Weeknote 2026/39

September 29, 2026September 29, 2026 / Sharon O'Dea / Leave a comment

Brightly coloured tentacles in the Yayoi Kusama exhibit — *Yayoi Kusama at the Stedelijk (photo: me)*

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

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

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

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

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

This week at work

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is why we do discovery rather than audit.

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

It will not tell you what anyone wants for dinner.

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

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

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

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

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

I went into the office on a Saturday.

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

The playlist was called ADHD Focus Music.

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

Also this week

I did an improv class. In Dutch.

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

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

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

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

This is how they get you.

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

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

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

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

Consuming

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

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

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

He died days after filming.

I got quite emotional.

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

Connections

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

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

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

Coverage

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

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

Published

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

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

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

Only the second is really a search problem.

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

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

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

Travel

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

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

This week in photos

Me at a desk in the empty co-working space on Saturday, monitor behind me, with the Dan PR deck in progress.

Black boxing gloves, a towel and a water bottle on a windowsill, with a grey, cloudy skyline outside.

Weeknote 2026/38

September 21, 2026September 21, 2026 / Sharon O'Dea / Leave a comment

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

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

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

And it worked. That’s the important bit.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Quite possibly, nobody did.

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

Graffiti on the bobsleigh track's mossy concrete wall: a grinning yellow cartoon character in a cap, with a speech bubble reading "Sloboda narodu!" (Freedom to the people!).

The underside of a raised section of the bobsleigh track: a rust-stained, moss-streaked concrete trough on angled concrete supports, tagged with graffiti, in a clearing among pine trees.

This week at work

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now it’s AI infrastructure.

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

An AI assistant has none of this institutional scar tissue.

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

Also this week

Bosnia: Mostar, then Sarajevo. Country 93.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Looking up at the gutted concrete shell of the Mostar sniper tower. Floors are open to the air and a skeletal staircase zigzags up the side. Faded letters painted along the top read "ZAVADI PA VLADAJ" (divide and rule).

Inside the sniper tower, a bare concrete staircase with graffiti on every step leads to an upper floor. A neon-green graffiti piece covers the wall, and through the open side you can see modern Mostar and bare mountains.

Sarajevo kept doing this to me.

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

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

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

I was holding it together until the binder clip.

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

Mirnes died a few years later.

That’s when I started crying.

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

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

Consuming

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

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

It isn’t.

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

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

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

Connections

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

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

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

Travel

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

This week in photos

Sarajevo from the hillside at dusk. Thousands of white headstones fill a cemetery in the foreground, and red-roofed houses, minarets and tower blocks stretch towards the mountains, where a band of orange sunset breaks under heavy grey cloud.

Looking up inside Vijećnica, Sarajevo's rebuilt City Hall and former National Library. A hexagonal stained-glass skylight in bright blue, yellow, green and red geometric stars sits above tiers of painted arches and slender columns.

Weeknote 2026/37

September 13, 2026September 14, 2026 / Sharon O'Dea / 1 Comment

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

We place far too much faith in the first verb.

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

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

Unfortunately, almost none of the interesting problems live there.

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

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

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

This week at work

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

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

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

Hence card sorts. Open first, then closed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Also this week

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Connections

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

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

Sharon and Ezra Butler, wearing a T-shirt reading "Critics are gonna critique" posing for a selfie against a wood-panelled wall.

Sharon and Lisa Riemers, a woman with red hair and dark-framed glasses taking a selfie outside a London pub, black door and brick wall behind them.

Coverage

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

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

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

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

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

Travel

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

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

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

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

A narrow twin room with dark wood panelling to waist height, brown curtains and net drapes at the window, a radiator beneath it, a wooden desk and chair along the right wall and a small flatscreen TV facing the beds.

Looking up at a concrete tower block hotel against blue sky, HOTEL SRBIJA in large metal letters on the red-edged canopy above the entrance, air-conditioning units bolted below the windows, trees framing the shot.

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

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

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

This week in photos

Sharon leaning on the counter of an outdoor bar hatch, pulling a rueful face at the camera, red polka-dot nails on the wood, tropical-bird curtain in the serving window behind.

A hand held up to show five short nails painted bright red with irregular white dots, in the style of Yayoi Kusama

Weeknote 2026/35

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

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

It absolutely pissed down at Forwards on Saturday.

