The residue has a price

/ Sharon O'Dea / Leave a comment
Surrealist painting of an abandoned open-plan office at dusk. On a pedestal, a glass bell jar holds a small lavender cloud made of faint speech-bubble shapes, with an orange auction tag hanging beneath it. Wisps of vapour drift towards it from the empty desks.


In August I wrote a piece for Reworked about the extraordinary afterlife of Spirit Airlines. The airline had gone bankrupt, leaving behind 100 million emails, 500 million Microsoft Teams messages, and the files, calendars and other records of its working life. Google bid $10 million for the archive. Then micro1, a startup building AI agents designed to work inside simulated companies, made a late offer of $12.5 million.

The airline was dead. Its employees had lost their jobs. But the corporate corpse still had a few organs worth harvesting.

My argument was that an archive holds the residue of work, not the work itself. And that you don’t need to believe the residue is valuable for it to change how people behave. You only need to believe that someone else does.

This week, Diane Coyle, Bennett Professor of Public Policy at Cambridge, published a working paper that arrives at roughly the same place from the opposite direction. I came at it from twenty years of watching people decide what to put in writing. She comes at it from the economics of intangible assets.

Coyle explains why relationships become more valuable as AI makes everything else easier to replicate. Spirit shows what happens when someone decides to strip-mine the evidence of them. And in a particularly elegant piece of economic self-sabotage, the prospect of extraction may make people rather less willing to leave anything worth mining.

Relationships are the moat

Coyle’s paper, The business of business is relationships, opens with a number most comms people will find faintly vindicating. By WIPO’s estimate, intangibles accounted for between 77% and 90% of the enterprise value of large companies in the top ten economies in 2024. Not factories, not stock. Stuff you can’t drop on your foot.

She proposes distinguishing between two kinds of intangible capital.

Knowledge capital is the codified, transferable stuff: software, data, brands, patents, designs. It can be owned, licensed, protected and sold. Its value often depends on being able to prevent other people from using it.

Organisational capital is harder to pin down. Management know-how, internal routines, the relationships that make things happen, and the vast body of knowledge about how the organisation actually works, as opposed to how someone in Transformation thinks it works after spending six months drawing boxes. It’s tacit, contextual and difficult to separate from the organisation that created it.

Her argument is that generative AI will put pressure on the value of codified knowledge while making organisational capital relatively more important.

When everyone has access to the same models, the same automation and the same ability to produce suspiciously familiar PowerPoint decks, competitive advantage has to come from somewhere else.

She models work as a chain of complementary tasks, where the weakest link determines what the whole system can achieve. Making one link spectacularly efficient doesn’t help much if the next one still involves persuading someone in Procurement to reply on Teams.

Who knows whom. Who can get something unstuck. Who understands why a particular process exists, even though nobody has documented the reason since 2014. Who you actually need to speak to in Finance.

These aren’t decorative features of organisational life. They’re part of how economic value gets created.

It’s the most rigorous economic case for internal communication and collaboration I’ve read in years. And it never once uses the phrase “internal communication”.

The afterlife of an airline

Coyle recognises that some organisational knowledge can be digitised and transferred, although much of its value depends on the context in which it was created. AI complicates that distinction because it can learn from digitally recorded activity, acquiring something that looks remarkably like tacit knowledge.

Spirit offers a rather grisly demonstration.

Google’s $10 million bid was selected at auction, although the sale still requires court approval. micro1’s higher late offer has not displaced Google as the selected buyer. And the approval hearing, originally scheduled for 14 October, has now been postponed until 6 November, following objections about employee privacy.

In a letter to Spirit and Google, 121 US lawmakers warned that removing names and other direct identifiers might not be enough to prevent individuals being identified from the records. Unions have also challenged the proposed transfer. Google says personal information will be excluded or de-identified by an independent third party before it receives the data.

There is a particularly revealing distinction in the proceedings. A court-appointed privacy ombudsman has recommended approval following additional safeguards for consumers. Employee privacy, however, fell outside the scope of the assessment.

The passengers have a privacy assessment. The people whose conversations helped run the airline are still fighting over what happens to theirs.

The hearing has been delayed, but the commercial proposition remains: records of an organisation’s working life have attracted substantial bids from companies interested in what AI might learn from them.

That doesn’t mean Spirit’s organisational capital was worth $12.5 million. It means a bidder believed it could extract that much value from the records. Those are different calculations.

An archive might tell you that everyone went to Jane in Finance whenever a procurement decision got complicated. It can’t necessarily tell you why. Was Jane the expert, the person with authority, the person everyone trusted, or simply the only human being who knew how to make SAP behave?

A model might learn to reproduce the pattern without understanding what made it work. Which, come to think of it, is a reasonable description of several corporate reorganisations I’ve witnessed.

This is the distinction that matters. The relationships were valuable because they enabled people to do things together. The records may be valuable because they allow a machine to simulate how those people behaved.

Relational value, recorded value and extractable value are not the same thing. But they overlap, and AI is making the boundaries between them commercially interesting.

The Enron email archive has been used by researchers for more than two decades. The idea that old workplace communications might be useful to outsiders isn’t new. What Spirit makes unusually visible is the market price attached to those communications, and the question of who gets to decide what happens to them.

Which is a problem for everyone who has spent the last decade persuading employees to put more of their working lives into the record.

The bit that goes first

In my Reworked piece I argued that when people suspect their words might become someone else’s asset, the first thing they stop writing down isn’t the decision. It’s the reasoning.

The trade-off. The reservation. The objection that got overruled. The explanation of why an apparently sensible proposal was rejected because somebody tried it three years ago and the results were catastrophic.

You end up with immaculate archives of decisions, stripped of every doubt, disagreement and inconvenient fact that might explain how anyone arrived at them. A corporate memory consisting entirely of the minutes, with none of the meeting.

Read through Coyle’s framework, this is more than a records-management problem. The reasoning is part of what allows organisational knowledge to survive beyond the people who originally developed it.

And when people stop recording it, the reasoning doesn’t necessarily disappear. It goes back into phone calls, coffees, private messages and the heads of people who happened to be in the room. Which is fine until one of them leaves, another gets promoted, and a third decides they’ve explained the same thing to six successive managers and can no longer be bothered.

What disappears is the organisation’s ability to inherit that knowledge.

Access becomes a matter of proximity again: who you know, which meetings you’re invited to, whether you happen to sit next to the person who remembers why the policy says something apparently insane.

Digital working was supposed to make that knowledge more widely available. Instead, we risk rebuilding the old hierarchy with better software.

And there’s a nasty feedback loop here. The more organisations try to extract value from the records of work, the more reasons employees have to keep the interesting parts of work off the record. The archive becomes cleaner, the organisation becomes less capable of learning from itself, and everyone congratulates themselves on their information governance.

Of course, this isn’t an argument for recording everything. Quite the opposite. A permanent, searchable record of every workplace conversation would be an extraordinary resource, provided your ambition is to create the world’s most comprehensive database of things people wish they hadn’t said.

People need room to think aloud, change their minds, disagree and occasionally say something stupid without wondering whether it will become training material for a future product.

The challenge is to preserve the knowledge organisations genuinely need without treating every interaction as something to be harvested.

That requires judgement about what gets recorded, why, for how long and for whose benefit. Not merely another exhortation to work out loud.

Measuring the wrong thing

Coyle ends with a measurement agenda, because economists, like comms professionals, have an unfortunate tendency to want numbers for things that resist being counted.

Her proposed indicators of organisational capital include organisational structures, management practices, employee ratings and investment in technology. They’re a starting point for research, not a definitive framework, and she acknowledges the difficulty of measuring something so contextual.

The trouble with proxies is that they’re wonderfully easy to count, which makes it tempting to forget what you were trying to measure in the first place.

An organogram can tell you how many layers separate the CEO from the warehouse floor. It can’t tell you whether anyone on the warehouse floor trusts a word the CEO says.

We have more sophisticated instruments in the digital workplace: collaboration patterns, organisational network analysis, employee listening. But these have their own limitations. A Teams graph can show you who talks to whom. It can’t tell you whether they’re collaborating brilliantly or engaged in a six-month argument about who owns the spreadsheet.

Interaction isn’t necessarily collaboration. Activity isn’t necessarily value. And a record of communication isn’t necessarily a record of what mattered.

There’s another complication. Measurement changes behaviour, particularly when the people being measured know that their conversations might be analysed, retained or repurposed.

If people become more guarded about what they write, the resulting data may still look comprehensive. There will be messages, meetings, documents and beautifully coloured network diagrams. But the record will increasingly reflect what people are prepared to make visible, rather than how the organisation actually works.

The instrument isn’t necessarily broken. The behaviour it’s observing has changed.

That matters because we are increasingly tempted to treat digital traces as a complete representation of organisational life. AI makes it possible to analyse them at a scale that would have been unimaginable a few years ago. It doesn’t make them a neutral or complete account of reality.

And the more commercial value we attach to those traces, the less neutral the process of producing them becomes.

Who owns the residue?

There’s another question running through Coyle’s paper that Spirit brings into focus: who benefits from organisational capital?

Among the relationships she expects to become more important are those between employers and employees, including the negotiation over how productivity gains from AI are shared.

It’s a pleasingly civilised arrangement, assuming the employees still have jobs, somebody has invited them to the negotiating table, and the table hasn’t already been sold to Google.

At Spirit, the people who produced the archive are no longer working for the airline. The proposed transaction is being negotiated through bankruptcy proceedings, with the potential proceeds forming part of the estate. The people whose conversations make up the archive don’t individually control its sale, and there’s no reason to assume they will personally benefit from the value their records might create for an AI company.

Organisational capital is collectively produced, but the rights to its digital remains are not necessarily collectively held.

This isn’t entirely new. Employers have long controlled substantial amounts of the information produced in the course of work. What has changed is the range of things that information might be used for, and therefore what someone else might be prepared to pay for it.

Spirit makes that imbalance unusually visible. And the privacy objections demonstrate that ownership of an archive does not automatically settle the question of what may lawfully or legitimately be done with everything inside it.

For anyone running internal comms or a digital workplace, this creates an awkward problem.

We’ve spent years trying to persuade people to share what they know, explain their decisions and make work visible. We did so because organisations lose an enormous amount of knowledge when everything happens in private conversations and the heads of people who eventually leave.

We weren’t wrong about that. But we built the systems on an assumption that now looks increasingly quaint: that the record of working life would remain primarily useful to the people doing the work.

So the answer cannot simply be better transparency about retention policies. Telling employees that their conversations might one day be sold to train AI models is admirably candid. It is not necessarily going to encourage them to keep talking.

We need to make deliberate choices about which knowledge deserves a lasting record, how long informal communications should survive, what secondary uses are acceptable, and what meaningful limits apply to the exploitation of workplace data.

Trust isn’t something you can retrofit with an engagement campaign after you’ve designed a system that gives people every reason to keep their mouths shut.

Just because storage is cheap and someone in IT thinks the archive might be useful to an AI model in 2031 doesn’t mean every half-formed thought deserves to be preserved for posterity.

We also need to recognise that employees have legitimate interests in what happens to the records of their working lives, even when those records sit on corporate systems.

Coyle makes a compelling economic case that relationships will become more valuable as AI commoditises knowledge. Spirit shows that the digital remains of those relationships may have a quite separate commercial value. And the people creating both are beginning to notice.

The challenge now isn’t simply to persuade employees to write more things down. It’s to give them good reasons to believe that doing so won’t eventually be used against them, or turned into somebody else’s product.

Because an organisation can own the archive. It can’t compel the candour that made it worth having.

Weeknote 2026/41

/ Sharon O'Dea / Leave a comment
Sharon on stage in a red top and headset mic, leaning forward and pointing emphatically, with faceless white mannequins in autumn jackets standing behind her.
Me presenting at DanPR in Ljubljana this week

This year’s Dan PR conference was themed A World Without Stability, which is an awkward brief to hand to someone who has built their entire personality around never staying still. I rarely work in the same place two days running. And the conference photos came back showing me mid-keynote, arms flung out in every direction, like a woman attempting to guide a small aircraft onto the runway.

So: a talk about instability, delivered by a fairly reliable source of it.

I took a couple of days away from client work to deliver the keynote in Ljubljana, taking the audience on a journey around Japan to explore how the future is already here — just, as William Gibson put it, not evenly distributed. We can’t know exactly what’s coming, but we can prepare for a range of possible futures by building resilience and adaptability into our communication channels and professional practice. Not by predicting the next crisis, but by making sure the next crisis doesn’t require us to invent an entirely new way of talking to one another.

Which turned out to be rather more relevant to the rest of my working week than I’d anticipated.

This week at work

Part of the keynote involved asking the room to do something faintly cruel to their communication channels: try to break them. For every layer — where you plan, publish, distribute and discuss — ask three questions. What do we use? What if it’s gone tomorrow? And where do people go instead?

I’ve written the talk up properly here.

A packed cinema-style auditorium watches Sharon on a spotlit stage. The giant screen reads "Test it before you need it", with a four-step to-do list and the quote "A crisis is not the moment to discover whether communication systems work".

Then, back on client work, I spent two days hearing the answer to that third question.

Jon and I are in the thick of discovery work at the moment, which means a lot of interviews, a lot of listening, and in my case a succession of video calls from a hotel desk in Ljubljana. And nobody needed a hypothetical outage to tell us where people go instead.

They’d already gone.

Across organisations, the patterns are remarkably familiar. The official collaboration platform that everyone has access to but nobody particularly wants to use. The informal group chat that started as a convenience and yet became essential infrastructure. The knowledge base that accumulated so much information it became easier to ask a colleague than even attempt to navigate it. The shared drive where documents breed, acquire version numbers, and eventually disappear into the sediment. The important information that’s technically available to everyone, provided you know the right person to ask.

Nobody designed this system. It doesn’t feature in anyone’s channel strategy. And yet it’s how a colossal amount of work actually gets done, held together with pipe cleaners, sticky tape and goodwill. An enterprise architecture that would struggle to survive a stiff breeze, but has somehow kept the organisation running for years.

Nobody’s complaining, exactly. They’d simply taken the shortest route. Faced with a choice between following the official process and getting an answer before the heat death of the universe, people had made a rational decision.

