Weeknote 2025/51

December 21, 2025December 21, 2025 / Sharon O'Dea / Leave a comment

A nighttime view of traditional Dutch buildings lining a canal in Amsterdam, illuminated by warm lights, reflecting off the water. — *Christmas week on the Prinsengracht. Photo by me.*

Today is the shortest day of the year. Winter’s nadir. The moment the light turns back in the right direction, however grudgingly.

I find winter utterly miserable at the best of times, and this year more so for having skipped the opening act by being in Japan, only to return and take the full European version in one concentrated hit. It’s faintly reassuring to know that, technically, things improve from here, even if January and February — the grimmest months — are still very much ahead.

Still, direction matters. And as it happens, this week has been full of looking back at moments that felt bleak, uncertain, or poorly timed at the time — and recognising them, with the benefit of distance, as the point at which things quietly started to turn.

From here on in, it gets brighter.

This week at work

We kicked off a new project with a new client, which is always a small thrill. We have a fairly standard approach to kick-off meetings — getting clear, early, on who actually needs to be involved, what we’re trying to achieve at a high level, realistic timelines, and the immediate next steps that stop everything dissolving into “we’ll come back to that”.

What’s exciting about this one is the ambition. The brief talks openly about building an AI-ready — even AI-first — communications infrastructure. But crucially, there’s a shared recognition that none of that will be achieved by simply bolting on new tech and hoping for the best. Instead, the foundations are the unglamorous but essential things: well-managed content, clarity on roles and responsibilities, and governance that enables rather than constrains. Get those right, and you create the conditions for a genuinely flexible, hyper-personalised channel ecosystem — one that adapts to people’s needs, preferences and ways of working, rather than forcing everyone through the same narrow funnel.

I’m already very excited about making this real. Proof, if any were needed, that I am a massive nerd.

Less exciting: the inevitable end-of-year admin scrum. Last-minute requests, frantic emails, and invoicing going right down to the wire. Very much the yin to the project work’s yang.

And while we submitted the final three chapters of the book last week, this week marked the start of the second review pass — looping back to the opening chapters to tidy, tighten and make sure the full narrative holds together as a coherent whole. Less triumphant finish line, more careful stitching. Which, in many ways, feels about right.

Also this week

It marked ten years since I left my job, with nothing to go to, a few days before Christmas. At the time it felt reckless, frightening, oddly calm — and also inevitable. The kind of decision that only makes sense once it’s already been made.

It felt like the right moment to reflect properly on what happened, how it felt then, and what’s unfolded since. So I wrote a short series of three blog posts: not a triumphalist origin story, but a more honest account of discomfort, drift, relief, uncertainty — and the slow accumulation of orientation rather than any single turning point.

Here’s the three posts

The Break covers the decision to leave
The Long Middle looks at the aftermath, and the years of working out where to go next
Orientation, Not Arrival covers how I look at things now

The response has been… a lot. The comments have been generous, but it’s the DMs that have really been on fire. So many women saying how closely it mirrors their own experiences: the erosion of confidence, the sense of being managed out rather than supported, the quiet calculation that leaving might be less costly than staying.

On the one hand, it’s reassuring to know I’m not alone. On the other, it’s deeply depressing that this pattern is so common — and that so many talented, experienced women end up circulating through the freelance market not out of burning entrepreneurial ambition, but because organisations make it structurally and culturally difficult for them to remain. Not a talent pipeline so much as a slow leak.

In London this week, I went to the annual Christmas Carol fundraiser for The Food Chain — a small but vital charity providing nutritional support to people living with HIV. The charity was formed in 1988 by a group of friends who simply delivered Christmas dinner to people living with HIV, who faced stigma and loneliness as well as as the illness.

The service struck a thoughtful balance: a lovely choir, extremely enthusiastic singing from me and friends, a genuinely funny speech from Jay Rayner (the charity’s patron), and a more sombre one from the CEO on why this work still matters — even now, when HIV is clinically manageable but inequality, isolation and food insecurity remain.

Somewhere between the carols, the message about feeding the hungry, and the sheer warmth of it all, it finally put me in a Christmas mood.

Consuming

📺 Watching

In what has now become an annual tradition, I hosted my Feminist Film Club. The format is simple: we re-watch a classic film and drink whenever we spot an instance of problematic behaviour. It is, as methodologies go, robust.

Previous years have seen us reassess Love Actually through a feminist lens (spectacularly problematic; blind drunk) and Pretty Woman (surprisingly progressive; mild surprise all round).

This year, we tackled Dirty Dancing. And to my surprise holds up remarkably well. Bodily autonomy. Class politics. A woman allowed to want things, choose things, and not be punished for it. A quietly feminist film hiding inside a watermelon-based cultural memory.

We still got drunk, obviously — it was the weekend before Christmas. But it was a genuinely lovely girls’ night in, equal parts cultural critique and joyful nostalgia.

Connections

Also in London, I caught up with fintech OGs Sarah Kocianski and Harriet Allner for lunch and the traditional end-of-year ritual of putting the world to rights.

A close-up selfie of two women smiling at the camera, with a blurred background of bright overhead lights. — *With Sarah Kocianski this week*

Coverage

My latest piece appeared in Reworked this week. This month’s editorial theme — next-generation self-service — finally gave me the excuse to write something that’s been brewing ever since I first came across Jamie Bartlett’s idea of “techno-admin”.

The piece isn’t really about self-service so much as the quiet redistribution of administrative work onto employees. Technology doesn’t remove the work; it just relocates it — updating records, fixing errors, navigating opaque systems — all framed as empowerment, and rarely acknowledged as labour.

I argue that genuinely next-generation self-service should reduce admin rather than disguise it, designing around human reality instead of system convenience.

Travel

My trip to London marked my last trip of the year. According to Flighty, that makes 59 flights in 2025 — which is bad, even by my standards. A frankly unhinged amount of time spent hurtling through the sky, drinking tiny cups of bad coffee and being a #LoungeWanker.

But here’s the strange bit: for the first time in… I don’t know, a couple of years? I have no travel booked. Nothing pencilled in. No flights lurking ominously in January.

It feels deeply unnatural. Like I’ll wake up like the mum in Home Alone with the sudden realisation I’ve forgotten something important.

Until then, I’ll enjoy being gezellig at home with my favourite people. Merry Christmas, Fijne Feestdagen to you and yours.

This week in photos

A laptop with stickers on it is placed on a table next to a bottle of Coca-Cola and an Irish passport, with a view of a pebble-strewn ground outside.

A side view of an EasyJet airplane at the airport, showcasing its distinct orange branding under a cloudy sky.

Orientation, not arrival

December 20, 2025December 20, 2025 / Sharon O'Dea / Leave a comment

A person walking along a dirt path towards a city skyline, with a signpost indicating the direction, under a clear blue sky.

This is the final piece in a three-part series reflecting on ten years of self-employment — what led me to leave my last employed role, what came after, and how I now think about work, identity, and change.

(if you haven’t read Part One and Part Two, read those first)

Ten years on, I’m not especially interested in tidy origin stories or triumphant endings.

What I have instead is orientation.

For a long time, I thought comfort meant stability: a role you could explain in one sentence, a trajectory you could sketch on a whiteboard, a sense that you were “on track”. I no longer think that. Comfort, as it turns out, isn’t the absence of change. It’s the ability to exist inside change without being overwhelmed — or taking it personally.

That distinction has taken years to learn.

Earlier in my career, I absorbed the idea that legitimacy had to be earned constantly. In the banking environment I worked in, surrounded by people who seemed far more confident, polished, and socially assured than I felt, I carried a low-level sense of being a chancer. Someone who’d slipped through a side door and needed to justify their presence.

So I worked harder. Stayed later. Took on more. Put my hand up when others didn’t. I treated exhaustion as evidence that I was doing it right. If I could just make myself indispensable enough, visible enough, useful enough, then my credentials couldn’t be questioned.

It’s not hard, in hindsight, to see where that leads.

These days, I’m better at holding uncertainty without immediately turning it into a personal failure. I don’t always get it right, but I’m quicker to notice when I’m reacting rather than responding.

That difference matters. Reaction wants certainty and closure. Response allows for partial information, for waiting, for keeping options visible. I make fewer decisions in a rush to feel safe. I’m more deliberate about what I lock in, and what I leave adjustable.

I expect the ground to shift, so I design for movement.

Being multi-hyphenated is often framed as a lack of focus. For me, it’s closer to a coping mechanism in a world that refuses to sit still. I don’t treat optionality as indecision; I treat it as resilience. I commit, but only lightly. I choose depth over novelty, without betting everything on a single version of relevance.

What I notice now, more than anything, is range — the ability to move between depth and breadth without losing my footing.

I have work that still interests me — not because it’s new, but because it’s deep. I work with people I respect, on problems that are hard in ways that matter. I have space for thinking, for writing, for changing my mind in public and in private.

