One of the more unexpected joys of writing a book is watching the pre-orders trickle in — each one a small, specific vote of confidence from someone who’s decided they’d like to read what you’ve written before it actually exists. It’s encouragement from the future, which feels oddly fitting for a week spent largely planning things that haven’t happened yet: workshops, proposals, projects that may or may not materialise. Much of the work was invisible, preparatory, and entirely unshowy. But it was there. And sometimes that’s enough.

This week at work

This week brought a flurry of conversations about potential new work, all via people I’ve worked with before who’ve since moved on to new organisations. Which is a pleasing reminder that doing good work, and not being a pain to deal with, remains the most reliable marketing strategy available.

Those conversations have already turned into two live proposals. Each proposal we do is entirely bespoke — no rinse-and-repeat templates here — which means they take a minimum of half a day to pull together, and often stretch over several days once the thinking, shaping, and sense-checking are properly done. I always underestimate how long these take, despite all available evidence.

We’ve got a workshop coming up this week, and spent a good chunk of time planning how to use that time well. Workshops are often treated as the work itself, when really they’re about setting the tone for the many months of work that follow. The challenge — and the point — is creating enough structure to help a diverse group of stakeholders with genuinely divergent views get to alignment and agreement, without flattening those differences or rushing to false consensus. Much of the real work happens before anyone enters the room: designing the flow, deciding where decisions actually need to be made, and being very deliberate about what doesn’t need to be debated on the day.

I also had a great call with the team from an employee experience and intranet app vendor. It’s always refreshing when vendors are open and thoughtful in response to the more awkward questions — recognising that edge cases are simply the price of doing business with the kind of complex organisations we advise. We’re never asking those questions to trip anyone up; we ask them because those messy, inconvenient realities are exactly what make a platform work, or not, in practice.

We also kicked off a promotion plan for the book. It’s been genuinely heartwarming to see how many people have already pre-ordered it — a small but steady drumbeat of encouragement from the future.

Also this week

Otherwise, a relatively quiet one. Gym sessions, and a new Sanctum class location — in a nightclub near my house. My first time setting foot in a nightclub in many years, and the fact it was for an exercise class says a great deal about my gentle but unmistakable slide into decrepitude.

A trip to the UK also meant I finally got to catch up with my brother and his wife, who I hadn’t seen in far too long.

All in all, one of those weeks that felt busy in the head, quieter on the surface, and better for the balance of the two.

Consuming

Pretty light this week, but I have been mainlining Irish Traitors to fill the Traitors-shaped gap in my life. It’s exactly the right level of drama: suspicious looks, mild hysteria, and strategic betrayal, all played out with just enough restraint to stay entertaining rather than exhausting. Add in the Irish lilt, a healthy fondness for swearing, and a cast who sound permanently on the verge of telling someone to cop on, and it’s been the perfect comfort watch.

Connections

I met with the founder of Statement to talk through plans for the next phase. It was great to shoot the breeze in person, and it reminded me why I was excited by the concept and vision in the first place — one of those conversations that leaves you a little clearer, and a little more energised, than when you arrived.

Travel

Incredibly, I made it all the way to February without setting foot in an airport. Normal service has now resumed; I’m writing this weeknote from an airport lounge.

The next six months will see me heading to three different continents, and I promise to be as infuriating about it as ever.

This week in photos

January is finally behind us. And yesterday was St Brigid’s Day, which for Irish people marks the start of spring. Not actual spring, obviously (it’s still absolutely baltic) but the promise of spring. A loosening. A sense that the light is thinking about showing up again, if it can be arsed.

That feels about right for this week: decisions made, things taking shape, and the faint sense that we might be emerging from winter with our critical faculties mostly intact. SharePoint is still not free, AI is still raising more questions than answers, and I’m still promoting a book with the shamelessness of someone who’s made their peace with being insufferable. But at least we’re moving in the right direction.

This week at work

We’ve been helping a client weigh up building a SharePoint/Viva Engage digital workplace versus buying something off-the-shelf. Comms teams get nudged—shoved, really—towards SharePoint on the basis that it’s “free,” which is a bit like saying a puppy is free if you ignore the food, the vet bills, the training, and the fact it’ll outlive your sofa.

A genuinely good SharePoint site takes time, skill, and ongoing investment. Off-the-shelf platforms are quicker to deploy and deliver a noticeably better experience out of the box—but at the cost of flexibility and an annual licensing bill that makes finance wince. We’ve been walking stakeholders through the real benefits, drawbacks, and long-term costs so they can actually just… decide. And move on.

