Weeknote 2026/44

November 1, 2026November 1, 2026 / Sharon O'Dea / 1 Comment

Paradise Valley in full: a green river winding between palm trees and pale rock slabs, swimmers and sunbathers along the edge, café umbrellas on the bank, and dry mountains rising beyond. — *Paradise Valley, Morocco*

There are two ways to make something simpler. One is to understand it well enough to work out what matters. The other is to bin everything that makes it complicated and hope nobody notices.

I’ve spent much of this week attempting the first approach. Three discovery projects have reached the point where we stop collecting information and start deciding what it means. This involves taking a giant pile of evidence, much of it contradictory, and reducing it to something someone else can reasonably be expected to read, understand and act on.

Too much detail and you’ve produced an expensive filing cabinet. Too little and you’ve produced a confident-looking PowerPoint presentation with scant relationship to reality.

Outside work, I’ve been thinking about the stories we simplify, too. At a digital nomad festival in Morocco, I heard experiences that made the familiar narrative of location-independent work look embarrassingly narrow. I’ve started reading Cory Doctorow on what happens when we optimise work for machines and leave humans to deal with the consequences. And I’ve been writing about an AI industry that’s getting extremely good at making individual employees more productive without necessarily making organisations work any better.

Different examples of the same problem. When we simplify something, who decides what matters? And what happens to everything – and everyone – that doesn’t make the cut?

This week at work

At the start of every discovery project, somewhere around slide six of the kick-off deck, Jon and I show clients a diamond.

It’s the Design Council’s Double Diamond, or at least the first half of it. The shape widens as we explore the problem from every angle we can find: interviews, surveys, analytics, card sorts, the shared drive nobody has opened since 2019 but which contains the definitive version of the communications strategy. Then it narrows again, as we make sense of what we’ve found and work towards a decision.

We warn clients that the widening part will feel messy. It’s meant to. The urge to jump straight to a solution is strong, particularly when somebody has already seen a demonstration of a platform they quite fancy buying. Resisting that urge is much of the job.

What we don’t dwell on is the line down the middle.

This week, three projects reached it at once. Interviews wrapped. Platforms reviewed. Surveys and card sorts done. And the charts. My God, the charts. AI-assisted data visualisation of such exquisite filth that I briefly considered marking the report NSFW.

The widest point of the diamond is also the point where you’re holding the most information you’ll ever have. Then you have to put most of it down.

That’s what synthesis actually is. Not adding things up, but taking things away so the remainder makes sense.

Six themes become five, because two of them were the same theme wearing different hats. A category that everyone insisted was essential turns out to be needed by nobody, because something else already does the job. Another gets a new name, because the old one described the furniture rather than the reason anyone goes looking. Two slides get hidden because they say what the slide before them said, only less well.

Twenty-five people tell you, each with complete confidence, which channel is for what. Unfortunately no two of them agree.

And somewhere in there, a score out of five has halved itself on the journey from spreadsheet to slide. You catch it at the last minute and resolve, again, to stop doing maths after nine at night.

None of this shows up in the finished report. Clients see the five themes, not the sixth one that didn’t make it. They don’t see the hours spent deciding whether something is a finding, a symptom, a cause, an unresolved territorial dispute between two departments, a grudge dating back to the 2018 restructure, or just a thing somebody said very insistently in an interview.

You can put a cover page on a transcript, but it doesn’t make it insight. Although I’ve seen people try.

The right-hand side of the diamond ends in a word we put on the slide in the same size font as all the others, as if it were equally easy: decide. Next week the readouts begin, and the hard part becomes someone else’s.

Also this week

The rest of the week went the other way.

I went to my first digital nomad festival. I spend about half my life on the road, entirely by choice, so I suppose I qualify. But I’ve never quite fitted the digital nomad mould. The usual proposition is to earn a Western salary while living somewhere considerably cheaper. I maintain a home in Amsterdam and an office I use about 40% of the time, while spending half my life travelling. All the inconvenience of a nomadic lifestyle, with the economics of a particularly badly run property portfolio.

I’ve also avoided the events. Too many seem to involve digital nomads selling courses on marketing, personal branding and making money remotely to other digital nomads, who presumably intend to make their money by selling courses on marketing, personal branding and making money remotely to yet more digital nomads. It’s a business model with the structural integrity of a pyramid scheme but considerably better weather.

Arab Nomad Fest, in Taghazout, was different. Less about helping privileged graduates speed-run gentrification by taking their European salaries to low-cost beach towns. More about bringing opportunities to people who might otherwise be shut out of them.

On Tuesday I gave my talk, on working out loud and treating asynchronous work as a discipline rather than a hack. Afterwards, someone thanked me for reframing working across time zones as a strength to sell, instead of a problem to solve.

Me speaking at Arab Nomad Fest beside a slide titled “One day, three places”: me in Nagasaki, a client in Berlin and Jonathan in Bristol, with work handed between time zones. Caption: “The client never experienced a time difference.” — *Me speaking at Arab Nomad Fest*

Then I sat back and let other people widen the aperture.

Nasser Saqer Almohannadi has been to 218 countries. He managed this over forty years without quitting his job in Qatar’s energy sector: two big trips a year, carry-on only, printed copies of every document, and a wife who ran the logistics and has passed a hundred countries herself. I’m somewhere short of half his total, and had been feeling quite pleased with myself. He’s completed the game, and my immediate response was to start calculating how many countries a year I’d need to visit to match his score. I’ve turned someone else’s lifetime achievement into a personal performance improvement plan.

Maria Cuesta, who runs a community app for nomads, pointed out that nomads tend to cluster. They find other nomads, work alongside other nomads, and rarely get to know the places they’re actually living in. She talked about Facebook groups with 18,000 members, where the main thing people have in common is that they’ve joined the same Facebook group. That’s a flimsy foundation on which to build a community.

And then there was Arab Nomad Fest founder Muhammed Alard, who grew up in Damascus and talked about the invisible tax of a weak passport. A Syrian passport gets you into just 26 countries without a visa. Every application means weeks of paperwork. Payments don’t go through. Potential clients decide it’s easier not to bother. For most of the room, remote work is a lifestyle choice. For him, it was a means of survival.

“The internet didn’t ask for my passport,” he said. “It asked for my skills.”

Last year he returned to Syria for the first time in fifteen years, and made a film about it.