I have a working life that accommodates curiosity and contradiction. One that leaves room for travel, for friendships, for health, for creative detours that don’t need to justify themselves immediately — or maybe ever. None of this arrived quickly or neatly. Very little of it could have been predicted at the outset.

But it’s a life that fits — not perfectly, but well enough.

Titles still don’t quite capture what I do. They probably never will. I’ve stopped trying to compress a complex working life into a single, tidy label. Some ambiguity is simply the price of doing work that spans systems, disciplines, and contexts. And that’s ok.

What’s changed is that I’m no longer looking for a final definition.

Writing has helped with that. It’s given me a place to be authoritative on my own terms — not by pointing at outputs, but by articulating patterns, judgement, and expertise. Over time, I’ve come to trust that credibility doesn’t only come from what you reveal. It also comes from sharing how you think.

And I’m comfortable saying this plainly: I have a bloody great life.

Not because everything worked out. Not because there was a master plan. But because enough worked out. Because the work is meaningful, the people are interesting, and the days contain more choice than they once did, and I wake up every day (well, most days) feeling like I’m making a positive difference to people’s working lives.

There wasn’t a moment of arrival. There still isn’t.

What there is, is a steadier way of standing while things move. A clearer sense of what I’m willing to tolerate, and what I’m not. The confidence that I can adjust my stance as the ground shifts — because it always will.

I’m not finished. I’m not “there”.

But I’m facing in the right direction.

And, for now, that’s enough.

The Long Middle

December 18, 2025December 20, 2025 / Sharon O'Dea / Leave a comment

A surreal image of a woman standing with her back to the viewer on large stone slabs that are broken apart and floating above a reflective surface, with a wide blue sky and clouds stretching out ahead of her.

This is part two of a three-part series reflecting on ten years of self-employment — what led me to leave my last employed role, what came after, and how I now think about work, identity, and change.

(if you haven’t read Part One yet, read that first)

Leaving got me out of a toxic situation. It solved the urgent problem — but it didn’t hand me a new map.

What followed wasn’t clarity or momentum, but a long stretch of recalibration.

There wasn’t a clear trajectory. There still isn’t. What changed was my tolerance for that.

In the early years after I left, I spent a fair amount of time trying on different versions of myself. Some of this was curiosity. Some of it was necessity. And some of it was the lingering belief that “progress” ought to look like movement towards something newer, shinier, or more obviously impressive.

I flirted with adjacent worlds — product, innovation, startups — not because I was particularly drawn to them, but because they seemed to represent where the action was. In contrast, going back to intranets and the digital workplace initially felt like a step backwards. I’d internalised the office pyramid: bigger portfolios, bigger teams, broader remits. Returning to a domain I’d started in felt uncomfortably like reversing down the ladder.

At the time, I was still measuring myself by scope rather than substance. Portfolio size rather than domain authority.

That shifted once I stopped borrowing other people’s career templates.

Joining forces with my now-business partner was a turning point. Not because it suddenly clarified everything, but because working in partnership changed the texture of my working life. Ideas became conversational rather than solitary. Drafts were sharpened through debate. Momentum came not from self-discipline alone, but from shared accountability. If I promised something by the end of the day, it happened — not because of pressure, but because I’d said it out loud to someone whose judgement I trusted.

More importantly, partnership reflected my strengths back to me.

Returning fully to intranet and digital workplace work stopped feeling like retreat, and started to feel like reclaiming something I was genuinely expert in. What had once felt “unsexy” now felt deep, consequential, and hard-earned. I stopped apologising for caring about work that sits at the intersection of people, systems, governance, and power — because that’s where things actually succeed or fail in complex organisations.

One of the more disorienting parts of this period was realising that a skill I’d come to doubt was, in fact, central to my value.

In my last job, the authority to do this work — rolling the pitch, preparing the ground, building buy-in — was quietly withdrawn, and with it went my confidence. Politics was treated as something faintly embarrassing — a distraction from “real” work — rather than the environment in which real work actually happens.

After the break knocked my confidence, I lost sight of the fact that understanding how organisations function is a skill in its own right. Knowing what a project sponsor is carrying. Recognising where resistance is coming from. Being close enough to the reality of organisational life to empathise — but far enough away to offer perspective and judgement.

The first time an old colleague hired me to support them at another organisation specifically for that capability, it was a genuine eureka moment. Not because I’d suddenly acquired a new skill, but because I could finally see clearly again what I’d been doing all along.

Consultants are often accused — sometimes fairly — of proposing ideas that sound elegant in theory but collapse in the cold light of day. What I’d been led to question wasn’t a weakness. It was the craft: working with context rather than around it, acknowledging politics instead of pretending they don’t exist, and offering help that is grounded, realistic, and usable.

That balance — empathy without over-identification, distance without detachment — turned out to be the thing that makes my work stick.

That realisation didn’t instantly restore confidence. Confidence lagged behind evidence. I had to stop apologising for how I work — and that happened slowly, unevenly, over years rather than months.

Identity, meanwhile, remained unresolved. Losing a job title I’d spent a decade chasing was harder than I expected. “Head of digital comms at a bank” collapsed overnight into “freelancer”, with all the ambiguity that entails. Titles are crude, but they’re socially useful shorthand, and I missed having one that did the explanatory work for me.

Go too narrow, and you limit the range of work you’re considered for. Go too broad, and you dissolve into a sea of digital hand-waving. I still feel that tension. But I’ve stopped treating it as a problem that needs solving.

This wasn’t simplification so much as a recognition of complexity.

Another quiet shift during this period was my relationship to impact and evidence. Working for large, complex organisations means you can rarely talk openly about what you’re doing. Commercial confidentiality applied in my last role, and it still does. For a while, I struggled with that invisibility — the inability to point to outputs, launches, or neat before-and-after stories.

What helped was returning to writing. Twitter (RIP), LinkedIn, and blogging gave me a way to be authoritative without breaching confidence. I didn’t need to show the workings to demonstrate the thinking. Over time, I became more comfortable with the idea that much of my value lies not in what I produce directly, but in the choices I help organisations make — including the mistakes they avoid.

Conditions during this period were far from perfect. I still wish I’d left my last job on better terms, with a clearer plan and some savings behind me. For a long time, I was angry — not just about how it ended, but about the injustice of it all. About being made to feel like a failure by an organisation that had benefited from my willingness to stretch, absorb, and endure.

That anger was oddly clarifying.

It stripped away some of the residual self-doubt and forced a reappraisal of what I’d normalised. I could see more clearly how readily I’d equated over-extension with professionalism, and how easily I’d absorbed responsibility for failures that weren’t mine to carry.

The anger didn’t vanish quickly. It lingered. It resurfaced, often out of nowhere. For a while, it was part of how I made sense of what had happened.

But over time, it loosened its grip.

It stopped being the engine of the story and became part of the context instead — something I could acknowledge without letting it define how I saw myself or what came next.

This phase of my career wasn’t about reinvention. It was about unlearning — letting go of borrowed hierarchies, inherited measures of success, and my habit of treating uncertainty as a personal failing.

The long middle taught me to live without a script. To value depth over novelty. To accept that some careers don’t resolve into clean arcs, and that progress is sometimes a matter of stance rather than speed.

The ground kept shifting. I learned to stand differently.

Now read Part 3, Orientation, not arrival.

The Break

December 16, 2025December 20, 2025 / Sharon O'Dea / Leave a comment

A surreal painting showing a woman in a dark business suit, seen from behind, stepping through an open door that leads into a blue sky filled with clouds. Behind her is a dim office interior with a desk and lamp fading into shadow.

This is part one of a three-part series reflecting on ten years of self-employment — what led me to leave my last employed role, what came after, and how I now think about work, identity, and change.

I didn’t leave my last employed role because I was brave, burned out on corporate life, or driven by some entrepreneurial calling.

I left because staying had become untenable.

By the time I quit, I was exhausted, unwell, and out of road. Not in a dramatic way — but in the slow, grinding way that comes from trying to make an impossible situation workable for too long.

For over a year, I’d been doing the work of two, arguably three people. I spent a year living in a hotel on the other side of the world to deliver a project against an unrealistic deadline, with neither enough resources nor senior support. Alongside that, I was managing two teams across eight time zones — a logistical and emotional load that never let up.

I did all of this willingly. Partly out of professional pride. Partly out of ambition. And partly because I believed (and was quietly encouraged to believe) that if I proved myself hard enough, everything would eventually resolve.

I was chasing a promotion I thought I needed, and a bonus that had been dangled just far enough ahead to keep me running. Early in that financial year, I discovered that someone in my team, with significantly less responsibility and a lighter workload, was being paid more than I was. When I raised it, I was told it couldn’t be fixed — but that it would be rectified at bonus time.

In retrospect, I was a mug.

Then came the reorganisation.