And that’s useful intel. Where people go instead isn’t the failure; it’s the insight. One distinction that emerged from the conversations that I’ve been mulling since: different channels carry different social expectations. An email suggests someone has thought about what they want to say. A chat message can feel like someone tapping you on the shoulder and expecting an immediate answer. That’s not a preference about software. It’s a design brief, and a more useful one than anything you’ll get from a vendor’s feature comparison spreadsheet.

On Tuesday I told a conference audience that a crisis is not the moment to discover whether your communication systems work. By Friday I’d been reminded that most organisations have already been told exactly where their systems fall short. The evidence is there in the workarounds, the unofficial conversations and the people everyone knows to ask. You just have to go looking for it.

Also this week

The conference finally got me to Ljubljana, and I’m already certain I’ll be back. It’s a beautiful, relaxed city and — for now — less overrun with tourists than it has every right to be. I’m aware that announcing this on the internet is precisely how the rot sets in, so please consider this paragraph strictly entre nous.

I don’t usually rank my own talks, but Tuesday’s was the best keynote I’ve ever given. Afterwards, the programme director wrote to say I hadn’t simply delivered a keynote, I’d “brought the whole theme of this year’s Dan PR to life”, which I have since reread a number of times that would embarrass me if I were capable of embarrassment.

I also got to hand a copy of the book to Dr Dejan Verčič, whose academic work I cite in it. There’s a very particular feeling that comes from presenting an academic with a book that quotes them: pride, accompanied by the sudden fear that you may have misunderstood everything they’ve ever written. German almost certainly has a word for this.

Sharon, beaming, holds up a copy of Digital Communications at Work beside Dr Dejan Verčič, in front of a purple screen reading "Dobrodošli na Dnevu PR, 6. oktober, Ljubljana".

Slovenia then did its best to make the case for not working. The Vintgar Gorge was autumnmaxxing so aggressively it looked as though someone had turned the saturation up to a level normally associated with estate agents’ photographs. Naturally, I spent an unreasonable amount of time examining the rock formations and thinking about clients. I’m told some people visit places of extraordinary natural beauty and simply appreciate them, without attempting to draw lessons about organisational change. I wish them well.

A wooden boardwalk clings to a sheer grey cliff in a narrow gorge. Two walkers in orange helmets head along it. Below, a still, clear green pool reflects a blaze of yellow autumn trees.
Late sun lights a hillside of yellow and orange trees above a fast, foaming river. A wooden railing edges a path cut into the rock on the left.
Sharon, in an orange safety helmet and navy jacket, smiles and leans on a wooden railing above a turquoise river. The boardwalk winds on behind her between steep, tree-covered rock walls.
Looking down through overhanging branches at a broad, clear river winding through autumn forest. Mountains rise in the blue distance, and a few people stand on a wooden viewing platform by the bank.
A white waterfall pours between mossy rocks into a deep blue-green pool. A wooden bridge crosses high above it, framed by golden autumn trees and blue sky.
Close-up of pale turquoise water churning white over moss-covered rocks and layered stone, with yellow leaves at the edge of the frame.

Lake Bled looks exactly like the photographs, which is the highest compliment I can pay a view.

Sharon, in sunglasses and a pale blue shirt, leans on a stone wall high above Lake Bled. The turquoise lake spreads out below, with its tiny island church and forested mountains beyond.
Close-up of Bled's island: a white church tower rises from a cluster of autumn trees in the middle of a still, turquoise lake. Small boats trace lines across the water beneath a wooded hillside.

And once the last call of the week had wrapped up, I spent an afternoon wine tasting in the Alps, which strikes me as the correct way to conclude several days of discovery interviews. I’ll be proposing it to Jon as a standard part of our methodology. There’s probably a legitimate business case to be made for it, if I can find someone willing to fund the research.

On Friday, Belgrade. Again. Three weeks ago I visited Serbia entirely by accident, when my flight to Mostar couldn’t land and the pilot took us back to Belgrade instead. This earned me an unexpected night in a hotel apparently last refurbished during the Tito administration, complete with the lingering aroma of several decades of indoor smoking. This time I went on purpose, for the weekend, which I guess counts as giving the city a second chance despite it having done absolutely nothing wrong. The plane landed where it was supposed to, and I celebrated with a pub crawl. A considerable improvement on my previous visit, although admittedly the bar was somewhere beneath the shag-pile carpet.

Looking down on a riverside promenade in Belgrade under heavy grey cloud. An old grey warship named SAVA is moored against the quay. Above it, the city climbs a hill to a church spire.
A white modernist building with a tall, slender glazed tower, glimpsed between ivy-covered trees in a park on an overcast day.
A tour guide holds up an archive photo of Belgrade's Victor monument with a tower block burning behind it, in front of a modern glass tower and a red-and-black shopping centre.
At dusk, Sharon stands on a red-carpeted staircase in front of the grand, floodlit façade of the Hotel Moskva in Belgrade, its green-and-cream decoration lit gold, as guests drift out of the revolving door behind her.

Consuming

Not much, frankly. Work, travel and an unreasonably scenic country accounted for most of my evenings. The exception was Thursday’s Celebrity Traitors, which I streamed live on my phone over a solo dinner, propped against the water jug like a small, treacherous dining companion. I regret nothing, although I now suspect everyone at the next table of being a Traitor.

Coverage

Jon and I kick off the new season of Katie Macaulay’s Internal Comms Podcast with Why better comms starts with discovery. We get into infobesity, writing for AI readers, why the things people can’t find are often more revealing than the things they can, and the peculiar corporate ritual of commissioning an exhaustive inventory of everything in the intranet before asking whether anyone needs any of it. Katie’s a superb interviewer, and she got one of the best conversations about the book out of us yet. If you take one thing from it, make it this: start with the appetite, not the fridge. Otherwise you’ll spend six months cataloguing the contents, reorganising the shelves and buying a very expensive new fridge, only to discover everyone wanted a sandwich.

I also made it into Slovenia’s Marketing magazin, talking about why there isn’t one future of work, but hundreds of them. A longer interview will appear in a forthcoming issue, which I’ll share when it’s out. My Slovenian is limited to hvala lepa, so I’m taking their word for what I said.

Travel

Home today. Then an entire week in one country, which will be an unsettling experiment in geographical continuity, before Paris for UNLEASH.

This week in photos

In Škofja Loka, a tall white church tower with a green onion dome rises over a row of pastel houses, one with peeling orange plaster. A small wooden hut with a red-tiled roof juts out over the dark, still river.
A white stone bridge with ornate balustrades arches over a calm green river in Ljubljana, its reflection rippling in the water, with grand pale buildings and poplars along the bank.
The verdigris statue of poet France Prešeren in Ljubljana stands beneath a robed bronze muse who raises a laurel branch to the sky. A pigeon perches on her head.
A pink baroque church façade towers over a cobbled square in Ljubljana. Slovenian and EU flags hang from the building beside it as people stroll and cycle past a small market stall.
Four stand-up paddleboarders on bright boards glide down the calm green Ljubljanica river, between pastel townhouses with balconies on one stone embankment and cafés on the other, under a sky full of rippled white cloud.
Sharon, in a red top and wide black trousers, leans on a stone parapet at Ljubljana Castle. Below her, the city's red roofs and apartment blocks stretch away to a line of mountains under a broad, cloud-streaked sky.
A Slovenian flag flies against a deep blue sky above a round stone tower with a conical red-tiled roof, with mountain peaks in the distance.
Zlatorog, the golden-horned chamois of Slovenian legend, cast in dark bronze, stands on a boulder at the edge of Lake Bohinj. Stormy grey cloud gathers over the steep, forested mountains behind.
In Škofja Loka, a tall white church tower with a green onion dome rises over a row of pastel houses, one with peeling orange plaster. A small wooden hut with a red-tiled roof juts out over the dark, still river.
Sharon, in a red top, gestures mid-answer on a stage with red sofas as a moderator holding a tablet listens. Behind them, a large screen shows the cover of Digital Communications at Work and the words "Want the long version?"

Build for change: communication that holds when the ground moves

/ Sharon O'Dea / 1 Comment
Surrealist painting of a gnarled old tree with its roots wrapped in hessian and twine, standing on a floating slab of earth high above a distant landscape. Soft white clouds drift across a blue sky, with hills and water far below.

Most internal communications planning operates on the charming assumption that organisations are fundamentally stable places, occasionally interrupted by change. There’s business as usual, with its newsletters, intranet stories and meticulously colour-coded content calendars, and then there’s The Crisis, during which everyone abandons the calendar and runs around looking for the emergency distribution list. Half the people on it have left, the other half haven’t opened an email all week, and someone from Legal would like to review the holding statement.

This was always a deranged way to think about organisations. Now it’s bordering on wilful denial. Instability isn’t an unfortunate interruption to business as usual. It is business as usual. Yet we continue to talk about transformation as though it’s a journey with a destination, rather than a series of wearyingly unpredictable events punctuated by steering committees. Nobody knows what’s coming next, and the reassuringly precise roadmap presented at last month’s town hall isn’t going to change that.

The job, then, is to build communication that can flex: channels people already use and trust, in a digital workplace designed to adapt as the organisation changes around it. That work happens in the good times. You can’t build trust once the crisis has started, however enthusiastically you update the CEO’s talking points.

This was the argument of my recent keynote at Dan PR in Ljubljana, organised by Marketing magazin under the bracingly honest theme A World Without Stability. I can’t give anyone stability back. Nobody can. What we can do is build communication that holds anyway.

The future arrived wearing a knitted hat

In Nihonbashi, Tokyo, I was once shown around by a tour guide who sat on my shoulder. It was a small robot in a knitted hat, from a café called DAWN, and the person guiding me was a pilot working remotely: someone living with a disability that would make a conventional job difficult or impossible.

Japan has a labour shortage. It also has people who want to work and have been shut out of work. DAWN connects those two problems. Walking around Tokyo with a robot on my shoulder should have felt futuristic. It didn’t. It felt completely ordinary, which is generally how the future turns up: not with a fanfare, but on your shoulder, wearing a hat.

Sharon O'Dea, in a blue t-shirt and jeans, walks on a Tokyo street with a small robot on her right shoulder
Being shown around Tokyo by a robot guide (photo: Sharon O’Dea)

I wrote much of Digital Communications at Work, the book I co-authored with Jonathan Phillips, in Japan. Many of the forces starting to reshape work in Europe — ageing populations, labour shortages, automation — aren’t the future there. They’re already the present. Japan is a useful corrective to the sort of futurism that involves putting 2035 on a PowerPoint slide alongside a stock photo of someone prodding a holographic interface.

And these forces aren’t arriving one at a time. Demographic change, geopolitical volatility, AI, eroding institutional trust and the fragmentation of work are accumulating and colliding. None is going to wait for the previous transformation programme to finish, or for the steering committee to approve the next phase.

Look at who counts as ‘internal’ now. Employees, yes, but also contractors, frontline workers, supply-chain partners, remote workers and people who move between organisations and projects. Access to information becomes uneven. Context becomes inconsistent. Some people feel close to the organisation; others barely feel part of it at all. Yet plenty of internal communication still assumes an employee sitting at a desk, logged into a company laptop, with enough control over their working day to read a message whenever we decide to send one.

As we put it in the book, “A communication strategy that assumes equal access will, inevitably, exclude.”

The robot in Tokyo wasn’t interesting because it was a robot. It was interesting because somebody had designed a way for a person to participate who would otherwise have been excluded. The technology was infrastructure, not the purpose. Any industry rather more interested in selling technology than asking who it actually helps might want to reflect on that.

Build something that holds

Many organisations still approach communication as a publishing operation. They have messages to distribute, channels to fill and calendars to maintain. The success measures tend to reflect that: how many things went out, how many people opened them, how many clicked. We’ve become tremendously sophisticated at measuring the production and distribution of material without really establishing whether any of it made a blind bit of difference.

But when the ground moves, nobody cares how many intranet stories you published last quarter. They care whether they can find out what’s happening, understand what it means for them and reach someone who can help. An impressive open rate tells you very little about whether someone understood the message, trusted it or could do anything useful with it. You can open an email halfway through a shift, discover you need to complete a task on a system you can’t access, and still count as a communications success story on somebody’s dashboard.

That’s an infrastructure problem, not a copywriting problem.

In Digital Communications at Work, we describe five layers of a communication ecosystem: Plan, Collaborate, Publish, Distribute and Discuss. It’s a way of seeing how information moves around an organisation, rather than looking at each channel in isolation, which is what happens when every department has its own platform, its own budget and a persuasive account manager.

Once you’ve mapped those layers, you can ask an uncomfortable question: what if one disappears tomorrow?

We worked with a human rights charity whose people operate across countries run by authoritarian regimes. They know that social networks can be switched off, sometimes along with the entire internet. For them, relying on a WhatsApp group wasn’t just a question of convenience; it was a vulnerability.

They reduced their dependence on platforms most likely to be withdrawn and made regular local backups of essential materials, so people could still access what they needed without a connection.

Most organisations aren’t operating under those conditions. But the underlying question applies to everyone. If email and Teams disappeared tomorrow morning, where would your people go? If your intranet was unavailable, how would you reach your people? And how many of your supposedly business-critical processes turn out to depend on a spreadsheet maintained by someone who’s currently on holiday?

If the answer is ‘I’m not sure’, you’ve found something worth fixing (ideally before the next incident review).

Resilience isn’t something you buy during an emergency. It’s built through the dreary work of mapping dependencies, agreeing fallbacks and testing whether they work. Nobody gets excited about a backup distribution list until the day they need one, by which point it’s a little late to discover that nobody owns it.

Holding isn’t enough

It’s relatively easy to notice when something breaks. Far harder to notice when it stops being useful. Communication also has to adapt to changes that happen slowly enough for everyone to convince themselves that nothing much is changing.

Working patterns shift. New technologies appear. Organisations merge, restructure and acquire new populations of employees. The channels that worked brilliantly five years ago become less useful, while the people responsible for them continue filling them with content because that’s what the communications plan says they should do.

This is where organisations tend to confuse the channel with the job it was supposed to perform. The intranet, the newsletter, the employee app: these are ways of meeting people’s information needs, not ends in themselves. Yet we become extraordinarily attached to them, particularly after spending eighteen months and a substantial amount of money getting them approved.

