Author: Sharon O'Dea

Weeknote 2025/19

/ Sharon O'Dea / 2 Comments
Cone on the head of the famous statue in Glasgow
Hello, Glasgow! (Photo: me)

It’s been a week of looking back—at old stats, old habits, and old gigs. That well-worn claim about intranets saving millions in productivity has resurfaced, yet again. I’ve written about it for Strategic, because, as the saying goes, some people use statistics like a drunken man uses lampposts—more for support than illumination. And we deserve better.

At the same time, I’ve been revisiting email. Not in my inbox (LOL no. I am heroically bad at my own email), but in research, trying to understand why the channel everyone loves to hate still quietly endures. And then, on the weekend, came Barrowland: a venue I’d mythologised since my teens, where I finally saw Supergrass play the album I bought with my pocket money. It’s strange how some things stick—channels, bands, friendships—and how time sneaks up on you while you’re still busy singing along.

This week at work

For someone in communications, I spend surprisingly little time actually communicating. Most of my work is on the plumbing behind the messages: platforms, processes, systems, and governance. Understanding user and organisational needs. Finding solutions. Helping clients sell the vision and deliver the change. I work closely with comms leaders and manage content teams, but rarely get to roll up my sleeves and write actual messaging these days.

This week was a welcome exception. I spent time with a product team, helping them articulate what they’re building and how it adds value for different kinds of users. It was great fun to stretch that part of my brain again—one I haven’t used much lately.

Jon and I also got stuck into a new writing and research project. For the next few weeks, we’re diving deep into email. Tech bros and comms pros alike have been confidently predicting the death of internal email for at least 15 years. And yet, it persists. Clunky? Often. Badly used? Certainly. But for many use cases, it’s still the most effective tool we’ve got. It cuts across hierarchies, systems, and schedules in a way few other channels can. As I often say, two things will survive the nuclear winter: cockroaches and email.*

(*I think I got that line from Sam Marshall, but I could be wrong.)

Also this week

My two besties and I had our annual girls’ weekend away. The tradition is simple: if a band we all like announces a tour, we pick a city we fancy visiting and make a trip of it. This year it was Glasgow, and Supergrass.

We finally made it to Barrowland—an iconic venue I’ve been reading about since I was a teenager. It’s one of those rare places that lives up to the myth: a sprung dancefloor, a luminous ceiling, and a crowd that knows how to have a good time. There’s a magic to it. Seeing a band you love there feels like a rite of passage.

Supergrass played I Should Coco in full—an album I bought with my pocket money in Our Price when I was 15. My pal Katy and I have been seeing them together since we met at 17. Mid-gig, fuelled by several beers, I turned to her and said: “I can’t believe we’ve been watching this band for twenty years.”

She looked at me, with the weary kindness of someone breaking bad news, and said: “It’s thirty years.”

And just like that, the beer wore off and my knees started hurting.

Supergrass' Gaz Coomes at Barrowland, Glasgow, 9 May 2025

Consuming

👩🏻‍💻 Internetting

Spotted this  thoughtful piece this from Sarah Daly which explored the subtle but significant ways AI is reshaping how we work. It’s not always about job losses; more often, it’s the quiet squeeze—doing more with less, with little time to adapt. While AI tools promise to save time, they often just shift the burden elsewhere. We’re now swimming in content: drafted, summarised and polished at speed, but lacking the depth or judgment that makes it useful. The term botshit—AI-generated sludge that clutters rather than clarifies—feels painfully apt.

The biggest loss might be the space to think. As AI accelerates the pace, opportunities for reflection, strategy, or just breathing room are eroded. If we want AI to genuinely augment human potential, we need to start designing for thinking time, not just throughput.

📺 Watching

No time for telly this week

📚 Reading

I’ve been reading Cal Newport’s A World Without Email—part research, part self-flagellation—as we dig into why the one channel everyone claims to hate just won’t die.

🎧 Listening

This week was all about Supergrass. Enjoy this setlist. The classic album in full, followed by a few fan favourites. Nostalgia turned up loud.

Coverage

A few weeks ago I posted on LinkedIn about dodgy McKinsey stats that do the rounds on vague productivity savings, and how I learned the hard way that these don’t wash with CFOs.

The same flawed stats did the rounds again this week, so Mike Klein invited to write my first piece for Strategic on how bullshit maths doesn’t help our profession to be taken seriously. 

Travel

Glasgow again later this week. Berlin next week. Shout if you wanna catch up.

This week in photos

Weeknote 2025/18

/ Sharon O'Dea / Leave a comment
Action shot from LumApps Bright in Chicago this week. (Photo: LumApps)

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.

Elbows up! Headed north.

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.

Tiny East Coast Canada
Tiny Quebec
Tiny Gatinau Balloon Festival
Tiny Ottawa
Tiny Toronto
Tiny Niagra
Little Canada mission control
Normal-sized me outside Little Canada

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.

Pro Networking

📺 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.

The Vaniers album launch show, Toronto. Photo: me.

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.

Andrea, Jenna and me in Toronto.

Travel

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

This week in photos

Weeknote 2025/17

/ Sharon O'Dea / Leave a comment
King’s Day in Amsterdam. Photo: me (of photo taken by a random child in the street)

This weeknote comes to you courtesy of epic jet lag. I’m in Chicago for the LumApps Bright conference. Landed yesterday and, in a triumph of willpower, stayed awake until 8.30pm.

Naturally, I was wide awake at 4.30am, because body clocks are cruel and unforgiving. The hotel gym doesn’t open until 6, so I spent a glamorous hour sitting in the dark, contemplating my life choices.

And now I’m committing that self-doubt to the blog. You’re welcome.

This week at work

I moved offices. Then spent about two hours in the new office before hitting the road again. But the new gaff seems nice.

Our big focus was a workshop day with a client.

Workshops are always rewarding, but they’re also hard graft. It takes a lot of thought and preparation to design them properly — working out the right questions to ask, the right exercises to run, the right structure to actually get people talking. It’s not something you can just wing (though plenty try); investing the time upfront makes all the difference.

