A lot of human progress is driven not by vision, but by spite.

Not the cinematic kind. Not revenge montages, power moves, or dramatically removing your glasses before delivering a devastating monologue. The quieter, more durable form: someone being told “that’s not possible”, “that’s just how it is”, or “we had no choice” — and immediately deciding to do it anyway out of sheer bloody-mindedness.

This week featured several examples. A gym rebuilt at astonishing speed after being abruptly shut down. People reconstructing careers after being chewed up and spat out by a market currently behaving like a raccoon trapped in a wheelie bin. Organisations slowly discovering that exhausted employees cannot, in fact, absorb infinite content while also surviving modern life. Even project budgeting turned out, in its own deeply unsexy way, to be a battle between reality and magical thinking.

Fuck you, watch me scales surprisingly well as a life philosophy. (One I’ve explored at some length, if you’d like the long version.)

This week at work

Spent much of this week helping a client estimate the next phase of their programme. This is always a delicate operation — not because the maths is hard, but because the temptation to round downward is enormous. Tech licensing and support are the easy bits to cost. It’s everything else — migration, content development, training, change comms — that gets shrunk to make the total number feel less alarming. We write about this in the Business Case chapter of the book: you can have a palatable number, or you can have a project that doesn’t collapse under its own weight, but you rarely get both. Underfund the non-tech side and you end up with a burned-out team lift-and-shifting an old site into a new one — same content, better UX, no improvement anyone actually notices. Better to put the scary number on the page and defend it.

Also spent some time this week looking at how communities can strengthen and deepen technology adoption — a thread that’s been running through several client conversations lately. The default assumption is still that you launch a platform, train people on the buttons, and adoption follows. It doesn’t. What drives adoption is seeing someone like you use the thing to solve an actual problem. Not ‘digital champions’. Not launch swag. Not a 45-minute webinar about where the settings menu lives. Communities give a platform a reason to exist beyond the launch email. Without them, you’ve got software. With them, you’ve got somewhere people actually want to be.

The other live project is in good shape. We had some properly lovely feedback from the client team this week. They’re happy with what we’ve produced and, more importantly, happy working with us. When you work for yourself there’s no performance review, no reassuring manager, no gold star sticker. The only meaningful metric is whether people come back. And even when clients are delighted they’re under no obligation to say so. So when it does land in your inbox, you take moment to appreciate it.

On Thursday I delivered a webinar for IABC, building out a metaphor Jon and I started kicking around earlier this year: if infobesity, or information overload, is the problem — and it really is — then what does ‘Infozempic’ look like? How do we tackle comms overload at the system level, rather than nagging individuals to send fewer emails? Had fun writing it, and the feedback was generous. If you missed it, Jon and I are running a version next month, and I’m taking it to the Heads of Comms Special Interest Group at IABC World Conference in Toronto in June.

Also this week

Monday took me to the opening of Casa Elevate, a popup gym from Rowen, one of my favourite instructors. There was an invite-only spin class. Tell me a decade ago that I’d be genuinely excited about an invite-only spin class followed by alcohol-free grapefruit electrolyte cocktails and I’d have laughed you out of the pub.

A bit of context. Velo was the spin studio near my flat that abruptly closed last month — lovely community, lovely vibe, the place where I learned that moving to music for an hour is the closest thing I’ve found to a hard reset on my brain. Gym friends. Familiar bikes. Weekend rituals. An accidental community stitched together by endorphins and loud music. A few hours a week where I wasn’t thinking about work or looking at my phone, which turns out to be something I actively needed. When it shut I was properly gutted. My remaining credits got shuffled over to a fancy chain — all the influencer-friendly aesthetic, none of the soul. Not the same.

Rowen ran her own strength and sculpt space in the same building. When Velo went down, she got similarly abrupt notice to shutter the gym she’d built from scratch. In class this morning she talked about moving from anger to frustration to focus — and then, in roughly a fortnight, finding a space, spending her own savings on spin bikes, painting the place, getting the doors open. The polite term is grit. The honest one is a sustained act of fuck you, watch me. I was honoured to be at the opening, delighted to see the community turn out in force, and — selfishly — delighted to have my spin class back. It’s not been open a week and I’ve been to four classes.

Consuming

Two reports this week, from very different angles, landing in the same place: organisations think they have a content problem, but what they really have is a human problem.

SWOOP’s SharePoint benchmarking report looked at hard intranet data across 41 organisations and found that employees have become ruthlessly selective about what they pay attention to. They’ll use content that helps them do their jobs, ignore sprawling corporate noise, and absolutely will not read your 1,200-word “exciting update”. The sweet spot is under 400 words — which should be causing visible distress among the LinkedIn thought leadership community, many of whom are currently posting 1,800 words on ‘5 Leadership Mindsets for Synergistic Excellence’.

Equilibrious Communications‘ Shifting Ground report came at the same problem from the emotional side. People are exhausted, overwhelmed, and processing internal comms in the context of layoffs, AI anxiety, political instability, climate disasters and whichever fresh hell the news cycle has produced since breakfast.

