One of the greatest disappointments of adulthood is learning that some people genuinely know what they’re doing.

Not in the broad sense. I mean specifically the people who have already booked next year’s holiday, understand their pension, and never once find themselves searching for accommodation the day before departure while wondering whether a 70-minute flight connection was always part of the plan.

I watch these people with fascination.

My own system is to organise the important 20% very efficiently, then leave the remaining 80% until it becomes an emergency. This is objectively a terrible process, but it has the advantage of being familiar.

And yet, inconveniently for anyone hoping to stage an intervention, some of the best things in my life have emerged from exactly this sort of organised chaos. Moving countries. Starting a business. Building friendships. Speaking opportunities. Entire adventures that began with a vague idea and an alarming lack of preparation.

I turn 46 this week, which some people might regard as a sensible moment for self-reflection and personal growth. After reviewing the evidence, however, I appear to have concluded that the system works.

Or at least that it fails in sufficiently interesting ways that I’m not planning to replace it now.

This week at work

A week with a theme running through it, which, as usual, I only spotted while writing this: most of what landed on my desk was some variation on “the platform isn’t the problem.”

Monday opened with a former colleague telling me about working in a building that’s actively falling apart — heating dead, a floor shut because of dodgy plumbing, a countdown underway to get everyone out before the place deteriorates any further.

The detail that stuck wasn’t the building itself, though. It was the contrast. Like a great many organisations, serious money is spent on customer-facing services, while the tools employees use all day are left to limp along for another year. The same staff being asked to transform services are doing it with systems held together by string, workarounds, and good intentions.

You can’t ask people to reinvent how they work while handing them a platform older than some of the employees.

Midweek brought news on the vendor side: a platform we’ve worked with a few times over the years has been acquired, pairing a newsletter business with an employee experience one. Old-world distribution meeting new-world engagement, if you want the elevator version.

What’s particularly interesting for us is that it lines up rather neatly with one of the threads running through the book. Organisations need both a trusted source for publishing and effective channels for distribution. We’ve spent years treating those as separate conversations, but increasingly they’re becoming the same one.

This week also brought a quick-turnaround proposal on a genuinely interesting piece of information architecture work, which I’ll seize almost any excuse to do. Partly because I get to play with dendrograms, but mostly because IA is one of those disciplines everybody agrees is important right up until it’s time to invest in it.

Findability is the whole game. It’s the difference between a channel people rely on and one they stop bothering with. Content that can’t be found can’t be used, and most organisations are sitting on shelves of the stuff: carefully created, properly signed off, and effectively invisible.

The latter end of the week went on preparing for a couple of upcoming events. A talk Jon and I are doing on Tuesday about information overload and how to tackle it, and a workshop helping a client’s team get their content “agentic ready”.

Which sounds like it should be a conversation about technology, but pointedly isn’t.

They already have a platform that does the job. The interesting questions are all the other ones: what’s actually a source of truth, what has simply been sitting there accreting since 2018, what needs to be maintained, and what can probably be allowed a dignified death.

An agent is only ever as good as what it’s reading. Which means the role starts to shift from publishing content to maintaining a clean, structured, trustworthy body of knowledge that people — and increasingly machines — can rely on. That’s a different skillset, and in some cases a different job. Pretending otherwise doesn’t help anyone.

We also spent some time this week reviewing questions for an internal comms survey, which is the sort of task that tends to provoke a certain amount of professional eye-rolling. Surveys are deeply unfashionable. Too long, too blunt, too often ignored. Most of that criticism is fair. None of it makes surveys useless; it just means most surveys are bad, which is a different problem.

The failure mode is usually the same. Someone wants to “just check” one thing. Then somebody else wants to check something else. Then a third person remembers a question they liked in another survey. Before long the thing has collapsed under the weight of its own curiosity.

Every question should earn its place by pointing at a decision. If the answer wouldn’t change what you’re going to do next, why are you asking it?

And the rule that gets broken most often: don’t ask if you’re not prepared to act. A survey is a promise disguised as a question. Ask people what’s wrong, do nothing about it, and you haven’t gathered insight. You’ve simply taught them that answering was a waste of time.

Better to ask three things you’ll genuinely act on than thirty you’ll quietly file away.

Which, now I write it down, turns out to be much the same lesson as everything else this week. The platform isn’t the problem. It’s everything around it.

Also this week

Two things, the first of which my body would like formally noted as a complaint.