When he finished speaking, he didn’t try to sell the room a course. He asked us to hire people from places like the one he grew up in.

Consuming

I’ve started Cory Doctorow’s The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI. A centaur is a human using a machine to extend their capabilities. A reverse centaur is a machine using a human to extend its own. Same ingredients, different employment prospects.

It’s a useful way of thinking about the increasingly fashionable promise to keep a ‘human in the loop’. This sounds reassuring, conjuring up an experienced professional exercising judgement, asking difficult questions and occasionally pressing a large red button marked STOP. In practice, the human may have neither the authority to challenge the machine, nor the expertise to understand what it’s doing, nor the time to check before the next automated decision arrives.

Congratulations. You’ve created an accountability sink with a login.

I’ve only read the opening chapters, but it’s already made me think differently about the workplace AI conversation. We spend an enormous amount of time asking what can be automated, and considerably less asking who gets to decide, whose work gets better, and who inherits the mess when the machine has finished being efficient.

Coverage

For Strategic, I wrote about why comms has a cope problem.

Within three weeks I attended two very different conferences. At Unily Unite in London, the reassurance was everywhere: on panels, in presentations, over coffee. AI might change the tools, but the fundamentals of communication would endure. We’re special smol beans, you see, and our spectacular people skills will protect us from disruption.

At UNLEASH in Paris, among 7,000 HR people, I didn’t hear anything remotely like that. When SAP said its recruiters were now doing 95% less admin, the room applauded.

Same technology. Two professions. One discussing what was already changing, the other reassuring itself that it probably wouldn’t have to.

Of course the purpose of communication doesn’t disappear because we’ve invented new tools. But confusing the enduring purpose of a profession with the permanence of its current jobs, methods and skills is a dangerous mistake. And it’s one thing to tell yourself that comforting story. It’s quite another to stand on a conference stage and encourage thousands of other professionals to believe it too.

We’ve somehow managed to turn professional development into a group therapy session for people who don’t think they need to develop.

The editor told me to let rip. I did, within the bounds of professional decency. But I seem to have kept some in reserve.

Published

Nobody buys shared. Workplace AI is being built to make individuals more productive and processes more efficient. What’s missing is the layer underneath: the shared facts, decisions and understanding that allow an organisation to function as something more than a collection of individually optimised employees, each enjoying a bespoke relationship with their own little robot.

There’s a perfectly good commercial reason for this, if by ‘good’ you mean ‘entirely predictable and deeply unhelpful’. Vendors sell to functions. Functions buy with their own budgets. Shared understanding belongs to everyone, which means nobody has a cost centre for it, a business case to fund it, or a vice-president whose bonus depends on its existence.

Meanwhile, we’re building systems that can give every employee a personalised answer without ensuring they’re all working from the same reality.

Extremely clever parts. Increasingly questionable whole.

Travel

Still in Morocco. Outside the festival, this has been my first proper experience of the country. Sleepy seaside surf towns, cats everywhere, camels, street dogs, and a quantity of tagine that must surely put me on some sort of national register.

One evening I was reading on the roof terrace of my little hostel when the owner came over and announced that I must have dinner with them. I explained that I’d already eaten. He considered this information entirely irrelevant. I’m now familiar enough with Moroccan hospitality to know that further resistance would be both futile and impolite. I was having another tagine whether I liked it or not.

I liked it.

On Saturday I went to Paradise Valley. Not quite as paradisiacal as the name suggests, but pleasant enough. I swam in the river, slid along the rocks with childlike, leisure-centre glee, and was deposited in a pool at the bottom. Ate another tagine, obviously.

Shortly after this goes out, I’ll be face down in a hammam, being pummelled by someone who presumably knows what they’re doing. If I emerge with any skin left, I’ll consider it a success.

The day after giving a talk on how to make working across time zones a competitive advantage, I sent the same meeting invitation three times because the clocks had gone back and I’d lost track of what day it was. In desperation, I asked Google what time it was in Morocco. It gave me three different dates, two different times, and a confident AI-generated explanation of a time-zone change that hadn’t happened.

Google search results giving three different dates and times for Morocco, with an AI-generated summary describing a time-zone change that never happened.

So that’s me and a trillion-dollar technology company, both defeated by the concept of Tuesday.

This week in photos

A corner greengrocer’s stall: crates of red onions, potatoes, sweet potatoes, peas and knobbly pumpkins, a bunch of bananas hanging from the awning, and a red Moroccan flag with its green star above a dusty lane.

A traditional hive wall: rows of mud-sealed cylinders set into a clay and timber frame, some caps cracked open, with woven reed baskets on the shelf above and a beekeeper’s metal smoker in the corner.

Weeknote 2026/43

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

Me in a black fluffy coat at the top of the Eiffel Tower, with the curve of the Trocadéro and the towers of La Défense behind me under low cloud. — *Up the Eiffel*

Every organisation has a woman who knows where everything is. Let’s call her Anya.

Anya knows which version of the expenses form actually works, why the procurement process described on the intranet bears only a passing resemblance to the procurement process in practice, and who to call when something needs doing by Friday. She’s survived three restructures, two digital transformations and a knowledge management programme designed, in part, to make her unnecessary.

None of this is in her job description. Nobody has allocated her any time to do it, and it certainly won’t feature in her performance objectives. But she’s helpful, she’s competent, and she’s a woman, so naturally she’s become the organisation’s unofficial helpdesk, institutional memory and emotional support animal.

The place would fall apart without her. Her manager thinks she’s excellent at teamwork.

The organisation, meanwhile, has spent a small fortune trying to make Anya unnecessary. It has built knowledge bases, implemented enterprise search, launched chatbots and is now enthusiastically investigating whether an AI agent can answer the questions that currently land in her inbox. The business case is compelling: think of all the time Anya could save if people would just stop asking her things.

Except the reason people ask Anya isn’t simply that she knows where the information lives. It’s that she knows what it means, whether it’s right, and what to do when the official answer doesn’t quite fit the question. She also knows the person asking, which turns out to be extremely useful.

This week I found myself working on several versions of the same problem, across organisations with almost nothing in common except employees, information and an impressive collection of digital tools.

The question wasn’t really how to get people to stop asking Anya. It was how to make sure everyone has an Anya.

This week at work

Some weeks I do one thing. This was emphatically not one of those weeks.

