fiction

A bend in the Herengracht canal in Amsterdam. It's a clear sunny day with blue sky and the canal houses are reflected in the water. — *Amsterdam looking banging in the spring sunshine. I love this town. Photo: me.*

After watching a film this week and diving headlong into a playlist of 60s protest songs, it struck me how much those voices felt both urgent and completely of their time. That raw, direct, unpolished energy — it’s hard to imagine it cutting through today’s noise. But the sense of fighting for something, the doing, stuck with me.

Which might be why this week felt like a battle cry of its own.

This week at work

It was probably inevitable that after saying last week I had some spare capacity, this turned out to be our busiest week in ages.

A big focus was helping a client find alignment on plans and ways of working across various streams in a digital transformation programme. We’re looking at how to balance wide input with the need to make a viable plan and actually get things done. It’s all about finding the right mix of consultation and decision-making.

Wrote the first draft of a keynote I’m giving at the LumApps Bright event next month.

Helped a client submit an award entry for an intranet we supported the development of. Always happy to do this; it’s a nice excuse to look back at the impact it’s had for the company and their people.

Responded to two RFPs. I never do a find-and-replace generic response. Either I take the time to think properly about what the client needs and how we can help, or I don’t respond at all. I like to think that gives people confidence we know what we’re doing. But it does mean:

a) every RFP takes days of work;
b) many go nowhere;
c) I’m left with the nagging feeling the whole process is designed to make us give our thinking away for free.

Also made some progress on a secret little side project. More on that soon.

Also this week

With an unexpected free weekend coming up, I booked a solo trip to Bucharest on a whim. So I spent some time planning that.

And when I say planning… I think this is a safe space to confess just how geeky my travel prep has become.

First, I have a travel planner board. So far, so Standard Nerd Behaviour. It’s in Microsoft Loop — basically a Blue Cross Week Notion for people forced to use Microsoft. We’re not, but most of our clients are, so we dogfood it anyway to stay close to their world.

The board has columns for:

Booked – trips in the diary, logistics sorted (or mostly)
Planned – agreed or pencilled in, but not yet booked
Wishlist – places I’d like to go
Done – completed trips, useful for sharing recommendations or just remembering what I’ve actually done

*Travel planner board in Microsoft Loop.*

Each trip links to its own Loop page, with a schedule showing transport, accommodation and any activities planned or booked. I also create a Google Map with sights, restaurants, shops, and must-sees pinned.

Separately, I’ve made a custom GPT that acts as my personal travel agent. It remembers hotel and travel preferences, airline loyalty schemes, the type of restaurants I like, and has persistent memory so I can keep adding to it.

I use it to generate itineraries: just plug in dates and ask it to build an agenda based on my preferences (weird history, long walks, offbeat sights, nothing that could ever be called “relaxing”). Once everything’s booked, I add the finalised schedule (from the Loop), then use it to ask things like:

“Can you give me a packing list for Colombia, based on the weather and planned activities?”
“What’s the best way to get between these places today?”
“Is there a lounge I can use at this airport?”
“Organise my packing into logical packing cubes. Will it all fit in carry-on?”

Geeky? Yes. Useful? That’s up for debate. But I enjoy figuring out how this stuff works — and the best way to learn is to apply it to your own weirdly specific use cases.

Consuming

👩🏻‍💻 Internetting

I’m watching from a distance as the usual vendor-consultancy alliance flogs AI as the answer for comms and customer service. It has bags of potential, but realising that potential relies on having great, up-to-date and well-organised content to train it on. And guess what? Yours isn’t.

Enterprise search didn’t magically solve the problem of findability, because the problem was never search. It’s the content being searched.

Realising investment in and promises of AI relies on the boring and unsexy work of governance and admin. Of producing good content and managing what you have tightly so you can be 100% confident what’s being produced, presented or regurgitated into new interfaces by AI is accurate.

As ever, that’s a people and organisation problem, not a tech one. So I very appreciated this piece from Clearbox’s Suzie Robinson which urges buyers to consider what they actually need AI for then vet the tools on that basis rather than base decisions on vendor hype.

📺 Watching

Finished the first series of Slow Horses. Started Adolescence because everyone was talking about it, but only managed one episode. It’s A Lot. I’ll watch the rest, but take my time over it.

Caught A Complete Unknown at the cinema. There’s a fascinating, complex story to be told about Bob Dylan — myth-making, reinvention, and what happens when a reluctant icon picks up an electric guitar and changes music history. This isn’t that story. Instead, it’s a reverential, paint-by-numbers biopic that never gets close to its subject. For a film so determined to explore who Dylan really was, it offers no insight beyond what any vaguely stoned ex-hippie could tell you in a pub.

Chalamet does a solid Dylan impersonation, and the production design is lovely — all smoky clubs and sixties grit — but the film drags. Dylan is written as a charmless narcissist, yet treated with such deference it’s as if the filmmakers were lobbying for his canonisation. The result is oddly inert: a film about a cultural earthquake that feels more like a tribute concert in soft focus

📚 Reading

Another non-reading week. I can either watch telly or read, but apparently not both.

🎧 Listening

With Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger both central to the Dylan story, it’s no surprise they feature heavily in A Complete Unknown. It sent me down a bit of a rabbit hole, listening to a whole heap of 60s and 70s protest songs — Guthrie, Seeger, Joan Baez, Dylan himself.