But when it clicks, it’s brilliant. I love those moments when you can go round the room and hear people properly reflecting, discussing, debating. And just as importantly, actually listening to one another. You can feel the energy shift when people move from lobbing opinions around to properly building on each other’s ideas.

Which is my long-winded way of explaining why I was basically brain-dead by close of play Friday.

Also this week

Which was unfortunate, because Saturday was King’s Day in the Netherlands. 364 days a year you can pretty much forget the country has a monarchy. Then on 27 April (or 26th if that’s a Sunday, as it was this year), the nation drowns itself in orange to celebrate King Willem-Alexander’s birthday.

The party kicks off the night before, on King’s Night, with street parties everywhere. Then on King’s Day itself, every street becomes a flea market, everyone starts drinking at breakfast, and the whole country gives itself over to a sort of joyful chaos. No one cares if you’re Dutch or not — just don something orange and get stuck in.

I scored a fluffy orange onesie in the kids section of Hema and danced the afternoon away at a sound system on the Palmgracht. Some bloke down the road hung a massive disco ball from his gevelsteen (the hook on the front of Dutch houses) and spent the day leading singalongs in the street.

This year was as beautiful and sunny as I can remember. On days like that, Amsterdam really does feel like the best place in the world. I’m so lucky to live there.

Consuming

👩🏻‍💻 Internetting

This week I stumbled across a brilliant story from a small town in Japan. Kawara’s Ojisan Trading Card Game turns real local men — train drivers, noodle chefs, retired robotics experts — into Pokémon-style trading cards.

It started as a way to bring kids and older residents together, and it’s worked: it’s broken down generational barriers, surfaced hidden talents, and turned everyday people into local heroes.

A good reminder for internal comms too. Connection doesn’t come from flashy campaigns. It comes from celebrating real people, making it easy (and fun) to get involved, and keeping things personal. Sometimes the best thing we can do is help people see how interesting their colleagues already are.

📺 Watching

Like millions of others, the news of the Pope’s death prompted me to rewatch Conclave. Impressive synergy between Conclave’s marketing team and God there.

📚 Reading

Finally took a proper deep dive into Internal Communication Strategy by Rachel Miller this week — a book I bought ages ago but only ever dipped into. A timely read for some research I’m doing for another project.

🎧 Listening

It was an eclectic music week.

On Sunday I was lucky enough to score tickets to an intimate performance by Jools Holland. He took questions from the audience of about 100, illustrating his answers on the piano. Over an hour or so he covered the history of the piano, his career, and the greats of blues and jazz, before ending with a few numbers with vocalists from his Big Band.

Jools Holland and his piano (photo: me)

Midweek, we saw the Sugababes at AFAS Live — a lovely early-00s nostalgia fest, albeit in my least favourite venue in the city.

Coverage

This week I published a new piece for Reworked: Less Content, More Clarity

It’s a call for a long-overdue clear-out of redundant, outdated and trivial content, and a shift away from publishing more towards communicating better.

I argue that it’s not enough to audit what we already have — we need proper discovery work to understand what employees actually need. Good internal comms isn’t about volume; it’s about clarity, user focus, and strong governance. When we get it right, we don’t just build trust — we create the conditions for better decisions, better digital experiences, and workplaces where people can actually get things done.

Travel

As I said, I arrived in Chicago yesterday afternoon. Here until Thursday — shout if you want to catch up.

Heading on to Toronto after that.

This week in photos

New office exterior. Obvs only a tiny corner of it is mine.
Flowers laid on my street to remember some resistance fighters who held out here in 1945.
Sugababes at AFAS
First of four planes this week
My bike got its annual service
11am on King’s Day and someone had already tweeted a portaloo into the canal
Traditional King’s Day display on Westerstraat
King’s Day in the neighbourhood
Me on King’s Day
Scenes outside my house
And the next morning
WFP. Trying to practice my talk without actually speaking out loud on the plane.
Smashing BBQ joint in Chicago
This is a ridiculous array of hotel pillows

Weeknote 2025/16

/ Sharon O'Dea / Leave a comment
Papieneiland on a beautiful spring day. Photo: me.

Easter weekend, and while I don’t mark it in any religious sense, I’m grateful for the long weekend all the same. It’s a well-timed pause in a year that already feels like it’s moving at double speed. We’re supposedly in spring now, though the weather hasn’t quite got the memo. Still, a bit of space to slow down and take stock has been welcome after a week that’s been emotionally intense, creatively energising, and, at points, quietly sad.

This week at work

An emotional rollercoaster of a week. We’re helping an organisation re-align and re-plan their digital transformation programme after a difficult-but-necessary pivot. Ahead of a team workshop, we’ve run a series of one-to-one interviews so people can share—confidentially—what’s happened and how they feel about it.

Being external gives us some distance and objectivity. We don’t carry the same baggage, which means people have been refreshingly honest. But at times it’s felt like being everyone’s therapist.

Despite the short working week, by Thursday I was absolutely wrung out.

And yet, also buzzing, because we officially signed contracts on a very exciting something. Which means I can stop being cryptic about it and, y’know, actually start doing the work. But not before a small celebratory toast.

I put the finishing touches on my presentation for LumApps Bright in Chicago next week. A few practice runs still needed, but I’m feeling pretty well prepped.

Oh, and I may have said yes to another side project, because apparently I’ve learned nothing.

Also this week

As mentioned in last week’s weeknote, I took to the stage on Sunday for PowerPints, the PowerPoint-based comedy show. My presentation—Hotels and their Design Crimes—didn’t win Best in Show (robbed, obviously), but I did get to say “jizz-stained wank blanket” repeatedly into a microphone in front of actual humans, so I’m calling that a win anyway.

I have strong views on plug sockets
And hairdryers
And wish to warn you about kettles

Ciara Murphy’s winning prezzo (“DuoLingo: Smash or Pass?”) had me properly howling. The whole evening was a joy. Would do again.

Some sad news too: Nick Booth died suddenly this week, far too young. Nick—aka Podnosh—was one of the first people I connected with when I joined Twitter back in my local gov days. He welcomed me into the digital government fold at the first LocalGovCamp in 2009. Kind, generous, funny, and full of heart, Nick was one of the good ones. He’ll be missed by so many.