The pop-up gym had an unlimited-classes deal on, and I — being me, congenitally unable to leave value on the table — fell on it with rather more enthusiasm than sense. Twelve classes in ten days, plus two more at my usual place, by which point even I could concede the maths had got away from me.

By Saturday, every muscle I possess was filing grievances with management. The whole enterprise was demanding a rest day, preferably submitted in writing and accompanied by supporting documentation.

I took one courtesy of birthday drinks with my local friends. At some point during the evening I looked around the table and had one of those moments that occasionally sneaks up on you.

I arrived in Amsterdam with two suitcases and a bag of optimism. Somehow, over the years, that has turned into a life filled with smart, funny, generous people who I genuinely enjoy spending time with. Not a bad return.

Consuming

I took my slightly sore head to the cinema on Sunday for a 25th-anniversary screening of Legally Blonde. The first thing to process was that 2001 — a year that feels, to me, basically last week — is now a quarter of a century in the rear-view, which is its own small horror.

The second was that it’s a more awkward watch than I’d filed it away as. Not in the obvious tabloid-feminism way — I can forgive a film for thinking liberation and a good blow-dry are the same project, that’s just 2001 being 2001. It’s the gay panic that’s curdled: a whole comic beat hinges on whether a man is gay or European, as though those are the only two options and both are punchlines. It plays now like a relic of a moment that thought it was being progressive and was mostly being loud.

And yet. Some of those lines have been lodged in my head for over twenty years, fully paid-up, and they still land. A film can be a period piece and a comfort blanket at once, apparently. Both things were true in a dark room and a comfy chair, hangover and all.

Connections

Two this week, both of the lovely-people-passing-through variety.

Tuesday brought Mike Wilkins, in town for a conference. Mike was a fixture of my London drinking life back when we both worked in the City and shared the good fortune of having offices within easy reach of the Old Doctor Butler’s Head — a pub that hosted a great deal of what we would have described as networking and HMRC might reasonably have described as Tuesday afternoon.

Since then we’ve scattered ourselves across continents: me to Amsterdam, Mike back to New Jersey. Which means opportunities to catch up over beers and schnitzel are rarer than either of us would like, and probably all the better for it when they happen.

Then Sarah Kocianski, another London friend, in town for Money20/20. We took the opportunity to put the world to rights over a very respectable Côtes du Rhône, as is traditional.

One of the unexpected side-effects of moving countries is that your friendships become event-based. You don’t have last-minute catch ups any more; you get concentrated bursts of conversation every few months or years. The intervals get longer, but somehow you pick up exactly where you left off.

Coverage

The folks at Nexer have put this year’s Camp Digital videos online, which means I get to point you towards 300 Seconds — the initiative I co-founded to help people who’ve never spoken at an event get their first go somewhere safe and supportive.

The format is simple: first-time speakers are paired with experienced ones to shape and rehearse a five-minute talk, then unleashed on an audience. Camp Digital have given us a slot on their agenda four years running now, and this year’s lightning talkers were Oana Puicar, Zhen Yang, Robin Roy, Aditya Shah and James Bilham.

You can watch the 300 Seconds session here.

The bit I’m proudest of, though, is what happens afterwards.

Almost every year, one of our speakers comes back with a full conference talk of their own. This year it was Jane Bowyer, who did a 300 Seconds slot in 2025 and came back to give a half-hour talk on the messy middle of design careers.

Which is really the whole point.

People often think the challenge is learning how to speak. Most of the time the challenge is believing you’re allowed to.

Five minutes isn’t just five minutes. It’s proof that you can stand on a stage, say something worth hearing, and survive the experience. Once you’ve done that, a lot of other things start to look possible.

Travel

I’m off to Canada for the IABC World Conference at the end of this week — a trip that has existed in two very different states.

The transatlantic flights and conference hotel were booked back in March, radiating the sort of competence that suggests a responsible adult was briefly involved. Everything else has been organised considerably more recently, in the long-standing tradition of confusing “I have a flight” with “I have a plan”.

The challenge now is balancing the two things I actually want to do: catch up with friends and see more of a country I’ve barely visited. Both entirely achievable goals, were it not for the small matter of attempting them during the World Cup.

It turns out accommodation pricing during a major international sporting event follows the same basic principles as airline baggage fees: technically legal, emotionally upsetting. Still, some combination of trains, optimism and questionable decision-making has got me this far. No reason to abandon a proven methodology now.

Elbows up!

This week in photos