Friday marked the first day of meteorological spring, and it certainly feels springlike out there. It’s sunglasses and coat weather. One of my best friends came to visit for the weekend and we had a glorious time walking around a sunny-but-chilly Amsterdam.
I took her to the Heineken Experience, because it’s somehow the top-rated tourist attraction in the city, and I have never been. Towards the end it included some photobooths where you can make your own ‘digital souvenirs’. These hadn’t been designed with short people in mind so results were, in their own way, the perfect souvenir.
Some things I did this week
Working on a business case for a new intranet. It’s always a tricky balance; on the one hand, everyone wants to keep the costs as low as possible to increase the chance of approval. But it’s vital you don’t overlook non-technology costs like implementation support, content, change management, training and adoption. Intranets are only as good as the content on them, and platforms that don’t get used don’t deliver value. Failure to invest in getting content and change right risks failing the entire programme. Make that case early on or you will live to regret it.
Spent a day on-site with a client’s team in the UK to help them plan for the next phase of work. It’s been really rewarding to see this programme making progress, and it’s a real credit to the teams behind it for navigating it through one of the most complex organisations I’ve ever worked with.
Had a tweet (or more accurately a thread) go viral for the first time since I lost my (OG) blue tick. The replies were glorious but I’d forgotten how much of a time-suck going viral is. The trick is to mute the tweet as soon as it starts doing numbers. But in a subliminal bid to prove myself wrong, I actually used Lancaster Gate station this week.
Went to two gigs; a surprisingly likeable shouty avant garde act at local indie venue De Nieuwe Anita, and former Super Furry Animal Gruff Rhys at Tolhuistuin for gentle tunes and excellent stage bants.
My mate and I also went dancing until 4am like we did when we were 18, only to remember the next day why this is something 18-year-olds do and 43-year-olds do not.
Caught up with Paul Loberman while he was visiting Amsterdam last weekend. And grabbed a coffee with Swoop Analytics‘ Pete Johns while I was over in Blighty, to nerd out over SharePoint and why you should only measure things if you’re in a position to do something with the results.
Something I learned
My visiting friend told me that a putting copper coin in the water stops your tulips drooping. Having bought 40 tulips and only being able to find one copper coin (who uses coins in 2024?) afforded the opportunity to A/B test this across two large vases. Three days in this appears to stand up to testing.
After signing off my last weeknote I headed for the lesser-visited north-east of Portugal to join celebrations at a unique and colourful festival that takes place in the village of Podence.
One of the most iconic elements of the Carnival of Podence is the “Caretos,” young men dressed in handcrafted costumes made of woollen quilts and vibrant masks, who roam the streets in groups, engaging in playful mischief (and drinking cheap beer and burning things).
They’re known for their loud bells, which they wear around their waists, and for their dances that create an atmosphere that’s equal parts anarchy and joy. The ritual involves chasing people (mostly younger women) as a symbolic act of fertility and renewal, echoing pagan traditions that predate Christian influences.
The Carnival of Podence has deep cultural significance and is rooted in ancient rituals that herald the end of winter and the arrival of spring. It’s a time when the community comes together to preserve their heritage through dances, music, and traditional foods.
I mostly experienced it through the medium of said traditional food, since houses in the village turn into pop-up restaurants. Barns become beer halls and the village’s aunties turn out hundreds of meals every day. It was a riot of colour and sound and I arrived home 60% grilled beef and stinking of bonfire. No regrets.
At the end of weeknote 5 I said there was a chance I might not get a chance to weeknote in week 6. Well I was right. But regular readers of my blog (hello Mum!) will have spotted I also missed week 7. Because as well as the week in Portugal it’s been quite a fortnight work-wise.
Some things I did since my last weeknote
Reported back early discovery findings with one client. It’s always tough when we need to tell an organisation they’re doing things wrong. On the one hand, that’s what they’re paying us to do; they want an outsider who’s been there, done it and got the t-shirt to identify what’s not working. But on the other, people are understandably close to – and defensive of – work they devoted months of their life to, so it’s important we acknowledge that and highlight the good as well as what could have been done better. In the end I think we handled it sensitively and got good buy-in on the future direction
Picking up pace on an intranet pilot with a longstanding client. It’s all getting very real. Great to see our earlier foundational work start to become real solutions that help people at work, but also conscious this is where the theoretical becomes practical, which means there are a bunch of thorny issues to work through at pace.
Pitched for and won a juicy project with an exciting new client. Excited to get my teeth into that one.
Started prepping for the second edition of 300 Seconds x Camp Digital, where we work together to showcase new stories and voices, and build a more diverse pipeline of conference speakers. Do come along!
What I’m reading
I’ve begun reading Friends: Understanding the Power of Our Most Important Relationships by Robin Dunbar. The psychologist author is the man behind Dunbar’s Number, or the idea that there may be a cognitive limit to the number of people with whom you can comfortably maintain stable social relationships. Or, as Stephen Fry put it on QI, the number of people “you would not hesitate to go and sit with if you happened to see them at 3am in the departure lounge at Hong Kong airport”. That number is about 150, with about five of them people you’d call ‘close friends’ (the kind you could call to ask for their help to dispose of the corpse of someone who tried to talk to you in an airport at 3am).
In this book Dunbar revisits his earlier work and finds his eponymous Number remarkably stable across time and culture — and also at work. He noted that in large organisations there reaches a point at which employees tend to form smaller, more manageable groups for effective communication and collaboration.
