I spent most of this week in sunny Italy, attending the wedding of a dear friend, and taking a few days out to explore Perugia and Florence.

I adore weddings, especially now they’re comparatively rare among my friends. And this one was special. The bride, my pal Christina, has had a tough few years battling breast cancer. She’s out the other side now and was determined to have a blowout bash to celebrate love and life. And delivered that in spades.

The warm sun casting a golden glow over the Umbrian hills, the scent of fresh flowers in the air, the sounds of a string quartet and laughter filling the stunning rustic villa. It was just perfect.

I started blubbing the moment I saw her. It was a beautiful emotional day. This was not just a wedding; it was a messy and glorious fusion of love, tradition, joy and the enchanting spirit of Italy.

The next day we headed to Florence to do the tourist thing, but found ourselves getting annoyed by tourists (I know, I know) so flipped to exploring the city’s odder sights. Like tracking down Galileo’s preserved middle finger, stored in a glass case in a museum, forever flipping the bird at the establishment that condemned him as a heretic.

Some things I did this week

However, working for myself and not being very good at taking time out I did end up doing some work things.

• More work on how we structure content across both internal and external sites. This finally feels like it’s making sense now.
• Ran a focus group, which is pretty much the final hurdle on an intranet and internal comms discovery we’ve been doing. This gave us the chance to dig a little deeper on some of the issues that our survey and interviews flagged up, and helped to explain some of the trends we were seeing.

Saw Bob Log III play at a lovely outdoor free festival in Florence. Midway through this gig I got an email confirming we’ve won yet another new project and new client. We’ve been talking to them for a while, got the sense they liked our approach, and felt like this was one which would land in the end. And it did. It’s an interesting client and project and we’re really excited to start working with them.

Bob Log invited me to drink prosecco out of an inflatable duck while making toast and throwing it into the audience. This seemed as good a way to celebrate as any.

In fact, I might make Drinking Prosecco Out Of A Duck my standard New Client Win celebration.

Connections

In theory I was having a week off, but as the beautiful bride is a former colleague from my Houses of Parliament days it was a good chance to say hello and catch up on the gossip. We managed to avoid talking shop, fortunately.

What I’m reading

I finished reading the Keir Starmer biography. The second half of the book covers his career. Leaving university, becoming a barrister, defending the pair in the McLibel trial, representing mineworkers who’d been injured at work, and his time at the DPP.

And finally on to his move into politics, the Corbyn years, winning the party leadership and the inside story on the battle to transform the party and get it ready to lead again. Starmer was (is) often accused of being boring. I liked his reply to this – there’s nothing more boring than opposition.

Given the news this week it’s been a timely and reassuring read. I’m so excited for politics to be boring again.

Hotels

It was another two hotel week. The first, in Perugia, had colour-adjustable lighting in the bathroom. Why? What is this for? In the bathroom one needs sufficient bright lighting to shave, pluck and apply make-up. There are no circumstances in which making the lights green, blue or pink enhance the bathroom experience.

Despite this I think I did a reasonable job on wedding make-up and hair.

In a sign that I spend far too much time in hotels, on Friday night I woke up at about 3am, and thought “I can’t remember where the bathroom is here”. I turned on the torch on my phone to find it, and realised I was in my own bed at home.

Theresa May famously once said “if you believe you are a citizen of the world, you are a citizen of nowhere — you don’t understand what citizenship means.”

Maybe I don’t know what citizenship means. Or maybe I just don’t share her definition of citizenship. This week I’ve been in four cities in three countries and felt at home, and felt like a person with rights and responsibilities, in all of them.

I like being a citizen of nowhere – or a citizen of Europe. As I’ve been flitting across the continent I’ve been watching the return of Farage back in the UK and hoping this is the last gasp of a dying band of obsessive, self-defeating Euroscepticism, before sanity prevails again in my (other) home country.

(And, as my Twitter feed makes all too clear, I am very much enjoying not having a politically restricted job this time around).

