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*On stage at LumApps Bright Paris (Photo: Andrew Hesselden)*

It’s been 13 days since my last weeknote and, somehow, I’ve crammed in a month’s worth of work, two cross-border events, several metric tonnes of confetti, and a minor brush with academic despair. I’ve danced under a disco ball in a museum, communed with inflatable robots in a laser fog, and read so many journal articles on “organisational sensemaking” that I briefly lost the will to live, then found it again in a footnote citing Habermas.

I’ve had days where I felt like a confident grown-up delivering keynotes and running strategy workshops, and others where I stared at a blank slide titled “Relevance at Scale” for so long I started to question whether anything in this life is ever truly relevant, let alone scalable.

Anyway. Here’s what else I’ve been up to while trying to outrun both burnout and late capitalism with a portable ring light and a decent day rate.

This week at work

It’s been a blur of conferences, client sessions, and the slow, creeping suspicion that time is folding in on itself. Conference season is in full swing, which means I’ve been knee-deep in decks, speaker notes, and trying not to visibly malfunction when someone asks me to “slow down a bit” — a request I find almost physically impossible once I’m excited and mid-flow.

First up was a thought leadership webinar for Cerkl on personalising comms at scale. Conveniently, it ties into a chapter of the book — distribution, personalisation, targeting, and relevance — so I got to test-drive some of our thinking in the wild.

Then came the European leg of LumApps Bright, where I gave the extended ‘director’s cut’ of my Chicago keynote — same themes, more depth, this time with added self-depreciation about my bad French. I also ran a roundtable on understanding employee needs, which turned into one of those lovely sessions where people are honest, energised, and insightful. DEEx and comms folks continue to impress me with their blend of grit, grace and spreadsheets.

There was also a UK client workshop — part of a series — and pleasingly, we can actually see momentum building between sessions. Progress. Real, tangible, post-it-note-covered progress.

*I asked Copilot to edit this to remove the text on post-its, for client confidentiality. It did, but also edited Jon to be a completely different person. Go figure.*

And with Camp Digital just around the corner, I’ve had prep calls with our brilliant first-time speakers. I can’t wait to see them in action — and to be the overly proud backstage goblin cheering them on.

Also this week

Went to Vincent op Vrijdag, the Van Gogh Museum’s monthly late-night opening — this time a joint venture with the Stedelijk, letting you do a cultural double-header with drinks. I saw the Anselm Kiefer show across both venues (big, bleak, brilliant), then stayed for the part where you dance under museum lighting and feel like a very sophisticated art heist is about to unfold.

Caught the Flaming Lips in Utrecht performing Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots in full — a retina-searing, glitter-drenched fever dream of lasers, confetti, and inflatable robots. Wayne Coyne, framed by a giant inflatable rainbow, looked like a man who’d seen the future and decided it needed more sequins. Utterly bonkers. Utterly wonderful.

Consuming

👩🏻‍💻 Internetting

I know nothing about private equity — truly, nothing — but I adored this explainer on what Taylor Swift’s masterstroke of reclaiming her catalogue can teach the buyout bros. Equal parts fangirl essay and forensic takedown, it’s a reminder that you underestimate a billionaire pop star and her army of emotionally over-invested fans at your peril.

On the other hand, I do know quite a bit about writing. Just not this well. Lauren Razavi’s piece on AI authorship is one of the most thoughtful, lyrical takes I’ve seen — part essay, part live DJ set, and all signal, no noise. Read it. Then reread it. Then make peace with the fact she’s probably written your next best idea, too.

📺 Watching

Gingerly stepped into the final season of The Handmaid’s Tale, watching in careful, rationed doses — partly because it’s harrowing, partly because it now feels like market research. Gilead is no longer dystopian fiction; it’s starting to look like a standard Wednesday in some parts of the world.

📚 Reading

In my last weeknote I worried that reading for fun would get pushed aside by reading for the book. Reader, it has. The International Journal of Strategic Communication now haunts my dreams.

🎧 Listening

Discovered British-Dutch electro-pop-punksters Crgclt at a party in a barn somewhere outside Leiden. Their set was a glorious mess of synths and snark — like Chvrches got drunk with Le Tigre in a tulip field. I will be seeing them again.

Connections

The last fortnight’s seen me people-ing at Olympic levels.

Caught up with Cargill’s Paul Thomas for a proper chinwag about hybrid work, generational gaps, and the quirks of Dutch corporate comms.

Money 2020 brought the finance glitterati to town — which meant finally meeting Jas Shah IRL, hanging out with Theodora Lau, and catching up with my old Standard Chartered pal Natalie Pereira, a full decade after our last night out in Kuala Lumpur.

Bright Paris also reunited me with DWG’s Paul Miller and internal comms veteran Andrew Hesselden, and gave me the joy of finally meeting some long-time online pals in person. The best bit of any event’s still the coffee-break conspiracies.

Travel

On Tuesday I managed breakfast in Amsterdam, lunch in London, and dinner in Paris — which sounds terribly glamorous until you realise breakfast was a sad airport lounge croissant, lunch was mystery beige from a meeting venue canteen, and dinner was a lukewarm M&S salad eaten on a hotel bed at 10pm.

Staying put this week. Thank god. Milan and London await next.