I realised that’s something I see a lot in the organisations I work with. Dunbar’s Number can inform how we design or organisations to maximise efficiency and cohesion. There’s huge value in building smaller, interconnected communities within larger enterprise social networks to foster meaningful interactions, trust, and collaboration.
This book got me thinking how Dunbar’s Number provides a useful framework for understanding how relationships scale in professional settings.
Perhaps we should be designing more human-centric social structures within our digital workplaces, aiming for a balance between wide network benefits and the depth of personal connections.
By recognising the natural limits to people’s social bandwidth, platforms and structures should facilitate smaller group interactions within the larger organisational context, acknowledging the quality of connections over quantity.
I’m only a couple of chapters in. Later chapters promise to look at the way different types of friendship and family relationships intersect, and at the mix of psychological and behavioural mechanisms that underpin friendships and make them possible.
It also made me reflect on how I am lucky to have my own Dunbar-length list of people I would happy chat to at an airport at 3am.
Connections
Ticked off one of my 100 people list this week thanks to an impromptu meet-up with DemSoc’s Anthony Zacharzewski. We talked about how knowledge moves around organisations, and how information it struggles to make it in or out of those same organisations. It got me thinking; in comms we often have advocacy programmes, where we equip people with the skills and information to talk about us and our work. To what extent should people be ambassadors for our orgs instead? That is, responsible for listening and feeding back as much as sharing and championing.
Something I learned
The Dutch for snail is Slakken.
So the Dutch for slug is Naaktslakken, or ‘naked snail’ 🐌
Today is Groundhog Day, when the spotlight turns to a groundhog named Punxsutawney Phil. His handlers in the western Pennsylvania town today announced he did not see his shadow, and so we’re due for an early spring.
I already knew this because I bought a massive puffa coat/wearable duvet on Wednesday, thus ensuring that – thanks to Sod’s Law– we are guaranteed to have the mildest winter any of us have ever experienced. You can thank me later.
Some things I did this week
Kicked off a new project. This client is in many ways similar to another we’ve been working with for a while. So what’s been interesting already is the extent to which, despite them having so much in common, their culture is different, and just a few days in it’s clear the approach we’re likely to take will have to differ too.
There are never any rinse-and-repeat projects in this line of work, and this has been a lovely reminder why we spend time understanding the organisation, its needs, its users and any parallel change happening before we start to look at solutions. It’s what keeps it interesting after mumble-ty years in the industry.
I took McGonigal’s How To Think Like A Futurist course at Stanford back in 2019 and it left me energised about the potential for the world to change for the better, and my own ability to design and drive that change. I incorporated many futures thinking techniques into my work, and can’t help spotting signals of change around me.
When, two years later, I found myself trapped in a shoebox flat in the middle of a pandemic, in a foreign city where I barely knew anyone, I signed up to the updated-for-unprecedented-times Coursera version of the course.
In that course – and in this book – McGonigal stresses that both individually and collectively we’re capable of a lot more than we think. During the pandemic things that were previously unthinkable suddenly became possible. The unimaginable became… imaginable.
We changed the way that we live, we work, we socialise. And if we can do that, we have the capacity and imagination to deal with all the other change we face.
McGonigal combines insights from futures studies, game design, and psychology in this call to arms for us all to actively shape the future instead of passively waiting for it to unfold.
We can do that. All of us. Think how much your life has changed in the last ten years; when you see how far you’ve come, you see how far you can go in the next ten.
By taking the time to consider what the future might look like, and how it can be different, we can challenge our assumptions and play an active role in imagining, in creating a better future.
Connections
It was a quiet week on the social front, but I had a brief catch up with Eve Warren, the creative brain behind the DWXS brand, while she was in Amsterdam the other day.
Something I learned
Thinking about the future activates several brain regions. Picturing and planning for future events activates the prefrontal cortex (responsible for planning and decision-making) and the limbic system (involved in emotions). This activation can enhance cognitive functions like planning, problem-solving, and emotional regulation.
That’s one of the reasons many of us were low-key depressed during the pandemic; we had nothing to look forward to aside from it just being over. The things we had planned kept being cancelled.
The specific future event lighting up my prefrontal cortex is a very-much-not-work break in Portugal next week. Which is my roundabout way of saying there might not be a weeknote for week 6.
Last Saturday was National Tulip Day, marking the official start of the tulip season here in the Netherlands. Like most official days, this one is bullshit. While it is true that from this time of year you can find cheap and plentiful tulips, that’s only because farmers grow them in greenhouses. Tulips don’t naturally bloom until March.
This does not deter 18,000 lunatics who descend on Amsterdam’s Museumplein and queue in the rain for hours to claim their 20 free tulips. People are idiots for free stuff.
While the tulip industry was keen to pretend spring has arrived, the weather had other ideas. The country was battered by two storms in three days, knocking the power out in much of the city twice, like it’s 1974.
Some things I did this week
On the back of the arguable success of my PowerPoint-based routine at Boom Chicago last year, and because the advert fell into my Instagram feed after I’d had a glass of wine, I signed up to a ‘comedy crash course’ from an organisation called Funny Women.
I had no idea what to expect. I don’t have any particular ambition to be a comedian, but I do a lot of presenting for work, I think I’m reasonably funny, and I figured I might learn a few useful tips. And falling that I might have a laugh.
