Beyond “Data-Driven”: Building a Culture of Purpose Enabled by Data
It happened again the other day, a headline in a major national business magazine: “Beyond the Tools — Building a Data-Driven Culture.” It’s a phrase I see more and more — understandable as our economy and society move ever deeper into what is really the golden age of data and AI. And as someone who believes in the transformative power of data with every fiber of my being, I should be pleased with the attention.
But I ask myself, “Is this really the discussion we should be having?” Because culture, in its fullest sense, is not something that can just be “driven”. Culture is organic, emotional, and idiosyncratic. It’s built through values, decisions, behaviors, and purpose over time. When we reduce culture to a slogan — whether “move fast and break things” or “data-driven” — we risk turning a deeply human endeavor into a performance metric.
I ran my musing by my colleague Juan Sequeda, our Principal Scientist at data.world, the head of our AI Lab, and the co-host of our Catalog & Cocktails: The Honest No-BS Data Podcast (with around 300 episodes now). His thoughtful response could be an axiom for this golden age:
“The most powerful cultures don’t just solve problems. They enable serendipity. They make it easy to find data, trust it, understand its meaning, and reuse it for new use cases,” Juan wrote me back in a thoughtful message. “And if that’s not happening, then what you’re calling a ‘data-driven culture’ is just a dashboard-driven illusion.”
Juan captured the challenge in a nutshell: We need to embrace the utility of data in all of our endeavors, without falling prey to a dashboard-driven illusion.
Here’s what I believe: data should inform our culture, not define it. And perhaps the better way to think about this is not to build a “data-driven culture”, but to nurture a data subculture — one that permeates and strengthens the broader organization with insight, curiosity, and discipline, without becoming its gravitational center.
The Gravity Problem
A good metaphor I’ve seen for this is “data gravity”. It refers to the tendency of large datasets to attract more infrastructure, tools, services, and attention — until the organization’s center of gravity shifts from outcomes to infrastructure. You start with the intention to empower better decisions, but suddenly you’re consumed by dashboards, pipelines, governance frameworks, and warehouse sprawl. You’re optimizing for the management of data, not the insights it’s supposed to generate. At the end of the day, data gravity is what I believe we challenge with the tools we create at data.world.
We challenge the irony that motion is often confused with progress. Reports get generated. Platforms get upgraded. But are we making better decisions? Are we delivering better outcomes? A truly effective culture isn’t driven by how many petabytes we store or which analytics stack we use — it’s defined by our ability to ask smarter questions, act wisely based on the answers, and increase business value
Data Fluency: The True Differentiator
One of the most misunderstood elements of data culture is literacy. It’s tempting to assume that giving everyone access to data is enough. But most organizations with data availability problems have even more serious comprehension problems. Data without context or understanding isn’t empowering — it’s dangerous. It fosters overconfidence and misinterpretation, leading to flawed strategies and unintended consequences.
Much of the confusion stems from a misplaced belief that installing the right tools makes a company data-driven. But access isn’t insight. In fact, there are downsides in a singular striving for a data-driven culture. Overreliance on data can lead to analysis paralysis, tunnel vision, or false precision. As leaders, we must prioritize building data maturity — ensuring clean, consistent, usable data — and pair it with widespread data fluency, so that people understand not just what the data says, but what it doesn’t.
The Risk of Dark Data and the Culture of Curiosity
Another lurking issue is what’s been called “dark data” — the massive troves of information that are collected but never used. These aren’t just wasted resources; they’re risks. They can violate privacy, skew the models that every enterprise should be using to master AI, and obscure the truth under a fog of noise. Just like with dark matter in physics, we know it’s out there, we just don’t know what to do with it — or even how to see it clearly.
What’s the antidote? A culture of curiosity. A culture where employees don’t just consume dashboards — they challenge assumptions, explore the “why” behind the “what,” and recognize patterns before algorithms do. This means rewarding experimentation, asking better questions, and welcoming ambiguity — not pretending data can remove it entirely.
Culture Should Be About Ends, Not Means
The most important lesson I’ve learned — both as an entrepreneur and as a steward of a mission-driven company that has been named a best place to work for nine years and across multiple publications — is that culture must be anchored in purpose. At data.world, we don’t view our culture as “data-driven”. We view it as values-driven, with data as the vital enabler. That distinction matters.
As I argued last month, our work at data.world to build advanced catalogs atop the AI-ready foundation known as a knowledge graph, is really to create the “brain and nervous system” of an organization’s data ecosystem. In strictly technical terms, we enable automatic asset identification, improved AI model training, elimination of data silos, and regulatory compliance. But most importantly, and in the true cultural sense, we enable enterprise-wide cognition. The market for data catalogs is projected to grow from $1.1 billion to $3.33 billion by 2029, driven by increasing data volumes, regulatory requirements, and the need for well-structured data to power virtually every function of the modern economy.
But data, as Juan put it, is not the end goal. It’s the means to that goal, and every enterprise has its unique goals that range from growing food to flying airplanes to educating our children for the future.
As I wrote in Chapter 18 of my book, The Entrepreneur’s Essentials, published in 2022 both for free online and at Amazon, culture isn’t built on tactics. It’s built on shared values — curiosity, integrity, community, and yes, the pursuit of truth.
The organizations that get this balance right are the ones where data teams aren’t just generating reports. They’re helping colleagues see more clearly, ask sharper questions, and connect their work to real impact.
Let me be clear: this is not an argument for gut instinct over analysis. It’s a call for balance — and humility.
A Better Way Forward
So let’s move beyond the mantra of “data-driven culture”. Let’s aim higher — for a culture of thoughtful decision-making, fueled by data but defined and animated by values.
Let’s recognize that data is only powerful when it’s understood — and only transformative when it’s used wisely. Let’s build data subcultures rooted in fluency, curiosity, and insight — subcultures that enrich, but do not define, the soul of our companies.
Data doesn’t tell us what kind of company we should be. That’s a question of vision. It doesn’t dictate how we treat one another, or what we owe our customers and communities. Those are matters of ethics, leadership, and imagination.
Because in the end, culture is not an algorithm. And data is not a compass. But together — with purpose and understanding — they can help us navigate toward the future we truly want to build. And that foundation will serve us well with the massive acceleration that AI offers.