Some things I did this week

With one client, we’re working to develop more structure for the team and programmes, to help everyone move forward with confidence and clarity on goals, roles and responsibilities. And that, it’s quickly becoming clear, is absolutely essential. Without greater clarity on what, where and who, we’ll have paralysis. We spent a lot of time this week wrangling with the detail of RACI matrices and decision-making processes. And it feels like we’re making huge progress with the programme overall, unblocking barriers to getting things done.

But with another, the search for clarity has only created paralysis. After two weeks trying to pin down deliverables in the context where so little else is clear, it’s actually meant we just can’t start anything. So – in an admirably pragmatic move – the client’s suggested we just sign for a Time and Materials contract and crack on iteratively. Just get the initial work done then see what to tackle next, with confidence we have enough flexibility to roll with it.

Both approaches are right, in their own circumstances. As a supplier I guess we have to learn to work with both. It makes juggling resources on our side a little more complex though.

We also agreed next steps for a content development programme we’ve been involved with for a while. And got further into the weeds on a complex site’s information architecture. Lots more to do on that one, but making good progress.

And spoke to a potential client about a possible project that had gone quiet for so long we assumed it was gone. It isn’t, and looking like it’ll turn into something more concrete in the months ahead.

Spent a couple of days with one of my oldest friends in Berlin. Ate schnitzel. Drank beer. Walked along the remains of the Berlin Wall and talked about how weird it was that it went up in our parents’ lifetimes and came down in our own living memory. 

Watched Green Day in the pouring rain at the Waldbühne, a stunning if chaotic amphitheatre next to the old Berlin Olympic Stadium. It was the 30th anniversary tour for Dookie, which has remained in my top 10 favourite albums for the whole of those three decades. 

The journey back from the venue was a nightmare of cancelled trains, buses too full to stop and no Ubers to be found anywhere, so I saw in my birthday on a packed-beyond-capacity S Bahn, under someone’s armpit, soaked to the skin.

My 44th will not go down as one of my more memorable birthdays. I spent most of it on a train from Berlin to Amsterdam that left an hour late then moved considerably slower than anticipated across Germany. I did at least make it home on time to go out for a rijsttafel dinner with my husband.

More cheerfully, on Wednesday I saw Atarashii Gakko at the Melkweg. J-pop at its finest, with a costume change per track, some impressively tight dance moves and stunning stage graphics.

Ay the end of the week I spent a couple of days in Rotterdam with good friends. Bad weather, mad architecture, spicy margaritas, a spin class and a lot of laughter. It was good for the soul.

Connections

The trip to Berlin gave me an opportunity to catch up with two people who are set to join the Lithos associate network in the coming weeks to support on new projects. Exciting.

What I’m reading

I’m halfway through Tom Baldwin’s biography of our presumed soon-to-be PM Kier Starmer. I’m enjoying it hugely. In part because I’m finally allowing myself to be excited about the prospect of a Labour government (disclaimer: I have been a member of the Labour Party since I was a teenager).

But also it’s been an interesting reflection on class politics. Kier’s dad -was a toolmaker (he may have mentioned this 😉), and he was the first of his family to go to university. My siblings and I were the first in our family to go to university, and I recognise the same internal conflict about clearly being middle class now, but not fully being able to explain when (or even if) you ever stop being what you grew up as.

Hotels

I bookended the week in two different chains which claim to have rethunk the hotel experience – Moxy (Berlin) and Citizen M (Rotterdam). I’ve stayed in several of both many times before.

The good: everything just works. Check-in, bedside power provision, shower pressure, decent hairdryer… they trick all the boxes. Nothing more, nothing less.

The bad: Because the chains are designed to be the same everywhere, down to the finest detail, there’s the disconcerting feeling of waking up and taking a few minutes to remember where I am today. I woke up on Friday and genuinely thought this could be Rotterdam… or anywhere?

The ugly: I do not – ever – want to select lighting to match my mood.

