was because engineers were feeling disempowered. The process of adopting, for example, the agile ceremonies, that restored power to the engineers because they had agency over their work again. Finally, there was an expectation that we build space into the process for people to get on the same page and build those functional feedback loops that we were just talking about. Where I would go with this is just how can we restore power and agency to the people doing the work? Because once you do that, then you start to see the space in between the people and what they need from each other that they might not even be revealing because they might not think they have to.
James Winegar: There’s a lot to dig into there. Also people don’t want to reveal some stuff. About, we’re not able to do X because we have no idea what’s going on with that.
Nicole Radziwill: Yeah. And nobody wants to be vulnerable either because think about it, what good does that do you? It doesn’t. There’s always going to be somebody on your team who’s like, ‘Oh yes, we can do that,’ even if that’s totally false. You know it, and they know it, there is someone who will say they can totally do it. This goes back to the power dynamics that we were talking about again. Why would that person say that they can absolutely do this thing that you know is not doable? Because they know someone else will look upon them favorably and it’ll make them more secure in their job or maybe they’ll get more opportunities.
James Winegar: Or they’re trying to get the promotion because Bob helped me out with all this stuff.
Nicole Radziwill: Or not be on the layoff list. Always there’s self-preservation at the core. Yep.
James Winegar: Firefighting is one of the things I think is a great example of this. If you’re always in the firefighter—why are you having to firefighter? Is the real question. But that requires intentionality to think about why is there always a fire?
Nicole Radziwill: To connect to what we were just saying, firefighters are usually incentivized. They get attention, they get honor and praise because you know what? Usually when there’s a fire and somebody puts out the fire, you’re really happy they put out the fire. You don’t want them to not put out the fire. We all reinforce the less than functional—
James Winegar: Yeah, but the real goal is how to not have a fire. Amen.
Nicole Radziwill: Amen.
James Winegar: Yeah. How do we stop the fire from existing? Exactly.
Nicole Radziwill: That takes focus on the process. That’s right. That takes focus on the process.
James Winegar: How do you get this intentional space to define what does success mean? It’s not what’s the thing you need to do? It’s what is the successful thing? Provide agency to people who are able to think about how to support that. Then give it just enough space to where the intermediate feedback loop is measured in days, not weeks or months.
Nicole Radziwill: It sounds silly—just saying creating a space for people to have those conversations sounds totally silly because sometimes people can get in the trap of feeling like, oh well, I need to be vulnerable to my team, I need to work with people’s feelings. In engineering, we know we just like to get the job done. At least most of us do. It’s not about the individual feelings or about the space for discussion. It’s about figuring out ways to make us stronger as individuals and knowing where and when to open up so that we’re stronger as a team. Because like you said, you’ve got to balance both of them. I know that the best engineering teams that I’ve worked with and that I’ve managed have been the ones where individuals know exactly what they can contribute and what the team likes for them to contribute. They’re able to find those spaces because they’ve had the conversations. It’s not like you have somebody who’s super talented sitting over on the side wondering why no one is seeing them, and yet no one’s seeing them because the person does not have an identity for what they can do for the team yet. You gotta develop that.
James Winegar: There’s a thing I talk about when I’m in these more strategic roles, ticket-driven development is what I call it. If you’re ticket-driven development or ticket-driven activities or whatever, if you’re so process-oriented against the ceremony of it, etc., you don’t actually make space for these discussions. You pretend like there exists space for these discussions, but people are just reiterating what they wrote in their ticket. You get measured on number of tickets completed, and you hope you get a bunch of really simple ones and then that way you did good, blah blah blah. Perverse incentives for people. What do you actually measure, etc. In reality, what you want is the most impactful work that somebody can do that they are indeed working on that. If they need help because there’s something that somebody else is good at, but it’s a portion of what they’re doing, that they can go talk to them, they can get the support, and they’re not like, ‘Well, I’m busy with my six tickets this week. I can’t give you any space to help you out.’ Ticket-driven development, the bastardization of the process to take away agency.
Nicole Radziwill: You know what the number one symptom of where that’s breaking down is? Just ask, who writes the ticket?
James Winegar: Yeah.
Nicole Radziwill: It’s not the engineer. 90% of the time it’s, ‘Oh, I got an email from somebody on the business side, they needed something, so I copied and pasted the email into the ticket.’ That’s not a conversation. That’s not building a shared understanding. That is so rife for spending a lot of time doing the wrong thing and them being unhappy anyway.
James Winegar: Yeah, because you didn’t interpret what they were really asking for. They don’t understand all the technical details of what is possible even.
Nicole Radziwill: Nor are they incentivized to spend that time with you so that you both really understand and build a relationship around what you want to get out the door. They’re not incentivized to do it. They’ve got other things to do that they think are more important.
James Winegar: Yeah. But if this thing’s important, then you should probably make space for it. This gets into the whole power dynamics around people type of thing as well.
Nicole Radziwill: You can tell what I’ve been thinking about the most over the past year, can’t you?
