Some weeks resist the usual format. This is one of them. I could tell you what I’ve been reading, what I’ve been watching, or how many emails I ignored. But none of that is important right now.

The story this week is that we had a launch party for the book, and I appear to have spent the days since discovering I have way more feelings than I’d budgeted for.

It was on the roof of Shoreditch House, which meant the whole thing happened against the skyline of the city I was born in, went to school in, and — bar a few brief spells elsewhere — lived in until I was thirty-nine. Most of the professional life this book is built on happened somewhere down there. Parliament. Banks. Charities. Agencies. Clients. Conference venues. Tube stations. Whichever Pret happened to be closest to whichever office I was working in that week.

London has never really felt like one place to me. It’s always been commutes and postcodes and jobs. But from up there, all at once, it suddenly became one continuous story. My story.

I should mention the dress.

I bought an incredible dress because it had a cape. An actual cape. Like I was either accepting an Oscar or about to arrest Lex Luthor.

I mentioned this to everyone. Not metaphorically. Literally everyone.

I’d be halfway through thanking someone for supporting my career over the last fifteen years before my brain interrupted with TELL THEM ABOUT THE CAPE.

“It’s got a cape.”

Reader, it did.

About 110 people RSVP’d. Fewer made it, as is always the way. I noticed for roughly twelve seconds.

Because then I looked around the room and realised what was actually there.

Twenty years of work.

Not “networking”, which is what LinkedIn insists on calling it. Just… people. Clients. Colleagues. Friends. The people who taught us the trade, challenged our thinking, hired us, argued with us, let us test half-formed ideas on organisations they were responsible for, and occasionally trusted us enough to implement them. Every one of them has ended up in this book somewhere, whether they know it or not.

Looking around the room, I realised there are only two occasions where everyone from across your life turns up at once: your funeral, and apparently your first book launch if you’ve spent twenty years in the same gloriously niche profession.

I can recommend the latter. Better catering. Less crying. And the guest of honour gets to wear a cape.

I gave a speech. On paper it was mostly self-deprecating jokes, because I don’t really know any other way of getting through emotional occasions. But somewhere around the thank-yous the armour stopped working.

Because underneath all the jokes about procrastination and mutually assured productivity was the thing I was actually trying to say.

I met Jon on Twitter around 2010. We started writing blog posts together. Then reports. Then client work. Somewhere along the way we accidentally built a company. Sixteen years later there’s a book with both our names on the spine.

A sequence of events that’s as brilliant as it is ridiculous.

I’d assumed I was fine. I’m good at being fine; it’s practically a professional competency by this point. But then I found myself standing in a room full of people who had each, in their own way, nudged that sequence along. The people who hired us before we really knew what we were doing. The people who challenged our thinking until it got better. The people who introduced us to other people. The people who kept believing we’d eventually finish the bloody thing.

The book felt like the excuse. Looking around the room, it was obvious what we were really celebrating was twenty years of friendships, collaborations and opportunities that somehow, improbably, added up to this.

The fineness rather comprehensively deserted me.

And then the microphone screamed with feedback, Jon looked at me, and we both completely lost it.

Which, in hindsight, was exactly the right ending to the emotional bit.

There’s a particular problem with being the centre of attention at your own party, which I last encountered at my wedding. It’s the exact opposite of ordinary party anxiety. You don’t spend the evening worrying you won’t know anyone. You spend it knowing everyone, and barely managing to speak to any of them.

Every time I got properly into a conversation, someone needed me to meet someone else, sign a book, pose for a photo, or stand somewhere with marginally better lighting. I’d spot someone across the room I’d been meaning to catch up with for an hour, start making my way over, and immediately get intercepted.

If we started a conversation and then I disappeared halfway through it, I’m sorry. I wasn’t ignoring you. I was being aggressively celebrated.

The overwhelm, naturally, waited until the following morning.

Overnight we’d been tagged in dozens of posts. People writing about the book, about the evening, about seeing old friends and making new ones. What struck me most wasn’t what people wrote about us. It was what they wrote about each other.

Lisa, who’s worked with Lithos often enough to know exactly which bits of our thinking need challenging, mapped a startling number of her own career connections back to a single retweet of mine from when Twitter was still good. One introduction became work with the British Red Cross. That became more work. That became an entire direction for her career.

I’d completely forgotten that retweet had happened.

Reading everyone’s posts, I realised how many of those moments there had been. Lisa could draw a straight line from one retweet of mine to a decade of work. I could draw equally improbable lines back to at least a dozen people in that room: someone who hired me, someone who vouched for me, someone who made an introduction, someone who took a punt on us when “us” was still mostly an idea.

None of those moments felt important when they happened. They took minutes, sometimes seconds. It’s only years later, when everyone starts comparing notes, that you realise careers aren’t built out of grand strategic plans. They’re built out of hundreds of tiny acts of generosity that the person doing them has usually forgotten by the following Tuesday.