One report says employees have finite attention. The other says employees have finite nervous systems. Together they make a fairly compelling case that the future of internal comms isn’t more content or more channels — it’s clarity, restraint, empathy, and designing for people who are already at capacity before they’ve even opened Outlook.

Connections

Monday: a useful chat with Kathryn Kneller, incoming chair of the IABC EMENA board. I’m on the slate for the 2026-7 board, and we spent some time walking through what the role actually involves. If it’s confirmed, I’m genuinely looking forward to getting stuck in — and I think I’ll need another project once the book is out the door.

Later in the week, a long-overdue proper chat with a seasoned comms pro I’ve known by reputation for years and met only in passing. We talked about the strange grief of a job ending badly — redundancy in her case, an abrupt walking-out in mine — and the work of processing the mix of emotions that follows. The market is brutal at the moment, but she’s landed somewhere new and is happier than she’s been in years. Always good to hear.

I’m not one for “everything happens for a reason” — I’m not spiritual, no one’s watching, the universe is indifferent — but there it is again: frustration and fuck you feeding into focus. Three for three this week.

Coverage

The Heard ran a feature this week on my annual International Women’s Day campaign, with what is comfortably the finest standfirst I’ll ever have written about me in my lifetime. NGL, I would like this on my headstone.

Friday brought the first Reworked writers’ room. I’ve been writing for Reworked for years now and find it a useful place to work through an argument in public, or to agitate for doing things better when the urge takes me. Good to meet some of the other regular columnists properly. Already plotting the next piece.

Travel

Off to London first thing tomorrow for a week stuffed with events and complicated by a tube strike. I’ve booked into a couple of strike-surge-priced hotels at various far-flung corners of the city, prompting Booking.com’s marketing engine to ask “excited for Uxbridge, Sharon?” — a sentence no human has ever uttered, in any language, at any point in recorded history.

Monday: the Institute for the Future of Work’s Making the Future Work event. Tuesday: over to Brunel for the History of Internal Communications conference. Then crossing London — slowly, expensively, on foot where necessary — for two days at the Engage Employee Summit, where I’m planning to spend most of my time catching up with the key vendors in the DEX space.

If you’re at any of these, come say hi. I’ll be the one attempting to cross strike-hit London via pure force of will.

This week in photos

The highlight of this week was going to visit my oldest mate, Bee. We’ve known each other since we were 11, which means she exists in my head simultaneously as a child in an oversized school jumper and NHS specs, and as the deeply competent parent she actually is now.

Over a bottle of M&S pinot grigio we concluded there are few things more humbling than being forced, at 13, to perform an interpretive dance about homelessness to the music of Phil Collins.

This happened to Bee and me during the golden age of British comprehensive education, where “the arts” often appeared to consist primarily of making toe-curlingly embarrassed children express societal issues through mime.

Thirty-five years later, we’re still friends.

(Recently, Another Day in Paradise came on while I was on a yacht in the Caribbean, which suggests the universe either has an excellent sense of humour or an unresolved administrative error somewhere.)

Anyway. It was one of those weeks that threw time into perspective: old friendships, new milestones, accidental visibility, and the increasingly strange experience of watching parts of your life become real while still feeling faintly surprised they happened at all.

This week at work

Still deep in the weeds on governance for a Viva Engage rollout at a complex, regulated organisation. I realise I bang on about governance a lot here, but that’s the inevitable consequence of working with regulated clients: when governance is bad, everybody notices. When it’s done properly, nobody has to think about it at all.

That’s exactly what we aimed for with SEFE — and, trumpet very much blown, the work picked up a Step Two award last year. The judges highlighted “a good balance between a more robust approach to governance, with a more flexible and lightweight approach, which can adapt as the company and intranet grow.” Which is gratifying, because eighteen months on, that’s precisely what’s happening: the governance is evolving alongside the platform, rather than calcifying around it.

Less than two months until the book lands now, and promotion is starting to consume most of the available oxygen. Delighted to say we’ve secured both a sponsor and a genuinely lovely venue for the launch party. Invites soon.

The flipside of all this is that my face is suddenly everywhere, which I find profoundly uncomfortable and refuse to pretend otherwise. But our new headshots from Paul Clarke came back this week and — against all odds — I actually like them. Reader, growth.

Here’s a preview:

Also prepping for an IABC webinar this week, where I’ll be using a chat about GLP-1 drugs as the route into talking about information overload at work. The basic argument: modern consumer society is an obesogenic environment, quietly engineered to encourage over-consumption while simultaneously telling individuals to exercise more self-control. Our information environment now works exactly the same way. Notifications, updates, channels, pings — too much, by design. Telling employees to “consume less information” misses the point entirely. The real answer is changing both production and consumption habits systemically.

Come watch me stretch an analogy slightly beyond structural tolerance.

Also this week

I was named in the Independent Impact 50 — fifty independent practitioners judged to be among the most innovative and influential in the industry. Genuinely chuffed, and slightly thrown by it, because I still instinctively think of myself as a behind-the-scenes person.

