A retail chain in Konya — 268 employees, seven stores, a rapidly growing e-commerce channel triggered by the pandemic — bought an expensive business intelligence licence at the end of 2020. Sales data was scattered across three systems, weekly management meetings were full of ‘in my opinion’ sentences, and the leadership team genuinely believed that the BI tool would fix this. The tool was installed. Training was completed. Three months later the manager noticed that the language in meetings had not changed at all. Regional directors still narrated their instincts. The dashboard was visible on the screen, but nobody was looking at it while they spoke. The problem was not the tool. The problem was the decision rituals.Most conversations about data culture get stuck at the technology layer: which BI platform, which data warehouse architecture, which integration method. These questions are not irrelevant, but they should not come first. The prior question is: where exactly does this company’s decision-making break down, and what is being used in place of evidence at those moments? In most Turkish SMEs the answer is consistent — hierarchy, instinct, and the preference of whoever speaks loudest in the room. Buying a tool does not change this behaviour. Changing the ritual does. That is the core of data culture: the institutional habits that determine how evidence enters a decision.By ritual I mean something concrete and observable, not abstract. How is a meeting agenda structured? How is a proposal brought to the table? How is a decision recorded? And how is that decision reviewed one week later? In the Konya chain, the pattern was familiar: agenda items were broad and vague like ‘sales update’, each person brought a feeling rather than a figure, discussion closed when the senior leader spoke, and decisions were deferred with a note that said ‘we will inform by e-mail.’ There was not a single opening in this flow where the BI tool could enter. Nobody had established the habit of saying ‘let us look at the data now.’ Buying the tool was not enough. A friction point for the tool had to be created first.There are three practical levers for changing this, and applying them in sequence works better than launching all three at once. The first lever is the decision template. Require every proposal to arrive at the table with a single page: what is the problem, what is the assumption, what data supports that assumption, and what is the alternative. This one structural change reduces the weight of ‘in my opinion’ sentences because filling in the template forces a confrontation with evidence. A food wholesaler in Gaziantep — roughly 190 employees, struggling with supply chain disruptions throughout the pandemic period — applied a version of this template as a standalone experiment. After eight weeks, meeting durations had dropped noticeably, and the share of agenda items that reached a clear decision without extended debate had risen in a way that the leadership team described as ‘clearly visible.’ The second lever is adding a fixed agenda slot for the outcome of the previous decision. This signals that decisions are tracked and that evidence returns to the room; it gradually pushes leadership behaviour toward accountable follow-through. The third lever is the leader visibly questioning their own decision with data. When a senior leader asks out loud ‘would this data change our decision?’ the team learns to ask the same question. If the leader does not ask, nobody does.A tension needs to be named plainly here. This approach — ritual change, decision templates, leadership behaviour — requires a very different tempo and resource profile from large-scale enterprise transformation programmes. In Turkey in 2021, most SMEs cannot start big-budget transformation projects while managing currency pressure, inflation, and ongoing pandemic uncertainty. The good news in this context is that ritual change does not require budget; it requires discipline. A decision template is a Word document. Adding an agenda slot costs nothing. Leadership behaviour is not a line item. That said, one important constraint must be acknowledged: ritual change does not become sustainable if the underlying data quality problem remains unsolved. A manager who is ready to tie decisions to evidence but whose data is unreliable or contradictory will find that the template produces confusion rather than clarity. Ritual and data quality work must run in parallel — waiting for one before starting the other simply delays both.The pandemic accelerated this conversation in a specific way. Moving meetings from physical rooms to Teams and Zoom screens during 2020 and 2021 both challenged and opened up decision-making practice. The challenge: conducting instinct-based discussions on a video call became even easier — it is simpler to ‘cut the camera’ and exit a remote meeting than to leave a conference room. The opening: screen-sharing a live dashboard, dropping a document link into the chat, and referencing a figure in real time all carry less friction on a digital call than they do in a physical meeting. The Konya retail manager was not claiming that the BI tool was worthless. The tool was simply left in a vacuum. Without redesigning the meeting ritual, the tool had no pathway into the decision flow.The right starting question for data culture is this: how does a decision actually close in this company? If the answer is ‘when the most senior person in the room states a preference,’ buying a tool will not change that answer. For the answer to change, a gap must first be created inside the decision — a moment where evidence can enter. That gap is built through meeting rituals, decision templates, and the visible behaviour of leadership. Technology widens the gap; people create it first. The Konya chain is still paying for that BI licence. But the third slot on the weekly meeting agenda now reads: ‘what was the outcome of last week’s decision?’ A small change. And yet it touches something that the expensive tool, on its own, never reached.
This article was originally published in Turkish by Gökhan MERCANOĞLU on May 3, 2021. The English edition has been reviewed and edited by the author.