On Monday I was helping a firm switch on a new community platform: posters, desk drops, content plans, senior leaders posting on day one, and the niche, nerdy joy of watching membership climb into the hundreds before lunch. NGL, I love this bit. Months of planning for the worst, hoping for the best, and then watching theory turn into practice, as people start finding answers, finding each other and, inevitably, finding the GIF button.

The best bit is what happens next. You can spend months plotting use cases, building adoption plans and modelling benefits in Excel, but give people the means to connect and they’ll invariably find uses you hadn’t imagined. Sometimes those turn out to be more valuable than anything you’d think to put in the business case.

Over the rest of the week, Jonathan and I interviewed people at a global organisation about how work and communication actually move around a distributed network of smart, engaged people. Elsewhere, we tested how researchers expect to find things on a university intranet. And on Thursday afternoon I read back our discovery findings to an international NGO from a corner of a conference centre in Paris.

Different sectors, different sizes, different tools, different problems. And yet, everywhere we looked, people kept asking for the same thing: other people.

At the university, the most common request in the open comments wasn’t a better menu or a smarter search. It was: who do I ask? At the NGO, almost nobody uses search, because colleagues are the search engine. At the conference, a European telco showing off its new intranet admitted that more than half of what people typed into the search box was, essentially, the name of someone in HR.

And at another organisation, people would rather message a colleague directly than post in a channel set up specifically for asking questions. Because asking in public feels a lot like being caught not knowing, and nobody wants four hundred colleagues to witness them asking where the expenses form lives.

If you’ve ever watched Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, you’ll recognise the dilemma.

On paper, Ask the Audience is the better lifeline. In the studio, the crowd is usually right. Wisdom of the crowd and all that. And at work, a well-functioning community can be extraordinary: someone, somewhere, knows the answer, and a good network makes it possible to find them. But putting four hundred people in an Ask channel doesn’t magically produce collective intelligence. Particularly when most have muted it, two reply ‘following’ and the only person who knows the answer left in 2022. Nor does a search box offering you a policy from 2019, three versions of the same form and a page called Useful Links containing no useful links.

So people phone a friend.

The catch with Phone a Friend is that you don’t pick your friend when the question comes up. You nominate them before the show starts. The whole lifeline depends on knowing, in advance, The Person Who Knows Things.

And there’s the problem. If you already know the right people, the system works fine. If you’re new, remote, in a different country, or simply outside the right WhatsApp group, I’m afraid you’re on your own. The organisation has a wealth of expertise, but access to it depends on whether you happen to know someone who knows someone. Less a knowledge management strategy than the Freemasons with Microsoft 365 licences.

And even if you do know Anya, there’s only one of her. She’s got an actual job, alongside her unpaid secondment as the organisation’s institutional memory, unofficial helpdesk and human workaround for three business processes nobody has bothered to document. Making her easier to find is useful. Making her personally responsible for explaining the procurement policy to eight hundred people is not a sustainable operating model, even if she’s been given a £15 Love2shop voucher in recognition of going above and beyond.

That’s the task for the digital workplace. Not to replace the friend with a page, nor to turn the friend into a permanently available human helpdesk. It’s to make expertise discoverable, answers reusable and routes to help clear enough that knowing the right person isn’t a prerequisite for getting anything done.

Sometimes the answer should be a well-written page. Sometimes it should be a conversation with someone who knows what they’re talking about. And sometimes the most useful thing the technology can do is help the first person who asks a question leave an answer that saves the next fifty people from having to ask it again.

Digital feeds the personal. It doesn’t replace it. But it ought to make the personal a little less dependent on luck, proximity and whether Anya happens to be on holiday.

Which is why, at a mock funeral for the intranet in Paris this week, I was the one at the back quietly suggesting the deceased had been misdiagnosed. We’ve been burying intranets for twenty years, and every time they turn up at their own wake, asking who’s responsible for updating the staff directory.

Also this week

Paris, for UNLEASH. On Tuesday evening I was on a panel at People Connect Club, talking about communication for people who don’t spend their working lives sitting in front of a laptop. On Wednesday I spent an hour and a half on the Flip AI stand signing copies of the book for people who, astonishingly, wanted them signed.

I’m still not entirely accustomed to the idea that people are sufficiently interested in my niche professional obsessions to read a whole book of them, let alone queue up to have me write something in the front. It remains both deeply flattering and faintly surreal.

Full disclosure: my time in Paris was a paid partnership with Flip AI. Cheers, guys. It was a blast.

Me in a red-striped top giving a thumbs-up beside Flip AI’s giant blue square mascot, who is clutching a copy of Digital Communications at Work under a “Frontline Agentic OS” sign.

The mock funeral at the Flip AI stand. A man in a hooded cape reads from a clipboard beside the blue mascot and a coffin holding a desk phone and keyboard, labelled “RIP the corporate intranet. The frontline deserves better.”

The Eurostar home was late, and deposited me back in Amsterdam at 11pm, in the middle of Amsterdam Dance Event. There was a rave on the tram. I declined to participate, preferring to trundle home with my suitcase like a woman whose idea of a wild night now involves remembering to put the bins out.

My own contribution to ADE came at 7pm the following evening: a spin class, stone cold sober. Forty-six is going brilliantly, thanks.

Before I left Paris, I had lunch at Chez Fernand Christine. I go every time I’m in town, because it tastes like my Nan’s cooking.

She was Parisienne, and came to London at the start of the 1950s. By the time my mum was at school, British food was still largely beige and boiled. So mum’s friends treasured an invitation to Chez Marguerite’s, where they could eat proper cordon bleu.

While Elizabeth David was busy introducing Britain to French provincial cooking, my mum’s friends were getting the real thing round Nan’s kitchen table. And for my entire childhood, I did too.

Nan died four years ago, just shy of 100. Every time I go to Paris, I make a beeline for this restaurant, order the boeuf bourguignon, and think about her. It’s not quite her cooking, of course. But it’s close enough to bring her back for an hour. Grief’s a funny old thing.

Connections

In Paris I caught up with Liz Hartley from HSBC. It had been long enough since we last met that she’s had two babies in the meantime. I’ve had a book. Hers involved less editing but considerably more cuteness.