But ten years into the accidental career — which has somehow become the most deliberate work I’ve ever done — being recognised by peers and people I respect feels worth being slightly loud about. I wrote more about it here if you want the longer version. Huge thanks to Nigel Sarbutts and Rod Cartwright for building something that recognises independents properly.
 

Also up north for Camp Digital, where I ran the 300 Seconds session. A few weeks ago I was writing here about coaching the speakers through their nerves, and about confidence being something you learn rather than something you’re born with. This week was the payoff.

Oana Puicar, Zhen Yang, Robin Roy, Aditya Shah and James Bilham each got up and delivered five-minute talks — mostly for the first time. They were nervous. They smashed it. One of them messaged me the next morning to say she’d lost her place a couple of times, carried on anyway, and felt proud of herself afterwards.

That, right there, is why I keep doing it.

The rest of Camp Digital delivered too, as it reliably does: Rachel Coldicutt on staying hopeful about tech without kidding yourself, Candi Williams on content design as applied linguistics, Tessa Quinn on the impossible trade-offs involved in building services for Ukrainian refugees at speed, and Dan Hett closing things out by taking the room somewhere emotionally that nobody had really braced for.

Nexer Digital have built the rare tech conference that genuinely feels like it’s for the people in the room, rather than the sponsors circling around them.

Consuming

No gigs this week — simply too busy. But I did catch Project Hail Mary at the cinema. Two and a half hours of Ryan Gosling waking up on a spaceship with no memory, gradually discovering he’s a science teacher who’s effectively been press-ganged into saving the sun from microscopic space organisms. He befriends an alien. There’s a lot of zero-gravity bumbling.

Enjoyably credibility-stretching nonsense, in the grand sci-fi tradition, and Gosling continues to possess the slightly unfair ability to remain charming even when the script is doing most of the heavy lifting.

I haven’t read Andy Weir’s book, so can’t speak to the adaptation, but the film is a solid fifteen minutes too long and would have been materially improved by stopping at the first ending. It earns one genuinely lovely emotional beat near the close, then immediately piles on several more endings, each diminishing the impact slightly further.

The Lord-and-Miller instinct to send everyone home smiling ultimately won out over the better instinct to leave them just a tiny bit winded. They always think we want more. We rarely do.

Connections

Excellent call this week with Ellen Griley, who’s doing some of the most interesting work I’ve come across on trauma-informed communications — taking principles long established in healthcare and education and applying them to how organisations communicate with employees. Practical, evidence-based, overdue.

I first heard the idea articulated properly at Camp Digital last year, and it resurfaced again this year — which is one of the reasons I keep going back.

Camp Digital also once again brought together some of my favourite people in the industry, off-stage as well as on. Most of whom I only see once a year. A brilliant chance to compare notes on the market right now: the strange sensation of change happening both far too slowly and far too quickly at the same time, clients of every conceivable variety, and the growing suspicion that “everything is terrible now” may have at least some correlation with all of us getting older.

Travel

Nothing! An entire week at home.

Back in London the week after next with a diary that already looks mildly concerning, plus a Tube strike to navigate around for added flavour.

This week in photos

Weeknote 18 comes to you from a pavement café on the Côte d’Azur, killing time before my flight. Mum’s already on hers — I dropped her at the airport an hour ago, her bound for London, I’m heading back to Amsterdam this evening. There is a small carafe of something the colour of weak hay perched on my table, begging to be drunk before it’s spilled over the keyboard.

It’s been a week about being seen. At a book launch. In front of a photographer’s lens. In front of a roster of first-time speakers I’m coaching for an event next week. And (though I didn’t quite clock it at the time) looking at your work hung on a gallery wall.

Up the coast, Matisse spent his final years making some of his best work from the bed he could no longer leave, scissoring shapes out of coloured paper. I’m not saying mum is Matisse. But the voice doesn’t necessarily arrive on schedule. Confidence, like travel, turns out to be something you can work at.

This week at work

Honestly, mostly OOO. But the bits that did happen earned their keep.

Jon and I started building out a detailed governance framework for Viva Engage. The thing about platform governance — and this is the part nobody puts on a vendor slide — is that it doesn’t exist in isolation. Most of what you need is already written down somewhere else: in your content governance, your Microsoft 365 governance, your employee policies, the dusty document called Acceptable Use that nobody has opened since 2019. The job isn’t to reinvent any of it. The job is to give people clarity on how the things that already apply, apply here, in this particular context, so the platform stays useful through its lifecycle rather than degrading into the digital equivalent of a noticeboard outside an abandoned village hall.

Jonathan came to London so we could finally do a shoot with the superstar photographer Paul Clarke. We’d been meaning to for ages; the book launch turned meaning into doing. I am, on the whole, against having my picture taken (growing up with a squint does that to a person) but Paul put me at ease, narrating his choices on light and framing as he went, which felt less like being photographed and more like being let in on the trick. I can’t wait to see the pics.

Then to the launch of Advita Patel’s Decoding Confidence: 7 habits of confident leaders. A chance to catch up with people I don’t see nearly enough, and to celebrate the work Advita does on confidence and visibility — both of which were on my mind all week.