In Digital Communications at Work, we argue for separating publishing from distribution. Keep a reliable source of truth, with content that’s accurate, owned and maintained. Then allow the channels carrying that information to change as people’s needs and working habits change. The information should be dependable. The means of reaching it should be adaptable.

That matters even more as AI assistants and agents become another way people access workplace information. Your content may increasingly be consumed and interpreted by machines before it reaches a human. If your policies are duplicated, contradictory or three years out of date, AI won’t magically fix the problem. It may simply repeat the wrong answer more efficiently, with the sort of confidence previously reserved for a senior manager explaining a system they’ve never used.

Flexibility isn’t an annual technology strategy exercise. It’s a habit of asking whether the channels you have still serve the people using them, and being prepared to stop doing things that no longer earn their place. Which sounds straightforward until you discover how many apparently indispensable communications exist primarily because somebody important once asked for them.

Resilience without adaptability leaves you maintaining an increasingly obsolete system. Adaptability without resilience gets you chaos with a new logo.

You need both.

Prepare the ground before you move the tree

On the Goto Islands, I stayed at Ako House, an old Japanese house restored by a man who bought it for one reason: to save the enormous old ako tree in the garden. He didn’t buy a house and happen to get a tree. He bought the tree and took on the house to protect it.

Japanese has a word for preparing a tree to survive being moved: nemawashi. Literally, it means digging around the roots, loosening the soil and preparing the tree so it has the best chance of surviving the move.

In organisations, the same word describes the work of consulting people before a decision becomes official. Talking to the people affected, understanding their concerns and allowing their input to shape what happens next. Not the ceremonial consultation that takes place once the decision is effectively irreversible, but the kind where somebody might actually have to change their mind.

We tend to do this backwards. Leaders make a decision, communications is brought in to prepare the announcement, and the people whose working lives are about to change hear about it once everything is settled. Then everyone is terribly surprised when they resist, and comms is asked to develop an engagement campaign to address the negativity. Perhaps with a colourful graphic explaining the benefits.

The groundwork isn’t the announcement. It’s the conversations that should have happened before it.

This is where trust becomes infrastructure too. People are more likely to believe what they hear during uncertainty if they’ve had reasons to trust the organisation when things were relatively calm. That means channels that work, information they can rely on and leaders who communicate even when they don’t have a polished answer. It also means being prepared to tell people things they might not want to hear, rather than treating every difficult message as a problem to be solved with more positive language.

Three sentences do an enormous amount of work: here’s what we know, here’s what we don’t know yet, and here’s when you’ll hear more.

‘We don’t know yet’ isn’t weakness. In a period of instability, it can be one of the most reassuring things a leader says, provided they do follow through on the third sentence. It’s certainly more useful than an elaborately worded assurance that the organisation remains committed to its people while declining to explain what is actually happening to them.

The same principle applies to the communication systems themselves. Agree what people absolutely must know, how you’ll reach them and who’s responsible for making sure it happens. Do it before the emergency, because when everything is moving, there won’t be time to build the relationships, the governance or the distribution mechanisms from scratch.

And no, buying an emergency notification platform is not a substitute for people believing the messages it sends.

Our robots are not AI

Back in Tokyo, there’s one detail about the robot in the knitted hat that I haven’t mentioned. The café’s website makes a point of saying: “Our robots are not AI.”

In an industry currently determined to put AI into absolutely bloody everything, including things that were working perfectly well before, this feels positively subversive.

Everything valuable about that tour was deeply human: the planning, choosing what to show me, the conversation we had, the connection we built. The technology’s job was simply to carry a person to where they were needed.

That’s a useful way to think about workplace communication, too. Technology can carry information further, faster and in more formats than ever before. AI is making that easier still. But carrying information isn’t the same as helping people make sense of it, and producing more content isn’t the same as building trust. If it were, the average organisation would have achieved perfect mutual-understanding nirvana by now.

I can’t tell you which change is coming for your organisation. Neither can your CEO, your IT department or your favourite LinkedIn futurist, although the latter will probably sell you a framework for it. What you can do is prepare for a range of possibilities, rather than betting everything on one prediction.

Build channels people actually use. Keep the information behind them reliable. Make sure the system can survive the loss of a platform and adapt when working habits change. And establish the relationships that will carry communication when people most need to trust what they’re hearing.

None of this can be bolted on after the ground has moved. It’s built in the calm, through the deeply unglamorous groundwork that rarely makes it into a conference keynote but determines whether communication works when it matters. It’s considerably less exciting than announcing a new platform or launching a transformation programme, which is probably why organisations keep doing those instead.

The ground will keep moving. The question is whether what you’ve built can move with it.

This essay draws on my keynote at Dan PR 2026 and ideas explored in Digital Communications at Work, co-authored with Jonathan Phillips. If you’d like me to explore these ideas at your event or with your leadership team, see my speaking page.

Weeknote 2026/40

/ Sharon O'Dea / Leave a comment
Me on stage at Unite 26, mid-gesture, in a striped top and wide black trousers, speaking to a full room. The screen beside me reads "Workshop: Signal Over Noise: Winning Attention in an Age of Infinite Content".
Me presenting at Unite (photo: Jonathan Phillips)

We do love a metric. Confront an organisation with anything complicated, human or fundamentally unknowable and within minutes someone will ask if we can put it on a dashboard, preferably with a traffic light, a percentage and an arrow pointing reassuringly upwards so everyone can go home.

This week I spent two days talking about AI, where we’ve built machines capable of producing an answer to almost anything but haven’t yet worked out how to measure whether the answer is any good. The most useful parts of those two days were conversations in corridors that will never appear in the event analytics. Then I went to a museum about migration and found myself thinking about suitcases: identical objects carrying wildly different amounts of consequence.

Some things are easy to count. Some things count.

Unfortunately, these are rarely the same things.

This week at work

Unite was two days heavy with the AI chat, which is roughly what every conference is now. You could have played bingo with the phrases — transformation, guardrails, human in the loop — although you’d have had a full house by 10.15 on day one and then had to spend the remaining fourteen hours pretending you still wanted to hear about agents.

But beneath the mandatory layer of AI conference mulch, some of it was genuinely good.

Charlene Li named the bind most organisations are in: FOMO, the fear of missing out, pulling against FOGI, the fear of getting it wrong. Her advice was to write the strategy in ink and the AI roadmap in pencil. This seems wise when some companies are rebuilding their entire AI stack every three months, presumably while maintaining a PowerPoint somewhere describing it as a five-year transformation programme.

Adecco described a year of rolling out AI at a service centre with no headcount reduction. Their favourite milestone wasn’t a productivity number or an enormous graph pointing north-east towards Shareholder Value Valhalla. It was a previously reluctant senior leader using Copilot, entirely unprompted, to accept a meeting invite. Somewhere, a transformation programme manager quietly shed a tear.

And a Microsoft researcher shared an A/B test that I haven’t stopped thinking about. When a senior leader emailed staff each week about how they’d used AI themselves, usage jumped 37% the next day. Not telling people to use it. Not another training deck. Just being visibly seen figuring it out themselves.

In one session I asked how we’re supposed to measure the quality of what AI produces. The honest answer from the stage was that we can’t yet. Our metrics were built for technology you give commands to, and this is technology you have a conversation with. How do you put a number on a great conversation?

Which brings me to the best part of the two days.

Unite was full of comms people I’ve known for years. As ever, the best bit of the conference was the corridor catch-ups: chewing over what we’d just heard, catching up on what we’ve been doing, and debating the existential crisis AI has helpfully dropped into the industry’s lap while vendors stand nearby explaining that everything will be fine because there’s a copilot now.

It all ended with cocktails, a great deal more talking, and dancing to bangers at a party DJed by Sophie Ellis-Bextor.

None of that will appear in the event dashboard. There’s no percentage uplift for the conversation in the corridor that changes your mind, no KPI for reconnecting with someone you’ve known for years, no ROI calculation for dancing badly with people you like.

Close-up of a big screen showing the Unite 26 logo in white, on a gradient of electric blue and soft yellow.
A slide reading "Attention is a budget, not a resource. You can't grow it. You can only allocate it." Coloured blocks for HR, IT, CEO, Comms and Payroll fill one working day. I'm on stage beside it, explaining.
A wide-eyed, open-mouthed selfie of me in a red-striped top and headset mic. Behind me, a packed room of workshop attendees are bent over tables, deep in group exercises.
woman with bright pink hair, holding a glass of fizz, photographs two attendees posing in front of a Unite 26 and Unily logo wall. On her phone screen, the shot she's taking is visible.
A blurry, purple-lit party selfie of me with Kim and Stu crowded in close and grinning. One of us holds up a swirled cocktail, with fairy lights overhead.
A selfie of me and Kim, cheek to cheek and beaming. Behind us, Sophie Ellis-Bextor performs in a sequinned skirt and black blazer, arm outstretched, in front of floor-to-ceiling windows full of city lights.
A warm, golden-lit selfie of me and Edeje. One laughs widely, and the other plants a mock kiss on her cheek. Behind them are red autumn leaves and strings of lights.
Sophie Ellis-Bextor, eyes closed and hand on heart, sings into a microphone in a black top and chunky silver necklaces. A night-time city skyline glitters through the window behind her.

Also this week

The only thing I managed outside Unite was a trip to Rotterdam to visit Fenix, the city’s new museum of migration, on a beautiful sunny early-autumn day.

The building alone is worth the trip. It’s a 1923 warehouse that was once the departure point for millions of people leaving Europe for North America. Rising through the middle is the Tornado, a double-helix staircase of polished steel that climbs out through the roof to a 30-metre viewing platform. One flight juts out on a cantilever, so for a moment you’re standing over the water, which is exhilarating provided you don’t allow the phrase “cantilevered staircase” to complete its journey through your brain.

The piece that stopped me was Daria Khozhai’s Pravda, a recreation of her childhood bedroom in Kyiv. In Soviet-era apartment blocks, people insulated their walls with old copies of Pravda, the state newspaper whose name means “truth”, sometimes nearly a foot thick, then papered over them. When Russian bombs blew those walls open in 2022, the newspapers spilled out.

Khozhai’s room has Pravda on the outside. Inside, the walls are lined with front pages about the invasion.

The official truth, holding the house up. The other truth, on the walls of a child’s bedroom.

A few days earlier I’d flown into Heathrow on one of those rare approaches that takes you right over central London. I spent twenty minutes with my face pressed against the window picking out landmarks, then suddenly spotted the house I grew up in.

Home, in one of the several increasingly complicated senses of the word.

Downstairs is the Suitcase Labyrinth: 2,000 donated suitcases, each with its owner’s story playing through a speaker. Some are a century old. Some were packed recently, for lives that haven’t quite started yet.

Today I unpacked my own suitcase from the last trip and immediately packed it again, because I’m off tomorrow. Passport in my Uniqlo bag, as ever. Laptop charger. Too many pairs of shoes. Packing sudoku. The familiar little choreography of leaving.

I didn’t give the passport a second thought. That’s the privilege: not having to.

A mirror selfie of me reflected in the polished steel of the Tornado: black top, jeans, a jumper tied at the waist, sunglasses pushed up. The curved timber deck sweeps behind me, with Rotterdam's rooftops and towers under a hazy blue sky.
The Tornado's stainless-steel loops coil overhead, mirror-bright against a mottled sky. Below them, a wave of green-tinted glass arches over the stairwell. Small figures lean on the rail of the rooftop platform, and a round tower block rises behind.
Through a window cut into a wall of yellowed Soviet-era newspapers, Pravda among them, the paper stacked thick at the edges, you can see a small room. Its walls are papered with recent front pages on Russia's invasion of Ukraine: "Putin invades", "Pray for Kyiv", "The siege of Kyiv".
Part of the Suitcase Labyrinth: trunks, leather cases and modern wheeled suitcases strapped into stacks. At the centre is a green wooden chest, hand-painted with a name, "W. Java" and an address in "Vleuten, Utr., Holland".

Consuming

The Celebrity Traitors is back. I cleared Friday night and had a friend round to watch the first two episodes back to back with a bottle of supermarket cava and a face mask, which is the only correct way to do it.

Two episodes in and it is already must-watch television. Richard E Grant’s gambit. Amol Rajan, my pick to win the whole thing, murdered immediately, thereby demonstrating the predictive power I normally reserve for technology markets. And Claudia Winkleman’s mathematically perfect fringe, no doubt of professional interest to Professor Hannah Fry.

No notes. Apart from quite a lot of notes, loudly, at the television.

Coverage

For Reworked, I commented on Meta’s third attempt at the enterprise market with Meta Enterprise Platform, after Workplace and Horizon Workrooms. My argument is that both earlier products started from Meta’s idea of how people ought to interact rather than how work actually gets done — and that enterprise deals are won in the deeply unsexy plumbing of data, identity, governance and risk.

Published

The produce button: It turns out I had a lot of Thoughts and Opinions about Unily’s Content Studio announcement. I sent some comments over to Reworked, then sat down to dash off a quick LinkedIn post.

Fifteen hundred words later, it was clearly not a LinkedIn post.

The argument, roughly, is that AI has demolished the cost of producing content without doing anything whatsoever to increase the amount of attention available to consume it. This may turn out to be something of a problem.

I had a lot of fun writing it. Only real ones recognise the PTSD of the corporate video years.

Travel

Tomorrow I’m off again, this time to Ljubljana for Dan PR, where I’m giving a keynote: When the Ground Keeps Moving: Building Communication That Holds. It’s my first time in Slovenia, so I’m staying on for a few days to explore.

Then on to Belgrade. Properly, this time, after last month’s accidental visit.

This week in photos

Aerial view from a plane window of London under grey cloud. The Thames curves through the foreground past riverside towers, with a park and a lake further back and the city stretching to the horizon. The plane's engine edges into the right of the frame.
A blazing orange sunset over London rooftops, seen from above. Dark towers stand silhouetted against the sky. Below them are roof gardens and brick buildings, with a lit-up corner café on the street.
A cocktail in a coupe glass with a frothy top marbled in swirls of green and red. It sits on a wooden bar next to three small mirror balls catching purple light.
Two women in white sheet face masks pull faces at the camera. I'm in focus with wide eyes and an open mouth, and Marie grimaces, blurred, behind me.
A pink cocktail with a strawberry garnish, held up in an airport lounge. Behind it, a laptop shows a slide titled "The shift" with a photo of me on a Tokyo street. A man in the background scrolls his phone.

