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 2026/07

February 15, 2026 / Sharon O'Dea / Leave a comment

A scenic view of a canal in a city, lined with brick buildings and parked bicycles. Several boats are visible in the water, along with whimsical, white paper-like figures resembling birds, creating an artistic touch to the urban landscape. — *Back home in Amsterdam (photo: Sharon O’Dea)*

Consulting is a game played over years, not weeks. Some engagements are about architecture and impact. Others are about helping procurement tick a box before buying what they were always going to buy.

The ratio varies depending on market conditions, how disciplined you are about qualifying leads, and whether you’re willing to walk away from bad-fit work when the pipeline looks thin. Most small consultancies say they’re selective. Most small consultancies also have mortgages.

The discipline is remembering that not every loss is a mistake — but some are instructive.

This week at work

We had the official kickoff with a new client this week, and it’s one of those projects that makes you feel the stretch in a good way. Ambitious scope. A platform that’s new not just to us, but to the industry. And a brief that isn’t “launch an intranet” but “design the foundations for an agentic-first communication architecture.”

Content structured for humans and AI agents. Governance designed with automation in mind, not bolted on afterwards. Distribution built around orchestration rather than broadcast.

It’s rare, in this field, to work on something that feels genuinely new. Most of what we do is evolutionary — cleaning up legacy, untangling compromises, retrofitting governance onto yesterday’s shortcuts. This feels different. I’m relishing it.

Less positively, we were also knocked back on a proposal this week. One we’d invested in properly.

We were recommended in by a former client. We had multiple constructive calls. We built demos. We did due diligence. We produced a draft project plan — explicitly positioned as a working document for discussion.

The moment that draft landed, the temperature changed. Silence.

Then, weeks later: “We’ve decided on a change of direction.”

Reader: there was no change of direction. There was a decision already made. Our work simply helped validate it — or more accurately, helped their procurement team tick the “we got an alternative proposal” box before buying what they’d already decided to buy.

This is a pattern small consultancies recognise instantly. You’re invited in to cost the hard bits — content, governance, migration, adoption — so a glossy platform decision can survive CFO scrutiny. You expose the complexity. You quantify the risk. You make the organisational reality visible.

And then that thinking becomes unpaid pre-sales support for someone else’s commission.

Let’s call it what it is: extracting expertise without paying for it.

It’s short-termism disguised as process. And it disproportionately hurts smaller firms, because speculative proposal work is not a rounding error for us. It’s days of senior time. It’s pulling in partners. It’s opportunity cost.

What makes it worse is the economics.

The organisation hasn’t “saved money.” They’ve simply shifted where it’s spent — typically towards a vendor backed by private equity, buoyed by marketing budgets, promising “turnkey” simplicity that rarely lives up to reality.

They will still need content. They will still need governance. They will still need adoption work. Software does not generate clear ownership, accurate information or disciplined lifecycle management by magic. It just generates invoices more efficiently.

You can underpay for advice or overpay for consequences. The invoice arrives either way.

The only guaranteed winner in this dynamic is the vendor.

And that’s the part that leaves a faint sadness beneath the anger. Because we actually want these programmes to succeed. We care about the long-term architecture, not the quarter’s sales target. Which is precisely why we’re less convenient to hire.

But then the very next day, we got the green light on a new project with a far more interesting client. One where the conversations are candid. Where the problem is complex in the right way. Where substance beats theatre. Where we’re building something durable, not decorative.

But that’s the gig. One minute you’re being picked clean like a buffet carcass by people who consider “market research” a legitimate use of your skull contents. The next, you’re signing something that actually matters. The whiplash is simply the cost of staying solvent.

Also this week

Accidentally had a week of AI immersion. Three sessions, three lenses — but a surprisingly consistent message.

The first focused on protecting our “human OS”: judgment, stance, taste, sense-making and responsibility. AI can inform and accelerate. It cannot own consequences. (Though it’s certainly convenient for those who’d prefer not to.)