They sound both urgent and like relics from another world. For the first time in my life it feels like progress on the issues they sang about — war, poverty, injustice — is going in reverse.

But the form, the earnestness, the melodies, and especially the lyrics (“Solidarity forever, for the union makes us strong!”) feel of another time. There’s a rawness and sincerity that’s hard to imagine cutting through today. And yet, there’s still something powerful in how directly they spoke to the times — and how much people listened.

Connections

Went to the Female Founders Brunch at TNW Spaces this week. Good people, bad coffee, and the usual mix of useful insight and slightly-too-earnest advice. Always energising to be in a room full of smart women building interesting things — though let’s be honest, women don’t need more encouragement to ask for help. They need investment.

Coverage

It’s five years since the first lockdown, and somehow companies still haven’t fully rethought how they communicate in a hybrid world. I wrote a piece for Reworked on how to turn communication chaos into clarity in the hybrid workplace.

This week in photos

*On my walk home last night I managed to catch that spot at Reguilersgracht/Herengracht where you can see all six bridges, with no boats. Jackpot. Photo: me.*

It’s St. Patrick’s Day, which means somewhere, someone is butchering the pronunciation of sláinte, and the world’s most tenuous Irish connections are being milked for all they’re worth.

As an actual passport-holding half-Irish person, I shall be marking the occasion by… doing what I do every week: wrangling intranets, herding stakeholders, and wondering why AI still can’t do the boring but important stuff properly.

This week at work

Back working with a client we helped launch an intranet for at the end of last year. It’s landed well—users like it, stakeholders are pleased, and now comes the next phase: shutting down the digital graveyards of legacy sites. We’re mapping what to keep, what to archive, and what to chuck in the bin.

Teams are often stunned at how little of their content is doing anything useful. Most pages get barely a glance. And while you could argue that abandoned content costs nothing, every extra page makes it harder to find the stuff that actually matters. Worse, if it’s outdated or misleading, it’s not just clutter, it’s a risk. The brutal reality is that unless you’ve had cast-iron content governance from day one, you can probably delete at least half your intranet with zero consequence. More likely, 90%.

So we’re sifting for the gold, reassuring stakeholders that most of their lovingly hoarded PDFs are no great loss, and helping the client streamline their digital estate. Fewer sites, less noise, and some actual cost savings.

Everyone in this space loves to talk about AI, but for now, it’s the unglamorous grind of governance and admin that makes the biggest difference to employee experience. (And yet, sorting the short neck of valuable stuff from the very long tail of ROTten content is exactly the sort of thing AI should be good at, and yet… isn’t. If you’re an intranet vendor with software that actually does this well, I would love to see it.)

Meanwhile, on another project, we’re developing a series of bespoke workshops. Didn’t set out to be a ‘workshop person,’ yet here we are. Apparently, we’re quite good at it too.

And since no one else is tooting our horn, I’ll do it myself. Recent feedback includes:

“That was the best-run workshop I’ve ever been to. I can’t believe we got through so much in a day.”
“Every meeting, I admired the way you managed to bring people together, even in tricky situations.”
“That was fantastic! Perfectly paced, and I love how you kept everyone focused.”

I do enjoy it—designing a well-paced, structured session that cuts through competing perspectives and actually gets people to a decision.

On the downside, a project we were due to start has been booted to a later budget round, so we’ve got some unexpected capacity over the next few months. If you need help untangling your communication and collaboration mess, give us a shout. Maybe you don’t quite know what you need, just that things aren’t working as well as they should. Those are my favourite projects.

In a laughably unsubtle attempt at business development, here’s my page on working with me. (And this lack of subtlety is why I don’t work in sales.)

Also this week

False spring came and went, but at least it was proof the planet is still spinning towards brighter days. News remains an omnishambles, so I’m sticking to my avoidance diet.

Quick trip to London to meet a prospective client, do some planning, and see my folks.

Consuming

👩🏻‍💻 Internetting

Anyone who’s worked on the internet for long enough will have watched the same cycle play out: bright young thing arrives to ‘shake things up,’ promptly tears everything apart, and then vanishes before the consequences hit, leaving others to clean up the mess.

So I appreciated this interview with Jennifer Pahlka, founder of Code for America and former US Deputy CTO. She lays out a case for smarter, more responsible government transformation. Her book argues that bureaucracy smothers good policy and that better internal tech capacity—rather than over-reliance on contractors—could fix it. Instead, we get sweeping, indiscriminate cuts that hurt the people who rely on public services the most.

Not that anyone in power will listen for a second.

The internet was built on cat pictures, so logically, its next evolutionary step is cat videos. Cats making burgers, to be precise.

It’s no “He’s making a mockery of you, Derry” bat video but an otter loose in the kitchen is always worth watching.

📺 Watching

I had a second attempt at watching Slow Horses, and got sucked in this time. Once you suspend disbelief at the poor OPSEC and laughably lax controls of a team supposedly working for the secret services it’s really quite enjoyable nonsense with some great performances.

I also saw the new Bridget Jones movie at the cinema. It was sold as a romcom but turned out to be a movie about grief that had me weeping from about 5 minutes in.

📚 Reading

Nowt this week

🎧 Listening

Episode three of Broken Veil cranked the creepiness up a notch.

Connections

I managed to catch up with the wonderful Lisa Riemers when I was in London. We talked, inevitably, about accessible comms. I’m looking forward to her book on the same.