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

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

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

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

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

Most weeks, you don’t notice it particularly.

This week, there was rather a lot of rain.

This week at work

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

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

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

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

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

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

All of those somebodies are me.

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

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

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

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

Also this week

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

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

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

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

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

Consuming

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

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

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

Coverage

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Published

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

The first few are up:

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

Travel

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

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

The glamour of international consultancy remains largely theoretical.

This week in photos

Weeknote 2026/34

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

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

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

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

It is magnificent.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This week at work

Organisations are way more complicated than their org charts.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Also this week

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

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

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

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

Next time.

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

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

Can confirm.

Consuming

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

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

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

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

It has absolutely everything.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The messiness is exactly what makes it valuable.

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

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

Connecting

Three this week, all people passing through.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Travel

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

This week it begins: a quick trip to Bristol.

This week in photos

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

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

Weeknote 2026/33

August 16, 2026August 17, 2026 / Sharon O'Dea / 1 Comment

*A lovely spot to ponder the nature of the universe* (Photo: me)

Eighty-eight per cent of the sun went behind the moon on Wednesday and it barely got dark.

That night, every star I looked at turned out to be another sun, filed down by distance to a pinprick. The moon is a rounding error next to the sun. It just happened to be closer, and in exactly the right place to block most of it.

Scale, it turns out, is extremely easy to misunderstand.

Organisations have this problem too. The bigger something gets, the more we tend to discuss it in aggregate: tens of thousands of employees, enterprise-wide adoption, transformation at scale. Eventually the people disappear altogether and you’re left moving percentages around a slide.

Over coffee this week I spent an hour talking through one person’s job. Earlier I’d been on a call about essentially the same problem across an organisation of tens of thousands. The enormous version turned out to contain exactly the same question as the tiny one: what is this person actually trying to do, and what’s getting in their way?

That’s the irritating thing about scale. To understand the big thing, you usually have to get very close to the small one.

The trouble starts when you assume it works the other way round.

This week at work

Over coffee, a friend told me her employer has been telling everyone to use AI. She’s not against it. She just doesn’t know what she’s supposed to do with it. Nobody has said what it’s for.

There is a mandate, and there is a tool, and between them a gap roughly the size of her actual job.

So I did what any normal person does to a friend on their day off and interrogated her about work for an hour.

I didn’t start by asking what she wanted AI to do. I asked what she finds difficult. What’s stopping her being as good at her job as she’d like to be?

Planning, she said.

Her industry works a long way out; she’s on Christmas 2028 at the moment, which is a boggling timescale for me, a person for whom buying food on Sunday for Wednesday constitutes advanced logistics.

The problem isn’t really making the plan. It’s holding the thing together once it exists: knowing where versions have drifted apart, where assumptions no longer match, and where six teams have all independently decided that the same fortnight would be an excellent time to do something enormous.

This is precisely the sort of work computers are annoyingly good at and human brains aren’t. So: give it the plans. Ask it to find inconsistencies, collisions and crunch points.

She said they’re so busy they tend to repeat the things they already know work. Fine. Give it the data from the last few programmes. What performed unusually well or badly? What was different? Are there patterns worth investigating?

Within about twenty minutes we’d gone from I know I’m supposed to use AI but I don’t know what for to a list of things she was genuinely excited to try.

No use-case library. No maturity assessment. No 73-slide deck entitled Unlocking the AI-Powered Future of Work.

We just talked about her job.

Her own takeaway was better than mine. She’s going to ask everyone on her team to bring one thing they’ve used AI for lately that actually made the work better or easier.

Not a strategy. Not a policy. Not a prompt library containing 400 examples nobody will ever read. Just one thing that worked, said out loud, by someone you know and trust, and not some twat from a consultancy who wears a hat indoors.

The funny part is that I’d started the week having essentially the same conversation, only with several more zeroes attached.

I’d been on a call with someone running an AI programme somewhere very large indeed, ahead of a client conversation about what adoption looks like at that scale. And scale changes the conversation surprisingly quickly. One person has a planning problem. Ten thousand people have an adoption strategy.

At organisational scale, everything acquires nouns: Adoption. Enablement. Transformation. Capability. Use cases. You can spend months discussing all of them without getting anywhere near the awkwardly specific question my friend answered over coffee:

What is hard about your job?