And it has been an absolute delight! Over four one-hour lunchtime sessions a string of brilliant female comics shared their insights on getting started, on finding ideas, and on making those ideas funnier. One session demystified the process of getting started on the comedy circuit to the point that it might even be something I’d conceivably do. Another walked us though a series of exercises to find and develop comic material, a process she called ‘finding your funny’ (which, on reflection, sounds like something the nurse does in a cervical exam).
One of the comics led a session on improv. I hate improv, and I especially hate the kind people who do improv. At my local comedy theatre when greeted with the words “we’ve switched out this evening’s performance for the improv show, is that ok?”, I said “no”, got a refund, and went home rather than watch a bunch of highly indebted drama school graduates wang on for an hour.
So now I’m doubly annoyed at how much I enjoyed it.
But the best thing about all of this was the other people. My eight fellow attendees were some of the sharpest, kindest, most encouraging and utterly hilarious women I’ve met in a long time. Over the course of the week we’ve (over)shared, given each other helpful and supportive feedback and made each other belly laugh.
This culminated today in a final showcase, for which we’d each prepared a couple of minutes’ material. My fellow apprentice comics had me laughing out loud on the class politics of Muller Fruit Corner, Turkish barbers’ ear-hair-removal techniques, aspirational dog breeds, and celebrating your birthday when you’re north of 40.
They say you should write about what you know… so I did a three minute monologue using material that began life as a LinkedIn post.
I enjoyed the whole thing immensely and am still buzzing at what a joy it all was.
The book offered thoroughly dispiriting insights into the chaos of cabinet posts. It exposes Johnson, Priti Patel and Liz Truss, all of he worked under at different points of his political career, as publicity-obsessed lightweights blessed (cursed?) with preternatural gifts for oversimplification.
But what stuck with me most was the chapter on his spell as Prisons Minister. I’ve read a bit about the trail of disaster wrought by the botched privatisation of the Probation Service (see Ian Dunt’s How Westminster Works And Why It Doesn’t for the full, horrifying tale of Chris Grayling’s incompetence). But this memoir blew open the human consequences. Stewart describes his feeling of shame as he apologised in person to the mother of a woman who was violently raped and murdered by a man who, were it not for that failure, would have been behind bars. Political failure has a human cost.
Rory writes thoughtfully on the monumental mistakes of the invasion of Iraq. It’s made me reflect on the same. I marched against the war, but later – when I did some work in and with the Iraqi parliament and spoke to people there – came to believe toppling Saddam was right in principle. People I spoke to in Baghdad felt bringing freedom to the country was on balance a good thing, if flawed in execution. But that was over a decade ago, and the events of the years since have forced me to rethink. So it was helpful to read the mental journey of someone who was much more closely involved.
Connections
Anna Cupani slid into my DMs to say she was in Amsterdam for a few days. Ended up in my local spending two hours chatting about mid-life career changes, language as a medium of exchange, and working with organisations that are designed around a profession.
Something I learned
Tulips don’t strictly continue to grow after they’re cut, but they appear to because of two phenomena. The cells in the stem elongate as they absorb water, which makes the stem get longer. At the same time, the cells in the tulip stem continue to respond to light (what’s called phototropism). This response can cause the stem to bend towards the light, and it may appear as though the flower is continuing to grow despite technically being dead.
One theme that threaded through our comedic conversations this week was the precipitous decline in fucks women have to give as we slide into middle age. I thought about the nine of us, like tulips, responding by growing towards the light.
Like much of western Europe, the Netherlands was hit with an Arctic Blast, which turned out to be little more than a light dusting of snow. And Amsterdam is insanely pretty in the snow.
Some stuff I did this week
We’re into the weeds with a client we’re supporting on a big digital comms transformation programme. Challenges this week included:
working out loud without creating more work for everyone because we don’t have answers to a lot of questions yet
our concept of internal and external audiences is nowhere near as clear as it used to be for communicators. Lots of people are both, or have a need that changes over time. And people who are internal might well be internal somewhere else too so you need to work harder to accommodate – and can’t necessarily expect them to care to the same extent. All that means we need to think how we serve audiences that might sit just outside a traditional definition of internal comms.
Won a new client 🎉 Looking forward to getting cracking with them soon.
On the flipside, we’ve had to do a swift pivot on work with a third client as they have some major internal changes happening and everyone felt it wasn’t right to move ahead with the discovery work we had planned. It’s a little frustrating to have to hit pause, but from experience if you do surveys and interviews in a period of change, they become an outlet for people to vent about the change rather than your communications, and you don’t get particularly useful outputs. Hope to pick that up again when the time’s right.
We sponsored UKEduCamp last week. It was the first time we’ve sponsored an event. I had no real idea if this would be worth doing, commercially, but we’ve been working with a few HE institutions lately and think it’s a fascinating space and wanted to support the folks making positive change in the sector. Anyway, we’ve had a few good conversations off the back of that this week.
I also saw Soulwax at the Paradiso. They had three drummers and it was the most incredible, visceral, almost primal sound. I can assure you there are no lessons I can draw from this on the subject of digital transformation.
Connections
Just the one this week: Met up with Cerys Hersey from Post*Shift for lunch and excellent chat.
