MENU

Why the most strategic thing a data leader can do is deliberately cultivate community beyond their own walls

Standing on stage at the World Leaders in Data and AI awards Gala, accepting their Trailblazer in Responsible Innovation award, I had a moment of clarity:

The most responsibly innovative thing I’ve done in my career was beyond a framework I built or a system I implemented…

It was my consistent and persistent approach to getting there by being deliberate about stepping outside the comfort of my organization and my knowledge and building on it to learn from people who think and approach problem-solving differently than I do.

Let me explain what I mean, because this matters for every data leader navigating 2026.

The Work Inside the Walls

For over 10 years at in the world’s largest, private, family owned pharmaceutical company, I built real-world evidence strategies, led data science initiatives, and drove digital transformation across local and global teams. I designed data governance frameworks specifically as foundations for AI delivery. I taught teams how to think about clinical development differently. I connected dots between regulatory requirements and technological possibilities.

That work mattered. It moved the needle. It created value for patients and for the business.

AND here’s what I’ve come to understand: all of that internal work reached its full potential especially because I was simultaneously doing something else, something that might have raised an eyebrow here or there, or looked inefficient to someone tracking billable hours or measuring productivity.

I was building relationships and learning from people who had expertise, experience, and knowledge beyond my immediate projects.

Where the Breakthroughs Actually Came From or Grew Up

Some of the most magical moments, ideas, and breakthroughs in my work didn’t come from the next strategic planning meeting or the latest consultant report. They came from conversations that seemed tangential at the time yet proved to be foundational when I connected the dots at just the right time.

Conversations with people in completely different departments within my organization, some of which were so impactful that we ended up joining forces and transforming how we worked together.

Startup founders and mentors I met through NYU Endless Frontier Labs who showed me what scrappy innovation looks like when you have to work outside of enterprise resources with energy, urgency, and creativity.

Biotech leaders I connected with at DPHARM: Disruptive Innovations to Modernize Clinical Trials who challenged every assumption I held about clinical trial design and showed me what’s possible when you evolve beyond the status quo.

Women leaders across industries I met through CHIEF, Orbition Group, and Gartner C-level Communities who helped me recognize patterns I’d been too close to my own work to notice, patterns about organizational change, about influencing without authority, about building cultures that support innovation rather than stifle it.

Each of these communities taught me something I learned outside of my organization; no matter how smart my colleagues were or how much budget we had, the insight came intentionally seeking and taking a different perspective.

The Strategic Imperative of Looking Outward

Let me be direct about something most won’t say out loud: your organization doesn’t have all the answers.

If done flawlessly (which, as a statistician, I would say always has some wiggle room around it as nothing is “perfect”), you have a brilliant team. You may even have a cutting-edge technology stack. YET, if you’re only learning from people inside your own walls or echo chambers or worse, only from people in your own industry vertical, you’re operating with a dangerously narrow field of vision.

This isn’t about being “open-minded” in some vague, feel-good sense. This is strategic necessity in 2026.

Here’s why: The pace of change in AI, data governance, real-world evidence, and digital transformation is accelerating faster than any single organization can keep up with. Regulatory frameworks are evolving. Technologies are emerging. Patient urgency and expectations are shifting. Competitive landscapes are being redrawn.

Waiting for internal teams to figure everything out through trial and error, is not being thorough but rather being inefficient.

The leaders that will outpace and win in this ever changing environment, they are the ones who:

• Cultivate relationships across industries, not just their own vertical
• Actively seek out alternative perspectives that may make them uncomfortable
• Build genuine community, not transactional networks
• Share knowledge freely because they understand that rising tides lift all boats

This is core strategic competency.

Three Superpowers Developed Through Community

Winning this award made me reflect on what’s actually driven my career trajectory. Three capabilities stand out, and every single one was developed through this intentional approach to community cultivation:

1. Future-Sensing Strategic Vision

You know those moments when you can connect dots that others haven’t linked yet? When you make a strategic bet that seems risky at the time but turns out to be prescient?

That doesn’t come from individual brilliance. It comes from being embedded in diverse communities where people are experimenting at the edges of what’s possible.

I understood the implications of large language models for clinical documentation before most pharma companies were discussing it, not because I’m smarter, but because I was having coffee conversations with data scientists working on completely different problems in adjacent industries.