Same problem. More zeroes.

The technology isn’t the difficult bit. Finding the useful problem is.

You have to do that first for a person, then for a team, then somehow across tens of thousands of people. And the further you get from the actual work, the easier it becomes to replace understanding it with buying something.

Which is how you end up with an enterprise AI strategy explaining very clearly that everyone should use AI, and an employee sitting in a café saying:

Yes. For what?

Also this week

I took 24 hours off midweek and went to the coast for the eclipse.

First surprise: the Netherlands has genuinely stunning beaches. Huge sweeps of powdery sand running from the dunes straight into the North Sea. The climate makes them properly usable for approximately nine afternoons a year, which may explain why the Dutch have declined to make this a central plank of the national brand.

We got one of the nine.

Past me had also had the unusual foresight to book a cabin near the coast and buy eclipse glasses back when they weren’t €20 a pair and being traded with the intensity normally reserved for Taylor Swift tickets and Class A drugs.

We took a couple of bottles of Sol down to the beach, which I’m going to present as thematic intent rather than the consequence of the bar offering a choice between that and Heineken.

At around quarter past seven, through the cardboard glasses, the first bite of the moon appeared at the edge of the sun. Then, very slowly, it ate it.

There’s something profoundly weird about watching celestial mechanics happen in real time. You know perfectly well that the moon goes around the Earth and the Earth goes around the sun. You have presumably known this since primary school. But normally this knowledge sits in the same part of the brain as plate tectonics and the existence of Belgium: accepted as fact, rarely requiring direct confrontation.

Then you watch one enormous object physically move across another and suddenly the solar system stops being a diagram.

What I couldn’t get my head around was the arithmetic of it. The moon is enormous. The sun is so incomprehensibly much more enormous that the comparison is barely useful. And yet from one particular patch of Dutch sand, because of an absurd coincidence of distance and geometry, they looked almost the same size.

At the peak, 88 per cent of the sun was covered. It barely got dark.

That was the bit that broke my brain. You can remove nearly nine-tenths of the thing and the remaining sliver is still bright enough for the world to carry on more or less as normal. The sun, it turns out, is quite a lot of sun.

Later that night I lay in a hammock in the Kennemerland dunes waiting for the Perseids.

The advice for watching a meteor shower is blunt: no screens. Your eyes need around twenty minutes to adjust properly to the dark, and one glance at a bright phone sets you back. This isn’t mindfulness. Nobody is asking you to reconnect with your authentic self or purchase a journal. It’s optics.

So the phone went away.

I live in a well-lit city centre and almost never see stars. Properly see them, I mean. Give your eyes enough darkness and they just keep arriving. A handful becomes dozens, then hundreds, then an absolutely unreasonable number of them.

And having spent the evening staring through cardboard at our sun, I suddenly couldn’t stop thinking about what I was actually looking at.

Every one of those pinpricks is another sun.

Not a decorative light. Not a white dot conveniently provided as background scenery. An actual star: vast and violent and burning away at an incomprehensible distance, reduced by that distance to something I could cover with the tip of my finger.

Then every so often something would tear across the whole lot. A Perseid lasts perhaps a second. A streak, sometimes a flash of colour in the tail, and gone before you’ve quite finished registering it. We’d wait in the dark for another, talking quietly, then one of us would suddenly shout there at a piece of sky the other person was inevitably not looking at.

There are worse ways to spend a night.

I lay there thinking about the scale of all of it: the sun we’d watched disappear behind the moon; the other suns scattered above us; the tiny bits of comet burning up overhead; us underneath, temporarily occupying a couple of hammocks on a sand dune beside the North Sea.

The universe is offensively large.

I found this wonderful.

And then, because apparently even transcendence must eventually become professional development, I realised something mildly embarrassing about my phone.

I’ve written a book about attention and information overload. I talk about this stuff for a living. I know that phones are designed to capture attention. I know that environment beats intention. I know all the arguments.

None of that reliably stops me looking at the bloody thing.

But tell me that one glance at it will ruin my night vision and make me less able to see the meteor shower I came here specifically to see?

Phone in a drawer. For hours. No struggle whatsoever. Turns out I didn’t need better self-control. I needed an immediate and comprehensible consequence.

Design beats willpower. I really, really should know this by now.