I also sat through a Gartner webinar on the future of work which was—unexpectedly—genuinely useful. One thread stuck with me all week: the growing cognitive impacts of GenAI use.

We’re enthusiastically embedding AI into everyday work, but doing far less thinking about what that does to judgement, decision-making, and sense-making over time. Not a dystopian meltdown—something subtler and arguably more worrying. I shared some thoughts on LinkedIn, going against platform orthodoxy by posting troubling questions rather than easy answers. Because there aren’t any.

Alongside that, I started planning an upcoming client kick-off workshop. This is a phase I genuinely love: the careful choreography before everyone arrives clutching their assumptions like emotional support animals and their strong opinions like concealed weapons.

And with the book now submitted, we’ve started thinking about how to promote it. Prepare for sustained, shameless self-promotion. I will not be taking questions about my dignity at this time.

Also this week

I’m trying to try more things this year. Doing things, making things, learning things. Fewer hours doomscrolling through other people’s catastrophes, more hours with actual materials that can’t algorithmically enrage me.

This week that took the form of an assemblies workshop, where the founder of Sets Studio helped us make a lamp, loosely inspired by the sculptural work of Issey Miyake and Isamu Noguchi.

The process was fun, genuinely interesting, and harder than I expected—always a good sign. A pleasingly absorbing way to spend an afternoon, and a chance to make something with my hands rather than my opinions.

I also now own one more object that will clutter up my house until I inevitably chuck it in a guilt-purge sometime around 2027.

Consuming

A friend and I went to the cinema to watch Cover Up, the Netflix documentary on the life and work of Seymour Hersh. It was heavy going, and I was glad not to watch it alone—very much the sort of film that needs a decompression chat afterwards, ideally accompanied by wine.

It revisits Hersh’s biggest stories, particularly My Lai and Abu Ghraib, and keeps circling the same unsettling question: how normal people dehumanise others, and what conditions make that kind of abuse possible. The film doesn’t flinch from Hersh’s own mistakes either, which saves it from the usual Great Man bollocks and gives it a welcome sharpness.

What landed hardest were the moments interspersed with him speaking to sources in Gaza, watching the same patterns repeat in real time. The central argument—about the role of a free press in protecting human rights—felt stark enough on its own. The timing made it worse, coming amid fresh headlines about journalists being arrested in the US, because apparently we’re speed-running every authoritarian playbook simultaneously now.

Uncomfortable viewing, but important. The kind of important that makes you want to lie on the floor afterwards.

Connections

This week I finally met up with Alexis Jimenez, who I first met on Twitter back when it was full of wonderful humans rather than Nazis and grifters, but had somehow never crossed paths with in real life. He was in town for a work event, so we did the sensible thing and prioritised dinner over whatever corporate nonsense had brought him here.

We covered Amsterdam, sales, Dutch food, running, and the absolute state of everything—which feels like the correct agenda for finally turning an internet acquaintance into an actual person. One of those reminders that some of the best professional relationships start as tiny avatars with opinions, before the platform inevitably goes to shit.

Coverage

Another week, another podcast—this one with a pleasingly quick turnaround, because this book isn’t going to flog itself and I’ve fully accepted my fate as a relentless self-promoter. 

I joined Cofenster’s Chris Brennan for a conversation about navigating digital communication in an era of suffocating noise. We talked infobesity (yes, I’m still pushing that term), why quality actually matters when everyone’s drowning in content, and what human-centred communication looks like when people are stretched, distracted, and operating at 60% capacity on a good day.

We also covered video, experimentation, audience insight, and where AI genuinely helps—spoiler: personalisation—without falling into the usual breathless “AI solves everything” nonsense that’s currently clogging LinkedIn.

Available on all your favourite podcast platforms, assuming you still have the attention span for podcasts.

Travel

It’s been over a month since I last left the country—the longest uninterrupted stretch at home since 2020, when “staycation” stopped being aspirational and became a legally enforceable lifestyle. It feels profoundly wrong, like I’ve forgotten how to perform my natural habitat: departure lounges and budget airline coffee. 

But this week normality resumes. I’m off to the UK for meetings that will definitely justify the carbon emissions. And there’s plenty more travel after that, because I’ve apparently committed to a lifestyle that involves eating meal deals in hotel lobbies. Normal service (by which I mean “perpetual motion with occasional invoicing”) restored.

This week in photos

A Wall Street Journal story caught my eye this week, showing a striking gap between how much time CEOs claim AI is saving them, and how little difference it’s making to working lives for everyone else. Which makes sense: if you’re senior enough, saved time comes back to you. If you’re not, it just creates space for more tasks to rush in and fill the gap in your to-do list.

