Inspiration comes from unexpected places. This week I read Jay Rayner’s final column for Observer Food Monthly—every word was bang on the money. Food should be served on plates and not in shoes or tiny wheelbarrows, concept menus are an abomination.

It made me think: what if I wrote my own set of Hot Takes on two decades in comms? And so I did. And had fun writing it.

Most intranets are bad. Not because the tech is bad—though it often is—but because there’s no strategy. An intranet without a strategy is just a dumping ground with a search box. And no, AI won’t fix it.

Read the full rant here.

Clearly, this hit a nerve—it’s one of the most liked and commented-on things I’ve shared in ages. It’s funny how stuff I knock out in a couple of minutes is a hit while content I take ages crafting and designing barely makes a dent. I guess you can overthink these things.

Meanwhile, LinkedIn is pushing everyone to do video now, but somehow I can’t quite bring myself to do it, even for this. I’m a written word person… do I really have to?

This week at work

• Helping one of our clients to hire a product manager to lead their intranet programme. I cannot emphasise enough the importance of having one person who owns, cares about and champions the intranet to stakeholders. Behind every successful intranet is one tenacious, passionate person at the helm. Someone who makes the case, works with teams to help them build out their content, sells the benefits and makes sure these benefits are realised. This is a critical hire for the future of the programme, and it’s refreshing to work with an organisation who recognise this, and keen to find the right person and give them the autonomy and authority to make it a success.
• Worked with a client on preparing an awards submission. They’re incredibly proud of what we jointly delivered — and so are we, so we’d like to share it with the industry.
• Kicked off prep for this year’s 300 Seconds x Camp Digital, where I curate a section on the main stage agenda to showcase new speakers and perspectives, and in doing so help to build a more diverse pipeline of industry speakers. Prepped guidelines and caught up with the organisers. I’m really looking forward to it.
• Had a bunch of social posts Do Numbers, which prompted me to take a look at a writing project I’d put on the back burner.
• Started work on a keynote I’m doing in the US in the spring. The earlier I start prepping, the more confident I am on the day. So I’m getting on to this one early before I get too busy.

Also this week

Saw The Libertines at the Paradiso, and it was an absolute joy. Even the pre-gig DJ set was pure 2004 indie disco singalong classics, setting the tone nicely. The band were as good as I’ve ever seen them—less early-00s Brixton chaos, more tight and energetic. Great crowd, perfect setlist, and pure nostalgia.

Finally made it to the Joan Miró sculpture exhibition at Beelden aan Zee before it closes. The windswept Dutch coast in February isn’t quite the sunny Barcelona rooftop where I first saw his work, but the collection was as playful as ever. Well worth it.

My next PowerPints appearance is locked in for 9 March, so I’ve started on new material. If you’re in Amsterdam, come cheer me on—or heckle.

International Women’s Day is coming up this week, and so too is the annual round of corporate hypocrisy.

Every year, we see companies posting about IWD, celebrating women in the workplace while doing little to advance gender equality in practice. They talk about empowerment but pay women less. They post about inclusion while sidelining working mothers. They share glossy graphics but resist flexible working that enables working mums to thrive at work.

Having taken last year off, and with orgs rapidly rolling back their meagre DEI efforts and Twitter dying its arse, I’m getting back on the case this year calling out firms which say one thing about equality on LinkedIn but do another in practice.

If your employer is one of them, I want to hear from you. I know that calling out your own company is career-limiting. But I don’t have a career to limit—so this year, once again, I’m offering Asking Awkward Questions As A Service.

I’ve cleared my diary to do some serious shitposting. I’ve already started compiling a database of the worst offenders.

📩 DM me or fill in my anonymous form to tell me about the gap between your employer’s words and actions. I’ll do the calling out so you don’t have to.

Consuming

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

I liked these tips from Giles Turnbull on working in the open. It’s always a tricky balance. I share what I’m doing partly because writing helps me untangle thorny questions and articulate issues. But most of our work is with private sector clients, where commercial and reputational concerns mean I can’t share much detail.

Turnbull suggests embracing “bad first drafts.” These weeknotes are where I do that. I share what I can, but worry it’s too vague, leaving people unclear on what we actually do.

Still working out the balance between confidentiality and openness. I’d love to hear from others in the private sector trying to work out loud.

📺 Watching
On my telly

Two-year-old documentary The Search For Instagram’s Worst Con Artist was on my Netflix homepage this week, and sucked me in immediately. It’s a two-part series on a wellness influencer who claimed to have cured her cancer through healthy eating alone.  I missed the entire story at the time, but the sheer scale of it – and the absence of any due diligence from parties who should have known better – was quite astonishing.

It’s trending again because a drama on the same case has just come out. Which I am going to watch next, obviously.

📚 Reading
Books I’ve (tried to) read

Nothing much this week.