There’s also a good story about how the book itself got written.

Donna at Kogan Page asked me if I’d write one in 2023. I demonstrated my enthusiasm by doing absolutely nothing about it for roughly a year. Eventually I said to Jon, “What if we wrote it together, so social awkwardness forces us to finish it?”

And that is, apparently, how you write a book.

We split chapters, swapped drafts, edited each other ruthlessly until neither of us could remember who’d written what, and hopefully ended up sounding like one person.

As chapter ten repeatedly points out, launching isn’t the end. It’s the point where people finally get to decide whether the thing deserved launching in the first place. So this is, technically, the beginning.

Thank you to Appspace for sponsoring the evening, so the emotional wreckage at least came with an open bar. To Paul Clarke, who photographed it, which means the bits I was too busy feeling things to remember are safely on record. To Donna and Anne-Marie at Kogan Page, whose faith in this book’s eventual existence significantly exceeded the available evidence. To the Lithos crew, who have spent years patiently correcting the pronunciation of a company name that two communications consultants somehow chose without ever saying it aloud first. To our clients, for occasionally letting us discover what doesn’t work on their time rather than ours.

And to David, who has lived with this book for considerably longer than any husband should reasonably be expected to.

Anyway.

tl;dr: we wrote a book. I wore a cape.

The launch in photos

I have spent the last three weeks becoming the sort of person who cries in bookshops, obsessively refreshes Amazon bestseller rankings, and voluntarily disappears into a Dutch field with patchy phone signal.

In my defence, all three seemed perfectly reasonable at the time.

The book Jonathan and I have been writing for the last eighteen months finally hit real and digital shelves, which turned out to be a far more emotional experience than I’d anticipated. Work became an unexpectedly coherent series of conversations about AI, change and the uncomfortable gap between what organisations want technology to do and what people are actually ready for. Then, because I’d apparently reached my annual quota of thinking, I went to Down The Rabbit Hole festival and spent three days remembering that basslines solve more problems than LinkedIn ever will.

Only sitting down to write this did I realise these weren’t really separate stories at all. They were all, in different ways, about letting go. Of certainty. Of ownership. Of the comforting illusion that once you’ve finished something, the hard bit is over.

Anyway. Here’s the last three weeks.

This week at work

We’ve been working with a client that doesn’t want to upgrade their comms platform. Or migrate it. Or even skip a version.

They want to leapfrog the whole lot and build an AI-first communications architecture instead.

It’s an ambitious instinct, and I think probably the right one. If you’re convinced the next decade of work will look fundamentally different, designing for that rather than polishing the last generation of technology makes a lot of sense.

The awkward bit is that becoming AI-first is itself a massive change programme. And change programmes have always run on one thing: good communication. So the capability you’d normally rely on to help an organisation navigate a transformation like this is… the capability you’re busy transforming.

It’s less “fixing the plane while flying it” and more flying one plane while trying to assemble a second, better plane alongside it, using parts that are still on backorder until sometime in 2027.

The other thing that kept nagging at me was ownership. Move internal comms onto a platform designed primarily around work rather than communication, and comms stops being the product owner and becomes another customer. That’s not really a technical decision. It’s an organisational one. You’re asking a team to hand over not just a platform, but a chunk of its identity.

That tension turned out not to belong to just one client. It surfaced over and over again in conversations that had nothing to do with each other.

A recruiter described our profession as “sleepwalking into oblivion” — his words, not mine — and pointed to something I’ve been wondering about for a while. AI absolutely is making people more productive. The problem is that most of those gains stay private.

If a four-hour task now takes thirty minutes, there’s not much incentive to announce that fact to your employer. So the productivity improvement exists, but only at the individual level. The organisation never really gets to bank it.

A researcher looking at AI governance in financial services arrived at almost exactly the same conclusion from the opposite direction. Most governance fails because it lives in documents instead of products. Nobody wants another policy. They want the safest thing to also be the easiest thing.

Then I spoke to someone working on AI for maritime crews — people scattered across ships for months at a time, often speaking different first languages. Different industry. Different problems. Same conclusion.

AI isn’t reducing information overload. It’s accelerating it. Robots producing content for other robots to summarise, while the humans are somehow expected to emerge at the end of the process better informed.

What struck me was that none of these conversations had anything to do with each other. Different organisations. Different industries. Different starting points. Yet they all kept landing in exactly the same place.

The technology is arriving faster than organisations can absorb it. AI isn’t eliminating the need for communication, governance or judgement. If anything, it’s making all three more important.

It’s always reassuring when reality starts independently peer-reviewing your book.

Also this week

Ah yes. The book. It exists!

After twenty years in digital, where everything is iterative, agile, endlessly tweakable and somehow never actually finished, writing a book turned out to be the most waterfall project imaginable.