What I’m reading
Code of Conduct: Why We Need to Fix Parliament” by Chris Bryant MP. As chair of the Committee on Standards and Privileges and Parliament’s foremost history nerd, Bryant chronicles the decline in standards, with more MPs resigning or suspended in this Parliament than any in history. He argues for Members to have increased control over parliamentary affairs – taking this away from the Executive – and advocates for greater ministerial accountability, transparency in lobbying and stricter penalties for misbehaviour. So far, so sensible.
But what I really appreciated was references ranged from the Merciless Parliament of 1388 to Ru Paul and the Sugababes. I love it when someone’s confident enough in their subject knowledge they can happily, unashamedly embrace the lowbrow.
Something I learned
On Weds and Thurs I tuned in to a few sessions of IntraTeam’s online event. I particularly like their events and community as there’s a core of people who attend year after year, all working on complex digital workplaces. That means the agenda aways includes in-depth sessions on really thorny case studies, huge organisations and mature ecosystems covering the full gamut of comms, collaboration, transactional and productivity tools.
My highlight was a session led by Frank Giroux on implementing generative AI at pharmaceutical giant Bayer. He talked about collecting and sharing stories on how colleagues are using (secure, enterprise) ChatGPT. What caught my attention was when he talked about a biweekly roundup of AI success stories which is shared across the organisation to encourage adoption and experimentation. Too many adoption programmes focus on selling defined benefits; it was interesting to see adoption comms encouraging people to experiment and inspiring them to find their own uses and affordances. An approach I fully intend to borrow.
I also learned that the Dutch for baseball is honkbal and I am not at all sure I can get over this.
When you work for yourself, you always have either not-quite-enough or slightly-too-much on. Last week was the former, then this week it felt like hitting the accelerator and going from 0-60 in seconds.
Some stuff I did this week
Kicked off the week by talking to an event organiser about facilitating a session on aligning comms with board-level strategic goals. Coincidentally I had just read this post from Craig Unsworth on priorities for boards in 2024. As I was reading it struck me how critical comms and engagement is to most of them. So it’s frustrating that we’re still having the same conversations about comms having a seat at the top table.
I spent the rest of the week in the UK, including two days on site with a client in Oxford, helping them to chose a platform for their new intranet. We’re now at the stage of the programme where we’re drilling down from bold ideas to thorny details. I love this bit, where we have to do the detailed thinking on how to make ideas a reality in messy, complicated organisations.
Connections
I drafted my 100 People list for the year. For the seventh year I’ve put together a list of people I’d like to catch up with – an idea I borrowed from Mary McKenna. They’re all business associates, former colleagues, or people in my wider professional network. Some are people I’m connected with online but have never met.
100 People started as an experiment in working my network, but now I no longer live in London I’ve found it’s a great way to be a bit more intentional and disciplined about keeping in touch with folks.
And that’s exactly what I did this week too, ticking four names off my list while I was in Britain this week, via excellent chats about comms, content, the future of work, and digital transformation.
Finished Marie Le Conte’s Escape: How a generation shaped, destroyed and survived the internet. It’s a memoir, but really it’s a paean to the internet as it was, when it was a secret space for us socially awkward weirdos. Le Conte takes us on a journey through the platforms and main characters of nascent social media. Over time that’s shifted from a space we went to escape real life, to being a force that shapes real life. Often in negative, destructive ways.
I sometimes think about stepping away from it all. Deleting my accounts. Moving to a paradise island. But like Le Conte, I couldn’t if I tried.
“I was born and bred online,” she writes in the introduction, “and if you remove the life I have led on there, it leaves me with no life at all.”
Hard relate.
Also finished The Last Mughal by William Dalrymple. A book about the fall of the Mughal Empire, focusing on the events of the 1857 rebellion against British rule. I started reading this while I was in India in November/December as I wanted to understand a bit more about the context and history of the places I was visiting; specifically the Red Fort, the fact that there isn’t a huge amount of Old Delhi left to see. But it was a bit heavy going to it took me a while to finish it.
It felt like a cautionary tale on the long term consequences of political figures manipulating religious and cultural differences to deepen and capitalise on societal rifts. A reminder – side-eye at politicians worldwide – that manipulating divisions for short-term political gain can have an impact that shapes societies for generations.
Something I learned
The first webcam was created not for security, or comms (or by a man broadcasting their hospital parts to strangers on the internet).
In 1991 Cambridge University scientists set up a camera to broadcast the state of the coffee pot in their computer lab, to help colleagues avoid the disappointment of schlepping down there only to find it empty.
I stumbled on the story of the Trojan Room Coffee Pot when looking for examples of employee-bodge solutions driving innovation.
When we do discovery exercises with organisations we always find a bunch of seemingly bonkers tools created (usually in Excel) by an enthusiastic employee who left years ago, yet still in regular use and often business critical.
The coffee pot cam and intranet-in-Excel are examples of employees identifying a real user need and using whatever tools they have at hand to meet it. I’ve been pondering the Workplace Bodge and the ways in which giving employees tools (eg no-code workflow builders) could help – or make it all so much worse. On the backlog of blog posts I might eventually get around to writing.
The quantity not quality approach to New Years fireworks here in Amsterdam
Inspired by Ann Kempster’s efforts, and having promised myself I’d write more this year, I’m going to start sharing a bit more about what I’m doing once a week or so*
* until I inevitably get too busy, or forget.
The new year arrived here in Amsterdam as it traditionally does… by making the city sound like a war zone. While other cities have one spectacular, giant firework display for people to gawp at, here in the Netherlands they have thousands of considerably less spectacular anarchic ones. For days leading up to oud en nieuw you’ll hear fireworks being set off everywhere, in an auditory scene redolent of Sam Mendes’ movie 1917.
