“The number one data governance & growth newsletter in Australia.”

Making you think a little differently about data governance and growth. 

Here is a question, a growth tidbit and a data governance nugget to get your mental juices flowing . . .

Question

Here is a question for you to reflect on:

“What am I addicted to that I’m pretending doesn’t matter?”

Growth Tidbit

Recent guest to the Diary of a CEO podcast, Michael Easter, best-selling author of the books Comfort Crisis and Scarcity Brain, provided a definition to the term ‘addiction’ which caused us in the office to pause and reflect.  Easter describes addiction as “choosing short-term reward over long-term growth”.  Suddenly, we were all thinking about the countless ‘short-term rewards’ that were consuming our time.  What else could we be achieving if we reallocted time away from the mindless activities that create useless short-term reward and dedicated that time to other more worthwhile endeavours?

What comforts are you addicted to that are actually barriers to your personal growth and future satisfaction? 

Data Governance Nugget

Unfortunately, the challenge is the opposite – no one is addicted to data governance – how boring!  For most data governance capabilities there are not enough short-term rewards.  Our efforts need to be in creating these rewards to greater engage the business and to strengthen the vitality of the governance connective tissue in the organisation.   Obviously, ‘quick wins’ are nice rewards, but ‘quick’ is often not quick enough. 

Another possible angle is introducing more fun.  In their research paper “Effect of Workplace Fun on Employee Morale and Performance”, Patel and Desai confirm the strong positive relationship between the morale and performance of employees in an organisation that creates a fun environment. 

One way Data Governance can help is through the gamification of the data governance function.  Setting up a system of stars and badges for updating of a term in the data catalogue in the past four weeks, or for profiling a set of data in a particular table, along with a point system and small rewards, can go a long way to creating a more fun environment and building data governance momentum.   

Sharing is caring : ) Want to share this issue of DG4G Hump Day via text, social media, or email with someone else? Just copy and paste this link: DG4G Hump Day Newsletter – Addiction & Reward