You research. You draft. You edit. You agonise over commas. Then, one day, someone prints the thing and that’s it. No hotfix. No version 1.1. No updating the chapter because you’ve thought of a better example.

Just several hundred pages of your opinions, frozen in time.

I’ve written before about being a late bloomer — the kid who couldn’t tie her shoelaces until she was ten, who didn’t finish university until 27, who never had a five-year plan and barely managed a five-day one. “Not reaching your full potential” was the phrase that got used, usually kindly, occasionally not.

People like me don’t write books. We’re not supposed to. So for eighteen months I treated it as a project rather than a fact — a series of Word documents that Jonathan and I could keep poking at forever. In the spring it became a PDF proof and a red pen. Abstract. Deniable. Still, on some level, not really happening.

Because of some logistical hiccups, my author copies were delayed. So I wandered down to the American Book Center here in Amsterdam and picked up a copy off the shelf, like any other customer.

And promptly burst into tears.

Not because it had become real, exactly. More because it had stopped belonging to me — and because the weird, shy, half-blind, shoelace-challenged kid I used to be would not have believed for a second that the object in my hands existed, let alone that I’d made it.

Suddenly it was a thing that people I’d never met were buying, reading, agreeing with, arguing with, using, learning from, spilling coffee on and — if I’m very lucky — recommending to someone else.

That’s a strangely emotional handover.

Since then it’s been quietly surreal seeing photos arrive from readers across the UK, Europe, Asia and Australia. A thing that lived almost entirely inside two people’s heads now seems to have escaped into the wild.

Unfortunately, so has my ability to behave normally about it.

Amazon doesn’t tell authors how many copies they’re selling in real time. It does, however, update the bestseller rankings with alarming regularity, which means I’ve spent rather more time than is healthy refreshing those charts and attempting to reverse-engineer my own sales figures from movements between books in the Public Relations chart.

This is obviously ridiculous behaviour. But I have absolutely no intention of stopping before the US launch later this month.

I also officially stepped into my role on the IABC EMENA board, taking on the professional development portfolio. Given the number of conversations I’ve been having lately about how our profession adapts to AI, changing careers and a rapidly shifting workplace, it feels like exactly the right thing to be working on.

Or, perhaps, like volunteering to captain the lifeboat while everyone is still arguing about whether the iceberg is really there. Time will tell.

Consuming

📺 Watching

Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey is either the most or least necessary film ever made, depending on your feelings about remaking one of the foundational texts of Western literature that people have already been adapting for roughly three thousand years.

It looks extraordinary. This is exactly the sort of film cinemas were invented for. Matt Damon makes a thoroughly convincing man who has spent the last decade annoying several gods simultaneously, and despite what the permanently aggrieved corners of the internet had to say beforehand, the casting is excellent throughout.

It is also, unfortunately, very long.

Not Oppenheimer long, where you somehow don’t notice. Properly, consciously long. Multiple wee break long. There were stretches where it felt less like Homer than a Hollywood epic fulfilling its contractual obligation to be Important Cinema.

Then again, The Odyssey is fundamentally the story of one man taking an absurdly long time to get home, so perhaps I should stop complaining about the pacing.

🎵 Listening

The real highlight of the last fortnight had nothing to do with books, AI or the future of work.

It was my annual pilgrimage to Down The Rabbit Hole, which also explains why these weeknotes disappeared for a couple of weeks.

The festival opened with Peaches dressed, entirely appropriately, as a bag of dicks, which immediately established that we were all in safe hands.

From there it just kept delivering. Little Simz. The xx. David Byrne somehow continuing to defy both age and physics. Empire of the Sun. CMAT. Johnny Marr.

My discovery of the weekend was Panic Shack: four women from Cardiff making gloriously unbothered punk music that sounds like someone weaponised the smoking area outside a Wetherspoons. I was completely sold within about thirty seconds. I also enjoyed The Mary Wallopers — essentially the Poundshop Pogues — considerably more than I’d expected.

Then Florence + The Machine closed the festival. The sun disappearing over the lake. Free ringing out across the site. Me dancing with my oldest and best friend.

After several weeks spent thinking and talking about AI, work, governance and the future of the profession, it was a useful reminder that sometimes the correct answer is to disappear into a field with no phone signal and listen to impossibly loud music for three days.

Life doesn’t get much better than that.

Life lately, in photos

Human beings like to imagine that awareness is a kind of immunity. It isn’t.

This week I spent a lot of time thinking about systems: how organisations choose technology, how AI adoption actually happens, and how large companies engineer the incentives that keep us doing exactly what they’d hoped we’d do.

Then I lost my Kindle halfway through a chapter explaining Amazon’s lock-in strategy. And I replaced it within days.

It’s oddly comforting to discover that, however well you understand the machine, it still processes you exactly the same as everyone else.