12 children are reported to have lost a hand thanks to oudjaarsavond fireworks this year.
My hearing returned roughly when my New Years hangover lifted sometime on 2 January, as I pulled together my round-up of 2023.
From Wednesday I eased myself into work slowly after the festive break. I began with the Opening Of Teams And Outlook. Working with multiple organisations at a time gives one the opportunity to compare their cultures and ways of working, and this was just such an occasion. I’m currently a member of four different Teams environments. I opened each, gingerly, in turn in their respective Chrome profiles.
One: Not a peep from anyone in over a week Another: A bunch of emails and Teams messages, including some sent on Christmas Day itself
Yes, to a degree that’s a reflection of both local/national cultures (not everyone celebrates Christmas), but the online culture of work is led from the top. If people see leaders sending emails and messages over the holidays, they’ll feel pressure to do the same.
My tip: feel free to work when’s best for you, but if you’re a leader or manager then use that schedule button and send your message in regular working days/hours, to encourage healthy working habits in those around you.
(full disclosure: I used to be absolutely dreadful for all-hours emailing when I was in-house. If you worked with/for me back then, I’m sorry).
By Thursday the break was a distant memory as projects picked up in earnest.
Some stuff I did this week
Finished a ‘comms and collaboration playbook’ for one client to help them get the most out of Teams/M365 by aligning on agreed ways of working. Microsoft don’t help their users by offering at least three different ways of doing the same thing, all with same names. And which they keep changing. I work with this stuff day in day out, and even I’m confused a lot of the time.
On the plus side, Jon accidentally discovered live gesture reactions on a Teams call this week, putting two thumbs up and accidentally injecting a firework display into a client call. To give Microsoft credit, it was both more impressive and a hell of a lot safer than your average Dutch display.
Got back into the weeds of work on an intranet programme, looking at some of the gnarly governance questions.
Landed an interesting speaking gig for later in the year. Not a bad start to the year, work-wise.
Connections
I haven’t yet written my 100 People list for 2024. But I had a couple of good not-work-related-but-kinda chats this week.
A nice call with a founder who’s interested in building something in the digital workplace space (I love geeking out on this stuff),
A splendid irl catch up with Cate McLaurin over beer and ribs.
I’m in London and Oxford next week. I’ve already got a couple of catch-ups booked in for while I’m there; if you’re around and want to catch up, give me a shout and let’s see if we can find time.
What I’m reading
Friend and regular Lithos Partner-er Lisa Reimers bought me Marie Le Conte’s Escape for Christmas. I’m about halfway through and enjoying it very much so far. It’s interesting how much is relatable, as someone who’s been extremely online from my early teens… and yet how different some of it is to my own experience as someone a good decade older, joining the party when the internet was a very different place.
2023 was a year of growth. Not literally – I remain, wearyingly, below the 5ft mark – but personally and professionally it was a good year.
Q1: Spinning plates
Towards the end of 2022 the work diary was looking a little barer than I’d like for the start of the year, so I said yes to a gig that I would otherwise have turned down, and invested some time and money in launching our new product, DWXS.
Naturally, no sooner had I started both than other juicy, rewarding projects turned up. So the first few months of the year was a crazy busy whirlwind of long days and weekend working, juggling clients and contractors.
My main focus in the first quarter was a discovery project with a thorny client that just the right level of challenging. We were really proud of the of the work we did – and rightly so, as we were quickly asked to partner with them on a few overlapping digital transformation workstreams. That’s kept us busy all year. On the plus side, that’s means I’ve felt more confident declining work that’s not a good fit, but it’s also meant I’ve not had the bandwidth to spend as much time as I’d hoped on DWXS.
Q2: Disconnecting, entertaining, Interrailing
After the craziness of the first 11 weeks of the year I badly needed a break. So I booked myself, last minute, on a group tour in the Philippines. It promised escapism and it delivered that in spades.
By day 2 I was headed for a private island which had no electricity or phone signal. This is exactly what I – someone who is terrible at switching off – needed. I took my Apple Watch off and let my 1500-day move streak finally end. Even I was surprised how liberating it was to finally break the clutches of my wrist-based prison guard. I jumped off the side of a boat into the clear, warm sea. I read. I ate. I laughed. But mostly I did absolutely nothing, and that was enough.
Ignoring my notifications in the Philippines
I spend my life pointing at PowerPoint, so I signed up to do a turn at a slideshow-based comedy night. I was more nervous than I’ve been over any professional speaking I’ve ever done, but I only went and won Best Act. Here it is if you’re interested.
Back in 2022 I bought an Interrail pass in the sale, feeling guilty about the number of flights I take and resolved to use lower-carbon transport where possible. With the expiry date impeding I did a badly-planned, disjointed rail tour. A few observations:
The idea of digital nomadding by rail is far better than the reality. I got a lot less done working on a train than I hoped to.
The German reputation for train efficiency is entirely undeserved
It’s striking how I can turn up to my local station, Amsterdam Centraal, and jump on a train to almost anywhere in Europe… except the UK, which demands passengers arrive 60-90 mins early, go through passport control twice, and waste time drinking vending machine coffee in a depressing waiting room. I’m not sure I could find a more perfect illustration of the UK’s self-defeating isolation from its neighbours.