Timely, too, with 300 Seconds at Camp Digital coming up. I’ve been talking to our new speakers about their nerves, and sharing (hard though it may be to believe now) that I was painfully shy well into my late twenties. There’s a tendency to treat confidence and introversion as fixed properties of personality, on a par with eye colour or a tendency to lose umbrellas. They are not. Confidence is learned. It’s practised. And for those of us, like Advita and me, who didn’t grow up surrounded by mouthy public school confidence, that’s a revelation worth holding on to. 

Also this week

Also this week: a few days in France with mum. Nice, Villefranche-sur-Mer, Cannes, Antibes, Monaco (country 91 for me, ~65 for her).

Mum gave me my love of travel. She worked in the industry, and loved taking us to new places when we were small — a habit I’ve adopted in adulthood with what can only be described as excessive gusto. Now she’s elderly, getting away is harder than it used to be. Last September the family went to the Auvergne to scatter my grandmother’s ashes in the volcanic hills where she was born more than a century before. It was there we decided on another weekend together, just us, to explore the land of her (and my) forefathers. Or, more accurately and more usefully, foremothers.

Ninety countries in, and somehow there are corners of this neighbouring one I’ve never set foot in. The Côte d’Azur is as stunning as anywhere in the world; you can see why the existentialists kept washing up here. Over bottles of cheap-but-excellent rosé, mum filled me in on her childhood holidays in the Auvergne, Provence and Bordeaux, and visits to her grandparents in Paris. An extraordinarily beautiful country, full of women who, like Louise Bourgeois, came into themselves on their own schedule. I regret that I haven’t claimed more of these roots, and that my French remains the kind that makes waiters switch to English with merciful speed. I really must spend more time here.

For me, travel and confidence are hand-in-hand. Going somewhere new, alone, takes balls. It also grows them. Every time I do something past-me would have hated — navigating the unfamiliar, making friends from scratch, navigating the menu and a phobia of cheese in a language I don’t speak — I add another piece of evidence that I can. And then some.

Mum has never been particularly confident. But since retiring she’s found her voice through painting. She exhibited at a local gallery recently and sold a couple of pieces. She’s walking taller. It turns out you can find your visibility late. You can find it sideways. You can find it in your 70s, in oils and acrylics and a quiet room with the right light.

Connections

Advita’s launch was, predictably, a who’s-who of internal comms loitering around the same canapés: Trudy Lewis, Jenni Field, Katie Marlow, Darryl Sparey, Anne-Marie Blake, Janet Hitchin, Shalini Gupta, Shayoni Lynn, Andrew Hesselden, and of course Advita herself. The kind of room where you realise how many people you only ever see at other people’s book launches, and resolve, unconvincingly, to fix that.

A diary coincidence also delivered an impromptu pint with regular Lithos co-conspirator Lisa Riemers, which (as these things do) became an impromptu dinner at an excellent barbecue joint

Coverage

Cassandre Arkema’s Algorithm Witch newsletter ran a smart piece this week on video, employee advocacy, and the precise method by which platforms decide what gets seen — which is, as far as anyone can tell, a mixture of vibes, pattern-matching and witchcraft. I’m quoted on the thing I keep coming back to: employee advocacy only works when value flows both ways. The moment it tips into a one-way relationship — endless content extracted from staff, nothing offered back — it stops being advocacy and becomes the thing it’s regularly accused of being.

It picks up on the Workshop webinar I did the week before with Yanni Pappas from Workshop and Michaela McKinley of Sprout Social on employee influencers — the rare webinar I’d recommend actually watching back. Video recap here:

Published

I’m trying to write a bit more ahead of the book coming out, so there’s new post on the book site this week: The zombie stat that won’t die: why “a bad intranet costs $16 million” is the wrong argument.

You’ve seen the stat. It shuffles back into view every few months, blinking in the sunlight: a bad intranet costs millions, employees waste hours searching, multiply by salaries, gasp at the total. It’s catchy. It’s easy to repeat. It’s also a terrible way to make the case for internal comms.

The post argues that time saved isn’t cash saved, that the benchmarks behind these numbers are mostly held together with hope and a vendor deck from 2014, and that the moment finance pokes at the source the whole thing collapses like a soufflé in a slammed door. If we want internal comms taken seriously as a strategic discipline, we need to stop reaching for dramatic-but-weak calculations and start describing real business impact: cost avoidance, risk, support deflection, onboarding speed, compliance. One meaningful stat and one real story will outperform a blizzard of theoretical millions every time.

Travel

By tomorrow I’ll have swapped rosé and palm trees for a flat white in Amsterdam, and by the end of the week, Mediterranean glamour for Mancunian charm. I’m at Camp Digital in Manchester for a few days and have a bit of spare time between sessions, so if you’re in Manc and fancy a coffee, give me a shout.

This week in photos

I began this week at Metamorphosen at the Rijksmuseum, and Ovid’s transformations followed me everywhere afterwards.

