Three weeks in Central America and I feel like I’ve come back to a different city. It was threatening snow when I left. I’ve come back to full tulip-scented springtime in Amsterdam. Something’s shifted, mostly for the better.

Cheered by news from Hungary that the slide to authoritarianism is not inevitable; a chink of hope that recent political tradewinds can reverse.

But this last fortnight also bought reminders that negative shifts happen too, and they can be rapid. A healthy pipeline can become a slow one. An open waterway becomes a global crisis. Democracy can shift into reverse.

This week at work

Proper behind-the-NDA work for most of it. One client standing up a relatively under-used platform as their intranet; another mid-rollout on Viva Engage.

The shiny vendor case studies — the intranet rolled out in a fortnight, the 60% reduction in case volume, the before-and-after slide — are real, mostly. But they leave out the part where the comms team had to compromise on visual design because search was non-negotiable. Or where the original pilot was scoped to thousands of users despite everyone agreeing that was mad and not in any way a pilot. Or where younger employees, against every assumption, still prefer phone calls.

That’s the stuff that helps people actually decide. Perfect stories get nobody anywhere; they’re marketing in a different hat. The real story — what broke, what didn’t ship, which stakeholder you had to win over twice — is where the usable knowledge lives. And it’s rarely the vendor who can hand it to you. After enough years and enough rollouts in enough complex organisations, Jon and I can usually find the dots to connect: someone elsewhere who’s done this exact thing and will tell you the truth over a drink in a way the reference call was never going to. Doing that for clients — as a matter of course, not a favour — is, increasingly, the job.

The people we advise are adults. They know there are trade-offs. Flagging them upfront — here’s what this platform does brilliantly, here’s what you’ll have to live with — actually makes selling-in inside organisations easier, not harder. Pretend it’s going to be perfect and you hand your sceptics the ammunition they need when month three arrives and the edge cases start landing.

Which made this week’s Strategic Communication Leadership Summit the tonic I didn’t know I needed  An unconference, so no vendor deck in sight. Just practitioners talking honestly about what’s working, what isn’t, and the inevitable compromises the profession makes that nobody writes case studies about. The best kind of room to be in.

And the book: final, final copy edits submitted — a phrase I’ve learned to take with the caution it deserves. Early copies out to first readers for endorsements. Feedback so far has been positive, which after all this I’ll take.

Also this week

Panama first. The canal is more absurd in person than any photograph prepares you for — container ships the size of small cities threading through what is, structurally, a trench. 8% of world trade passes through it. Standing on the lock edge, you feel the scale of what that did to global connectedness a century ago. It’s tempting to treat a transformation of that size as permanent.

It isn’t. Connectedness can reverse. The crisis in the Strait of Hormuz is the loud current example. And less abruptly: more than 40 countries have enacted data localisation laws, cross-border data flows are slowing, information flows are now the most contested trade flows of the lot. I finally read the DHL/NYU Stern Global Connectedness Report this week, and wrote about it on LinkedIn. It isn’t aimed at internal communicators, but it should be. Your channel stack is geopolitical infrastructure now — where your intranet data lives, who hosts your messaging platform, what happens when a relationship fractures fast rather than slowly. Those are governance questions, not IT ones. The best time to have mapped the stack was two years ago. The next best is now.

Panama in pics:

Jetted back home, and Tuesday evening saw me at the Tolhuistuin for Science & Cocktails — Is Dutch democracy at risk? Leiden University’s extremist politics professor Sarah de Lange doing the mental heavy lifting. Three-quarters of the world now lives in autocracies, up from half in 2005; only seven per cent of us live in liberal democracies. Declining trust, the hunger for a strong leader, rising polarisation — these, she argued, aren’t the causes of democratic backsliding. They’re the consequences. Which upends a lot of the usual handwringing.

The line that stuck: statements by mainstream politicians erode democratic norms more than statements by the far right themselves. When respectable parties accommodate fringe positions — on immigration, most obviously — they do the normalising work the fringe can’t do on its own. The danger isn’t the people shouting from the edge. It’s the ones in suits nodding along.

Walking home I kept thinking of something I wrote back in October, from Nagasaki. We’d been round the Atomic Bomb Museum, and a guide from the Peace Workshop said a line I’ve come back to more than once since: peace isn’t something you have, it’s something you make. Democracy works the same way. You have to keep at it. It doesn’t happen by accident. It isn’t inevitable.

The tail end of the week took me to Luxembourg for a few days — racking up country 90. Small enough to see most of it between one coffee and the next. Pretty in a faintly theatrical way, as though the old town had been set-dressed for a period drama and never struck. I strolled across a bridge and found myself in Germany — a near-imperceptible shift, and a perfect encapsulation of European unity and of the dividends peace has bought our continent.

And — news closer to home — Velo has closed. Abruptly. My local spin studio, cornerstone of the weekend, the place that somehow turned me from someone who tolerated cardio into someone who needed it. You don’t expect a community to form around an hour on a stationary bike, and then you find yourself in one. This was the first Saturday in I-don’t-know-how-long that I didn’t set my alarm for Swiftie Saturday. I miss it.

Consuming

The Testaments. Disney+. Devoured the first three episodes in one sitting when they dropped; episode four this week, rationed like a sensible adult. Atwood has been a constant since I first read Handmaids for year 9 English, and it is slightly too on-the-nose to be watching this in a week whose dinner-table topic was democratic backsliding. But also exactly right.

Two gigs: Dry Cleaning at the Melkweg — Florence Shaw deadpanning her way through lyrics that arrive half-overheard and land three seconds late, over a tight post-punk racket. A band who’ve made speaking over songs feel like the only sensible approach. And The Undertones at Paradiso for the 50th anniversary show — a room full of people who knew every word of Teenage Kicks, sung back like an anthem because it is one.

Coverage

Read an FT piece earlier this week on AI on Meta launching an AI version of Zuckerberg for leadership comms and got, as the kids say, The Ick. Thought on it. Reflected. (Personal growth, yo.) Came back with a more generous conclusion: AI has a place in leadership comms — especially in organisations that have to communicate at scale. The question, then, isn’t if. It’s how.

Which became a piece in Unleash this week: AI won’t fix your leadership communication, but it might expose it.

Travel

Home. Two weeks in a row — what passes for a holiday by recent standards.

This week in photos