From Dashboards to Dialogue

Avoiding the Dashboard Trap: 5 Takeaways About Real Data Culture

The 2025 CDOIQ Symposium, hosted by Richard Wang, was supported by leaders from Microsoft Purview, Coginiti, DQ Labs, Telmai, and other organizations. The focus extended well beyond tools and tech stacks. I left with sharper insight into emerging tools—and a deeper reminder: adopting technology isn’t the goal. Using it wisely is.

The point is finally landing: The real challenge isn’t technical. It’s human, and it’s lasting.

Despite the sharp suits and even sharper demos (I’m looking at you, Danielle Beringer / KPMG), the most meaningful insights came from stories—shared in panels, hallway conversations, and late-night sidebars across disciplines.

A different kind of throughline emerged:

We don’t have a technology gap. We have a translation, trust, and turf gap. And you can’t dashboard or code your way out of that.

Below are five reflections from CDOIQ 2025 that stuck with me, and might help you. They might help those of you trying to move the needle on culture, not just infrastructure.

1. Culture change is not a product launch. It’s a community of /genuine/ relationships.

If you’re waiting for a tipping point, stop. Culture moves slowly, and that’s not failure—it’s fidelity. Fidelity to learning, to trust, to psychological safety.

As Linda Powell (CFPB, U.S. Treasury) put it: “If I had led with governance, I’d have been marched out.” She learned to lead with questions people couldn’t un-hear. Nancy Morgan (CIA, ODNI) echoed this: “The question isn’t ‘What’s the right governance model?’ It’s ‘What’s the right conversation for this team, right now?’” Both modeled a shift from mandates to inquiry—earning influence through listening, not instruction.

Both Powell and Morgan modeled a key shift—from mandating behavior to asking better questions:

• What does this dashboard assume?
• Who defined this metric—and why?
• What decisions are delayed because someone’s afraid of being wrong?

Culture shifts when questions shift. You can’t drive that with a deck. You need relationship, reflection, and room to adapt.

2. You can't enforce alignment—you have to earn it.

I heard this everywhere: street cred before structure.

From the refinery floor to the boardroom, alignment was achieved through problem-solving, not position.

One story: a refinery worker turned Citizen Development Manager used PowerApps to track hurricane-related downtime. IT said it would take weeks. He built it in a day. It worked. He earned influence because he solved a real problem. Now, he’s leading change from the inside. Another CDO described asking business units, “What do you wish worked better?”—not a word about data domains or policies. Just curiosity.

Eventually, stakeholders flipped the script: “Can I own this domain?” “Can I write the standard?” That’s transformation: when the invitation comes from them.

3. Dashboards without dialogue create delusion.

Dashboards often calcify assumptions more than they clarify them. In every organization, there’s a temptation to mistake clean charts for clear thinking.

Davenport’s (tongue-in-cheek) "Law of Common Information" still holds: “The more an organization cares about a concept, the less likely it is to agree on what it means.” So you get three “customer” definitions. Two churn models. One meeting-ending fight.

As low-code tools proliferate, so do local interpretations. But the answer isn’t to block experimentation. It’s to build real, working guardrails—not static PDFs no one reads. Tools like Microsoft’s Power Platform now embed governance layers, surface telemetry alerts, and nudge users to make better decisions. Doing the right thing has to be easier than not.

But even that isn’t enough. Culture change requires a deeper reckoning:

• What assumptions underpin this number?
• What aren’t we measuring?
• What would we never put on a dashboard, but desperately need to talk about?

[See my GenX existential moment with Nick Doughty.]

4. AI might be the shiny object, but plumbing still matters.

This year, AI dominated nearly every session. But behind closed doors, most leaders admitted the same thing: our plumbing and our mindsets aren’t ready.

One CDO said it plainly:

“Everyone wants the smart bathroom with fancy fixtures, but no one’s checking the pipes.”

