Why nobody can find anything on your intranet

September 24, 2026 / Sharon O'Dea / Leave a 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

September 21, 2026September 21, 2026 / 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.

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.

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.

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

September 17, 2026September 17, 2026 / 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

September 13, 2026September 14, 2026 / Sharon O'Dea / Leave a comment

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.

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

The communication mismatch: Why risk-averse sectors struggle with social media

September 9, 2026September 9, 2026 / Sharon O'Dea / Leave a comment

A businessman in a dark suit stands at a podium reading financial compliance documents; the documents flow from his mouth toward a bright neon social media feed on the right, marked with repeated "REJECTED" stamps. The feed displays viral content (dogs, travel, coffee, emojis) with high engagement numbers. The composition contrasts formal financial communication with the algorithm's preference for engagement-driven content.

Platforms engineered to make you angry, envious or unable to stop scrolling are, it turns out, not ideal places to get financial advice.

And yet here we are.

I’ve spent nearly two decades working around this problem, from the early days of social through my time as Head of Digital Comms at a global bank, to a decade advising fintech, insurance, legal and other regulated sectors.

The pattern is remarkably consistent. Organisations want to be on social media. They believe they should be there. Someone senior has noticed a competitor doing suspiciously well on LinkedIn. A strategy is commissioned. A content calendar appears. Somebody says we need to “humanise the brand”.

And then everyone discovers that the platforms reward almost exactly the opposite of what the organisation is built to do.

This isn’t really a content problem. It’s a structural mismatch between the communication social platforms reward and the communication risk-averse organisations actually need to do.

And no amount of making the logo bigger will fix it.

The incentives are almost perfectly backwards

Social platforms reward certainty, novelty, outrage and aspiration. They like strong opinions, simple answers and people who became financially independent at 23 through a combination of waking up at 4.30am, owning seven Airbnbs and selling a course explaining how you can too.

Nuance has a tougher time.

Good financial communication is slow, qualified and probabilistic. It contains sentences like “this depends on your circumstances” and “the value of your investment may go down as well as up”. Nobody has ever screenshotted a risk disclaimer and captioned it THIS 👏.

The same tension exists across regulated sectors. Insurance has edge cases. Law has liability. Pharma has uncertainty and adverse effects. Financial products contain actual financial risk. These aren’t unfortunate communication wrinkles awaiting a sufficiently talented copywriter. They are the nature of the thing being communicated.

The platform says: make it fast, certain and shareable.

The sector says: it’s complicated, and we’re legally required to explain several ways this might go wrong.

Then someone in Marketing asks if we could make it a carousel.

The organisation isn’t built for this either

There is a second mismatch, and this one happens inside the building.

LinkedIn rewards what we like to call authenticity, although what it really rewards is a very particular performance of authenticity: personal, frequent, opinionated, immediate and just controversial enough to generate comments without requiring a meeting with HR.

Risk-averse organisations are not built like this.

They’re built around governance, approval, consistency and the management of reputational risk. This can be maddening if you’re waiting three days for someone to approve a post saying you’re delighted to be attending a conference. But these things aren’t necessarily organisational pathologies. A bank should care more about whether something is true than whether it is trending.

Put that organisation onto a platform demanding speed, personality and opinion and one of two things generally happens.

Either it moves at organisational speed and nobody sees it.

Or it learns to imitate the people who are getting attention.

Thus we arrive at one of the stranger artefacts of modern corporate life: the professionally produced spontaneous thought.

The CEO selfie accompanied by a surprisingly well-structured personal reflection. The employee story which has passed through six pairs of hands and somehow acquired three brand messages. The executive who independently decides, at exactly 8.07am on Tuesday, to share precisely the same campaign hashtag as 46 colleagues.

The more carefully authenticity is manufactured, the less authentic it becomes.

Now make the employees do it

This is where employee advocacy enters the chat.

The logic is seductive. Corporate accounts don’t travel very far. People trust people more than logos. Employees have networks. Employees are authentic! Excellent! Let’s get the employees posting!

And this is roughly where a perfectly sensible observation about how trust works turns into a programme with a toolkit, a webinar, some Canva templates and an Excel sheet tracking who has posted this month.

Because organisations tend to want the benefits of employee voice without the awkward bit where the employee has to have a voice.

Thought leadership only works if somebody has a thought. Advocacy only means anything if people have some agency over what they advocate for.

Give 400 employees the same approved copy and branded graphic and you haven’t created 400 advocates. You’ve created one corporate account with 400 passwords and family photographs. And trust me, audiences can tell the difference.

The people who are genuinely good at this aren’t good because they attended a 45-minute personal branding webinar. They’re good because they know something. They have opinions. They have experience. They can connect what they know to what other people care about.

And, crucially, they feel sufficiently trusted by their organisation to say something that hasn’t first been passed around a Teams chat called FINAL_SOCIAL_COPY_v7.

That makes employee advocacy much less of an external communications problem than it first appears.

There isn’t really an inside and an outside any more

Once upon a time, internal and external communications could at least pretend to be separate.

Employees were over here. Customers and the public were over there. Internal Comms had an intranet; External Comms had journalists; Marketing had campaigns. Everyone had their own mailing list and, with luck, their own budget.

Social media has made that distinction largely fictional. An employee can read an announcement on the intranet at 9am, discuss it on Teams at 9.15, and post their interpretation of it on LinkedIn before lunch.

Meanwhile, the CEO’s supposedly personal LinkedIn post may have been drafted by Corporate Affairs, polished by an agency, checked by Legal and then read by more employees than the CEO’s actual internal communication.

The inside is outside. The outside comes straight back in.

Which creates a fairly obvious problem if the story you’re telling externally bears little resemblance to what people are experiencing internally.

You can spend a fortune telling the world you’re a wonderful employer. Your employees are also on LinkedIn.

Also, they have met you.

This is why I think we need to stop treating employee advocacy as essentially a distribution strategy. Its success depends on what happens long before anybody opens LinkedIn.

Do people understand what the organisation is doing and why? Do they know where their work fits? Do they trust what they’re being told? Do they have access to useful information? Do leaders trust them to exercise judgement?

If not, another advocacy toolkit is unlikely to be the breakthrough.

You can’t manufacture externally what doesn’t exist internally. Employee advocacy isn’t really a social media strategy, it’s an organisational trust strategy with a social media output.

Perhaps being bad at social is useful information

We tend to treat poor performance on social media as a problem requiring intervention.

Perhaps it is information.

If your organisation struggles to communicate effectively on a platform, that tells you something about the organisation, the platform or, usually, both.

But because we’ve spent the past 15 years treating social media presence as more or less axiomatic, we rarely ask the obvious question.

Why are we doing this?

Instead we ask how to improve the strategy.

We need a LinkedIn strategy.

We need an employee advocacy programme.

We need more video.

We need our leaders posting.

We need thought leadership.

But y tho?

Nobody wakes up wanting their bank to have better LinkedIn engagement. They want to know whether they can afford the mortgage.

So: FFS start there.

The boring stuff is often boring because it works

For some communication, the answer is deeply unfashionable.

A clear piece of long-form guidance on a channel you control can be read, revisited, checked and shared. Email remains remarkably effective at putting information in front of a known group of people. Documentation lets complexity exist without being squeezed into six slides with enormous numbers on them. An intranet can provide context, provenance and somewhere to find the bloody thing again next Tuesday.

None of this will make anyone at a marketing conference gasp, but that is not a serious argument against it.

Then there are people. Financial advisers, branch staff, lawyers, medical teams, managers, subject-matter experts: people who can explain the awkward bit, answer the follow-up question and understand why the answer for one person might not be the answer for another.