It was badly handled, driven more by internal politics than how teams actually function. My team was disbanded — a fact I didn’t learn in a meeting, or even on a phone call, but via a text message from a junior team member, because my manager had forgotten to invite me to the meeting.

Shortly afterwards, I was moved under a new manager who neither understood nor valued digital, and who had little appetite for making a success of a platform I’d spent the previous year delivering. Because it wasn’t their idea, it was quietly undermined — along with the person responsible for it.

By then, my body had already started to register what I was still trying to rationalise. I barely slept. I was constantly tense. I was ill with stress in a way I’d never experienced before. I took a few days off sick — the only sick leave I took in the whole time I worked there — and received an email from HR informing me that if I remained off, my pay would be withdrawn.

It wasn’t framed as concern. It was framed as process.

That was the moment the spell broke.

Up until then, I’d still been operating under the illusion that if I just worked harder, explained myself better, or endured a bit longer, the situation would right itself. That email made it clear this wasn’t a misunderstanding or a temporary rough patch. The system had made its position known.

I didn’t quit because I was brave. I quit because I had reached the limit of what I could reasonably absorb.

At the time, it didn’t feel like a career decision so much as a physical and emotional necessity. I didn’t leave on good terms. I didn’t have a plan or a financial cushion. I left carrying a messy mix of anger, relief, fear, and a deep sense that I’d somehow failed.

Looking back, I wish I’d been kinder to myself.

I wish I’d trusted my own signals sooner, rather than forcing my body to escalate the message. I wish I’d recognised that enduring harm isn’t professionalism, and that loyalty to a system that isn’t reciprocated is rarely rewarded.

Ten years on, I don’t romanticise that moment — but I respect it. Walking away wasn’t a career move. It was an act of self-preservation.

And everything that followed began there.

Part two, The Long Middle, is here.

Weeknote 2025/50

December 14, 2025 / Sharon O'Dea / Leave a comment

A collection of vinyl records displayed on a shelf, featuring album covers from various artists including Sepultura and Suicide Silence. — *Amsterdam Vinyl Club this week Photo by me.*

This week had a strong clearing space energy to it.

Not in the sense of bold new beginnings or fresh starts, but in the quieter, less Instagrammable way: finishing things, tidying edges, and letting go of what no longer needs to be carried forward. Less about acceleration, more about reduction.

French writer and fellow airport departure lounge regular Antoine de Saint-Exupéry wrote that perfection is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away. That line kept resurfacing for me this week, not as an abstract ideal, but as a practical reality. Editing rather than drafting. Removing rather than accumulating. Accepting that some things have done their job.

Some of that showed up as work. Some of it looked suspiciously like procrastination. Some of it was simply recovery after intensity. All of it, in one way or another, was about making space. Mentally, professionally, and occasionally quite literally.

This week at work

We submitted the final three chapters of Digital Communications at Work. After months of living with these ideas — in offices, airports, trains, hotel rooms, borrowed desks, co-working spaces, OneNote thought-dumps, half-finished Notes apps, a thousand Teams chats, Slack messages, voice notes, screenshots of whiteboards, comments in Word, comments on comments, and the occasional “I’ll remember this later” (I did not) — the moment of pressing send on the email to the publisher was an odd mix of momentous and underwhelming.

The chapters focus on the unglamorous but decisive end of the digital workplace lifecycle:

Launching channels — not as a moment, but as a process. How organisations communicate value, build habits, and avoid the familiar post-launch fade where “new” quietly becomes “ignored”.
Measurement and management — moving beyond vanity metrics and zombie stats towards evidence that actually helps teams make better decisions, course-correct, and earn trust over time.
What’s next — less about shiny tools, more about the slow forces reshaping work: demographic change, automation, trust erosion, and what all of that means for internal communication as a profession.

The book is no longer hypothetical. It exists now as something that has to survive editing, disagreement, and the uncomfortable process of being read by people who weren’t in my head when I wrote it.

Also this week

With a book deadline looming, I indulged in a familiar form of productive procrastination and cleared out my wardrobe.

It’s a decade since I left my last corporate job. The pandemic killed off the corporate suit for me and, it appears, consulting more generally. And yet some things had been hanging in there for years — not because I wore them, but because of what they might one day be for.

Maybe I’d go back into corporate. Maybe future-me would finally be that person.

On the floor lay the ghosts of a life past… and a few imagined futures that never quite happened.

There was also something telling about how easy it was to part with things that are now too big — a decisiveness I notably did not show in the opposite direction.

Undeniably work avoidance, yes. But also an oddly appropriate companion to a week spent finishing a book about legacy, change, and what we choose to carry forward.

A close-up image of a colorful assortment of fabrics and clothing items, featuring various patterns and textures, folded and layered together.

A colorful assortment of clothes hanging on a closet rack, showcasing various patterns and textures.

Consuming

📺 Watching

After a week of intense writing, thinking, and deadline-brain, I deliberately switched my higher functions off and let television do its thing.

I watched the entire second series of Welcome to Wrexham and became genuinely, embarrassingly invested in the fortunes of a football team in a town I’ve never visited and, realistically, probably never will. It’s an object lesson in narrative engineering: take stakes, characters, time, and a sense of shared jeopardy, and you can make anyone care about anything. Football is almost incidental.

And like any good Swiftie, I watched the first two episodes of the The End of an Era docuseries released on Disney+ on Friday. I was caught off guard by how emotional it made me, reliving a tour that already feels oddly historic. There’s something about watching collective experience back through a screen — tens of thousands of people moving in sync, night after night — that hits harder in retrospect than it does in the moment.

I also started knitting again — largely while watching all of the above. I’m still objectively terrible at it, but it turns out keeping my hands occupied is an effective way to stop myself doom-scrolling through the credits. Parallel processing, but make it wool.

🎧 Listening

In a similar spirit, my listening was entirely functional rather than aspirational. A heady mix of cheerful pop and various flavours of ADHD Focus Music on Spotify — deployed less for deep work than for emotional regulation. Not taste so much as task support.

Connections

Earlier in the week, I met up with my old mate Peter Morley, now Head of Communications at AI infrastructure darling Nebius. He filled me in on life inside a company in genuine hypergrowth; I filled him in on the correct way to eat bitterballen.

Peter also introduced me to a former Nebius colleague, Anna Fedosova, who’s now building an HR startup tackling an achingly familiar problem: keeping policies and compliance current across multiple geographies and fast-changing legislation.

I took a selfie afterwards but, in my haste, failed to check whether my eyes were actually open in it. In retrospect, a fairly accurate metaphor for the week ahead.

Three friends smiling for a selfie in a warmly lit urban setting with holiday decorations. — *Peter, Anna and me (with my closed eyes fixed by Google Gemini with a surprising degree of competence)*

Coverage

I appeared in two industry publications this week, both circling a familiar theme: cutting through noise.

In InComms, I shared practical advice on making LinkedIn work for you without becoming beholden to the algorithm — focusing on voice, format, and visibility that serves real professional goals rather than platform theatrics.

And in HR Grapevine, I contributed to a piece looking beyond the usual AI-heavy trend forecasts for 2026, arguing instead for closer collaboration between HR and internal communications, and for designing change that people can actually understand and act on.

Travel

I was home all week, which felt not just pleasant but extremely necessary. No trains, no airports, no tactical packing.

This coming week I’m heading to London for a couple of meetings — my final trip of the year. I’ve got a little slack in the diary, so shout if you’re around and fancy a cuppa.

This week in photos

Sharon O'Dea standing in front of a mirror, wearing a blue button-up shirt over a black top and black wide-leg pants, holding a phone for a selfie in a dimly lit hallway.

A pair of black boxing gloves positioned next to a black water bottle on a windowsill with a cityscape view in the background.

Weeknote 2025/49

December 7, 2025December 8, 2025 / Sharon O'Dea / Leave a comment

A modern building with large glass windows and a surrounding plaza, featuring a prominent evergreen tree. People are walking around the area under a partly cloudy sky. — *London trying its best to look festive this week.* *Photo by me.*

I keep coming back to the same realisation this week: the future of comms isn’t just more digital. It’s more structurally complex.

Not more tools in a tidy stack. Not smarter systems in a neat ecosystem. But messier audiences, overlapping loyalties, porous identities, and workplaces that no longer contain people in the way they once pretended to. Add AI, video overload and algorithmic confidence into the mix and you don’t get clarity. You get chaos but with single sign-on.

Consider the past few days a field experiment no one asked for but everyone participated in.

This week at work

I’m currently locked in a low-grade standoff with the final chapter of the book — the one about the future of digital internal comms — which is refusing to behave like a normal chapter and instead insisting on being part travelogue, part systems theory, part group therapy session for a profession in the middle of a long, quiet identity crisis. It keeps pretending to be a chapter while actually being an accumulation of travel, interviews, unease and an unreasonable number of open browser tabs. It is, frankly, a menace.