🎧 Listening
In my earholes

Not content with giving us the likes of the IT Crowd, Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace, The Mighty Boosh and What We Do in the Shadows, Matt Berry is also a brilliant musician. I’ve had a couple of his albums (Phantom Birds and Heard Noises) on repeat this week.

🧳 Travel

Nothing coming up immediately but I’ve got a fair bit booked now for the months ahead. Let’s meet up in:

• Copenhagen (8-11 April)
• Chicago (27 April-1 May)
• Toronto (1-5 May)
• Glasgow (8-15 May)
• Milan (18-20 June)

Inevitably I’ll also be in London a few times.

Connections

I caught up with Nebius‘ Peter Morley for chat about AI, scaling at speed, the value of a good editor and why no podcast should be over an hour long.

Coverage

I wrote this piece for Reworked about the state of enterprise social networks—why the grand vision of open, company-wide conversation never quite materialised and why social collaboration hasn’t disappeared, just fragmented.

ESNs have largely shifted from collaboration spaces to corporate broadcast channels, while employees now default to Teams, Slack, and smaller, purpose-driven communities. The challenge isn’t the tech; it’s organisational culture. If ESNs aren’t driving meaningful engagement, maybe it’s time to rethink their role.

Buenos días, dear readers

There was no week 6, and week 7 is late, because I’ve been (mostly) offline. And it was absolutely bloody marvellous, so I’m not apologising.

I’m writing this 33,000 feet over the Caribbean Sea, heading home after an incredible trip to Colombia. This country was a glaring omission from my earlier South American adventures—frankly embarrassing, given how much time I’ve spent on this continent. So it seemed like the perfect place to hit my 80-countries-visited milestone.

I travelled with Flash Pack—again. They specialise in high-end, high-energy group trips for solo travellers. Which, in reality, mostly means women. Because, let’s be honest, most men would rather miss out on a brilliant experience than admit they’re nervous about going somewhere alone.

This was my fourth trip with them (last one: 2024/week 42), and as usual, it was a high-octane sprint through three destinations and three weeks’ worth of activity in nine days. Equal parts thrilling and exhausting, designed for people who are determined to live the absolute shit out of life. My people.

Highlights included:

• Getting a crash course in Bogotá’s past and present via its banging street art scene
• Trying my hand at Tejo, a bar game that involves throwing a metal ball at some gunpowder, and despite a heroically shite performance and a police raid, surviving with both hands intact
• Conquering El Peñón de Guatapé. Less a hike, more an extended queue at altitude. Not quite “27 hours to shuffle past the Queen’s coffin” queuing, but a strong contender for the Queue Hall of Fame. The view from the top was worth it, mind.
• Visiting Medellín’s Comuna 13. Once a violent slum, now a riot of colour, music, and ice-cold micheladas
• A 17-course tasting menu at El Cielo, including a course where I licked chocolate off my own hands like a feral child, and an onion ice cream that was far tastier than it had any right to be
• Taking a salsa lesson, then, fuelled by rum, putting my newfound skills to use dancing with a man in a giant inflatable mouse costume
• Sailing to an island in the Caribbean, jumping into the sea, and ordering a ludicrous piña colada in a hollowed-out pineapple from a bloke in a kayak

Another perk of a trip like this? Someone else sorts out all the logistics. You just show up and enjoy. If something goes sideways, there’s a Pack Leader. In this case, a man called Oscar—part guide, part miracle worker, with the patience of a monastery full of monks and the problem-solving skills of a seasoned diplomat—who took it all in his stride. For control freaks people like me, the real luxury isn’t the boutique hotels or the fancy dinners. It’s the rare, beautiful feeling of letting someone else take the reins without worrying you’re missing out.

Colombia in slightly more photos than anyone’s really interested in:

More so than usual, this trip made me reflect. It’s impossible not to compare it to my first time in South America, 23 years ago. A time before smartphones, Google Translate, or even the vaguest semblance of common sense.

For reasons that presumably made sense at the time, I—a person who had travelled solo exactly once—decided to move to Bolivia on a whim.

The trip started badly. A two-night layover in Miami led to a wild night out with some nurses from New Jersey, the reckless expenditure of a month’s worth of spending money, and nearly missing my flight because I slept through check-out.

I arrived in Bolivia with zero Spanish. I’d bought a Lonely Planet phrasebook and skim-read six pages of it on the plane. By the time I landed, I could say “hello” and count to eight. And that was it.

A couple of days in, I sat on my bed in the random houseshare I’d moved into and thought: what the actual fuck have I done? Then I cried my eyes out. But I survived.

More than that: it changed me. When you’re thousands of miles from home with no one to rely on, you grow up fast. I learned the language (well, enough of it). I found a confidence – and a maturity –  I never knew I had. Getting on that plane was the kick up the arse I didn’t realise I needed.