UNLEASH was also a chance to catch up with friends from the HR world, including finally meeting Allie Nawrat, my editor at UNLEASH, in person. I’ve been writing for them for five years, during which we’ve managed an entire professional relationship without ever occupying the same room. A pleasingly analogue development at a conference devoted to the future of work.

Me and [name?] raising espresso martinis at the Recognition Café, a lilac-walled bar on the UNLEASH show floor.

Coverage

For inComms, I joined Rachel Miller and Chris Love in answering a deceptively simple question: how do you prepare leaders for a town hall?

My answer started with what a town hall can do that nothing else in the channel mix can: put a leader in the room, speaking in their own voice, with people who can actually respond. If all they do is read out the financials, they’ve thoroughly earned the eye-roll every office worker knows. This meeting could have been an email. An expensive one, given the cost of gathering hundreds of people to hear someone read aloud.

It ended somewhere a little more uncomfortable: not every leader should automatically get a town hall. An audience isn’t a perk of the pay grade. And if you’re going to put a leader in front of people, brief them on what those people have already heard, what they’re actually worried about, and which questions everyone in the rehearsal room is desperately hoping nobody asks.

I also wrote up both days of UNLEASH on LinkedIn. Day one featured an AI agent spending two minutes and thirty-six seconds searching every connected system for a fact available on Wikipedia, before informing me I wasn’t authorised to know it. Day two featured a funeral for the intranet, whose supposedly deceased body was demonstrating 84% monthly active users an hour later.

The future of work is in excellent hands.

Published

Your frontline communication problem isn’t a frontline problem.

Around 80% of the world’s workers don’t sit at a desk, yet most internal communication is still designed for the ones who do. When it doesn’t land, we call the people on the shop floor “hard to reach”, as though they’ve deliberately hidden themselves behind the stockroom shelves to avoid the CEO’s latest thoughts on transformation.

But the problem isn’t them. It’s design: communication built around the sender’s convenience rather than the conditions of the work, from the device to the time to the shift pattern. Which is why the reflex fix, another app (possibly with badges, because apparently we’re all eight), so rarely works.

An app can put information in someone’s pocket. It cannot put five spare minutes in their shift.

Travel

This weeknote comes to you from Taghazout, Morocco. Country 95, a very normal number of countries to have visited.

I’m here for ten days, for Arab Nomad Fest, working as a digital nomad for clients back in Europe while giving a talk on how to make that work: working out loud, treating asynchronous communication as a discipline rather than a hack, and accepting that flexibility requires rather more planning than simply taking your laptop somewhere with better weather.

So if you need to phone a friend, I’m here. I’ll answer eventually.

This week in photos

Looking straight up from beneath the Eiffel Tower: four iron legs curving inwards into a lattice of rivets and arches against a pale sky.

Lunch for one at Chez Fernand. Beef bourguignon with small potatoes and carrot, a glass of red wine etched with a cockerel, sparkling water, and a red gingham tablecloth.

Weeknote 2026/42

October 20, 2026October 20, 2026 / Sharon O'Dea / Leave a comment

Golden late-afternoon light on a tree-lined canal. An arched brick bridge crowded with parked bikes leads to a red-roofed gabled house hung with yellow festival banners. Small boats are moored on water that mirrors it all. — *I love this town, part 26,995*

We seem to have decided that the ultimate purpose of technological progress is to eliminate the inconvenience of being alive. Every click is one too many, every pause a productivity leak, every interaction an opportunity to shave another three seconds off the crushing administrative burden of existing. Why read a book with your own eyes when a machine can extract five key takeaways, sparing you the tedious business of encountering an argument, considering it, and perhaps even changing your mind? Why have a conversation when you can have a summary? Why experience anything at all when you could receive a concise, actionable digest of what you would have experienced, had you not been so terribly busy optimising your life?

The logical endpoint is presumably a world in which machines do all our reading, writing, thinking and talking, freeing us to devote our remaining hours to watching strangers reorganise their fridges on TikTok. Somewhere, a management consultant is preparing a slide deck explaining why this represents a 40% improvement in human flourishing.

Except some of the best things about this week were spectacularly inefficient. I travelled to an actual office to meet actual people, schlepped across the Netherlands to watch three Japanese men make an unconscionable amount of noise, and spent an evening with old friends without generating a single piece of content to prove it happened. Meanwhile, at work, I found myself arguing for deliberately making a digital experience less effortless. Not because inconvenience is inherently virtuous — anyone who’s ever tried to change a password on a government website knows otherwise — but because sometimes the bit we’re so desperate to eliminate is the bit that makes the whole thing worthwhile.

Perhaps the problem isn’t that we haven’t yet managed to make everything effortless. Perhaps it’s that we’ve become so obsessed with removing the effort that we’ve stopped asking what any of it was for.

This week at work

One client asked a question this week that sounds like a policy question but is really a design one: can I post this?

The answer we landed on fits on a Post-it. If it could go in the newsletter, it can go in the community. If it couldn’t, it can’t. No flowchart, no twelve-page acceptable use policy, no appendix clarifying whether a thumbs-up emoji constitutes formal endorsement. Just a small, well-placed moment in which someone has to stop and think about who’s going to read what they’re about to publish.

That moment is friction. And friction has had a terrible press.

Anything that slows a user down is a defect to be eliminated, preferably by a product team with a reassuringly expensive job title. Which is all very well until the thing you’ve made effortless is sending the board pack to the wrong Sarah.

Hans Monderman, a Dutch traffic engineer, spent much of his career taking things away. In Drachten, he removed the traffic lights from the town’s busiest junction, which carried around 22,000 cars a day, and replaced them with a roundabout, a cycle path and somewhere for pedestrians to cross. By one account, crashes fell from thirty-six in the preceding four years to two in the following two. “The trouble with traffic engineers,” he said, “is that when there’s a problem with a road, they always try to add something.”

Which is a devastating assessment of several other professions I could name.

Monderman hadn’t made the road frictionless. He’d moved the friction out of the signage, which drivers had long since learned to obey without thinking, and into their heads, where it could do some useful work. Without a green light assuring you that the universe has granted you right of way, you have to look at the cyclist. The cyclist looks at you. Somebody slows down. Everybody has to acknowledge that other people exist, which is a radical proposition in traffic engineering and, increasingly, online.

