communications

Weeknote 2025/24

/ Sharon O'Dea / 1 Comment
A red barge on the Prinsengracht canal in Amsterdam. It's a clear sunny day.
Amsterdam summers are something else (Photo: me)

Middle age has arrived, not with a crisis but with a calendar reminder. The quiet realisation that I’m now older than most start-up founders, Olympic athletes, and several government ministers. Which, frankly, explains a lot.

Between birthday reflections and packing for yet another work trip, it’s been a week of wrangling conference decks, academic papers, and coming to terms with the fact that my knees now make a noise when I stand up too fast.

This week at work

A week of contrasts. Juggling wildly different projects, which I tell myself is what keeps it interesting.

  • Finalised my slides for Intranet Italia Day next week, with a few solid practice runs
  • Helped a client plan how their leadership can actually show up on the social intranet — plus wrote quick-start guides for low-effort, high-impact engagement
  • Sat through a couple of intranet/employee experience vendor demos. One looked genuinely startled when I asked about things like functionality gaps, governance, or how this would work in an organisation with more than one type of employee. As if complexity were some kind of curveball, not the baseline most IC folks are dealing with.
  • Followed up on a series of workshops with a long-term client — great to see momentum building
  • Supporting our brilliant 300 Seconds speakers as they prep for Camp Digital (less than three weeks to go!)

Meanwhile, quietly ramping up a(nother) secret side project. More on that soon.

Also this week

Turned 45 this week. Officially middle-aged — not in crisis, just doing the maths. It’s the age where you realise that you’ve probably had more than you’re getting. Strangely, that’s a relief. Less to prove. More clarity. Fewer big swings. And the slow, inevitable expansion of the midsection.

A box of donuts with different icing and toppings
In the Netherlands, you bring cakes inn for everyone else for your birthday
A woman (me)with brown hair, holding a glass on Mimosa
Mimosa-based birthday breakfast
Presents, wrapped, and flowers
I was spoiled rotten

Because no one asked, here’s 45 lessons I’ve learned in 45 spins round the sun:

  1. You don’t need to finish the book
  2. Or the bottle
  3. Lifting heavy weights makes you feel superhuman
  4. If someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time
  5. Good lighting fixes many things
  6. No one is thinking about you as much as you think they are
  7. If you need to ask whether it’s worth the drama, it’s not
  8. A well-timed “hmm” can save you hours
  9. Good sleep beats any wellness trend.
  10. You’ll never feel like going for a walk. Go anyway.
  11. Pay attention to how people treat waitstaff
  12. The hotel iron will ruin your top. Pack something that doesn’t crease.
  13. Always look up. You’ll notice stuff and be glad you did.
  14. Walk away. From the app. From the thread. From the man with a podcast.
  15. Airports are emotional purgatories. Don’t make big decisions there.
  16. Drink water, then decide if you’re really hungry
  17. It’s OK to be the person who leaves early.
  18. Wear the good outfit.
  19. Cheap shoes are a false economy
  20. You will regret trying to save money with a flight that leaves before 7am
  21. A single “lol” can prevent a workplace argument.
  22. It can also cause one.
  23. Just because it’s urgent to them doesn’t mean it’s important to you (with thanks to the late David Pearson for the line “your bad planning is not my emergency”)
  24. If you’ve packed contact lenses and your credit cards, everything you’ve forgotten is fixable
  25. Never trust someone who says “I don’t do drama.” They are the drama.
  26. Boundaries aren’t mean.
  27. You don’t owe everyone an explanation. Most people aren’t even listening.
  28. Sometimes the bravest thing is not replying.
  29. There’s no award for most burnt out.
  30. You can outgrow people without hating them.
  31. Getting older is a win. Plenty of people don’t get the chance.
  32. The red flag is never that subtle.
  33. Skincare is mostly pseudo-science, except for good sunscreen. Factor 50 FTW.
  34. Everything feels worse when you’re hungry.
  35. You will never regret leaving a bad job.
  36. But you will regret not standing up for yourself in it.
  37. If a company says it’s a family, run.
  38. You don’t owe anyone on the internet your attention
  39. It’s OK to only give it 70% once in a while.
  40. Confidence doesn’t come before doing the thing. It comes from doing it.
  41. You can’t change people. Only your expectations of them.
  42. Not everything has to be #content.
  43. You’re not behind. You’re on your own route.
  44. Compare your life to a LinkedIn post and you deserve the existential crisis that follows.
  45. You can always make money. You can never make time.