The second, at Work/Shift, made the uncomfortable observation that individual productivity gains aren’t translating into organisational value. People are faster. Teams are not. AI is amplifying whatever system it enters — including half-finished transformations and fuzzy accountability. If your organisation isn’t legible to itself, it certainly won’t be legible to machines.

Kim England shared an instructive example from Pearson: a five-day reduction in customer response time only happened after fixing broken processes. AI layered on top of clarity works; AI layered on top of chaos simply scales it at premium margins.

The third was the launch of IABC’s AI Special Interest Group — communicators recognising that we’re now in the room for governance and ethics whether we like it or not. The tone was less “how do we deploy this?” and more “how do we remain human while we do?”

Across all three, the pattern was clear.

There’s a growing murmur that AI isn’t living up to enterprise hype. Gains are localised, uneven, individual. The transformation dividend hasn’t shown up in the quarterly numbers.

But that often precedes normalisation. The dip before the Plateau of Productivity. Or the bit where everyone stops mentioning the initiative while still paying the licence fees. Which makes this moment less about disappointment and more about architecture.

If AI is going to move beyond personal productivity hacks and into collective capability, the foundations matter. Governance. Context. Team coherence. Legible decision-making.

In other words: exactly the sort of agentic-first communication architecture we kicked off this week. Funny how these things converge.

Consuming

Work didn’t leave much time for TV or reading this week, but I did re-watch the original Star Wars in preparation for our forthcoming trip to actual Tatooine.

Not “inspired by.” Not “filmed near.” Actual Tatooine.

There is something deeply pleasing about revisiting the 1977 version — before the CGI accretions, before the franchise industrial complex metastasised into a content vertical, when it was just slightly wonky world-building, questionable haircuts and a desert that genuinely looked like it might ruin your moisturiser.

Watching it now, you can see how much of modern storytelling muscle memory it created. The pacing is almost quaint. The practical effects hold up alarmingly well. And the optimism — that scrappy, analogue rebellion energy — feels oddly refreshing in an era of algorithmically optimised content engineered to perform well in A/B testing.

It also turns out that once you know you’re going somewhere that lent its name to Tatooine, every sand dune becomes a scouting exercise.

I cannot promise I won’t hum the theme tune the entire time.

Travel

On Thursday, we’re heading to Tunisia for the first time.

Roman ruins. Star Wars geography. Sahara edges. North African food that I suspect will permanently recalibrate my spice tolerance.

It’s a short trip, so this week is all anticipation. Next week: sand, ruins, and (inevitably) reflections.

If you’ve got Tunis tips, send them quickly. Binary sunsets pending.

This week in photos

Two kayakers paddling in a canal surrounded by historic buildings in Amsterdam, with a cloudy sky overhead.

A downward view of a spiraled wooden staircase leading to an exit, surrounded by vintage signs and dark wooden walls.

Weeknote 2026/06

February 8, 2026 / Sharon O'Dea / Leave a comment

A laptop on a wooden table next to a Heineken 0.0 beer bottle, with a view of a lounge area in the background. — *Back on the road this week (photo: Sharon O’Dea)*

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

View from a gym window overlooking a cityscape at sunrise, with a treadmill interface displaying various workout options.

Close-up view of feet in white socks standing on a gym floor next to a barbell with yellow and green weight plates.

Weeknote 2026/05

February 2, 2026 / Sharon O'Dea / 1 Comment

Night view of a canal in Amsterdam with illuminated buildings, boats, and a dome-shaped structure in the background. — *Amsterdam, Monday (photo: Sharon O’Dea)*

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.

A woman presenting with a laptop in a meeting room, with a projector screen displaying an image, while attendees sit at a long table with drinks and notebooks.

A metallic mesh sculpture resembling a pyramid, set on a table with various glasses and utensils in the background.

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.

*Alex and me in a freezing cold Amsterdam street*

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 nighttime view of a canal bridge adorned with glowing lights, reflecting in the water, surrounded by illuminated buildings and bicycles.

A gym scene reflecting through a glass partition, showing a person sitting on a bench taking a selfie with a phone, while another person is working out in the background.