Amsterdam (where I spent an entire week, for once), offers a working demonstration of the full range. The red tarmac of a cycle lane tells you where you are without demanding anything of you. A tram bell interrupts you just long enough to prevent you stepping off the kerb into several tonnes of public transport. A speed bump on a bike path makes you reconsider your enthusiasm. The barrier at a level crossing dispenses with persuasion altogether. Cue, pause, confirm, gate. And for most of the journey, nothing, because most of the journey should be nothing.

The skill is knowing which moment deserves which intervention.

Get it wrong in one direction and you end up with the security warning: an interruption so routine that people have trained themselves to dismiss it before they’ve finished reading. In one study of more than 25 million browser warnings, users clicked straight through 70% of Chrome’s SSL warnings and around a third of Firefox’s. Same risk, different design. A useful reminder that the presence of a warning is not the same thing as the presence of thought.

Get it wrong in the other direction and people simply go somewhere else. At another client, there’s an entirely sensible push to lock down a video tool, because AI note-takers can wander into meetings unannounced, like a wedding guest nobody quite remembers inviting but who appears to be recording the speeches. The same team is wisely leaving WhatsApp alone for now, because the people who are rarely at a desk practically live in it. You can block a tool with the best of intentions, but if you’ve made someone’s job harder without giving them a workable alternative, the work doesn’t stop. It just moves somewhere you have even less control over. Congratulations: you’ve improved compliance by making the non-compliance invisible.

So perhaps frictionless was the wrong ambition all along. The goal isn’t to remove every obstacle, or to introduce a confirmation dialogue every time someone so much as looks at a button. It’s to make the ordinary things easy and the consequential things just difficult enough that someone has to engage their brain.

Monderman put it more bluntly: treat people like idiots, and they’ll behave like idiots.

An observation with applications well beyond Dutch roundabouts.

Also this week

Last week I promised an unsettling experiment in geographical continuity. The results are in: seven consecutive nights in the same bed, and the faint suspicion that I was getting away with something. No airports, no baffling hotel lighting, no trying to remember which country’s plug sockets I was dealing with. An almost indecent level of domestic stability.

I even had a face-to-face meeting with a client. In their actual office. Here in Amsterdam. I signed in at reception, acquired a visitor badge and sat in a room with other human beings, like it was 2018. Going to client offices used to be the tedious bit of consulting, an occupational hazard to be endured in exchange for the interesting work. Now it happens so rarely that I found the whole thing rather thrilling. I came away more energised than I have from any video call this year, which is perhaps something we ought to consider before commissioning another eighteen-month study into the future of hybrid work.

Without an airport to get to, the week filled up with the things I keep meaning to do when I’m not living out of a suitcase. I went to boxing. I went to HIIT. I bought tickets for two gigs at Paradiso in March 2027, which is either the mark of a settled, organised life or a spectacular act of optimism from someone whose travel diary routinely resembles a game of Risk. Apparently there are people who make plans five months in advance and simply expect to be in the country when the date arrives. Fascinating way to live.

And at the weekend, my best friend Marie turned fifty.

There’s something rather disconcerting about watching your friends reach their half century. Partly because I am quite certain we all turned thirty approximately five years ago, and somebody needs to explain where the intervening two decades have gone. But mostly because it’s wonderful. Here we all still are, with decades of shared history, a frankly unreasonable quantity of stories and absolutely no intention of behaving like respectable middle-aged people.

It was glorious. There are almost no photos, because we were all too busy having a lovely time. Imagine that. An entire social occasion that wasn’t organised around producing evidence of itself.

Consuming

Electric Eel Shock, Japanese garage metal, at Willem Twee in Den Bosch. On a Sunday afternoon, because the live music industry has finally discovered its most lucrative demographic: people who still want their faces melted off by loud guitars but would also quite like to be in bed at a reasonable time.

The band came on at half four. Ninety minutes of filthy riffs at a volume sufficient to rearrange your internal organs, and a drummer who still performs wearing nothing but a strategically placed sock. That’s a level of commitment to the bit most of us couldn’t sustain through a single quarterly business review, never mind an entire international touring career. I can only assume the venue’s risk assessment made for interesting reading.

And then, at six o’clock, it was over. Even after schlepping home from Den Bosch, I was on the sofa with a takeaway by quarter to eight and tucked up in bed by nine. All the joy of a proper metal gig, none of the inconvenience of being awake when the pubs close. No queuing for the night bus, no standing on a platform at midnight wondering whether the last train is a philosophical concept rather than an actual service.

Getting old is fucking brilliant.

Coverage

For UNLEASH, I wrote about AI’s latest change of name, because apparently the technology hasn’t generated quite enough confusion without somebody deciding it needs rebranding. My instinct is to roll my eyes and get on with my life, but unfortunately the people responsible for enterprise technology procurement don’t always have that luxury. My argument: name the tool, not the technology. A useful name tells people what something does. A grand one mostly tells you what somebody would like you to think of them.

Jon and I also joined the Digital Workplace Group’s Digital Workplace Impact podcast to talk about designing channels people actually use. A deceptively simple ambition which, judging by the state of the average digital workplace, remains surprisingly controversial.

Published

The residue has a price.

Diane Coyle has published a paper arguing that as AI makes knowledge increasingly cheap to copy, relationships become the asset that matters. Meanwhile, the archive of bankrupt Spirit Airlines, including 100 million emails and 500 million Teams messages, has attracted bids from Google and an AI start-up. The accumulated detritus of working life is now a commodity, and a potentially rather valuable one.

Put those two developments together and you have an uncomfortable problem for everyone who spent the past decade encouraging employees to work out loud, share what they know and leave a useful record of their working relationships. We sold people the benefits of transparency without necessarily explaining who might eventually own the transparent bits.

The court hearing has since been pushed to 6 November, so this one has some way to run.

An organisation can own the archive. It can’t compel the candour that made it worth having.

Travel

I’m writing this on the train to Paris, which is certainly an interesting time to visit. The French are once again demonstrating their commitment to making political instability a participatory national sport, though I suppose nobody can accuse them of being indifferent.

It’s People Connect Club tonight, then UNLEASH World, where I’ll be signing copies of the book with Flip. If you’re there, come and say hello. I promise not to make you discuss friction, unless you start it.

This week in photos

Tall brick canal houses and their wobbly reflections in still water under a clear blue sky. A white-and-black houseboat and a small orange rowing boat are moored against the quay, with bikes lined along the railings and a bridge on the right.