“My purpose is to tell of bodies which have been transformed into shapes of a different kind,” he wrote. The exhibition traces two thousand years of artists grappling with his central insight: everything is in constant flux, yet nothing truly disappears. Forms shift, but essence persists. Chaos finds structure. Internal becomes external. The creator falls in love with their creation.

What struck me most was the question posed in the Chaos & Creation room: “From where does form emerge from formlessness? When does matter become animated? And is creation ever truly complete?” These felt less like ancient philosophical puzzles and more like the exact challenges I’d be wrestling with all week — helping organisations shape pilot communities from sprawling possibilities, watching AI tools cross the line from experiment to operational reality, seeing my own book transform from manuscript to physical object while readers transformed it again through their responses.

Ovid positioned himself as Arachne’s counterpart: a weaver of verses, binding everything to everything else. That’s the work, really. Taking the scattered threads — theory and practice, context and constraint, internal understanding and external expression — and weaving them into something coherent. Something that holds, resonates, delights.

But the exhibition also reminded me that not all transformation is benign. Metamorphosis, as the Jupiter and Medusa rooms made clear, can mean the loss of agency. Power often dictates who gets transformed and how. The Narcissus myth — falling in love with a reflection, “mistaking a mere shadow for a real body” — felt particularly relevant in a week spent thinking about digital literacy, social media advocacy, and the gap between what tools promise and what they actually deliver.

By week’s end, I was seeing transformation everywhere: platforms becoming pilots, internal voices becoming external influence, chaos becoming creation. Everything shifting, nothing disappearing.

This week at work

Helped an organisation plan their Viva Engage rollout — a perfect example of that Chaos & Creation question: from where does form emerge from formlessness? Right now we’re looking at what communities to include. Enough to test what we need to (governance, planning, resource, training, and impact on content/channel strategy), but small enough that it’s genuinely a pilot and not opening up to the whole company. Jon and I spent an intellectually brilliant day kicking the tyres on this one, reflecting on what we’ve experienced elsewhere, what people told us when we did the research for the book, what the theory tells us, and the context of this specific organisation and its needs. We’re both pretty happy with the rigour of the recommendations we made. And it’s stuff like this which means I’m still fascinated by this work, twenty years in.

We’re helping another organisation plan and budget for a platform proof of concept. Again, applying theory, practice and context to come up with an estimation model that we think stands up to scrutiny. The work of giving shape to the shapeless, making the invisible visible.

Spent two days at HR Tech Europe, and came away thinking about Jupiter’s transformations — gods taking on different forms to serve their own ends. The rhetoric was all about AI enabling humans, but when you dug into the actual solutions, most were designed to make HR’s life easier by pushing complexity onto employees. There were exceptions — Pandora’s Byron Clayton showed what genuine transformation looks like when you redesign work rather than just digitise it, freeing store managers from 12 hours a week of admin to get back on the shop floor — but they felt rare.

What struck me most was the ‘AI Proximity Paradox’ that Mercer presented: the more employees use AI at work, the more anxious they become about it. Getting closer to the digital reflection only to become more unsettled by what you see. Meanwhile, 42% of people don’t understand what value AI will bring them, but they’re three times more likely to adopt it when leaders communicate clearly. The bottleneck isn’t the technology. It’s us.

Did a brilliant webinar with Workshop on employee influencers — pure Arachne territory, this. The art of weaving internal understanding into external voice. Kelsey Kingdon, Yanni Pappas, Micaela McGinley and I spent an hour unpicking how internal comms is becoming external comms in 2026. How well a brand gets delivered externally depends on how well it’s understood internally. If your people don’t get your mission, vision, and values, then (as Yanni put it) you’re cooked. You can’t push for external advocacy without doing the internal work first.

People want stories, not to be sold to. And those stories come from lived experience, not from marketing. The other thing that landed: this isn’t something IC owns alone. Employee influencer programmes that work are cross-functional by design. When one team tries to own it, silos kill the programme along with it. My contribution: this stuff is inherently risky. Some things don’t land, things can go pop that you didn’t expect, and content can go viral for good reasons and bad. Employee influence is hugely powerful, but if you’re deploying it you have to be prepared to take the rough with the smooth — and support employees when it goes sideways.

Got the endorsement quotes in for our book. I might have cried a bit reading them. It’s weird, writing a book then handing it over and seeing what people think. A bit like Pygmalion, in reverse — you create something, fall in love with it, then watch other people bring it to life in ways you never imagined.

Also this week

Tomorrow is King’s Day. Which means the drinking starts this afternoon and runs through to about 7pm tomorrow. Nobody much cares whether you’re Dutch, or whether you have any feelings about the monarchy. Wear orange. Grab a beer. You’re in. Nationalism done about as well as nationalism can be

As I mentioned, I went to Metamorphosen at the Rijksmuseum earlier in the week. If you’re in Amsterdam, catch it before it closes next month — it’s genuinely worth the trip. The way it traces transformation across two millennia of art is remarkable, and (as this weeknote attests) you’ll find yourself seeing the themes everywhere afterwards.