Lloyd Davis wrote a beautiful tribute here.

Consuming

👩🏻‍💻 Internetting

This week I fell down a delightful rabbit hole watching fish on a webcam. Not just any webcam: Utrecht’s Visdeurbel (fish doorbell). It’s a live stream of a canal lock, and with spring migration underway, volunteers are asked to ring a virtual doorbell when they spot a fish. Enough rings and someone opens the lock to let them through.

It’s charming. It’s weird. It’s very early-internet vibes. And yes, I pressed the button

📺 Watching

Sweet Bobby: My Catfish Nightmare, the Netflix retelling of that truly bananas case that spawned the podcast. Years of fake Facebook accounts, phantom illnesses, and even Skype calls with someone who refused to show their face. Kirat Assi is a calm, sympathetic narrator—but I still spent most of it yelling “HOW did you fall for this for ten years?” at the screen. “Witness protection? Come on.”

Glossy production, plenty of unanswered questions, and a resolution that lands with more of a shrug than a punch.

📚 Reading

Absolutely nothing. My brain said no thank you.

🎧 Listening

Caught French psych-rockers The Limiñanas at Tolhuistuin. Channelling Gainsbourg, Morricone and The Cramps, they delivered fuzzed-out riffs, retro cool, and pure groove with barely a word spoken. Like a Tarantino soundtrack come to life.

Support band David Shaw and The Beat were an unexpected delight too. Dark synthy post-punk vibes. Brussels-based Mancunian weirdos: I’m in.

Travel

A whole week without going near an airport. Glorious.

Sadly, the last such week until… late May.

Coming up: London, Chicago, Toronto, London again, Glasgow (twice), Berlin. And probably London again.

Pray for my inbox.

This week in photos

The most photographed spot in town, before all the tourists arrived
Een koffiemometje
Singel, 9am.
Limiñanas on stage at the Tolhuistuin
Monet painted this. And did a far better job of it than I did.

Weeknote 2025/15

/ Sharon O'Dea / 1 Comment
Obligatory touristy shot of Nyhavn, Copenhagen. Photo: Sharon O’Dea

There’s something about spending time with your nerd tribe that hits the reset button in the best way. After a few days in Denmark talking shop with the digital workplace faithful—followed by a gloriously sunny weekend back in Amsterdam—I’m feeling that perfect combination of knackered and energised. The kind of tired that comes not from burnout, but from doing work that matters, with people who get it.

This week at work

Huge week. Monday brought excellent news about a new project I can’t tell you about yet (and keeping it a secret is killing me). But rest assured, the moment the NDA drops, I’ll be shouting about it from the nearest rooftop.

Tuesday saw me hopping over to Copenhagen for the IntraTeam Event. My annual pilgrimage to the temple of digital workplace nerdery. I’ve been going since 2011, and it remains one of the few conferences that doesn’t just skim the surface. No hype, no fluff, just solid, detail-rich sessions with people who’ve done the work on complex, interesting digital workplaces.

My Lithos colleague Jonathan took to the stage with Sabine Arnold from our client SEFE Securing Energy for Europe, talking about how we delivered a content-first intranet in just 100 days. No generative AI in sight, just good, old-fashioned content design done properly, in two languages and at a frankly indecent speed. We didn’t stop at launch either: we built in training, governance, and community spaces so the thing can grow without collapsing under its own weight.

Jonathan Phillips and Sabine Arnold on stage at IntraTeam
Lithos Partners’ Jonathan and SEFE’s Sabine Arnold at IntraTeam

As ever, the real value came from conversations in corridors. Susan Hanley’s SharePoint insights were especially useful (though, as someone about to dive into a new SP project, they also induced mild heart palpitations). Copilot agents are showing promise (but as ever the biggest challenges are in the human factor side of implementation), intranet governance is still the wild west, and the best strategy remains doing less, better.

After the main event, IntraTeam’s Kurt gathered a gang of us “invited experts” to discuss where the industry’s going. I wasn’t sure what to expect, but it turned out to be the most valuable day of all. No slides, no sales pitches, just actual grown-up debate with some of the smartest people in the game.

And then, in an odd bit of narrative whiplash, I got blocked on LinkedIn.

Someone posted one of those “a bad intranet costs millions of dollars a year” type takes, based on the McKinsey stat about people spending 1.8 hours a day searching for information. You know the one. It did the rounds again, complete with some back-of-the-napkin maths and sweeping statements about the cost of poor digital experiences.

If you’re going to make the case for a better digital workplace, “time saved” isn’t going to cut it. Telling the CFO you’re saving five minutes a day is like telling a doctor you feel vaguely better. It’s not a diagnosis. It’s not a business case. Time spent searching is a symptom, not an outcome. Want to be taken seriously? Show how poor findability leads to risk, compliance failures, attrition.

So I said so. Politely. Succinctly. Then followed the LinkedIn prompt and turned my comment into a post. Got a ton of engagement—likes, nods, DMs… and then, boom. Blocked.

And interestingly (depressingly?), it’s not the first time. A few weeks ago another industry “influencer” responded to a (very polite) build I’d offered on one of their posts by… quietly deleting it. Poof. Gone. Not because I’d been rude or even really challenged their post, just because I’d dared to expand the conversation beyond a narrow comms focus.

And look, it’s their feed, they can do what they want. But if your response to professional critique is “lalala can’t hear you,” we have a problem. Our field doesn’t move forward by clapping along to every fluffy take.

If we’re not willing to have grown-up conversations about what good looks like (and doesn’t) then we don’t get to complain when we’re not seen as a business-critical function.

We do our industry a disservice when we treat criticism or challenge as a personal attack. If our default mode is cheerleading and groupthink, we’re not growing, we’re just echoing.

Disagreement isn’t disrespect. And blocking someone for calling out lazy thinking isn’t strength—it’s fragility.

Also this week

I also managed a quick visit to the Ocean exhibit at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art. A stunning, immersive look at our relationship with the sea, blending science, art and activism in a way that somehow made me feel both awestruck and vaguely guilty.