This week at work

I spent a good chunk of the week with an internal communicator trying to answer one of those questions that sounds straightforward until you actually ask it: what’s the best intranet platform?

The answer, infuriatingly, is the same as it always is:  it depends.

There are dozens of dedicated intranet platforms before you even get into the various flavours of SharePoint and employee apps. Then come the demos. The analyst reports. The comparison matrices. The sales teams who all insist their product was designed specifically for organisations exactly like yours. Somewhere around this point IT joins the conversation with a list of things they’ll never support, procurement starts asking awkward questions, and everyone’s forgotten what problem they were trying to solve.

Which is why the first job isn’t evaluating products. It’s deciding how you’re going to evaluate them.

The obvious place to start is with the technology you’ve already got. If you’re a Microsoft organisation then SharePoint isn’t really a choice; it’s already sitting there waiting for you. The real decision is whether you use it as Microsoft intended, add an intranet-in-a-box product on top, or walk away from the ecosystem altogether.

All three can be the right answer.

Native SharePoint is wonderfully flexible in much the same way Lego is wonderfully flexible. Given enough time and determination you can build almost anything. You can also spend six months arguing about which brick goes where before you’ve produced anything recognisable.

An intranet-in-a-box gives you much stronger opinions. Less flexibility, more momentum. That’s often sold as a compromise. In practice it’s frequently the thing that stops a project disappearing into an endless debate about homepage layouts and whether every department deserves its own shade of blue.

Going outside Microsoft opens up some genuinely excellent user experiences, particularly for frontline organisations. But you also inherit a different set of problems: identity, people data, integrations, duplicated content, and all the other plumbing that nobody puts on the front page of the brochure.

The technology, though, is only half the story. The bigger question is what you actually need the thing to do.

An intranet serving lawyers, engineers and office workers looks very different from one serving retail staff who’ve never logged into a corporate laptop. That’s one of the reasons Jon and I built the “graphic equaliser” model into Digital Communications at Work. Every intranet is balancing the same handful of jobs — communications, knowledge, applications and collaboration — but every organisation pushes the sliders differently. It’s a much more useful place to start than asking which platform everyone else seems to be buying.

This particular communicator is already leaning away from SharePoint. That may turn out to be exactly the right decision.

The important thing is being able to explain why before the first vendor demo persuades you otherwise.

Jon and I also managed to spend a day together this week working through upcoming client projects and making one final pass at the book launch.

With publication less than a week away, the to-do list has entered that peculiar phase where everything feels both desperately urgent and somehow already too late.

We even remembered to take a photo together. Admittedly I then asked Gemini to remove the evidence that I’d apparently eaten lunch directly onto my shirt. Authenticity has its limits.

The strangest part is that people have started receiving their copies of the book. Mine, meanwhile, is somewhere between a warehouse and Amsterdam.

There’s something slightly surreal about knowing people you’ve never met are already reading words you spent two years writing, while you still haven’t actually held the finished thing yourself.

I’m sure there’s a profound metaphor in there about letting creative work go. Fortunately, I’m under no obligation to find it.

Also this week

Back from Canada and straight into a record-breaking heatwave, which my body greeted as if someone had accidentally changed the difficulty setting.

After all of 22 hours at home I was back at Schiphol, Bristol-bound to catch up with Jon and — much more importantly — to see one of my oldest friends, Katy, for Super Furry Animals at Bristol Sounds.

It was their first tour together in more than a decade, and they wisely resisted the temptation to get clever. Hit after hit, just enough deep cuts to keep the loyalists happy, and a reminder that they were always far stranger, funnier and more inventive than they were ever given credit for.

The really odd thing was discovering that every lyric was still sitting somewhere in the back of my brain, untouched for twenty-odd years, waiting to be retrieved at a moment’s notice.

I can’t remember why I walked into the kitchen half the time, but apparently The Man Don’t Give a Fuck has been safely preserved since 1996.

The venue sits right on Bristol’s harbourside and, under normal circumstances, must be one of the nicest places in the country to watch a gig.

Unfortunately the weather had decided to recreate the surface of Mercury.

It was still glorious.

There’s a point at every really good gig where your brain stops keeping score of everything else. The heat, the crowds, your feet hurting, the price of the beer. It all just… drops away for a couple of hours.

The heatwave finally admitted defeat last night. For hours, lightning rolled across the sky behind the Westerkerk while thunder echoed around the city. I abandoned all pretence of doing anything useful, put the tripod in the window and just watched.

Nature remains embarrassingly overqualified for putting on a light show.

Consuming

I managed to lose my Kindle somewhere between Toronto and Montréal.

This would merely have been annoying were it not for the fact that I was halfway through Cory Doctorow’s Enshittification at the time.

