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.