David Hanna
Wesley Community Action (WCA) was formalised in 1950 and has since grown to a network of centres based across the wider Pōneke region, prioritising working in a whānau-led, community-driven, and warm-hearted way to uplift and inspire real change. Coming from the Methodist tradition, who had some of the first missionaries in Aotearoa and were at the signing of Te Tiriti o Waitangi, WCA has a strong commitment to upholding Te Tiriti in its work and actively promotes a Rangatira approach through its Te Ahunga Te Hua strategic direction.
This piece is written by David Hanna, WCA’s Director for the last 21 years. David has long been part of the Council at NZCCSS and we are fortunate enough to have him as one of our current Co-Presidents alongside Renee Rewi of Kake Oranga Hāhi Katorika | Catholic Family Support Services. David is someone who passionately engages with new ideas and leads WCA with data-driven insights meshed with human compassion. His strong Methodist background drives him to be a fierce advocate for communities, justice, and ethics. I knew asking him to write something for this collection would gift us with something I hadn’t even considered, and so it has, as he introduced me to the concept of Warm Data Labs.
NZCCSS is proud to have WCA as a key member who practice awhitanga and manaakitanga for the whole Pōneke community, and I am grateful to David for the opportunity to share his thoughts with you all.
– Rachel
New Zealand’s Social Investment approach is growing the reliance on administrative data, metrics, and quantitative indicators to inform decision-making. This has significant ethical implications that are not being fully discussed.
These forms of data offer clarity, comparability, and a sense of control. They allow systems to count, measure, and monitor trends at scale. Yet when relied on in isolation, administrative data can unintentionally flatten reality. It abstracts human lives into categories and numbers, often stripping away context, meaning, and relationship. Warm Data Labs offer a vital counterbalance to this tendency by bringing forward the richness of lived experience and enabling a deeper engagement with the complexity of human systems.
The psychiatrist and philosopher Iain McGilchrist offers a helpful lens for understanding why this imbalance occurs. His work on the brain’s hemispheres suggests that the left and right hemispheres attend to the world in fundamentally different ways. The left hemisphere tends toward narrow focus, abstraction, categorisation, and control. It excels at measurement, analysis, and decomposition. The right hemisphere, by contrast, takes in the world as a whole. It is attuned to context, relationship, nuance, embodiment, and meaning. Crucially, McGilchrist argues that while both modes are necessary, modern Western systems have become dominated by left hemisphere ways of knowing, often at the expense of the right.
Administrative data aligns strongly with this left hemisphere orientation. It privileges what can be counted, standardised, and compared, often decontextualising human experience in the process. Numbers can tell us what is happening, but they struggle to convey how it is experienced, why it matters, or what it means within the wider fabric of people’s lives. When this mode of attention becomes dominant, organisations risk mistaking the map for the territory—treating representations of reality as though they are reality itself.
Warm Data Labs deliberately reengage a more right-hemispheric mode of attention. Rather than extracting information from individuals, they create conditions for people to meet as people, not as roles or data points. Through facilitated conversations that move across multiple contexts—family, culture, economy, environment, governance, identity—participants surface how different parts of a system interact and co-shape one another. What emerges is not a dataset to be analysed, but a living picture of relational complexity.
The richness of warm data lies precisely in what resists easy measurement. It includes stories, emotions, metaphors, tensions, and contradictions. It reveals patterns of relationship rather than isolated variables. This aligns closely with McGilchrist’s assertion that the right hemisphere is better suited to apprehending living systems, where meaning arises through connection and context rather than fragmentation. Warm data does not seek certainty or closure; it holds ambiguity long enough for deeper understanding to emerge.
Importantly, Warm Data Labs do not reject quantitative data. Instead, they restore balance. They allow the left hemisphere’s analytical capacities to be guided by the right hemisphere’s broader, more humane grasp of reality. In doing so, they help organisations ask better questions of their numbers and recognise what those numbers cannot capture on their own.
In an era increasingly shaped by dashboards, algorithms, and performance indicators, Warm Data Labs recentre the human. They remind us that systems are not merely managed—they are lived in. By integrating relational, contextual understanding alongside administrative data, Warm Data Labs support responses that are more ethical, resilient, and attuned to the full complexity of human systems.