Consuming

Two pieces by Oana Leonte, published two days apart, which have been rattling around my head ever since. The first starts with Rick Rubin, who cannot play an instrument or read music, and who told Anderson Cooper that what he’s actually paid for is confidence in his own taste. His contribution to a record is often subtraction: take that out, strip this back, do it again. He has no signature sound because a signature would compete with the judgement.

Leonte uses him to make a distinction I haven’t stopped thinking about: attention is rented; judgement is owned. Attention has to be re-earned every day and returns towards zero the moment you stop feeding it. Judgement compounds. Demonstrate good taste often enough and eventually people trust the verdict — which is why artists at the top of their careers will fly across continents to sit in a room with a man who can’t play a note. They’re not buying his output. They’re buying his judgement.

This is inconveniently at odds with how we measure most things online. We can count impressions, views, followers, clicks and frequency, so we do. Judgement is slower, fuzzier and extremely resistant to dashboards, which means it tends to sit outside the spreadsheet twiddling its thumbs while attention gets all the credit.

Then came part two, prompted by everyone asking how. And she corrects herself: invisibility isn’t the strategy, it’s a by-product. Copy the quiet without the substance underneath it and you’re not cultivating mystique, you’re just a person nobody has heard of. Queen were broke for years being too much for the rooms they were playing. Obscurity is what you pay to get good.

What actually holds is coherence — and here she draws a distinction I’m going to steal wholesale, because half my working life is spent in rooms where coherence and consistency are treated as synonyms. Consistency is surface: same logo, palette, tone, templates, everything governed until no rogue shade of blue can threaten the enterprise. It photographs as discipline and is often just rigidity with a hex code.

Coherence is the sense that the choices belong together, even when they don’t look the same. Consistency asks whether the parts match; coherence asks whether they came from the same place. You can be flawlessly consistent and mean absolutely nothing, which explains an alarming amount of corporate communication.

And then the question I’d put on a poster: would any of this still be standing if you stopped posting tomorrow?

I read all of this while planning a mailing list, a webinar and another run of book promotion, so I’m not claiming any position of moral superiority here. The most coherent thing I did all week was spend several hours in a hammock looking at objects that have existed for billions of years without once publishing a thought-leadership carousel.

Then I came home and wrote about them on the internet. The stars, presumably, remain relaxed about the competition.

Coverage

In.Comms asked five comms pros (including me) whether it’s internal comms’ job to motivate employees. Nobody said yes, which I found reassuring, because we’ve spent far too long accepting accountability for things we have almost no authority over.

Pay. Workload. Leadership. Whether the work itself is any good. Whether your manager is a prick. Motivation is downstream of all of these things, and when they’re not working, asking comms to boost engagement is applying corporate Febreze to a structural problem.

What we can do is help people understand what’s happening, why it matters and where their work fits. What we can’t do is communicate someone into being happy about a job that’s giving them perfectly good reasons not to be. My bit sits alongside Jennifer Sproul, Jo Coxhill, Adeela Warley and Rachel Miller.

Also recorded this week: Jon and I joined Nancy Goebel on DWG’s Digital Impact podcast to talk about designing channels employees actually use — the five layers, why most organisations have a coherence problem rather than a channel problem, and the intranet manager who hit an annual page-view target in 48 hours by leaving fifty browser tabs auto-refreshing.

This is both objectively funny and a near-perfect demonstration of what happens when a metric stops measuring the thing and becomes the thing. Somewhere, a dashboard was green. Everyone could go home.

Out in the autumn, at which point I’ll link it properly.

This week in photos

A rusted shopping trolley and several mangled bicycles, caked in silt and weed after being hauled from a canal, piled against a graffitied concrete pillar under a bridge.

A rainbow flag flying from the brick facade of a large gothic church, with pinnacles and arched windows above. A blue street sign on the corner reads "Spuistraat, Centrum".

Weeknote 2026/32

August 9, 2026August 10, 2026 / Sharon O'Dea / Leave a comment

The World Press Photo 2026 exhibition inside De Nieuwe Kerk. A red entrance panel sits beside a large black and white portrait of an older woman in traditional dress. Photographs are hung on curved slatted wooden screens down the stone nave, with red banners overhead. — *World Press Photo in de Nieuwe Kerk* (Photo: me)

I’ve started thinking about the things that earn their place.