Tonight’s the night: PowerPints, the PowerPoint-based comedy show. I submitted my slides Monday and promptly panicked about learning the thing. Enter ChatGPT, which turned out to be an unexpectedly brilliant rehearsal partner. Its dictate function can’t hear tone or pace, but it will sit quietly while I mumble at my screen for 10 minutes and offer some surprisingly helpful prompts to help me memorise my script.

Feeling ready. I’ll report back next week (unless I bomb spectacularly, in which case let’s all pretend this paragraph never happened).

(Still a few tickets left. If you’re in Amsterdam, come witness the chaos.)

Consuming

👩🏻‍💻 Internetting

I’m glad people are out there asking the important questions about emerging technologies. Such as “why DO so many AI company logos look like bumholes?”

📺 Watching

I’ve been too busy to watch anything this week, which has helped me manage the FOMO of knowing the final series of Handmaid’s Tale is out across the pond.

📚 Reading

Hallie Rubenhold’s The Five was brilliant, so I’ve leapt straight into her latest, Story Of A Murder. Only a few pages in, but I’m already hooked.

🎧 Listening

Delighted with the new Pulp single, like bumping into an old mate in a pub and realising they’re still cool as fuck.

Connections

IntraTeam was full of excellent humans, but the people-ing didn’t stop there. I caught up with UX designer Eugene (from The Breakfast) for coffee, had dinner with two of my Colombia travel crew in Copenhagen’s achingly hip Meatpacking district, and squeezed in a drink with Hiveonline’s Sofie Blakstad before my flight. 10/10 week for chats.

Flash Pack Colombia reunion

Travel

Nowhere next week. A rare and beautiful thing. But after that, it’s all systems go: London, Chicago, Toronto, Glasgow.

If you’re local to any of those, let’s grab a cuppa. Or a gin. I’m not fussy.

This week in photos

The engine and side of an orange and white EasyJet plane, on the tarmac with a clear blue sky
On the move again. AMS > CPH
A white woman with brown hair stands in front of a Microsoft sign. She is wearing sunglasses, a bright green top and a black jacket,
At the Microsoft offices in Copenhagen
An AI-generated picture of an action figure. The text says "Sharon O'Dea: Digital Workplace Expert"
The AI-generated action figure trend
A historic brown brick building with a mostly empty square in front. It has a clock tower on the top-left.
Copenhagen Radhuisplads
A selfie of two women - Sharon O'Dea and Sofie Blakstad.
With Sofie Blakstad in CPH
A Japanese-style stage in the background with a patch of daffodils in the foreground.
Finally visited Tivoli Gardens
A woman (me) surrounded by coloured lights in a dark room
Inside the Yayoi Kusama artwork at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art
Spring Saturdays in AMS

Weeknote 2025/14

/ Sharon O'Dea / Leave a comment
London, this week. Photo: me.

Time is a flat circle, calendars are lies, and yet somehow it’s April and I’m still knee-deep in tasks I confidently told myself I’d wrap up in January. The to-do list has developed sentience and is now breeding in the wild. Meetings beget more meetings. Progress is measurable only by the faint glow of a Teams notification turning off.

So: not a week of breakthroughs, but of motion. Possibly even forward.

This week at work

A week of spinning plates rather than carving out any serious thinking time.

Bitsy jobs included planning workshops, writing and delivering a couple of presentations, and wrestling the year-end finances into something resembling order.

Had a great chat with an HR tech vendor about digital employee experience. Specifically, how platforms only deliver value if they’re actually aligned with processes and, wild idea, people. Training, culture, the human stuff. We’re exploring ways to work together, so watch this space.

Started digging into pre-work for a team alignment piece with a client. Everyone needs a say, but time is tight, so we’re walking the tightrope between inclusion and getting it done. So we’re having to be flexible and creative, while giving everyone confidence that we’re genuinely listening and can be trusted to be discreet.

A recent pitch didn’t land. New client, new sector—it was always a stretch, but still a bit of a sting after putting in the hours.

More positively, I had a fab chat with a founder about something new, interesting and intriguing. The thinking behind it really resonated, my brain’s fizzing with ideas, and I’m keen to get involved. But I need to find some clear headspace to give it the depth of thinking it deserves.

Also this week

Spent one more day in Bucharest and visited its crazy-large Parliament building.

Back home in Amsterdam, I found myself in Dam Square at the exact moment someone drove in and set themselves and their car on fire. What looked, from my brisk departure angle, like a terrorist incident. Flashbacks to growing up in London in the 80s and 90s. Suspicious bags, dodgy alarms, constant low-level anxiety. Ah, the nostalgia.

Did a lightning dash to London to catch up with a bunch of mates I’ve known since I was a teenager. Between us: Johannesburg, Singapore, Amsterdam, North London and several time zones’ worth of baggage. First time we’ve all been in the same place in years, and it was glorious.

My long-delayed turn at PowerPints—the PowerPoint comedy night—is finally next week. Slides are ready. Memory? Less so. Wish me luck.

If you’re local, come down to Boom Chicago on Sunday and heckle support. Tickets here.

Consuming

👩🏻‍💻 Internetting

New research from Centre for Cities shows how WFH has reshaped the capital’s pub trade. Thursdays are now the new Fridays, as seen in both pub takings and TfL passenger data.

London bucks the national trend. Elsewhere, post-work pints have vanished almost entirely. Commuters are also spending less on food near the office, but not at cafés—it’s all going to suburban supermarkets. Living the Aldi dream.

The FT did a piece last weekend on LinkedIn “super users”. Apparently, I’m one—81,000 followers puts me in the “mid-tier influencer” bracket.

Is it useful? Occasionally. Mostly, it means more men in my DMs explaining things I already know.

But despite the hustle bros, AI sludge and endless posts about personal brands, LinkedIn can still be brilliant. It’s where I show how I think, what I do, and learn from people outside my bubble.

People ask how I “grew my audience”. No strategy, no funnel, no content calendar. Just be useful, be funny, be consistent. For years.

