Action Brief: The Signals That Shaped 2025

This year made a few things impossible to ignore.

Public trust failures became visible and costly. Governance moved out of compliance checklists and into leadership conversations. Suddenly, data governance wasn’t optional, it was required for responsible AI. “Insight theater” started wearing thin, replaced by a growing demand for data work that can be reproduced, explained and defended. Across data-serious organizations, accountability stopped being a downstream concern and became part of the day-to-day work itself.

This year-end Action Brief highlights what truly landed for us.

Persistent Signals

In 2025, we watched a few recurring truths surface repeatedly. By now, they seem like established wisdom:

• Speed without trust amplifies fragility.
• AI without context amplifies risk.
• Data leaders fail less from lack of insight than from overconfidence and overreach.
• The hardest work is behavior change: helping people change how decisions are made.

What we published this year touched on these ideas.

A Year of Analytics Advantage

Leadership Begins With Self-Awareness

From To Thine Own Data Be True to Using Data to Outsmart Your Overconfidence, our message remained consistent: good leadership begins with knowing your own blind spots before diagnosing anyone else’s.

Execution Over Insight

From Vision to Victory reminds us that insight is useless until it becomes a habit. Plans only matter when they show up in calendars, reviews and decisions.

Patterns Over Panic

Across multiple newsletters, we returned to a simple discipline: stop reacting to symptoms and start seeing structure. Most “data problems” aren’t problems, they’re patterns asking to be recognized.

Trust Is a System, Not a Feeling

When nobody trusts your data, speed is irrelevant. The two-week trust reset demonstrated that trust and credibility can be rebuilt quickly when integrity is made visible.

AI Is a Leadership Problem

Our AI coverage made one thing clear: failures aren’t technical, they’re organizational. Missing governance, incentives and context create far scarier outcomes than bad models.

More From Action

Making Sense of Data Cloud

At Tableau Conference 2025, Keith Helfrich sat down with Salesforce’s Architect for Data and AI, David A. Spezia, for an eye-opening interview about Data Cloud and how it fits into the Tableau Next product strategy.

Data Engineering, Demystified

Action’s data engineer, Samad Husain, launched a new blog series to highlight the often invisible nuances of data engineering, replacing murky mystery with clearer mental models to help teams collaborate and strengthen trust in how the data is produced.

Why Your Meetings Suck (and Why It’s Not Your Fault)

In expanding his role as a team collaboration designer, Jay Farias published a series of articles to address a universal pain point: meetings that drain energy without producing clarity. He offers simple shifts that transform meetings into alignment tools.

Experiments and Breakthroughs

• We launched animated versions of the Analytics Advantage newsletter.
• Shaun Davis published a “Data Leadership Academy” series in Analytics Advantage.
• We launched this Action Brief newsletter as a monthly peek into what Action is up to.
• Jay Farias, an extraordinarily talented team facilitator and workshop designer, began offering his services to clients.
• We continued to build a growing knowledge library with 56 new blog articles designed to be used in the flow of real work, not skimmed once and forgotten.
• We began recording short videos of our Actionauts introducing themselves and their work. See the videos for Jay, Robert, Shaun, Jeremy, and Phil.

From the Vault

Tableau Conference 2025: What to Look For

Our breakout content piece this year was the pre-TC25 episode of The Sensemakers. With more than 11,000 views, the Tableau community tuned in to find out what they should look for at the conference. We felt like rockstars as conference attendees came up to say how much they appreciate our work.

👉 Watch the video.

The Action Way

The Action Way is our ethos in practice. It details the memorable, foundational principles that shape how our projects move and how we work with each other.

In 2025, our Action ethos moved ever deeper into practice:

• Clarity is kindness showed up as we improved our user story creation process to cleanly define when a task is “done-done.” We also created a template and library of runbooks to more soundly document our workflow processes.
• Integration as a cultural virtue is how we work. This year, we more effectively tied together our Slack conversations, user stories, Notion docs and Google Workspace to create a more effective shared reality.
• Slow is smooth, and smooth is fast proved itself again and again as calm systems outperformed rushed ones.

From the Quotebase

“Build a culture that sees the patterns, not the panic.”
— Shaun Davis

If 2025 had a one-sentence thesis for us, this might be it.

Looking Ahead

Heading into the new year, we’re paying closer attention to:

• Decision quality, not output volume.
• Data governance as enablement, not constraint.
• Systems that make good behavior easy.

No predictions. We’re just asking intelligent questions.

Ahead for Action in 2026

• A new season of The Sensemakers, with new formats and additional hosts.
• New product and service offerings.
• AI Foundations.
• Leadership Facilitation.
• Financial Analytics.
• Marketing Analytics.
• Workshops and webinars.
• Exciting new partnerships.

Thank You for Engaging With Us

For staying curious, resisting panic and choosing clarity when it would’ve been easier to rush.

Let’s carry it forward into the new year.