The produce button

/ Sharon O'Dea / 3 Comments
A surrealist painting of a vast, pale office. On a pedestal, a small elegant machine with a single orange button pours out an endless flood of paper, screens and charts that sweeps across the room and up the walls. On the far right, a lone office worker calmly types on a laptop, almost buried.
Yes I burned a tree to generate this pic in CanvaAI, the irony is not lost on me.

At Unily’s Unite conference this week I watched someone turn a set of source documents into a podcast, an infographic and a video in the space of a few minutes.

This was Content Studio, Unily’s new AI-powered tool for taking trusted company information and turning it into different formats for different audiences: podcasts, videos, infographics and more, grounded in the original sources and with humans still in control of what goes out.

It was impressive. Genuinely impressive.

And I could immediately see the use case. Take a health and safety update written centrally, turn it into a visual explainer for factory workers, translate it into the languages spoken at that site, make an audio version for people who spend their working day away from a screen. Do in minutes what would previously have required designers, translators, video editors and several increasingly desperate emails to an agency.

There was, though, a rather lovely irony to the timing.

At the very same conference, I was running a workshop called Signal Over Noise: Winning Attention in an Age of Infinite Content. We’d expected about 40 people. More than 100 turned up.

Either internal communicators have suddenly developed an unexpected passion for information theory, or having too much stuff and nobody paying attention to it has struck a nerve.

So there we were. In one room, demonstrating how astonishingly easy it has become to produce more content. In another, communicators were crammed around tables trying to work out how to stop drowning people in the stuff.

Welcome to internal communications in 2026.

Because the interesting thing about Unily’s new Content Studio isn’t whether it’s good. It is. The interesting thing is what happens when tools like it collide with a communications system that already produces far more than people can reasonably consume.

Unily’s own framing gets to the heart of it: content is abundant, impact isn’t. And now, having identified the abundance problem, we have invented a machine for making abundance virtually free.

This is what we’ve been asking for

Credit where it’s due, because there is a lot to like here. The central argument of Digital Communications at Work is that communication needs to be designed around how people actually work. Not around the org chart, and certainly not around what’s convenient for the communications team.

A frontline employee on a twelve-hour shift does not have the same information needs, available time or working context as someone sitting at a laptop in head office. Yet for years we’ve routinely given them the same 800-word intranet article and called the job done because technically everyone could access it.

Congratulations. It’s responsive.

The problem with doing this properly has always been partly practical. Adapting communication for different roles, languages, locations, channels and contexts takes time and money. Most internal comms teams simply don’t have the capacity to make twelve versions of everything.

AI changes that equation. One source can become an infographic for a factory screen, an audio summary for someone on the move, a short article for the intranet and a translated version for a local team. The underlying information remains grounded in approved source material while the presentation changes to fit the person receiving it.

That’s not gimmicky personalisation. That’s good communication design.

For years we’ve said we should meet employees where they are. Now we actually can.

Which makes the next question rather important: How often should we?

We are already drowning

The communications problem inside most organisations isn’t that employees need more information.

It’s that they are surrounded by it.

Emails. Teams messages. Intranet news. Town halls. Newsletters. Notifications. Communities. Videos. Podcasts. Viva Engage posts. PDFs attached to emails summarising PDFs attached to other emails, with Copilot in the same window offering to summarise the summary.

Then we look at falling engagement figures and ask how we can persuade people to read more. Wrong question.

Information overload isn’t a personal failing by employees who need to manage their inbox better. It’s a design outcome.

Organisations have built systems in which hundreds, sometimes thousands, of people are independently authorised to demand everybody else’s attention. Every function has something important to say. Every project needs visibility. Every leader has an update. Every initiative has a launch. Every programme has a newsletter.

Individually, almost all of these decisions are reasonable. Collectively, they amount to being trapped in a lift with the entire organisation barking its priorities at you.

And then along comes AI and removes one of the few remaining constraints: making the stuff.

Attention is a budget.

Every communication spends some of it. Every notification asks someone to stop doing one thing and pay attention to another. Every beautifully personalised two-minute video is still two minutes in which they aren’t doing the work they’re ostensibly employed to do.

Personalisation can make each individual item more relevant.

It does nothing, by itself, to reduce the number of items.

And when the cost of producing those items approaches zero, I have a nasty feeling we’re about to discover that the natural volume of organisational communication, when freed from all physical constraints, is infinite.

The problem with removing friction

The first risk is obvious: volume.

Production cost has always acted as a crude form of governance.

Making a video used to be sufficiently expensive and annoying that someone, somewhere, had to believe the subject warranted a video. You needed a camera, an editor, perhaps an agency, a budget, and the particular form of psychological collapse that comes from hearing the same thirty seconds of Intro by The XX for the twenty-fourth time while someone adjusts a crossfade.

That’s not an especially sophisticated editorial process, but it was a brake.

Remove the friction and suddenly almost everything clears the production bar. Why wouldn’t we make a podcast version? It takes three minutes. Why not an infographic too? Why not a video? Why not six localised versions, translated into eight languages and personalised for four employee groups?

Soon the organisation hasn’t solved information overload. It has achieved information overload in twelve beautifully targeted formats, each carefully optimised for the precise demographic characteristics of the person ignoring it.

And I don’t think employees will become cynical about AI-generated communication simply because a machine made it. Most people have better things to worry about.

They’ll become cynical if there’s more of it, especially if all of it starts to sound eerily similar.

The signal that somebody bothered

The second risk is trust.

Part of the signal carried by communication is that somebody bothered. The medium is the message and all that.

Someone wrote the note. Someone chose the words. Someone stood in front of a camera and said the uncomfortable thing. Someone decided this mattered enough to spend some time on it.

Effort itself communicates importance.

If the CEO records a five-minute message after a difficult restructuring, that act carries information beyond the words themselves. They showed up. They put their face to it. They had to look into a camera and say “I know today’s news will be hard for many of you” out loud, while arranging their face into the internationally recognised expression for I am not, in fact, a sociopath.

If software turns their announcement into a jaunty three-minute podcast, the information may be perfectly accurate.

But something has changed.

Communication isn’t simply information transfer. If it were, internal comms would have been solved by SharePoint in about 2003 and we’d all be doing something else now.

Who said something, why they said it, what they chose to emphasise and how much effort they were prepared to expend saying it are all part of the message.

The cheaper communication becomes to manufacture, the more valuable those signals of human intent may become.

There’s an odd possibility here that the more polished content we can generate, the more we’ll value the slightly awkward video of an actual person saying actual words into a camera without three keywords sliding smoothly into view beside their face while ambient electronica burbles underneath.

Human imperfection may yet become a premium feature.

Month six is the bit that worries me

The third risk is complacency.

I’m actually less worried about hallucination here than I am about habituation.

In month one, everyone will scrutinise the generated storyboard. They’ll check every sentence against the source. They’ll debate the emphasis. They’ll inspect the images. Someone will zoom in to 400% and discover the reassuringly diverse group of colleagues in the background includes a woman with seven fingers and a security pass apparently growing directly from her sternum.

By month six?

Yeah, you know how this works.

You’re late for another meeting. Teams is flashing. Somebody needs this published by four. You’ve generated versions of this sort of thing dozens of times before and they’ve always been fine.

You glance.

Looks alright, dunnit?

Publish.

Grounding a system in approved sources is important because it reduces the risk of invention. But a communication can contain no invented facts whatsoever and still be wrong.

It can emphasise the wrong thing. Bury the caveat. Miss the thing employees actually care about. Turn a complicated and politically sensitive decision into something technically accurate yet completely tone-deaf.

Those are judgement problems, not generation problems, and no amount of source grounding removes the need for judgement.

Governance needs to happen before the produce button

This is why I’m not convinced the most important governance question is who approves AI-generated content.

By that point, we’ve already made it.

The more useful question comes earlier: Should this communication exist at all?

In my Signal Over Noise workshop at Unite, I used what I call the Fletcher Test: Means, Opportunity, and Motive. I stole the method from the iconic Jessica Fletcher, because I did a sufficiently wishy-washy arts degree to spend three publicly funded years of university watching an enormous amount of trashy daytime television. Murder, She Wrote taught me that every murder needs three things: the means to do it, the opportunity to do it, and a motive.

(It also taught me that Cabot Cove had a murder rate that really ought to have attracted federal attention, but this is not the time, nor is it the place).

The same test turns out to be surprisingly useful for internal communications, with fewer suspiciously well-dressed corpses.

Do we have the means to reach this audience effectively?

Do they have the opportunity to pay attention to it?

And, most importantly, do they have a motive to care?

AI makes the Means bit astonishingly easy.

That’s precisely why Motive and Opportunity become more important.

If I can make you a personalised video in your preferred language, beautifully formatted for the device you’re holding, I have solved the delivery problem. But I have not magically made you care.

I’d go further. Communications teams should start thinking in terms of attention budgets for audiences. Not simply how much content a team produces, but how much attention it’s reasonable to demand from the people receiving it.

Approval shouldn’t just ask whether something is accurate, on-brand and compliant. It should ask whether this thing is worth interrupting people for.

What if we’ve got the direction wrong?

There’s another possibility I find much more interesting. Most enterprise personalisation still starts with the organisation.

We have a message.

We have twelve audiences.

We will create twelve versions and push the appropriate one towards each person.

It’s cleverer broadcasting, really. But generative AI opens up another model entirely. Imagine a housekeeper sees that the CEO has published a long update and asks:

What does this mean for me?

The system knows enough about their role and context to answer usefully. It draws from the original, approved communication. It explains what’s relevant and leaves the rest alone. If they want more detail, they ask another question. The original remains there, intact, as the source.

That’s pull rather than push, and I think that’s potentially much more transformative.

Instead of communications teams trying to anticipate every conceivable information need and manufacturing twelve versions just in case, employees interrogate trusted information when they actually need it.

That doesn’t eliminate broadcasting. Some things genuinely need to be pushed. Emergencies exist. Mandatory information exists. Leaders sometimes need to speak to everyone. But most organisational information isn’t an emergency, however enthusiastically its owner filled in the comms request form.

Pull changes the economics of personalisation because we don’t need to manufacture every possible version in advance.

And if we’re going to personalise proactively, our understanding of audiences needs to get much better too. Personas shouldn’t simply be lovingly hand-crafted descriptions of what we imagine “frontline Fiona” wants, replete with a stock photo of a suspiciously cheerful woman in a hi-vis jacket.

We have years of behavioural and engagement data telling us what different groups actually use, ignore, search for and respond to. Use it.

The scarce skill is restraint

AI is going to have us hammering the produce button with the glassy-eyed enthusiasm of a Vegas gambler who’s three hours past bedtime and halfway through the children’s inheritance.

That’s inevitable. And, mostly, it’s useful.

But the interesting consequence is that production itself becomes less valuable. If everyone can turn a policy document into a podcast, infographic, video, article and six translations before lunch, doing so is no longer much of a skill.

Knowing whether to do it is.

Which brings me back to the bigger question I came away from Unite thinking about: what exactly is the internal communications job becoming?

A significant chunk of communications work has historically been production. We write the article. Build the newsletter. Edit the video. Create the campaign. Polish the CEO post. Turn the strategy into an infographic. Then, because we’ve made the thing, we need people to consume the thing, so we spend another chunk of time trying to persuade them to click on it.

It’s an entire professional ecosystem built partly around the fact that making things used to be difficult.

Now it isn’t. Or increasingly, it won’t be.

And I don’t think the answer is to reassure ourselves that AI simply frees everyone up to do more valuable, strategic work, as if there’s a vast strategic nature reserve somewhere waiting to receive several thousand newly liberated newsletter editors.

There may well be fewer traditional communications jobs. The production layer is getting thinner. Pretending otherwise won’t make it thicker.

But the work that remains becomes more judgement-heavy, not less.

What deserves attention?

What doesn’t?

When does personalisation make something genuinely more useful, and when does it simply manufacture more noise?

When does a leader need to show up themselves?

When should an organisation speak, and when should it make good information available and trust people to find it when they need it?

And perhaps most uncomfortably: if we no longer need quite so many people to make the content, are we prepared to define the value of communications by something other than the amount of content we make?

For a long time, communications teams were constrained by what they could produce. This week I watched that constraint disappearing in real time.

Then I walked into a room designed for 40 people and found more than 100 communicators waiting to talk about how to produce less. There’s probably something in that.

The produce button is the easy bit. The difficult bit is resisting the obvious next step: pressing it over and over until the entire organisation disappears beneath a perfectly personalised slurry of podcasts, infographics and three-minute videos explaining why nobody has time to get any work done.

Weeknote 2026/39

/ Sharon O'Dea / Leave a comment
Brightly coloured tentacles in the Yayoi Kusama exhibit
Yayoi Kusama at the Stedelijk (photo: me)

There is a great deal of stuff in the world that is technically there.

I briefly thought the theme of this week was dark matter: things we know are there largely because of the effort involved in detecting them. But this is unfair to dark matter, which appears to perform an important structural function in the universe. The same cannot necessarily be said for the 95% of SharePoint content nobody has touched in the last ninety days.

I’ve been thinking about the gap between being present and having an effect. The information exists. The capability exists. The feature exists. Someone has carefully written it, approved it and uploaded it to the place where the governance document says it should go. Whether anybody has looked at it since is an entirely different field of study.

This week I’ve encountered that gap in client content, in a research method we put in a book published less than three months ago, in the 270 messages competing for the average worker’s attention every day, and in my own ability to speak Dutch, which turns out to exist but requires mild peril to activate.

Presence is not effect. Existence is not utility. And there is an astonishing amount of organisational dark matter just taking up space while everyone insists the answer is probably another platform.

This week at work

This week Jon and I went from nought to a hundred on two discovery projects at once. That is not a speed anyone recommends. It is also, apparently, the only speed there is.

For one of them we now have a board with ninety-nine hypotheses on it, pulled from desk research and a small mountain of documents. Every one is coded and tracked.

This is not, I should admit, what our book tells you to do.

In the book, we recommend running hypothesis-led research on a Kanban tool like Planner. We add that you could use a relational database if you had the time and the skills, in the tone of someone mentioning that you could also build your own boat. Probably overkill, we said.

AI has since made the overkill option an afternoon’s work.