Not in a minimalist, throw-away-everything-that-doesn’t-spark-joy sense. I own far too many shoes for that, and my travel plans would not survive even the most cursory audit. More in the sense that addition ought to come with a burden of proof.

We’re very good at adding things. Another name. Another message. Another platform. Another feature. Another trip. Complexity accumulates almost invisibly because every individual addition can be made to sound perfectly reasonable on its own. It’s only when you stand back that you realise you’ve built something requiring a diagram, a 45-minute induction and a SharePoint page explaining which SharePoint page to use.

This week threw a few variations of that at me, from some fairly unexpected directions.

More isn’t inherently the problem. Neither is less inherently virtuous. The interesting bit is what happens when you stop assuming that adding something automatically makes the thing better.

The question is whether it earns the space it takes up.

This week at work

Four client projects, two proposals, and all the usual scaffolding of running a business — invoices, contracts, the small administrative barnacles that attach themselves to any given week. Jon is still away. So: a lot.

Everything is moving in the right direction, at least. But four projects at four different stages means four sets of context, four vocabularies, four mental models to load and unload across a single day. The work isn’t the tiring bit. The switching is. By Thursday I had approximately six organisations’ worth of information in my head and no reliable way of knowing which one any given acronym belonged to.

The consolation of weeks like this is the pattern-spotting. Do this for long enough and you start seeing the same problem turn up in completely different organisations wearing a different coat and insisting you’ve never met before.

This week’s recurring guest was naming.

Whether to give your channels names — and, if so, what — is one of the great perennial arguments of our trade. Alongside where IC should report into and whether anyone has ever successfully governed a SharePoint site by sending the site owner an annual email, it will presumably outlive us all.

I have Views.

Names can be genuinely useful. A name gives people something to hold onto. It’s a handle in a sentence: put it on Yammer, it’s in the Hub, check Connect. It makes an abstract thing tangible and gives people a shared shorthand for talking about it. This is useful. Humans like naming things. We named the moon and that doesn’t even have single sign-on.

The trouble is that intranets and employee apps actively resist being named, because they aren’t one thing. What do you call the platform that’s the news, the payslips, the policy library, the person finder, the canteen menu and, for reasons nobody can now reconstruct, the only place you’re allowed to order a new security pass?

Nothing specific fits. So you end up at Workplace. Or Engage. Or Connect. Or Hub.

Names for tools that do everything, which is another way of saying names that describe absolutely nothing.

Worse, every single one is already a product on the market. Frequently it’s also the name of another tool already inside the same organisation, bought by a different department in a different year with a different budget and announced with exactly the same adjectives.

We have been brought in more than once to adjudicate which platform gets to be called Workplace.

This is a service we provide. I would love to tell you it’s the most intellectually demanding work we do. It’s certainly the one that requires my best diplomacy skills.

My rule is simple: a name is only worth having if it saves you an explanation. If it doesn’t, you’ve just doubled your workload, because now you have to explain the service and the name — in every induction, on every intranet page, every time somebody new asks which one you mean.

Some years ago I worked somewhere with a room-booking system called Trimble.

Not a codename, nor a project name that had escaped containment. Just Trimble, because that was the vendor, and the vendor’s name had welded itself to the product the way Hoover did to vacuum cleaners, except nobody had ever heard of Trimble and nobody was going around saying they were going to Trimble a meeting room.

At some point a rule established itself: any mention of Trimble on Slack was answered with the same photograph of David Trimble. This one:

A black and white photo of Northern Ireland politician David Trimble, in the 1970s.

Same photo. Every time. No comment.

Nobody agreed to this. There was no meeting. No governance model. No launch plan. It simply became true, the way the most successful bits of workplace culture generally emerge while somebody elsewhere is writing a 34-page launch strategy.

It fired constantly, because most mentions of Trimble were people asking what Trimble was.

And that was precisely the problem, right there: the name was prompting the question it should have answered.

The joke ended when someone* laughed out loud in an open-plan office and had to explain why a photograph of the former First Minister of Northern Ireland kept appearing in response to questions about meeting rooms.

* it might have been me.

Eventually the organisation gave up and renamed it The Room Booking System. Everyone knew what it was immediately, forever, at zero ongoing cost. The photos stopped.

