The last post in our ongoing series on building a data culture focused on the importance of community, and on ways organizations can create and promote successful communities around data. But while a community is where the data culture can grow, how can you motivate people to participate, to contribute, and to be part of that growth?

Business intelligence is more about business than it is about technology, and business is really about people. Despite this, many BI professionals focus their learning largely on the technology – not the people.

Do you remember the first time you were involved in a performance tuning and optimization effort? The learning process involved looking at the different parts of the tech stack, and in understanding what each part does, how it does it, and how it relates to all of the other parts. Only when you understood these “internals” could you start looking at applying your knowledge to optimizing a specific query or workload.

You need to know how a system works before you can make it work for you. This is true of human systems too.

This video^[1] looks at motivation in the workplace, and how you can motivate the citizen analysts in your data culture to help it – and them – grow and thrive. If you think about these techniques as “performance tuning and optimization” for the human components in a data culture, you’re on the right track.

People are motivated by extrinsic motivators (doing something to get rewards) and intrinsic motivators (doing something because doing it makes them happy)^[2], and while it’s important to understand both types of motivators, it’s the intrinsic motivators that are more likely to be interesting – and that’s where we spend the most time in the video.

When you’re done with the video, you probably want to take a moment to read this Psychology Today article, and maybe not stop there. People are complicated, and if you’re working to build a data culture, you need to understand how you can make people more likely to want to participate. Even with an engaged executive sponsor, it can be difficult to drive personal change.

In my personal experience, task identity and task significance are the biggest success factors when motivating people to contribute in a data culture. If someone knows that their work is a vital part of an important strategic effort, and if they know that their work makes other people’s lives better, they’re more likely to go the extra mile, and to willingly change their daily habits. That’s a big deal.

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^[1] If you’re not old enough to recognize the opening line in the video, please take a moment to appreciate how awesome commercials were in the 1980s.

^[2] Yes, I’m oversimplifying.