Some of those people will also be your best external communicators. Not because you’ve successfully transformed them into Brand Ambassadors™. But because expertise travels.

Someone who is useful, knowledgeable and trusted inside an organisation has a decent chance of being useful, knowledgeable and trusted outside it too.

Good thought leadership is often simply organisational knowledge with a name and a face attached to it. Comms doesn’t need to manufacture the thought. It needs to help the person who had it get it out of the building without sanding off everything interesting on the way.

Governance is critical, too. I know “governance is good, actually” is unlikely to get me booked for many tech conferences, but approval processes aren’t inherently communication failures. Sometimes they’re how organisations make sure what they say is accurate, lawful and trustworthy.

The answer isn’t zero governance. It’s governance proportionate to the risk, and quick enough that the information remains useful by the time it escapes.

Why do we keep doing this, then?

Because social media is wonderfully visible.

Followers! Impressions! Engagement!

A graph goes up and everybody gets to feel something happened.

“We posted 37 times this quarter and reached 1.2 million people” sounds reassuringly like achievement.

“We made our guidance considerably easier to understand” is harder to put on a dashboard.

This is one reason organisations repeatedly over-invest in things they can easily count. Social media provides abundant evidence that communication was distributed. It provides rather less evidence that communication did anything useful.

There is FOMO too, obviously.

Our competitors are there. Our customers are there. Our employees are there. The CEO is there and has started asking why a man he went to business school with gets more likes.

But “people are there” isn’t the same as “this is where this communication should happen”.

People are also in pubs. Most banks have resisted developing a pub strategy.

And social media isn’t really social media any more

There is another reason to revisit all this: the thing we’re calling social media isn’t really the thing organisations originally signed up for.

The promise was connection. Conversation. Communities. Organisations could talk directly to customers and employees; people could talk back; useful things might happen in public.

What we increasingly have instead is an advertising system wrapped around a feed.

Algorithms decide what gets seen. Organic reach has been squeezed. Platforms have become exceptionally sophisticated at identifying which bits of human behaviour will hold attention for long enough to put another advert beside them.

Advertising is useful.

Distribution is useful.

Discoverability is useful.

But advertising isn’t conversation, and attention-capture isn’t connection. We should stop pretending we’re still buying the thing in the 2012 brochure.

This matters particularly in regulated and high-trust sectors because social media doesn’t simply distribute their communications: it fundamentally changes them.

It encourages organisations to be more certain, more immediate, more personal and more provocative because those are the behaviours the system rewards. Then it provides a lovely dashboard showing how well the more provocative version performed.

The metric becomes the brief, and somewhere along the way, “is this useful?” becomes “did it engage?”

Use social where it earns its place

None of this means regulated organisations should delete LinkedIn, retreat behind the compliance manual and communicate exclusively through 47-page PDFs.

Social media can be extremely useful.

It can be good for discovery, recruitment, campaigning, customer service and professional reputation. It can help expertise travel beyond organisational boundaries. It can connect people who genuinely have something useful to say with people who genuinely want to hear it.

Those are jobs. “Being on social” isn’t one.

So start with your actual communication system. Where do people go when they need information they trust? Who do they ask? Which channels work for which tasks? Where does information get stuck? Where does it get distorted? What happens when something moves from internal to external and back again?

Then make those things work brilliantly.

And if you want employees to participate externally, don’t confuse enabling people to communicate with turning people into channels.

The former means giving people context, confidence, permission and access to good information, then trusting them to exercise judgement.

The latter means emailing everyone some suggested LinkedIn copy at 10am and wondering why 47 people are simultaneously “thrilled to share” the same news by lunchtime.

The channel should fit the job

For years we’ve treated social media presence as almost axiomatic. Of course an organisation should be there. The only questions were which platforms, how often and who gets the password.

I think that assumption deserves another look.

Not because social media is universally bad. Not because regulated organisations are uniquely incapable of being interesting. And not because everything was better when corporate communications involved a fax machine and a man called Nigel.

But because channels have characteristics. Organisations have characteristics. Communication tasks have characteristics.

Good communication happens when those things fit.

And the boundaries have changed. Employees are simultaneously audience, expert, commentator and public voice. What happens inside the organisation shapes what can credibly be said outside it. The external story comes straight back into the building to be judged by people who know whether it’s true.

Which means the answer isn’t simply to get better at feeding the platforms.

Sometimes the strategic decision is to stop trying to win a game whose rules require you to become worse at the thing people trust you to do.

Use social media where it earns its place. Trust knowledgeable people to have actual thoughts. Build the communication infrastructure that gives them something worth saying.

And stop assuming every communication problem needs to be solved in the feed.

This piece was prompted by commentary I contributed to Finextra’s “How Social Media Became a Fintech Antihero,” published in September 2026. The mismatch between social platforms and regulated sectors is one I’ve been working around for nearly two decades

The record without the reasoning

September 2, 2026 / Sharon O'Dea / Leave a comment

Surrealist painting of a wide steel filing cabinet drawer floating unsupported against a blue sky with scattered white clouds. Inside, a neat row of buff-coloured file folders has large rectangular sections cut away, revealing the same cloud-filled sky through the empty spaces.

Somewhere in your organisation there is a decision that everyone works around and nobody can explain.

It might be a field on a form that absolutely has to be filled in. An approval that must come from one particular team. A platform choice that constrains six other things. A rule about who can publish where. Something mildly annoying, surprisingly consequential and apparently ordained by God.

Ask why and you’ll get a shrug and a name, usually the name of someone who left in 2021.

The decision itself is in the record. It’s probably in several records. There’s a PowerPoint about it. A Teams thread. A project page nobody has looked at since launch. Possibly a PDF called FINAL_v7_APPROVED tucked lovingly into SharePoint.

What isn’t in any of them is the useful bit: why.

What trade-off was being made. What constraint applied at the time. What other option was considered and rejected. Whose objection was overruled and on what grounds. Which apparently permanent principle was, in reality, “we had £40k left in the budget and it’s use it or lose it.”

That part existed for about a fortnight, in the heads of four people and a meeting that wasn’t minuted properly, and then it evaporated.

This is something I think internal communicators — and anyone responsible for the digital workplace — need to take much more seriously.

We’ve spent fifteen years making work more findable, but we have not made it any more explicable.

Those are quite different problems. Worse, solving the first has made it easier to ignore the second, because a beautifully indexed archive of outcomes looks so much like organisational memory that we kinda stop noticing it isn’t.

Why the reasoning goes first

Every organisation loses knowledge. What’s less obvious is that it loses it in a pretty predictable order.

The decision survives because it has to. Someone needs to act on it, so eventually it becomes a policy, a configuration, a process map, a field marked mandatory.

The artefacts survive too. The deck. The paper. The approval email. The minutes saying “the group agreed to proceed with option B.”

What disappears first is the reasoning, and there are three mundane reasons for that:

The first is that reasoning is the only part that feels unnecessary to record at the time. When you’re in the middle of a decision, the logic is so obvious that writing it down feels faintly ridiculous. Of course we’re doing it this way. Everyone knows why.

The problem is that “everyone” is a group with an aggressive rate of attrition. Four years later, half of them have left, one has changed role twice, nobody can remember which supplier caused the problem, and a new person is staring at the resulting process wondering why on earth anyone would design it like this.

The second reason is that the reasoning is often awkward, embarassing even.

Real decisions are made under constraints. Budgets. Politics. Supplier relationships. Deadlines. Personal preferences. Compromises. A senior person who really, really liked option B.

None of this looks at all elegant six months later, so the rough edges get sanded off. What enters the official record is a rationale: tidy, retrospective and strategically aligned.