Weeknote 2026/04

January 25, 2026January 25, 2026 / Sharon O'Dea / Leave a comment

A vibrant display of red and green tulips stacked on a market table, with a blurred background featuring a red car and boxes of flowers. — *It’s tulip season again (photo: Sharon O’Dea)*

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

A group of traditional drums arranged in a circle on a wooden floor, with two individuals visible in the background. The setting appears to be a rehearsal space.

Scenic view of a canal in Amsterdam, featuring historic buildings reflected in the water during early evening.

Weeknote 2026/03

January 18, 2026January 19, 2026 / Sharon O'Dea / Leave a comment

Night view of a historic clock tower beside a canal, with illuminated buildings and street lamps in Amsterdam. — *Amsterdam, again (photo: Sharon O’Dea)*

This week involved a disconcerting amount of physical reality.

People materialised in actual rooms. Ideas escaped their Google Docs and did things to other humans in real time. Work happened in ways that required shoes—sometimes even presentable ones. Collaboration, usually a distributed affair mediated by timestamps and emoji reactions, briefly acquired mass and occupied three-dimensional space. It was all very analogue, in that faintly unnerving way analogue things are when you’ve forgotten they exist.

I hadn’t quite realised how thoroughly my working life now exists as a theoretical proposition rather than a physical practice until this week gently but firmly dragged me back into corporeal form.

This week at work

We delivered an ‘infobesity’ workshop with Swoop at ING—their term for information overload, and a very good one, which resonated immediately with me, a middle aged woman who has tried and failed at every diet known to (wo) man.

The morning brought together a collection of comms people from pleasingly complex organisations. And I’ll admit it: I love running workshops. The architecture of ideas, the careful choreography, that electric moment when something actually lands in a room full of people who’ve heard everything before. It went well. People were open, honest, collaborative, generous with their ideas and tolerant of our extended metaphors. And that’s the best I can hope for.

It was also my first public outing of the “Infozempic” concept, which I’d been nursing like a potentially embarrassing joke at a wedding. The collective intake of breath when I said it—that visceral ohhh—was gratifying in a way that probably says something unflattering about me. The metaphor hit a nerve. Possibly because everyone’s drowning and I just named the water.

A presenter speaks to an audience during a presentation about obesity, with images of food displayed on a screen behind her. — *Me at the workshop this week. Photo: Gemma Saint*

The feedback was effusive enough that I immediately carved out time to write an extensive blog post on the same theme. Yes, responding to a workshop about information restraint by producing more information is ironic in a way that would make Alanis Morissette weep. But when an idea has heat, you chase it. Better a considered piece written in the moment than another half-arsed thread abandoned at 11pm.

With Jon in town for the workshop, we seized the opportunity to tick off two remarkably adult tasks. First: professional photographs. Despite speaking daily across international borders, we’ve somehow amassed approximately zero visual evidence of existing in the same postcode. Given the book’s imminent arrival, it seemed prudent to acquire proof that we’re not an elaborate catfishing scheme before journalists start asking reasonable questions about whether we’ve ever actually met.

Second: actual strategic planning for book promotion. We discussed what we want to say, who might conceivably care, and how to avoid becoming just another desperate voice howling into the digital void come launch day. The bar is low, but we’re hoping to clear it.

Mid-week brought a pitch to a potential new client. Early omens were promising, which means we’re now in that delightful purgatory between “I think that went well?” and “now we wait while they ghost us or don’t.”

Simultaneously, we’re spinning up two new projects, doing the unglamorous but essential work of actually understanding the organisations before swanning in with hot takes. It’s the bit that doesn’t make for good anecdotes, but it’s where most projects are quietly sentenced to success or failure.

And the book continues its stately procession through the publisher’s approval machinery, advancing without us like a child you’ve sent off to university. It’s oddly pleasant and faintly unsettling to watch something you’ve made take on independent life, trundling along tracks you’re no longer steering.

Also this week

I also went to hear Timothy Snyder talk about tyranny and freedom, which is exactly the sort of thing a normal person voluntarily does on a weeknight. I left genuinely uncertain whether I felt enlightened or simply more anxious about everything—probably both, which I suspect was rather the point. He positioned Ukraine not as just another crisis to scroll past between doom updates, but as the philosophical hinge point for Europe. No pressure.

