Most data teams are bankrupt

A data team’s currency is trust. And most are bankrupt.

Walk into any data all-hands and you’ll hear the same existential hand-wringing about ROI measurement. Earnest frameworks proliferate like dashboard widgets—each promising to finally capture that elusive “business impact.” They’re all solving the wrong equation.

Here’s what we’re actually doing: Data teams are trust brokers in the influence economy. We don’t produce insights—we produce credibility that leaders can spend on decisions.

The great measurement delusion

Yes, Doug Hubbard’s right—you can measure anything. Decompose problems with sufficient perspicacity and you’ll find your proxy metrics. But measuring everything doesn’t mean you’re measuring what matters.

The commentariat genuflects at the altar of dollar attribution. “Show me the ROI!” they cry, demanding Excel proofs for what’s fundamentally a social phenomenon. Sure, track your decision velocity, your model accuracy, your incremental lift. But recognize these for what they are: shadows on the cave wall. The real game happens in conference rooms where someone stakes their career on your analysis.

Most data teams are default dead. They just don’t know it yet.

Your balance sheet has the wrong currency

Think of your data team as a particularly exotic investment bank:

Trust = (Technical Competence × Business Translation) ^ Relationship Quality

This isn’t metaphor—it’s mechanism. Every interaction either deposits or withdraws from your credibility reserves. Technical competence? That’s your asset quality. Business translation? Your market-making ability. Relationship quality? The exponential factor that separates the quick from the dead.

The banking parallels run deeper than you’d think:

Credit rating → Your reputation after the last model failed
Interest rates → How fast insights decay (consumer behavior changes overnight; human nature, rarely)
Liquidity crisis → Everyone needs answers NOW but your pipeline’s frozen
Seigniorage → The value gap between raw data and actionable insight

But here’s where it gets interesting: banks make money through lending. So do you. Every recommendation is a loan of social capital from your credibility reserves to a decision-maker’s initiative.

The influence game has two paths

Path 1: Elbows
You personally elbow your way into rooms where decisions happen. Exhausting but effective. Think of yourself as an intellectual pugilist, trading technical haymakers for strategic influence. Works brilliantly until you burn out.

Path 2: Alive companies
You find leaders willing to stake their capital on data-driven bets. They understand the core transaction: “I’ll bet my credibility on your analysis.” These companies move with alacrity while others form committees to discuss forming committees.

The cheat code? Founder-led companies. As Alex Danco notes:

“The founder has this incredible reservoir of storytelling capital, which gets replenished every time people tell the founding story.”

They can afford to bet on your insights because their credibility regenerates. Everyone else hoards social capital like Depression-era gold.

Technical excellence is table stakes, not the game

Here’s what terrifies me: someone reads this and decides to hire PowerPoint jockeys who “influence” without substance. Let me be crystalline: technical excellence is your ante, not your winnings.

The brutal calculus:

Technical error → Your Lehman moment (credibility bankruptcy)
Influence without rigor → Another opinion in an opinion-rich environment
Rigor without influence → Cassandra with a Jupyter notebook

Herbert Simon understood this decades ago: “You do not change people’s opinions by defeating them with logic.” Logic is necessary but insufficient. The sufficient condition? Someone with capital to spend says, “I’ll stake my reputation on this.”

The equations that actually matter

Forget traditional ROI. Here’s what drives data team value:

Impact = (Decision Velocity × Decision Quality × Stakes) ^ Feedback Loops

Notice the exponential factor. Fast feedback loops don’t just improve decisions—they compound your influence geometrically. This is why consumer analytics beats enterprise: you know if you’re wrong by Tuesday.

ROI = (Impact × Trust × Future Capability) / Total Investment

Traditional view sees revenue over cost. Sophisticated view sees a three-factor multiplication where zero in any factor zeros the whole equation.

Playing Kelly with your credibility

Most data teams are either cowards or cowboys. The smart ones? They’re Kelly bettors.

The Kelly Criterion tells you how much to bet based on your edge. For data teams, it’s about how much social capital to stake on each decision. Got 70% confidence with massive upside? That’s a measured bet. Got 95% confidence with marginal impact? That’s a small ante.

The key insight: optimize for long-term credibility growth, not single-decision glory.

This is why catastrophic failures destroy data teams—they bet the farm on one model. The perspicacious leader builds a portfolio:

Core holdings (60%): Statistical fundamentals, domain expertise, communication
Growth investments (30%): Causal inference, engineering skills, leadership
Speculation (10%): Bleeding-edge techniques, contrarian approaches

The path forward

Smart data leaders recognize they’re running a trust-manufacturing operation, not an insight factory. Every technical investment builds credibility. Every successful translation builds trust. Every trust expenditure that pays off earns compound interest.

The virtuous cycle:

Technical investment → Credibility
Credibility + Translation → Trust
Trust → Access to bigger decisions
Bigger decisions → Greater impact
Impact → Resources for more investment

But here’s the rub: one catastrophic failure equals bankruptcy. One “winter coats in July” moment (because someone mixed hemispheric data) and you’re done. Not for a quarter—for years.

Your Monday morning question

Stop asking “What’s our ROI?” Start asking “What’s our trust balance?”

If you can’t answer—if you’re genuflecting at measurement altars while influence ebbs away—you’re already default dead. The liquidators are coming. They’re called “budget cuts” and they feast on teams that confuse dashboards with decisions.

The teams that survive? They know they’re banks. They know trust compounds. They bet Kelly, not YOLO.

Most importantly, they know that in the influence economy, technical excellence earns you a seat, but trust earns you a voice.

And voices, properly deployed, change companies.