So that’s what we use now, and it’s better. The method hasn’t changed. What counts as a practical way to execute it has.

It’s the second thing in the book to age since July. One of our case studies has since changed its approach completely. This is the problem with writing a printed book: you spend eighteen months making it as current as possible, hand it to the printer, and reality immediately begins issuing corrections.

None of the ninety-nine hypotheses are in the ‘proven’ column yet. That’s the job of the survey going live today and the interviews after it. But a few patterns are already difficult to ignore.

A tiny fraction of the organisation’s SharePoint content has been touched in recent months. On another platform, the overwhelming majority of activity is concentrated on a vanishingly small proportion of pages.

This isn’t at all unusual. Do this exercise on almost any mature content estate and you’ll find the same thing: a small amount of content doing almost all the work, surrounded by an enormous sedimentary layer of stuff somebody once thought important enough to write.

Somebody wrote all of it. Somebody approved it. In some cases several somebodies probably discussed the title.

This is why we do discovery rather than audit.

An audit is a very thorough inventory of the fridge. It will tell you there are three jars of mustard, half a lemon and a yoghurt of uncertain vintage. It is accurate, complete and eminently conditionally formattable.

It will not tell you what anyone wants for dinner.

Discovery starts at the other end. Who’s eating? What are they hungry for? Who’s allergic to what? Who works nights? Who has four minutes between shifts to eat anything at all? Some of the answers will be in the fridge. Most won’t.

And you’d never discover that half the household quietly stopped eating in two years ago if all you did was count the jars.

In between all this I’ve been writing two talks, both about attention.

The average worker gets 117 emails and 153 Teams messages a day: an interruption roughly every two minutes. The first talk, for Unily Unite on Tuesday, argues that attention is finite and organisations spend it as though it isn’t. The second is for Dan PR in Ljubljana, on what makes communication hold when everything around it keeps moving.

To write it, I did what anyone who has studied workplace distraction closely would do.

I went into the office on a Saturday.

The co-work was, unhelpfully, busy, because someone was holding a party downstairs. But my floor was empty. Nobody was going to email me. Nobody was going to Teams me. I turned the music up and got more done in a few hours than I had in several days of attempting to concentrate alongside the normal digital woodpecker of working life.

The playlist was called ADHD Focus Music.

Sometimes the universe is a little heavy-handed with the symbolism.

Also this week

I did an improv class. In Dutch.

This combines two things I dislike: improv, and speaking Dutch in front of people who can hear me. Two fears for the price of one.

It was, against all my expectations, strangely enjoyable. More surprising still, it turns out I can speak Dutch when I need to. This is not the same as speaking it when I want to, when every noun immediately leaves my head and the word order becomes a hostage situation, but it’s closer than I’d thought.

I would do improv again, a sentence I did not expect to type this week.

Improv people call this ‘yes, and’. I’ve since signed up for Dutch conversation classes.

This is how they get you.

I also went to the Yayoi Kusama retrospective at the Stedelijk. I’ve seen her work in London and Tokyo, but never much of the early stuff: what she was making before she became Kusama, before the pumpkins, dots and infinity rooms became recognisable from fifty paces.

What I loved was seeing the evolution. Not one grand idea arriving fully formed, but an artist repeatedly changing materials, scale and approach as the world around her changed too. The recognisable thing is the endpoint we see looking backwards. Living through it presumably felt much messier.

There’s probably a lesson in there about changing your approach as the times change.

But mostly her work is just joyful, and I loved it.

Consuming

I watched 70 Up on catch-up. The series has followed the same group of people since they were seven, returning every seven years.

It’s extraordinary television. The ambitions at seven. The certainty of 21. The marriages and divorces, careers, children, disappointments, surprises and gradual accommodation with the person you turned out to be.

One participant looks back over a life that took him from a farm in the Yorkshire Dales to a career in the United States. At 70, he concludes quite matter-of-factly that he probably won’t be around to do this again in seven years.

He died days after filming.

I got quite emotional.

There’s something almost unbearably moving about watching people become themselves in seven-year increments, then realising that eventually there isn’t another increment.

Connections

I met up with Liz McCarthy from Oxford University. We’ve worked with Oxford for several years, including with Liz, and always got on well with the team there. Well enough that some have escaped the client category entirely and become friends.

Liz and I had a long, lovely lunch and talked about… well everything, really.

It’s quite a vote of confidence when people who have experienced you professionally still choose to spend their weekends with you.

Sharon O'Dea and Liz McCarthy

Coverage

Three book appearances in two days, each opening with the time ChatGPT invented two books I hadn’t written. By the third, I could hear myself doing the voice.

  • Ana Neves wrote a detailed and very generous review of Digital Communications at Work. Thank you, Ana.
  • ClearBox Hot Seat: Jon and I joined Suzie Robinson to talk about building employee experiences in a more complicated world. I argued that the conversational intranet has a whiff of the search-first intranet about it: bad content sank that idea, and the bad content has not subsequently been taken away by the content fairy. Jon was more bullish. We’ll see who’s right.
  • Meet the Author with VMA Group: a longer conversation covering why the book exists, why governance is deeply unsexy but matters more than almost everything people prefer talking about, and why you cannot communicate your way out of bad management.
  • The Internal Comms Podcast: recorded with Katie Macaulay, out when Season 16 launches in October. More then.

Published

This week’s essay: Why nobody can find anything on your intranet.

It started with the information architecture work I wrote about a couple of weeks ago, for a client whose intranet works perfectly well and on which people still can’t find things.

‘I can’t find anything’ turns out to be one complaint doing the work of at least five. The information isn’t there. It’s there but called something nobody would search for. It’s filed somewhere nobody would look. There are six plausible versions. Or nobody has agreed which version is true.

Only the second is really a search problem.

The rest are content, structure and governance problems, which is why organisations can upgrade their search, rebuild their navigation and still get exactly the same survey result eighteen months later, only now with nicer filters.

The essay covers how to work out which problem you’ve actually got, and why the research still won’t hand you the answer. It also explains why putting an AI assistant on top of three contradictory process pages isn’t solving the problem.

It’s asking a chatbot to referee your governance dispute.

Travel

On my way to London today for Unily Unite. I’m in town for four days, and looking forward to seeing familiar faces at the event and meeting some new ones.

If you’re in or around the City and fancy a coffee, let me know.

This week in photos

Me at a desk in the empty co-working space on Saturday, monitor behind me, with the Dan PR deck in progress.
Black boxing gloves, a towel and a water bottle on a windowsill, with a grey, cloudy skyline outside.
Me holding my certificate from Improbattle Taaltheater, reading "Bewijs van Deelname" (proof of participation), after an improv class in Dutch.
A graffiti-covered barrier closing off a path, with bicycles parked beside it and old buildings beyond.
A small boat of passengers on an Amsterdam canal under a clear blue sky, with the Westerkerk tower rising above the trees.
An Amsterdam canal after dark, with streetlights and moored boats reflected in the water.
Mirrored steel spheres packed tightly together at the Kusama retrospective, each one reflecting the gallery and its neighbours.
My hand, nails painted red with white polka dots, held up against one of Kusama's yellow pumpkins with black dots.
Brightly coloured, tentacle-like sculptures rising from the floor at the Yayoi Kusama retrospective at the Stedelijk, Amsterdam.

Why nobody can find anything on your intranet

/ Sharon O'Dea / 1 Comment
A lone figure in a dark suit stands in an enormous surreal gallery beneath a bright blue sky, surrounded by hundreds of near-identical framed documents stretching impossibly into the clouds. One document glows neon yellow among the otherwise cream, orderly rows, suggesting the difficulty of finding the right information when everything looks equally authoritative.

Every organisation with an intranet eventually performs the same ritual.

Someone runs an employee survey. “I can’t find anything on the intranet” appears somewhere near the top. Everyone nods gravely. A project is formed.

Perhaps the search needs improving. Perhaps the navigation needs another go. Perhaps the homepage needs fewer tiles, or more tiles, or the same number of tiles but in a different order. Someone suggests AI, because it is 2026 and someone always suggests AI.

Things are moved around. Search is upgraded. The new navigation is launched with considerable ceremony.

Eighteen months later, someone runs another survey.

“I can’t find anything on the intranet.”

And round we go.

The problem is that organisations tend to treat findability as a technology problem. Sometimes it is. Quite often the technology is simply the place where a much messier organisational problem has chosen to make itself visible.

Before you start dragging things around the navigation again, it’s worth working out which problem you actually have.

Search matters. But it can’t perform miracles

Let’s get this out of the way first: bad enterprise search absolutely exists.

Search can be badly configured. Synonyms can be missing. Important results can be buried beneath ancient PDFs. Promoted results can point proudly to something nobody has used since Theresa May was prime minister. Pages can have titles written entirely in the language of the team that owns them.

If your expenses page is called “Expense Management Policy and Procedures” while everyone in the organisation searches for “claim expenses”, you have given your search engine an unnecessarily difficult afternoon.

As Jonathan Phillips and I put it in Digital Communications at Work, enterprise search is not Google with a lanyard.

Google has an almost unimaginably large pool of behavioural data from which to infer what you probably meant. Your intranet has Hannah from Procurement looking for the travel policy twice a year.

So yes: configure your search properly. Use synonyms. Look at what people are actually typing into the box. Write page titles for humans. Retire the promoted result for the 2018 office move.

All of that’s important.

But search can only work with what you give it. And “I can’t find anything” can mean at least five quite different things.

Five reasons employees can’t find information on your intranet

1. The information isn’t there

The simplest problem is also the one no search engine can fix. Sorry.

Someone wants to know how to request a new laptop. There is no page explaining how to request a new laptop.

They search for “new laptop”. Nothing useful appears. They try “replacement computer”. Nothing. They browse IT. They try Help. Eventually they message someone on Teams, who messages someone else, who sends them a link to a form they have inexplicably had bookmarked since 2021.

From the employee’s perspective, the intranet has failed.

This is a content gap, not a search problem. But search data can help you find it. Repeated searches with no useful result are a pretty good signal that people expect information to exist that doesn’t.

That makes zero-result searches some of the most interesting data your intranet produces. They’re people submitting content requests without knowing they’re doing it.

Does better search help? Not really. Search can tell you where the hole is. It cannot fill it.

2. It’s there, but called something unexpected

This one is more fixable.

The information exists, but the person who published it and the person looking for it use completely different language.

HR has published a page about “Family Leave”. Your employee searches for “maternity leave”.

Finance has “Travel and Expense Management”. Everyone else wants to “claim expenses”.

IT has an “End User Device Replacement Process”. Dave just wants a new laptop.

This is where search configuration, synonyms and better content design genuinely earn their keep. If hundreds of people search for “holiday” and your organisation insists on calling it “annual leave”, your search engine should be capable of holding both thoughts in its head.

But there’s a content lesson here too. Internal language has a habit of leaking into intranets. Department names, programme names, operating-model terminology and acronyms make perfect sense to the fourteen people who use them every day and considerably less sense to everyone else.

Organisations then compound this by insisting the technically correct term is the right one.

It may be. Your employees are still typing something else.

Does better search help? Yes. This is exactly the sort of problem it should help with. Better titles and content design help too.

3. It lives somewhere they wouldn’t think to look

Now things get more interesting.

The page exists. It has a perfectly sensible title. Search can probably find it.

But the employee is browsing.

Where should information about parental leave live?

Under Benefits? Policies? Working Here? Life Events? HR? People? Family?

There may be a perfectly logical answer from the perspective of the team that owns the content. Unfortunately, nobody has informed the employee of that logic.

This is how intranets end up reproducing the organisation chart in clickable form. Information is grouped according to who owns it rather than why someone needs it.

Finance owns expenses, so expenses live under Finance. IT owns collaboration tools, so guidance on Teams lives under IT. HR owns flexible working, so flexible working lives under HR.

Administratively, this is beautifully tidy. But all it asks of the employee is that they understand your operating model before they can book a train, which is simply not a thing people actually do.

Search provides an escape hatch here, but it doesn’t make the underlying structure good. And people don’t always search. They browse, particularly when they don’t know what the thing they need is officially called.

Does better search help? Sometimes. But this is fundamentally an information architecture problem.

4. Several plausible versions exist

This is where search can actively make things worse.

Someone searches for the travel policy.

Excellent news: the intranet has found it. In fact, it has found six of them.

There’s the current policy page, a PDF from 2024, another PDF attached to an old news story, a version sitting in Finance’s SharePoint site, a regional variation and a PowerPoint deck from somebody’s manager briefing.

All contain roughly the right words. All look plausible. One is correct.

Possibly.

Your search engine has done exactly what you asked it to do. It has found things matching the query. You cannot really blame it for the fact your organisation has spent seven years quietly breeding travel policies.

This is not a search failure. It is a content management failure.

Organisations accumulate information because creating content is easy and retiring it is not. A new version gets uploaded but the old one stays where it was. Teams create local copies because they don’t trust the central one to remain available. PDFs escape into document libraries and spend the next decade popping up in search results like administrative ghosts.

The result isn’t a lack of information; it’s an excess of it.

Does better search help? Potentially the opposite. It can surface all the duplication with tremendous efficiency.

5. Nobody has agreed which version is authoritative

And now we reach the problem search cannot touch.

Imagine there are three pages explaining how a particular process works. Not three old versions of the same thing. Three current versions.

Operations says the process works one way. HR describes it slightly differently. A regional team has adapted it because the central process doesn’t quite work for them.

Which one should search rank first?

There is no technical answer to that question, because the organisation has not agreed what is true.

This is the point at which “findability” stops being an intranet problem at all. You can tune search weights, tidy the metadata, redesign the navigation and put a shiny AI assistant over the top of the whole lot.

The AI assistant will still need to decide which of your three contradictory answers to believe. That isn’t artificial intelligence. That’s asking a chatbot to referee your governance dispute.

Search can only help you find the wrong answer faster.

And that distinction’s kinda critical, because all five problems feel exactly the same to the employee: I can’t find the bloody thing.

Underneath that one complaint might be a technology problem, a vocabulary problem, a structural problem, a content problem or a governance problem.

Treat them all as “search” and you can spend quite a lot of money solving the wrong one.

Intranet findability is a set of trade-offs

I’ve been working recently on information architecture for an organisation we’ve worked with, on and off, for several years.

