communications

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.

Travel

Back from Berlin. One full week at home before heading to London and Paris. I will not waste it.

This week in photos

The geek community have been all a-fluster since the launch of Google’s latest big project, Google Wave, to a select group of 100,000 testers.

Google Wave is probably best described as a collaboration platform, bringing together the key functionality from email, instant messaging, shared documents and multi-media content. Google themselves say it’s ‘what email would be like if it had been invented now’.

After a long week wondering if Google Wave invites would be retro by the time I got one, mine finally arrived. At last I was one of the chosen few. My initial enthusiasm for it was tempered a bit when I realised the only other person I knew with an invite was Dave Briggs, and he wasn’t even logged on.

Things took a turn for the better, though, when I was invited into a SocITM09 Conference Wave, with Alan Coulson waving live from the SOCITM conference. This coverage really showed the potential of the platform. Alan live-blogged from the event in detail, adding links in where he could to slideshows posted online. This really helped those of us who were interested but not at the event to get a feel for what was going on (especially when combined with the live Twitter stream on the #socitim09 hastag).

At the same time, Sarah Lay and I had a bit of a chat within the broader Wave conversation (this is what Google call a ‘wavelet’).

Right now Wave is mostly a live chat type of system, like a souped-up MSN Messenger, where you can watch people type in real-time, replete with typos and corrections. But beneath the bonnet, it’s no Halfords Hero. It’s packed full of top-notch features and has bags of potential.

Things I learned:

Wave looks great. It does some cool stuff, which are better explained by Mashable than by me.
As you’d expect from a product that isn’t even in Beta, it’s a bit buggy (I’ve crashed out a few times), but the interface generally works well, is easy to understand and has some interesting features. Search isn’t integrated with proper Google Search yet, so the results are a bit iffy, but no doubt this will be fixed in time.
Wave is considerably more interesting once you know a handful of people with logons. Like anything else on the interwebs, unless you’ve got someone to talk to you’re just belming into the void.

Things I didn’t learn:

What Google Wave is actually for. For many years now I’ve had the principles of SMART objective-setting drilled into me, where one considers what one wants to achieve before working out how to get there. I’d imagine this applies as much to product development as communications strategy, and I wonder if somehow this missed the key step of identifying the problem before developing a solution.

On the other hand, a lack of clear purpose isn’t always a problem. I mean, Twitter isn’t really for anything, yet it’s clearly successful. I can’t help liking Wave. I’m a massive geek, and I love geeky things.

I’m not sure what use it has right now for council communications. Apart from anything else, you need a decent browser and good connectivity to make the most of it – we often lack both in the public sector, and in many areas of the country (particularly rural ones) our residents do too. The potential is there, but we need the technology to catch up.

Nonetheless, I can see plenty of applications for it in other areas of online life. In our ‘wavelet’, Sarah Lay and I discussed how the interface reminds us in many ways of journalists’ newswires, with rapid and quick-fire updates adding to an ongoing, fast-developing narrative produced by collective intelligence and effort.

I’ve seen this in action a few times; first, on September 11 2001, and second, on July 7 2005. On the former, working in a newsroom I watched the story unfold via successive text and picture updates (from a small number of sources like AP, Reuters and AFP). Four years later, we saw the collective intelligence of hundreds of Londoners quickly produce a summary of events on Wikipedia using a variety of sources and reports.

I can see Wave taking this to its next logical step, with collective effort producing a collaborative document including text, photo, video, maps, links, etc. It has the added bonus that it can be played back, so you can see how the narrative developed.

Now clearly you can’t sustain or develop a platform just so it can come into its own in the case of a huge but fortunately rare event. But the principle – of harnessing collective effort and intelligence to produce a single multi-media document – applies in all sorts of areas.

You could, for instance, use Wave for an online debate, adding different streams to the discussion and enhancing this with text, video, maps, and so on. This can be played back to show the evolution of the conversation.

Michele Ide-Smith posits a scenario where technology like Google Wave could really enhance citizen consultation. Online consultation on a housing development, she suggests, could begin with a short video and interactive maps, followed by discussion and debate on the issue facilitated online. Discussions can be replayed and key points responded to during or after the live event.

Eventually Google Apps and Docs will be integrated with Wave, giving it bags more potential (especially so for organisations that move to cloud computing).

Will it replace email? Maybe. Outside of work, where I drown in the stuff, I use email less and less, increasingly favouring things like Twitter, Facebook and IM, so a product which brings together the best of all of these could be just the thing we need.

I’m still thinking about what, if anything, Wave could do for us internal communicators specifically. There’s now a handful of us with Wave accounts, so I’m hoping to organise an Internal Comms Wave later this week to check out the features and think about how it can enhance our own work. If you’re on Wave and you’re interested in taking part, drop me a line or leave me a comment and I’ll invite you in.

One final thing: I can’t log on to Google Wave without getting the Pixies’ Wave of Mutilation as an earworm. I suspect this is just me. Is it?