This weeknote comes to you from a train somewhere in the middle of Germany. I’m en route to Berlin for a weekend with one of my besties…

…two hours later than planned, thanks to DB cancelling my train. The German reputation for train efficiency is entirely undeserved, in my experience.

Some things I did this week

We’re working with two different organisations on intranet content migrations right now. In both cases they have a lot of legacy content which will need a significant amount of work to bring up to scratch and move. Every time I do one of these programmes I end up with the feeling it would be less work and deliver a better outcome for users if we just burn it all down and starting again.

But it’s rare that any organisation has the courage to do that (and it’s all too common for these projects to settle for a huge lift-and-shift to avoid the difficult stakeholder discussions, which just moves crap old content wholesale to shiny new platforms, replicating all the same problems they had before they invested in new tools). 

This feels like a problem that’s getting worse rather than better. We’re so used to hosting being practically free that we’ve lost any incentive to throw anything away, digitally. But every out of date, incorrect piece of content you’ve got makes it harder to find the good quality content you actually need.

AI isn’t going to magically solve this, and could end up making it worse by regenerating crap old content into crap new content. We need more active curation and content governance – and again that’s easier when starting afresh.

Started the heavy lifting on information architecture for a programme bringing multiple disconnected websites into one consistent site. It’s oddly satisfying, bringing order to chaos. But I know from experience that stakeholders are often wedded to their existing sites and structures and need to be convinced to change. So doing solid user testing is vital to make the case for a site restructure. So that’s next.

We also started the analysis phase on a discovery with a US client. I always enjoy this bit, looking at how interviews and surveys confirmed some of our initial assumptions, while flagging up new ones. Encouragingly this one flagged a bunch of relatively easy fixes the organisation can implement quickly and cheaply to show some momentum while they work on the bigger and more fundamental issues.

Saw Dogstar (feat Keanu Reeves) at the Melkweg. This meant I wasn’t able to see Beth Gibbons in Utrecht (as they were on at the same time) so I took a quick trip down to Brussels to catch that show the following night. Glad I did; it was a hauntingly beautiful gig (featuring my old mate on the keyboards, and a sneaky backstage drink after). It was a good music week all round.

What I’m reading

Honestly this week I’ve been so glued to the ongoing car crash that is the UK general election that I haven’t opened a book.

My favourite election blogs/Substacks are:

• Comment is Freed’s election briefings
• Newsletter of (Not Quite) Everything
• Striking 13
• Odds and Ends of History
• Democracy Club

Connections

With both Money 2020 and Unleashing Innovation in Internal Comms both taking place in Amsterdam this week, lots of work contacts/friends were floating about the city. That gave me a chance to enjoy a few beers on the (finally) sunny terrassen while ticking six people off my 100 People list in one week.

Then as an added bonus my impromptu trip to Belgium gave me a couple of hours to catch up with Mark Smitham. We reminisced about the glory days of digital gov and how it’s weird to think 12 years on we’ve both emigrated, got a new nationality and learned Dutch. Neither of us saw that coming.

Coverage

Ana Neves has made my recent tongue-in-cheek talk at Social Now available on YouTube.

The hotel review no one asked for

Motel One Brussels. Selected purely on the basis it was closest to Cirque Royal.

• The good: 8/10 bedside power provision. Hangers! The Scandinavian custom of two duvets on one bed. Every time I see this in a hotel I think I should adopt this at home.
• The bad: Those hairdryers which are wired to the wall and make you hold the button down to operate.
• The ugly: Classic migraine-inducing carpet

I don’t know about you, but I’m feeling 22.

Taylor Swift might be feeling 22, but I most certainly am not. It is somehow June, my birthday month, and I’m staring my 44th in the face.

In a misplaced burst of nostalgia I went to a 90s music theme ride at spin today. Halfway through I realised that not only was I the only person there who danced to these tunes at the time, but at least half of the riders weren’t even born. Life comes at you fast, huh?