If you have an address outside the UK, an Interrail pass is a great hack for the UK’s overpriced train tickets. The saving on a single, last-minute journey from Wales to London was over half of the cost of my two-month Europe-wide pass.
Would I do it again? Maybe, but only if I had time to plan it better.
One of many sub-optimal work-from-train setups I had this year
Q3: Teamwork
My business partner Jonathan Phillips and I work brilliantly together. Arguably a bit too well. On client calls we know exact what the other is about to say. Sometimes we’ll open a collaborative document and start writing exactly the same thing. Recently I sent him a slide I’d done to illustrate a web of relationships between different elements of a programme, only to find he’d created something almost identical at the same time.
We worry we’re in danger of failing to challenge our own thinking. And because we’re so aligned, when we bring others into the team we need to work harder to intentionally communicate our expectations. We’ve not always got that right in the past.
But Q3 was where it seemed to fall into place. A couple of chunky projects demanded we really beef up our team, bringing in experts on digital skills, training, user research, content strategy and adoption. We’ve worked with some brilliant and talented people over the years and love it when we have the opportunity to bring people we trust and respect into our client work. Expanding our team rapidly forced us to rethink the way that we plan and share our work, to delegate more, to share more consistently.
All of that meant that while Q3 was even busier than Q1, I shared that burden with a great team and didn’t end up burned out at the end of it.
Q4: Travelling, connecting, celebrating
The final quarter of the year started much like the others: at an airport. Kicked off with a new client in New York, which afforded me the opportunity to catch up with a few NY-based pals while I was there. Took a side quest to Philadelphia and ended up getting interviewed by Fox News.
On the ‘Rocky Steps’ in Philly
In November my husband and I celebrated 20 years together. He’s the best. Being an unconventional couple, after marking the event at home in Amsterdam we headed off on holiday… separately. I spent a little under a month travelling around India. Watched the cricket cup final with a tense crowd in Mumbai, worked from poolside in Goa, joined Hindu devotees waiting for sunrise on the beach, ate my way around old Delhi by tuktuk, took a Bollywood dance class, cycled in Jaipur (which I do NOT recommend), rode a camel in the Thar desert, took a train through rural Rajasthan, drank masala chai in the sunset in Udaipur and caught up with old friends in Bangalore.
For the 6th year in a row I had a list of 100 people I hoped to meet before the year was out. A mixture of former colleagues/business associates and online connections. I managed 53 catch-ups across 10 cities, which is less than I’d hoped, but every one of them left me energised and my mind bubbling with new ideas.
I’ve never been much of a planner. But a combination of sheer dumb luck and a few good decisions have given me the opportunity to do work I enjoy, with people I like, to live where I want to, given me a brilliant support network of friends and family, and allowed me to travel the world and see some incredible things. And for that I’m incredibly grateful.
I hope to see more of the world – and of you – in 2024.
Here’s my year in daily one-second snapshots
2023 in quant
Flights: 42
Trains: 22
Countries visited: 12
Cities visited: 22
Hotels stayed in: 36
Events spoken at: 7
Comedy gigs: 2
Podcasts: 1
Times voted: 1 (Dutch water board elections – there’s no vote too provincial for for me to get excited about)
Spin classes: 114
Weight lifted: 100kg
Weight lost: -2kg (the food was too good in India)
UK businesses face a perfect storm in the months ahead. The Brexit transition and pending deal means UK businesses must find their footing in a new—and currently uncertain—era of international trade. And at the same time, the crisis caused by Covid-19 shows little sign of abating, leaving a trail of economic impacts and forcing changes to the way that we live and work forever.
So firms face an almighty challenge; they must fundamentally adapt and find new ways to remain competitive at a time of unparalleled disruption. But how?
Having written about the factors businesses need to consider as they adapt previously, I was interested to see Microsoft’s latest report Creating a blueprint for UK competitiveness. This comprehensive piece of research looks at what it takes to compete in a post-COVID, post-Brexit world.
They partnered with an independent team of economists and researchers, led by Dr Chris Brauer (Director of Innovation at my alma mater, Goldsmiths, University of London). Through extensive qualitative and quantitative research, they uncovered the need for a new model of competitiveness.
Among the report’s recommendations, they focus on the need to shape a new world of work. They outline two potential paths to growth, which resonated with me and the work I’ve been doing this year.
Path 1: ‘Hollow Growth’: cost reduction with missed opportunities
The first path, which the report calls Hollow Growth, is characterised by a focus on cost reduction. While a switch to distributed work presents the opportunity for huge real estate savings, if businesses focus on savings alone, they’ll miss this chance to radically reshape the business.
When it comes to future readiness, hollow growth organisations are notable for:
rigid organisational structures (which, as I blogged about previously, are a barrier to strategic delivery in a remote-first world)
minimal support for workers when it comes to adapting and re-skilling for the future
basing forward plans heavily on the past, for example by sticking to traditional measures of productivity and ignoring less tangible outcomes like agility, resilience and culture
failure to use technology to optimise individual functions and services
Path 2: Sustainable Growth (or ‘Sustainable Growth’: finding strategic advantages to bring real transformation, over cost reduction)
As a counterpoint to the earlier short-termist approach, the report outlines an alternative, sustainable path to growth. One which:
focuses on organisational resilience
nurtures and grows the culture of trust, empowerment and inclusivity—essential to scale distributed ways of working adopts leadership defined by both empathy and decisiveness
Sustainable Growth organisations prioritise real transformation over cost reduction alone. This part of the report chimed with me, reflecting many of the points I’ve made about leadership, strategy and skills for example.