What happened was reasoning: contingent, human, occasionally embarrassing and considerably more useful.

And then there’s memory itself.

Six months later, ask the people involved why they made the decision and they will generally give you an answer. They’ll probably believe it, too. Humans are extremely good at constructing coherent explanations backwards from outcomes.

Which means there is a fairly short window in which you can capture why something actually happened. Miss it and you don’t preserve the reasoning later. You preserve a plausible replacement.

We touched on this in Digital Communications at Work as “shrinking organisational memory”, alongside hybrid working patterns and rising employee expectations as conditions tightening around communicators.

I’ve come to think this one has the longest tail. Hybrid arrangements will settle into something. Organisational memory won’t magically improve, because almost nothing in the way we’ve designed modern work is intended to preserve it.

Quite the opposite.

The expensive consequences of forgetting why

None of this appears as a line item in a budget, which is convenient, because it costs organisations a fortune.

Decisions become permanent by accident.

A decision with a recorded reason can be revisited. You look at the original constraint, ask whether it still applies and, if it doesn’t, change your mind.

A decision without a recorded reason has only two possible statuses: permanent or arbitrary. Neither is terribly useful.

In practice, organisations tend to choose permanent, because overturning something when you can’t explain why it exists feels reckless. So temporary constraints acquire the status of ancient law.

This is how you end up with an intranet governed in 2026 by the ghost of a licensing arrangement that expired in 2019.

Platform decisions are often driven by a single technical constraint: it has to be SharePoint, because…

The “because” deserves far more scrutiny than it usually gets. But if nobody writes the “because” down, three years later there is nothing to scrutinise. The organisation inherits the conclusion, assumes some clever person once had an excellent reason for it, and carries on.

It’s an extraordinarily efficient mechanism for turning temporary compromises into strategy.

New people can’t learn from the record

“We decided X” teaches you nothing.

Onboarding someone properly into a function is largely about teaching them the shape of decisions already made: why things work the way they do, which obvious alternatives have been tried before, where the bodies are buried and which bits of received wisdom are still true.

If none of that exists in the record, it has to be transmitted person-to-person.

Organisational knowledge then moves at the speed of coffee. And worse, it only reaches people who get invited for one.

This is one reason informal networks matter so much more inside organisations than org charts suggest. The person who knows why the process is like that becomes part of the infrastructure. Lose them and you haven’t just lost a person. You’ve deleted part of the manual.

Discovery becomes archaeology

When I go into an organisation to work out what’s actually wrong with its internal comms or digital workplace, a surprising amount of the work is reconstructing why the system looks like this in the first place.

Why are there three intranets? Why does this team own that channel? Why is this audience excluded? Why is everyone still producing a weekly PDF? Why is there a separate platform for seventeen people in Belgium?

Sometimes the archaeology is the discovery. The reason something happened five years ago turns out to explain a great deal about why it isn’t working now.

But it’s slow. And there is something a little absurd about paying an outside consultant to interview twelve people in order to reconstruct a decision your own organisation made.

Teams with decent decision records get to spend that time solving the current problem instead.

Please don’t create another database

The obvious response to this is to write a policy saying decisions must be documented. But really, please don’t.

“Document decisions” already appears in thousands of governance frameworks, where it sits alongside “ensure stakeholder alignment” and other phrases that are technically instructions but provide no clue what anybody should actually do.

It fails because it has no threshold, no format and no home, and in the real world, where I am forced to live, you need all three.

Set a threshold

Don’t document everything. That’s how you create another repository everyone resents.

Instead, record the reasoning behind decisions that will outlive the person making them, cost money or credibility to reverse, or constrain somebody else’s choices later.

That’s a much smaller number than it sounds. For most communications and digital workplace teams, you’re probably talking about a handful a quarter.

It also gives everyone permission not to document the other 97% of things they currently feel vaguely guilty about.

Give the record a fixed shape

Four lines will do it:

What we decided
What we chose it over
What made the difference
What would make us revisit this

That last line is the clever bit.

It turns a historical record into something useful. Whoever inherits the decision knows not only why it was made, but under what circumstances they have permission to change it.

It also improves the decision itself. A room full of people forced to answer “what would make us revisit this?” has to confront how certain it actually is.

“We will never reconsider this” sounds considerably sillier when someone has to type it into a box.

Put the reasoning next to the thing it explains

The most reliable way to lose a decision record is to create a dedicated Decision Log in a worthy corner of SharePoint and announce its existence in Teams.

Six months later it will contain eleven decisions, seven made by the person who created it.

Reasoning needs to live with the thing it explains: in the governance space where the platform decision sits, in the channel framework, in the standing papers for the group that made the call.

In Digital Communications at Work we describe programme governance as needing “just enough structure”: a steering group, a standing agenda, records that are actually kept and remain visible.

Most organisations already have somewhere this could live.

You almost certainly don’t need another tool.

One of the counterintuitive benefits of doing this properly is that you can actually write less down.

Teams that don’t capture the why tend to compensate by capturing everything else. Status updates. Meeting recaps. Partial summaries. Deck after deck explaining where we’ve got to, because nobody is entirely confident that the important thing has been retained.

Four honest lines about an actual decision can replace an awful lot of anxious documentation.

And a note on ownership: this isn’t a communications job in the sense that comms should become the organisation’s official minute-taker. It is a communications job in the sense that communications people are often among the few who sit across enough of the organisation to notice when a decision has gone feral and nobody can account for it.

That’s an argument for a seat at the governance table, not for taking the minutes.

And now we’re making the archive intelligent

There is one reason this perennial problem has suddenly become more urgent.

Until recently, people wrote things down on the assumption that the record was essentially inert. Yes, the organisation retained it. Yes, technically someone might find it. Yes, lawyers occasionally appeared carrying the word “discovery” when someone uses a DSAR as leverage.

But most of the time, the Teams chat you wrote in 2022 sat on a server doing nothing.

That assumption is disappearing.

I wrote about this recently for Reworked, prompted by the proposed sale of Spirit Airlines’ workplace data during its bankruptcy. The interesting thing about that story wasn’t simply that workplace messages had survived. We always knew they did.

It was that the archive had acquired value in its own right.

Emails, chats, documents and other traces of organisational life aren’t just records any more. They’re material that can be searched, analysed, synthesised and used to teach machines something about how organisations actually work.

Which creates an tricky tension.

At precisely the moment technology is becoming extraordinarily good at reading the organisational record, humans have more reason to be cautious about what they put into it.

You don’t have to believe your company’s Teams archive is going to be sold in a bankruptcy auction for that to change behaviour. You only have to think your colleagues believe their words may eventually be read by audiences they cannot currently imagine.

And people won’t respond by writing nothing down. They’ll do something much more rational. They’ll keep recording the decision. The project update. The agreed position. The clean version.

What they’ll become less inclined to record is the messy, contingent, human explanation of why one option won and another didn’t.

The politics. The uncertainty. The compromise. The constraint. The thing everyone in the room understood but nobody particularly wants appearing in an AI-generated summary three years from now.

In other words, exactly the part of organisational memory that was already starting to disappear.

That, my friends, is the paradox.

We’re building tools capable of searching almost everything an organisation has ever written at the same time as we’re creating stronger incentives for people not to write down the bits that would make the archive genuinely useful.

The result may be organisations with an almost perfect record of what they did and progressively less idea why they did it.

A decade of impeccably searchable history and no memory at all.

And it won’t happen because somebody forgot to switch on retention.

It’ll happen one perfectly sensible individual decision at a time.

