After signing off my last weeknote I headed for the lesser-visited north-east of Portugal to join celebrations at a unique and colourful festival that takes place in the village of Podence.

One of the most iconic elements of the Carnival of Podence is the “Caretos,” young men dressed in handcrafted costumes made of woollen quilts and vibrant masks, who roam the streets in groups, engaging in playful mischief (and drinking cheap beer and burning things).

They’re known for their loud bells, which they wear around their waists, and for their dances that create an atmosphere that’s equal parts anarchy and joy. The ritual involves chasing people (mostly younger women) as a symbolic act of fertility and renewal, echoing pagan traditions that predate Christian influences.

The Carnival of Podence has deep cultural significance and is rooted in ancient rituals that herald the end of winter and the arrival of spring. It’s a time when the community comes together to preserve their heritage through dances, music, and traditional foods. 

I mostly experienced it through the medium of said traditional food, since houses in the village turn into pop-up restaurants. Barns become beer halls and the village’s aunties turn out hundreds of meals every day. It was a riot of colour and sound and I arrived home 60% grilled beef and stinking of bonfire. No regrets.

At the end of weeknote 5 I said there was a chance I might not get a chance to weeknote in week 6. Well I was right. But regular readers of my blog (hello Mum!) will have spotted I also missed week 7. Because as well as the week in Portugal it’s been quite a fortnight work-wise.

Some things I did since my last weeknote

• Reported back early discovery findings with one client. It’s always tough when we need to tell an organisation they’re doing things wrong. On the one hand, that’s what they’re paying us to do; they want an outsider who’s been there, done it and got the t-shirt to identify what’s not working. But on the other, people are understandably close to – and defensive of – work they devoted months of their life to, so it’s important we acknowledge that and highlight the good as well as what could have been done better. In the end I think we handled it sensitively and got good buy-in on the future direction
• Picking up pace on an intranet pilot with a longstanding client. It’s all getting very real. Great to see our earlier foundational work start to become real solutions that help people at work, but also conscious this is where the theoretical becomes practical, which means there are a bunch of thorny issues to work through at pace.
• Pitched for and won a juicy project with an exciting new client. Excited to get my teeth into that one.
• Started prepping for the second edition of 300 Seconds x Camp Digital, where we work together to showcase new stories and voices, and build a more diverse pipeline of conference speakers. Do come along!

What I’m reading

I’ve begun reading Friends: Understanding the Power of Our Most Important Relationships by Robin Dunbar. The psychologist author is the man behind Dunbar’s Number, or the idea that there may be a cognitive limit to the number of people with whom you can comfortably maintain stable social relationships. Or, as Stephen Fry put it on QI, the number of people “you would not hesitate to go and sit with if you happened to see them at 3am in the departure lounge at Hong Kong airport”. That number is about 150, with about five of them people you’d call ‘close friends’ (the kind you could call to ask for their help to dispose of the corpse of someone who tried to talk to you in an airport at 3am).

In this book Dunbar revisits his earlier work and finds his eponymous Number remarkably stable across time and culture — and also at work. He noted that in large organisations there reaches a point at which employees tend to form smaller, more manageable groups for effective communication and collaboration. 

I realised that’s something I see a lot in the organisations I work with. Dunbar’s Number can inform how we design or organisations to maximise efficiency and cohesion. There’s huge value in building smaller, interconnected communities within larger enterprise social networks to foster meaningful interactions, trust, and collaboration.

This book got me thinking how Dunbar’s Number provides a useful framework for understanding how relationships scale in professional settings.

Perhaps we should be designing more human-centric social structures within our digital workplaces, aiming for a balance between wide network benefits and the depth of personal connections.

By recognising the natural limits to people’s social bandwidth, platforms and structures should facilitate smaller group interactions within the larger organisational context, acknowledging the quality of connections over quantity.

I’m only a couple of chapters in. Later chapters promise to look at the way different types of friendship and family relationships intersect, and at the mix of psychological and behavioural mechanisms that underpin friendships and make them possible.

It also made me reflect on how I am lucky to have my own Dunbar-length list of people I would happy chat to at an airport at 3am. 

Connections

Ticked off one of my 100 people list this week thanks to an impromptu meet-up with DemSoc’s Anthony Zacharzewski. We talked about how knowledge moves around organisations, and how information it struggles to make it in or out of those same organisations. It got me thinking; in comms we often have advocacy programmes, where we equip people with the skills and information to talk about us and our work. To what extent should people be ambassadors for our orgs instead? That is, responsible for listening and feeding back as much as sharing and championing.

Something I learned

The Dutch for snail is Slakken.

So the Dutch for slug is Naaktslakken, or ‘naked snail’ 🐌