Like much of western Europe, the Netherlands was hit with an Arctic Blast, which turned out to be little more than a light dusting of snow. And Amsterdam is insanely pretty in the snow. 

Some stuff I did this week

We’re into the weeds with a client we’re supporting on a big digital comms transformation programme. Challenges this week included: 

• finding names for things that make sense to people 
• working out loud without creating more work for everyone because we don’t have answers to a lot of questions yet 
• our concept of internal and external audiences is nowhere near as clear as it used to be for communicators. Lots of people are both, or have a need that changes over time. And people who are internal might well be internal somewhere else too so you need to work harder to accommodate – and can’t necessarily expect them to care to the same extent. All that means we need to think how we serve audiences that might sit just outside a traditional definition of internal comms. 

Won a new client 🎉 Looking forward to getting cracking with them soon.  

On the flipside, we’ve had to do a swift pivot on work with a third client as they have some major internal changes happening and everyone felt it wasn’t right to move ahead with the discovery work we had planned. It’s a little frustrating to have to hit pause, but from experience if you do surveys and interviews in a period of change, they become an outlet for people to vent about the change rather than your communications, and you don’t get particularly useful outputs. Hope to pick that up again when the time’s right. 

We sponsored UKEduCamp last week. It was the first time we’ve sponsored an event. I had no real idea if this would be worth doing, commercially, but we’ve been working with a few HE institutions lately and think it’s a fascinating space and wanted to support the folks making positive change in the sector. Anyway, we’ve had a few good conversations off the back of that this week. 

I also saw Soulwax at the Paradiso. They had three drummers and it was the most incredible, visceral, almost primal sound. I can assure you there are no lessons I can draw from this on the subject of digital transformation. 

Connections 

Just the one this week: Met up with Cerys Hersey from Post*Shift for lunch and excellent chat. 

What I’m reading 

Code of Conduct: Why We Need to Fix Parliament” by Chris Bryant MP. As chair of the Committee on Standards and Privileges and Parliament’s foremost history nerd, Bryant chronicles the decline in standards, with more MPs resigning or suspended in this Parliament than any in history. He argues for Members to have increased control over parliamentary affairs – taking this away from the Executive – and advocates for greater ministerial accountability, transparency in lobbying and stricter penalties for misbehaviour. So far, so sensible. 

But what I really appreciated was references ranged from the Merciless Parliament of 1388 to Ru Paul and the Sugababes. I love it when someone’s confident enough in their subject knowledge they can happily, unashamedly embrace the lowbrow. 

Something I learned 

On Weds and Thurs I tuned in to a few sessions of IntraTeam’s online event. I particularly like their events and community as there’s a core of people who attend year after year, all working on complex digital workplaces. That means the agenda aways includes in-depth sessions on really thorny case studies, huge organisations and mature ecosystems covering the full gamut of comms, collaboration, transactional and productivity tools. 

My highlight was a session led by Frank Giroux on implementing generative AI at pharmaceutical giant Bayer.  He talked about collecting and sharing stories on how colleagues are using (secure, enterprise) ChatGPT. What caught my attention was when he talked about a biweekly roundup of AI success stories which is shared across the organisation to encourage adoption and experimentation. Too many adoption programmes focus on selling defined benefits; it was interesting to see adoption comms encouraging people to experiment and inspiring them to find their own uses and affordances. An approach I fully intend to borrow. 

I also learned that the Dutch for baseball is honkbal and I am not at all sure I can get over this.