As summer’s warmth has faded fast, a quiet transformation begins to unfold. The golden sun now softens, casting longer, more thoughtful shadows across the landscape.

This shift has happened a little too quickly for my liking this year. When I headed to Riga it was glorious sunshine. When I returned autumn was well and truly upon us.

(the Riga trip was why there was no Weeknote 38 btw).

While the Dutch weather is already testing my patience, I’m trying to stay positive. The air carries a crispness, a promise of change, as the first leaves turn amber and red, dotting the trees like whispers of the season to come. There’s a gentle pause in the rhythm of life, as if nature itself is taking a breath, settling in for autumn’s embrace—a time for reflection, comfort, and preparing for the colder months ahead. The shorts-and-vests bit of my wardrobe goes into storage; the opaque tights and boots come out.

The shift from summer to autumn is more than just a change in the weather; it’s a reminder of the cyclical beauty of life. The vibrant, carefree days give way to a season of depth and colour, inviting us to slow down, savour the warmth of a cosy jumper and a baked potato and find joy in the rustling of leaves underfoot.

It’s in these little moments that I remember the real charm of autumn—a time to let go, just as the trees release their leaves, and make space for what’s next.

Some things I did this fortnight

We’ve been focused on a big shift in the plan on one intranet project. I’ve been quietly pleased at how swiftly we were able to identify and investigate alternative paths to delivery that meet their new strategic direction. We’ve barely even lost any time on our own project roadmap.

As part of that we’ve begun to explore how we might use auto-migration to move some content over from the existing landscape. On the whole I’m not a fan of any large-scale content migration. These just move crap over from one site to another, passing up the only real opportunity you have to improve it and focus on high-quality materials that deliver value. Migrated content is often never looked at again, until the cycle starts all over again with the next site. On one ill-fated programme we found content that was 17 years old, having been migrated from site to site twice (and, as far as I know, a third time – those pages are in their mid-20s now).

But sometimes using automated tools is simply the only pragmatic way forward. If there’s a hard deadline or a burning platform, for example. But while we’ve been exploring the technical feasibility, we’ve also been conducting an assessment of the outputs and associated risks.

That is: you can run a script to move it from A to B, but what you’ll get in B probably won’t be much good. We’re working out what’s needed to turn that into useable, useful and well-structured pages. I strongly suspect it’ll be a significant chunk of effort.

Over on our other project, after a few weeks of delays things were unblocked in a major way this week and suddenly we’re cracking on at pace. It’s been wonderful to see our team getting stuck in and delivering at speed.

Less positively, with it being the end of the month I did the usual round of invoices, and the sadly usual round of checking and seeing that none (0) of the ones that were due before the end of this month have been paid. It really grates that organisations don’t consider the impact treating due dates as – at best – guidance has on cashflow for SMEs like ours.

Some non-work things I did this fortnight

My husband and I headed for the Baltics for a long weekend. Mostly Riga, which was a delightful combination of fine weather, city walks, climbing up a tall building and delving into the darker side of the city’s history. The Museum of the Occupation was heavy going. We also booked in for a tour at the former KGB headquarters, with a guide who, having been a young man in the dying days of the Soviet occupation, knew much of the history of oppression first-hand. Somehow he bought just the right degree of levity to the occasion. Very much recommend.

On Monday we headed down to Lithuania – by my reckoning ticking off my 71st country – visiting the city of Šiauliai and the nearby Hill of Crosses. No one’s quite sure why people started leaving crosses on this old hill fort, but the practice is believed to have started in the mid 1800s. In Soviet times public displays of religion were banned, and so this became a site of resistance, with authorities removing or destroying the crucifixes, only for locals to sneak back and leave more. And so it became a symbol of anti-Soviet resistance and the fight for Baltic religious and national freedom. There are now thought to be over 100,000 crucifixes atop this small hill.

And if I’m honest we mostly went there because it’s creepy as fuck.

Saw retro pop-rocksters Lemon Twigs at the Tolhuistuin. Two weeks on I still can’t decide if their schtick is deliberate nostalgia-bait, or just some charming and annoyingly catchy 60s-inspired tunes. Enjoyable enough in any case.

We also saw Beetlejuice Beetlejuice at the cinema. A valiant attempt to capture the magic of the original, and a good performance from Michael Keaton. But maybe trying a little too hard. The plot felt over-stuffed. Overall it’s not a bad movie, but I’d wait for streaming rather than go out of your way to watch it.

Connections

Comms legends Advita Patel and Jenni Field were in town for the Amsterdam Business Forum. They were both pumped after meeting their hero, Brené Brown. And that enthusiasm was infectious. We had a lovely chat about emotions at work, how work’s changing – and how it isn’t – and what that means for communications. And some shared frustration at hearing the same tired debates in the industry when we should be stepping up and taking a lead as a critical business function in the context of a rapidly changing world of work.

It was only a brief wine and catch-up but I came away from this chat feeling energised and excited. I can see why people really rate the pair of them (and their co-conspirator Trudy) as business coaches.

I have finally downloaded the Brené Brown book to my Kindle.

I also managed to catch up with Kaisu Koskela, who’s a postdoctoral researcher on digital nomadism and digital labour mobility.

Coverage

Reworked’s Siobhan asked if I might have views on how ageism starts hitting in your 40s. And I certainly did. Here’s my piece on age, gender and the depressingly tiny window we have between being too young and past our prime. This was cathartic to write. And it seems to have touched a nerve, given how many shares this got on BlueSky.

Travel

I’m in London from Wednesday for five days. I’ve got a little spare time on Friday 4th; HMU if you want to catch up.

Upcoming in October:

🇬🇪 Tbilisi, Georgia
🇹🇷 Istanbul, Turkey

As ever, if you’re in either, or you know some interesting folk who are who I should meet, let me know.