Midweek I was back in London for the Communicate Conference, hosted by vendor Interact. It was at an Interact event, over 15 years ago, that I met my now business partner, Jonathan. So it felt oddly cyclical to be there discussing whether intranets even exist in the future.

A group of five professionals posing for a photo at an event, smiling and wearing lanyards, with a background featuring a stylish interior. — *Intranerds assemble! L-R: Lisa Riemers, Suzie Robinson, me (Sharon O’Dea) looking like I’ve been Photoshopped in at the wrong scale, Chris Tubb, Steve Bynghall*. *Photo by Lisa Riemers.*

What I hadn’t fully anticipated was how many familiar faces I’d run into who’ve been in the intranet and comms world for as long as — and in some cases longer than — I have. Which led to a steady stream of conversations that start light and get surprisingly philosophical. The shared laugh was always the same one: everything old is new again. The same overblown vendor claims we heard fifteen years ago, now wearing an ill-fitting suit called AI.

Different nouns. Same promises waiting to be broken.

But running underneath the cynicism was something much more serious. The conversations quickly turned to how the organisations we’re working with now are structurally more complex than anything we dealt with a decade ago — layered supply chains, outsourcing, platforms, regulators, global delivery, blended workforces, algorithmic management. And at the same time, the pace of change has accelerated to the point where even seasoned teams feel permanently slightly behind their own reality.

It’s a strange duality: the tech rhetoric looping, while the organisational conditions it’s being dropped into are genuinely unprecedented. Which may explain why so many “this will finally fix it” moments keep… not fixing it.

A few highlights from the conference:

Allan Tanner opened with a session on AI and the digital workplace. A quick poll showed about two-thirds of the room using generative AI weekly, but early findings from the Gallagher State of the Sector report suggest one in three are using it without any oversight, and only 40% feel confident in their skills.

What surprised me wasn’t the numbers so much as the familiarity of them. You could lift this whole section almost intact from a conference two years ago and nobody would blink. In a field that insists it’s moving at hyperspeed, that’s… odd. Is the survey already ageing in dog years? Or are comms teams simply adopting more slowly than the hype suggests?

The idea of an AI agent-first future replacing intranets floated through the room — but the awkward ownership question still hung there, unresolved. Comms? IT? HR? When everyone owns it, no one really does.

Also: we have absolutely been here before with chatbots.

The exact example used was booking leave. The endlessly cited use case where, in theory, a bot should smoothly handle what currently requires checking a team calendar, emailing your boss, verifying your entitlement, and then logging it all in some separate HR system. That was the canonical chatbot demo when I was doing a whole series of talks on this… in 2017. That’s getting on for a decade ago. If this really is an easily solved problem, we’d be living in it by now. The fact that we aren’t tells you something important.

When the tech keeps changing but the outcome doesn’t, you’re not looking at a technology failure — you’re looking at a human systems failure.

Sam Bleazard followed with employer brand as the connective tissue between HR and marketing, using Fortnum & Mason as a case study in visual storytelling and employee voice.

Then came Tom Vollmer from Cofenster with the stat that properly landed: around 23 hours of internal video uploaded every week, versus about 10 minutes actually watched. The issue isn’t underinvestment — it’s saturation. We are not video-poor. We are video-exhausted.

I fear I have crossed a generational Rubicon because I now actively resent being asked to watch a video for an entire minute. A minute of looking. Nope. I want text I can skim while emotionally elsewhere. I want bullet points, headings, and plausible deniability. Video is no longer a medium; it’s an attention hostage situation.

AI can now generate highlights, scripts and even videos from PDFs, which is undeniably impressive. But it also raises a more troubling possibility: that we’re no longer just producing noise at scale — we’re now automating it at industrial volume.

And when people can’t even keep up with the volume of information being thrown at them, it’s hardly surprising they stop engaging with it. Cognitive overload is the silent assassin of communication.

Helen Bissett shared disengagement data from Gallup that was hard to ignore: 90% of UK employees feel disengaged at work, while over 80% practise mindfulness outside of work. People are repairing themselves in their own time because work no longer does.

But this is also where I felt a quiet friction forming with some of our default assumptions. Engagement is treated as the unquestioned North Star — yet I’ve just spent weeks in Japan, a country consistently cited as having low employee engagement, alongside high levels of personal life satisfaction.

It left me, once again, with a nagging sense that we may not always be chasing the right thing.

The closing case study from AMS took an 11-page PDF innovation brief and turned it into an intranet takeover with storytelling, countdowns and discussion. Strong results. But what stuck with me was structural: AMS staff often hold dual loyalty, to the company that employs them and the client organisation they sit inside. It’s a pattern on the rise: the audience for “internal” comms is often not internal at all.

Across the day, the pattern repeated: AI, video, employer brand, purpose — all accelerating. But the deeper shift isn’t technological. It’s structural. Our audiences are fragmenting, our channels are multiplying, and the idea of a single, coherent “employee experience” is becoming more theoretical than real.

Oh, and we unexpectedly landed a juicy new client. Entirely unplanned. Entirely welcome <stares at impending HMRC bill>. All systems go.

Also this week

I went to the WB-40 Christmas dinner in London. WB-40 is a podcast about how tech reshapes work, with an associated Signal group that might genuinely be the friendliest place on the internet. It was lovely to see people properly, in three dimensions, after years of being avatars in each other’s phones.

And it left me with a question I can’t quite shake: what if low engagement at work isn’t always a failure? What if, in some cases, it’s a boundary?

It certainly maps, subjectively at least, to my own experience of the last decade. I haven’t had a “proper job” in years, and I don’t look to work for belonging, identity or community in the way I once did. Those needs are met elsewhere now — through friendships, networks, odd little internet corners, shared projects.

So if people can have rich lives, strong identities and real community without work being the emotional centre of gravity, is “more engagement at work” always the right thing to chase? Or are we sometimes trying to re-inflate a social and psychological role that work can no longer credibly carry?

That Japan contrast keeps needling at me. Maybe the problem isn’t that people are disengaged from life. Maybe they’re disengaging from work — deliberately.

Some of the most important people in my life mostly exist as glowing rectangles in my pocket. Which feels odd to admit, and yet it’s completely true.

Which made the next thing I went to this week land even harder: a talk on psychological safety with Ania Hadjdrowska — and instead of feeling theoretical, it felt uncomfortably operational.

Because in a world of hybrid teams, async work, platform hopscotch and digital performativity, psychological safety now shows up (or doesn’t) first in online behaviour:

Who speaks in the channel
Who stays silent
Who only reacts with emojis
Who disappears entirely

In remote and hybrid work, participation is visibility. Silence is no longer just silence. It’s interpreted as disengagement, resistance, risk, apathy. Often unfairly. Often reductively.

The classic barriers still apply:

Fear of judgement
Fear of exclusion
Fear of conflict

But digital work amplifies all three. You don’t get tone-of-voice buffers. You don’t get corridor repairs. You don’t get the quiet reassurance of eye contact after a risky comment lands badly. Everything is logged, screenshot, searchable. Mistakes feel permanent. So people calculate. And then they don’t speak.

Before the rational brain catches up, the amygdala scans for threat — hierarchy, tone, uncertainty. If it detects danger, it triggers fight, flight, freeze or fawn. No one innovates when they’re being emotionally chased by a tiger. And no one meaningfully collaborates when every contribution feels reputationally risky.

Psychological safety, as defined by Amy Edmondson, is the belief that you won’t be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns or mistakes. Not agreement, but constructive disagreement.

That matters even more when:

Teams are distributed
Trust is assumed rather than built
People meet as avatars before they meet as humans
Employment relationships are shorter, looser, more conditional

We are asking people to be brave in systems that increasingly give them no margin for error.

The line I can’t shake is still this: silence is expensive. In digital workplaces especially, it quietly drains collaboration, learning, innovation and belonging — while looking, misleadingly, like “everything’s fine.”

And that “booking leave” example kept needling at me again. Such a small task, yet it still demands procedural obedience, reputation management, tool-hopping and emotional calibration. Multiply that across a working life and you start to see why people are tired — and why AI keeps stalling on exactly the same rocks.

Layer on the social media disinhibition effect (performance, oversharing, dunking, provocation) and it doesn’t always switch off at work. When trust thins, people retreat into safer containers: private chats, external networks, side communities. Belonging migrates. Collaboration fragments. Comms gets harder.

Consuming

(Keeping this bit short this week cos I’ve wittered on above)

Like the rest of the planet, my listening week was dominated by the release of Spotify Wrapped — the global ritual in which an algorithm holds up a mirror and everyone pretends to be surprised by what’s staring back.

Once again, mine was a window into my not-so-secret pop shame. I had solemnly vowed that Taylor Swift would not dominate my Top 10 this year. And then she went and released a banger. And Lily Allen casually dropped the confessional of the decade. What’s a woman supposed to do?

Once again, I will not be sharing my list with the wider world.

