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In Episode 6, of Season 7 of Driven by Data: The Podcast, Kyle Winterbottom was joined by Dru Patel, Data Lead at The Football Association, where they discuss how embracing failure fuels a human-centred approach to data leadership that unlocks adoption, trust, and real organisational change, which includes;
- How an unconventional background spanning Kenya, the Cabinet Office, and a life coaching qualification shaped a distinctly human approach to data leadership.
- Why hard work alone has a ceiling, and how the first ten years of Dru's career proved that technical output without soft skills will only take you so far.
- Why starting with the "why" is the most powerful tool a data leader has for driving engagement, adoption, and business buy-in.
- How asking "why" five times gets you to the real root of what a stakeholder actually needs, and why most data teams stop at the first answer.
- How the gap between data teams and the business is normal, and why failing to challenge it with the right questions is the real problem.
- Why data teams need to push back on the brief rather than just building what's requested.
- How a dashboard that stops being used isn't always a failure, and why it often signals that the business is ready to ask bigger questions of the data.
- Why data literacy and data culture are not the same thing, and what it actually takes to move from one to the other.
- How the six blind men and the elephant illustrates what happens when everyone is right in their own context and nobody is looking at the whole picture.
- Why treating data like the organisation's own money, rather than a technical function, is the mindset shift that drives real literacy.
- Why data leaders take failure far harder than anyone else in the room, and what a 1980 psychology study reveals about the stories we tell themselves.
- How building a PPE supplier system in six days during COVID taught Dru that perfection is the enemy of progress.
- Why owning failure openly builds more trust than silence, and how to reframe the conversation from blame to improvement.
- How imposter syndrome shows up in data leadership, why it never fully goes away, and what mentors and trusted voices can do to help reframe it.
- Why nerves and excitement are the same feeling, and how the most effective leaders choose which one to act on.
- Why listening, really listening, before jumping to solutions is the soft skill most data professionals underestimate.
- How a human-centred lens, not a technical one, is what ultimately bridges the gap between data teams and the decisions that matter.