Mirror selfie of Sharon in black workout gear in a dark studio lit by red LED strips along the floor. Behind her, rows of tall VersaClimber machines stand like a small army, with a couple of other class members warming up.

Weeknote 2026/41

October 11, 2026 / Sharon O'Dea / 1 Comment

Sharon on stage in a red top and headset mic, leaning forward and pointing emphatically, with faceless white mannequins in autumn jackets standing behind her. — *Me presenting at DanPR in Ljubljana this week*

This year’s Dan PR conference was themed A World Without Stability, which is an awkward brief to hand to someone who has built their entire personality around never staying still. I rarely work in the same place two days running. And the conference photos came back showing me mid-keynote, arms flung out in every direction, like a woman attempting to guide a small aircraft onto the runway.

So: a talk about instability, delivered by a fairly reliable source of it.

I took a couple of days away from client work to deliver the keynote in Ljubljana, taking the audience on a journey around Japan to explore how the future is already here — just, as William Gibson put it, not evenly distributed. We can’t know exactly what’s coming, but we can prepare for a range of possible futures by building resilience and adaptability into our communication channels and professional practice. Not by predicting the next crisis, but by making sure the next crisis doesn’t require us to invent an entirely new way of talking to one another.

Which turned out to be rather more relevant to the rest of my working week than I’d anticipated.

This week at work

Part of the keynote involved asking the room to do something faintly cruel to their communication channels: try to break them. For every layer — where you plan, publish, distribute and discuss — ask three questions. What do we use? What if it’s gone tomorrow? And where do people go instead?

I’ve written the talk up properly here.

A packed cinema-style auditorium watches Sharon on a spotlit stage. The giant screen reads "Test it before you need it", with a four-step to-do list and the quote "A crisis is not the moment to discover whether communication systems work".

Then, back on client work, I spent two days hearing the answer to that third question.

Jon and I are in the thick of discovery work at the moment, which means a lot of interviews, a lot of listening, and in my case a succession of video calls from a hotel desk in Ljubljana. And nobody needed a hypothetical outage to tell us where people go instead.

They’d already gone.

Across organisations, the patterns are remarkably familiar. The official collaboration platform that everyone has access to but nobody particularly wants to use. The informal group chat that started as a convenience and yet became essential infrastructure. The knowledge base that accumulated so much information it became easier to ask a colleague than even attempt to navigate it. The shared drive where documents breed, acquire version numbers, and eventually disappear into the sediment. The important information that’s technically available to everyone, provided you know the right person to ask.

Nobody designed this system. It doesn’t feature in anyone’s channel strategy. And yet it’s how a colossal amount of work actually gets done, held together with pipe cleaners, sticky tape and goodwill. An enterprise architecture that would struggle to survive a stiff breeze, but has somehow kept the organisation running for years.

Nobody’s complaining, exactly. They’d simply taken the shortest route. Faced with a choice between following the official process and getting an answer before the heat death of the universe, people had made a rational decision.

And that’s useful intel. Where people go instead isn’t the failure; it’s the insight. One distinction that emerged from the conversations that I’ve been mulling since: different channels carry different social expectations. An email suggests someone has thought about what they want to say. A chat message can feel like someone tapping you on the shoulder and expecting an immediate answer. That’s not a preference about software. It’s a design brief, and a more useful one than anything you’ll get from a vendor’s feature comparison spreadsheet.

On Tuesday I told a conference audience that a crisis is not the moment to discover whether your communication systems work. By Friday I’d been reminded that most organisations have already been told exactly where their systems fall short. The evidence is there in the workarounds, the unofficial conversations and the people everyone knows to ask. You just have to go looking for it.

Also this week

The conference finally got me to Ljubljana, and I’m already certain I’ll be back. It’s a beautiful, relaxed city and — for now — less overrun with tourists than it has every right to be. I’m aware that announcing this on the internet is precisely how the rot sets in, so please consider this paragraph strictly entre nous.

I don’t usually rank my own talks, but Tuesday’s was the best keynote I’ve ever given. Afterwards, the programme director wrote to say I hadn’t simply delivered a keynote, I’d “brought the whole theme of this year’s Dan PR to life”, which I have since reread a number of times that would embarrass me if I were capable of embarrassment.

I also got to hand a copy of the book to Dr Dejan Verčič, whose academic work I cite in it. There’s a very particular feeling that comes from presenting an academic with a book that quotes them: pride, accompanied by the sudden fear that you may have misunderstood everything they’ve ever written. German almost certainly has a word for this.

Sharon, beaming, holds up a copy of Digital Communications at Work beside Dr Dejan Verčič, in front of a purple screen reading "Dobrodošli na Dnevu PR, 6. oktober, Ljubljana".

Slovenia then did its best to make the case for not working. The Vintgar Gorge was autumnmaxxing so aggressively it looked as though someone had turned the saturation up to a level normally associated with estate agents’ photographs. Naturally, I spent an unreasonable amount of time examining the rock formations and thinking about clients. I’m told some people visit places of extraordinary natural beauty and simply appreciate them, without attempting to draw lessons about organisational change. I wish them well.

A wooden boardwalk clings to a sheer grey cliff in a narrow gorge. Two walkers in orange helmets head along it. Below, a still, clear green pool reflects a blaze of yellow autumn trees.

Late sun lights a hillside of yellow and orange trees above a fast, foaming river. A wooden railing edges a path cut into the rock on the left.

Lake Bled looks exactly like the photographs, which is the highest compliment I can pay a view.

Sharon, in sunglasses and a pale blue shirt, leans on a stone wall high above Lake Bled. The turquoise lake spreads out below, with its tiny island church and forested mountains beyond.

Close-up of Bled's island: a white church tower rises from a cluster of autumn trees in the middle of a still, turquoise lake. Small boats trace lines across the water beneath a wooded hillside.

And once the last call of the week had wrapped up, I spent an afternoon wine tasting in the Alps, which strikes me as the correct way to conclude several days of discovery interviews. I’ll be proposing it to Jon as a standard part of our methodology. There’s probably a legitimate business case to be made for it, if I can find someone willing to fund the research.