My top tips, if you want them:
🚀 Say something original. If ChatGPT could write it, maybe don’t.
🚀 Ditch your niche now and then—you’re allowed layers.
🚀 Social media is social. Don’t just dump content like a cat dropping a dead bird to impress its human.
🚀 LinkedIn loves video and carousels. I don’t. That’s ok.
🚀 Be a human, not a brand.

Accidental mid-tier influencer, signing off.

📺 Watching

Series 3 of Slow Horses. Still loving it. Still wouldn’t trust any of them with a stapler.

📚 Reading

Almost finished the book about Romanian history I started last week, Children of the Night: The Strange and Tragic Story of Modern Romania.

Got over-excited in the airport WHSmiths yesterday and bought a whole stack of dead tree books to get me through the next few months.

Connections

With Q1 now done with, here’s a progress update on my 100 People project – my annual mission to catch up with 100 people in my network.

19 met, 5 booked. Just shy of 25%. But with a travel-heavy Q2 looming, I’ll be racking up catch-ups at pace.

Travel

Last week’s trip to Bucharest reminded me of another hotel design irritant: the annoyingly quirky labelling.

“This might be vodka.” No. It’s lukewarm water from the bathroom sink, and confusing the jet-lagged is not a flex. Please stop.

🇩🇰 Next stop: Copenhagen on Tuesday for IntraTeam. Ready to nerd out about intranets with the best of them.

This week in photos

My feet in Bucharest
I like large administratve buildings anfd I cannot lie
Incident in Dam Square on Thursday
Amsters early in the morning, when it’s weirdly peaceful
Travelling light
My first visit to Stansted in 20 years
With my mates in London

Weeknote 2025/13

/ Sharon O'Dea / Leave a comment
Peles Castle, Transylvania. Edited to make it look sunnier than it actually was. Photo: me.

This week’s update comes to you live from Bucharest, fuelled by pastrami, palaces, and yet another chance to indulge my not-at-all-unhealthy interest in dark history.

I’m trying not to compare every client challenge to a diplomatic standoff with Vlad the Impaler—but some weeks do feel like they need a pointy solution.

This week at work

A week of three halves. Or maybe thirds. Maths was never my strong suit.

Slow but steady progress on work to help a team with alignment and ways of working around their digital transformation.

Meanwhile, cracking on with content development for another client, where every draft is a thrilling journey into “what if we just said it like humans?”

Also: quite a lot of time on a new secret-squirrel project. Can’t say more for now, which obviously makes it sound far more exciting than it probably is. But still—watch this space.

Also this week

Faced with a dangerously empty weekend and an allergy to sitting still, I panic-booked a solo trip to Bucharest. Because why not? Romania becomes country number 81 on the list, which is a very normal number of countries to have visited, thank you for asking.

Highlights included:

  • A walking tour that packed about 1,000 years of history, coups, communism and chaos into three hours and one coffee stop
  • Discovering pastrami is one of the few foods Romania can claim as its own—then heroically eating my bodyweight in it for research purposes
  • Marvelling at Bucharest’s architectural approach, which seems to be: yes. Neo-gothic? Sure. Brutalist? Why not. French chateau next to a 1980s concrete monolith? Go on then. A city that feels like someone shuffled the architectural deck then played every card at once
  • Taking a bus out to Transylvania to gawp at forests, palaces, and not one single vampire, which frankly feels like false advertising

Consuming

👩🏻‍💻 Internetting

I had a play with the new GPT image tools like everyone else, because if you’re not anthropomorphising your inbox or reimagining your cat as a 19th-century general, are you even alive in 2025?

My headshot, but make it Family Guy. Photo credit: Paul Clarke, kinda.

📺 Watching

I finished Adolescence. As everyone else has said already, tough but important telly.

Also most of Series 2 of Slow Horses.

📚 Reading

I like to learn about the places I visit, so I’m reading Children of the Night: The Strange and Tragic Story of Modern Romania.

It’s part travel writing, part history (so, you know, right up my alley), tracing how Romania ended up where it is today. Full of unexpected turns, grim humour and sharp insights, it’s a useful lens on a country that’s often misunderstood.

Connections

I met up with Stephan van Bolderik, who I met via The Breakfast app. We chatted about startups, exits, working culture across the generations, Burning Man, LinkedIn, and much else besides.

Travel

🇷🇴 Back from Romania tomorrow evening

🇩🇰 Copenhagen next week for IntraTeam

This week in photos

Weeknote 2025/12

/ Sharon O'Dea / Leave a comment
A bend in the Herengracht canal in Amsterdam. It's a clear sunny day with blue sky and the canal houses are reflected in the water.
Amsterdam looking banging in the spring sunshine. I love this town. Photo: me.

After watching a film this week and diving headlong into a playlist of 60s protest songs, it struck me how much those voices felt both urgent and completely of their time. That raw, direct, unpolished energy — it’s hard to imagine it cutting through today’s noise. But the sense of fighting for something, the doing, stuck with me.

Which might be why this week felt like a battle cry of its own.

This week at work

It was probably inevitable that after saying last week I had some spare capacity, this turned out to be our busiest week in ages.

A big focus was helping a client find alignment on plans and ways of working across various streams in a digital transformation programme. We’re looking at how to balance wide input with the need to make a viable plan and actually get things done. It’s all about finding the right mix of consultation and decision-making.

Wrote the first draft of a keynote I’m giving at the LumApps Bright event next month.

Helped a client submit an award entry for an intranet we supported the development of. Always happy to do this; it’s a nice excuse to look back at the impact it’s had for the company and their people.

Responded to two RFPs. I never do a find-and-replace generic response. Either I take the time to think properly about what the client needs and how we can help, or I don’t respond at all. I like to think that gives people confidence we know what we’re doing. But it does mean:

a) every RFP takes days of work;
b) many go nowhere;
c) I’m left with the nagging feeling the whole process is designed to make us give our thinking away for free.

Also made some progress on a secret little side project. More on that soon.

Also this week

With an unexpected free weekend coming up, I booked a solo trip to Bucharest on a whim. So I spent some time planning that.