Consuming

Two classics over the weekend. Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, because my husband had somehow never seen it. A neat loop back to Metamorphosen and the Hermaphroditus works — though I didn’t plan that. I first saw Priscilla when it came out, when I was about fourteen. Suffice to say it lands differently now. Which is its own kind of metamorphosis: the film stays the same, but I’ve been transformed by everything I’ve encountered since. What felt like pure spectacle at fourteen now reads as something deeper about identity, belonging, the courage it takes to become who you are.

And then The Hitcher, which David watched at fourteen and I’d never seen. Also set against vast, barren desert. That is where the similarities end. Where Priscilla is about transformation as liberation — drag as metamorphosis, the road as a place where you can shed old selves and try on new ones — The Hitcher is about transformation as menace. Rutger Hauer’s character reshaping everyone he encounters, usually fatally. Same landscape, completely different mythology.

Both films reminded me of something the exhibition kept returning to: we don’t just observe transformation, we’re constantly being transformed by what we consume. Every story changes us a little. The question is whether we notice.

Connections

HR Tech Europe was as much about the conversations in the corridors as the sessions on stage. Had a particularly good catch-up with Dr Dieter Veldsman, a Rotterdam-based HR organisational scientist and author. We ended up in a proper deep dive about organisational design — his observation that every company is essentially a reflection of its history of dysfunction really stuck with me. Which, he pointed out, is precisely what makes this work so interesting. And if you’ll excuse one more Ovid insight: we are all transformed by what came before, and the shapes we take now echo the forces that shaped us.

Also met with Ruxandra-Laura Bosilca, a mainstay of the IABC down in Brussels and one of the organisers of last week’s Strategic Communication Leadership Summit. A lovely, if far too short catch-up on an Amsterdam rooftop in the spring sunshine. We covered in-house vs consultancy, what vendors get right and wrong, comms platform buyers, and much else besides.

And Workvivo treated us to a splendid dinner at MOS on a glorious spring day at the Westerdok. Big thanks to Ciaran O’Malley for the invite (and the pronunciation lesson). Good insights from Michael Nord on change communication and Ingrid Meier on IC’s role in digital workplace deployment. Nice to catch up with Leo McCauley and Natascha de Waal and put faces to more LinkedIn profiles. There’s something magical about the transformation of digital connections into actual conversation over good food and wine in the Amsterdam sunshine.

Coverage

New piece out this week in Reworked on why organizations are building digital literacy and calling it AI literacy — when they’re not the same thing at all. Pure Narcissus territory, this. In Ovid’s telling, Narcissus falls in love with his own reflection in a pool. The more he gazes, the more he’s convinced the reflection is real, until he wastes away reaching for something that was never there.

Organisations are doing much the same with AI capability. They’re enchanted by the surface — the workshops, the adoption rates, the tool proficiency — while missing what actually matters. The core argument: digital literacy is about operating tools; AI literacy is about judgment. Knowing when to trust an output, when to push back, when to close the tab and do it yourself.

But most organisations keep staring at their reflection in the digital pool (look how AI-ready we are!) while the real capability dissolves beneath the surface. Ninety percent of people already use AI at work, most without telling their employers. The problem isn’t that they don’t know how to use it. The problem is that 92% don’t check outputs for accuracy, even though they express skepticism about what AI produces. That’s not a training gap. That’s a judgment gap. And you can’t close it with a Copilot workshop.

Travel

After eleven whole days at home I’m back on the road this week. London first, for meetings and book promo, then a few days in France. It’s my first time in Nice, so recommendations welcome. Especially if they involve good food and plenty of walking.

This week in photos

Three weeks in Central America and I feel like I’ve come back to a different city. It was threatening snow when I left. I’ve come back to full tulip-scented springtime in Amsterdam. Something’s shifted, mostly for the better.

Cheered by news from Hungary that the slide to authoritarianism is not inevitable; a chink of hope that recent political tradewinds can reverse.

But this last fortnight also bought reminders that negative shifts happen too, and they can be rapid. A healthy pipeline can become a slow one. An open waterway becomes a global crisis. Democracy can shift into reverse.

This week at work

Proper behind-the-NDA work for most of it. One client standing up a relatively under-used platform as their intranet; another mid-rollout on Viva Engage.

The shiny vendor case studies — the intranet rolled out in a fortnight, the 60% reduction in case volume, the before-and-after slide — are real, mostly. But they leave out the part where the comms team had to compromise on visual design because search was non-negotiable. Or where the original pilot was scoped to thousands of users despite everyone agreeing that was mad and not in any way a pilot. Or where younger employees, against every assumption, still prefer phone calls.

That’s the stuff that helps people actually decide. Perfect stories get nobody anywhere; they’re marketing in a different hat. The real story — what broke, what didn’t ship, which stakeholder you had to win over twice — is where the usable knowledge lives. And it’s rarely the vendor who can hand it to you. After enough years and enough rollouts in enough complex organisations, Jon and I can usually find the dots to connect: someone elsewhere who’s done this exact thing and will tell you the truth over a drink in a way the reference call was never going to. Doing that for clients — as a matter of course, not a favour — is, increasingly, the job.

