#374 How to Build a Data-Inspired Decision Culture

**Dr. Darren Pulsipher** (0:00)
Welcome to Embracing Digital Transformation. Before we dive in, I wanted to personally thank you for listening. Many of the ideas we discuss on this show inspired my new book, AI Augmented Teams. If you're looking for practical ways to combine human expertise and AI to achieve better outcomes, I think you'll find it valuable. Learn more at padar.ai.books. That is paidar.ai.
Now, let's get started with the show.

**Dr. Sebastian Vinicky** (0:30)
With the purpose of digital transformation, I mean, why are you doing it? You're doing it because you're hoping that data will help you. You're hoping that data will, in the future...
Make the decisions more. You're hoping that data will allow you to automate things. And then it turns out, and I mean, you've also been For... so long in digital transformation, there's always that big hope, that big promise, and then people look back at that transformation and just say, there's all of this frustration. I was promised transformative results.

**Dr. Darren Pulsipher** (1:03)
Why this matters to you. Most transformation programs still treat data as a reporting layer instead of a decision discipline. And that is why so many initiatives stall after the dashboards go live. If your teams are using metrics to defend positions instead of test them, you do not have a data problem. You have a leadership problem. In this episode, we look at the difference between collecting information and changing how an organization thinks. That distinction affects culture, accountability and the pace of change. Let's get into the conversation.
Welcome to Embracing Digital Transformation. This is Dr. Darren. On this episode, how to build a data inspired decision culture with Sebastian Vinicky.
Sebastian, welcome to the show.

**Dr. Sebastian Vinicky** (1:55)
Hi, Darren. Great to be here.

**Dr. Darren Pulsipher** (1:57)
Hey, I'm really excited about this topic because not a lot of people really use data to help with their cultural change.
A lot of times they go, let me see which way the wind is blowing and try and steer through this very complex digital transformation, which includes a lot of people, right? And culture change and all that. So I'm excited to talk about this today. But before we get started, everyone that listens to my show knows that I only have superheroes on the show and every superhero has a background story. So Sebastian, what is your background story? What's your origin story?

**Dr. Sebastian Vinicky** (2:40)
Yeah, no radioactive spider bites or anything like that.

**Dr. Darren Pulsipher** (2:43)
No, god, darn, I was hoping for something like that.

**Dr. Sebastian Vinicky** (2:46)
Well, maybe one day, maybe that was my hope. So when I got started getting into data, I was actually studying bioinformatics because I was always super, super interested in what can data tell us about the human body and what can it do with helping us figure out how everything works and how we can find help when the body is not working. So that got me super, super interested in data. But then unfortunately, I'm just an extremely curious person. And at the same time, I had an issue when I graduated from bioinformatics, that there was only one data set. It was the time where we had that single human genome, or it has later turned out that draft sequence. And so that got me curious about all of these other things. So I did data with financial services, with industrial clients and so forth. For 20 years now, I've basically tried to help clients to do better things with their data and find the value that they're hoping for.

**Dr. Darren Pulsipher** (3:48)
So that's really interesting. I bet you see data in everything that you do then.

**Dr. Sebastian Vinicky** (3:52)
Yeah. And sometimes where other people also don't see it, right? So I will actually look at, you know, let's say there's a field of wheat outside of there, and I've recently worked with somebody in precision agriculture. So for me, it will be like, almost in my mind, I divided up, oh, it's all these little squares where you could measure the temperature and the humidity. And I recently read about this really, really cool machine, which I think it sounds like sci-fi. So if you're dreaming about a machine that can identify weeds with AI and then use a laser to shoot them down, that exists.
It's a million bucks, but you can almost, you know, you can buy one if you want one. And so we're living in this amazing world where if you just look closely enough, data is everywhere. It's like background music, you don't notice it. But once you start paying attention and basically say, you know, yeah, what's outside there? And you know, oh, the cars, they're all collecting data, even if they're not self-driving. And if I go grocery shopping, I mean, how the store arranged it, the pricing, how the products are made, all everything is data. Data is already running the world if you just look for it.