It’s a useful test for most things we currently label as “progress”. AI. Trust initiatives. New ways of working. Not whether they sound impressive, but who actually gets the gains. This week I found myself on both sides of that equation.

This week at work

The work that actually landed this week reinforced how new doesn’t always mean shiny — and the most interesting work often happens in the gaps nobody’s quite bothered to map yet. We’ve been working with a client on preparing their internal content for an agentic-first future, which sounds like the sort of consultant waffle that should come with a health warning but actually just means: what happens when your systems stop passively sitting there like well-meaning idiots and start doing things with your content? Making decisions. Taking action. Possibly developing opinions about your governance framework. It’s been genuinely exciting to think through. The sort of work that makes you sit up slightly straighter because it feels like you’re operating at the edge of something that hasn’t quite settled yet, which is either thrilling or deeply unnerving, depending how your week’s going.

Predictably, it’s also reinforced the least fashionable truth in comms: none of this works without solid foundations. Clear content. Sensible structure. Agreed ownership. The boring stuff. The stuff that makes people’s eyes glaze over in workshops. It was never about the tools, and it still isn’t.

I also read the Edelman Trust Barometer this week, found myself increasingly irritated by the conclusions, and wrote about it for Strategic. The response suggested I wasn’t alone in my scepticism. There’s something about the annual ritual of treating a global perception survey as if it were both diagnosis and cure for trust that reliably sets my teeth on edge. Plenty of people agreed with my view that we shouldn’t be too quick to congratulate ourselves on employers being the most trusted institution: it’s only because we’re the least worst in a world where everything’s gone comprehensively to shit. Edelman’s prescription — “trust brokering” — might make communicators feel momentarily useful, like we’ve been handed a purpose and a tote bag, but we’re not in any position to fix fractured societies through great workplace facilitation and a really solid Q&A format. Lots of nodding along in the LinkedIn comments, which is always reassuring (if slightly depressing).

On the book promo front, I recorded a conversation with Chris Brennan from Cofenster, an AI video company for internal comms. Regular readers will know I’m something of a workplace video sceptic. A words person. A face for text. Too old for TikTok. I resent something being shoved into a one-minute video when a single sentence would do the job, sitting there in its tab demanding my undivided attention like a needy bastard. People have limited time, limited attention, and often limited reason to care — and video is a particularly demanding format if you get it wrong. Which, let’s be honest, most people do. Despite all this barely-suppressed hostility, we found ourselves agreeing on more than we disagreed on: video has a place, but only when it’s intentional, respectful of time, and actually good. AI can help with that. It can also automate the production of absolute drivel at industrial scale, so, you know.

Also this week

Off the back of the taiko drumming workshop I did in Japan, I signed up for a class here in Amsterdam. Extremely fun, deeply physical, and unexpectedly calming — all rhythm, coordination and collective focus. I will absolutely be drumming again.

I was also delighted to get confirmation that we’re bringing 300 Seconds back to Camp Digital this year. This will be our fourth outing: five-minute talks from first-time speakers, showcasing new voices and perspectives. Camp Digital is always an absolute corker — smart, thoughtful, genuinely cross-disciplinary — and I love that it consistently makes room for people who don’t usually put themselves forward for a conference stage. If you manage or mentor talented people who have something to say but might not yet see themselves as “speakers”, please nudge them in our direction.

I’m especially chuffed to see Jane Bowyer, one of last year’s 300 Seconds speakers, appearing on the main conference agenda this year — exactly the outcome this format is designed to create. Huge thanks to the Nexer Digital team for carving out space for this again. Manchester in May: firmly in the diary.

All of which put me in a suspiciously good mood — the kind that briefly convinces you you’re on top of things. Feeling unusually competent, I made the classic error of assuming this was a good moment to finally deal with my expenses.

And in a stunning personal breakthrough: I cracked them. With AI’s help. This is not a small thing. I hate admin. I am catastrophically terrible at expenses. My avoidance of them has been a recurring source of low-level stress and occasional quiet despair. The sort where you lie awake at 3am wondering if HMRC has a special category for “tax evader through sheer incompetence and avoidance.”

But this week, I finally built myself a system that works with my brain rather than against it. And for once the efficiency actually benefited me.

Some context: I am in the unfortunate position of being both dreadful at admin and having a complex financial life. Businesses and homes in two countries, multiple currencies and accounts, frequent travel. A combination that lends itself not to calm quarterly expense management but to spreadsheet paralysis and elaborate procrastination, usually involving reorganising the kitchen.