Spotify also informed me that my “listening age” is 46. I am 45 and a half, thank you very much. I refuse to be aged up by an algorithm.

Connections

Staying with the theme of where community actually lives these days, I also met up with Jenny Watts — a mainstay of another of my favourite online communities, the old FitFam crowd.

Two women smiling and posing together in a casual setting, wearing colorful clothing. In the background, a sushi restaurant sign is visible. — *Jenny Watts and me*

FitFam started life years ago on Twitter: a loose group of people talking about health and fitness, cheering each other on with our running times, gym attempts and “I went for a walk instead of lying face down on the sofa” victories. It was low-key, kind, and weirdly effective.

Given the descent of Twitter into a hate-filled sewer, the group’s now migrated to WhatsApp. Same people, different platform. The conversations are smaller, more honest, less performative. It’s a nice reminder that while platforms come and go, the communities that matter tend to quietly pack their bags and move together.

Another small data point in the same direction: belonging is increasingly something people build around themselves, not something work hands out with a lanyard.

Coverage

I ended up in the Financial Times this week. Which, in comms-world terms, is basically being knighted.

They shared a slice of my time in Nagasaki. Including my slightly surreal exploration of the future of work alongside a remote-controlled robot tour guide, piloted by a disabled operator elsewhere in Japan. A sentence I still can’t quite believe I get to write.

Screenshot of an article from the Financial Times featuring Sharon O'Dea discussing her experiences in Nagasaki, Japan, and insights on the future of work. — Screenshot

And yes, I am rightly smug about this. A positive mention in the FT is the biggest win you can get in this industry. It’s the comms equivalent of a Michelin star, an Olympic medal, and being retweeted by someone with an opinion column — all at once.

I will now be quietly unbearable about this for a while.

Travel

I’m going absolutely nowhere this week. An entire week without visiting an airport or getting up at the crack of dawn to catch a train. Bliss.

Next week, though, I’m back in London for the final time this year. I’m organising some drinks — if you’re around and would like to come*, give me a bell.

*and I actually know you

This week in photos

A person standing in a fitness studio, wearing athletic clothing and taking a selfie in the mirror.

The exterior of St. Pancras Railway Station in London, showcasing its ornate brick architecture and tall spires under a clear blue sky.

Weeknote 2025/48

November 30, 2025December 1, 2025 / Sharon O'Dea / Leave a comment

A illuminated sign on a building in Amsterdam that reads 'THE LIGHT YOU SEE IS PAST.' with bicycles parked nearby. — *Amsterdam Light Festival.*

After six weeks in Japan, this week was all about timing — or more accurately, being completely out of sync with it. My body is convinced 4am is an excellent time to start the day. My inbox seems startled that I’m replying during daylight hours. And all the ideas I’d parked while sweating my way around Nagasaki chose this week to sit up in bed like startled toddlers.

Between jetlag, a chapter that staged a full rebellion, and Andreas Wagner’s talk on dormant innovations (apparently even grass needed 100 million years to get going), I’ve been reminded how much of this job is just… timing. When a client’s ready. When a chapter clicks. When the organisation finally notices the thing you’ve been politely suggesting since 2019.

Timing might not be everything, but this week it certainly felt like the main character.

This week at work

A lovely vote of confidence: We won a new piece of work with an existing client — always gratifying, always reassuring, and always a reminder that just doing good work is always the best marketing.

In my first week in Japan I ended up doing a pitch. It was 9pm where I was, but still 32 degrees. I had to duck out of a group dinner to join the call. I was sitting on the floor with a fan blowing behind me to partially avoid collapsing into a puddle of sweat. Somehow, we won the gig and we start work next week. So this week we’ve been getting ready to do just that.

The chapter that fought back: Got one of the earlier chapters back from our editor at Kogan Page. On reread, it just… didn’t sing. Too many lists, not enough soul, and absolutely none of the “why should anyone care?” that Jon and I bang on about. It was also far too long.
So I did what any reasonable author would do: took a deep breath and decided to brutally rewrite the whole thing.

What I thought would be a quick tidy-up became two solid days of editing, trimming, rearranging, despairing, and eventually emerging triumphant. By Thursday it felt like a completely different chapter — tighter, clearer, and something I’m actually happy to put my name on. But it was a slog.

With that behind me, I finally pulled together the outline for the twelfth and final chapter of the book. Can’t quite believe we’re almost there — after months of interviews, diagrams, Japan detours, and existential questions about the future of workplace comms, the end is in sight. So I spent a chunk of the week writing up insights from Japan — drones, shrinking workforces, robot tour guides — and threading the best bits into the horizon-scanning sections.

Also this week

Went to this month’s Science and Cocktails talk by evolutionary biologist Andreas Wagner, on the mystery of dormant innovations — ideas or traits that emerge long before they have any impact, sitting quietly until the environment shifts and suddenly they’re transformative.

Think grasses: they appeared, did nothing much for 100 million years, and then boom, global dominance — and the basis of most human food systems. Or bacterial genes capable of antibiotic resistance long before antibiotics existed. Or early cultural ideas and technologies that only take off when society is finally ready for them.

The tl;dr is: nature – and culture – generate far more potential than they currently need, and environments act as the “prince” that wakes these sleeping beauties when the moment is right.

It made me think about internal comms and digital workplace work: how often the “innovation” isn’t the new tool, but the dormant capability already in the organisation — the half-built governance model, the underused feature, the employee insight nobody acted on — just waiting for the right conditions, leadership, or crisis to wake it.

And, frankly, how much of my job is quietly planting seeds for things that won’t catch until the organisation shifts in the right way. A slightly humbling, slightly comforting reminder that timing is half the craft.

Aside from that, I had a quiet week back in Amsterdam. Woke up at 4am several times, which is perfect if you’re a monk; less so if you’re merely someone who made poor timezone choices.

Cultural re-entry has hit me at odd times, mostly when tired. I nearly bowed at multiple Dutch people, but have avoided saying arigato gozaimasu at anyone (so far).

I’m playing catch-up on socials, sorting through thousands of photos and ten times as many memories. Realised I now possess 400 photos of fruit-shaped bus stops. No plan for them. Yet.

Consuming

👩🏻‍💻 Internetting

Two very different takes on the future of internal comms collided in my feed on Tuesday, and the contrast was so stark it felt almost choreographed.

On one hand: Unily’s “Future of the Workplace”

On the other: Mike Klein’s “Big Shift”

Unily’s view is the one most people in big, complicated organisations will recognise: grounded, sensible, measured.

The world of incremental improvements: a bit less friction, a bit more governance, modest, polite steps toward AI, progress paced by budget cycles and risk committees. And honestly, that’s where most digital workplaces genuinely are. The average intranet of 2026 won’t look wildly different from its 2016 ancestor — and that’s fine. Evolution has value.

Klein, meanwhile, is squinting at an entirely different horizon. His lens: AI compressing decision cycles, dissolving management layers, accelerating knowledge loss, reshaping coordination itself. Less “optimise the comms plan”, more “your operating model may not survive contact with the next five years”.

The key thing, of course, is that both are true — just on different timescales.

But the bit we can’t wish away: AI isn’t a shiny add-on. Used badly, it could be a workplace bloodbath. Many people are understandably nervous about automating themselves out of relevance. And demographic change is already gnawing at the edges.

Japan hammered that home. Fewer workers, more automation, and a very immediate need to rethink how work gets done at all.

Small DEEx improvements still matter. They make the day-to-day tolerable. But they’re not the thing that will get us through the real shifts barrelling towards us.

If anything, the moment calls for more boldness — in how we use AI, how we explain it, and how we help people navigate what’s coming.

📺 Watching

Finger on the cultural pulse as always, I finally started Celebrity Traitors. I intended to watch one episode as a palate cleanser after a day of editing… and then resurfaced four episodes later, blinking at the clock like someone who has accidentally time-travelled.

It really is as good as everyone says: the camp, the scheming, the sheer operatic commitment to drama over absolutely nothing. It’s the kind of show that gives you whiplash from switching between “oh come on” and “I would absolutely betray every one of these people for £120k”.

No spoilers, obviously — but I am now fully invested, irrationally suspicious of everyone, and contemplating whether a roundtable on “psychological safety and betrayal in hybrid teams” might be a useful conference talk.

📚 Reading

My copy of Lisa Riemers and Matisse Hemel-Nelis’s Accessible Communications was waiting for me when I got home — a comforting sight after weeks with only my Kindle for reading company. I’d already had the pleasure of reading an advance copy earlier this year, but there’s something about holding a hard copy (a proper dead-tree edition) that makes the material land differently. Maybe it’s the weight; maybe it’s the guilt of knowing this will outlive all of us.

Re-reading it, I’m reminded what a genuinely important book this is for our industry. Too much accessibility advice for comms people is either painfully high-level (“write clearly!”) or so technical it requires a support animal. Lisa and Matisse manage to bridge that gap beautifully. They give you the principles and the practicalities, without ever making you feel lectured or incompetent.