But hey, everything will be alright if we just keep dancing like we’re 22 22 22 22.

Some things I did this week

Trying to bring order to chaos on a complex programme of work. A big question this week was to take a look at recurring meetings and think how to make that time more productive (whether by making the meetings themselves better, or catching up in different ways and using that time better), and how to make it easier and clearer for decisions to be made and turned into action.

We mobilised the team to kick off a new project for a client next week. Exciting. I think.

Talked to two founders in the HR tech space. There’s a symbiotic relationship between digital workplace/intranet and enterprise transactional tools. Employees are focused on tasks over comms, but they often need content to help them at the same time, and as organisations we need to give people relevant comms to build engagement and alignment. Because of that overlap it’s an area I find myself spending more time looking at, and should probably investigate a little more.

Saw Fat White Family at Tolhuistuin. A vastly under-rated band imho, especially live. They have a raw, unapologetic garage rock/post-punk sound and a zero-fucks-given stage vibe.

The following night me and my mate Ngozi saw Paloma Faith at the Melkweg. The first two thirds of the show were tracks off her new album – which I’ll confess I’ve never listened to – which is about her break up with the father of her children. But between her absolute belter of a voice and hilarious bants about motherhood, her ex and her sex life it was a perfect night out.

On Saturday Cate McLaurin and I went on a public transport adventure across the Netherlands – via train, tram, metro and a pedestrian/bike ferry – to Futureland, a visitors centre and exhibit in a far corner of the Rotterdam port. Along the way we learned more than we ever needed to know about container shipping. The most fun bit was the ferry which took us right alongside the ships. The photos don’t convey how monumentally HUGE these things are and what a technical and logistical feat the port is. All in a super nerdy day out which I can thoroughly recommend.

What I’m reading

I finished Jonn Elledge’s A History Of The World In 47 Borders. This book took me on a wild tour of the planet’s quirkiest and most contentious lines.. With sharp wit and a knack for storytelling, Elledge dives into the messy, often absurd history behind borders, from the infamous to the obscure (I was quietly delighted that he covered Bolivia’s coastline, which still appeared on official maps when I was there 20 years ago, despite them having lost it in a war over a century earlier).

Each chapter is a snappy vignette, blending historical insight with present-day relevance. Elledge’s irreverent tone makes heavy topics surprisingly digestible, whether he’s unpacking colonial legacies or modern-day disputes. The last few chapters felt a bit rushed, but even so I loved this equal-parts-eye-opening-and-entertaining book.

For anyone curious about the arbitrary lines that shape our world (or if, like me, you just have an obsession with maps) Elledge offers a rollocking ride through the world’s most fascinating boundaries.

Connections

Had a dinner at Jansz with the irrepressible Lauren Razavi. A digital nomad for over a decade now, Lauren knows more then most about life on the road.

One of the best things about having worked and travelled all over the place – as we both have – is that there’s almost nowhere in the world we don’t know someone I can catch up with coffee. Over dinner we talked about how it’s hard to keep track of who we know where, especially if the people you know are also pretty mobile.

This feels like something LinkedIn could/should help with. A way to tell it I’ll be in this city on those dates and have it give me suggestions of people I’m connected with who are temporarily or permanently in the same place.

Relatedly: The next few weeks will see me in Berlin, Rotterdam, Florence, and Bristol. So if you’re in any of those and want to catch up, do slide into my DMs. Or if anyone’s in Amsterdam for Money2020 I’m uncharacteristically in town for the entire week.

Coverage

With the tiresome debate about low value degrees rolling around again in the latest desperate Tory policy announcement, I was in the i this week talking about my own ‘Mickey Mouse Degree‘.

Those who dismiss newer subjects often betray a lack of understanding of what these degrees actually entail and the skills they offer employers.

But more than that, reducing any degree to its impact on average salary rates is nonsense.

University helps you learn how to learn – the most valuable of skills in a modern economy, where the half-life of hard skills is shrinking every year.