I saw the shift toward real-world evidence coming years before it became regulatory expectation because I was listening to regulators, payers, patient advocates, academic researchers, and industry leaders, all in different contexts, having different conversations, solving different problems.

I recognized that traditional clinical trial monitoring approaches were failing before we had the data to prove it because I was talking to site coordinators, clinical research associates, and startup founders who were all experiencing the same pain points from different angles.

Strategic vision isn’t prophecy. It’s pattern recognition across multiple contexts that you’d never encounter if you stayed in your lane.

2. Human-Centered Transformation Leadership

Here’s what nobody tells you about digital transformation: the technology is the easy part.

The governance frameworks? Challenging but manageable. The AI algorithms? Complex but solvable. The data architecture? Requires expertise but it’s doable.

The genuinely hard part is helping people navigate the uncertainty, anxiety, identity shifts, and very real disruption that comes with significant change.

You can’t learn that from a project management certification or a change management textbook. You learn it from other leaders who’ve been in the trenches, who’ve made mistakes, who’ve figured out how to create psychological safety when everything feels unstable.

Some of my most valuable leadership lessons came from:

• Design thinking workshops where I learned to lead with empathy before solutions
• Conversations with Chief members navigating completely different industries who taught me about building culture intentionally during rapid change
• Women in tech and data communities where we shared the unvarnished truth about what it takes to lead authentically in spaces that weren’t designed for us
• Startup founders who showed me how to move fast without breaking trust
• Cross-departmental collaborations inside my organization where I learned that the best innovation happens when you bring together people with different expertise and create space for them to challenge each other constructively

Every community taught me something different about what it means to lead transformation in a way that honors the humans experiencing it, which has huge positive implications to the business outcomes we’re trying to achieve.

3. Strategic Collaboration and Influence

The bridge-building work I do, translating between technical teams and business leaders, between data scientists and clinical experts, between innovation teams and compliance functions, between pharmaceutical companies and regulatory bodies… it didn’t develop in isolation.

It developed because I’ve deliberately positioned myself in dozens of different “rooms” across industries, roles, and perspectives.

I’ve learned how epidemiologists think versus how software engineers think. I understand what keeps a CFO up at night versus what excites a data scientist. I can speak the language of patients, regulators, venture capitalists, and academic researchers. I know how to frame the same AI governance challenge differently for a risk-averse quality team versus an innovation-hungry product team.

That’s not natural talent. That’s deliberate exposure to diverse thinking, combined with genuine curiosity about how different people solve similar problems.

When I’m in a room at DPHARM listening to clinical operations leaders describe their challenges, I’m also thinking about the conversation I had last month with a Chief member from retail about supply chain optimization. The problems aren’t identical, but the patterns often are.

When I’m advising a biotech startup at NYU on their data strategy, I’m drawing on lessons from Gartner C-level conversations about enterprise transformation that seem only tangentially related but actually share deep fundamental principles.

This ability to synthesize across contexts, to see analogies, to transfer solutions, to connect people and ideas that should know each other, is perhaps the most valuable superpower I’ve developed. And it only exists because I’ve refused to stay in my comfort zone.

Your Superpowers Inventory

These three capabilities of future-sensing strategic vision, human-centered transformation leadership, and strategic collaboration, weren’t built in isolation. They emerged from my consistent and persistent practice of stepping outside my organizational comfort zone.

Now I want to hear from you: Which of these three superpowers resonates most with your own experience? Or what capability have you developed specifically because you sought out diverse perspectives outside your organization?

Share in the comments below. And if you’re wondering how to actually operationalize this approach, how to make external learning a strategic practice rather than an occasional side activity, I’ll be sharing the three specific practices that make responsible innovation possible in my next post.

In the meantime, ask yourself: When was the last time you had a conversation with someone who challenged your assumptions? If it’s been more than a week, it might be time to expand your circle.

---

About the Author:

Dr. Victoria Gamerman is a biostatistician, digital transformation consultant, and thought leader specializing in AI and real-world evidence applications in life sciences. After over 10 years leading global digital transformation and data science at Boehringer Ingelheim, where she built real-world evidence strategies, led data science initiatives, and designed data governance frameworks for AI delivery, she continues to lecture at Columbia and mentor startups at NYU while running RWD Insights, her consulting practice focused on helping life science oriented companies implement AI responsibly and effectively. She is a 2025 recipient of the WLDA Trailblazer in Responsible Innovation Award.