What I love most is that they treat accessibility not as a compliance box to tick, but as core craft — part of what it means to be good at communication, full stop. They weave in examples, checklists, real-world scenarios, and the kinds of small, humane decisions comms people make a hundred times a day but rarely interrogate.

For anyone working in internal comms, content design, digital workplace, HR, UX, or frankly anywhere words meet humans: it’s one of those books you’ll keep within arm’s reach and quietly force on colleagues. Highly recommend.

🎧 Listening

Lily Allen’s new album has been on repeat in my ears since it dropped last month. I keep intending to listen to something else — a podcast, a serious audiobook, literally anything that would make me seem more intellectual — and then five seconds later I’m back in Lily-land, tapping away like a woman possessed. 10/10, no notes.

Travel

I’m heading to London this week for the Communicate conference. Looking forward to seeing some of my favourite intranerds in 3D. If you’re coming, say hello — or buy me a coffee if you’d like to hear about robot tour guides.

This week in photos

A glowing neon radiator sculpture illuminated against a dark urban backdrop, showcasing the architectural features of nearby buildings.

A speaker presenting on stage at an event, discussing the topic of dormant innovations. A presentation slide is visible in the background with the title 'Sleeping Beauties'. The audience is seated in front of the stage, engaging with the talk.

Weeknote 2025/47

November 23, 2025December 1, 2025 / Sharon O'Dea / Leave a comment

A woman walks down a city street with a small robot on her back, showcasing a blend of technology and urban life. — *Exploring Tokyo and the future of the work*

This week was spent under Tokyo’s pulsating screens, where the pavements hum, the escalators chirp, the traffic lights sing, and you’re permanently one missed step away from being swept into a tide of humanity. The city doesn’t so much greet you as flip your settings to 11 and leave you buzzing like a faulty transformer.

If you’ve never experienced it, it’s hard to explain the sheer scale of the sensory assault. It’s immediate and total. Visually, the city is a chrome-and-neon deluge: vast video boards loop hyper-real animations that bathe the crowds in shifting washes of cerise, cobalt and electric green. Every surface is broadcasting something — a brand, a warning, an offer, a jingle — all competing for your attention at once.

The soundscape is its own kind of madness: pachinko parlours spilling manic 8-bit cheer into the street; “don-don-donki Don Quijote” worming its way into your skull; the rhythmic clatter of the Yamanote line overhead; clipped, polite announcements issuing instructions you’re too overloaded to follow; the constant shuffle and thrum of tens of thousands of footsteps. It’s a multi-layered wall of noise you feel as much as hear.

Even the air has texture: a metallic tang of exhaust, the savoury steam of yakitori stalls, the strangely comforting detergent-clean fragrance that leaks from department stores every time their doors sigh open.

It’s an unrelenting, high-definition reality that demands attention. Your brain simply cannot keep up with the bits-per-second being hurled at it. You become both anonymous and hyper-stimulated. You’re a single vibrating nerve ending plugged into a city-sized nervous system.

As a dyed-in-the-wool city girl, I was both in love with it and completely exhausted by it. Exhilarated one minute, brain-fried the next.

But every night, as my circuits started to smoke, I slipped back to Shimokitazawa: a low-rise pocket of sanity I’ve stayed in so often it feels like popping on a familiar jumper. Gentrified? Absolutely. But still human-sized, warm, and (crucially) horizontal. After a month in slow, sloping Nagasaki, Shimo was the space I needed to transition into Tokyo without short-circuiting entirely.

Evenings in Shimo were the antidote to Tokyo’s intensity: smoky teppanyaki counters frying okonomiyaki bigger than your face; tiny wood-panelled izakayas with fogged-up windows; a six-seat local bar where the drinks are strong, the welcome quiet, and the conversation optional. In a city that overwhelms by design, Shimo made the whole thing survivable.

The rest of the week unfolded as a tour of contrasts — human, urban, sensory and technological. The kind of juxtapositions Japan does with unnerving ease.

I went to two gigs: one in Shimokitazawa, one in a suburban burger restaurant, both showcasing that deeply Tokyo magic trick of creating tiny, intimate worlds inside the sprawl. There’s a particular joy in finding these pockets where no one cares that you’re foreign; you’re just another person there for the music.

I finally made it to the Yayoi Kusama Museum (worth the booking hassle, worth the hype, worth the wait). I wandered through Tokyo’s parks in full autumn drag, riotous maples showing off under cold blue skies. I slurped heroic amounts of ramen in small rooms filled with smoke and laughter.

I made the pilgrimage to TeamLab Planets, something I’d avoided for years because on paper it is precisely the sort of place I should hate. Big Influencer Energy. The kind of venue where you fully expect to be elbowed aside by someone wielding a ring light like a weapon. I arrived ready to roll my eyes so hard I’d sprain something.

Wading through warm water in a mirrored room has no business being as good as it is. Nor does being surrounded by giant drifting flowers; on paper it’s pure gimmick, yet there I was, perilously close to having feelings. It’s sensory overwhelm with actual depth: playful, deliberate, and mercifully not designed solely for people who say “content creator” with a straight face.

A dark room filled with colorful, illuminated patterns on the floor, as visitors wander through the space, experiencing an immersive art installation.

A person standing in a colorful, illuminated room with projections on the floor, surrounded by other visitors.

I also did something rather lovely: a walking tour of Tokyo with a palm-sized robot perched on my shoulder, remotely operated by someone with a disability, working remotely from elsewhere in Japan. Fun, surprisingly polished, and a little glimpse into a future of work I’ll write much more about another time.

A person is walking with a small robot on their shoulder, with a view of tall skyscrapers in Tokyo in the background.

A woman stands on a city street with a palm-sized robot on her shoulder, set against a backdrop of modern buildings.

And then there was Kagaya. I genuinely don’t know how to describe Kagaya Izakaya without sounding unhinged. It’s nominally a dinner, but in reality: a one-man piece of performance art that veers between slapstick, surrealism and something approaching group therapy. At various points there were puppets. There were costume changes. There were props I’m fairly sure violated several fire codes. The man has the timing of a seasoned comedian and the energy of someone who’s drunk six cans of Monster and made peace with chaos.

The food was excellent, but also completely beside the point. If David Lynch ever opened a pub, it would be this: unsettling, hilarious, oddly tender, and impossible to explain to anyone who wasn’t in the room. I’m still trying to process it tbh.

He asked that we don’t put videos on the internet, and I absolutely respect that. Some experiences deserve to stay unmediated, uncaptured, held in the moment rather than flattened for the feed. Kagaya is very much one of those. So this one solitary snap it is.

Kagaya sitting at an easel, looking at the viewer with a surprised expression, wearing a green checkered shirt and a black hat, in a cozy, wooden interior.

Amid all this, I published my first reflection from Nagasaki: an article for Reworked on what organisations can learn from the digital nomad movement. It’s the first of what will no doubt be many pieces. Now that I’m briefly still, I finally have space to breathe, process, reflect and write. This whole experience has given me a lot to think about; I’ve barely begun to scratch the surface.

I also made a reel summing up my month — forty-odd one-second clips stitched into a fever dream of trains, temples, islands and neon. The algorithm seems determined to bully me into becoming better at video, so… apparently that’s a 2026 project.

View this post on Instagram

Between it all: the shopping. So much shopping. Tokyo retail isn’t an activity; it’s an endurance sport. One minute you pop into Don Quijote “just to have a look”, and two hours later you’re on floor 5 of 8, dehydrated, overstimulated and clutching two baskets filled with matcha KitKats, face masks, Totoro purses, Super Mario bag charms, Ichiran ramen kits and a hair towel you saw on TikTok. You’re seriously considering upgrading to one of those little basket trolleys so you can start a third.

You have lost all sense of time. You have no idea if the sun is still up. The shop jingle has played for the 756th time and permanently lodged itself in your skull. Every surface flashes something at you; every aisle whispers “buy me.” You are borderline delirious. You reach — helplessly, inevitably — for another Hello Kitty coin purse. Bic Camera, Yodobashi Camera, Donki… they’re all the same fever dream: capitalism at its most chaotic, joyful and unhinged.

And then — abruptly — Amsterdam.

Back home, I battled the jetlag and stayed awake long enough to see The Hives at AFAS — a band I’ve been going to see for over two decades. I’ve seen them in a tiny venue in Malmö, a community centre in Warsaw, a big corporate venue in London, and everything in between. Pure, chaotic rock-and-roll energy that hasn’t dimmed a watt in 20 years.

And honestly, after six weeks in Japan, stepping out into the Dutch winter (a hard, unfriendly zero degrees) and trying to remember how to be a person in my own life again… that helped. A reminder that some rhythms — loud guitars, shared joy, a band giving absolutely everything — travel with you.