Specifically, I’d just finished the chapter explaining how Amazon uses DRM to lock you into its ecosystem. Once your library exists inside Kindle, he argues, the cost of leaving becomes larger than the cost of staying. You’re not choosing the best device anymore. You’re paying an exit fee from a prison you forgot you were in.

Staring a bookless flight home in the face,  before heading to the airport, I went to Best Buy and bought another Kindle. Immediately.

No comparison shopping. No soul-searching. No stirring speech about refusing to reward monopolistic behaviour. Just the defeated efficiency of someone who has read the warning label, nodded thoughtfully, and carried on drinking the poison because, in fairness, it does come in a very convenient bottle.

It’s one of the defining experiences of modern life: becoming fully aware of the machine while continuing to feed yourself into it because all your stuff is already in there.

Doctorow would probably regard this as evidence. Amazon would probably regard it as a successful customer journey.

Coverage

Over on Reworked this week: More Tools Won’t Fix Collaboration. Communities Might. It’s about the thing I think a lot of AI rollouts are getting wrong.

Most organisations are still treating adoption as a licensing problem. Buy the seats. Deliver the training. Publish the guidance. Job done.

Except it isn’t. People don’t really learn new ways of working from documentation. They learn them from each other.

The missing infrastructure underneath most AI programmes isn’t another platform. It’s the social layer that helps people swap ideas, steal good workflows and discover what’s actually useful.

Seat counts tell you how much AI you’ve bought. Appropriation tells you how much you’re getting back.

This week in photos

I came to Canada and was immediately, overwhelmingly, welcomed.

Some of it was people I already knew — friends from online, from conferences, from random corners of the world who happened to be in the same city at the same time. Some of it was strangers who became familiar within hours. A pub full of Canadians who adopted me on the basis of a red bucket hat. A room full of communicators who turned up with problems and left with each other’s contact details. A community that has been warm in the way that only happens when people genuinely care about the work they do and the people they do it with.

I love people. Specifically: being in rooms with them.

This fortnight provided an almost unreasonable quantity of that. New conversations. Old friends. Conference corridors. Hotel bars. Dinners that ran late, then turned into windowless speakeasies. The peculiar magic of finding yourself among people who understand your niche corner of the world without requiring a fifteen-minute explanation first.

And then, after several consecutive days of exactly the thing I claim to enjoy, I fled into the Quebec wilderness and spent a day hiking alone in relentless rain.

One of the more annoying discoveries of adulthood is that liking people and needing a break from them are not, in fact, contradictory positions. So I’m heading home today full. Full of conversations, ideas, and new connections.

Also, briefly, full of rainwater.

(regular readers — hello, Mum 👋 — will note there was no weeknote 24. I was just crazy busy and it fell off my radar. Bumper edition this week to make up for it.)

The last two weeks at work

The last fortnight was largely consumed by Toronto, where I spent the better part of a week oscillating between IABC World Conference and Comms Reboot. But it actually began a little earlier, with Jon and me delivering our Infozempic webinar — our increasingly elaborate attempt to explain information overload through the lens of weight-loss drugs — to communicators across Denmark, Sweden and Germany.

The session went well. The audience was engaged. The feedback was positive.

And yet presenting to a gallery of muted thumbnails remains one of the least natural activities modern working life has invented. Human beings spent hundreds of thousands of years evolving to communicate face-to-face and have somehow landed on “talking enthusiastically into a laptop while occasionally wondering whether everyone has quietly gone to make tea”.

Sunday was considerably better.

I opened the IABC Heads of Comms Special Interest Group, delivering essentially the same material to a room full of actual people. Lots of questions. Good discussion. The sort of session where you can feel the audience thinking with you. Every time I do both formats back-to-back I’m reminded that online may be more efficient, but in-person is still better.

Then came three days of the main conference.

There was plenty worth taking away. Fred Cook from USC Annenberg shared data showing the proportion of CEOs who think companies should speak publicly on social issues has fallen from 89% to 52% in just two years, which feels like one of those statistics that tells you rather a lot about the current moment. There was a surprisingly interesting session on what communicators can learn from DJs. Lots on AI, segmentation, employee engagement and the usual industry obsession with measuring things that may or may not actually exist.

I came home with a notebook full of ideas and an even bigger ‘to read’ pile than I had before.

The week finished with Comms Reboot, Jenni Field’s unconference. If World Conference is about learning from experts, Comms Reboot is about locking practitioners in a room together and seeing what happens. No speakers. No slides. No carefully polished case studies. Just people bringing problems, experiences and opinions. After three days of sitting in rows, it was refreshing to spend an evening sitting in circles.

More broadly, the whole week was a reminder of how much I enjoy spending time with people who think deeply about this work. Not people collecting hot takes or chasing engagement, but practitioners wrestling with genuinely difficult questions about trust, leadership, culture, technology and communication. I came away with pages of notes, half a dozen new ideas, and several things I thought I understood that now require further examination. Which is generally a sign that you’ve learned something worth learning.