Degrees of all kinds foster creativity, cultural awareness, and the ability to build a nuanced understanding of issues, which are invaluable in cultivating a well-rounded, informed society. Those qualitative benefits don’t show up in salary statistics but unlock opportunity, personal fulfilment and societal progress. Perhaps that’s what those who lean on tired stereotypes about “Mickey Mouse” degrees have a problem with…

On Friday I joined 6,000 members of Amsterdam’s middle-aged community at the first date of Pulp’s European tour.

I caught sight of myself in a mirror on the way to buy some weak lager at the bar, clad in combat trousers and a freshly bought band t-shirt from the merch stand. You could say I haven’t moved on from 1997.

But coming two days after the surprise general election announcement, I’m fully embracing the late 90s nostalgia.

“Do you remember the first time? I can’t remember a worse time…But you know that we’ve changed so much since then.”

Do I remember the first time? Yes. But I wasn’t old enough to vote. This time around I am enjoying every second of this car crash campaign, and feeling hopeful that things are finally going to change.

Some stuff I did this week

Months back I decided to tack a few days on to my Lisbon trip, to give myself a few days chill time after what was set to be a busy few weeks of work/travel/speaking. I booked an Airbnb by the sea which promised fast wifi for remote working.

As it turns out the wifi was well used, with calls from 7.30am to 7pm both days, and not much chill time in-between. Sigh.

But it was lovely to knock off work and be able to go for a walk by the beach and get stuck into some tasty and cheap seafood.

Much of that work was a bunch of proposals and pitches. They’re not something I enjoy as they take a good chunk of time, with no guarantee that anything will come of them. But these were all solid, qualified asks from existing clients or those we’ve been talking seriously to, so we felt they were worth doing. Will have some serious scheduling to do in the coming months.

I recorded a podcast with the folks over at workplace tech firm Joan. A long old chat which was supposed to be about workplace tech but ended up being about people. Like I frequently say, tech is the easy bit. It’s people and culture that are harder to change. I love geeking out in this stuff. Will share when the episode is out.

We landed a chunky project to support a super interesting client with the next steps of their digital workplace transformation.

Between that project and our ongoing ones, and other projects coming down the line, we’ve got a lot on, and a lot to coordinate. So we hired two people this week to support us with delivery management and client content development. I’m looking forward to both of them starting with us in the coming weeks.

What I’m reading

Apparently it’s reasonably common for people who (like me) lack 3D vision to think in mental or visual maps, and I suspect that’s why I’ve had a life-long obsession with cartography.

I also love a history book. So I’d been waiting for Jonn Elledge’s A History Of The World In 47 Borders to hit the shelves. And it didn’t disappoint. Each chapter is a standalone tale of the (mostly bad) decisions and historical accidents behind the lines on our maps, and how these are still impacting people and politics today.

I’ve powered through the first half of this. There’s no better travel companion than a good book; I took this one to bars and enjoyed it with a few sangrias (pictured). I expect to devour the rest in the next day or two. Recommend.

Connections

Caught up with Anne-Marie Blake at the Sky Bar in Amsterdam to talk about comms, training and balancing the demands for a steady stream of updates on LinkedIn and the like with being too busy with the day job to produce them.

Coverage

I was interviewed for this piece in BA’s Club Magazine about building a trip around going to a gig – something I do regularly.

The folks over at Nexxer have made all the videos from Camp Digital available. Which gives me the opportunity to see all the talks I couldn’t catch because there were so many good ones to choose from at the same time. And also means I can share the 300 Seconds session for new speakers with the wider world.

Here it is, with an intro from me and four brilliant stories from four brilliant women.

This week was A LOT. Five cities, three countries, two flights and far more people-ing than I’m used to doing these days. And in the background, juggling three live client projects with three that want to start working with us. And, as always, slightly too many side projects.