And that’s it. My final weeknote from Japan.

Six weeks that shifted how I think about work, community, belonging and pace. A reminder that cities are laboratories, that culture is generous, that work has a future if we’re imaginative enough, and that slowing down long enough to notice is half the point.

Not quite the end of the story, I suspect. But definitely the end of this chapter.

This week in photos

View of Tokyo skyline with modern buildings and clear blue sky, showcasing the urban landscape.

An immersive art installation featuring bold pink hues and black polka dots, creating a visually striking environment of swirling patterns.

Weeknote 2025/46

November 17, 2025December 1, 2025 / Sharon O'Dea / Leave a comment

A wooden torii gate leading into a lush forested area, with people walking beneath it, symbolizing a traditional Japanese threshold. — *Torii gates: thresholds between worlds*

There are weeks that feel like a straight line, and weeks that feel like a series of thresholds. This one was the latter: a chain of quiet crossings, each nudging me from one state of mind to another.

Japan has physical markers for these moments: torii gates. Step beneath one and, in theory at least, you leave the human world and enter the realm of the kami. But what I’ve learned this month is that thresholds don’t have to be dramatic to matter. Sometimes they’re a shift in perspective; sometimes they’re the soft double-click of a chapter ending.

My week has been full of these liminal moments. Some planned, some unexpected, all adding up to a sense that I’ve stepped from one space in my life and work into something else. I can’t name the new thing yet, but I can feel its outline.

At the shrine where I took that torii photo, it wasn’t the gate that caught me so much as the details: the heavy shimenawa rope; the tassels; the zig-zag shide strips hanging like paper lightning. I learned they symbolise rain, renewal, and the hope for a good harvest. Not a passive hope, but an active one: may what begins here find nourishment enough to grow.

I don’t yet know what will grow out of the past month, but the soil is definitely shifting.

A traditional torii gate adorned with shimenawa rope and tassels, surrounded by dense greenery, symbolizing a threshold between the human world and the spiritual realm.

The first threshold of the week wasn’t spiritual, though; it was the lobby of a Fukuoka hotel, where my husband David arrived after a long flight from Amsterdam. After a month on the far edge of Japan — working odd hours, accumulating tiny cultural recalibrations — seeing him appear felt like briefly stepping back into my own life. Or at least the version of it that comes with an Irish lilt and knows how I take my tea.

But before that, Fukuoka delivered a different kind of homecoming.

I met up with my friend Tony, whom I first encountered on the intranet scene in the early 2010s, back when we were all swapping SharePoint hacks and governance war stories. It was a rooftop bar in Singapore in 2015 that shifted us from acquaintances to friends, and we’ve crossed paths in London, Berlin (their adopted home), and now, improbably, Japan.

We spent the evening eating ramen, hammering Taiko no Tatsujin in an amusement arcade, and laughing with the sort of abandon you reserve for people who have witnessed your more ridiculous professional eras. The universe also arranged for us to turn up in almost identical outfits, resulting in a “fit check” video under the glow of claw machines. I even won a Taiko plushie, prompting an entirely undignified amount of joy.

It reinforced something I keep relearning: home is, more often than not, people rather than places.

And once David arrived, Fukuoka became another kind of home. We did what we always do in a new city: walked, talked, ate too much, and tried to understand the place through its smallest details. Fukuoka is warm, open, generous — but after Nagasaki’s sleepy intimacy, even a soft re-entry into big city life was A LOT.

And then: sumo. I’d expected drama, ritual, weight. And I got it. But I hadn’t expected quite so much theatre. Watching the wrestlers step into the ring felt like watching a centuries-old operating system running beautifully on modern hardware. Ceremony and precision, every movement carrying the residue of repetition. The crowd swung between reverence and sudden, explosive joy. One of the most choreographed human experiences I’ve ever seen.

Sumo wrestlers walking down a corridor with a directional sign in Japanese indicating 'East' while preparing to enter the ring.

A sumo wrestling ceremony taking place in a circular ring, surrounded by an audience. Participants in traditional Japanese attire are engaged in conversation, while spectators watch eagerly from seated positions.

Sitting there, I realised sumo isn’t really about the moment of impact. It’s about the build-up — the stamping, the salt, the slow escalation toward inevitability.

Another threshold. A step, a breath, a brief clash.

Fukuoka reminded me that not all thresholds mark endings. Some are reunions, reconnections, or simply the recognition of who you are when you’re with the right people.

A few days later I was back on Gunkanjima — Hashima, the Battleship Island — for the second time in three weeks. The first visit had been full of big narratives: industrial rise and collapse, whole communities uprooted, the human cost of rapid change. The story you expect the island to tell (and which, indeed, I did in weeknote 45).

This time I tried to notice what doesn’t make the documentaries. The angles of collapsed staircases. Plants punching their way through concrete. The wind’s low hum as it threads through broken windows. The guide’s almost affectionate way of describing buildings on the verge of collapse. A single gull perched on the rusting rail of a former school, as if taking attendance.

Gunkanjima isn’t just a monument to abandonment; it’s also a lesson in what remains.

The first time, I saw it as a symbol of disruption — what happens when the world changes faster than people can adapt. This time, it felt like a study in endurance. Not resilience in the motivational-poster sense, but the plain, unsexy persistence of things that refuse to disappear.

The walls crumble, but the city is still legible: market square, shrine, apartment blocks. The sea eats the edges, but the island keeps its shape. Even absence has structure.

Thresholds aren’t always about stepping forward; sometimes they’re about looking again. A second reading. A different angle. A willingness to listen for the other story.

Gunkanjima, this time, wasn’t a cautionary tale. It was a reminder that endings — even violent ones — don’t erase what came before. Some places, and some experiences, leave an imprint that outlasts their usefulness.

Another threshold crossed. Not forward this time, but deeper.

And then it was time for the nomads programme to end. The final days had that familiar end-of-term energy: admin, emotion, last lunches, shared folders, and the sudden urge to squeeze in just one more conversation with people you’ve only known for a month but who now sit firmly in the rhythm of your day.

I’ve done enough programmes to know most are neatly bounded. This one wasn’t. It was lived. Embedded. Threaded through Nagasaki in a way that made leaving feel like stepping out of a parallel life.

We’d spent a month meeting city officials, entrepreneurs, artistans, students, elders watching demographic change unfold, and families who opened doors tourists never find. A decade’s worth of experiences in four weeks. Not in a TikTok bucket-list sense, but in the sense of having been allowed inside something special.

The team behind it all — industrious, warm, omnipresent without being intrusive — created a space where curiosity sparked easily. Where conversations stretched from marketing tactics to the future of urban economies without anyone blinking.

And then came the final night: a goodbye dinner with speeches — the heartfelt, slightly wobbly kind that only happen when something genuine has happened. Laughter in corners. That soft ache that sits under any meaningful ending.

In that moment, I realised we’d all adopted a very Japanese habit: the long goodbye. All month, whenever we visited workplaces or workshops, people would bow and wave until we were fully out of sight — round the corner, down the road, onto the bus, they’re still waving.

On our final night, we did exactly the same. Waving, hugging, bowing, waving again, stretching the goodbye because no one wanted it to end.

But naturally, it didn’t. Nomad cohorts don’t do tidy exits. We spilled into the night and ended up in a bar: karaoke massacred with enthusiasm, pool played with debatable competence, photos taken that we’ll be grateful for later. Messy, joyful, perfect.

These aren’t just programme peers now; they’re the sort of friends you’ll bump into again in Berlin, Bangkok, Lisbon, or some godforsaken airport you never meant to be in. Nomads orbit like that.

By the time the evening finally fizzled out — karaoke ringing in our ears, pool balls still clacking — I could see how many storylines were quietly forming. New collaborations. Ideas not quite ready to declare themselves. Questions hitching a ride into the next phase of the book.

Not outcomes. Just beginnings pretending not to be beginnings.

So yes, bittersweet. Sad to leave, of course. But I’m also carrying an inconvenient amount of… hope? Perspective? Mildly chaotic inspiration? Whatever it is, it’s coming with me.

Another threshold crossed. Not grand, but the sort that matters later.

Leaving Nagasaki for Tokyo felt like stepping out of a quiet room and straight into a speaker stack. One moment I was waving increasingly ridiculous goodbyes in a café — then crying in an airport like a woman in a low-budget travel documentary — and the next I was in Shinjuku Station trying to remember how to function in a city built entirely from escalators and LED screens.

Tokyo is always a jolt, but after a month of islands and low-rise neighbourhoods, it hit differently. Buildings stacked on buildings. Trains layered like geological strata. Enough neon to power a small European nation. My brain, still tuned to Nagasaki’s warmth, tried to cope and promptly threw an exception error.

