Every evening, on the train from work, my mind doesn’t switch off.
Munich moves past the window — commuters, lights, quiet conversations — and I’m somewhere else entirely. Thinking about DATA.
Not the CODE. Not the MODELS. The PEOPLE around them.
I’ve spent years building data systems for some of the world’s most complex problems — Child Mortality Prediction, flood forecasting, food security, and agricultural risk in the world , East and Central Africa. And somewhere along the way, I noticed a pattern.
The projects that failed rarely failed because of bad data.
They failed because someone didn’t believe in its value.
A department head who saw data sharing as losing control.
A team that had been burned before and wasn’t ready to trust again.
A brilliant engineer who spoke only in technical terms to people who needed plain language.
I’ve sat in those meetings. I’ve watched a room full of intelligent people talk past each other — not because they disagreed on the destination, but because nobody had built a bridge between what the data could do and what the business actually needed to hear.
Data is only as powerful as the humans willing to act on it.
The cleaning, the engineering, the modelling — those are skills you can learn. What’s harder to teach is the ability to walk into a room of sceptics and bring them along.
That’s the work nobody talks about.
What’s the most human challenge you’ve faced in a data project? I’d love to hear it.
