Welcome to the first edition of Action Brief, your quick catch-up on the most useful content, insights, ethos, and sensemaking from across The Action Company. Look for new issues on the last Friday of every month.

From This Month’s “Analytics Advantage” Newsletters

The False Urgency of Now

The joke answer to “When do you need this?” is “Yesterday.” Too often, that joke gets treated as policy. In this newsletter, Shaun argues that urgency is not a strategy. Protecting your team doesn’t mean blocking every demand; it means knowing when urgency is real and when it’s noise from someone else’s agenda. Read the blog version.

Patterns Beat Context Every Time

Don’t be intimidated by big logos or pedigrees; watch the shapes in the data. Patterns repeat across industries and situations, even when context tries to distract you. Follow the repetition to get closer to the truth. Read the blog version.

The Simplicity Trap

Everyone wants simplicity, but few accept the grind required to achieve it. Real simplicity comes from wrestling with the mess, discarding the noise, and isolating the two or three levers that actually move outcomes forward. It looks effortless only after the hard part is logged. Read the blog version.

More Action

Introducing Jay Farias

We’ve launched a new series of short resume videos for Actionauts. In the first profile, meet Jay Farias and get a fast sense of what he brings to Action. Watch the video.

Learn more about Jay.

Getting to Know Shaun Davis

If you read Analytics Advantage, you know Shaun. This new video goes further—how he thinks about data, collaboration, and the kinds of problems he loves to untangle. Watch the video.

See Shaun’s resume.

Dashboard Discovery Workshop

Jay’s Dashboard Discovery Workshop is coming soon. He wrote a behind-the-scenes article on the approach and shared a free template in both PDF and Miro formats. Read the article and access the templates·

Confused by Data Cloud? Start Here.

What is Salesforce Data Cloud and how does it fit in the broader Salesforce ecosystem? We’ve got three resources to help you: an interview with Salesforce Data & AI architect David Spezia, a companion blog post, and a concise explainer PDF. Watch the interview · Read the post · Download the PDF.

From the Action Vault

We’re asking AI agents to make decisions, automate tasks, and operate across the enterprise. There’s a catch: they don’t know what anything means. Without context: lineage, trust, governance, semantics, AI becomes little more than a very expensive intern. In this animated Analytics Advantage , Action’s Keith Helfrich explains why metadata is becoming the control plane of enterprise AI and what happens when we get it wrong. Watch now.

“When you understand how things work, you can work with them.”

—Keith Helfrich, Action Founder

The Action Way

The Action Way is our ethos in practice: small, memorable principles that shape how projects move forward and how we treat each other. We share them openly because our approach to analytics is rooted as much in clarity, thoughtfulness, and self-discipline as it is in data.

• 🌱 Clarity is kindness. We begin each task by identifying what “done-done” looks like.

Until Next Time

If you want to see the next Action Brief in your email inbox on Sept. 26, subscribe to Analytics Advantage. In the meantime, you can keep up with us on LinkedIn, the Action blog, and our YouTube channel.

👉 Keep making sense. Keep moving forward with clarity. Keep taking action!

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