But I wouldn’t have it any other way. I’m writing this weeknote from the balcony of my Airbnb by the sea on the Portuguese Riviera, where I’ve taken myself for a few days so I can catch up and unwind.

The sun is shining, the wine is cheap and it’s a beautiful part of the world.

Evoked, maybe, by the scent of jacaranda trees and vinho verde my brain has just unearthed a proverb my Portuguese schoolfriend’s mum used to use, which I hadn’t even thought about for 20 years.

Fia-te na Virgem e não corras, meaning “trust the Virgin and don’t run away”.

It means that you can’t just sit back; you have to act and trust that things will work out.

It feels oddly fitting. There are lots of exciting opportunities on the horizon, and with so much going on I’ve started to doubt my ability to do it. But I need to grab chances as they come and not run away.

Some things I did this week

Like I said, this week involved a lot of juggling of projects and people and places.

Ran a workshop for a client in the UK to help them get a complex, multi-stream programme on track. We looked at scope, comms and routines and helped them get to what really matters and how to make it all actionable and realistic. I enjoyed this a lot and we got really positive feedback from the team afterwards. So: warm glow at a job well done.

Two very different clients want turn discovery work into delivery. We’ve been working with both on how to do that, and how we can – and can’t – help. We’re delighted that clients come back to us again, and recommend us to others, but this week Jon and I reached the conclusion we need to hire someone to help us coordinate it all.

Attended the 10th Social Now event in Lisbon, Portugal. This is the second time I’ve been to this event for people working with enterprise social and digital workplace. Organiser Ana Neves brings together an impressive group of practitioners and vendors but, in focusing it on the needs of a fictitious company with recognisable challenges, makes it action-focused rather than salesy.

My highlights were:

Andrew Pope characteristically sensible opening on empowering managers to build capability and resilience in digital work practices

Fabio Frota (of OrangeTrail) giving a informative and practical intro to Microsoft co-pilot. In a world where every conference has a string of talks on AI that are delivered from a position of zero knowledge and on closer examination aren’t really AI, it was refreshing to have an accessible-yet-expert take on the tool everyone’s talking about

Emily Hinks ☀️ on why we need to make mischief at work to bring values to life and humanity into all we do

Sumeet Gayathri Moghe on taking an async-first approach to work

Simon Scullion on building your Digital Workplace one block or layer at a time

Clearbox’s Suzie Robinson‘s intro to mapping the digital workplace. Every organisation has one – it’s never truly greenfield – and it likely a messy muddle of overlapping tools

I delivered a tongue-in-cheek talk to close the event, called “How to ensure failure in your digital workplace programme”.

Plus a number of hands-on exercises facilitated by Céline Schillinger, and smooth MCing from Samuel Driessen. And – what I think makes this event special – the in-depth chats with experienced, knowledgeable and passionate digital pros over long lunches.

Ana claims this will be the last Social Now, but attendees are already hoping she has a change of heart.

What I read

Nothing. Zero spare time this week!

Connections

Social Now was a brilliant chance to catch up with some old friends and contacts from the digital workplace world, and to meet new ones. We’re already planning a little reunion for the Amsterdam contingent next month.

But I am peopled out now and need a solid few days talking to absolutely no one.

Coverage

For a while I’ve been predicting that Meta would pull the plug on their Workplace enterprise offering as it’s failed to gain the traction they hoped for and is increasingly mis-aligned with their core offering.

I was right. I love being right, but I do feel for everyone affected by the fallout.

I wrote this for Reworked on what went wrong for Workplace.

“As news of Workplace’s demise became public, many former customers and staffers took to LinkedIn to express sadness at the product’s failure to revolutionize the way we collaborate and communicate at work. But perhaps it was the expectation that it ever would do so that sowed the seeds of its failure.“

(PS I’m not sure it actually is week 20. It might be 21. Did I lose a week somewhere?)

Today is Bevrijdingsdag (Liberation Day), marking 79 years since the Netherlands was liberated from Nazi occupation. It’s a national celebration of both that event and more generally of freedom, democracy and human rights.