This week in photos

Some weeks you feel on top of things. Other weeks, you’re writing a book, delivering workshops, prepping talks, flying to Berlin, crying in a photo exhibition and accidentally going to two punk gigs at opposite ends of the country.

No idea what kind of week this was, but it definitely happened.

This week at work

I didn’t realise how jam-packed this week was until I sat down to write this. No wonder I’m tired.

First, the big news I’ve been hinting at: the cat’s out of the bag. I’m writing a book with my colleague and longtime co-conspirator Jonathan Phillips.

Digital Communications at Work: Designing Channels for Employee Engagement and Experience is a practical guide for comms professionals handed responsibility for digital channels. It’ll be published by Kogan Page in 2026 and is packed with case studies, real-world advice, and the kind of tips we wish someone had given us when we were in-house.

If you’ve ever been given the intranet keys, told to “sort out comms,” or been stuck between IT and HR, this one’s for you.

Over the coming months, these weeknotes will chart our progress — and my slow descent into madness — as we try to write a whole book in our spare time.

(There’s another exciting cat in another bag, but that one stays put for now)

Jon and I also popped over to Berlin to see our client SEFE, the German energy company. Late last year we delivered them a new intranet — config, IA, content, training, the whole shebang — in just 100 days. They’re thrilled with it, and so are we. This week we finally met the team in person to celebrate and look ahead to what’s next.

We also went to Flip Forward, a sharp one-day event from employee app vendor Flip, focused on what the digital workplace really means for the frontline. A few standout themes:

AI is now the infrastructure, not just a feature. Flip (like everyone else) is “AI first,” but the most useful applications weren’t flashy — they helped people quickly access the info they actually need. Like when’s my next shift?
Flip’s Marian Finkbeiner said: “Interview people on the shop floor and solve from there.” I’d add: also observe and triangulate. What people say and what they need aren’t always the same.
Martina Merz delivered a brilliant keynote on AI, trust and dialogue. Her warning: don’t simulate listening with AI and call it connection. Real trust comes from real dialogue, not a chatbot pretending to care.

That idea — making sure people are genuinely heard — came up again in a series of workshops we’ve been designing for another client. We’re building ways for people to contribute before, during, and after sessions. Not just once, but as an ongoing habit.

Camp Digital is now less than two months away, so prep is ramping up. I had a great call with one of our first-time speakers, and I’m already excited for what’s shaping up to be a brilliant programme.

But first: a few more speaking commitments.

In a couple of weeks I’ll be in Paris, giving the extended version of the employee experience keynote I did in Chicago at the European leg of LumApps Bright. I’ve been reflecting on what landed, what didn’t, and where more clarity or examples might help.

I’ve also been prepping for a webinar I’m doing with Cerkl, as part of their IC Thought Leader series. I’ll be talking about why internal comms needs to move past volume and focus on relevance: using data to deliver useful, usable messages in the moments that matter. Sign up here. It’s free to attend — or sign up and get the recording later if you can’t make it.

Also this week

I went to this year’s World Press Photo exhibition at De Nieuwe Kerk. As ever: devastating and essential. The 2025 edition features powerful photojournalism capturing war, displacement, climate crisis, and human resilience. The winning image — a young boy in Gaza who lost both arms in an airstrike — was particularly hard to take.

Other standout stories: the drought-stricken Amazon, the aftermath of the Turkey–Syria earthquakes, and several photo sets showing the disproportionate impact of conflict on women. Sexual violence as a weapon of war in Tigray. Women trying to protect their families in Gaza and Ukraine. Women stripped of all rights in Afghanistan.

The memorial to journalists killed in the line of duty was horrifyingly long. 2024’s total matched that of 2020, 2021, and 2022 combined, almost all of them in Gaza.

I cried twice. But I go every year, because bearing witness still matters.

The World Press Photo exhibition inside the Nieuwe Kerk, Amsterdam

A series of blue banners with a long list of names of journalists killed in th line of their work

Consuming

👩🏻‍💻 Internetting

I read this Eventbrite piece on “Fourth Spaces” — their term for the way digital communities now spill into physical gatherings. It’s based on research into Gen Z and millennials, who want to connect around shared interests formed online.

It’s a helpful way to think about modern community-building: not just passive audiences, but people looking to co-create, belong and participate. If you’re in events, engagement or comms, it’s worth a look.

📺 Watching

I watched Fred and Rose West: A British Horror Story on Netflix. I knew a lot from the news at the time, and from All Killa No Filla, but seeing the victims’ families speak was utterly heartbreaking. It’s a grim but important reminder of the need to listen, to believe, and to keep asking uncomfortable questions.

📚 Reading

Nothing this week, unless you count background reading for the book (I fear reading for pleasure may be the first casualty of this writing project)

🎧 Listening

A two-gig week. Went to Den Haag on a whim to catch Japanese garage rockers Electric Eel Shock. Then saw UK punk duo Soft Play (formerly Slaves) — a ferocious, sweaty wall of sound. Two blokes. One guitar. One drum kit. Absolute carnage.

Connections

Berlin was a good excuse to catch up with internal comms legend Tony Stewart — someone who understands the power of community both on and offline. I hope we get him on a Lithos project soon.

Also caught up with Michael Nottingham, another of our Lithos collaborators, over an Ethopian meal in Kreuzberg. We talked content, govtech, politics, and the challenge of restaurants meals eaten without cutlery.