I help organisations — usually large, usually complicated, often regulated — work out what their communication system is actually doing and how to make it hold together. That’s the work I do through Lithos Partners. If any of the above sounded uncomfortably familiar, get in touch.

Weeknote 2026/35

August 31, 2026August 31, 2026 / Sharon O'Dea / Leave a comment

“If you want the rainbow, you gotta put up with the rain,” said Dolly Parton.

It absolutely pissed down at Forwards on Saturday.

Proper, committed rain. The sort where you spend the first twenty minutes trying to preserve some vestige of dignity before accepting that your hair is fucked, your shoes are wet and this is simply your life now. At which point, pleasingly, it becomes fun. I put my raincoat on and danced like an absolute twat and it was brilliant.

This week bought the sad news that Dolly died, and I spent much of the following two days listening to her music and having a bit of a cry. So the quote has been rattling around my head ever since.

It also turns out to be a reasonably good description of running a small consultancy.

The rainbow is the bit you get to announce: we won a new client. We ran a great session. We wrote something people wanted to read. The rain is contract negotiation, procurement portals, pitch decks for meetings that get postponed, timesheets, project plans, pipeline reviews and writing a scope annex whose principal purpose is to establish, at considerable length, all the things you are not going to do.

We tend to talk about work in terms of its outputs because those are the bits you can see. Projects delivered. Decisions made. Things launched. But underneath them is an enormous amount of preparation, negotiation, context and maintenance: the work behind the work.

Most weeks, you don’t notice it particularly.

This week, there was rather a lot of rain.

This week at work

We won a new client this week. Open tender, decision faster than expected, and we’re very pleased about it.

Winning it immediately produced a full day of contract negotiation, a scope annex written from scratch to define all the things we weren’t doing, and a compliance process that ran first into a legal team needing ten working days and then into our client contact going on annual leave. None of this is billable. All of it has to happen before the billable work can begin.

The same week, we spent two days preparing for a pitch. Deck built, case studies chosen, argument sharpened, review session with someone who knows the target organisation well. The session was postponed the day before it was due to happen. It’s been rescheduled, which is the good version of this outcome. The two days don’t come back either way.

Around that: proposal responses, project plans, timesheets, finances, contracts, and a full pass over every live and prospective piece of work on the board. All necessary. None billable.

A lot of people seem to be going independent at the moment, and the advice I keep giving them is unfortunately the least glamorous advice available: be brutally realistic about how much work you can actually do.

We’re pretty efficient at this stuff. We’ve put real effort into getting the machinery down — time tracking, project management, the pipeline board, templates for almost everything — and it works. But somebody still has to run the business. Somebody still has to make sure there’s work in three months’ time. Somebody has to negotiate the contract, write the proposal, chase the purchase order and discover that the procurement portal requires a document nobody has requested since 2009.

All of those somebodies are me.

Realistically, only about half my week is available to sell. Which means the useful calculation when you’re setting a day rate isn’t what you want to earn divided by 260 working days. It’s what you need to earn divided by the days doing work somebody might conceivably pay you for.

We also ran a session for IABC this week on discovery: how to work out what an organisation’s communication problem actually is before anyone buys something to fix it.

It went well. One attendee said he was taking our hypothesis-board approach straight into a meeting that afternoon, which is about the best feedback there is. Another asked whether all this was in the book. It is, and given that I literally wrote the thing I should probably have thought to mention that myself.

The following day we agreed a second session for a different audience, and there’s a keynote version coming in October. It’s a format we do a lot, enjoy doing, and — pleasingly — people keep asking us to do without us having to invent a funnel for it.

Also this week

Bristol again, this time for Forwards. There is still nothing better than a weekend in a field with loud music and good friends, and at 46 I think we can safely conclude I’m not going to grow out of it.

The weather did its level best. Once you’ve accepted that you look like a drowned rat and there is no longer anything worth protecting, dancing in the rain turns out to be enormous fun.

Little Simz, Wet Leg, Self Esteem and Viagra Boys all delivered. Tricky did not: weirdly quiet, strange atmosphere, and the peculiar experience of being able to hear his backing singers perfectly while the man whose name was on the poster remained largely theoretical. Princess Nokia was simply bad.

And a Rubicon crossed. For the first time in my life, I had genuinely never heard of one of the festival headliners.

I assume this is how it begins. Next year I’ll be bringing a folding chair.

Consuming

All Dolly, all week, after the news broke on Wednesday. Veering chaotically between bluegrass, the classics and Backwoods Barbie, all bought during a lengthy Dolly phase that followed a trip to Tennessee and a pilgrimage to Dollywood.

Live your life such that when you die the praise is that unanimous.

Me at Dolly’s Tennessee Mountain Home, a million years ago

Coverage

I wrote a piece for Reworked about the Spirit Airlines data sale, which is now the subject of a bidding war involving Google and a startup that builds AI agents to work inside simulated companies. A sentence that would have required considerably more explanation five years ago.

The argument, roughly: we spent a decade telling people to work out loud, on the understanding that persistence would work in their favour. Write things down. Share what you know. Leave a trail somebody else can follow.

What Spirit demonstrates is that the archive can outlive the conversation, the project, the team, your employment and, eventually, the company itself. And the first thing people stop writing down once they’ve noticed that isn’t the decision. It’s the messy reasoning behind it — the disagreement, uncertainty, context and half-formed thinking — which is the only part that was ever genuinely inheritable.

There’s a second half I expected to find harder to write than I did, about why that archive is worth twelve and a half million dollars.

Workplace software gets built by small young companies where twelve people talk to each other constantly, then sold to organisations with shift patterns, works councils, contractors, subsidiaries, six layers of sign-off and thirty years of documents nobody can find. The people building software for large organisations have surprisingly little evidence of what life inside one actually looks like.

Spirit’s archive isn’t a use case. It’s a world.

Which is why the sale is simultaneously creepy and entirely economically rational. Both things can be true at once, which is what makes it an argument rather than a lament.

The whole thing started as a paragraph in a weeknote a fortnight ago. I cut it because it was too much for the space it had. Turns out it was an essay.

Published

I’ve started putting essays on the site as well as these weeknotes. Weeknotes are chaotic by design – whatever happened that week, from day rates to a Dolly Parton deep dive. Some things need more room than that, and one subject at a time.

The first few are up:

SharePoint is a box of Lego: how to choose an intranet platform SharePoint, intranet-in-a-box, standalone platform or custom build? A practical guide to choosing an intranet platform — and deciding how to decide.
Designing channels for complex organisations Shared services, contractors and multiple affiliations break traditional channel design. A layer-by-layer approach to internal comms in complex organisations.
Start with Discovery: how to find out what’s actually wrong with your internal comms Most organisations know something isn’t working. Far fewer can tell you what. Discovery is the distance between those two states — and the reason an audit is the wrong place to start.

Travel

This weeknote comes to you from a characterless, overpriced pub in Bristol Airport, which scores precisely nothing under the LoungeWanker rules.

Home for forty-eight hours, then back to the UK for client meetings.

The glamour of international consultancy remains largely theoretical.

This week in photos

Start with Discovery: how to find out what’s actually wrong with your internal comms

August 26, 2026August 26, 2026 / Sharon O'Dea / 2 Comments

A surrealist painting of a bowler-hatted man examining an open refrigerator with a magnifying glass. The brightly lit fridge contains nothing but a grey four-drawer filing cabinet. The sparse, muted room and the man’s solemn attention make the absurd scene feel entirely ordinary.

“We need a new intranet.”

I get this brief a lot. Sometimes it’s an app. Sometimes it’s “we need to reduce email volume” or “we need to do something about Teams.” Occasionally someone has already got as far as choosing the product and would now like some research to confirm they were right.