As I type this I can hear a raucous and joyful Liberation Day party taking place on the Westermarkt, the square close to my house (and right next to the annex where Anne Frank and her family lived in hiding).

Having been fortunate enough to grow up in democratic countries, it’s easy to take our own liberty for granted. I can go where I want and say what I think – as my Twitter feed will attest – without fear.

But I remember my grandmother’s tales of Nazi-occupied Paris, and am conscious that a third of the world’s population still don’t have the same freedoms I enjoy.

My Nan never talked much about that time. It was very much her character that instead of talking about the dark days of occupation, she focused on the explosion of joy and happiness when her home city was liberated.

Reflecting on that day, she wrote: “The hidden Tricolours had come out at the windows, not just on public buildings from which the black spiders of the swastikas had crawled away, but in every street as before the occupation they had bedecked houses on the 14^th of July, the anniversary of the storming of the Bastille. Red, White and Blue. Red for liberty, won at a price, White for equality, and Blue for fraternity, as in the motto of the French republic. It was as if the whole city had blossomed into a great flower garden. Back home we stood at the windows and balconies and in the warm summer evening we heard the bells of all the churches singing for freedom”.

On this warm early summer evening I’m sitting at my window, looking at the Dutch flags flying where fascist ones once hung, thinking how people shared that same relief and euphoria of liberation right here. And eight decades on here I am listening to my neighbours singing in celebration of freedom, recognising how far we’ve come – and how far the world still has to go.

Some things I did this week

It was a crazy busy work week. On Monday Lithos Partners moved into a new, bigger office. Our little European HQ is now right in the centre of town, close to Rokin metro. Annoying moving admin done with I can appreciate it’s a great space (if only because we now have enough desks!). If you’re passing through town, do pop by.

We’re cracking on with a discovery for a US-based client. For the most part this stuff is universal, but it’s interesting how differences in working culture either side of the pond are reflected in leadership priorities, and how that feeds into our work.

When you run your own business the real marker of success is that organisations ask us back, or recommend us to others. Pleasingly, that happened three times this week. Previous clients coming back to us to see if we can help with new challenges. So we’ve spent a chunk of time this week talking, planning and seeing where we can help.

One recent learning that is that it helps everyone if we can be upfront about where we aren’t best placed to support. I’ve got a great network and this week have been able to tap into that to find associates to join our projects, but also to simply put others in touch directly where we’re just not the best team to help.

Jonathan and I spent the latter half of the week at the HR Technology Europe conference here in Amsterdam. It’s slightly adjacent to the teams and tools we normally work with – and all the more valuable for it.

As a communicator by trade it pains me to say this, but no one is anywhere near as interested in news on the intranet as the internal comms team are. People go to their digital workplace to get stuff done. That’s not to say they like doing it. But there’s an admin overhead associated with having a job. People want to get that over with as quickly as possible and go back to the real job.

We put comms in the way of that user journey in the hope and expectation that people will see and read it. But the reality is there’s a mutual benefit there in HR (and other functions) integrating all their stuff with the digital workplace – in increasing the likelihood that anyone will ever find or use it – and in turn positioning work channels as useful, increasing readership for comms too.

The long and short of it is intranets and HR tools and portals of any kind are simply not places that real employees ever want to digitally hang out, and nor should they be.

This hard truth was one that didn’t seem at all apparent to either vendors or attendees at the conference. There’s an explosion of tools for pay, benefits, engagement, performance, planning… all of which seem to harbour under the illusion that these are things any sane person wants to spend more than the absolute minimum time doing.

I did a talk on day 2 on why we need to deliver integrated experiences so people don’t need to navigate myriad tools and interfaces, but can simply get the thing done and go and do something else.

We had a few good chats afterwards with both vendors and those delivering HR tech programmes in big orgs. But I came away withy the distinct feeling these tools focus on the buyer (HR) over the users (everyone with a job).

