Hi, Jeff –

The holidays are here and new year is right around the corner. As we wrap up 2025, please be sure to put January 27-29 on your calendar for our annual Learning Business Summit – see the Web site for a great agenda and details on how to register.

On other fronts, we recently released two new (and free) association-related reports that can be very useful in planning for 2026:

• Where Mission and Margin Meet: How Association CEOs Think About Learning and Education
• The Strategic Outlook for Association Learning Businesses 2026

Now, let’s dive into this month’s Leading Links, arranged according to the Tagoras Learning Business Maturity Model (you have taken the free assessment, right?):

[Leadership] Association Leadership and Goliath’s Curse
Adrian Segar draws on Luke Kemp’s research on societal collapse to make an uncomfortable but important point: organizations – and not just associations – don’t have to be empires to fall into patterns that make them fragile. Centralized decision-making, limited feedback loops, and “power-over” dynamics show up quietly inside associations—and inside many learning businesses. When staff closest to learners and markets can’t share what they see or influence decisions, the system becomes rigid at exactly the moment flexibility is needed. Segar’s alternative isn’t soft—it’s structural. “Power-with” dynamics distribute insight, shorten response times, and build resilience by letting the organization see itself more honestly. That has been true across civilizations, and it’s true inside any learning business trying to stay relevant.

💡Takeaway: If information and authority can only move up, fragility moves in. Resilience grows when decision-making and sense-making move outward.

[Strategy] The Strategic Outlook for Association Learning Businesses 2026
Our new report shows a sector with plenty of ambition but not enough focus. Leaders want to grow revenue, strengthen engagement, align with workforce needs, innovate—often all at once. The result is predictable: stretched timelines, diffuse portfolios, and stalled execution. Just as striking is how consistently capacity shows up as the binding constraint. Demand isn’t the issue. Staffing, systems, and sustained marketing often are. The report also highlights a persistent gap: associations believe their learning aligns with their strongest assets, but most admit they could do far more to leverage standards, credentials, research, and advocacy—the Credibility Capital that no competitor can easily copy.

💡Takeaway: For 2026, the organizations that will move meaningfully ahead will choose fewer priorities, align capacity with those choices, and anchor learning firmly in what gives them real authority.

[Marketing] If your marketing isn’t working…
In a short, sharp reminder, Seth Godin returns to a truth we’ve emphasized for years: marketing isn’t the hype at the end. It’s the choices you make about audience, promise, and value from the start. If a program isn’t getting traction, more promotion won’t fix the underlying issue. And in a world where many educational offerings look the same, “best effort” is rarely enough. This pairs well with our recent article on hidden demand: you must create something that matters—and matters specifically to someone.

💡Takeaway: If marketing feels hard, look at the offering first. A clearer audience and a sharper promise do more than any campaign.

[Portfolio] Debunking Learning Styles: What the Research Really Says
Mike Taylor offers one of the clearest, most practical explanations of why learning styles remain popular despite decades of evidence showing they don’t improve outcomes. He also avoids the unhelpful “myth-busting victory lap” and notes what many critiques ignore: learner preferences are real, and learning businesses—who must attract and retain paying learners—can’t simply wave them away. The real cost of chasing learning styles isn’t moral failure; it’s misused time and energy that could be spent on strategies that reliably help people learn: dual coding, worked examples, cognitive load management, spaced practice, retrieval. These are the tools worth investing in.

💡Takeaway: Respect preferences, but design for learning. Shift effort from style-matching to evidence-based practices that actually help learners succeed.

[Capacity] Your team is using AI, but are your prompts letting you down?

More learning businesses are bringing AI into their workflows, but prompt quality often lags behind the enthusiasm. Catherine Dock offers a structured way to close that gap by blending verification and validation principles with the 4Ds (Delegation, Description, Discernment, Diligence). The framework helps teams decide what AI should do, how to give it the right context, how to evaluate its output, and how to ensure ethical and instructional quality. None of this is about sophistication for its own sake—it’s about getting consistent, trustworthy results and avoiding “rubbish in, rubbish out” cycles that waste time and erode confidence.

💡Takeaway: Treat prompt design as instructional design. Clear decisions, clear inputs, and honest evaluation lead to AI outputs you can actually use.

That’s it for this edition. If you like what you read here, please share it with others – and maybe hit “Reply” to let us know. Also, be sure to follow us on LinkedIn for ongoing resources.

Best regards,

Jeff & Celisa
Tagoras
Leading Learning