There’s a certain kind of wrong that turns out, in the right context, to be exactly right. Jetlag that becomes a productivity hack. A brain that can’t distinguish between languages, accidentally fluent. A notification arriving at precisely the wrong — or possibly perfect — moment.

Curaçao will do that to you. It’s a place that shouldn’t quite work — Dutch colonial architecture in the Caribbean heat, a language built from five others, an island that looks like Delft and feels like nowhere else — and absolutely does.

This week at work

Started Monday strong with a 5am planning workshop — client in Europe, colleagues in Asia, me in Curaçao calculating whether I could make it to the beach by nine. The answer was yes. There’s something to be said for jetlag as a productivity strategy: brutal early start, done and dusted before the Netherlands has made it to lunch, the rest of the day entirely your own.

It works both ways, too. My business partner Jon is in the UK. When I’m east — Japan, say — I’d have the day’s work wrapped before he’d had his first coffee. Now I’m west, he picks things up first, gets them moving, and hands them to me to finish off. Use it well and the timezone gap stops being a problem and starts being a relay baton. As regular readers may have noticed, this is a hack I deploy fairly regularly.

Same client, different challenge: we started mapping out our approach to digital employee experience testing on their new digital workplace. This is the stuff that gets skipped in favour of launch day announcements and gets missed the moment something doesn’t work for real humans in real contexts. Good to see a team treating it as foundational rather than optional.

Thursday brought the formal kick-off with a new client — at the comparatively civilised start time of 7am — and it generated an excellent pile of actions. Early days, but already I’m struck by their pragmatism and genuine appetite to move at pace. That last bit always comes with caveats in a sprawling corporate context, where the gap between ambition and organisational physics can be considerable. But the intent is there, and intent is where it starts.

Friday was more mixed. A conversation with a vendor about fronting some talks — one I’m still turning over. The book needs promoting, and I know the months ahead require me to be more visible, more vocal, more out there. But there’s a version of this that tips into “comms influencer” territory, and I’m not at all sure that’s who I am or want to be. Practitioner first. Sizeable social following, yes, but that following exists because I say things I actually believe. I need to be clear on where the line is before I cross it.

On a more straightforwardly enjoyable note: a good conversation with a public sector organisation thinking hard about launching a new social platform. These projects are tricky anywhere — but in public sector there’s an extra layer of scrutiny that goes beyond “will people use it?” and straight to “can we justify people using it?” The fear that investment gets undermined by employees being too engaged, too social, too human, and the Daily Mail does not like that.

I printed off the book’s manuscript and proofed it on the plane here. Genuinely not bad. I’d buy it. The book website is live — digitalcommunicationsatwork.com — and the marketing machine is slowly cranking into gear. More on that in the weeks ahead.

Also this week

Also this week, in between the early starts and 5am workshops: Curaçao itself. Clear blue water. Sand between the toes. Caves and coves. Jumping into the sea. And the genuinely disconcerting experience of wandering the streets of Willemstad, which looks exactly like a Dutch canal town, except it’s 30 degrees and there are flamingos.

It’s also a genuinely odd linguistic proposition — and an unexpectedly validating one. My brain, when abroad, does not distinguish between languages. It just goes “you’re abroad! Try foreign!” and fires whatever it has. Dutch in Germany. Spanish in Italy. Usually both at once, nouns from one, conjunctions from the other, meaning somewhere in the middle.

It makes no sense anywhere. Except Curacao. Because Papiamentu — the local creole — is built from Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, English, and West African languages. Purity was never the point. It evolved to be understood, by these people, in this place.

At one point this week, the sentence “Spaans of Holandes is fine” came out of my mouth. And somehow, it was.

Consuming

I have a habit of reading the history of a place before I visit. History being, largely, the story of bad men doing awful things, this means my travel reading list is a reliable parade of war, repression, dictatorship, and genocide. I thought Hell’s Gorge — Matthew Parker’s history of the building of the Panama Canal — might be a cheerier proposition. Epoch-defining infrastructure. Human ingenuity. That sort of thing.

Reader, it was not.

Connections

This week’s unexpected connection: I ended up sharing an apartment in Curaçao with Meri Williams — ex-GDS/Monzo, and one of the more interesting people on the internet. This is the second time in six months I’ve ended up on holiday with someone I met on LinkedIn. I’m choosing to see this as a feature of how I socialise now, rather than a symptom of anything.

Coverage

New piece out this week in Reworked: the argument that the HR–IT partnership everyone’s so excited about is missing a third leg. Internal communications keeps getting invited to the table at the announcement stage, long after the decisions are made. That’s not a seat at the table. That’s a chair by the door. The piece is about what genuine shared accountability across all three functions actually looks like — and why AI makes getting this wrong considerably more expensive than it used to be.

And: I was quoted in the Financial Times this week on unusual co-working spots — specifically, working from an onsen in Japan. Bathrobe, regular dips in the pool, the works. I got the notification while Working From Yacht, somewhere off the coast of Curaçao. The irony is in no way lost on me.

Travel

Next stop: Panama. Country 89, which is a perfectly normal number of countries to have visited and I will not be taking questions. The plan is a genuine week off — no workshops, no 5am calls, no Working From Yacht. Just me, the Canal, and a book that has already comprehensively disabused me of any romantic notions about what building it involved.

Wish me luck.

This week in photos