Unfortunately none of these things is actually a problem. They’re solutions somebody has already chosen, usually in a meeting I wasn’t in, and my job as briefed is to go away and build the thing.

Jon and I spent an hour with IABC members this afternoon making the case for not doing that. The session was billed as how to find out what’s actually wrong with your comms, which is a better title than we’d have come up with ourselves because it names the gap rather neatly. Most organisations know something isn’t working. Far fewer can tell you what. And the distance between those two states is Discovery.

The audit trap

When comms teams do decide to look before they leap, they nearly always reach for an audit. Catalogue the channels. Count the newsletters. Map the publishing calendar. Produce a spreadsheet with 400 rows in it and a slide saying WE HAVE 17 CHANNELS, as if the number itself is the diagnosis.

Audits aren’t useless. They’re just usually the wrong place to start. For one thing, an audit tells you what you’re serving, not what anyone wants to eat. It’s a stocktake of the fridge. You come away knowing you own a lot of yoghurt and no bread, but not whether anyone in the house is lactose intolerant.

Everything you learn is bounded by what already exists. Which means the thing that might actually help — the channel you don’t have, the moment in somebody’s day you’ve never designed for, the workaround everyone uses instead — is structurally invisible.

The second problem is slightly more awkward. If your team publishes the channels, your team is now auditing its own homework. You will discover that the newsletter is broadly fine and the intranet could do with a redesign, because those are conclusions everyone can live with. I’ve watched very capable people do this in complete good faith. It isn’t dishonesty; you just can’t see the water you’re swimming in.

Discovery starts at the other end. Not “what have we got?” but “what are people actually trying to do, and where does it go wrong?”

What Discovery actually is

The idea isn’t ours, and it isn’t new. It grew out of agile and user-centred design, after enough expensive digital projects had failed for people to notice a recurring feature: teams kept leaping enthusiastically towards solutions before they’d properly understood the problem. The UK Government Digital Service made Discovery standard practice, and the discipline has gradually seeped into adjacent fields ever since.

Internal comms has been slower to catch on, partly because we’ve never really thought of ourselves as builders of things. But we are. A channel is a product. Content is a service. And the failure modes are remarkably similar: eighteen months, a six-figure budget, a great deal of stakeholder excitement, then launch day arrives and everybody else carries on with their lives.

At its simplest, Discovery means swapping assumptions for evidence. It’s the shift from “what do we want to say?” to “what do people need, and what would have to be true for this to work for them?” That is more mindset than methodology, and it can be uncomfortable because it asks you to slow down at precisely the point everyone is desperate to demonstrate momentum.

One leader I worked with used to say “facts are friendly”, usually just before somebody put an extremely unfriendly number on a slide. It’s the right instinct. The point of Discovery isn’t to prove your gut right. It’s to find out, early and cheaply, which bits of your gut are wrong.

Why slowing down makes you faster

This is the bit that gets pushback, because Discovery looks like delay. Four to six weeks of research before anyone builds anything appears on a Gantt chart as four to six weeks in which nobody has changed the colour of the homepage and everyone’s still complaining about it. When budgets are tight and a sponsor wants a launch date, it’s therefore one of the first things to disappear.

But the cost of being wrong rises sharply the later you find out. Fixing a misconception on a whiteboard costs an afternoon. Fixing it during build costs a change request. Fixing it after launch costs the change request, the migration, the rework and some portion of the credibility you’ve just spent telling everyone the shiny new thing was going to make their working lives better.

Software engineering learned this decades ago, largely by making all these mistakes first. There are various neat rules of thumb suggesting defects become ten times more expensive at each stage. I’d treat the exact multiplier with suspicion; the underlying point is less controversial. Finding out early is cheaper than finding out late.

But there’s another failure mode that matters more than money. Look at why large internal projects go wrong and it’s rarely because somebody couldn’t make the technology function. It’s unclear requirements, unexamined assumptions, teams building competently and diligently towards a destination nobody properly agreed. You cannot engineer your way out of having solved the wrong problem, and no amount of change management will persuade people to adopt something that simply doesn’t fit their day.

Discovery is cheap insurance against building the wrong thing beautifully.

Start with what you already know

The first move isn’t research. It’s an inventory of belief.

Most organisations are sitting on years of potentially useful material: old comms surveys, engagement data, post-implementation reviews, research from the last intranet project, a strategy deck from three restructures ago. Some of it is gold. Some of it is actively misleading. Old research is like milk: check the date and give it a sniff before pouring it over anything important. A survey run before a major restructure tells you a great deal about an organisation that no longer exists.

Then write down what you think you know. Not vague impressions, but specific claims that can turn out to be wrong:

Frontline workers don’t see HR updates because they don’t have email access.
People ignore the intranet homepage because it’s cluttered and irrelevant.
Managers are quietly rewriting key messages before they reach their teams.

Put them on a board with four columns: to test, partially validated, validated, disproven. Then move them as the evidence arrives. Trello, Planner, Notion, spreadsheet, sticky notes: it really doesn’t matter. What matters is committing your assumptions to writing before you start looking for evidence, so you can’t quietly retrofit the story later. Academics call this pre-registering your hypothesis. In comms, I prefer to think of it as making it harder to mark your own homework twice.

It does something else useful too: it stops Discovery sprawling. You’re not setting out to research absolutely everything anyone has ever thought about internal communication. You’re pulling on named threads. And when a stakeholder asks why you’re recommending something, you can show them the belief, the evidence and how your view changed, which is a significantly better answer than “trust me, I did some interviews.”

Means, motive and opportunity

The most useful frame I know for understanding user needs is borrowed from every moderately competent television detective.

Means: can people technically access the channel? Login, device, email address, permissions. This is where comms teams tend to stop, because it’s the bit we can see and the bit IT can report. But access is table stakes. It tells you what’s technically possible, not what anybody actually does.

Opportunity: when, in the real shape of someone’s working day, can they engage? Five quiet minutes at a desk? Thirty seconds on a phone between jobs? Nothing until they’ve clocked off and would rather be literally anywhere else?

And then motive: why would they bother? Does this help them do the job faster, better or with fewer headaches? If not, attention evaporates regardless of how lovingly somebody has written the CEO update.

We worked with an organisation employing hundreds of maintenance staff who spent their days out on the road. Adoption of the intranet was dismal. Leadership’s diagnosis was that the site needed to work better on tablets. On paper, means looked fine: everyone had a login.

Then we went and watched people work. There was one device per vehicle, not per person, so access meant sharing a tablet behind a clunky login. Opportunity was worse. They spent most of the working day driving, and unsurprisingly were not allowed to use a device at the wheel. Their main window for checking the intranet was therefore at the end of a shift, parked up, when its principal competitor for their attention was going home. And then motive: why wrestle with a slow site to read generic organisational news that had nothing whatsoever to do with the job in front of you?

A tablet-optimised intranet would have solved almost none of this. What helped was removing friction, designing properly for mobile and introducing audio content people could listen to hands-free while driving. None of that is especially clever. It is, in retrospect, painfully obvious — but things often become obvious once you’ve bothered to look.

Mix your methods, and skip the focus groups

Surveys and analytics tell you what is happening and, roughly, at what scale. Interviews, observation and diary studies help tell you why. Treating these as competing methodological tribes is a category error: you need both.

Analytics have one particularly important blind spot in internal comms: they can only show you the behaviour of people who are already using your channels. The employee who gave up six months ago leaves no trace. Neither does the colleague who never had access in the first place, nor the team who have quietly moved their entire working life into a WhatsApp group you know nothing about.

Those shadow channels are often the most revealing thing Discovery surfaces. They show you precisely what the official system is failing to do, because somebody has already gone to the trouble of building a workaround.