But in the middle of all that intensity was a tiny moment of calm: a visit to Kanda Myojin Shrine, where Tokyo’s tech industry goes to have its ventures blessed. In Akihabara’s chaos — all anime billboards, maid cafés, shops selling cables of brief but unquestionable necessity — I bought a charm for digital safety and asked for a blessing for my business. A thoroughly modern pilgrimage: startup meets Shinto.

Oddly grounding, too. A reminder that even in a hypermodern city, people still seek rituals to mark beginnings or ask for protection as they step into the unknown. Another threshold, just with better branding.

The rest of Tokyo unfolded as it always does: exhilarating, overwhelming, impossible to process in real time. Even buying water felt like an extreme sport. Every sign shouts. Every pavement pulses. Every crossing demands confidence you may or may not possess.

But beneath the sensory overload was something gentler. A sense that this, too, was part of the transition. If Nagasaki was the month-long inhale, Tokyo was the exhale — abrupt, glittering, impossible to ignore, but ultimately part of the same breath.

And somewhere between Shinjuku’s chaos and Meiji Shrine’s calm, I realised I wasn’t overwhelmed because Tokyo is too much.

I was overwhelmed because the past month had meant more than I’d let myself admit.

This week in photos

A person standing in front of a traditional Japanese shrine gate, flanked by decorative lanterns and colorful banners, with modern buildings visible in the background.

A Pikachu figurine wearing a headband, holding a bowl of ramen on a wooden display, with a red banner in the background featuring Pokémon-themed designs.

Weeknote 2025/45

November 10, 2025November 10, 2025 / Sharon O'Dea / 1 Comment

A distant view of Gunkanjima, also known as Hashima Island, featuring abandoned concrete buildings and a rocky hill under a clear blue sky. — *Gunkanjima, or Battleship Island (photo by me)*

I began the week on a boat bound for Gunkanjima, a ghost island that was once the most densely populated place on Earth. From the deck, it looks like a floating city, a tangle of concrete blocks rising from the sea. A century ago, thousands of miners lived here, stacked in dormitories above the tunnels they worked in below. Coal fuelled Japan’s industrial revolution, and this tiny island was its engine room.

Then the coal ran out. Within months, the residents were gone, leaving behind schools, cinemas, playgrounds — lives interrupted mid-sentence. Nature has reclaimed it now: trees sprout from window frames, waves gnaw at stairwells, concrete smashed by annual typhoons. The tour guide called it “a monument to progress” though it looked more like a cautionary tale. Every industrial revolution leaves ghosts. You wonder what ours will look like. Server farms in the desert, perhaps, or data centres left humming to themselves long after we’ve moved on.

The week turned from from ruins to road trips. On Monday, on a whim, we headed north. First, the glass sand beach at Omura, the most Wes-Anderson train station imaginable glowing under a pink sky, then dinner in a tiny onsen town where hot-spring footbaths line the street. At one point I found myself perched at one with my laptop — the most literal interpretation yet of “working from anywhere.”

Finally we set off to catch the final night of teamLab: A Forest Where Gods Live, an installation we’d only discovered the day before. The exhibition had been running for months in the ancient Mifuneyama forest, but Monday was its very last evening. So we threw plans to the wind, piled into a rental car, and drove through the dark.

By the time we arrived, it was pitch dark, save for the moon hanging over the park — a vast garden of ancient stones and trees, half-swallowed by mist. teamLab had transformed it into something otherworldly: waterfalls of light cascading down boulders, azaleas blooming in digital colour as you passed, and koi fish made of pixels swimming in rippling ponds.

It wasn’t just beautiful; it felt sentient. The light shifted as you moved, responding to your presence. A trunk would glow, then fade. A rock would bloom briefly, then fall dark again. The boundary between nature and code dissolved. The forest felt alive; half divine, half designed.

A vibrant digital waterfall illuminated with colorful lights cascading down a rocky surface, surrounded by dark foliage and trees in a misty forest setting.

A nighttime view of a forest illuminated with colorful lights, showcasing vibrant green and blue hues among the trees and shrubs.

And because we’d arrived at the very end (the last night, actually the very last hours) there was an added sense of fragility. Soon it would all vanish. The lights dismantled, the cables packed away, the forest returned to its unlit self.

Tuesday brought another hidden world: a private bar tucked inside a 200-year-old house. The barman, dressed entirely in black, spoke softly through an interpreter, his enthusiasm and knowledge palpable. He talked us through his gin collection, explaining why drinks taste better from crystal glasses — not as a gimmick, but as a philosophy. I’m not entirely convinced. But each pour was deliberate, reverent even. The house itself was a work of understated beauty: all tatami mats, dark beams, and the scent of cigarette smoke and stories.

Experiences like this keep catching me off guard here. Not curated, not for show, just shared out of sheer generosity and pride. The kind that make you feel lucky to have stumbled into them.

Wednesday was back to work: an interview with a journalist from the Asahi Shimbun about global nomadism, the future of work, and this curious experiment I’m part of. Then a meeting with a digital workplace vendor (because I am, unapologetically, a massive nerd for such things) before rounding off the day at Stadium Onsen for a sauna and cold plunge. A uniquely Japanese ritual I’m fast becoming addicted to; equal parts mindfulness and mild masochism.

At a community gathering that evening, Ryota (one of the programme team) told us about okagesame: the unseen labour that allows things to happen. The work that doesn’t seek attention. The shadows that make the light visible. The concept lodged in my head and hasn’t left since.

Thursday might have been my favourite day so far. A group of local women invited us to dress in yukata (lighter, day-wear kimonos) and even did our hair before taking us on a photo walk around town. There’s something special about seeing a place through someone else’s eyes, especially when they’re so proud to share it.

I did find myself wondering, briefly, whether this edges into cultural appropriation. Everyone here insists it doesn’t, but no one can quite explain why. Perhaps context matters: who’s offering, who’s receiving, and whether the exchange is rooted in pride or parody. Either way, it felt genuine.

I felt radiant for once. And, having weighed myself at the onsen the day before and realised I’d quietly hit my target weight, it was nice to see a photo of myself and not immediately wince. Small victories.

A person smiling while wearing a floral kimono, showcasing a half-dressed traditional outfit in a modern kitchen setting.

Person wearing a colorful floral yukata with a green obi, standing outdoors under trees.

That evening we drove back to Omura for a taiko drumming workshop. Loud, joyful, and communal. You can’t play taiko alone: it’s about rhythm and synchronicity, trust and timing. Again, that theme of unseen coordination. The collective effort that makes something beautiful look effortless.

A diverse group of people poses together in a community taiko drumming workshop, holding drumsticks and displaying cheerful expressions.

A person playing a taiko drum enthusiastically in a practice space, holding drumsticks and wearing a black outfit.

By Friday, Nagasaki had been overrun by Pokémon Go players. Thousands had flown in for an in-game event, chasing digital creatures through real streets. I didn’t have a ticket, but it was fun to watch the city buzz with people of all ages.

That night, a “quick drink” with my fellow digital nomads — people I’ve only known a couple of weeks — turned into a late night out, which turned into ramen at 3am. Connection happens fast here. Different languages, different backgrounds, but the same impulse to stay up too late laughing and being heroically bad at darts. Proof, maybe, that even in a world intently staring at its phone, what we crave most is still human connection.

Saturday unfolded in two acts: a morning of small, personal triumph (I bought my first pair of UK size 8 jeans in about twenty years and cannot stop smiling), then a remarkable evening. Our group met the Mayor of Nagasaki to share feedback on making the city more nomad-friendly — the visible, civic part of this grand experiment — before heading to dinner hosted by kenban, Nagasaki’s geisha. The food exquisite, the music ethereal, the laughter unguarded. A glimpse of a world few Japanese people ever see. Another gift, freely shared.

Three women in traditional Japanese kimonos performing a dance on stage, holding colorful folding fans and flower arrangements, with decorative lanterns hanging overhead.

Five women in traditional Japanese kimonos seated on tatami mats, smiling and interacting in a traditional setting.

Now, as I write this, I’m on the shinkansen slicing across Kyushu, fields and mountains blurring past, heading to Fukuoka to meet my husband for our anniversary. I’m thinking about how much of life — and work — runs on okagesame. The invisible scaffolding. The people who hold things up without ever being seen. From the miners who built Gunkanjima to the engineers who built TeamLab’s dreamscape; from the barman who polishes crystal glasses to the local women who tie silk sashes just so; from the quiet work of Ryo, Shelly, Tam, Nanami, Doy-Chan and the Nagasaki Nomads team to the simple pleasure of a shared meal, everything depends on what’s hidden.

It’s funny, really. You come halfway across the world to think about the future of work, and end up learning from a miner, a barman, and a forest full of lights. Turns out the future isn’t an app. It’s appreciation.

This week in photos

A view of the crumbling remains of a building on Gunkanjima, with overgrown vegetation and partly collapsed concrete structures under a blue sky.

Abandoned buildings on Gunkanjima, an island once known for its coal mining, with remnants of brick walls and concrete structures against a clear blue sky.