The Sustainable Growth model the report outlines provides a useful model for organisations looking to turn flexible and distributed work into a driver of strategic advantage. With a focus on people and culture, employees are empowered to work flexibly and supported to learn new skills.
Similarly, the Sustainable Growth model takes a more mature and (small ‘a’) agile approach to digital, embedding it into the heart of the organisation. This means tools are transitioned to quickly and systemically, making the organisation fit to respond to new challenges and opportunities when they arise.
But given the uncertain-looking future, companies want and need those cost savings, as does the economy. Can the Sustainable Growth model deliver? The authors certainly think so.
The report paints a powerful picture of the benefits of taking this sustainable path. The Goldsmiths researchers calculate that if, supported by the government, every UK organisation adopted a more sustainable growth model and achieved a small, incremental increase in their competitiveness, it would deliver a boost to the national economy of £48.2 billion.
It’s clear UK businesses will be put to the test like never before in 2021. Competitiveness will be critical in the short term as businesses fight to stay afloat and remain relevant. But a laser focus on sustainable growth is essential for the long term too—yielding a long-term impact on organisational performance that’s positive for people, communities and our planet, as we grow our economy out of crisis.
With the landscape moving so quickly, Matt and I spent some time last week working through the remaining themes we identified as priorities for organisations that want to make remote an enabler of (rather than a barrier to) delivery of their strategy.
In our first post we looked at systems, structure, shared values, skills and roles and strategy. Take a look.
Now we turn to the final four themes
Spaces
For a long time, offices – like factories before them – where were you accessed the equipment necessary to get work done. The availability of cheap laptops and ubiquitous broadband means this hasn’t been the case for at least a decade.
Nonetheless, offices continued to be the primary place of work because of their secondary purpose; the belief that bringing people together in the same place helped to foster collaborative working. Rows of open plan desks gave way to mixed environments offering impromptu meeting spaces to facilitate this. Even the most digital of companies such as Google and Facebook continued to encourage employees to come to the office in order to foster innovation.
Covid changed all of that, forcing all to figure out how we can work individually from home. In the past 10 weeks we’ve used collaboration tools to try re-create the in-person interactions we had while working in the physical office.
Spaces are now sitting empty, and people are wondering what we do with them next. There’s an assumption that we’ll continue to work at home for individual tasks, with offices being re-configured for more collaborative in-person working such as workshops once this is all over.
However, early indications suggest that assumption could be some way off the mark. Social distancing rules dictate that even where offices are being re-opened, meeting rooms and breakout areas need to stay out of bounds. A room that could have hosted ten is now strictly capped at two. How do you manage a group brainstorm around the whiteboard while keeping everyone two metres apart?
You don’t. You need to do what Matt and I did for this session and find ways to do this online.
(We used Miro, a tool we’ve both become evangelical about in recent weeks, because it allows you to do things collaboratively with people in a way that you can’t do in physical space, focusing conversation yet making it possible to integrate other media. It’s what hypertext was supposed to be.)
People will need to learn how to use such tools for virtual collaboration. But putting collaborative tools into the hands of every employee democratises them and, in turn, drives up the quality of collaboration. Especially when compared with scarce physical tools such as interactive meeting room whiteboards.
And once these skills and habits have been gained, it leaves open the question of what physical workplaces are actually for.
But physical spaces serve other purposes. These include:
Access to specialist equipment: clearly a research scientist is not going to set up a complete lab in their spare bedroom
Status symbols: those big glass towers making up some of the world’s most expensive real estate in New York, London and Hong Kong send a clear message about your brand and stability
Proof of life: for smaller companies, a physical office is considered evidence you exist, helping to build trust with customers
Grounding in the community: this is especially true for local businesses, public/voluntary sector organisations or those with a longstanding connection with place
Additionally, there will always be some people who can’t – or don’t want to – work from home. For example someone living in crowded accommodation with children at home.
So organisations shift to remote or distributed work, their use of physical space will change but not disappear. The focus will move to supporting smaller numbers of staff with specific needs for office space, and those secondary purposes listed above. Office space – and the roles supporting it – becomes a cost to be minimised.
This has some potentially huge second-order effects for property markets and for cities. WeWork’s business model looks even more precarious than it was, as corporate tenants retrench from secondary spaces on short leases to their owned properties. At the same time, we could see the rise of local co-working hubs providing office space for those who need it without the long (and in these socially-distanced times, potentially dangerous) commute. The Irish community organisation Grow Remote provides a useful model here; they champion physical and virtual hubs to those working remotely diverse organisations benefit from connection with one another and with the communities in which they’re based.
One outstanding question is what, if anything, replaces the function of the building as a signal of prestige. What’s the digital equivalent of the client floor or the tower projecting its logo across Hong Kong’s harbour?
Corporate communications
Organisations and their leadership need to communicate to their people about their goals, values and progress. They want to align employee action with their purpose and objectives, and keep people engaged and informed.
In the past couple of decades the internal communications profession has moved away from a top-down distribution role to one of curator, controller and advisor. They understand what is going on in the organisation at all levels, ensuring that employees are in the loop, and facilitate two-way conversation between employees and leadership.