And when I say planning… I think this is a safe space to confess just how geeky my travel prep has become.

First, I have a travel planner board. So far, so Standard Nerd Behaviour. It’s in Microsoft Loop — basically a Blue Cross Week Notion for people forced to use Microsoft. We’re not, but most of our clients are, so we dogfood it anyway to stay close to their world.

The board has columns for:

  • Booked – trips in the diary, logistics sorted (or mostly)
  • Planned – agreed or pencilled in, but not yet booked
  • Wishlist – places I’d like to go
  • Done – completed trips, useful for sharing recommendations or just remembering what I’ve actually done
Travel planner board in Microsoft Loop.

Each trip links to its own Loop page, with a schedule showing transport, accommodation and any activities planned or booked. I also create a Google Map with sights, restaurants, shops, and must-sees pinned.

Separately, I’ve made a custom GPT that acts as my personal travel agent. It remembers hotel and travel preferences, airline loyalty schemes, the type of restaurants I like, and has persistent memory so I can keep adding to it.

I use it to generate itineraries: just plug in dates and ask it to build an agenda based on my preferences (weird history, long walks, offbeat sights, nothing that could ever be called “relaxing”). Once everything’s booked, I add the finalised schedule (from the Loop), then use it to ask things like:

My Travel Buddy chat
  • “Can you give me a packing list for Colombia, based on the weather and planned activities?”
  • “What’s the best way to get between these places today?”
  • “Is there a lounge I can use at this airport?”
  • “Organise my packing into logical packing cubes. Will it all fit in carry-on?”

Geeky? Yes. Useful? That’s up for debate. But I enjoy figuring out how this stuff works — and the best way to learn is to apply it to your own weirdly specific use cases.

Consuming

👩🏻‍💻 Internetting

I’m watching from a distance as the usual vendor-consultancy alliance flogs AI as the answer for comms and customer service. It has bags of potential, but realising that potential relies on having great, up-to-date and well-organised content to train it on. And guess what? Yours isn’t.

Enterprise search didn’t magically solve the problem of findability, because the problem was never search. It’s the content being searched.

Realising investment in and promises of AI relies on the boring and unsexy work of governance and admin. Of producing good content and managing what you have tightly so you can be 100% confident what’s being produced, presented or regurgitated into new interfaces by AI is accurate.

As ever, that’s a people and organisation problem, not a tech one. So I very appreciated this piece from Clearbox’s Suzie Robinson which urges buyers to consider what they actually need AI for then vet the tools on that basis rather than base decisions on vendor hype.

📺 Watching

Finished the first series of Slow Horses. Started Adolescence because everyone was talking about it, but only managed one episode. It’s A Lot. I’ll watch the rest, but take my time over it.

Caught A Complete Unknown at the cinema. There’s a fascinating, complex story to be told about Bob Dylan — myth-making, reinvention, and what happens when a reluctant icon picks up an electric guitar and changes music history. This isn’t that story. Instead, it’s a reverential, paint-by-numbers biopic that never gets close to its subject. For a film so determined to explore who Dylan really was, it offers no insight beyond what any vaguely stoned ex-hippie could tell you in a pub.

Chalamet does a solid Dylan impersonation, and the production design is lovely — all smoky clubs and sixties grit — but the film drags. Dylan is written as a charmless narcissist, yet treated with such deference it’s as if the filmmakers were lobbying for his canonisation. The result is oddly inert: a film about a cultural earthquake that feels more like a tribute concert in soft focus

📚 Reading

Another non-reading week. I can either watch telly or read, but apparently not both.

🎧 Listening

With Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger both central to the Dylan story, it’s no surprise they feature heavily in A Complete Unknown. It sent me down a bit of a rabbit hole, listening to a whole heap of 60s and 70s protest songs — Guthrie, Seeger, Joan Baez, Dylan himself.

They sound both urgent and like relics from another world. For the first time in my life it feels like progress on the issues they sang about — war, poverty, injustice — is going in reverse.

But the form, the earnestness, the melodies, and especially the lyrics (“Solidarity forever, for the union makes us strong!”) feel of another time. There’s a rawness and sincerity that’s hard to imagine cutting through today. And yet, there’s still something powerful in how directly they spoke to the times — and how much people listened.

Connections

Went to the Female Founders Brunch at TNW Spaces this week. Good people, bad coffee, and the usual mix of useful insight and slightly-too-earnest advice. Always energising to be in a room full of smart women building interesting things — though let’s be honest, women don’t need more encouragement to ask for help. They need investment.

Coverage

It’s five years since the first lockdown, and somehow companies still haven’t fully rethought how they communicate in a hybrid world. I wrote a piece for Reworked on how to turn communication chaos into clarity in the hybrid workplace.

This week in photos

Gorgeous sunny day in town
Dusk on my walk home
Dinner at Trattoria Koevoet
Spin sesh
Pretty much every street in the city is being dug up right now
Dutch Hello Fresh is wild. Whoever plans these seems to think this is a normal volume of green beans for two people, and also that one single clove of garlic is an acceptable level of flavour
FC Ajax turned 125 this week. This is the only photo I have to show for it.
More canal views
Lindengracht Markt

Weeknote 25/11

/ Sharon O'Dea / Leave a comment
On my walk home last night I managed to catch that spot at Reguilersgracht/Herengracht where you can see all six bridges, with no boats. Jackpot. Photo: me.

It’s St. Patrick’s Day, which means somewhere, someone is butchering the pronunciation of sláinte, and the world’s most tenuous Irish connections are being milked for all they’re worth.

As an actual passport-holding half-Irish person, I shall be marking the occasion by… doing what I do every week: wrangling intranets, herding stakeholders, and wondering why AI still can’t do the boring but important stuff properly.

This week at work

Back working with a client we helped launch an intranet for at the end of last year. It’s landed well—users like it, stakeholders are pleased, and now comes the next phase: shutting down the digital graveyards of legacy sites. We’re mapping what to keep, what to archive, and what to chuck in the bin.