One method I’d generally avoid for diagnosis is the focus group. They’re seductive: one meeting, lots of voices, apparently faster than doing a load of individual interviews, and senior leaders love them. In practice, people are much less likely to admit in front of colleagues that they don’t understand something, dislike something or have abandoned the official process altogether. Add hierarchy to the room and it gets worse.

To run one properly you need two researchers anyway, which rather eats into the supposed efficiency. You also have to find a point when eight busy people are free at once, so good luck with that. Focus groups are useful for co-creation and testing ideas. They’re a fairly poor way to diagnose what’s actually going wrong.

Knowing when to stop

Research is not an endurance sport. When the same hypotheses keep getting reconfirmed and new interviews stop surprising you, you’ve hit saturation. Stop. More research at that point won’t make you more certain; it will mostly consume money you could be spending fixing the thing you now understand.

For most comms Discoveries, a part-time project over roughly eight weeks is a reasonable rule of thumb. Larger and more complicated organisations may need longer. Genuinely unexplored territory may need longer.

Then you synthesise: cluster the findings, name the themes, show the patterns and be explicit about what your evidence cannot tell you. Every research method has biases and gaps. The mistake isn’t using imperfect evidence — there is no other kind — but presenting it as complete.

And finally, triage. What’s a quick win? What’s structural? What needs a year? What would require an entirely different operating model? And, crucially, what isn’t yours to fix?

A good Discovery will surface things that look like communication problems but aren’t: a broken process, an unpopular policy, a manager who doesn’t manage, a workload problem, a system designed around a neat version of the organisation that has never existed outside PowerPoint. Being able to tell a leadership team “this is not a communication problem, and no new channel will fix it” is one of the more useful outputs of Discovery, even when it isn’t what they hired you to say.

Do this properly and you arrive at the business case with something surprisingly rare: a clear account of what is actually wrong, evidence that it is wrong, and a defensible view about what to tackle first.

Which seems a considerably better place to start than “we need a new intranet.”

Discovery is Chapter 1 of Digital Communications at Work, the book I wrote with Jonathan Phillips. It covers all eight steps in full, including stakeholder interviews, ethics and synthesis. The research methods toolkit that wouldn’t fit in the chapter is free to download. And if you’d rather not run one on your own, that’s what we do.

Designing channels for complex organisations

August 24, 2026August 24, 2026 / Sharon O'Dea / 1 Comment

A quiet surrealist office in muted grey tones. A woman in a grey suit stands with her back to us, facing five identical open doors. Each doorway reveals a different sky: blue and sunny, dark and stormy, warm evening light, pouring rain, and bright clouds. A sparse wooden desk and lamp sit to one side as she stands motionless, choosing none of the doors.

Somewhere in your organisation there is a person wearing one organisation’s uniform, carrying a second organisation’s lanyard, and logging into a third organisation’s systems with a password only the first can reset.

They are doing a job that at least two of those organisations believe belongs to somebody else.

They are not an edge case. Not any more.

Research by SAP and Oxford Economics, surveying 2,050 executives across more than 20 countries, found that only 58% of workforce spend goes on employees. The other 42% buys contingent workers and service providers: contractors, agencies, IT outsourcers, consultancies. More than half of those executives said their organisation couldn’t conduct business as usual without them.

And yet we still draw the organisation as a pyramid.

One person at the top, everyone else arranged obediently underneath, solid lines and dotted lines and a surprising amount of money spent arguing about where they should go. Then we design internal communications for that picture: one intranet, one all-staff email, one audience, one direction of travel.

The picture was always a simplification. What’s changed is how much of the actual organisation now sits outside it.

The organisation on the slide isn’t the organisation people work in

Real organisations are messy.

Work runs through partners, contractors, shared services, joint ventures and outsourced back offices. Two organisations can share a finance function and approximately none of a culture. A team is fully shared across two employers while HR is shared only transactionally. Someone is employed by one entity, works exclusively for another, and consequently can’t see either one’s internal communications properly.

This isn’t unusual, and it isn’t a temporary state of disrepair on the way to something tidier. It is the organisation.

In Digital Communications at Work, Jonathan Phillips and I describe today’s internal audience as including contractors, freelancers, agency staff, suppliers and partners: people who sit inside the working life of an organisation without sitting on its payroll.

The boundary around “internal” has got very fuzzy indeed.

Then add all the people your internal communication channels were never particularly good at reaching in the first place. Frontline and deskless colleagues make up around 80% of the global workforce, and many have no corporate email address and no reason to spend their working day lovingly browsing the intranet.

Access is uneven. Context is uneven. Someone who has worked there for fifteen years has a completely different map of the place in their head from someone who has worked fifteen shifts.

Enterprise software doesn’t much like any of this, because enterprise software has generally been designed for an organisation tidier than any organisation that has ever existed. Even now, major platforms struggle with someone holding multiple affiliations inside a single institution, never mind across several (working across two or more instances of Teams, for example, remains a PITA).

So we design channels for the diagram and then wonder why the people who don’t fit neatly inside the diagram aren’t using them.

This is an internal communications problem before it’s a technology one

When the channel estate isn’t working, the instinct is usually to go shopping.

New intranet. Better search. Employee app. AI assistant. Something with a reassuringly expensive implementation partner attached.

But a systematic review of 77 studies of digital internal communication found the same problem recurring: channels rolled out top-down without enough attention to whether they fitted how people actually worked.

The tool was rarely the interesting bit. The assumptions underneath it were.

And the bar for changing people’s behaviour is high. Gourville’s rule of thumb suggests people need to perceive a new system as roughly nine times better than the habit it replaces before they’ll switch.

Against an existing workaround — a WhatsApp group, a noticeboard, asking Sandra in Finance because Sandra actually knows — nine times better is a demanding standard.

Against nothing at all, the bar is practically on the floor.

Which is worth remembering before spending a year replacing something that works reasonably well for the people at the centre while leaving the people at the edges with bugger all.

Complexity doesn’t make channel design impossible. But it makes guessing impossible.

Start with what communication needs to do, not which platforms you own

The trouble with mapping your internal communications channels as a list of tools is that it tells you what you’ve bought.

It doesn’t tell you whether any of it works.

You get an inventory when what you need is a diagnosis.

The five-layer model we use in the book maps the capabilities a communication ecosystem needs rather than the products that happen to deliver them:

Plan: where campaigns, priorities and editorial calendars get coordinated. Invisible to employees; essential to communicators.
Collaborate: where content gets drafted, reviewed and signed off.
Publish: the source of truth. Structured, accurate and searchable.
Distribute: getting the right thing to the right person at the right time.
Discuss: dialogue, feedback and sense-making.

These aren’t five little boxes into which you must now dutifully sort Microsoft 365. They overlap. They reinforce one another. A single announcement might pass through all five.

The useful thing about thinking in layers is that the layers survive the platform churn.

Tools come and go. Names change. Products get bundled, rebranded, sunsetted and occasionally transformed into an AI assistant nobody remembers asking for. But these five jobs still need doing somewhere.

And in a complex organisation, the model lets you ask a much more useful question than should we have one intranet or several?

You can ask: what actually needs to be shared?

Shared or local? It depends what you’re sharing

Every complex organisation eventually has this argument.

Central control gives you accuracy and consistency, but can feel distant and generic. Local ownership gives you nuance, relevance and speed, but also duplication, contradiction and the occasional page last updated during the Cameron administration.

Choose entirely one or the other and you lose something you need.

At the level of “should we have one intranet or two?”, this is almost impossible to resolve because it isn’t really a technology question. It’s a question about identity, brand, budget, power and who gets to decide things, wearing a SharePoint hat.