Since then, I’ve been back to South America plenty of times, usually with my (now) husband. But this was my first time doing it solo since that first trip. And in the intervening years I’ve moved country three times, learned two languages, visited 66 more countries, started a successful business, and built a life I never thought possible back then.

I wish I could tell 2002 Sharon how it all turned out. But honestly, she’d never believe me.

Consuming

👩🏻‍💻 Internetting
Bits of digital lint caught in my browser’s belly-button

• Research by McKinsey finds that for all the bloviating over RTO mandates, the office experience still mostly sucks for a lot of people. In a tight job market, talent has to suck it up. But as soon as the pendulum swings, as it inevitably will, your best employees will jump ship for places that offer a better employee experience and quality of life. Forbes have a summary of the research here.

📺 Watching
What’s on my telly
I watched Lee on the plane out here. A sharp-elbowed biopic of the model-turned-war photographer Elizabeth “Lee” Miller, who smashed through the glass ceiling with a camera in one hand and a cigarette in the other. Kate Winslet embodies her with grit and fury, trudging through the horrors of WWII while men in uniform try (and fail) to sideline her. A story of talent, trauma, and telling the patriarchy to get stuffed. Perfect material for the journey out to meet a troop of boss women, on reflection.

📚 Reading

Downloaded five books to my Kindle to read on this trip. Managed 0.4 books, or 41% of Killing Pablo: The true story behind the hit series ‘Narcos’ (a hit series I’ve never watched, but never mind).

Tl;dr: El Patrón was a bit of a shit.

🎧 Listening

A heady mix of salsa, raggaeton and Chappell Roan. Eclectic is my middle name*.

* it isn’t. It’s Margaret.

🧳 Travelling

Nothing coming up for a few weeks. Yay.

Coverage

I was interviewed for this piece in Reworked on why organisations have invested in collaboration tools but aren’t seeing the benefits.

Too often, employees default to email and chat instead of using shared channels—leading to confusion, lost information, and burnout. Many of these habits were cemented when organisations rushed to roll out Microsoft 365 and other tools during the pandemic, without the time or training to support real behavioural change.

The key takeaways:

• Create a team charter: Set shared expectations for when to use email, chat, and channels
• Equip managers: If leaders don’t use channels properly, their teams won’t either
• Customise notifications: A little time spent tweaking settings can reduce noise and improve focus

We’re supposed to be having a slow patch. Inevitably, it’s not working out that way. I know this is a me problem; I’m terrible at not being busy.

We skipped back to London for a meeting with a team we’ve been working with closely for a year. It’s kind of mad that we’ve worked closely, pretty much daily, and delivered some seriously good work, and we’ve only met once. Jon hadn’t met them face to face at all before. It was over too quickly and I’m annoyed I didn’t get time to chat to everyone properly.

Ours is a relationship business. And I think we’re pretty good at that; our clients frequently hire us multiple times, and recommend us to others. I was delighted to get a lovely email this week from a client who said we were the best external team she’d ever worked with.

But relationships end. And they should. I joke that as an external consultant your only real metric is that people still hire you. But while that’s true on a macro level, on a project and client one your real goal is to make yourself redundant. We’re there to help teams build the capability to do this stuff themselves. We help build teams work out what they need, to put processes and teams in place, to develop strategy and to make decisions. But that should all be structured so that in the medium and certainly longer term that happens without us.

We’re really proud that we worked intensively with one team over the last four months to deliver an intranet. A whole intranet, end to end, config and content. Not bad going eh? I’m equally proud that they’d like our support in the future – but on a much more limited basis of just a few days a month. That’s exactly how it should be. Consultancy should build strength, not dependency.

(But yeah this is why I don’t work in sales)

Consuming

👩🏻‍💻 Internetting
Bits of digital lint from my browser’s belly-button

• I got around to reading this year’s Edelman Trust Barometer. Late enough that everyone had already written much better summaries than I could possibly do. But one finding paints a stark picture that I thought relevant in my line of work: trust is eroding across the board. But there’s nuance.
  • 👩🏻‍🦳 Trust in Leaders: Employees still trust their CEOs more than government or media—but this trust is conditional. Leaders earn it by being transparent, addressing societal challenges, and prioritising people over profits. Trust grows when actions and values align, especially in tough times
  • 👨‍🏭 Trust in Employees: Ordinary employees remain trusted ambassadors. Their authenticity makes them credible voices, both internally and externally. Amplifying their stories builds trust and strengthens organisational culture
  • 💡 The Role of Internal Comms: Internal communicators are key to bridging the gap between leadership and employees. This means:
    • Helping leaders articulate and live their values
    • Highlighting and amplifying employee voices to build authenticity
    • Fostering genuine two-way communication in a world drowning in (often shitty/badly written/badly targeted) messaging
  • When trust flows across all levels, employees become the organisation’s strongest advocates—credibility that’s more valuable than ever.