It was also a welcome break from the strange economics of LinkedIn, where every problem can apparently be solved with a carousel, every case study is a triumph, and everyone is either disrupting, transforming or revolutionising something. There’s a lot to be said for spending time in rooms where people are allowed to admit that the work is complicated.

Back in the real world, both client projects moved forward nicely. We also picked up a new IA piece with a returning client, which is always gratifying. Winning new work is lovely. Being asked back is better.

A couple of other opportunities continue to move through the pipeline. One scoping conversation was rather more adversarial than I’d hoped, but occasionally consulting involves politely explaining that reality exists. If a prospective client can’t handle that, that’s probably not a project worth taking on.

Meanwhile the book is now less than two weeks from publication, which means the marketing machine is cranking into life. This is either exciting or terrifying. Possibly both.

Also this fortnight

I turned another year older the day before leaving for Canada. Did very little to mark it. Birthdays at this age are less a celebration than an administrative update.

The timing of the trip was fortunate in ways I hadn’t anticipated. The World Cup had just kicked off, and Toronto was a host city. I took the train in just before Canada’s first game began, dropped my bag at the hotel, changed into red and white, and headed for the nearest pub. Where I was immediately adopted by Canadians. There are worse ways to arrive somewhere.

A friend I met at a conference in Aarhus a decade ago happened to be in the city for birthday drinks of his own, which meant an unexpected reunion — one of those pleasing discoveries that some friendships travel well across a decade and an ocean. The following evening, a jetlagged dinner with one of my Colombia Flashpack group, Jenna.

After four days of Comms Reboot, I was finished. Not with the event — the event was excellent. Finished with people. Finished with noise. Finished with eye contact. Finished with hearing my own voice.

So I took a bus to Mont-Tremblant National Park and spent a day hiking alone in what I can only describe as rain with intent. Rain that had clearly reviewed my plans and taken them personally. The trails were deserted. The sky was the colour of a corporate e-learning module. By mid-afternoon I was essentially a mobile ecosystem. It was magnificent.

The Dutch call it uitwaaien — literally, “to blow out”. What I’d failed to appreciate until that afternoon is that sometimes the most effective way to stop thinking about work is to become completely preoccupied with whether your socks have dissolved. If your job depends on people, you’ll recognise the feeling. The peculiar exhaustion that comes not from hard work, but from constant connection. Eventually your brain becomes the spinning beach ball of death. At that point, mindfulness apps are of limited value. What you need is wilderness, hostile weather, and absolutely nobody asking if you’ve got five minutes for a quick chat.

The rain followed me to Montreal, where another Colombia Flashpack friend, Andrea, came to meet me for the weekend. Montreal, it turns out, is entirely unbothered by rain. We were tourists, unashamedly. It was exactly what was needed.

Consuming

Normally I’d tell you what I’ve been reading or watching. This fortnight I have been watching football. This will surprise anyone who knows me, as I have historically had the relationship with football of someone who is aware it exists and considers that sufficient. I do not have opinions on football. I do not follow football. I have never, to my knowledge, voluntarily sought out football.

And yet here I am, having thoughts about squad fitness. Tracking recent form. Trying to work out the progression paths for any of the myriad teams I am apparently entitled to support, on account of having what I can only describe as complicated nationality. The Dutch. The English. The Scottish. The French. And, because I happen to be here, Canada.

It’s a lot of flags. It’s a lot of feelings. A lot of football.

Connections

Too many to list — between IABC World Conference and Comms Reboot, both my heart and my notebook are full. But I’ll try.

It was wonderful to spend time with Lucy Eckley, Kathryn Kneller, Janet Hitchen, Eduvie Martin, Katie Macaulay, Lisa Riemers, Simon Cavendish, Simon Finch, Mike Klein IABC Fellow, Ann-Marie Blake, Sia Papageorgiou, Andrea Greenhous, Monique Zytnik, Arnab Roy Choudhury, Matisse Hemel-Nelis, Shannon Hofmeister — and to meet so many brilliant new faces from across the global community, including Pinaki Kathiari, Darlene Wilson, Mel Loy, Mirko Petricevic (and tens of others!)

At Comms Reboot, it was a joy to see Jenni Field and Chuck Gose and Priya Bates — and to meet a whole host of new faces from the Greater Toronto area.

The IABC EMENA AGM took place a couple of weeks ago, and the new board slate was ratified. I’m on it. I’ll be taking on the Professional Development portfolio — which means I’m now very keen to hear from members about what they want to learn, and equally keen to speak to people who have knowledge to share and might want a platform to do it. Word Conference was a fab opportunity to spend time with the IABC EMENA crew, and I’m looking forward to doing that a lot more in the year ahead. If you’re an IABC member with ideas, ambitions, or expertise, do get in touch.

