This week’s travels took me to two very different cities: Toronto, which I visited for the first time, and Chicago, which I’ve been to before, but never with quite so many slides in tow.

Toronto was all maple leaves and mid-century apartment blocks, with unexpectedly excellent pastries and the sort of icy politeness that makes British manners feel borderline aggressive. It was good to decompress and catch up properly with friends.

Chicago was all business: a keynote on the future of workplace communication, delivered to a ballroom full of people who hopefully didn’t notice I was running on three hours’ sleep and a Starbucks croissant. The talk landed well (no heckling! some laughter!) and sparked the kind of conversations I always hope for—about clarity, culture, and why the tools we use at work feel like they were designed by someone who’s never actually worked with real humans.

A week of contrasts, then: friends and flights, ideas and jet lag. On the plane back home now, with a suitcase full of leaflets, receipts, and hotel pens, and a head full of new thinking.

This week at work

The early half of the week was mostly consumed by the LumApps Bright event: prepping, presenting, and the usual performance anxiety. But I was on first, as the opening keynote, which meant I could relax and spend the next two days listening and learning too.

Plenty of bright thinking from Bright too. The usual chatter about tools gave way to deeper questions about trust, friction, and how people actually experience work.

Day 1 focused on personalisation, content strategy, and the evolving role of AI. Key themes: effective intranets are governed well, personalised smartly, and designed with the frontline in mind. Employee-led content outperforms corporate noise. And AI? Not a threat, but a capacity-booster—if it’s embedded into workflows, not bolted on as a gimmick.

Day 2 got a bit meatier. Mike Klein shared new research showing a sharp disconnect between comms and business leaders: different views on adversity, tool effectiveness, and what employee engagement even means. Business leaders want more interaction; comms want more streamlining. Everyone wants better alignment between IT, HR and comms—but that’s still a work in progress.

Mike’s survey on the future of work is ongoing. If you’re a comms leader, do take ten minutes to share here.

DWG’s Nancy Goebel did a fireside chat with LumApps’ Sean Winter (who I finally met in person, after working on the StanChart Jive rollout with back in 2012-15!). Key messages from Nancy: AI remains the dominant undercurrent, but treat it like a teammate, not a toy. Hyperpersonalisation is driving a comeback for knowledge management, and there’s a growing call for intrapreneurship and investing in employee adaptability. Or, as Nancy neatly put it: agility is the new social currency.

I also kept a few client plates spinning from hotel desks and airport lounges.

Also this week

Toronto! My first time in Canada 🇨🇦 (taking my country count to 82), and I liked it as much as I expected. Big bookshops, brilliant food, and the kind of orderly vibe that makes you feel like you should apologise for jaywalking. Saw friends, walked miles, and remembered what it’s like to spend an afternoon doing nothing in particular. Bliss.

Also visited Little Canada, a surprisingly delightful miniature version of the country, complete with tiny trains, tiny cities, tiny lakes, tiny forests, tiny music festivals and tiny hockey games. Left wanting to see a lot more of Big Canada, which seems like a delightful place to be.

Consuming

👩🏻‍💻 Internetting

It felt timely to read this after another conference where the AI conversation has clearly moved from hype to value: Johnson & Johnson made headlines by pivoting their GenAI strategy, doubling down on only the highest-value use cases and quietly killing off the pilots that weren’t delivering.

Their CIO, Jim Swanson, was refreshingly blunt: it’s about focus, not novelty. After a year or so of exploratory dabbling across industries, we’re now firmly in the ROI phase. Not every use case deserves to make it out of the lab—and that’s not failure, it’s progress.

I also picked up this pro networking tip from Melinda Seckington on LinkedIn: create a QR code of your LinkedIn profile, add it as an image on your Apple Watch. Took minutes and was really handy meeting people at the conference.

📺 Watching

Found myself watching a lot of US cable news (Fox, CNN, ABC), which left me feeling equal parts baffled and terrified.

Also happened to catch coverage of the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the Netherlands by Canadian forces. Touching to see the commemorations, given I live there. Something quite moving about watching it unfold on Canadian news, from Canada itself.

📚 Reading

It was not a reading week. But I did find a place in Toronto with a vending machine dispensing a random book for five bucks. I wound up with a copy of Tikta’Liktak: An Inuit-Eskimo Legend, which I’m not at all unhappy about.

🎧 Listening

Went to see The Vaniers, a Toronto band launching their new album. They dressed and sounded like a composite of every Britpop band from the tail end of the ’90s—after Britpop had quietly stopped being cool. The lead singer wore John Lennon sunglasses with an Umbro football top, like Liam Gallagher circa 1997. Watching a nostalgia trend come back round again was like bumping into your own teenage diary: oddly familiar, slightly cringey, and deeply unsettling.

In a bout of jetlag-induced insomnia, I listened to the entire series of Invisible Hands, a BBC podcast presented by David Dimbleby about the shifting story of capitalism over the past century or so. The first half of the series explores how ideas once on the fringes—about markets knowing best, governments stepping back, and the primacy of shareholder value—moved into the mainstream.

The second half shifts focus, tracing how support for capitalism is now waning, as its promised fruits have instead delivered widening inequality, hollowed-out public services, and a growing sense that the system no longer works for most people.

It’s thoughtful, balanced, and surprisingly absorbing at 3am when your brain refuses to adjust to a new timezone.

Connections

My two-centre visit gave me a chance to catch up with all manner of brilliant folks.

At Bright Conference I had a chance to catch up with fellow speakers Nancy Goebel and Mike Klein. And like all these events, I was able to put a face to names I know only on LinkedIn, and met a bunch of brilliant intranerds from across the US and further afield for the first time.

And outside of the conference, I had a few great catch-ups too. I first met Jim Ylisela back in 2011 when he gave a memorable keynote on what communicators can learn from the rough-and-tumble of Chicago politics. So memorable, in fact, that I can still recall key points 14 years later—and there are very few conference talks I can say that about.

As often happens in our line of work, we’ve since found ourselves working together on a few client projects that needed some transatlantic expertise in either direction. I couldn’t visit Chicago without catching up with Jim. He was even more delightful in person. I find folks like him usually are.

I also caught up with Sara Zailskas Walsh. Sara and I first met at work events in Denmark and New York, and have kept in touch since. Last time we saw each other was in 2022—since then she’s beaten breast cancer, so there was a lot to catch up on.

Up in Toronto, I squeezed in a coffee with Meena, an old colleague from Standard Chartered. We met in the lobby of the bank where she now works, and it felt like no time had passed at all, like being back at Marina Bay Financial Centre.

But my highlight was catching up with two of the gals from my recent Colombia trip. I’ve done four Flash Pack trips and have kept in touch with people from all of them, but there was something special about this particular combination of people. I feel like I made firm friends that week.

I couldn’t visit Jenna’s hometown and not hang out—and Andrea even drove down from Ottawa to make a weekend of it. It was wonderful to see them again.

Travel

Landing back from Canada this morning. Heading to Glasgow later in the week.

This week in photos