I’m conferencing again next week, running a 300 Seconds session at Camp Digital, to bring some new speakers and stories to the stage. So a high point this week was some final planning (and re-planning thanks to a train strike) and mentoring one new speaker. I’m looking forward to it.

What I’m reading

Being a huge politics nerd, and with results stretching over three days, reading this week took a back seat to endlessly scrolling Twitter for results and memes. Came out happy on both counts.

Connections

Plenty at the HR Tech conference. And I got to meet Mervyn Dinnen, who I’ve been following on Twitter for a decade but never met irl.

Yesterday was Koningsdag, or King’s Day, here in the Netherlands. It’s a national holiday and celebrates King Willem-Alexander’s birthday with lots of music, dancing, flea markets, beer and everything orange.

King’s Day begins the day before, at around 5pm, when everyone starts drinking. On King’s Day itself, for one day only, you can sell stuff in the street. So the streets become a giant flea market of people selling random old tat, home-made cakes and booze outside their front doors. Enterprising Dutchies will set up games you can play for cash; round here we had “shoot a champagne cork out of a nerf gun and win a sandwich”, the world’s saddest mini-golf and some students with a job lot of crockery charging €2 to throw a plate at a wall. All of which seems like a good idea when you hit the beer at 11am.

Everyone’s dressed in orange. I picked up a fluffy orange onesie in the kids’ section of Hema, which gave me a disconcerting ‘Guantanamo, but cuddly’ vibe. The flag is flying everywhere and painted on people’s faces. And yet it doesn’t feel aggressively nationalist. It’s just a big orange street party with bands playing in the street and everyone dancing and having a jolly old time.

It’s nationalism done about as well as it can be.

Some things I did this week

I got back from my holiday on Wednesday, and it feels like a long time ago already.

• Working with a client on a multi-year approach to de-risk their existing intranet pronto and move to a more sustainable long-term product approach
• Putting together a deck for the talk I’m doing at HR Tech Europe on May 3rd
• Spoke to an investor who wanted to know more about the Digital Employee Experience market
• Lots of admin and tax stuff (which I hate)

What I’m reading

I finished the Short History of South Africa on the plane back from Victoria Falls to Johannesburg. It was good to understand more about the country, but I felt like it didn’t go into nearly enough depth on the recent history of the country. For example there was a single, short chapter on the 1970s and 80s

Started What Can I Do? Why Politics Has Gone So Wrong, and How You Can Help Fix It by Alastair Campbell. Only one chapter in – will report back next week.

Connections

None this week. Need to get back into it.

The hotel review no one asked for

I had a quick stop in London on my way back from South Africa, spending a night at the Citizen M in Victoria. The chain claim to have re-thought the hotel experience, and they mostly get it right. Comfy bed, curtains that properly close, a hairdryer that works.

I found myself getting annoyed at the quirky branding and endless mood lighting options, but I suspect it was because after two weeks away I just wanted to be home. Doesn’t matter how good their pillows are (and they are), there’s nothing like sleeping in your own bed.

I was determined to actually take some time off this week – and I managed it. Jonathan’s been holding the fort while I’ve been away (some exciting updates to come, but they can wait). 

I ignored my emails, read no books and threw myself into exploring. And it’s been brilliant in every way. 

So this is a self-indulgent, photo-based update on my week. 

Since last week I’ve: 

🐘 Done two days safari in Kruger National Park.  

🦬🦒🦁🦏🐆🦓 Followed by three days at a private game reserve where I completed the Big Five. Highlights included: 

🌅 Flew up to Zimbabwe and watched the sun go down surrounded by hippos on the Zambezi 

🐊 🦛Took a trip over the border to Botswana. More lions! Crocodiles! Buffalo! And elephants swimming across the river. 

And this morning, walked in the spray of the magnificent Victoria Falls.  

It’s been a wonderful first visit to Africa – and I’m sure it won’t be my last. 

Normal service resumed next week.