The postscript is that the software has since been sold twice and now lives inside MRI Software, where it’s called Space Scheduling. The descriptive half of the name outlasted four owners. The corporate half fell off somewhere between acquisitions, unmourned.

Call things what they are.

There’s a section on this in the Launching Channels chapter of the book, which is considerably more even-handed than I have just been: when a distinct name genuinely earns its keep, why naming competitions are a trap, and explicit permission to just call the intranet the intranet.

You do not have to call it Spark. You do not have to call it Connect. You definitely do not have to invite 14,000 employees to submit suggestions and then spend three months explaining why the winner can’t be used because somebody forgot to check the trademark.

Sometimes good design is simply resisting the urge to make a perfectly comprehensible thing more interesting.

Also this week

Saturday afternoon at De Nieuwe Kerk for World Press Photo, which I go to most years and usually leave in silence, feeling slightly worse about humanity. This year felt different, and it took me a while to work out why.

Not less bleak. There were still plenty of bombed-out streets and destroyed homes, and this year’s Photo of the Year is a family being separated by immigration enforcement in an American courthouse. Nobody’s going to World Press Photo for a restorative afternoon.

What had changed was the scale. Previous years have felt dominated by destruction seen from a distance: ruined blocks, flattened cities, the landscape of catastrophe. This year leaned much harder into resilience and resistance, told through single lives followed over months and years. Girls’ education. A 46-year-old woman living with anorexia. The lives of girls born by IVF to a 60-year-old mother. Afro-Latin communities in Colombia holding onto traditions carried from lands their ancestors were taken from centuries ago.

None of it was nice. That isn’t the shift here.

But there’s a difference between an image that shows you the size of a disaster and one that puts a person inside it and makes you stay there with them. Destruction at scale numbs you slightly, if we’re honest. At some point the numbers get too large, the rubble starts looking like other rubble, and your brain puts up a screen marked TOO MUCH.

Then, halfway round, I found the panel explaining what I’d already noticed. They’ve threaded eight projects through the exhibition under the heading Visions of Hope. The stated reason is media fatigue: audiences tell them they want to stay engaged with the world, but through stories that illuminate rather than overwhelm.

Which is a curatorial decision, obviously. But it’s also a comms one, made by an organisation whose entire purpose is bearing witness to the worst things human beings do to one another.

They’ve concluded that relentlessness is counterproductive. That if you overwhelm people, eventually they stop looking. And a record of the world that nobody can bear to look at isn’t doing much bearing witness.

It’s not a million miles from the argument I spend my working life making, arriving from a considerably more consequential direction: more information does not necessarily produce more understanding. At some point volume stops informing people and starts providing them with reasons to disengage.

The photograph I keep thinking about, though, was something else entirely.

Paula Hornickel photographed Waltraud, a resident at a care home in Albershausen, sitting across the table from Emma — a toddler-sized social robot made by a Munich startup.

German care homes are dealing with two crises at once: not enough staff, and residents who are profoundly lonely. One in five over-80s in care describe themselves as severely lonely. Emma recognises faces and remembers previous conversations. Waltraud was sceptical, then came round.

“When she tells her jokes, that’s really good.”

And there, unexpectedly, in the middle of a photojournalism exhibition, was one of the more interesting future-of-work stories I’ve encountered in a while.

We spend enormous amounts of energy arguing about which bits of knowledge work AI will automate. The lawyers. The developers. The copywriters. The consultants, who remain remarkably confident that everybody else’s job consists of repeatable tasks while theirs involves ineffable reserves of judgement and human insight.

Meanwhile, automation is turning up in care homes. At the one kind of work we tend to assume is irreducibly human because the work is being there with another person.

And it’s arriving not because somebody has produced a spreadsheet showing a 14% productivity gain. It’s arriving because there aren’t enough humans there.

I don’t know how I feel about that. I can construct the argument in both directions and dislike parts of both of them.

Waltraud seems fine about it, which is probably the only opinion that counts.

Consuming

Peaches at the Melkweg. My first gig in months, which for me is close to a personal record and not one I’m remotely proud of.

Worth the wait, though. A proper show. Giant inflatable spread legs. Dancers dressed as vaginas. Costume changes, choreography, staging that commits absolutely and unapologetically to the bit. None of the standing-behind-a-laptop-looking-intense business that passes for a live electronic set surprisingly often these days.