Translation? No metadata. No lineage. No clarity on retention or access. Yet, executives are eager to move fast on LLMs. This isn’t just a technical issue—it’s a leadership dissonance problem. The ambition is futuristic. The foundations are fragile.

Platforms like DQLabs and Talmai demonstrate that AI can be responsibly embedded into operations—but only if the necessary groundwork is in place. As low-code platforms multiply, our partnership with tools must evolve. The goal isn’t to reduce human friction; it’s to surface human insight. Tools should support hard conversations, not replace them.

I had the chance to connect with leaders from Microsoft ( Nick Doughty ) Talmai (Steve Carman) and DQLabs (Chris Caldwell), all sponsors of the event, about a shared concern: how do we keep humans meaningfully in the loop as AI begins to validate and accelerate decisions? They underscored a clear risk—if users don’t trust the data before AI enters the picture, the model will only amplify their confusion. That insight stuck with me. My interest in this question goes beyond operational accuracy to user agency and design integrity. How do we help people stay sharp at the wheel—not just technically, but ethically and attentively? What might we learn from aviation, medicine, or other high-stakes fields about the discipline of cross-checks and the quiet power of pause?

You can’t (or shouldn't) automate discernment. You have to earn it. Before the prompt, before the pipeline, before the promise.

5. Governance Doesn’t Have to Feel Extractive—If It’s Grounded in Care

The biggest shift at CDOIQ wasn’t in the keynotes—it was in the quiet moments with people like Hema Seshadri, Ph.D. Denise Lee, Danielle Beringer, Michael Ross, Matthew Mullins, Chuck Kane, Maggie Remynse, Josh Seidman, Veronika Durgin, Aaron Wilkerson and several others.

These weren’t checkbox conversations. They were stewardship conversations. In the early days of Amazon, Jeff Bezos once warned: “The metric has become the proxy for truth.” It’s a familiar trap in governance, where the quality score stands in for trust, or the dashboard becomes a measure of performance, rather than reflection.

Real governance doesn’t start with control, policies, or compliance. It’s about accountability, especially for what doesn't appear on a dashboard. It starts with curiosity, questions about the business priorities, and strategy: What does this metric assume? Who defined it, and what are they protecting? What risks are we still blind to?

Whether it was federal intelligence veterans, Fortune 500 execs, or startup founders, the same truth emerged: people don’t resist governance because they don’t understand it. They resist it because it feels extractive.

Too often, governance is introduced as a compliance checklist or a policy PDF dropped from above. It’s reactive, arriving after a breach or a failed audit. And it carries the posture of “you should have known better” instead of “let’s design smarter systems together.”

When practiced well, governance is a verb, not a noun. When reframed as care—not constraint—it opens the door for these questions. It becomes a shared discipline of discernment, not a performance of compliance.

That’s not a trend. That’s a reckoning. And it’s long overdue.

Closing Thoughts

Don’t start with the dashboard. Start with the questions it can’t answer.

I’m grateful to the organizers of CDOIQ—and to its sponsors—for creating a space where layered, human-centered conversations can unfold. This field is no longer just growing; it’s coming to terms with the complexity of its impact and the depth of leadership it requires.

Data culture isn’t what you publish. It’s what you’re willing to question—and redesign when it no longer serves.

The road ahead isn’t just about better tools. It’s about better judgment and a better relationship with the tools we use. That means choosing them with care, integrating them with intent, and ensuring they reinforce the values we want to scale.

That’s the work. That’s why it matters.

For more information: CDOIQ Conference: https://cdoiq.org

My related work on governance, ethics, and culture:

• Research: What Does Values Drift Really Mean? | What Does AI Anomia Really Mean?
• Books: Driving Data Projects | Driving Your Self-Discovery

Founder of Dative.works, Christine Haskell, PhD, helps leaders navigate the space between data and decision—to slow down, think with clarity, and lead with alignment in an age of accelerating complexity.