Break it into layers and it gets much easier.

I ran this exercise recently with communications, HR, digital and transformation leaders across two organisations that shared much of a back office and very little else. The resulting pattern is one I’d expect to see in a lot of complex organisations.

Publish pulls hard towards shared.

Policy, terms, anything with legal or regulatory weight: you want one authoritative version. Copying the same information across multiple estates is how you end up with two confidently contradictory answers to the same question.

This is the layer I’d consolidate first.

AI has made this more important, not less. When an assistant starts surfacing intranet content directly, stale and duplicated pages don’t merely sit quietly being wrong somewhere nobody visits. The machine can now fetch them and be wrong on your behalf.

Discuss stays stubbornly local.

This is where culture lives. You can establish minimum standards for conduct and moderation, but you can’t centrally procure a community.

People have an irritating tendency to decide for themselves who they want to talk to.

Design this with them, not for them.

Plan sits awkwardly in the middle, because of course it does. Different leadership cycles, priorities and approval chains make fully shared planning difficult even where everyone is notionally committed to it.

Collaborate follows the work. Different brands, different style guides, different approval processes. Making all of that shared generally requires senior decisions considerably bigger than “where shall we put the Word document?”

And then there’s distribution.

Your distribution problem is really a people-data problem

Distribution is the layer that catches people out because its unit isn’t an organisation.

It’s a person.

A particular person, with a particular contract, role, location, device and set of permissions, who may work for two organisations and be properly represented in the directory of neither.

Which means distribution becomes an identity and employee-data problem long before it becomes an internal communications channel problem.

If you can’t reliably answer who is this person, what should they be able to see, and how can we reach them?, then targeting is mostly decorative.

You can spend weeks designing beautiful audience segments. If the finance officer employed by Organisation A but working full-time for Organisation B isn’t correctly represented in the underlying systems, no amount of clever channel strategy will make them magically appear on the right list.

Get identity right and all sorts of things become possible: one publishing estate with personalised views, targeted distribution that actually reaches contractors and frontline staff, and clear rules about who gets access to what.

Get it wrong and you can rebuild the intranet every three years until retirement and remain faintly disappointed by the results.

The bit of the digital workplace nobody sells you

There is a part of all this no vendor will quote for: Identity. Navigation. Search. A shared design language. The connective tissue that makes a collection of separately procured tools feel, to the unfortunate person trying to use them, like one place.

You can buy an ITSM platform, an HR system, a CMS and an employee app. You can give each of them a cheerful name and launch them with cupcakes.

But you can’t buy coherence.

The average organisation now runs well over a hundred applications, each perfectly sensible on its own terms and together producing an experience like an orchestra warming up: every instrument playing its own tune, quite competently.

In the book we describe the intranet as the wrapper, not the chocolate bar. I’d go further: the important bit isn’t any single platform. It’s the experience created at the joins.

Somebody has to own that.

Not each tool. The whole.

Because choices made in isolation get paid for at the joins, and the joins are where employees actually live.

Design an internal communications ecosystem that survives the next reorganisation

Complex organisations reorganise. It’s practically a hobby.

Shared services get created, merged, renamed and unpicked. Partners arrive and leave. Business units combine. Someone unveils a new operating model with pleasingly rounded rectangles and announces that it will make everything simpler.

If your internal communications architecture depends on the current organisation chart remaining true, start the countdown.

There are five principles I’d design around instead:

Adaptability: assume the organisation chart will change and the channels shouldn’t have to
Accessibility: including the version that means frontline, deskless and low-bandwidth access, not just WCAG compliance
Clarity of ownership: “who looks after this?” should be a question with an answer
Interoperability: content and state need to be able to leave the system they were created in.
Cognitive simplicity: every additional interface is a tax, and employees pay it

And I’d add a sixth, less comfortable one: mandate.

Skills you can hire. Time you can, eventually, carve out. But someone needs the authority to make decisions across the boundaries.

In a shared or complex organisation, the person responsible for the digital workplace without the authority to say no to senior stakeholders on either side owns the blame and none of the levers.

No amount of elegant architecture makes organisational politics disappear. But being explicit about who has the mandate to make decisions is usually the difference between a channel strategy that survives contact with reality and one that gets quietly negotiated into beige.

Design for the organisation you actually have

The useful shift is a small one.

Stop treating organisational complexity as a defect to be tidied away before the real design work starts. Treat it as the design constraint.

Because the mess isn’t evidence that there’s no system.

Quite often, the mess is the system.

It’s running on local knowledge, friendships, workarounds, favours, WhatsApp groups and hundreds of tiny negotiations nobody has ever written down. It’s the person everybody knows to ask. The spreadsheet somebody maintains because the official system doesn’t quite work. The contractor who’s been there eight years and still can’t open the link in the all-staff email.

Designing a beautifully logical channel architecture that ignores all of that doesn’t simplify the organisation.

It simply gives people one more thing to work around.

Nobody experiences a tool. They experience a task.

Design for the task, and for the person trying to get it done — whichever organisation’s lanyard they happen to be wearing today.

This essay draws on ideas from my book, Digital Communications at Work: Designing channels for employee engagement and experience, written with Jonathan Phillips and published by Kogan Page.

If you’re wrestling with this in your own organisation, my consultancy practice, Lithos Partners, runs discovery, designs channels and develops digital workplace strategy for organisations that don’t fit the neat diagram.

Weeknote 2026/34

August 23, 2026August 23, 2026 / Sharon O'Dea / Leave a comment

An Amsterdam canal at night, lined with lit gabled houses and a moored houseboat with flower boxes. A small open boat full of people passes under a bridge, its wake catching the reflected lamplight. — *Prinsengracht after the concert* (Photo: me)

My second favourite part of the Prinsengracht Concert, after several thousand people singing Aan de Amsterdamse Grachten together, is what happens immediately afterwards.

Hundreds of boats have spent the evening crammed into the canal, several deep, wedged against one another in a configuration that suggests nobody gave much thought to the concept of leaving. Then the concert ends and, simultaneously, everyone would like to go home.

It is magnificent.

For the next half hour the Prinsengracht becomes a giant aquatic game of Dodgems. Boats reverse into gaps that don’t exist. People push off neighbouring vessels with their hands. Someone three boats away is shouting instructions to a person they have never met. Entire flotillas shuffle sideways because one tiny boat has committed to a three-point turn and apparently we’re all seeing this through now.

From the bridge, it looks like complete chaos. Except it works.

There’s a system in there. It’s just not the sort anyone would put into PowerPoint. It runs on eye contact, shouted instructions, local knowledge, mild peril and hundreds of tiny negotiations between people adjusting constantly to what everyone around them is doing. There are formal rules, obviously, but they get you only so far when you’re pointing backwards in a canal with someone’s bow six inches from your wine glass.

Organisations work rather more like the Prinsengracht at 11pm than anybody designing an operating model would ideally like to admit.

We draw the hierarchy as a pyramid, put one person reassuringly at the top, arrange everyone else underneath and call it an organisation. We map systems into boxes. We assign owners. We draw solid lines and dotted lines and spend quite a lot of money arguing about where they should go.

This is all useful, up to a point. The problem comes when we mistake the diagram for the thing it describes. Reality has an irritating habit of continuing to be three-dimensional after we’ve put it on a slide.

The mess isn’t necessarily evidence that there is no system. Sometimes the mess is the system.

Open boats crowd a canal at night, packed with people watching a concert, with a lit lamp and Amsterdam flags among them. Crowds line the quayside above beside a row of red-brick buildings and a lit restaurant.