Covid has forced corporate communications into crisis mode. The priority has been to keep people informed about what their employers are doing to keep them safe, keep customers happy, keep people in work and ensure the business stays solvent. And at the same time, many of the most effective tools in the communicators’ armoury aren’t available, like the old-fashioned poster and digital signage.
The result has been an overwhelming shift to broadcast channels. In a straw poll during my keynote at last week’s Brussels Digital Workplace Event, 87% of attendees said they had relied especially on email and 82% on a traditional intranet to keep employees in the loop. But at the same time, organisations have had to more actively listen to what employees, using things like sentiment analysis.
As organisations shift to this New Abnormal, corporate communications can’t simply go back to what they were doing pre-Covid. Instead, they need to redesign their channel architecture and content strategy around the needs of employees who rarely come into the office.
That means:
Understanding employees’ need for communication, and taking a user needs focused approach to designing and delivering it
Offering a mix of push and pull channels, so people receive the information they need, but also have the means to find what they want and be confident it’s accurate
Finding ways to cut though the (now somewhat overwhelming) noise and ensure what people get is relevant and timely. This could mean borrowing techniques from digital marketing and using data to target employees effectively. But equally, it could mean looking at how messages naturally propagate within organisations – via the grapevine – and hacking that.
Finding the right balance between listening to employees and understanding what they want, without surveiling them
Getting this balance right means relying less on copying best practices, and rather on understanding employee needs, experimenting with new approaches, and seeing what gets cut through. All of that requires a more robust approach to measurement.
Organisational communication
Related to this – and often using the same channels – is how people within organisations communicate with one another to get work done.
In a physically co-located team, communication is implicit. That is, you pick up on conversations happening around you. You can lean over the desk and say “Hey, Dave, are you working on this? Do you know where this file is? Can you tell me the latest on this customer?”. That communication is largely synchronous, in that it happens while you’re both in the room, and much of it is tacit; we communicate without even thinking about it, through our body language and tone.
In recovery mode we’re still working synchronously, but we’re having to work much harder to do that, and be more deliberate. But that’s exhausting. It also demands more of our energy and attention; Zoom fatigue is a very real phenomenon.
Making this work long term means retaining that explicit, deliberate communication, but adapting it to be less time-consuming and attention-demanding by embracing asynchronicity.
That means mixing up modes and channels, using interactive channels (like Miro) or collaborative documents, rather than video feeds.
Embracing asynchronous working has secondary benefits, too. It means more knowledge and conversation is committed to corporate memory, and allows people to work more flexibility across shifts or time zones.
To shift to asynchronous communication and collaboration in order to become truly remote-first, organisations need to give people training, coaching and time to experiment with a flexible suite of tools.
Support
Organisations offer support to employees to get their work done – from providing transactional services to troubleshooting issues and problems with equipment, facilities, software and so on.
Traditionally this is offered on a tool-by-tool or service-by-service basis, meaning the overall support landscape is as fractured and siloed as the organisation itself.
In a traditional workplace this is augmented by informal support. People will turn to a longer serving or otherwise helpful colleague to help them resolve problems.
Shifting to home work has left employees reliant on digital channels to get work done, but often struggling to access help to resolve problems or learn new systems, as colleague support is unavailable and helpdesks overwhelmed.
For organisations to turn remote work into a strategic advantage, they need a greater focus on supporting employees to be engaged and productive. They need to understand that employees are reliant on a complex and fragmented set of tools to get work done, and when these aren’t working employees are left frustrated and productive time is lost.
This means:
Replacing fractured single-system help with a concierge approach focused on unblocking problems for the user quickly
At the same time, helping employees to build their digital skills and confidence to use the tools they have and resolve their own problems
Consider the overall digital employee experience and, where possible, streamline and simplify this so it’s designed around the needs of staff and not the structure of the organisation
Build informal support networks to help resolve issues and unblock problems, and to share advice and learning with one another as it’s learned
Managers understanding the role they play in unblocking barriers and creating a successful work environment – and leading by example
On reflection, it makes sense to roll this into the ‘Roles and skills’ theme we covered in the last session.
Conclusions
Across all of our themes there were some clear principles:
Re-thinking how work gets done rather than translating existing office-based ways of working to digital channels
Taking a user needs-focused approach, understanding barriers to effective distributed/remote working and how these can be ameliorated
Helping people build their skills in communication and collaboration so they can embrace asynchronous working
Trust underpins all effective remote working. Organisations must look at how this can be built and sustained at scale and for the long haul.
In his WB40 podcast, Matt talked to Dave Coplin about his recent research. Coplin found trust for managers in their employees was important, but so too was trust in peers. Managers need to know that work is being done (and done properly) and employees at all levels need confidence that their peers are pulling their weight too.
Measuring productivity in knowledge workers is notoriously difficult. Very little work can easily be attributed to outcomes, forcing us to measure outputs and throughputs instead (particularly in public sector organisations, where there may be pressure to demonstrate value for money). But such measurement is largely inaccurate (as anyone who receives weekly emails from Microsoft’s MyAnalytics can attest) and open to being gamed.
Striking the right balance between demands for productivity monitoring, sentiment analysis and creepy employee surveillance presents one of the first thorny challenges organisations face as they move from recovery mode to the long haul.
The two whiteboard sessions enabled us to evolve our model a little. Here’s version 2. It’s still a work in progress and we’re keen to get your thoughts on how it can be improved. Let us know in the comments.
Sharon O'Dea 