Consuming

👩🏻‍💻 Internetting

This week’s descent into the rabbit hole: the Pentagon Pizza theory. Credit to the FT’s data editor, who noticed a spike in pizza orders near the Pentagon just before Israel’s recent strikes on Iran. Turns out: when staff start pulling long hours ahead of global mayhem, the local Domino’s gets busy. Forget Bloomberg terminals — the true indicator of looming geopolitical chaos is a pepperoni surge in Arlington.

📺 Watching

Caught Titan on Netflix — the docuseries that unpacks the doomed OceanGate submersible and the spectacular hubris that powered it. What starts as a story about billionaire adventurers quickly becomes a cautionary tale about ignoring experts, side-stepping safety protocols, and brushing off internal dissent.

If there’s a workplace moral here, it’s this: when someone raises a hand to say “this seems dangerous,” don’t label them difficult — listen. Whistleblowers aren’t the problem; they’re the last line of defence before disaster.

📚 Reading

This week’s book-writing milestone: a shiny new library card for the University of Amsterdam. Great social sciences collection, and a Proustian flashback to my dissertation days in Senate House. I’m loving getting stuck back into the communication theory I studied two decades ago — proof, perhaps, that a media degree is more useful than its “Mickey Mouse” reputation suggests.

A had with shiny pink nails holds a University of Amsterdam library card

This week’s highlight reel of academic page-turners included:

🎧 Listening

Caught the Happy Mondays at the Paradiso, and it was brilliant. I’ve seen them twice in recent years, both times in bigger venues, but there was something magic about seeing them up close in a packed, sweaty room. Bez was fully Bezzing, limbs everywhere, powering the crowd with vibes alone. Shaun Ryder barked out lyrics like a man reading a gas bill under protest. It was chaotic, feral, and all the better for it. No polish, no pretence — just joy at full volume.

Bez from the Happy Mondays, on stage with maracas
Pulp's 'More' album on blue vinyl

I’ve also been spinning the new Pulp album (in delicious blue vinyl). It’s gloriously familiar; simultaneously novel and like pulling on an old, comfortable jumper that somehow still fits perfectly. Jarvis sounds as sharp and sideways as ever, and the whole thing hums with that unmistakable mix of kitchen-sink melancholy and disco sleaze.

Connections

No one this week. Honestly, was people-d out after last week.

Travel

This week the wheelie bag and I are off to Milan, then London. I have a little spare time in both so shout if you’ve got time for wine.

This week in photos

Sanctum exercise in an atmospheric candlelit church
It’s iced coffee weather
And ‘pootling about on a boat’ weather
The first Amsterdam Vinyl Club was a huge success
Crate digging at Amsterdam Vinyl Club
The Dutch tradition of hanging a school bag from a flagpole to mark school graduation
Buying flowers at the market, again
This town 🥰
One of four spin classes this week

Weeknote 2025/23

/ Sharon O'Dea / Leave a comment
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.

We won’t let the robots defeat us.

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

Dutch summer
Knee deep in decks at the hairdressers
My pal’s 40th on a sunny day in Amsterdam
Bonjour Paris
Crgclt at JoFest in Koudekerk aan den Rijn

Weeknote 2025/21

/ Sharon O'Dea / Leave a comment
Quintessentially Berlin (Photo: me)

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.
Flip Forward in Berlin.

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
People's wishes written on square white pieces of paper, pinned to a board

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

Seven pillows. One head.
Kreuzberg sunset.
Jonathan and I at Flip.
Turkish barbecue. Basically Korean barbecue with mezze. Nothing wrong with that at all.
Berlz
My Saturday market run.
Soft Play at Melkweg
Electric Eel Shock at Sneister Fest, Den Haag
A magnet fisher tries to retrieve whatever this girl dropped in the canal opposite my house

First thoughts on Google Wave

/ Sharon O'Dea / 1 Comment

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?