This week at work

Organisations are way more complicated than their org charts.

Someone can turn up wearing one organisation’s uniform, carrying another’s lanyard, logging into a third’s systems with a password reset only the first can authorise, doing a job that half of them think belongs to somebody else.

Work runs through partners, contractors, shared services and joint ventures, and plenty of people hold more than one allegiance at once. There’s a chapter on this in the book, framed mostly around the gig economy and deskless work, but the same problem turns up anywhere separate organisations share most of a back office and almost none of a culture.

That’s a comms problem before it’s a technology one. Your channels have to fit the organisation you actually have, mess included, rather than the neat little pyramid with one person at the top and everyone else arranged obediently underneath.

This week I ran a workshop with comms and digital leaders in an organisation dealing with exactly this kind of complexity. We started with what a digital workplace actually is, and why it matters more, not less, when the organisation around it is changing.

It’s how change gets communicated, obviously. But it’s also how you unlock the value you were promised when you bought all those services in the first place. A service nobody can find is, for most practical purposes, a service you don’t have.

I introduced our graphic equaliser model: the idea that a digital workplace is a mixing desk with four faders — comms, knowledge, transactions, and community and collaboration — and every organisation runs a different mix. Some crank comms all the way up. Others lean heavily into tools and self-service. We spent time looking at where their balance sits now, and where it needs to move.

I love sessions like this because I learn as much as I share about the increasingly messy reality of how work gets done. I always say there’s no right balance, only what’s right for your organisation. What this one reminded me is that there isn’t necessarily one setting for an organisation either.

Different parts of the business need the dials in different places. Increasingly, so do individuals.

Which means the digital workplace has to flex around the organisation you actually have. That took us into the perennial question of what needs local control and what benefits from central planning.

It’s harder when there are multiple reporting lines, because budgets and approvals follow accountability, while work has the irritating habit of ignoring it. Publishing pulls hard towards shared: one system, different lenses. Discussion stays stubbornly local, because that’s where culture lives and nobody particularly wants theirs decided by committee. Planning sits awkwardly in the middle, because of course it does.

No amount of elegant architecture fixes the fact that organisations contain politics.

The dials get set by whoever holds the budget line. They get lived with by everyone else.

Also this week

I tore a hamstring in a HIIT class, which is what I get for going to HIIT classes.

It turned out to be relatively minor, but kept me out of the gym and mostly confined to the flat for the week. Last weekend I was hobbling around with a walking stick, mentally rearranging the next three months of my life around my exciting new identity as Person With Hamstring Injury. By Friday I was walking again, albeit not at my usual faintly aggressive pace.

Recovery was swift enough that I’ve decided to take personal credit for it, having contributed absolutely nothing beyond sitting still.

The one casualty was the line dancing class I’d signed up for as part of my ongoing efforts to Try New Things. I was fully prepared to attend and be heroically bad at it. Then I couldn’t go, so my potential as a line dancer remains mercifully untested.

Next time.

Saturday was the Prinsengracht Concert, one of those moments every year that makes me absurdly glad to live here. The city is both backdrop and main character: a stage built over the canal, thousands of people lining the water, boats packed in until the whole thing looks faintly impossible.

It ends, as it always does, with everyone singing Aan de Amsterdamse Grachten together — a song about how beautiful this city is and how nobody could wish for anything better than to be an Amsterdammer.

Can confirm.

Consuming

Saw Sparks in Nijmegen, for their only Dutch date this year, in a lovely outdoor theatre. We’d got ourselves in the mood the night before with The Sparks Brothers, Edgar Wright’s documentary: two and a quarter hours of people you already suspected of having excellent taste confirming that they do.

The gig was delightful right up until it wasn’t. They finished This Town Ain’t Big Enough for Both of Us and the heavens opened. They made it through Whippings and Apologies with rain sheeting off the canopies before the show was finally called off for safety.

Sixty years, twenty-odd albums, and I got about two thirds of a set. The Mael brothers have outlasted glam, disco, synth-pop, Britpop and several physical media formats, only to be defeated on Thursday night by Dutch weather.

I’ve also been transfixed by the Spirit Airlines story all week. Google has bought the bankrupt airline’s entire internal archive for $10 million: a hundred million emails, five hundred million Teams messages, seventeen million files, all to train AI on. Former employees are now in court trying to get themselves removed from the dataset.

It has absolutely everything.

What happens to how people behave at work once they realise the archive might outlive the company. The legal question of whether anything you wrote at your desk was ever really yours. Bankruptcy law colliding with data protection colliding with AI. Organisational complexity. Workplace technology. The lot.

And then there’s the bit I keep turning over, because I love nothing more than to be a contrarian, which is that this might actually make the software better.

Enterprise software has always been designed for an organisation tidier than any organisation that has ever existed. When I spoke to the Facebook team during the Workplace years, they seemed genuinely baffled that companies didn’t want information to be open in the way it was at Facebook. That openness was the product. It was also one of the reasons so many corporates couldn’t use it.

Microsoft, all these years later, still can’t cleanly accommodate someone holding multiple affiliations with one institution, never mind several institutions at once — which describes an enormous number of people I encounter through work.

Nobody has ever had a really good dataset showing how a large organisation actually functions, because all the interesting stuff is behind a firewall. The formal structure is easy. The useful bit is the messages, workarounds, accidental networks, weird permissions, duplicated effort, informal power and the seventeen people you have to ask before discovering that Sandra in Finance knows how it works.

Now, suddenly, there’s one on the open market.

The messiness is exactly what makes it valuable.

Which is also the problem. The upside depends on the data being rich, specific and human enough to reveal how work really happens. The privacy disaster is that it’s far too rich, specific and human to anonymise properly.

There’s no version where you get one without the other.

Connecting

Three this week, all people passing through.

Mark Chapman, who runs an NHS intranet, was briefly in town. I failed to have a proper conversation with him at the book launch, just as I failed to have a proper conversation with almost everyone at the book launch, so we made up for it in my local by nerding out about intranets at considerable length.

Then Chris Higham, finally, in person. Chris and I are part of a group that formed on Twitter years ago around sharing our fitness ups and downs, then migrated to WhatsApp when the platform went the way it went. It’s still one of the most supportive gangs I’m in: the rare group chat that survived the collapse of its natural habitat (I wrote about that community in 2025/49)

He was over with his family on holiday, so I got to meet all of them too.

And yesterday, a walk-and-talk with Anne Ditmeyer, a Paris-based designer and facilitator I met at the Awesome Authors meet in London in May (see Weeknote 2026/21). She was in the Netherlands for a design event, so we walked and talked about unlocking creativity. Eexactly the sort of conversation that gets better once you remove the table.

She also introduced me to Bonnie Cauble and Sarah Pedlow, both creatives based here. Amsterdam continues its long-running campaign to make everyone in the world no more than two introductions away

Three people pose for a selfie at a small wooden table in a traditional brown café, beer mats scattered in front of them. The walls behind are covered in framed prints and photographs, with a window onto a cobbled street to the left.

Four women pose for a selfie on the pavement outside a stone building marked 210, with Soho House Amsterdam and Michelin plaques by the door. Bicycles are parked along the railings behind them. All four are smiling at the camera.

Travel

Autumn has been sitting ominously in the calendar for a while now.

This week it begins: a quick trip to Bristol.

This week in photos

A canal packed side to side with small open boats, seen from a bridge. A concert stage and banked seating are set up on the water in the distance, with the Westerkerk tower rising behind under a heavy grey sky.

The illuminated Westerkerk tower rises above a dark Amsterdam canal at night. Small boats with coloured navigation lights move along the water, their reflections streaking across the surface between lit canal houses.