Teams are often stunned at how little of their content is doing anything useful. Most pages get barely a glance. And while you could argue that abandoned content costs nothing, every extra page makes it harder to find the stuff that actually matters. Worse, if it’s outdated or misleading, it’s not just clutter, it’s a risk. The brutal reality is that unless you’ve had cast-iron content governance from day one, you can probably delete at least half your intranet with zero consequence. More likely, 90%.

So we’re sifting for the gold, reassuring stakeholders that most of their lovingly hoarded PDFs are no great loss, and helping the client streamline their digital estate. Fewer sites, less noise, and some actual cost savings.

Everyone in this space loves to talk about AI, but for now, it’s the unglamorous grind of governance and admin that makes the biggest difference to employee experience. (And yet, sorting the short neck of valuable stuff from the very long tail of ROTten content is exactly the sort of thing AI should be good at, and yet… isn’t. If you’re an intranet vendor with software that actually does this well, I would love to see it.)

Meanwhile, on another project, we’re developing a series of bespoke workshops. Didn’t set out to be a ‘workshop person,’ yet here we are. Apparently, we’re quite good at it too.

And since no one else is tooting our horn, I’ll do it myself. Recent feedback includes:

  • “That was the best-run workshop I’ve ever been to. I can’t believe we got through so much in a day.”
  • “Every meeting, I admired the way you managed to bring people together, even in tricky situations.”
  • “That was fantastic! Perfectly paced, and I love how you kept everyone focused.”

I do enjoy it—designing a well-paced, structured session that cuts through competing perspectives and actually gets people to a decision.

On the downside, a project we were due to start has been booted to a later budget round, so we’ve got some unexpected capacity over the next few months. If you need help untangling your communication and collaboration mess, give us a shout. Maybe you don’t quite know what you need, just that things aren’t working as well as they should. Those are my favourite projects.

In a laughably unsubtle attempt at business development, here’s my page on working with me. (And this lack of subtlety is why I don’t work in sales.)

Also this week

False spring came and went, but at least it was proof the planet is still spinning towards brighter days. News remains an omnishambles, so I’m sticking to my avoidance diet.

Quick trip to London to meet a prospective client, do some planning, and see my folks.

Consuming

👩🏻‍💻 Internetting

Anyone who’s worked on the internet for long enough will have watched the same cycle play out: bright young thing arrives to ‘shake things up,’ promptly tears everything apart, and then vanishes before the consequences hit, leaving others to clean up the mess.

So I appreciated this interview with Jennifer Pahlka, founder of Code for America and former US Deputy CTO. She lays out a case for smarter, more responsible government transformation. Her book argues that bureaucracy smothers good policy and that better internal tech capacity—rather than over-reliance on contractors—could fix it. Instead, we get sweeping, indiscriminate cuts that hurt the people who rely on public services the most.

Not that anyone in power will listen for a second.

The internet was built on cat pictures, so logically, its next evolutionary step is cat videos. Cats making burgers, to be precise.

It’s no “He’s making a mockery of you, Derry” bat video but an otter loose in the kitchen is always worth watching.

📺 Watching

I had a second attempt at watching Slow Horses, and got sucked in this time. Once you suspend disbelief at the poor OPSEC and laughably lax controls of a team supposedly working for the secret services it’s really quite enjoyable nonsense with some great performances.

I also saw the new Bridget Jones movie at the cinema. It was sold as a romcom but turned out to be a movie about grief that had me weeping from about 5 minutes in.

📚 Reading

Nowt this week

🎧 Listening

Episode three of Broken Veil cranked the creepiness up a notch.

Connections

I managed to catch up with the wonderful Lisa Riemers when I was in London. We talked, inevitably, about accessible comms. I’m looking forward to her book on the same.

This week in photos

Being a #loungewanker en route to London
Flying over St Pauls and the City on my way into London City
Home
Usual Saturday routine: buying
flowers at the market
Banging Sunday lunch
Bridget Jones at the Pathe
Spin class
Blue skies in Amsterdam!

Weeknote 2025/10

/ Sharon O'Dea / 1 Comment
A message for International Women’s Day. Photo: me.

Yesterday was International Women’s Day, so once again, I picked up the mantle of Asking Awkward Questions On The Internet.

Why? Because DEI is under attack, pay gaps persist, and women’s rights are rolling back globally. This work isn’t done.

Last year, I took a break—I was tired of shouting into the void. But this year, I couldn’t sit back while companies trotted out the same empty platitudes, hoping no one would notice the gaping chasm between their words and actions.

So once again I cleared my diary and got ready to call out hypocrisy when I saw it.

I came prepared. I’d invited women who didn’t feel able to comment on their own (or their former) employers to ping me the details so I could do it on their behalf.

In all I got 42 submissions calling out 33 organisations across the private and voluntary sectors. Roughly half mentioned maternity discrimination, about 40% unequal pay, with some more touching on harassment, lack of access to flexible work and other issues. About a third covered more than one issue.

What does that tell us? That equal pay reporting has barely nudged the dial on workplace equality. Worse, its tunnel-vision focus has let companies off the hook for the outright grim treatment of pregnant women and mothers—because if the numbers look sort of okay, no one’s asking the bigger questions.

Armed with my hit list, I got to work. I fed the lot into ChatGPT—pay data, corporate waffle about flexible work, news stories on maternity discrimination, the works. A bit of jiggery-pokery later, and I had myself a tidy spreadsheet.

Then the real graft started. Refining each into a solid response. I could have automated more, but didn’t. Partly because ChatGPT is a compulsive liar and needs fact-checking, but mostly because I wanted the flexibility to tailor my replies as the corporate nonsense started rolling in.

I set myself some ground rules:

  • Reply only to posts from companies someone contacted me about
  • Stick to actual IWD hypocrisy. If a company posted about how much they love women, I’d hit them with some inconvenient truths
  • Only use publicly available info. People shared grim stories of discrimination, but to protect their privacy (and my own arse), I kept it to news reports and official data

Then, on Friday afternoon, I got to work. Because in Asia, it was already IWD. And in corporate comms teams everywhere, social media managers were queueing up their posts so they could knock off early for the weekend. Fair dos. Been there too.