The people we advise are adults. They know there are trade-offs. Flagging them upfront — here’s what this platform does brilliantly, here’s what you’ll have to live with — actually makes selling-in inside organisations easier, not harder. Pretend it’s going to be perfect and you hand your sceptics the ammunition they need when month three arrives and the edge cases start landing.

Which made this week’s Strategic Communication Leadership Summit the tonic I didn’t know I needed  An unconference, so no vendor deck in sight. Just practitioners talking honestly about what’s working, what isn’t, and the inevitable compromises the profession makes that nobody writes case studies about. The best kind of room to be in.

And the book: final, final copy edits submitted — a phrase I’ve learned to take with the caution it deserves. Early copies out to first readers for endorsements. Feedback so far has been positive, which after all this I’ll take.

Also this week

Panama first. The canal is more absurd in person than any photograph prepares you for — container ships the size of small cities threading through what is, structurally, a trench. 8% of world trade passes through it. Standing on the lock edge, you feel the scale of what that did to global connectedness a century ago. It’s tempting to treat a transformation of that size as permanent.

It isn’t. Connectedness can reverse. The crisis in the Strait of Hormuz is the loud current example. And less abruptly: more than 40 countries have enacted data localisation laws, cross-border data flows are slowing, information flows are now the most contested trade flows of the lot. I finally read the DHL/NYU Stern Global Connectedness Report this week, and wrote about it on LinkedIn. It isn’t aimed at internal communicators, but it should be. Your channel stack is geopolitical infrastructure now — where your intranet data lives, who hosts your messaging platform, what happens when a relationship fractures fast rather than slowly. Those are governance questions, not IT ones. The best time to have mapped the stack was two years ago. The next best is now.

Panama in pics:

Jetted back home, and Tuesday evening saw me at the Tolhuistuin for Science & Cocktails — Is Dutch democracy at risk? Leiden University’s extremist politics professor Sarah de Lange doing the mental heavy lifting. Three-quarters of the world now lives in autocracies, up from half in 2005; only seven per cent of us live in liberal democracies. Declining trust, the hunger for a strong leader, rising polarisation — these, she argued, aren’t the causes of democratic backsliding. They’re the consequences. Which upends a lot of the usual handwringing.

The line that stuck: statements by mainstream politicians erode democratic norms more than statements by the far right themselves. When respectable parties accommodate fringe positions — on immigration, most obviously — they do the normalising work the fringe can’t do on its own. The danger isn’t the people shouting from the edge. It’s the ones in suits nodding along.

Walking home I kept thinking of something I wrote back in October, from Nagasaki. We’d been round the Atomic Bomb Museum, and a guide from the Peace Workshop said a line I’ve come back to more than once since: peace isn’t something you have, it’s something you make. Democracy works the same way. You have to keep at it. It doesn’t happen by accident. It isn’t inevitable.

The tail end of the week took me to Luxembourg for a few days — racking up country 90. Small enough to see most of it between one coffee and the next. Pretty in a faintly theatrical way, as though the old town had been set-dressed for a period drama and never struck. I strolled across a bridge and found myself in Germany — a near-imperceptible shift, and a perfect encapsulation of European unity and of the dividends peace has bought our continent.

And — news closer to home — Velo has closed. Abruptly. My local spin studio, cornerstone of the weekend, the place that somehow turned me from someone who tolerated cardio into someone who needed it. You don’t expect a community to form around an hour on a stationary bike, and then you find yourself in one. This was the first Saturday in I-don’t-know-how-long that I didn’t set my alarm for Swiftie Saturday. I miss it.

Consuming

The Testaments. Disney+. Devoured the first three episodes in one sitting when they dropped; episode four this week, rationed like a sensible adult. Atwood has been a constant since I first read Handmaids for year 9 English, and it is slightly too on-the-nose to be watching this in a week whose dinner-table topic was democratic backsliding. But also exactly right.

Two gigs: Dry Cleaning at the Melkweg — Florence Shaw deadpanning her way through lyrics that arrive half-overheard and land three seconds late, over a tight post-punk racket. A band who’ve made speaking over songs feel like the only sensible approach. And The Undertones at Paradiso for the 50th anniversary show — a room full of people who knew every word of Teenage Kicks, sung back like an anthem because it is one.

Coverage

Read an FT piece earlier this week on AI on Meta launching an AI version of Zuckerberg for leadership comms and got, as the kids say, The Ick. Thought on it. Reflected. (Personal growth, yo.) Came back with a more generous conclusion: AI has a place in leadership comms — especially in organisations that have to communicate at scale. The question, then, isn’t if. It’s how.

Which became a piece in Unleash this week: AI won’t fix your leadership communication, but it might expose it.

Travel

Home. Two weeks in a row — what passes for a holiday by recent standards.

This week in photos

There’s a certain kind of wrong that turns out, in the right context, to be exactly right. Jetlag that becomes a productivity hack. A brain that can’t distinguish between languages, accidentally fluent. A notification arriving at precisely the wrong — or possibly perfect — moment.

Curaçao will do that to you. It’s a place that shouldn’t quite work — Dutch colonial architecture in the Caribbean heat, a language built from five others, an island that looks like Delft and feels like nowhere else — and absolutely does.