James Winegar: Yeah. It is what it is. It’s weird for me because in my position, usually, I’m in the position to navigate that problem for my team. We actually won’t work with people where we have these types of problems because it’s going to be—
Nicole Radziwill: I love it. That’s a great boundary to set. That’s really great.
James Winegar: Yeah, well, because what’s going to happen? I’m going to deal with a bunch of nonsense. We’re going to have legal issues because we’re not delivering what they need or whatever. My team’s going to be unhappy. It’s going to cost us more in internal crisis handling than it is to deliver value. That mental energy could be spent on a client who’s willing to partner with us to solve their problem.
Nicole Radziwill: You got it right there. You got it. Are we partners or are we providers? Because in most relationships, you can figure that out pretty quickly. If you’re partners, you can get anything done together and everybody can be mostly happy. If you’re providers, there’s always going to be a power dynamic and whoever is asking for the thing that’s being provided will always be on the upper hand, and that’s not always the way to get them what they want or need the fastest. I’ve been working with a stealth startup on the side for a couple years on the team dynamics issue. One of the most shocking things that I’ve realized over the past couple of years is that different people need different things. You have your work habits, you have your work preferences, and you have to feel the vibe that drives you. You might look in on a group of completely cut-throat competitive people who are stomping on each other to get the job done and say, ‘Gosh, that’s a toxic environment.’ Strangely enough, I found out there’s some people who need that. They need the drama in order to be able to stay engaged at work. That was one of the biggest shockers to me because I assumed that there was a global, here’s how to have a not-toxic technical team versus here’s how to have one. I thought it was absolute. Turns out it’s not because if you have a group of people who all share the values and who all work better and appreciate that environment that’s tough on the outside, maybe that’s the way to get the job done. I don’t know. The jury’s still out on that one. I’m not sure where I land on it, but—
James Winegar: There’s a mix on that. I think with you’ve got—I’m just going to call it Type A personalities. If you’ve got a bunch of Type A personalities, if they’re all focused on the outcome still, it’s really the outcome focus. Is it just their personality that people become sensitive about whatever, because really, they just want to get to point A or point B?
Nicole Radziwill: Type As want to get to point B.
James Winegar: Yeah. Everybody has to learn how to navigate with each other. Not everybody’s the same person. Everybody’s different.
Nicole Radziwill: But we all tend to think other people are like us. Yeah. Which is not true. Yes, that’s the big learning point. We all tend to project what we want, what we think is good, what we value on other people. That’s why when I say the issues arise in the space between people, it’s because that’s our natural tendency and because we don’t collectively invest the time in crossing that chasm. I find that a lot of people don’t learn to understand other people. It’s hard. I’ve been trying to do this for three decades and even with a lot of developed empathy, it’s still hard, especially when one of the people you’re trying to understand is the person who has their silo of one or the person who is going to be an obstructionist for anything that requires getting into their world because they don’t want that world to be threatened. Those personality types, I don’t think they’re going to go away. It’s up to leadership to identify those person and remember to recommend them that they have the opportunity to do that somewhere else. True. That’s not within their organization. As you know, enablement is also part of the problem. Identification and adjustment is a thing you need to do. You have to with intention go, is anybody on my team creating problems for other people to be the most effective that they can be? Do you remember that book, The No Asshole Rule? It’s probably 10 years old right now. Yeah, I know. I don’t necessarily agree with that. I think it’s the protectionist type of stuff that really bothers me. Well, I was at a company that they had the signs hanging on the wall, the No Assholes. I was like, ‘Awesome! I’ve finally found a company that is committed to the No Assholes, this is going to be great.’ You know what I found out after about six months? The perception, the experience of someone else being an asshole is totally relative. You might have one person who all these people think is a total asshole, other people think, ‘Wow, they get so much stuff done and they’re so enjoyable to work with.’ That’s what made me realize that we were talking about earlier about each person is a universe of one. That’s what made me really realize it, because I think I was just so excited about, ‘Oh great, a functional environment, we’re all going to be cheery and happy and get along and crank out some great work. Look at the signs that say No Assholes, this is going to be fantastic.’
James Winegar: There’s times where I find whenever a value gets projected as a thing that’s always talked about, chances are that’s weaponized as well. Ooh. Good realization. Yeah, that’s a good one. Because this whole perception. People are complicated, people are protectionist, people, it’s their own reality that they operate within, and how do we navigate people? How do we navigate in the space between people? Instead of expecting us all to change, how can we all come together towards that center to more effectively and more enjoyably get the job done? We all share the same values of we want to do good work. I think it all comes back to one core theme and the thing for us to remember is the reason why working with data and analytics and AI teams is challenging is that we are the providers of the stories that we bring to everyone else that changes the leverage between them. It’s not just that we’re embedded in this environment where there’s all these power dynamics, it’s that data is the political flashpoint. We either hold back or provide the things that change the power dynamics between other people, and people have a very palpable sense of this. The leverage that they have over each other changes as we provide them with information.
