The Good Strat Board

Tuesday 24th February 2026

Right, so imagine this: it’s a Sunday in 2026, and somewhere in the digital equivalent of a greasy spoon café with flickering neon and a faint smell of burnt metadata, a group of data professionals has gathered round a table that’s less “round table discussion” and more “round table of the apocalypse”. They’ve had three coffees each, none of them decaf, and they’re absolutely livid about LinkedIn. Not the platform itself, you understand – though God knows it deserves it – but the absolute carnival of self-congratulatory lunacy that passes for “thought leadership” in the data world.

The host – picture a man who’s seen one too many “Is Data Governance Dead?” carousels and now speaks in the tone of someone apologising to his own eyeballs – opens with the classic: “Good morning. Or afternoon. Or whenever you’re watching this because you were too hungover to get up.” Classic. Relatable. Depressing. Welcome to The Sundays Rants, the podcast equivalent of shouting at clouds, but the clouds are posting about “AI-powered stewardship” five times a day.

And then the panel unleashes. Smart Alex stands up like he’s about to denounce a heretic, jabbing at the camera: fourteen-slide carousels longer than the Old Testament rewritten by a drunk algorithm! Self-healing dashboards? Like Wolverine, but for bar charts! He once tried reading one all the way through and his eyes started bleeding. Actual blood. From his eyes. That’s how evil they are. You believe him, don’t you? Because you’ve been there. Slide nine, and suddenly you’re questioning your life choices.

George Melly goes full Mel Brooks: “Oy gevalt!” Secret sauce? It’s Thousand Island dressing on a lie! The data lake is alive – and it’s billing you monthly! Young Frankenstein meets The Social Network meets a tax audit. Brilliant. Terrifying.

Then Yours Stewly – oh, Yours Stewly, the man who speaks like he’s rationing syllables – delivers the slowest, most devastating takedown imaginable. These people post five times a day… five… which is a lot… because most of us struggle to post once without feeling slightly sick… but the algorithm is basically a toddler with a dopamine button… “This!”… “More! More!”… so they sell you a course on how to post five times a day… so you too can pretend you understand Power BI… when really you just copied someone else’s carousel and changed the font to Comic Sans… because irony is dead. Apparently. The pauses alone could qualify as performance art.

Mark Marx leans in, incredulous: What the actual f***? Every workplace problem – slow decisions, bad reports, Karen in accounts still using Excel from 1997 – “That’s a governance failure!” No it isn’t! It’s Karen! And these consultants charge six figures for “cultural transformation workshops” where you sit in a circle pretending to be data champions while nothing changes except your bank balance. Spot on. We’ve all been in that circle. We all hated it.

And then Sir Afi – Sir bloody Afilonius, Knight Errant of Automatic Identification and Data Capture – rises like a medieval herald who’s just discovered TikTok. Hear ye, hear ye! These thought leaders are base-born mountebanks! Peddling tin for gold! Profaning the sacred sigils of the barcode! Mocking the eternal hum of the RFID tag! Rainbow-vomiting dashboards with forty-seven slicers? Heretical tapestries of ignorance! He’s ridden through shadowed valleys of legacy systems where ETL pipelines weep! Faced the Data Silo Dragon! Challenges them to produce a verifiable DAX query or be cast into the Pit of Unread Whitepapers! It’s like if King Lear discovered conditional formatting and lost his mind.

Smart Alex piles on: dashboard porn! Not a dashboard, a cry for help in conditional formatting! Forty-seven slicers – like someone threw a fruit machine down the stairs! Pie charts so distorted they’re abstract expressionism with numbers! One gave him a migraine and a political opinion simultaneously.Stewly again, even slower: They say governance is dead because AI will replace it… then two posts later sell you a governance framework for the AI… so it’s not dead, it’s been promoted to undead consultancy… a vampire that still does Zoom calls and says “just circling back” on the death of governance.

Sir Afi thunders on: Data is the new oil? Foul lie! Oil burns clean when refined; this is rancid chip fat left in the sun! Hoard it in cesspits, promise AI alchemists will turn bytes to gold! Folly! Call to arms: mute the false prophets! Block the emoji hordes! Demand proof – hard lineage, clean metadata, actual phone numbers! True knights post once a quarter with real SQL and admit when their pipeline fails spectacularly!

George Melly: Sequel – “LockedIn Strikes Back: The Empire of Bad Metrics”. Click refresh… nothing. Data’s still rubbish. Roll credits.Smart Alex peaks: AI stewards replace governance? They can’t replace a lightbulb without hallucinating a conspiracy! One knocked on his door at 3 a.m.: “Your data lacks provenance!” His browser history fought back – opened tabs from 2007! Haunted by his own shame tabs!

Mark Marx: Same con as everything – create crisis, sell solution, blame workers.Final thoughts: Block them all. Make the parody: “LockedIn: Men in Tights… of Data.” Just stop posting, please. Tax them heavily. For king, country, clean metadata, and a feed untainted by fire emojis!

Host closes: See you next Sunday – if LinkedIn hasn’t turned us all into paid subscribers to someone’s thought leadership journey.

It’s a glorious, cathartic howl against the grift. Because in a world where people charge nearly a grand to teach you how to type “synergy” without vomiting, sometimes the only sensible response is to rant until sense returns. Or at least until your eyes stop bleeding.

y about “AI-powered data stewardship” makes them important.

THE SUNDAY RANT – The Great Data Grift, LockedIn Lunatics and the Death of Sense – 2026/02/22