Mid-May, and everything’s in full swing, from Glasgow’s sunshine-and-sequins chaos to rooftop chats and research calls back in Amsterdam.

This week’s had a bit of everything: live music, sectarian parades, strategic business cases, and a reminder that good comms (like good gigs) need more than just volume — they need structure, purpose, and the right rhythm.

This week at work

Last week’s Strategic post on the damage caused by flimsy, made-up productivity metrics sparked a flurry of comments and DMs — mostly variations on: “OK, but how do I build a real business case, with numbers that actually mean something?”

The honest answer is it takes time, expertise, and a bit of graft. You need to understand the problems you’re solving, the costs and benefits of each option, the risks of doing nothing — and then turn all that into a case the board can’t ignore.

One of those DMs came from a communicator whose previous business case had been knocked back. This week we helped her map out an eight-week plan to build a stronger one. It starts with discovery: not just how the current channels are performing, but where the friction points and missed opportunities lie. From there, we’ll shape solutions that fit their timeline, budget, and culture — and wrap it all up in a business case that blends data on business impact with human stories that make the cost of inaction impossible to ignore.

The team’s excited. It’s the kind of partnership we love — where we bring the strategy, structure, and skills, and they bring deep knowledge of their people and context.

Elsewhere, we’ve been planning the second in a series of alignment workshops with a long-term client, and I’ve started prep for a webinar I’m delivering with Cerkl on 28 May, on how to personalise internal comms at scale.

And I’ve been cracking on with interviews for our current research project. It’s been a brilliant excuse to chat to smart, thoughtful people working at the coalface of the digital workplace.

Also this week

Back to Glasgow again — this time for my annual weekend away with a different group of friends. The city was every bit as sunny and welcoming as last week, but with an added chaotic twist: Celtic’s league win, an Orange March, and Kylie headlining during Eurovision weekend. Sunshine, sequins and sectarianism made for quite the cultural cocktail.

Boozy backdrop aside, it was a glorious long weekend of laughs, wandering, and very good company.

Consuming

👩🏻‍💻 Internetting

Intrigued by this story in the weekend’s FT: a law firm offering a £1m bonus pot if staff collectively rack up a million Microsoft Copilot prompts this year.

It’s a bold move to drive AI adoption, but it also raises familiar questions. When you incentivise a behaviour that can be gamed, are you driving real change, or just inflating the numbers?

This kind of thing will be familiar to anyone who’s ever had a KPI based on clicks or page loads: dashboards full of ‘engagement’ that doesn’t stick, incentives that drive quantity over quality, and habits that vanish the moment the carrots do.

Does this kind of scheme lead to sustained, meaningful use, or just a a race to writing meta Copilot prompts that generate twenty prompts a day?

(Which is precisely what I would do if offered that bonus)

Incentivising prompt count feels a bit like rewarding people for sending emails. Technically activity, but is it progress?

AI’s the future, shouldn’t we be teaching people to *think* with it, not just rack up prompts like step-counters for productivity?

📺 Watching

Nothing. At all.

📚 Reading

I picked up Careless People, a sharp, scathing account of life inside Facebook, as part of my airport WHSmith book haul. It’s brilliantly, terrifyingly compelling. I’ve ploughed through 39 chapters in three sittings.

The book charts how a company that promised to connect the world instead amplified division, eroded privacy, and ducked accountability — all while its leadership, particularly Zuckerberg and Sandberg, remained either wilfully blind or strategically indifferent. A story of hubris, harm, and the high cost of scale without ethics.

(I still haven’t deleted my Facebook account though, although I do barely use it anymore)

🎧 Listening

I caught San Francisco psych-rock heroes Osees at the Paradiso last night. Few bands summon chaos quite so joyfully. Relentless, raucous, and gloriously weird, they tore through a set that felt more like a ritual than a gig — and yes, any band with two drummers gets bonus points for commitment to noise.

Enjoy the setlist, but do it properly: volume up, neighbours be damned.

Connections

Caught up with Dutch intranet veteran Samuel Driessen this week for a great chat on a sunny Amsterdam rooftop — the sort of meeting that reminds you why in-person is still magic. We covered a lot: the tricky leap from Dutch to international markets, the different rhythms of public vs. private sector work, and how intranet strategy is (finally) starting to converge with product thinking. A thoughtful conversation with someone who’s seen the field evolve and isn’t afraid to challenge it.

Travel

Tomorrow I’m heading to Berlin to catch up with our client there and to attend Flip’s conference. I’ve got a little spare time so if you’re about, give me a shout.

This week in photos