They have an intranet. It works. People still struggle to find things.

That’s less damning than it sounds. In an organisation of any real complexity, findability isn’t a problem you solve so much as a set of trade-offs you choose deliberately.

Ten teams can have a legitimate claim on the same page. Three of them call it something different. The structure that makes perfect sense to the person responsible for maintaining the information may make no sense at all to the person who needs it once every eighteen months.

Take parental leave.

HR might think of it as a policy. A benefits team might think of it as part of the employee offer. The employee concerned may be thinking “having a baby”. Their manager may be looking for “what do I need to do when someone goes on maternity leave?”

None of these people is wrong. Which is, frankly, inconvenient.

This is why information architecture gets difficult surprisingly quickly.

You cannot simply ask people where something “belongs” and expect one correct answer to emerge. Nor can you hand the problem to the content owners, because content owners know too much. They understand distinctions, structures and organisational boundaries that ordinary employees have neither the time nor inclination to learn.

Once you have worked somewhere long enough, all sorts of absurd things start to feel self-evident. Of course Expenses sits under Corporate Services. Of course Flexible Working is in People Policies rather than Ways of Working. Of course P&C means People and Culture and not, say, something involving procurement.

Then someone joins the company and ruins everything by having no idea what any of it means.

The job isn’t to discover the perfect structure. It’s to find the compromises that create the least friction for the greatest number of people.

And to do that, you need evidence.

How to diagnose intranet findability problems

The useful question is not “How should we reorganise the intranet?”

It’s “Why are people struggling to find things?”

Different research methods let you see different bits of the problem.

Analytics and search logs show you what people do

Start with behaviour. What are people searching for? Which queries produce no results? Which searches are repeatedly reformulated? Where do people bounce backwards and forwards?

Search logs are particularly useful because they capture people expressing a need in their own language, rather than the language you’ve thoughtfully invented for them.

If 600 employees search for “payslip” every month and your payroll team calls the page “My Compensation Statement”, you have learned something.

If they repeatedly search for something that doesn’t exist, you may have found a content gap.

If they search for a policy that exists in seven places, congratulations: you may have found an entirely different problem.

Analytics tell you what happened. They don’t necessarily tell you why.

Interviews show you how people think

Talk to people and you begin to understand the mental model behind the behaviour.

What words do they use? Where would they expect something to live? What do they do when they can’t find it? Who do they ask instead?

This is often where apparently obvious organisational logic begins to wobble.

A content owner may tell you that something “obviously belongs under Operations”. An employee may reveal that they have no idea what Operations actually does.

Both are useful findings. Only one of those people is trying to find the page.

Open card sorting shows how people group things

In an open card sort, you give participants a collection of content items and ask them to group them in whatever way makes sense to them, then name the groups.

The important thing here is that you are not holding a referendum on the navigation.

If seven out of ten people put something under “Working Here”, democracy does not require you to put it there.

What you’re looking for is pattern.

Which things repeatedly end up together? Where is there broad agreement? Where do people diverge wildly? What words do they naturally use for categories?

And, often most usefully, which distinctions that seemed enormously important to the project team turn out to be invisible to everyone else?

Closed card sorting tests your proposed categories

A closed card sort starts from the other direction.

You provide the categories and ask people where they would expect particular items to sit.

Now you’re testing your homework.

If almost everyone puts an item where you expected, lovely.

If participants scatter it across five categories like confetti, also useful.

It tells you that the distinction which looked beautifully crisp on the workshop whiteboard may not survive contact with anyone who wasn’t in the workshop.

Again, the result does not tell you what you must do.

It gives you evidence.

Tree testing tells you whether people can actually navigate it

Once you have a proposed structure, tree testing lets you test the hierarchy without all the distracting furniture of an actual intranet.

Give someone a task: You want to find out whether you can work from another country for a month. Where would you go?

Then watch.

Can they reach the right destination? Do they take a direct route? Do they wander around? Does everyone confidently choose the same wrong branch?

That last one is particularly valuable. One person getting lost might be a person getting lost. Twenty people getting lost in exactly the same place is a design decision waving at you.

And it is considerably cheaper to discover this before launch than six months afterwards, when the navigation is live, the project team has disbanded and everyone has developed strong emotional attachments to the nouns.

Test the structure before you build the bloody thing.

None of these methods gives you the whole picture.

In Digital Communications at Work, we use the analogy of reconstructing an extinct animal from fossils. You rarely have a complete skeleton laid obligingly in front of you. You have fragments and traces from which you build the most plausible picture.

The same is true here.

Analytics cannot tell you about the page someone never found. Interviews tell you what people say they do, which is not always what they actually do. Card sorts strip away much of the context in which real information-seeking happens. Tree tests tell you whether people can navigate your proposed hierarchy, not whether the content waiting at the end is any good.

Every method gives you a partial view.

The useful stuff happens when you put them together.

Research still doesn’t give you the answer

This is the bit that tends to disappear from neat diagrams of the UX process.

You can run interviews, analyse search data, conduct card sorts and tree-test your proposed navigation.

At the end of all that, the computer does not flash up:

CONGRATULATIONS. YOU HAVE DISCOVERED THE CORRECT INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE.

Annoying, really. You still have to make decisions.

Research gives you evidence with which to make better compromises. It shows you where people’s mental models converge and where they don’t. It gives you grounds for pushing back when a team insists its content absolutely must have a top-level navigation item because it is Very Important Indeed. It helps you distinguish an edge case from a widespread need.

But there is no objectively perfect taxonomy sitting somewhere in the data waiting for a sufficiently diligent consultant to uncover it.

At some point, someone has to choose.

And sometimes the research takes you straight back to the organisational questions you were hoping the intranet project would allow you to avoid.

Who owns this information?

Who is allowed to change it?

Which version takes precedence?

Who decides when two parts of the organisation disagree?

Those are not search questions.

Bad search is a technology problem. Bad structure is a design problem. Duplication is a content problem. Authority is a governance problem.

To the employee, they all look exactly the same: I can’t find anything on the intranet.

That’s why curiosity is more useful than certainty here. Don’t begin with the solution you already wanted to implement and work backwards until the research agrees with you. Work out which problem you actually have.

If people can’t find anything on your intranet, don’t start by moving the navigation around.

At Lithos Partners, we help large and complex organisations work out what is actually going wrong before jumping to the solution: using research, analytics, card sorting, tree testing and good old-fashioned conversations with the people who have to use the thing.

And if you’re not quite ready to have that conversation, Jonathan Phillips and I go into considerably more detail about search, information architecture, governance and designing channels around employee needs in Digital Communications at Work: Designing Channels for Employee Engagement and Experience.

Weeknote 2026/38

/ Sharon O'Dea / Leave a comment
Sharon, in a cream cardigan and jeans, smiles as she stands in the bobsleigh track. The curved concrete wall beside her is covered in graffiti in pink, purple, green and teal, and tall pines rise behind.
In Sarajevo (Photo: me)

Above Sarajevo, at the top of the Trebević cable car, there’s a bobsleigh track built for the 1984 Winter Olympics. On Tuesday, I skived off work for the afternoon to walk down it.

When it opened, it was state of the art: a triumph of Yugoslav engineering, built for the country’s first Winter Games and beamed around the world as evidence of a modern, confident state that could pull off the technically difficult business of firing people down a mountain on a tiny sled at 80 miles an hour.

And it worked. That’s the important bit.

There was nothing wrong with the track. Nobody had cheaped out on the concrete or forgotten to consult the bobsleigh stakeholder group. It did precisely what it had been designed to do, extremely well.

Eight years later, the country it had been built to showcase was tearing itself apart.

The front line ran across Trebević and the track acquired a rather different use, as an artillery position for the forces besieging Sarajevo. The curves built to shave hundredths of seconds off an Olympic run turned out to offer useful cover in a war. You can still see the bullet holes in the concrete.

Now it’s more than a kilometre of cracked track curling through the trees. Moss grows over it. Graffiti covers almost every surface, new layers appearing over old ones. People walk it, cycle it, spray-paint it, photograph it. Nobody bobsleighs.

There’s something almost indecently neat about the timeline. State-of-the-art Olympic infrastructure. Artillery position. Ruin. Tourist attraction. All in forty-odd years. Most enterprise software doesn’t manage that many changes of purpose without a rebrand and a licensing review.

The people who designed the track weren’t wrong about what it was for. They just couldn’t design for what happened next.

I’ve been thinking about that a lot this week.

We have a habit of looking at old systems and assuming their current state tells us something about the quality of the original decision. Look at this mess. Who designed that? What idiot thought this was a good idea?

Plenty of today’s messes began as perfectly sensible answers to yesterday’s problems. The organisation changed. The technology changed. People found new routes through it. New requirements arrived; old ones developed the organisational equivalent of squatters’ rights. Somebody added a workaround, then a platform to fix the workaround, then another platform to join up the platforms, and eventually everyone forgot which bit was the workaround.

Nobody sat down with a blank sheet of paper and designed the resulting horror. It accumulated. That’s the bit we tend to miss. We judge inherited systems as if they were commissioned yesterday in their current form, rather than deposited gradually, layer by layer, by years of individually defensible decisions. Organisational geology.

Eventually you end up looking at something nobody would build today and wondering which idiot designed it like that.

Quite possibly, nobody did.

The bobsleigh track certainly wasn’t badly designed. It was exceptionally well designed for a world that ceased to exist.

Graffiti on the bobsleigh track's mossy concrete wall: a grinning yellow cartoon character in a cap, with a speech bubble reading "Sloboda narodu!" (Freedom to the people!).
The underside of a raised section of the bobsleigh track: a rust-stained, moss-streaked concrete trough on angled concrete supports, tagged with graffiti, in a clearing among pine trees.
Looking along the bobsleigh track as it curves away under a bright blue sky. The walls are covered in overlapping graffiti, and concrete supports stick out above among the pines.
A curve of the abandoned 1984 Olympic bobsleigh track on Trebević, its concrete walls covered in layers of bright graffiti. Trees crowd in overhead and concrete supports jut out above the track.
Two graffitied concrete pillars at the bobsleigh track. One has a huge grinning yellow cat. On the other, a stick figure in a hat holds a heart above the words "For all war victims".

This week at work

We kicked off a discovery with a new client this week. Their channel mix has grown the way most do: one thing at a time, each added for a perfectly good reason, almost nothing ever taken away. No villain. No single terrible decision. Just years of reasonable people solving the problem immediately in front of them until, collectively, they’ve created something nobody would ever design from scratch.

It works, sort of. It’s just not designed for what comes next.

Discoveries are my favourite kind of work. Many projects start with an answer: build this, launch that, write the strategy. A discovery starts with a question, and you’re being paid to take it seriously. You get to look at the platforms and the data, then at how people actually find things rather than how the org chart, governance deck and person who bought the software insist they do.

You nearly always find the thing that wasn’t in the brief.

That’s usually the thing that makes the difference..

Obviously I would say bringing in an outsider is a good idea. I run a consultancy. Please apply the appropriate discount for vested interest. But hear me out.

People inside an organisation have learned the routes. They know which channel really means it, which folder contains the actual version, which search result to ignore, and who to ask when all three fail. This knowledge is hard-won, enormously useful and almost completely invisible to the people who have it. After you’ve stepped over the same loose floorboard every day for five years, you stop thinking of the floor as broken.

An outsider walks in and immediately trips over it. That’s useful intel.

We can ask the obvious question without looking daft. We have no emotional attachment to the SharePoint site somebody spent eighteen months getting approved. People tell us things they’d never say in the meeting where its owner is sitting three seats away. And because we’ve looked inside a lot of organisations, we can tell a problem peculiar to you from one that practically everyone has.

It’s usually the second, which people find oddly reassuring.

Timing matters too. The moment to look is before the next thing gets added: the new platform, the new app, the new channel promising to tidy up all the other platforms, apps and channels. This is the workplace technology equivalent of buying another storage box because the cupboard is full.

You have not solved the storage problem, you have simply purchased more storage problem.

Another big piece of work this week sits at the opposite end of the lifecycle. This organisation’s intranet is relatively new. The paths are still clean and not many people have wandered off them yet. They’ve asked for advice on structure now, before it grows, which is rarer and smarter than it sounds.

Most organisations only ask for directions once they’re lost.

Partly this is for the humans. Increasingly, though, it’s for the machines.

Everyone wants AI that can answer staff questions. Fine. But the answer will only ever be as good as the information the machine is pointed at. Clear structure. A named owner on every page. A date somebody last checked it. An agreed source of truth, rather than six documents called FINAL_v7_USE_THIS_ONE.

None of this is sexy. Nobody is putting “we know who owns the expenses policy” on the keynote stage at an AI conference (but if you really want to, you know where I am). For years we’ve called it housekeeping, which is perhaps why organisations have been able to avoid doing it with such determination.

Now it’s AI infrastructure.

People eventually learn to stay on the paved path. They know Dave’s folder is ancient, that the policy on the old intranet is only there because nobody has the permissions to delete it, and that “FINAL” is, at best, an expression of optimism.

An AI assistant has none of this institutional scar tissue.

It will cheerfully wander off-trail, find the 2019 expenses policy in a folder everyone else knows to ignore, and read it back to you with the serene confidence of something that will never personally have to explain the rejected claim.

Also this week

Bosnia: Mostar, then Sarajevo. Country 93.

I was eleven when the war began and fifteen when it ended, which means Bosnia occupies a very particular bit of my mental filing system: the evening news of my childhood. Sarajevo was one of those place names I knew long before I had any idea where it actually was. Mostar. Banja Luka. Srebrenica. Snipers. Siege. UN peacekeepers in blue helmets looking variously concerned.

Occasionally the war escaped the television and turned up at school, when a new kid with little English arrived from a place I’d previously only heard about from a man standing in front of some rubble on the Six O’Clock News.

Thirty-odd years later, I went to five museums about it in three days. This is, even by my standards, quite a lot of museum-based misery.

Three were in Mostar: the Museum of War and Genocide Victims, the War Photo Exhibition and the Mandate of Memory. Two were in Sarajevo. Much of what they showed looked exactly as I remembered it: grainy and grey, all mud and smoke and rubble, filmed from a distance or shot through a long lens. War as it arrived in a British living room in the 1990s, somewhere between John Major’s cones hotline and the nation’s apparently endless wait for Wet Wet Wet to relinquish the number-one spot.