This week at work

Started Monday strong with a 5am planning workshop — client in Europe, colleagues in Asia, me in Curaçao calculating whether I could make it to the beach by nine. The answer was yes. There’s something to be said for jetlag as a productivity strategy: brutal early start, done and dusted before the Netherlands has made it to lunch, the rest of the day entirely your own.

It works both ways, too. My business partner Jon is in the UK. When I’m east — Japan, say — I’d have the day’s work wrapped before he’d had his first coffee. Now I’m west, he picks things up first, gets them moving, and hands them to me to finish off. Use it well and the timezone gap stops being a problem and starts being a relay baton. As regular readers may have noticed, this is a hack I deploy fairly regularly.

Same client, different challenge: we started mapping out our approach to digital employee experience testing on their new digital workplace. This is the stuff that gets skipped in favour of launch day announcements and gets missed the moment something doesn’t work for real humans in real contexts. Good to see a team treating it as foundational rather than optional.

Thursday brought the formal kick-off with a new client — at the comparatively civilised start time of 7am — and it generated an excellent pile of actions. Early days, but already I’m struck by their pragmatism and genuine appetite to move at pace. That last bit always comes with caveats in a sprawling corporate context, where the gap between ambition and organisational physics can be considerable. But the intent is there, and intent is where it starts.

Friday was more mixed. A conversation with a vendor about fronting some talks — one I’m still turning over. The book needs promoting, and I know the months ahead require me to be more visible, more vocal, more out there. But there’s a version of this that tips into “comms influencer” territory, and I’m not at all sure that’s who I am or want to be. Practitioner first. Sizeable social following, yes, but that following exists because I say things I actually believe. I need to be clear on where the line is before I cross it.

On a more straightforwardly enjoyable note: a good conversation with a public sector organisation thinking hard about launching a new social platform. These projects are tricky anywhere — but in public sector there’s an extra layer of scrutiny that goes beyond “will people use it?” and straight to “can we justify people using it?” The fear that investment gets undermined by employees being too engaged, too social, too human, and the Daily Mail does not like that.

I printed off the book’s manuscript and proofed it on the plane here. Genuinely not bad. I’d buy it. The book website is live — digitalcommunicationsatwork.com — and the marketing machine is slowly cranking into gear. More on that in the weeks ahead.

Also this week

Also this week, in between the early starts and 5am workshops: Curaçao itself. Clear blue water. Sand between the toes. Caves and coves. Jumping into the sea. And the genuinely disconcerting experience of wandering the streets of Willemstad, which looks exactly like a Dutch canal town, except it’s 30 degrees and there are flamingos.

It’s also a genuinely odd linguistic proposition — and an unexpectedly validating one. My brain, when abroad, does not distinguish between languages. It just goes “you’re abroad! Try foreign!” and fires whatever it has. Dutch in Germany. Spanish in Italy. Usually both at once, nouns from one, conjunctions from the other, meaning somewhere in the middle.

It makes no sense anywhere. Except Curacao. Because Papiamentu — the local creole — is built from Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, English, and West African languages. Purity was never the point. It evolved to be understood, by these people, in this place.

At one point this week, the sentence “Spaans of Holandés is fine” came out of my mouth. And somehow, it was.

Consuming

I have a habit of reading the history of a place before I visit. History being, largely, the story of bad men doing awful things, this means my travel reading list is a reliable parade of war, repression, dictatorship, and genocide. I thought Hell’s Gorge — Matthew Parker’s history of the building of the Panama Canal — might be a cheerier proposition. Epoch-defining infrastructure. Human ingenuity. That sort of thing.

Reader, it was not.

Connections

This week’s unexpected connection: I ended up sharing an apartment in Curaçao with Meri Williams — ex-GDS/Monzo, and one of the more interesting people on the internet. This is the second time in six months I’ve ended up on holiday with someone I met on LinkedIn. I’m choosing to see this as a feature of how I socialise now, rather than a symptom of anything.

Coverage

New piece out this week in Reworked: the argument that the HR–IT partnership everyone’s so excited about is missing a third leg. Internal communications keeps getting invited to the table at the announcement stage, long after the decisions are made. That’s not a seat at the table. That’s a chair by the door. The piece is about what genuine shared accountability across all three functions actually looks like — and why AI makes getting this wrong considerably more expensive than it used to be.

I was quoted in the FT this week, in Isabel Berwick’s piece on the rise of ‘third spaces’ as co-working spots: “There was something quite fun about working in a bathrobe and breaking up a hard day’s PowerPoint with a dip in a pool and ten minutes in a sauna.”

I got the notification about this while Working From Yacht, somewhere off the coast of Curaçao. The irony is in no way lost on me.

Travel

Next stop: Panama. Country 89, which is a perfectly normal number of countries to have visited and I will not be taking questions. The plan is a genuine week off — no workshops, no 5am calls, no Working From Yacht. Just me, the Canal, and a book that has already comprehensively disabused me of any romantic notions about what building it involved.

Wish me luck.

This week in photos