On Friday, Belgrade. Again. Three weeks ago I visited Serbia entirely by accident, when my flight to Mostar couldn’t land and the pilot took us back to Belgrade instead. This earned me an unexpected night in a hotel apparently last refurbished during the Tito administration, complete with the lingering aroma of several decades of indoor smoking. This time I went on purpose, for the weekend, which I guess counts as giving the city a second chance despite it having done absolutely nothing wrong. The plane landed where it was supposed to, and I celebrated with a pub crawl. A considerable improvement on my previous visit, although admittedly the bar was somewhere beneath the shag-pile carpet.

Looking down on a riverside promenade in Belgrade under heavy grey cloud. An old grey warship named SAVA is moored against the quay. Above it, the city climbs a hill to a church spire.

A white modernist building with a tall, slender glazed tower, glimpsed between ivy-covered trees in a park on an overcast day.

Consuming

Not much, frankly. Work, travel and an unreasonably scenic country accounted for most of my evenings. The exception was Thursday’s Celebrity Traitors, which I streamed live on my phone over a solo dinner, propped against the water jug like a small, treacherous dining companion. I regret nothing, although I now suspect everyone at the next table of being a Traitor.

Coverage

Jon and I kick off the new season of Katie Macaulay’s Internal Comms Podcast with Why better comms starts with discovery. We get into infobesity, writing for AI readers, why the things people can’t find are often more revealing than the things they can, and the peculiar corporate ritual of commissioning an exhaustive inventory of everything in the intranet before asking whether anyone needs any of it. Katie’s a superb interviewer, and she got one of the best conversations about the book out of us yet. If you take one thing from it, make it this: start with the appetite, not the fridge. Otherwise you’ll spend six months cataloguing the contents, reorganising the shelves and buying a very expensive new fridge, only to discover everyone wanted a sandwich.

I also made it into Slovenia’s Marketing magazin, talking about why there isn’t one future of work, but hundreds of them. A longer interview will appear in a forthcoming issue, which I’ll share when it’s out. My Slovenian is limited to hvala lepa, so I’m taking their word for what I said.

Travel

Home today. Then an entire week in one country, which will be an unsettling experiment in geographical continuity, before Paris for UNLEASH.

This week in photos

In Škofja Loka, a tall white church tower with a green onion dome rises over a row of pastel houses, one with peeling orange plaster. A small wooden hut with a red-tiled roof juts out over the dark, still river.

A white stone bridge with ornate balustrades arches over a calm green river in Ljubljana, its reflection rippling in the water, with grand pale buildings and poplars along the bank.

Weeknote 2026/40

October 4, 2026October 4, 2026 / Sharon O'Dea / Leave a comment

Me on stage at Unite 26, mid-gesture, in a striped top and wide black trousers, speaking to a full room. The screen beside me reads "Workshop: Signal Over Noise: Winning Attention in an Age of Infinite Content". — *Me presenting at Unite (photo: Jonathan Phillips)*

We do love a metric. Confront an organisation with anything complicated, human or fundamentally unknowable and within minutes someone will ask if we can put it on a dashboard, preferably with a traffic light, a percentage and an arrow pointing reassuringly upwards so everyone can go home.

This week I spent two days talking about AI, where we’ve built machines capable of producing an answer to almost anything but haven’t yet worked out how to measure whether the answer is any good. The most useful parts of those two days were conversations in corridors that will never appear in the event analytics. Then I went to a museum about migration and found myself thinking about suitcases: identical objects carrying wildly different amounts of consequence.

Some things are easy to count. Some things count.

Unfortunately, these are rarely the same things.

This week at work

Unite was two days heavy with the AI chat, which is roughly what every conference is now. You could have played bingo with the phrases — transformation, guardrails, human in the loop — although you’d have had a full house by 10.15 on day one and then had to spend the remaining fourteen hours pretending you still wanted to hear about agents.

But beneath the mandatory layer of AI conference mulch, some of it was genuinely good.

Charlene Li named the bind most organisations are in: FOMO, the fear of missing out, pulling against FOGI, the fear of getting it wrong. Her advice was to write the strategy in ink and the AI roadmap in pencil. This seems wise when some companies are rebuilding their entire AI stack every three months, presumably while maintaining a PowerPoint somewhere describing it as a five-year transformation programme.

Adecco described a year of rolling out AI at a service centre with no headcount reduction. Their favourite milestone wasn’t a productivity number or an enormous graph pointing north-east towards Shareholder Value Valhalla. It was a previously reluctant senior leader using Copilot, entirely unprompted, to accept a meeting invite. Somewhere, a transformation programme manager quietly shed a tear.

And a Microsoft researcher shared an A/B test that I haven’t stopped thinking about. When a senior leader emailed staff each week about how they’d used AI themselves, usage jumped 37% the next day. Not telling people to use it. Not another training deck. Just being visibly seen figuring it out themselves.

In one session I asked how we’re supposed to measure the quality of what AI produces. The honest answer from the stage was that we can’t yet. Our metrics were built for technology you give commands to, and this is technology you have a conversation with. How do you put a number on a great conversation?

Which brings me to the best part of the two days.

Unite was full of comms people I’ve known for years. As ever, the best bit of the conference was the corridor catch-ups: chewing over what we’d just heard, catching up on what we’ve been doing, and debating the existential crisis AI has helpfully dropped into the industry’s lap while vendors stand nearby explaining that everything will be fine because there’s a copilot now.

It all ended with cocktails, a great deal more talking, and dancing to bangers at a party DJed by Sophie Ellis-Bextor.

None of that will appear in the event dashboard. There’s no percentage uplift for the conversation in the corridor that changes your mind, no KPI for reconnecting with someone you’ve known for years, no ROI calculation for dancing badly with people you like.

A slide reading "Attention is a budget, not a resource. You can't grow it. You can only allocate it." Coloured blocks for HR, IT, CEO, Comms and Payroll fill one working day. I'm on stage beside it, explaining.

Also this week

The only thing I managed outside Unite was a trip to Rotterdam to visit Fenix, the city’s new museum of migration, on a beautiful sunny early-autumn day.

The building alone is worth the trip. It’s a 1923 warehouse that was once the departure point for millions of people leaving Europe for North America. Rising through the middle is the Tornado, a double-helix staircase of polished steel that climbs out through the roof to a 30-metre viewing platform. One flight juts out on a cantilever, so for a moment you’re standing over the water, which is exhilarating provided you don’t allow the phrase “cantilevered staircase” to complete its journey through your brain.