Then, early one morning in Mostar, before the day trippers arrived, I squeezed through a gap in a fence and climbed the old sniper tower.

It wasn’t built as a sniper tower. It was a bank.

The Ljubljanska Banka building was a modern office block on what became the front line, tall enough to command a view across the city. During the war, that made it useful for something its architects presumably hadn’t included in the requirements.

Today it’s a shell: cracked concrete, exposed floors, bullet holes, broken glass. No reassuring visitor-centre arrows telling you where to stand or laminated panel explaining what you’re looking at. Getting in involves climbing through a hole in a fence, which is generally a fairly reliable indication that your travel insurer would prefer you didn’t. Mostly, these days, it’s where people with nowhere else to go end up sleeping, and using.

The whole building is covered in graffiti now. Huge, lurid, constantly changing graffiti, in colours the footage never had. At the top there was nothing between me and a perfectly clear blue sky.

I stood where the guns had been and looked down at the streets I’d watched on the news, on a beautiful sunny morning.

It was troubling in a way I still haven’t quite found the words for. Perhaps because the pictures in my head had always been grey. History had helpfully stayed there, in the grainy footage, where I’d filed it. Finding the same streets sitting under a blazing blue sky, full of people drinking coffee and going to work, made the distance between something that happened on television when I was a child and something that happened to actual people in this actual place collapse rather abruptly.

Looking up at the gutted concrete shell of the Mostar sniper tower. Floors are open to the air and a skeletal staircase zigzags up the side. Faded letters painted along the top read "ZAVADI PA VLADAJ" (divide and rule).
Inside the sniper tower, a bare concrete staircase with graffiti on every step leads to an upper floor. A neon-green graffiti piece covers the wall, and through the open side you can see modern Mostar and bare mountains.
A huge graffiti cat with a red face and round yellow eyes fills a pillar inside the sniper tower. Beside it, an open window frames a sunlit view of Mostar, a tall church bell tower, and a green hill topped with a cross.
A dim concrete room inside the sniper tower, its walls layered with graffiti tags and cartoon characters. Piles of rubble and rubbish cover the floor, and daylight falls through holes in the ceiling.
Another view of the graffiti-covered staircase inside the sniper tower. Behind it, a wide open floor with graffiti-painted parapets looks out towards green hills and apartment blocks.
A low-angle shot across a rubble-strewn floor in the sniper tower: broken concrete, shattered glass, plastic bottles and cigarette packets. On the far wall, among the graffiti, someone has written "I remember when I was a window".
A breeze-block wall with "They told me to find a hobby" spray-painted in black, beside a red and blue graffiti star.
A bullet-pocked concrete wall inside the sniper tower. Through an empty window frame you can see a bright election poster of two smiling politicians on the street outside.

Sarajevo kept doing this to me.

The War Childhood Museum is built around objects donated by people who were children during the war, each accompanied by a few lines of their story. No grand sweep of military history. No arrows moving across maps. Just the stuff children had.

Amina was born in 1980, the same year as me. For her thirteenth birthday, in 1993, her friend Jelena made her a soft toy out of old clothes, because you couldn’t just go to a shop and buy a present. They were both too old for toys by then, Amina wrote, but she kept it somewhere she could see it. Its bright colours made the war days more beautiful.

I turned thirteen in 1993 too. I couldn’t tell you what I got.

I was holding it together until the binder clip.

Damir was younger, born in 1986. One summer he got hold of a permanent marker, which gave him a certain status among his friends. His friend Mirnes, a year older, offered to swap it for a binder clip, the way their parents swapped a bag of flour for a lamp. Before handing the marker over, Damir used it one last time to draw a smiley face on the clip.

Mirnes died a few years later.

That’s when I started crying.

There is something particularly brutal about seeing a war through the things children decided were valuable. History deals in borders, armies, treaties and casualty figures. Children deal in permanent markers, homemade toys and the important business of whether a binder clip constitutes a fair swap.

Two days later I walked past the Genocide and War Crimes Museum and kept going. It turns out even I have a limit on misery museums.

Consuming

Whenever I travel I try to read something set where I’m going. For Bosnia, on Emma Duke’s recommendation, that was Black Butterflies by Priscilla Morris.

It’s set in Sarajevo in 1992. Zora, a painter, sends her family to safety in England and stays behind, sure it’ll all be over in a few weeks.

It isn’t.

Halfway through the trip I visited Vijećnica, the old National Library, which has an exhibition about its burning and rebuilding. A few days later I reached that part of the book: the library in flames, its books drifting across the city as scraps of black paper. That’s where the title comes from.

Normally reading something set in a place gives me a better picture of it.

This time it worked the other way round. I didn’t have to imagine the room, or the building, or where it sat in the city. I’d stood there, and that hit hard.

Connections

On Tuesday I hosted an IABC EMENA session on communicating with digital nomads. Tony Stewart joined from Hong Kong, Simon Cavendish from London, and I dialled in from an apartment in Sarajevo, which felt like either excellent commitment to the premise or an elaborate tax-deductible visual aid.

The audience was a mix of people already working on the move, the nomad-curious, and communicators trying to work out what happens when someone on their team announces they’re going to spend six weeks working from another time zone.

We’d set out to make it a conversation rather than a presentation, and it was. Thanks to everyone who came and asked questions. I’ve written up what we talked about, and so has Simon.

Travel

At home this week, prepping for two talks. After that I’m heading to London for Unily Unite, then Ljubljana for Dan PR, Slovenia’s top communications conference, where I’ll be talking about building communication that holds an organisation together when the ground keeps shifting.

This week in photos

Sarajevo from the hillside at dusk. Thousands of white headstones fill a cemetery in the foreground, and red-roofed houses, minarets and tower blocks stretch towards the mountains, where a band of orange sunset breaks under heavy grey cloud.
Looking up inside Vijećnica, Sarajevo's rebuilt City Hall and former National Library. A hexagonal stained-glass skylight in bright blue, yellow, green and red geometric stars sits above tiers of painted arches and slender columns.
Sarajevo's Orthodox cathedral, a pale yellow building with a tall clock tower, a dark onion-shaped spire and several domes topped with gold crosses, under a grey sky. People walk past on the pavement below.
Bosnian coffee on a pink-and-copper engraved tray: a small copper pot with a long handle, a cup, a lidded sugar bowl and a glass of water decorated with roses. A plate of shredded-pastry dessert sits behind, on a café terrace.
The ornate entrance portal of the Gazi Husrev-beg Mosque in Sarajevo. Carved honeycomb stonework fills the arch above dark wooden doors with geometric panels, framed by faded blue floral painting and gold calligraphy, with a red-and-white kilim on the floor in front.
The Sebilj, an ornate wooden Ottoman-style fountain with a green copper dome, in Sarajevo's Baščaršija square. Pigeons crowd the paving, and a mosque's dome and minaret rise behind the old shops.

Digital nomads aren’t the problem. Your ways of working are.

/ Sharon O'Dea / 1 Comment

How to communicate with employees working across locations and time zones

Surrealist scene of a suited worker facing three open doors leading to an office, a tropical beach and mountains, beneath a large clock and blue sky.

Last year I spent a couple of months living and working in Nagasaki, as part of a programme that brought together digital nomads from all over the world.

We lived in the same apartment building, worked from the same spaces and gradually got to know one another. After a while, something occurred to me.

Almost nobody had a job.

We worked, obviously. Quite a lot, in most cases. But out of a group of around 20 people, only one had what you might call a conventional job with an employer. Everyone else was freelance, self-employed or running their own business.

I don’t think that’s because freelancing is intrinsically more appealing. You certainly don’t choose it for the pension. Or the security. Or the tremendous thrill of doing your own accounts.

They had chosen self-employment because, for many people, it’s still the only door through which that degree of flexibility is available.

That’s beginning to change. More employers now offer some version of “work from anywhere”: perhaps a few weeks a year in another country, within whatever tax, legal and employment restrictions apply. For someone with family overseas, that can mean spending meaningful time with them without burning through a year’s annual leave. For others, it’s simply an opportunity to live somewhere else for a while without having to resign first.

But the prospect of employees working from Japan, Johannesburg or just somewhere inconveniently far from head office tends to make organisations nervous. How will we communicate? How will their manager know what they’re doing? What about meetings? What about culture?

Earlier this week I hosted a discussion for IABC EMENA with communicators and people who work in and manage distributed teams about exactly these questions. And the more we talked, the clearer something became.

Digital nomads aren’t really a communications problem. They’re a stress test for all the communication problems you already have.

We bought the tools. We didn’t redesign the work.

Most organisations now have everything they technically need to work across locations and time zones.

Teams. Slack. Zoom. SharePoint. Google Drive. Pick your particular collection of tabs.

But when those tools arrived — particularly during the great everyone-go-home scramble of 2020 — we mostly poured our existing ways of working into them.

We took the meeting, put it inside Teams and congratulated ourselves on the digital workplace. The desk-side interruption became a chat message. The attachment became a SharePoint link nobody could open. And the working day remained stubbornly organised around the assumption that everyone important was awake at the same time.

We changed the interface without changing much underneath it.

I remember working for a global bank before video calls became routine. I would schlep all the way into the City for 8am in order to sit at a desk and get on the phone to colleagues in India, China and Singapore.

On reflection, this was absolute madness. But the office was considered the place where work happened, even when everyone I was actually working with was thousands of miles away.

Some of that assumption survives. We have distributed technology but surprisingly location-dependent habits. We still organise work around everybody being available at roughly the same time. We still use meetings to transfer information that could have been written down. Decisions still happen in rooms, then travel by osmosis to everyone who wasn’t there.

A digital nomad six time zones away makes those weaknesses obvious.

But they didn’t create them.

If you have to be there to know, you have a documentation problem

One of the most interesting points in our discussion was about what happens after a hybrid meeting.

The remote person can see the slides. They can hear the conversation. With decent facilitation, they can contribute perfectly well.

Then the call ends. The minutes record the decision. Three people walk towards the coffee machine, carry on talking and change it.

Congratulations: your source of truth is now a conversation nobody else knows happened.

For the people who were physically there, this is almost invisible. They know the extra context. They heard the objection raised afterwards. They know that when everyone said “yes” in the meeting, what they apparently meant was “yes, unless Dave catches me by the Nespresso machine.”

The remote colleague gets none of that.

That’s an influence gap, but it’s easy to interpret it as evidence that remote work doesn’t work.

I’d argue it shows something else: too much organisational knowledge and influence is still travelling informally.

The same problem affects people who work from home, people in regional offices, colleagues in other countries, part-time workers and anyone who has the temerity to leave the office before the boss does.

I’ve seen this close up. In one organisation, proximity to senior people had a surprisingly large effect on who got pulled into interesting pieces of work. Something came up, a senior person looked around, and the person sitting nearest got the juicy project.

Do that often enough and proximity starts to compound. Interesting work brings exposure; exposure brings opportunities; opportunities bring more interesting work.

Meanwhile the person doing the nursery pickup has committed the career-limiting offence of being somewhere else at 5.37pm.

That’s not collaboration; it’s rewarding familiarity.

If important decisions only exist in the heads of people who happened to be present when they were made, location isn’t your problem. Documentation is.

Not every meeting should be an email

I am temperamentally attracted to asynchronous working, not least because I have spent enough of my adult life in meetings to have developed Strong Opinions about them.

We’ve spent years talking about paperless meetings. But what if we look at it the other way round, as meetingless papers? Write the thing down, let people read it when they’re awake, and use everyone’s overlapping time for something more useful.

Nobody needs 45 minutes in a calendar to watch somebody read aloud from a slide.

But the discussion challenged me on this, rightly.

The question isn’t really whether we should have fewer meetings. It’s what synchronous communication is uniquely good at.

If the purpose is simply to transfer information, write it down. Your calendar does not need to become a theatrical venue for information that already exists elsewhere.

But if the quality of the outcome depends on interaction, that’s different.

High ambiguity. High emotional load. Conflict. Urgency. Several people needing to build on one another’s thinking. Creative or strategic problems where the friction between different views is part of the work.

Those are good reasons to be together at the same time.

There’s another one which is easier to dismiss because it sounds fluffy: sometimes humans need to see other humans.

If every interaction in a distributed team is transactional, people become a collection of avatars who materialise when they need something from you. The small conversations that build familiarity matter. They give us context. They help us understand someone’s tone. They make us more likely to give a slightly brusque message the benefit of the doubt rather than spending the afternoon constructing an elaborate theory about why Deborah in Procurement now hates us.

Culture needs some of what Tony Stewart called “squishy human stuff” too.

The answer isn’t meetings or async. It’s designing deliberately for both.

Async isn’t automatically equitable

There’s a comforting idea that asynchronous communication democratises work. And it can.

Writing things down removes some of the advantages enjoyed by the loudest person in the meeting. People in different time zones can contribute. Everyone can see the same information. People have time to think before responding.

But writing creates hierarchies of its own.

The person working in their first language may be able to formulate an argument faster than someone working in their second, third or fourth. Confident writers can sound more authoritative than people who think best by talking an idea through.

Then there’s the colleague who apparently has Slack surgically attached to their central nervous system and manages to respond to every question before the rest of the team has opened it.

Their answer becomes the starting point. Everyone else’s thinking bends around it.

Async cultures can still reward availability. If the same people always respond first because they’re permanently online, we’ve simply replaced proximity bias with notification bias.

Good distributed communication isn’t about declaring everything asynchronous and going home. It’s about sequencing.

Give people material in advance. Let them think and contribute independently — sometimes even without seeing everyone else’s answers first. Bring people together when interaction will improve the outcome. Then document the decision so nobody needs to have been there to know what happened.

That’s not a remote-work trick. It’s just good communication design.

Time zones are a design constraint, not a personal failing

If your team stretches from Japan to California, there is no magical meeting time that works for everybody.

Someone is getting the bad end of the deal. The question is whether it’s always the same someone.

Global organisations have a habit of discovering that “the time that works best globally” bears an uncanny resemblance to 10am wherever the most senior person sits. Funny, that.

Everyone else gets a recording and an invitation to feel included.

That isn’t an equivalent experience. If one group gets to ask questions, react, challenge and participate while another gets to press play eight hours later, you haven’t run a global event. You’ve run an HQ event with international distribution.