🎬 Watching

I watched The Substance, a thought-provoking and occasionally gross film that left a lasting impression. And not just because I hadn’t clocked it was a horror until I started watching.

It tackles the challenges of aging with raw honesty, which struck a personal chord for me, a middle aged and increasingly haggard woman.

The film’s portrayal of vulnerability and resilience felt painfully intimate at times, mirroring my own reflections on growing older and frequently not liking what I see in the mirror. Its muted cinematography, haunting soundtrack, subtle performances and visual horror left me reflecting long after I was planning to be asleep that night.

It’s not an easy watch. On balance I’d recommend. But go with a friend.

🎧 Listening

• After the US election I couldn’t face the news. Two months on I still can’t. I asked people on BlueSky for suggestions of podcasts I can listen to that allow me to not engage at all with news or current affairs – and they came up trumps (I probably need to retire that phrase for the next four years).
• Off the back of that I’ve started listening to A History Of Rock Music In 500 Songs. Which should keep me in non-news content for a solid year.
• I also caught Lydia Lunch in Utrecht playing an interpretation of post-punk band Suicide. It was… a thing. A thing I’m not going to do again.

🧳 Travelling

I cancelled plans to travel this week and already feel better for it. But I made plans for a real adventure next month. Can’t wait.

Connections

I met with the team from LumApps in Paris at the start of the week, to talk about intranet and digital workplace geekery, and discuss a potential collaboration (more on that soon!)

On Thursday I had a super early coffee with Swoop Analytics‘ Cai Kjaer and Nicolle Scott. Despite the 7.30am meeting time – for which I only have myself to blame, since it was my idea – we were all bursting with energy and ideas. Walked away with a new idea to follow up on. Love that.

Coverage

A rant about HRT vs those tiny bags you can take though airport security prompted me to write a blog post that, if I’m honest, I’ve mentally had written for a decade on the gender politics of hand luggage.

Differing expectations for professional dress based on gender and age mean it’s not easy for women to go hand luggage only – and dudes who brag about travelling for months with a single backpack need to have a bit more empathy.

This week’s weeknote comes to you from my grandmother’s home city, Paris. She died a couple of years ago and I miss her terribly.

Her fellow Parisian Guy de Maupassant wrote

“Our memory is a more perfect world than the universe: it gives back life to those who no longer exist.”

I can’t really explain it but being here makes me feel connected to her again. Just hearing French spoken around me reminds me of her voice and her laugh and all the things that made her special. It’s oddly nice, to walk around and be reminded of conversations we had and places that she talked about.

Taste has a remarkable way of evoking emotions, too. I had old school classics Boeuf Bourgignon and Tarte Tatin at St Germain neighbourhood fave Chez Fernand Christine last night, and suddenly I could taste the memory.

Food was Nan’s love language. When she moved to the UK in the 50s she bought with her a notebook of hand-written family recipes for traditional French favourites. To Mum’s schoolmates – raised on the standard 1960s diet of overcooked meat and veg – an invite to tea after school at Chez Marguerite became legendary.

I should try and make some of this at home,

This week at work

Jon and I met up in London on Monday for some in-depth planning. In Q4 we were deep in the weeds on client work and didn’t have a moment to zoom out and look at the bigger picture (or even really to lay the groundwork on anything beyond the short term). Too busy IN the business to work ON the business.

We have a short breather before things go bonkers again, so we made sure to take some time to look at the bigger picture.

Communication history was made at the old BBC Television Centre, so it was fitting that it was where we met up.

I’d love to say this was on-brand planning, but if I’m honest it’s because it’s close to both tube and cheap parking.

Nonetheless, the setting was a perfect background for our day: reflecting on the stories of the past year and envisioning the future we want to build.

We celebrated successes, learned from the challenges, and scribbled plans for what’s ahead.

We’ve got one project ongoing and another about to start. So we’re using the few weeks while that ramps up to do some industry research we’ve been talking about for ages.

Once we made a plan, we were all go. Within days we had a solid proposition and a plan. I’m kind of excited to see how this goes now.

Also this week

I made it back to weight training. It took three days for my legs to stop hurting.

Ann and I met up in Paris to eat our body weight in patisserie and put the world to rights. Successful trip on both counts.

Paris has got a lot nicer – cleaner, quieter, noticeably less car-centric – since I was here last.

A highlight was visiting the newly-reopened Notre Dame. I was awestruck by the sheer scale, and the speed and quality of the restoration. It’s almost odd how no traces of the devastating fire are left. The near-thousand-year-old church feels… new. An extraordinary job. Imagine the craftsmanship that went in to making this happen. Breathtaking.

Consuming

👩🏻‍💻 Internetting
Bits of digital lint from my browser’s belly-button

• The UK Government’s AI opportunities action plan. I admire the ambition – positioning the nation as a global leader in artificial intelligence, and the proposed investment (£14bn) is substantial enough to take seriously. But I’d like to see the government be bolder on policy to enable a transition to a future of work in which humans are augmented by computing power. That means investing in skills, but also supporting people and businesses through a period of rapid change.
• I had a quick scan-read of the WEF global risk report. A must-read for me every year. Will give it a much more thorough read this week and share thoughts.