For years, the problem wasn’t the maths. It was the ‘activation energy’. Too many receipts, too many edge cases, too much scope to get something slightly wrong and then feel dreadful about it for weeks. So instead of trying (again) to “be better at expenses” — a resolution that has failed me annually since roughly 2012 — I built a system that does the thinking with me.

The result: a task I’d been avoiding for months got done in a morning, and I could stop feeling guilty and stressed about it.

And this, I think, is the bit that often gets missed in the AI efficiency conversation. AI can make us more efficient — but only if we’re allowed to keep the gains. In irritants removed. In tasks genuinely finished. In stress not carried around for weeks and keeping you awake at night. And sometimes, if you’re lucky, in the ability to take that reclaimed time or money and reward yourself with something tangible — like booking a holiday and remembering what it feels like to be slightly ahead of your life rather than chasing it.

(If you also hate doing expenses, there’s a short note at the bottom of this post on how I did this myself.)

Consuming

Like much of the UK, I have been completely gripped by The Traitors. This is the first time in years I’ve curtailed an evening out with friends on purpose so I could be home at a specific time to watch a television programme as it was broadcast. All round, it’s top-notch TV: pacey, absurd, psychologically vicious, and impeccably cast. I now have no idea what to do with my evenings now that it’s finished. I suppose I could go back and watch the first three series, which I somehow failed to get around to at the time — a rare luxury, discovering you’ve accidentally stockpiled excellent television.

At the other end of the spectrum, I read On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century, which I picked up after hearing Timothy Snyder speak last week. It’s a short read, but a bracing one — and it feels especially urgent given events in Davos and the US this week. Not exactly comfort reading, but the sort of book that sharpens your thinking and makes it harder to wave away things you’d rather not look at too closely.

Coverage

Jonathan and I popped up on Mike Klein and Janet Hitchen’s Navigating Disruption podcast, talking about the present (and alleged future) of work. It was a genuinely refreshing conversation, mostly because it refused the usual Anglo-Saxon rut: endless RTO discourse, a light dusting of AI panic, and everyone pretending the “future of work” is being drafted in a WeWork somewhere between London and San Francisco.

This episode was recorded with me in Japan, Janet and Jonathan in two different UK cities, and Mike in Iceland — which rather made the point for us. Work is already global, hybrid, mobile and messy; the debate just hasn’t caught up. With Mike about to head to India for a study visit, we talked about demographic realities that completely reshape the problem statement: Japan’s rapidly ageing population and shrinking workforce, versus India’s surge of young people joining the workforce faster than jobs can be created. The “future of work” isn’t a singular. It’s a patchwork — and a lot of it is already happening.

We also ended up, inevitably, back in our home territory: comms and digital channels are still designed around an outdated archetype of the Western office worker, while real organisations are a mix of employees, contractors, outsourced teams, mobile workers, and people in places where the power and wifi don’t behave reliably. The challenge isn’t “how do we boost engagement?” so much as “how do we enable people to do good work, wherever and however they’re doing it?”

A note on how I finally did my expenses (without hating every second)

As mentioned above, I’ve finally cracked expenses with AI’s help. And I’m sharing the approach in case it’s useful to other admin-haters out there.

Realising that what was stopping me getting this job done was the combination of data entry and detail-orientation, I experimented with building a custom agent to do it for me.

• I used AI as a patient, non-judgemental admin assistant, not as an accountant. I fed it photos of receipts, bank statements, and my often rambling explanations, and asked it to turn those into the exact structured format I needed to submit to my accountant.
• I didn’t just dump everything in and hit go. I worked one statement at a time, sense-checking the outputs, confirming accuracy, and correcting it where needed.
• Each pass made the agent better. I tweaked the instructions as I went — clarifying rules, edge cases, VAT treatment — so it gradually learned how my finances work.
• I gave it the rules once (what counts as a business expense for me, what needs explanation, what doesn’t) and reused that context.
• I asked for very specific outputs: itemised lists, totals, and notes I could paste straight into my spreadsheet
• Crucially, I stayed responsible for the final check. It reduced the load; it didn’t absolve me of responsibility.

And doing that means a task I’d been dodging for far too long finally got done. Even the fiddly little ones I’d previously have decided weren’t worth the. effort.

The broader lesson (for me, at least) is that AI is at its most useful not when it’s doing flashy, impressive things, but when it removes friction from the tasks you dread, so they actually get done.

This week in photos