At one point Peaches simply walked out over the crowd, held up entirely by the audience, and carried on performing.

You either have that kind of contract with a room or you don’t.

There’s something enormously satisfying about watching someone who’s been doing this for decades know exactly what the room is for, and use every inch of it. No attempt to make herself tasteful or contemporary or slightly less Peaches now she’s in her fifties. If anything, more Peaches.

Came out sweaty, delighted, and mildly annoyed with myself for leaving it so long.

Travel

None, and I’m delighted about it.

I’m midway through a long stretch at home, and it turns out that’s exactly where I want to be. No airports. No packing. No waking up and having to spend several seconds establishing which country I’m in. Just my own bed, my own kitchen, and an entirely unremarkable knowledge of where all my things are.

The Dutch weather asks a lot of you. Months of grey, damp, low-ceilinged winter, the sort that makes you question not just your decision to move here but the entire concept of northern Europe.

But summer in Amsterdam is the finest bargain in Europe. Long evenings, terraces spilling into streets, everyone outside because we’ve collectively understood that this is temporary and must therefore be treated as an emergency. I’ve spent most of this one amazed at my luck in getting to live in it.

I could get used to this.

I have, obviously, booked an enormous amount of travel for the autumn.

This week in photos

Weeknote 2026/31

August 2, 2026August 3, 2026 / Sharon O'Dea / 1 Comment

A WorldPride parade boat with a "25 Years of Marriage Equality" banner, dancers performing on top, watched by crowds along the Prinsengracht and from boats on the canal. — *The Canal Parade on Amsterdam’s Prinsengracht canal* (Photo: me)

I spent much of this week being reminded that systems have lives of their own.

You can appoint community champions, but the actual community will organise itself around somebody else. You can design an intranet around the company you think you have. Employees will build another one around the work they’re actually trying to do. You can ask whether AI can replace a chief executive. Then you’ll quickly learn the hard part was never making the decision; it was getting several hundred people to behave as though it was their idea all along.

And if you happen to inflate a giant Donald Trump on Amsterdam’s canals, the city’s seventeenth-century bridges will provide a piece of physical comedy no creative director could have improved upon.

Systems, it turns out, are always co-authored by reality.

This week at work

Two client conversations this week. Different organisations, different problems. Exactly the same mistake.

One is designing a pilot community. As always, the interesting conversations aren’t about technology, they’re about people.

Specifically, which people.

Not the loudest voices. Not the volunteers. Not whoever has Community Champion in their email signature. (We’ve retired the word champion, which is probably healthier for everyone.) The people you want are the ones who are already connecting the organisation without being asked. The colleague everyone seems to know. The person whose Teams chats somehow span six departments. The ones who bridge gaps that don’t officially exist. You find them by watching what they already do, not by asking for volunteers.

The other client wanted to know why their intranet wasn’t working.

It turns out it’s organised around the people who publish to it, not the people who use it. Search for something and you don’t land on “I need to book parental leave” or “How do I order a laptop?” You land on “HR Services” or “Corporate Operations”, because the architecture reflects the org chart rather than the work. One team became so frustrated they quietly built their own version elsewhere. Nobody approved it. Nobody budgeted for it. They just needed something that solved the problem in front of them instead of the one the organisation thought they had. These are some of my favourite projects because, on paper, nothing is obviously wrong. The platform is fine. The content is mostly fine. Governance exists. Ownership exists. Every individual decision makes perfect sense.

It’s like one of those suburban Frankenhouses assembled over forty years from planning permission, optimism and B&Q vouchers. The conservatory solved one problem. The loft conversion solved another. The garage became a gym for six months before the running machine became an expensive laundry drying rack, and the room was turned into an office. Every owner improved the bit immediately in front of them until the whole thing acquired the navigational logic of an escape room whose clues were designed by six different consultancies.

None of those decisions was irrational. Every extension solved a genuine problem. It’s only when you try to get from the front door to the garden that you realise the shortest route involves passing through six unrelated architectural eras and apologising to whoever’s on a Zoom call in what used to be the garage.

Organisations build digital workplaces in much the same way.

Nobody sets out to build something incoherent. It just accretes that way, one perfectly reasonable local decision at a time. Every team improves its own room. Every department hangs another sign. Every budget cycle adds another extension. Nobody is designing the journey. They’re decorating individual rooms.

