Overview
In this episode of The Dashboard Effect, Brick Thompson and Landon Oaks tackle a problem that derails more BI initiatives than bad data or poor tool selection: culture. Building a great dashboard is the baseline. Getting people to trust it, use it, and make decisions with it is the harder work, and it is almost entirely a human problem rather than a technical one.
The conversation is a useful corrective for any organization that has invested in BI and found itself asking why adoption is lower than expected. The answer, Brick and Landon argue, is almost always somewhere in the cultural environment around the tool rather than in the tool itself. See how Blue Margin’s Managed Analytics & Insights builds the adoption strategy, training, and change management support into every engagement so that dashboards delivered actually get used.
What This Episode Covers
Resistance to Change (0:44 – 1:10)
Employees may resist new BI tools for reasons that have nothing to do with the technology. Fear of transparency, concern about increased accountability, and attachment to familiar systems are all real forces that shape how people respond to dashboards. Understanding those motivations is a prerequisite for addressing them.
Technical Intimidation and Distrust (1:11 – 1:41)
New systems can feel overwhelming, and when a dashboard produces a number that contradicts what someone has been tracking manually in Excel for years, the instinct is often to distrust the dashboard rather than the spreadsheet. Building trust in the data is a process, not a launch event.
Misaligned Incentives (1:42 – 2:10)
Shared data initiatives can surface tensions between departments that were previously invisible. When Finance and Sales are looking at the same numbers but optimizing for different outcomes, a dashboard does not resolve that conflict automatically. It can make it more visible, which is only useful if leadership is prepared to address it.
Address the Excel Problem (2:11 – 2:57)
Fighting Excel is a losing battle. The more effective approach is to integrate it, using dashboards to provide cleaner, more reliable data that users can export and work with in the tools they already trust. Meeting people where they are is a faster path to adoption than asking them to abandon their existing workflows entirely.
Model Leadership Adoption (3:30 – 3:59)
Dashboards gain traction when leadership uses them visibly and consistently. If executives are still asking for data to be sent as email attachments or pulling their own spreadsheets for meetings, the signal to the rest of the organization is that the dashboard is optional. Culture follows behavior from the top.
Infuse Dashboards into Daily Work (4:00 – 4:39)
The most effective way to make dashboards stick is to make them unavoidable in the right way. Office monitors, daily email summaries, and incorporating data into routine meetings all normalize the tool and reduce the friction of adoption by bringing the data to people rather than expecting them to seek it out.
Prioritize Training and Psychological Safety (4:40 – 6:31)
Adequate training demystifies the technology, but the more important variable is psychological safety. If employees believe data will be used to evaluate or punish them, they will find ways to avoid it or undermine it. When data is framed as a tool for empowerment rather than surveillance, adoption follows naturally.
Use Meaningful Metrics to Track Adoption (7:30 – 8:50)
Page views and login counts are vanity metrics. Understanding whether a dashboard is actually driving value requires looking at usage patterns and engaging directly with power users to understand what is working and why. That feedback loop is what allows teams to iterate toward tools that people genuinely rely on.
Who It’s For
This episode is worth your time if you are a BI or data leader who has delivered technically sound dashboards that are not getting used, an executive sponsor of a data initiative trying to understand why adoption has plateaued, a change management or operations professional involved in rolling out new reporting tools, or anyone who has heard the phrase “we already have that in Excel” one too many times and wants a framework for responding to it effectively.
Why It’s Worth a Listen
The technical side of BI gets most of the attention, and for good reason. But this episode makes a compelling case that the cultural side is where most initiatives actually succeed or fail. Brick and Landon bring a perspective shaped by real engagement work, and the strategies they outline are specific enough to be actionable rather than generic change management advice.
The point about psychological safety is worth particular attention. Data initiatives that are positioned as accountability tools tend to produce one of two outcomes: people game the metrics or they avoid the system entirely. The firms that get lasting value from BI are the ones that establish early and clearly that data exists to help people do their jobs better, not to build a case against them.
For any organization that has done the technical work and is still not seeing the results it expected, this episode is a useful diagnostic. The problem is almost certainly not the dashboard.