Coverage

Two pieces out in the last fortnight.

In In.Comms, I wrote about what happens when your internal community turns on the company — and why every tool in the standard moderation playbook becomes an escalation tool the moment it does. The short version: you can’t moderate your way out of a legitimacy problem. The dissent isn’t noise to be managed down. It’s the signal.

And in PRMoment, Ann-Marie Blake wrote up my IABC Heads of Comms keynote on infobesity — the argument that information overload is structural, not personal, and that the comms equivalent of GLP-1 isn’t telling people to manage their inboxes better.

Travel

Currently: Montreal, with 24 hours left before the long journey home.

Then 24 hours at home — enough time to do laundry, presumably misplace something important, and remember what my flat looks like — before heading out again.

Not my finest logistical work. Wish me luck.

This week in photos

One of the greatest disappointments of adulthood is learning that some people genuinely know what they’re doing.

Not in the broad sense. I mean specifically the people who have already booked next year’s holiday, understand their pension, and never once find themselves searching for accommodation the day before departure while wondering whether a 70-minute flight connection was always part of the plan.

I watch these people with fascination.

My own system is to organise the important 20% very efficiently, then leave the remaining 80% until it becomes an emergency. This is objectively a terrible process, but it has the advantage of being familiar.

And yet, inconveniently for anyone hoping to stage an intervention, some of the best things in my life have emerged from exactly this sort of organised chaos. Moving countries. Starting a business. Building friendships. Speaking opportunities. Entire adventures that began with a vague idea and an alarming lack of preparation.

I turn 46 this week, which some people might regard as a sensible moment for self-reflection and personal growth. After reviewing the evidence, however, I appear to have concluded that the system works.

Or at least that it fails in sufficiently interesting ways that I’m not planning to replace it now.

This week at work

A week with a theme running through it, which, as usual, I only spotted while writing this: most of what landed on my desk was some variation on “the platform isn’t the problem.”

Monday opened with a former colleague telling me about working in a building that’s actively falling apart — heating dead, a floor shut because of dodgy plumbing, a countdown underway to get everyone out before the place deteriorates any further.

The detail that stuck wasn’t the building itself, though. It was the contrast. Like a great many organisations, serious money is spent on customer-facing services, while the tools employees use all day are left to limp along for another year. The same staff being asked to transform services are doing it with systems held together by string, workarounds, and good intentions.

You can’t ask people to reinvent how they work while handing them a platform older than some of the employees.

Midweek brought news on the vendor side: a platform we’ve worked with a few times over the years has been acquired, pairing a newsletter business with an employee experience one. Old-world distribution meeting new-world engagement, if you want the elevator version.

What’s particularly interesting for us is that it lines up rather neatly with one of the threads running through the book. Organisations need both a trusted source for publishing and effective channels for distribution. We’ve spent years treating those as separate conversations, but increasingly they’re becoming the same one.

This week also brought a quick-turnaround proposal on a genuinely interesting piece of information architecture work, which I’ll seize almost any excuse to do. Partly because I get to play with dendrograms, but mostly because IA is one of those disciplines everybody agrees is important right up until it’s time to invest in it.

Findability is the whole game. It’s the difference between a channel people rely on and one they stop bothering with. Content that can’t be found can’t be used, and most organisations are sitting on shelves of the stuff: carefully created, properly signed off, and effectively invisible.

The latter end of the week went on preparing for a couple of upcoming events. A talk Jon and I are doing on Tuesday about information overload and how to tackle it, and a workshop helping a client’s team get their content “agentic ready”.

Which sounds like it should be a conversation about technology, but pointedly isn’t.

They already have a platform that does the job. The interesting questions are all the other ones: what’s actually a source of truth, what has simply been sitting there accreting since 2018, what needs to be maintained, and what can probably be allowed a dignified death.

An agent is only ever as good as what it’s reading. Which means the role starts to shift from publishing content to maintaining a clean, structured, trustworthy body of knowledge that people — and increasingly machines — can rely on. That’s a different skillset, and in some cases a different job. Pretending otherwise doesn’t help anyone.

We also spent some time this week reviewing questions for an internal comms survey, which is the sort of task that tends to provoke a certain amount of professional eye-rolling. Surveys are deeply unfashionable. Too long, too blunt, too often ignored. Most of that criticism is fair. None of it makes surveys useless; it just means most surveys are bad, which is a different problem.

The failure mode is usually the same. Someone wants to “just check” one thing. Then somebody else wants to check something else. Then a third person remembers a question they liked in another survey. Before long the thing has collapsed under the weight of its own curiosity.

Every question should earn its place by pointing at a decision. If the answer wouldn’t change what you’re going to do next, why are you asking it?

And the rule that gets broken most often: don’t ask if you’re not prepared to act. A survey is a promise disguised as a question. Ask people what’s wrong, do nothing about it, and you haven’t gathered insight. You’ve simply taught them that answering was a waste of time.