The piece that stopped me was Daria Khozhai’s Pravda, a recreation of her childhood bedroom in Kyiv. In Soviet-era apartment blocks, people insulated their walls with old copies of Pravda, the state newspaper whose name means “truth”, sometimes nearly a foot thick, then papered over them. When Russian bombs blew those walls open in 2022, the newspapers spilled out.

Khozhai’s room has Pravda on the outside. Inside, the walls are lined with front pages about the invasion.

The official truth, holding the house up. The other truth, on the walls of a child’s bedroom.

A few days earlier I’d flown into Heathrow on one of those rare approaches that takes you right over central London. I spent twenty minutes with my face pressed against the window picking out landmarks, then suddenly spotted the house I grew up in.

Home, in one of the several increasingly complicated senses of the word.

Downstairs is the Suitcase Labyrinth: 2,000 donated suitcases, each with its owner’s story playing through a speaker. Some are a century old. Some were packed recently, for lives that haven’t quite started yet.

Today I unpacked my own suitcase from the last trip and immediately packed it again, because I’m off tomorrow. Passport in my Uniqlo bag, as ever. Laptop charger. Too many pairs of shoes. Packing sudoku. The familiar little choreography of leaving.

I didn’t give the passport a second thought. That’s the privilege: not having to.

A mirror selfie of me reflected in the polished steel of the Tornado: black top, jeans, a jumper tied at the waist, sunglasses pushed up. The curved timber deck sweeps behind me, with Rotterdam's rooftops and towers under a hazy blue sky.

The Tornado's stainless-steel loops coil overhead, mirror-bright against a mottled sky. Below them, a wave of green-tinted glass arches over the stairwell. Small figures lean on the rail of the rooftop platform, and a round tower block rises behind.

Consuming

The Celebrity Traitors is back. I cleared Friday night and had a friend round to watch the first two episodes back to back with a bottle of supermarket cava and a face mask, which is the only correct way to do it.

Two episodes in and it is already must-watch television. Richard E Grant’s gambit. Amol Rajan, my pick to win the whole thing, murdered immediately, thereby demonstrating the predictive power I normally reserve for technology markets. And Claudia Winkleman’s mathematically perfect fringe, no doubt of professional interest to Professor Hannah Fry.

No notes. Apart from quite a lot of notes, loudly, at the television.

Coverage

For Reworked, I commented on Meta’s third attempt at the enterprise market with Meta Enterprise Platform, after Workplace and Horizon Workrooms. My argument is that both earlier products started from Meta’s idea of how people ought to interact rather than how work actually gets done — and that enterprise deals are won in the deeply unsexy plumbing of data, identity, governance and risk.

Published

The produce button: It turns out I had a lot of Thoughts and Opinions about Unily’s Content Studio announcement. I sent some comments over to Reworked, then sat down to dash off a quick LinkedIn post.

Fifteen hundred words later, it was clearly not a LinkedIn post.

The argument, roughly, is that AI has demolished the cost of producing content without doing anything whatsoever to increase the amount of attention available to consume it. This may turn out to be something of a problem.

I had a lot of fun writing it. Only real ones recognise the PTSD of the corporate video years.

Travel

Tomorrow I’m off again, this time to Ljubljana for Dan PR, where I’m giving a keynote: When the Ground Keeps Moving: Building Communication That Holds. It’s my first time in Slovenia, so I’m staying on for a few days to explore.

Then on to Belgrade. Properly, this time, after last month’s accidental visit.

This week in photos

Aerial view from a plane window of London under grey cloud. The Thames curves through the foreground past riverside towers, with a park and a lake further back and the city stretching to the horizon. The plane's engine edges into the right of the frame.

A blazing orange sunset over London rooftops, seen from above. Dark towers stand silhouetted against the sky. Below them are roof gardens and brick buildings, with a lit-up corner café on the street.

Weeknote 2026/39

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This week at work

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is why we do discovery rather than audit.

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

It will not tell you what anyone wants for dinner.

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

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

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

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

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

I went into the office on a Saturday.

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

The playlist was called ADHD Focus Music.

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

Also this week

I did an improv class. In Dutch.

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

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

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

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

This is how they get you.

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

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

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

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

Consuming

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

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

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

He died days after filming.

I got quite emotional.

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

Connections

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

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

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

Coverage

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

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

Published

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

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

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

Only the second is really a search problem.

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

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

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

Travel

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

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

This week in photos

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

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

Weeknote 2026/37

September 13, 2026September 14, 2026 / Sharon O'Dea / 2 Comments

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

We place far too much faith in the first verb.

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

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

Unfortunately, almost none of the interesting problems live there.

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

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

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

This week at work

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

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

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

Hence card sorts. Open first, then closed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Also this week

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Connections

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

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

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

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

Coverage

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

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

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

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

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

Travel

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This week in photos

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

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

Weeknote 2026/35

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

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

It absolutely pissed down at Forwards on Saturday.

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

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

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

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

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

Most weeks, you don’t notice it particularly.

This week, there was rather a lot of rain.

This week at work

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

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

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

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

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

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

All of those somebodies are me.

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

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

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

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

Also this week

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

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

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

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

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

Consuming

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

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

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

Coverage

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Published

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

The first few are up:

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

Travel

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

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

The glamour of international consultancy remains largely theoretical.

This week in photos

Weeknote 2026/34

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

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

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

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

It is magnificent.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This week at work

Organisations are way more complicated than their org charts.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Also this week

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

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

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

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

Next time.

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

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

Can confirm.

Consuming

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

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

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

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

It has absolutely everything.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The messiness is exactly what makes it valuable.

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

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

Connecting

Three this week, all people passing through.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Travel

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

This week it begins: a quick trip to Bristol.

This week in photos

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

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

Weeknote 2026/33

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This week at work

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

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

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

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

Planning, she said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

We just talked about her job.

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

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

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

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

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

What is hard about your job?

Same problem. More zeroes.

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

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

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

Yes. For what?

Also this week

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

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

We got one of the nine.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So the phone went away.

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

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

Every one of those pinpricks is another sun.

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

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

There are worse ways to spend a night.

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

The universe is offensively large.

I found this wonderful.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Consuming

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Coverage

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

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

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

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

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

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

This week in photos

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