Nicole Radziwill: The one thing that data teams have that is unique across the whole organization is visibility. I guarantee you everyone on data teams listening to this right now, they know exactly who doesn’t have a shared understanding of a concept with someone else. They know exactly when sales and marketing are looking at things completely different ways. It would be so easy for them to say, ‘Yes, here are all of the challenges and the tensions that need to be solved so that we all can have clear expectations so that we can build that shared understanding.’ It’s that information, it’s the information about how things are aligned or more importantly misaligned. What I would love for everyone listening to leave here with is a recognition that if you want your data to be better so that your decision-making is better, you look towards the process. The process is the thing that brings the people together towards those shared goals. When you improve the process, you improve the data that the process can breathe out, if you will. That leads us back to the number one value that a data team or a chief data officer can bring to an organization is helping everyone else understand how to get on the same page with each other more frequently. I have an example of that that everyone should be able to identify with and that is, how often have you seen a product team release a feature and then the next day they’re like, ‘Hey, we released a feature last night, how is it performing?’ But nobody told the data team, so there’s no way to monitor this thing that’s so very important and was going to be the next thing to unlock the business value. How often does that happen? Guarantee you with most of the people listening, they’ve had it happen at least once and it probably happens more than once. That’s a great example of that concept that I was saying. We have the visibility, we have the understanding that can help people in the rest of the organization cross-functionally get on that same page with each other. Our leaders, I would invite all of the leaders to open up and start reflecting on how they can bring that about. Okay, I got two things there. One is the product analytics, you have a new thing that happens. If you were intentional, if you created space to intentionally solve a problem, you would have a standardized approach to solving those particular types of question of event analytics, whatever. Then all it is to the consumers is change what event type that you’re looking at. But that takes a lot of investment, a lot of effort, a lot of intention on what are you trying to accomplish?
James Winegar: The second thing you mentioned, the Chief Data Officer, is the need for somebody to have a seat at the table in order to drive these changes to happen. Exactly. Because to the point of power dynamics, there needs to be somebody who’s able to handle the power dynamics. If your data team is all analyst, and then there’s the on high, everything above, then that team is not enabled to enact any type of change.
Nicole Radziwill: Not at all. You are not in control of it. You might not even know the people who are in control of it. But you can see the symptom. By sharing that information and by making an organizational priority to get that to the people who are in control of those parts of the processes, you can solve the problem together. This is one of the reasons why Tom Redman, who’s one of my favorite guys in our space, one of the favorite gurus, he wrote a book not too long ago called People and Data, it’s right here, it’s backwards I think in my screen. One of the things that he really emphasizes here is that regular people can’t solve all the problems. He calls out that the solutions are in the space between the people too. One of the reasons that he and I talk about this sort of thing is that he focuses on people being the solution to this. In the recent work that I’ve done, I focus on people as the problems. Unfortunately, one of the techniques he introduces is force field analysis. You could take all of his reinforcing factors and all of my negative power dynamics factors and get a really great force field analysis for your organization’s people and data.
James Winegar: This is the role of a Chief Data Officer, really. It’s not a bunch of technical stuff. It’s really how do you enable everybody to do what they need to do to get the answers to things they need to get the answers to to drive the change that’s going to enable the business to be the most impactful it can be.
Nicole Radziwill: Exactly.
James Winegar: Nicole, where can people learn more about you and the work that you do or connect with you?
Nicole Radziwill: Absolutely. The easiest way to find me is on LinkedIn. I am the only Nicole Radziwill who is in data and the only Nicole Radziwill who looks like me. My picture’s up there. That helps. Things that you might reach out to me for are a couple of the projects that I have coming out the door. I have this book that I wrote last year called—you won’t be surprised—Data, Strategy, Culture & Power, because this is what I’ve been thinking about lately. But also, the audiobook has just come out and I’ve turned it into a course that says, how do we know if these are problems in our organization? If we diagnose those, what are some things we can do about it? To help data teams or the leadership teams who are saying, ‘Gee, there’s a problem with the data,’ to help people on either of those levels identify some actions that they can take so that they can start resolving these issues to build the clear expectations, the shared understanding, and the functional feedback loops. Like I mentioned, we built a course on that and we also deliver that as workshops. We also deliver workshops and consultative coaching that even goes beyond that and doesn’t focus on data but focuses on the space between people and helping to sensitize people to how work habits and preferences and the things that we don’t say can actually impact how well we get stuff done with the people around us. We’re working on actionable ways to solve these really uncomfortable problems that nobody likes to talk about but that still impact our productivity and impact every day.
James Winegar: I love it.
Nicole Radziwill: This is great. Thank you.
James Winegar: Nicole, it was great to talk to you. Wish you the best.
Nicole Radziwill: You too, James. You too, this has been an enjoyable way to spend my morning. Appreciate it.
Jason: That’s it for this episode of Data BS. If you enjoyed this episode, make sure you subscribe wherever you listen to your podcast to not miss the next one. This episode was sponsored by CorrDyn, a data consultancy that helps organizations unlock the power of their data. If you have a data challenge, we can help. Visit corrdyn.com, C-O-R-R-D-Y-N dot com, to learn more. See you next time.