A speaker, Timothy Snyder, is presenting on the topics of freedom, tyranny, and democracy at an event in Paradiso, with Roxane van Iperen in conversation. The background features a large screen displaying the event details and an audience is visible in the foreground.

What lingered was his insistence that resistance requires an actual vision of what you’re for, not just what you’re against. Freedom, properly understood, isn’t just the absence of interference—that thin, negative American definition—but the conditions that let people become what they want to be. Europe, he noted, practices this reasonably well while barely mentioning it, which leaves us ideologically underprepared when someone shows up to actively dismantle it.

The framing stuff was grimly compelling: Trump understanding sovereignty purely as property rights, immigration as pretext for building an unaccountable federal force, oligarchy and surveillance capitalism aligning beautifully with authoritarianism. None of it felt theoretical. All of it had the unfortunate coherence of something that’s already happening, which—Snyder argued—is exactly what makes it resistable if you can see the pattern.

He was bracingly blunt about media deference letting US presidents set Europe’s agenda days in advance. And he positioned history not as a warning label we slap on things, but as a reservoir of actual meaning alongside art and culture. Protest needs art, he said, especially now that AI can churn out infinite aesthetic slop. Human unpredictability still counts for something.

Oddly, the hopeful bit came last: talk to people in real life, including the racist uncle. Don’t try to win—plant seeds. Build coalitions with people you agree with 85% of the time, not 100%. Fascism is never defeated intellectually; you have to actually win things. Elections, institutions, minds, power.

I didn’t leave reassured. But I did leave thinking the catastrophe is at least comprehensible, which means it’s not inevitable. Small mercies.

Connections

Ahead of the workshop, with Jon and the Swoop team already in Amsterdam, I did something dangerously close to networking: I organised drinks for comms and digital workplace people. Actual, three-dimensional humans gathered in a bar—a concept that still feels faintly experimental post-pandemic.

It was genuinely lovely meeting people I’ve known online for years but never actually stood near, plus a few I’d met once years ago, and had since reverted to being profile pictures who occasionally like my posts. Always a relief when your LinkedIn feed materialises as actual thoughtful, funny folks rather than the corporate avatars you’d half-convinced yourself they were. We complained about vendors, and I demonstrated the ancient Dutch art of eating bitterballen without incinerating your entire mouth (secret: patience bordering on the superhuman, waiting until the molten core drops below lava temperature).

Coverage

I appeared on the WB-40 Podcast this week, talking nomad working with Lisa Riemers—podcast host and regular Lithos co-conspirator. The conversation emerged after she’d read my Yearnote, specifically the bit cataloguing the increasingly ridiculous places I’d worked from last year, and decided this warranted interrogation.

Her challenge was entirely fair: just because you can work from a capsule hotel in Fukuoka doesn’t mean you should, or that anyone else wants to. What about people who need routine, a proper desk, the psychological comfort of consistency? I didn’t argue. In fact, I have a half-finished blog post festering in my drafts that’s essentially a litany of everything that doesn’t work about nomad working—the friction, the exhaustion, the endless low-level admin of simply existing somewhere new.

But that doesn’t make it pointless. Working from Japan isn’t viable for most people—it’s barely viable for me much of the time. People like me are early adopters operating at the extreme edges of what current work systems can tolerate. And that’s precisely the point. If you can make work function for nomads, you make it work better for a vastly larger group: parents, carers, people nowhere near major cities, people whose lives categorically refuse to conform to a 9-to-5 tethered to a single postcode.

We already have most of the tools. What we haven’t managed is loosening our death grip on time the way we’ve started—barely—to loosen it on place. Until we do, we’ll keep extracting a fraction of the potential value while excluding far more people than necessary. But at least we’ll all be in the office on Tuesdays.

This week in photos

Two people posing for a selfie in front of a modern building with large windows and the words 'do your thing' displayed prominently.

A group of people seated in a modern meeting space with tiered seating, engaged in discussions and note-taking.