Essays

Sharon O'Dea at her laptop, working. The laptop's covered in stickers.

Longer pieces on internal communication, intranets and the digital workplace.

I’m Sharon O’Dea. I’ve spent twenty years building these things, mostly in large and complicated organisations, and I co-wrote Digital Communications at Work with Jonathan Phillips. These essays are where I work out what I actually think — usually starting from something that came up in client work, and usually arriving at the conclusion that the technology wasn’t the problem.

For the week-to-week version, there are weeknotes.

Latest thinking

  • Nobody buys shared
    I asked a seven-figure AI orchestration platform how many people worked for the company. It told me I wasn’t authorised to know. Workplace AI is getting very good at the individual and the process, and nobody is building for the organisation in between
  • The residue has a price
    Diane Coyle argues that as AI makes knowledge cheap to copy, relationships become the asset that matters. Spirit Airlines has just shown that the records of those relationships can be sold. That’s a problem for everyone who spent a decade persuading people to work out loud.
  • Your frontline communication problem isn’t a frontline problem
    Around 80% of the world’s workers don’t sit at a desk, and almost everything we call internal communication was designed for the other 20%. The frontline communication problem isn’t a frontline problem. It’s a design problem.
  • Build for change: communication that holds when the ground moves
    In Tokyo, a robot in a knitted hat showed me what the future of work actually looks like: ordinary, human, and designed for people who’d otherwise be shut out. Here’s what it taught me about building internal communication that holds when the ground keeps moving.
  • The produce button
    AI has made internal communications content almost free to produce. Attention, stubbornly, has not. What happens when a machine for making abundance meets a workforce already drowning in it?
  • Why nobody can find anything on your intranet
    People complain they can’t find anything on the intranet, so organisations improve search or rearrange the navigation. Then the complaints come back. That’s because findability isn’t one problem: it’s five different ones that happen to look the same.
  • Digital nomads aren’t the problem. Your ways of working are.
    Digital nomads aren’t really a new communications problem. They’re a stress test for all the problems you already have: meeting dependency, proximity bias, undocumented decisions, time-zone inequality and managers who struggle with object permanence.
  • The communication mismatch: Why risk-averse sectors struggle with social media
    Social platforms reward outrage and certainty. Financial services need caution and nuance. Why the structural mismatch between regulated sectors and social media is the real problem—and what to do instead.
  • The record without the reasoning
    Organisations have never had more searchable history and never had less usable memory. The two things aren’t the same. Unfortunately, we’ve spent about fifteen years behaving as though they are.
  • 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.