📖  Reading
Books I’ve read (or tried to)

• Started Tony Blair’s On Leadership

📺 Watching

• I did not expect to enjoy a Robbie Williams musical auto-biopic in which he is anthropomorphised as a chimpanzee anywhere near as much as I did. I laughed out loud. I cried. I managed not to sing along.Surprisingly emotional – and watchable. Recommend.

🎧 Listening

• Quite enjoyed The Rest Is Classified, on the North Korean intelligence agencies’ cyber heist. And not just because I learned they’re known in the intelligence community as NORKS

🧳 Travelling

This week I’m heading to London again, briefly.

Connections

Met the first of this year’s 100 People: Laura Morgan from University of the Arts London.

Coverage

All employees really want from their digital platforms is timely, relevant information and easy access to the tools and answers they need, when they need them.

The dream of a personalised workplace that automates rote tasks and delivers information and assistance where and when you want it is – in theory anyway – in reach through the application of AI in the digital workplace.

In my latest for Reworked I explain how much potential AI has to deliver that vision. But also that we need to be realistic — we’ve got our work cut out to reach digital workplace nirvana. Getting there starts with user research, so we’re solving real problems rather than making new ones.

It’s a fortnight into the year and I’ve only just got around to weeknoting.

I’ve not really been busy. Rather, I’ve deliberately been busy not being busy. I didn’t write my ins and outs for 2025, make any look-ahead predictions, become a marketing ninja, level up my AI skills, write my social media plan, choose a word for the year, or any of that jazz.

Instead, I leaned in hard to the whole being-on-holiday thing. And it was great. I spent three and a half weeks pootling about East Africa, and it was brilliant in every way.

After a couple of years running Lithos Partners I realised that absolutely nothing happens between mid December and mid January. So the best thing I can do is take a proper break (and after a very full-on 2024 I needed one too!)

After my primate-based antics in Weeknote 52, I headed to Tanzania where I hiked (just the bottom bit of) Kilimanjaro and saw in the new year with fireworks and a dance around a swimming pool. Then flew over to dreamy Zanzibar for some chill time, before heading to Kenya, where final few safari drives gave me the opportunity to level up my pointing-at-things skills.

(If my accountant is reading this, does this count as tax-allowable professional development for a PowerPoint jockey? 😉)

A quick look back at 2024

In quant:

10 projects
7 clients
6 conferences spoken at
2 podcasts featured on
22 gigs (but only one of them was the Eras Tour)
26 books (all but one non-fiction)
52 coffees with the 100 people I hoped to catch up with this year
0 umbrellas lost
1.5kg weight gained
49 flights
28 hotels
17 countries visited (11 of them new, taking me to 78 total)
46 weeknotes

In one second every day:

Some stuff I did the last couple of weeks

I’ve been easing myself back into work slowly.

• Delivered a training session for editors on an intranet our client launched just before Christmas
• Had a super positive meeting with another client about the plan we submitted for delivery of their new intranet in 2025. Pleased they’re happy with both the proposed direction and the rigour and clarity of the associated plan. The timeline is ambitious, but we’ve done everything we can to strip out unnecessary complexity
• Started working on a new initiative for our DWXS benchmarking tool

Consuming

👩🏻‍💻 Internetting
Bits of digital lint from my browser’s belly-button

• The World Economic Forum’s 2025 Future Of Jobs report. This bi-annual report is an essential read for anyone interested in the future of work, and more broadly in digital transformation. The predictions about the increasingly short shelf-life of the average skillset are particularly alarming.

📖  Reading
Books I’ve read (or tried to)

• Character Limit, the book about Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter. A compelling read that confirms everything I thought I knew about Elon. Tl;dr he is an awful person who fires everyone who disagrees with him, such that now he has no one left in his orbit to have a word while he has a very public breakdown, taking western democracy down with him
• Rwanda Inc. by Patricia Crisafulli and Andrea Redmond. I like to get the background on places I visit, and a quick Google recommended  this examination of Rwanda’s post-genocide economic transformation under Paul Kagame’s leadership, focusing on its business-friendly policies, innovation, and ambitious development goals. While it champions Rwanda as a model of progress and stability, the book’s optimistic tone (written from the perspective of 2012) felt rose-tinted (naïve, even) in 2024, given growing concerns about political repression and inequality
• The Teeth May Smile But The Heart Does Not Forget: Murder and memory in Uganda. A second read for the second stop on my tour, on the legacy of violence in Uganda through the investigation of Eliphaz Laki’s murder during Idi Amin’s rule. This gripping blend of true crime and history offers a deeply human perspective on justice, memory, and resilience, making it a compelling read for those interested in the intersection of personal stories and political turmoil. It certainly helped me make sense of the place as I was travelling around.
• Rather than attempt two further books for Tanzania and Kenya I went for An African History of Africa by BBC correspondent Zeinab Badawi. This delves into the continent’s rich and diverse past, drawing on oral traditions, archaeology, and historical records. An engaging and accessible intro to Africa’s profound cultural, social, and political history. Great background read for someone who – like me – hasn’t paid nearly enough attention to the continent in the past

📺 Watching

• Binge-watching the latest series of Queer Eye. Jeremiah is a wonderful new addition to the Fab 5 and I’ve found myself welling up every time he does. Which is a lot.