Of the 33 companies on my list, 22 posted something vacuous on LinkedIn. I replied to all of these.

So, well, what have we learned?

Firstly, the silence says it all. Of the 22 companies I called out, not one has responded. Not even a token “we’re working on it.” Just deafening, awkward silence.

These companies love talking about “celebrating women” and “accelerating action.” But ask a real question—about pay gaps, maternity discrimination, or flexible work—and it’s tumbleweed.

Pay gap reporting isn’t fixing anything. Years of mandatory reporting, yet progress on equal pay has stalled. Meanwhile, pregnant women and mothers are still treated like an inconvenience. The data is out there, but what’s the consequence for companies that do nothing? A bit of bad PR, if anyone even notices.

Speaking up is still a privilege. The sheer number of women who messaged me privately, asking me to say what they couldn’t, is as unsurprising as it is despressing. Calling out injustice still comes with career risks, and companies count on that silence.

And yet, public scrutiny works. No responses (yet), but to the PR teams lurking on my LinkedIn profile: hi, I see you. Maybe they’re scrambling for a response. Maybe they’re hoping this blows over. Either way, they’ve been reminded that people are paying attention.

What next?

I don’t expect a day of dunking on LinkedIn posts to fix corporate sexism. But dragging the gap between rhetoric and reality into the light? That matters. If more of us did this—if we asked real questions instead of just liking glossy IWD posts—maybe, just maybe, things would start to shift.

For now, I’ll keep watching. I’ll keep asking awkward questions. And if you see a company banging on about how much they support women while quietly making their lives harder, maybe you should too.

Because women don’t need more inspirational quotes. We need accountability.

This is the sweater I had made when a company, fresh from raising $100m in their Series B, asked me to do a bunch of work in exchange for a €30 AMAZON VOUCHER. I got this custom-made by the wonderful Lisa Macario and sent them this photo by way of response. It’s now my default reply to such requests.

<normal weeknote service resumes>

This week at work

Spent two days at HR Tech Europe, covering everything from recruitment to onboarding, engagement, and employee experience. And by the end of it, one thing was clear: AI is transforming HR—but employee experience is still an afterthought.

AI could automate admin, improve decision-making, even redesign work itself. But too many vendors are busy selling AI to HR teams, not designing it for employees.

One session ran a live poll on AI in HR. Not a single mention of employee experience. For the second year running, vendors proudly boasted about time spent in their apps—as if forcing people to spend more time in HR software is something to celebrate.

Unless you work in HR, you should be spending as little time as possible in HR systems. The best tech automates, integrates, and disappears into the background so people can get on with the work they actually signed up for.

Another big theme? Tech overload. One company revealed they have 120 SaaS tools for 135 people. That’s not streamlining, that’s madness. Instead of reducing complexity, too many organisations are piling on more tools, more silos, more duplicated effort.

It’s not just about cutting tools—it’s about better design. As we tell clients: There’s no ROI in launch—only in sustained adoption and use. Good design, proper integration, and automation mean higher adoption, lower training costs, and a better experience for employees.

The big takeaway? HR tech should work for people, not against them. If we don’t prioritise employee experience, we’re not making work better—we’re just making it more complicated.

Also this week

It’s absolutely glorious in Amsterdam, like we’ve moved straight from winter to summer. The giant puffa jacket has given way to a cardigan. Along with half the city I had my first beers-on-terrace outing of the year. People are out on their boats and sitting by the canals. When the sun’s out this really is the best place in the world.

Saw Kyla Cobbler’s show at Boom Chicago this week. Sharp, fast, filthy and chaotic in the best way. A mix of razor-sharp storytelling and unfiltered crowd work, delivered with full Irish energy that keeps you on edge. Some bits landed harder than others, but when it hit, it really hit and my girlfriends and I laughed till we hurt. A wild, unpredictable ride.

Less of a hit was Biig Piig last night at the Melkweg. A few of us went, mostly just as something to do for my pal’s birthday. Felt a bit too try-hard, perhaps because our group were responsible for bringing the average age of the crowd up by at least a decade. One of those gigs where you realise you’re just not the target audience, and that’s fine.

Consuming

👩🏻‍💻 Internetting
What’s in my browser this week

  • With two holidays under my belt already this year, and three more booked, you can definitely file this one under “well you would say that, wouldn’t you?” but I enjoyed this piece on why travel makes you a better person.

    Travel isn’t just fun—it can rewire your brain. Immersive experiences boost empathy, challenge assumptions, increase self-awareness, and spark creativity. Travel builds trust, fosters open-mindedness, and keeps you grounded by pushing you beyond your comfort zone. Travel has certainly made ME a. better person, and I’m thankful for that.
  • A timely piece in the Economist on the persistence of the gender pay gap. Sunlight has not, in fact, turned out to be the best disinfectant.

📺 Watching

Nothing of note this week.

📚 Reading

One of the exhibitors at the HR Tech conference had the bright idea of giving out free books if you pose with it for a selfie. So I’ve finally started reading Brene Brown, about a decade after everyone’s raved about her at me.

🎧 Listening

I’m two episodes in to Broken Veil. Unsettling.

Travel

🇬🇧 I’m heading to London this week. I have a little spare time so shout if you want to catch up.

Connections

I had a virtual coffee with Stephanie Barnes this week. We talked about moving countries, the overlaps between KM and digital workplace, and using creativity in workshops to prompt people to think differently.

HR Tech Europe also gave me a chance to catch up with Anne-Marie Blake again, and meet her co-founder Howard Krais for the first time.

With Anne-Marie Blake and Howard Krais at HR Tech Europe this week

Coverage

I spoke to Nexer’s Cat Cutmore about what 300 Seconds is and how the idea came about.

My one-woman IWD campaign was picked up by West Country Voices.

This week in pics

One of several banging Amsterdam spring sunsets
With my pals after the comedy
At the spin studio
Fair comment
Sunset at Westerpark
Local gelateria has opened for the season. The weather got the memo too.
Biig Piig at Melkweg
Drinking my coffee sitting on the edge of the canal like it’s summer already
This town 🥰