Fixing it requires someone who can look across the whole floorplan and say, “Yes, that’s better for Finance, but it’s worse for everyone else.”

Which means you need two things in the same place: someone who genuinely advocates for employees, and someone with enough authority to overrule everybody else.

Most organisations have one or the other. Very few have both.

So the house keeps growing. Another extension. Another corridor. Another perfectly sensible decision that makes the whole thing slightly harder to live in.

Two client rooms. One week. Same lesson.

Also this week

The popup gym closed this week. I found myself milking every possible moment, signing up to five classes on five successive days. And even going to a gym closing party. I’m now a person who goes to parties at the gym. Who even am I?

This weekend was Pride in Amsterdam. It’s one of my favourite weekends of the year, and this year’s had an extra layer: Amsterdam is hosting WorldPride, marking twenty-five years since the Netherlands became the first country to legalise same-sex marriage.

The city has been celebrating all week. Around the corner from me, at the Westermarkt, the festivities opened with the Drag Olympics, featuring events such as stiletto sprinting and the handbag toss. As with so many Dutch traditions, nobody seemed entirely sure whether this had always existed or had simply materialised because it was a good idea.

Yesterday was the Canal Parade. Eighty boats making their way down the Prinsengracht, representing every imaginable corner of the city’s LGBTQ+ communities, from the Ministry of Defence to Roze 50+ to Amsterdam’s museums turning up together in solidarity. Noticeably fewer corporate boats than in previous years, and all the better for it.

The best float, by some distance, was an enormous inflatable Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin locked in an embrace.

Amsterdam’s canal bridges are lower than many of the boats, so every single one has to deflate before passing underneath, then reinflate on the other side.

Which meant that, every few hundred metres, Trump and Putin would slowly crumple into one another, disappear beneath the bridge in a heap of orange and grey vinyl, then rise majestically back into existence for the next stretch of canal.

Nobody planned that joke, but the bridges just kept telling it.

Boat 21 in the Canal Parade, decorated in purple with giant inflatable bi+ pillars and a "Speak up for bi+ equality" banner, spectators on a nearby boat cheering with arms raised.

Close-up of an inflatable parade float showing two caricatured world leaders in Delft-blue overalls locked in an embrace, holding tongue-in-cheek signs ("Grab me by the...", "Kiss the person next to you"), set among orange tulips and Delft-tile decoration.

Coverage

Allie Nawrat at Unleash asked me to weigh in on Skyfall AI’s plan to buy a small software company and install an AI as CEO.

I’ll never turn down an invitation to opine on this kind of thing, so I was delighted to pen an op ed in response. My take is that they’re testing entirely the wrong thing.

The experiment assumes the difficult part of being a chief executive is making decisions. It isn’t. Plenty of people can make decisions. The difficult bit is persuading several hundred other people — each with their own priorities, incentives and entirely reasonable objections — to act as though those decisions were sensible all along.

Revenue, churn and customer growth are the exhaust, not the interior. If your test company is small enough that everyone already knows everyone else, you’ve just removed the thing that makes leadership difficult in the first place.

Which is why I suspect they’re less likely to discover whether AI can replace a CEO than whether a small software company can survive six months with an unusually confusing org chart.

And, small housekeeping note: the book is now finally out in the US and Canada too. If you’ve spent the last few weeks apologetically explaining to North American colleagues that it existed but was being withheld from them for reasons nobody could satisfactorily explain, you can stop doing that.

Travel

None. I’m home, holding the fort while Jon’s in Canada. Quiet on this front for now. The calm, however, is temporary. The autumn diary is now filling up at a rate that suggests Future Sharon has made a series of commitments Present Sharon hasn’t properly thought through.

This week in photos

Laughing behind a bar, headphones round the neck, hands on a vinyl turntable, shelves of spirits lit with fairy lights behind.

A spin studio bathed in red light, instructor on a raised platform ringed with candles under a glowing red "V", riders reflected in the surrounding mirrors.

Weeknote 2026/30

July 26, 2026 / Sharon O'Dea / Leave a comment

*Me speaking to guests at the Digital Communications at Work book launch* (Photo: Paul Clarke)

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

Weeknote 2026/29

July 19, 2026 / Sharon O'Dea / Leave a comment

*My book. On a shelf. In a shop.* (Photo: me)

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.