🎧 Listening

• The news is all too depressing and angering so I’ve unsubscribed from most of my diet of news and politics podcasts and am just listening to music and, when I need spoken word, history
• It was an eclectic music week, starting with Burna Boy and Afrobeats and moving on to indie Bristollians Getdown Services

🧳 Travelling

This week I’m heading to London (work) then Paris (meeting Ann for art, history and gluttony).

In Weeknote 16, I mused that I hoped my first visit to Africa wouldn’t be my last. Little did I know it would take me a mere eight months to prove myself right.

After April’s adventure, I found myself with a travel itch to scratch. So, I did the sensible thing: finished my last work tasks for the year, caught a gig, and darted off to the airport.

The first stop was Kigali, Rwanda—a city that, while not exactly stuffed with sights, compensates admirably with charm. It’s possibly the safest city in Africa, and certainly its cleanest. Imagine Singapore levels of compulsive tidiness, and you’re halfway there. It was the perfect place to shake off the work-year cobwebs and ease into holiday mode. We zipped about on mopeds, visiting the quieter markets and sombre historical sites, including the scene where Belgian peacekeepers tragically lost their lives in the early days of the 1994 genocide.

Speaking of which, we also visited the Rwanda Genocide Memorial. Grim doesn’t quite cover it. A quarter of a million people lie in three mass graves on the site, making it an experience both sobering and difficult to put into words.

From Kigali we moved on to Volcanoes National Park to hit the safari trail. First up: hiking Mount Sabinyayo to find a troop of Golden Monkeys. Quirky little creatures, scuttling through the trees munching on twigs.

Next, the Dian Fossey Centre, a must-visit for anyone remotely interested in gorilla conservation. Think of it as the prelude to the main event: seeing mountain gorillas in the wild.

For this, we crossed into Uganda’s Mgahinga National Park. After a strenuous hike (read: I questioned my life choices more than once), we met up with the trackers. They’d already located the gorilla group and were busy hacking through the undergrowth with machetes. Just as we were expecting another guide to appear, a colossal silverback emerged instead.

There he was, a metre away, calmly munching leaves like an oversized Zen master. And then—because why not—he got up and casually strolled past us, brushing against my leg as if to say, “Yes, you may bask in my magnificence.” In total, we saw three silverbacks, a juvenile male, a female, and a baby. It was beyond anything we’d hoped for.

Here’s the best minute of phone video I’ve ever shot, though it doesn’t quite capture the “pinch me” magic of the moment.

From there, we ventured to Queen Elizabeth National Park. Highlights included lions and leopards napping in trees (as one does), chimpanzees cavorting in Kyambura Gorge, hippos luxuriating in a watering hole, and elephants frolicking on the banks of the Kazinga Channel. It was like living inside a wildlife documentary, only with worse hair and more mosquito bites.

Next, Lake Mburo, where we mixed game drives with a walking safari. There’s something both humbling and slightly absurd about strolling among giraffes and zebras as if you’re just out for a yomp across the Sussex Downs.

Finally, we wrapped up in Entebbe. A jaunt to Kampala included scaling the Gaddafi Mosque’s minaret for a sweeping view of the city’s seven hills and a chilling visit to Idi Amin’s torture chambers.

And this morning we took a boat trip to Ngamba Island. There, we fed rescued chimps and watched a baby chimp gleefully somersault down a hill. Truly, the Olympic gymnastics team has nothing on this little guy.

I’d love to tell you there’s a profound lesson here about digital transformation, but I’m afraid there isn’t. Just a reminder that sometimes, the best thing you can do is step away, embrace the unexpected, and marvel at the sheer wonder of it all.

Happy New Year, folks.

This week saw the culmination of months of hard work as we launched a new intranet for a client. It’s always satisfying to see a project move from concept to delivery, and this one was no exception.

Our first meet with the client was in February, and it took another five months of to-and-fro before we had a final agreement on the work ahead.

But while it was slow to get started (and intranet projects usually are), it’s been a whirlwind ever since. In a little over three months we’ve planned and configured the site, integrated tens of apps, developed and tested the IA and worked with the team to design and establish governance and workflows.