Better to ask three things you’ll genuinely act on than thirty you’ll quietly file away.

Which, now I write it down, turns out to be much the same lesson as everything else this week. The platform isn’t the problem. It’s everything around it.

Also this week

Two things, the first of which my body would like formally noted as a complaint.

The pop-up gym had an unlimited-classes deal on, and I — being me, congenitally unable to leave value on the table — fell on it with rather more enthusiasm than sense. Twelve classes in ten days, plus two more at my usual place, by which point even I could concede the maths had got away from me.

By Saturday, every muscle I possess was filing grievances with management. The whole enterprise was demanding a rest day, preferably submitted in writing and accompanied by supporting documentation.

I took one courtesy of birthday drinks with my local friends. At some point during the evening I looked around the table and had one of those moments that occasionally sneaks up on you.

I arrived in Amsterdam with two suitcases and a bag of optimism. Somehow, over the years, that has turned into a life filled with smart, funny, generous people who I genuinely enjoy spending time with. Not a bad return.

Consuming

I took my slightly sore head to the cinema on Sunday for a 25th-anniversary screening of Legally Blonde. The first thing to process was that 2001 — a year that feels, to me, basically last week — is now a quarter of a century in the rear-view, which is its own small horror.

The second was that it’s a more awkward watch than I’d filed it away as. Not in the obvious tabloid-feminism way — I can forgive a film for thinking liberation and a good blow-dry are the same project, that’s just 2001 being 2001. It’s the gay panic that’s curdled: a whole comic beat hinges on whether a man is gay or European, as though those are the only two options and both are punchlines. It plays now like a relic of a moment that thought it was being progressive and was mostly being loud.

And yet. Some of those lines have been lodged in my head for over twenty years, fully paid-up, and they still land. A film can be a period piece and a comfort blanket at once, apparently. Both things were true in a dark room and a comfy chair, hangover and all.

Connections

Two this week, both of the lovely-people-passing-through variety.

Tuesday brought Mike Wilkins, in town for a conference. Mike was a fixture of my London drinking life back when we both worked in the City and shared the good fortune of having offices within easy reach of the Old Doctor Butler’s Head — a pub that hosted a great deal of what we would have described as networking and HMRC might reasonably have described as Tuesday afternoon.

Since then we’ve scattered ourselves across continents: me to Amsterdam, Mike back to New Jersey. Which means opportunities to catch up over beers and schnitzel are rarer than either of us would like, and probably all the better for it when they happen.

Then Sarah Kocianski, another London friend, in town for Money20/20. We took the opportunity to put the world to rights over a very respectable Côtes du Rhône, as is traditional.

One of the unexpected side-effects of moving countries is that your friendships become event-based. You don’t have last-minute catch ups any more; you get concentrated bursts of conversation every few months or years. The intervals get longer, but somehow you pick up exactly where you left off.

Coverage

The folks at Nexer have put this year’s Camp Digital videos online, which means I get to point you towards 300 Seconds — the initiative I co-founded to help people who’ve never spoken at an event get their first go somewhere safe and supportive.

The format is simple: first-time speakers are paired with experienced ones to shape and rehearse a five-minute talk, then unleashed on an audience. Camp Digital have given us a slot on their agenda four years running now, and this year’s lightning talkers were Oana Puicar, Zhen Yang, Robin Roy, Aditya Shah and James Bilham.

You can watch the 300 Seconds session here.

The bit I’m proudest of, though, is what happens afterwards.

Almost every year, one of our speakers comes back with a full conference talk of their own. This year it was Jane Bowyer, who did a 300 Seconds slot in 2025 and came back to give a half-hour talk on the messy middle of design careers.

Which is really the whole point.

People often think the challenge is learning how to speak. Most of the time the challenge is believing you’re allowed to.

Five minutes isn’t just five minutes. It’s proof that you can stand on a stage, say something worth hearing, and survive the experience. Once you’ve done that, a lot of other things start to look possible.

Travel

I’m off to Canada for the IABC World Conference at the end of this week — a trip that has existed in two very different states.

The transatlantic flights and conference hotel were booked back in March, radiating the sort of competence that suggests a responsible adult was briefly involved. Everything else has been organised considerably more recently, in the long-standing tradition of confusing “I have a flight” with “I have a plan”.

The challenge now is balancing the two things I actually want to do: catch up with friends and see more of a country I’ve barely visited. Both entirely achievable goals, were it not for the small matter of attempting them during the World Cup.

It turns out accommodation pricing during a major international sporting event follows the same basic principles as airline baggage fees: technically legal, emotionally upsetting. Still, some combination of trains, optimism and questionable decision-making has got me this far. No reason to abandon a proven methodology now.

Elbows up!

This week in photos