Sometimes the fairest answer is to run something twice. Sometimes you rotate the inconvenience. Sometimes the answer isn’t a global meeting at all, but stronger regional communities connected by good documentation and handovers.

And sometimes the time difference itself becomes useful.

When my business partner is in the UK and I’m working from Asia, we can use the gap almost as a superpower. I work through my day, hand something over, and he picks it up as his begins. With the right handover, we can fit two working days into one calendar day.

But that only works if the handover is good.

“Over to you!” followed by a mysterious SharePoint link and six hours of radio silence is not a handover.

Distributed work makes the quality of your communication infrastructure visible very quickly. Ambiguous ownership, missing context and decisions buried in someone’s inbox become much more expensive when the person who can explain them has just gone to bed.

Flexibility doesn’t have to mean the same thing for everyone

There is an obvious challenge here for employers.

If one employee can spend six weeks working from Lisbon, what do you say to someone whose job requires them to be physically present?

This matters because flexibility can very easily become another laptop-class perk: something available to senior people whose work can be done from a rooftop in Barcelona while everyone else is told that flexibility is one of the company’s core values and could they please confirm their Saturday shift.

But equity doesn’t require identical arrangements.

One of the points from our discussion that has stuck with me is that for someone working shifts, flexibility might actually mean certainty.

Knowing your rota far enough in advance to organise childcare, appointments or the rest of your life around it can give someone more meaningful control than a vague promise of “flexible working”.

For someone else it might mean more control over start and finish times. For another person it might be the ability to swap shifts more easily.

The useful question isn’t “can everybody work from Bali?”

It’s “how much autonomy can we reasonably give people over where, when and how they work, given the actual requirements of their role?”

And if the answer is none, organisations should at least be capable of explaining why.

“We’ve always done it this way” is an explanation. It’s just not a very good one.

Managers need object permanence

Technology is only part of this.

Some managers are excellent at managing distributed teams. Others are like toddlers, or possibly dolphins: they haven’t quite developed object permanence. If they can’t see you, they struggle to conceive that you continue to exist.

You disappear from view and, apparently, cease producing work.

Presence then becomes a proxy for performance. The green dot is good. A bum on a seat is better. Being within a two-metre radius of someone senior at precisely the moment they remember a project exists is best of all.

None of this is really about productivity. Visibility is simply easier to observe than outcomes.

And distributed work is deeply inconvenient to that style of management because it removes the comforting visual cues. You can’t glance across an office and see someone looking industrious. You have to know what they’re supposed to be doing, whether they’re doing it and whether the work is any good.

Which sounds suspiciously like management.

Distributed teams force managers to do more of that work explicitly: setting expectations, creating clarity, facilitating communication, connecting people, documenting decisions and judging contribution by something more meaningful than whether Teams thinks you’re available.

That takes more intentionality than walking around an office and assuming communication will happen by ambient magic.

But intentional doesn’t mean complicated.

Teams can agree where different kinds of communication belong. They can decide what requires a meeting and what doesn’t. They can establish handovers. They can create space for the non-transactional squishy human stuff. They can ask colleagues in different regions what would actually make participation easier rather than announcing that the global town hall will be at 3am their time and helpfully providing a recording.

None of this requires a new platform.

Which is unfortunate news for anyone hoping to solve it by buying one.

Digital nomads are the edge case that reveals the system

This is why I think organisations are asking the wrong question when they ask how to communicate with digital nomad employees.

You don’t need a digital nomad communication strategy.

You need ways of working that don’t depend on everybody being in the same building, in the same time zone, with the same working pattern and the same access to the boss.

Because the benefits extend far beyond the person answering Teams from Sarajevo (hi! 👋).

They extend to the parent doing the school run. The colleague working in their second language. The regional office six hours ahead of HQ. The person working part-time. The field worker who doesn’t spend all day looking at a laptop. The employee who thinks better before they speak. And, yes, the person who would quite like to spend six weeks closer to family without having to quit their job to do it.

Digital nomads make the cracks easier to see. But the cracks were already there.

And if your communication only works when everybody is in roughly the same place at roughly the same time, digital nomads aren’t your problem.

Your ways of working are.

Weeknote 2026/37

/ Sharon O'Dea / 2 Comments
A crowd of swimmers in swimwear and wetsuits packed along an arched brick canal bridge with bikes propped against the railings, waiting to enter the water, canal houses behind.
Amsterdammers lining up to begin the City Swim (Photo: me)

We place far too much faith in the first verb.

Launch the intranet. Start the business. Join the platform. Introduce flexible working. Take off.

They’re pleasingly definite things. They have dates and project plans and announcements. You can put a tick next to them and briefly enjoy the sensation that something has been achieved.

Unfortunately, almost none of the interesting problems live there.

They live in what happens afterwards. Whether anyone can find anything on the intranet you launched. Whether the business you built ten years ago still fits the person running it. Whether the platform you joined actually rewards the kind of communication you’re trying to do. Whether “work from anywhere” still works once anywhere is seven time zones away. Whether an aircraft that took off shows any comparable enthusiasm for landing where you expected.

This has been a fortnight of second-order problems: the things that appear only after the first-order problem has been triumphantly declared solved.

Which is irritating, because those are generally the ones that require the actual work.

This week at work

Last week came and went without much time to reflect, still less to write. So this is two weeks in one. Not so much a bumper edition as the usual edition with the middle taken out.

Most of it has gone on information architecture for a client we’ve worked with, on and off, for several years. They launched a new intranet a couple of years back. It works. People still can’t find anything.

That’s less damning than it sounds. In an organisation of any real complexity, findability isn’t a problem you solve so much as a collection of compromises you choose deliberately. Ten teams have a legitimate claim on the same page. Three of them call it something different. The structure that makes perfect sense to the people who own the content is almost never the one that makes sense to the person frantically hunting for it while trying to do something else. There are no clean answers, only trade-offs — and the work is deciding which ones you can live with.

Hence card sorts. Open first, then closed.

An open sort gives people the content and no categories at all. They group it however they like, then name the groups themselves. You learn what belongs with what in their heads rather than on the org chart — and, just as usefully, where their heads disagree. The naming is the gift. Nothing exposes the alleged obviousness of a category quite like asking five people to name it and getting six answers.

The closed sort comes next, and it isn’t simply the open sort with the answers filled in. New cards this time, and the categories we’ve derived from the open sort, already named. People file content they haven’t seen before into labels they didn’t write. That’s the harder test: not whether the structure accommodates the set we happened to start with, but whether it survives contact with the next thing somebody publishes into it. Cards that land consistently are settled. Cards that scatter are contested, and those are the ones worth having an argument about.

Then a tree test, which asks the other question entirely: not where you’d put something, but whether you can find it after somebody else has put it there.

Between them, you end up knowing not just where to compromise but why — which is the difference between an information architecture you can defend and one that lasts until the first person with strong opinions, edit permissions and a free half-hour in their calendar.

The rest of the fortnight has gone on preparing for a heavy run of talking. Unite in London at the end of the month: a working clinic on attention and overload, which means building something people actually do rather than sit through while discreetly answering email. A keynote in Ljubljana for Dan PR, on building communication that holds when the ground keeps moving. And before either of them:

This Tuesday I’m doing a fireside chat for IABC with Tony Stewart on communicating with digital nomads — 12:00 UK, 13:00 CEST, 19:00 HK — with Simon Cavendish joining as a third voice.

Tony will be in Hong Kong. I’ll be in Bosnia, Simon in London. None of that should be remarkable. The fact we have to design communication differently because of it, rather than simply pretending we’re all sitting in the same office with slightly worse Wi-Fi, is very much on point. Sign up to join us here

Also this week

A trip back to London: a client catch-up, a certain amount of prospective-client schmoozing, and a long-overdue few days with my parents, which is the item that should have been top of that list and wasn’t.

Took my mum to the Frida Kahlo exhibition at Tate Modern. I’ve seen a great many Frida shows over the years — I’ve been to the Casa Azul three times — and she still hasn’t worn out on me. Familiarity doesn’t seem to do to her what it does to other artists. Perhaps because the work was so relentlessly about the same person changing underneath it.

Sharon standing in a blue dress at the foot of a huge street mural of Frida Kahlo on a brick wall, the portrait assembled from panels with a monkey, a black cat and green leaves.

Also went to an evening called Owning Our Becoming at Soho House, run by Ten with Veuve Clicquot, with Fabienne Chapot and Marthe de Groot. Fabienne started her label at 24 on instinct and not much corporate experience, took investment, and grew it from €3m to €30m in six years — then stepped down as CEO to become founder and shareholder instead, focusing on culture, storytelling, key clients and mentoring. Marthe arrived at much the same conclusion from a different direction. Their advice, distilled: everything will be okay. Just jump.

Three women with microphones seated in front of a large yellow "Bold" sign in a panelled room, speaking to a packed, mostly female audience seen from behind.

Which I did, ten years ago, though I’ve written about how little it resembled a jump at the time. I left because staying had stopped being survivable, without a plan or much of a cushion, and it took a long, unglamorous middle before any of it looked retrospectively like a brave decision rather than a sequence of things I somehow kept getting away with.

The more useful reminder was the bit after the jump. The thing you leapt to isn’t necessarily the thing you’re supposed to keep doing forever. The role you carve out for yourself when the business is new has to change as the business does, otherwise eventually you’ve just built yourself another job you’re slightly annoyed about having.

That’s more or less where I landed at the end of that series: orientation rather than arrival. Expect the ground to move; build accordingly. Easy enough to write in December. Slightly different to hear it said out loud by someone who’s just voluntarily moved the ground again.

Connections

Caught up with Ezra Butler, last seen in New York in 2019. Over brunch we covered the etymology of colour, whether Robin Hood was Jewish, and the missing pieces in the creator economy — a conversational range I’d normally spread across three separate people and at least one WhatsApp group. Seven years is too long.

In London, I put the world to rights with Janet Hitchen over wine, and had a brief catch-up with regular co-conspirator Lisa Riemers. A last-minute let-down then turned into a spontaneous and splendidly decadent lunch with Steve Chambers, which is clearly the correct response to a cancellation and one I intend to make policy.

Sharon and Ezra Butler, wearing a T-shirt reading "Critics are gonna critique" posing for a selfie against a wood-panelled wall.
Sharon and Lisa Riemers, a woman with red hair and dark-framed glasses taking a selfie outside a London pub, black door and brick wall behind them.
Sharon and a bearded man in a navy zip-up top taking a selfie beside a printed floor sign in a venue stairwell.

Coverage

Quoted in Finextra’s long read on how social media became a fintech antihero, alongside a solicitor, a market analyst and several people worrying about finfluencers. My contribution was the structural bit: organic reach has been in decline since around 2014, and social without both excellent content and paid promotion is now functionally invisible. Which makes it advertising, not conversation.

Attention is the only currency on there, and outrage and aspiration are the cheapest ways to buy it — neither of which sits particularly comfortably with products that are boring, slow, probabilistic and occasionally required by law to explain fourteen different ways you might lose your money. There is no native social format for “this is moderately sensible and, assuming several things nobody controls, may work out quite well over thirty years”.

Answering their questions shook loose rather more than would fit in a quote, so I wrote the rest of it up: The communication mismatch. Finextra’s piece is about the advice consumers get; mine is about the organisations trying to compete with it, and why they can’t.

Platforms reward speed, certainty and strong opinions. Regulated sectors deal in qualification, edge cases and several legally significant ways this might all go tits up. That’s not a gap a better copywriter closes. It’s the nature of the thing being communicated, and being bad at social might therefore be information rather than a problem to solve.

The argument I suspect will annoy the greatest number of people is that employee advocacy is an organisational trust strategy with a social media output, rather than a distribution plan with a toolkit. If your people don’t trust the organisation enough to say useful things about it in public, another webinar about optimising their LinkedIn profiles is unlikely to be the missing ingredient.

Travel

This one comes to you from Bosnia, by way of Belgrade, which was not on the itinerary.

The flight made two attempts at landing, neither of which resulted in the traditional outcome of being on the ground, and then returned to where it had started — an experience I’d describe as mildly terrifying while it was happening and extremely tedious for the subsequent 24 hours.

Country 92, therefore, ticked off in perhaps the least satisfying manner available: transit, unexpected return, then being decanted into a hotel that appeared to have been sealed in 1974 and reopened specifically for me.

The room had wood panelling to waist height and curtains the colour of weak gravy. Dinner was a buffet of such profound pallor that the chicken, mashed potato and vegetables — boiled to the outer limit of their structural integrity — were all, and I want to be absolutely clear about this, paler than me. The waiters had the manner of men serving out a sentence.

A narrow twin room with dark wood panelling to waist height, brown curtains and net drapes at the window, a radiator beneath it, a wooden desk and chair along the right wall and a small flatscreen TV facing the beds.
Looking up at a concrete tower block hotel against blue sky, HOTEL SRBIJA in large metal letters on the red-edged canopy above the entrance, air-conditioning units bolted below the windows, trees framing the shot.

And everyone was smoking. Indoors. Everywhere. At all times. With the serene absence of self-consciousness you only see in people who have never once been asked whether they might perhaps take that outside.

I’d forgotten how much the 1980s smelled of cigarettes. Twelve hours in a Belgrade hotel and it all came flooding back, along with the light nausea and a powerful urge to watch Bergerac.

I did eventually make it to Mostar, 24 hours later than planned. More on which next week, once I’ve recovered my sense of humour and everything I own no longer smells faintly of Marlboro.

This week in photos

Sharon leaning on the counter of an outdoor bar hatch, pulling a rueful face at the camera, red polka-dot nails on the wood, tropical-bird curtain in the serving window behind.
A hand held up to show five short nails painted bright red with irregular white dots, in the style of Yayoi Kusama
A floor-length dress on a mannequin in a gallery, the skirt covered in padded red flaming hearts with glass eyes set into them, other visitors and paintings in the background
Sharon standing beside a business bookshop shelf, hand resting under a copy of Digital Communications at Work, shelved face-out among other management titles.
Sharon bent over a bookshop counter signing the title page of Digital Communications at Work, a service bell and stacks of new releases beside her.
A mirrored board reading SUSPICIOUS propped outside a shop on a wet cobbled Amsterdam street, reflecting the photographer in a hooded raincoat holding a phone.