On the content side, we’ve developed the content strategy and put it into practice, pulling together an ace team of content designers, working with stakeholders to create hundreds of pages of accessible, clear content – in two languages! We smashed it: over 400 pages, sites, applications and communities in smidge over three months.

And alongside that we’ve helped the organisation get ready for launch, designing and delivering training for communicators and content owners, so the site doesn’t just look good on  day 1, but will be just as good on day 365.

We began as three organisations – Lithos, the client and an IIAB vendor – but quickly we were working and delivering together as one team. We’re delighted that the newly-launched intranet has had positive feedback already, including from the CEO.

A successful launch is a splendid note to end the year on. But as we always say to clients, there’s no value in launch – the value is in adoption and use, with the platform positively impacting colleagues for years to come. The team have ambitious plans to grow and iterate their intranet; this launch is just the start of that journey.

I also delivered a webinar on hybrid work for Modo Labs, looking at trends in hybrid work for 2025. I think it’ll be available on demand – so NO SPOILERS, save to say the future of work is really a reflection of the future of the wider world, of changes in society, tech, the environment, and so on. So in this session I drilled down from the broad trends impacting the globe in the year ahead, to how these might manifest in the workplace, and finally what this means for hybrid work.

Remote work and return-to-office is once again a big debate – thanks in no small part to people desperate to make it part of their tedious culture war – but I always enjoy the opportunity to reflect and share insights. Prepping an hour’s material is a massive task though. Or at least it is for me, because I like to create fresh material when I’m commissioned to do something like this. I’m not one for phoning it in with a rinse-and-repeat presentation.

Overall I think it went pretty well. Timings were on point and feedback on LinkedIn etc was good. I’ve got a huge amount of material from my research, planning and thinking, so I’m going to think how I can put it to use with a few blog posts or articles.

With that, I’m winding down for the year.  There are a few loose ends to tie up, but I’m looking forward to a proper break and a chance to recharge before 2025’s challenges come into view.

Some non-work things

On Monday my pal Lauren and I went to an event called Knits and Tits, a crafting-meets-intersectional feminism event at the Paradiso that aims to “challenge traditional perceptions of knitting, showcasing it as a vibrant and empowering form of creative expression that embraces womanhood and intimacy in a bold and unapologetic manner”.

As someone who has been knitting for – checks notes – a month, it was fascinating to see the crafting subcultures of Amsterdam close up. Women of all ages come together for an evening of chilling, chatting and watching a band, while doing crafts. There was a talk from Marieke Voorsluijs on how knitted representations of anything make them friendlier and more approachable. Knit or crochet a packet of cigarettes or a knife and it’s immediately fun. And so she began knitting vulvas in all their variety of shapes and sizes. There’s even a web series on crafting vaginas.

It was a lovely vibe. I should go to more leftfield events like that one.

I also saw Conclave at the cinema. A compelling political thriller that delves into the secretive process of electing a new pope (kind of West Wing for lapsed Catholics). Solid performances from Ralph Fiennes, John Lithgow and Isabella Rossalini. I’d give it an 8/10.

Connections

Unily‘s Kaz Hassan was in town for Workday Rising, and we managed to find time for breakfast and intranet geek chat. We talked about the intranet as a critical interface for a hot mess of enterprise apps, the whole intranet/HR vendor space, and whether enterprise social is on its way out.

(On which I have views – will save that for another weeknote).

The agenda for next year’s Camp Digital has been announced. Once again I’ll be working with the team to identify brand new speakers from under-represented groups, and supporting them to plan and deliver short talks in our 300 Seconds session. The aim is to give people an opportunity to try speaking at an event, to build confidence and experience – and in doing so, build a more diverse pipeline of speakers with new and interesting stories the rest of us can learn from. As ever, the rest of the agenda is cracking. Hope to see you there.

Travel

I’m off on HOLIDAY. Did I mention that? I’m going to Africa for three weeks. 🇷🇼🇺🇬🇹🇿 🇰🇪

The next couple of weeknotes, if I get around to doing them at all, are likely to be primate-heavy. 🦍

This week we finished and submitted a business case for an intranet. It’s the culmination of months of work. First looking at their existing content and services, and identifying ways to streamline and simplify them. Then spinning up a proof of concept to test and validate our thinking on site structure, IA and templates. Then once everyone was comfortable with the approach, going away and working out how what suppliers, budget and people will be needed to make it a reality.

For the client, it’s just the start of the journey. They still have to build and launch the thing. But I feel comfortable that they have a realistic, pragmatic plan which allows them to start small, deliver fast and grow from there.

But we can’t underestimate the scale of the task. Like many organisations, this one wants to build their intranet in SharePoint. There are lots of good reasons for that –  alignment with the rest of the stack, integration with other productivity tools, and the promise of AI magic in the future. And often teams are just being pragmatic; it’s easier to get the go-ahead to build an intranet using a platform you already have (SharePoint) than to make the case for anything else.

And you can build great intranets in SharePoint. For example, most years 8 of the top 10 intranets in the NNg Intranet Design Annual are SP.

But in a world where people want fully-formed toys, SharePoint is a box of Lego. And just as with Lego, your ability to deliver is limited by your skills, imagination and budget.

Allow me to stretch this analogy to the point of absurdity.

As it comes, SharePoint is an unlimited box of Lego. In theory you could do anything with this.

But in reality you lack the time, skill and imagination to build much more than this.

And that’s fine. It meets the brief. It shuts the kids up for five minutes.

But it’s not really what you were hoping for. You want something more impressive. You have a few options.

You could buy a Lego Kit. Following the instructions you get this, which looks way more impressive, in just a few hours.

The intranet equivalent of this is an ‘Intranet In A Box’ (IIAB). These are products that work alongside SharePoint and make it work like a regular CMS. Using one of these you can spin up something that looks and works brilliantly, really quickly. We’ve just delivered one end-to-end, including all the content, in three and a half months. It’s still just Lego (SharePoint) but it looks good and is simple to use.

But you’re stuck with the pieces that come in the box. If you want to convert the Main Street Record Store into a bookshop, you’re bang out of luck because the kit only includes the orange and yellow storefront.

IIABs, like Lego kits, come in all shapes and sizes, from simple to complex, and you can choose based on your needs and budget.

If you want something more bespoke, you need to work with the box of Lego. But you need to find some experts to make it look good, and work consistently, or you’ll just have a proliferation of disconnected home-made crappy Lego houses.

You can engage an agency to build a site and templates for you using regular bricks. Think of this as the equivalent of getting someone to custom-design your own kit. You’ll get a box of parts and a set of instructions, so you can spin up Main Street and houses consistently and quickly.

This gets you broadly to where you’d have been if you’d just bought a kit, but this kit will be precisely to your specifications, with a bookshop instead of a garish record store. This will typically take 9-12 months.

If you want to switch the bookshop for a Gail’s Bakery in the future, you can go back to your agency, or hire a developer to change it for you. You’ll also need to hire a bunch of people to manage it all.

The other option is to custom-develop. If you have time, detailed knowledge of all the pieces and possibly a 3D printer (ie a team of in-house developers) you can build anything.

This looks pretty cool, to be fair. And so do all the winning SharePoint intranets in the NNg annual. But you have a remember that they took an average of 23 months to build, with a team of 15 behind them.

If you have the luxury of time and money, then fill your boots.

But typically organisations have neither of those things. And so they need to compromise, somehow, on a solution that is good enough for now and meets most of the needs they have.

Some non-work things I did this week

Like much of the middle-aged internet I have a soft spot for true crime podcasts. And few has sucked me in as much as Kill List, in which tech journalist Carl Miller uncovers a dark web murder-for-hire website listing hundreds of potential victims.

The team have, thankfully, eschewed the fashion for live podcast recordings but they did have a panel talk this week when I happened to be in London, moderated by Jamie Bartlett (the guy behind Missing Cryptoqueen).

Depressingly, but not surprisingly, the intended targets of murder-for-hire websites are mostly victims of intimate partner violence. But while these websites are scams that con people out of crypto for ‘hits’ that will never happen, the threats against people are very real indeed. The intent is there, and these people could well take matters into their own hands. Miller and the show’s producers talked about their frustrations when authorities were slow to act, leaving them in a race against time to warn those in danger.

Dark but fascinating. Do listen to the podcast.

What I’m reading

I’ve started reading A Certain Idea Of France, Julian Jackson’s biography of Charles de Gaulle.

It’s a hefty tome and I’m only part way through but he quotes de Gaulle asking “How can you govern a country with 258 cheeses?”

That line struck a chord immediately, as this week I’ve been putting the finishing touches to an intranet governance model for one of the most complex organisations I’ve ever worked with.

Managing this level of complexity isn’t about reducing variety—it’s about creating the structures and processes that allow diverse inputs, roles, and goals to align effectively. Clear governance doesn’t stifle creativity; it provides the guardrails to harness it.

De Gaulle had a lesson for us all here: Complexity isn’t the enemy. With the right framework, it can be a strength.

Connections

A trip to London gave me a chance to catch up with a whole bunch of people I’ve been meaning to see for ages including

Unfortunately there were just as many people I didn’t have time to meet. See you in 2025.

Coming up

2025 is less than a month away. So this upcoming week I’m doing a webinar for Modolabs on hybrid work trends for 2025. Despite high profile RTO mandates hybrid’s going nowhere. That’s because using people, places and digital work practices creates organisational resilience – and that’s critical to weathering whatever the future of work holds.

So in this session I’ll look at resilience, and at three related trends for the year ahead.

It’s on Thursday. Register here.

Travel

One more week until holiday. HMU with your tips for Kigali and Nairobi.