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Weeknote 2026/39

/ 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.

Sharon O'Dea and Liz McCarthy

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.
Me holding my certificate from Improbattle Taaltheater, reading "Bewijs van Deelname" (proof of participation), after an improv class in Dutch.
A graffiti-covered barrier closing off a path, with bicycles parked beside it and old buildings beyond.
A small boat of passengers on an Amsterdam canal under a clear blue sky, with the Westerkerk tower rising above the trees.
An Amsterdam canal after dark, with streetlights and moored boats reflected in the water.
Mirrored steel spheres packed tightly together at the Kusama retrospective, each one reflecting the gallery and its neighbours.
My hand, nails painted red with white polka dots, held up against one of Kusama's yellow pumpkins with black dots.
Brightly coloured, tentacle-like sculptures rising from the floor at the Yayoi Kusama retrospective at the Stedelijk, Amsterdam.

Weeknote 2026/38

/ Sharon O'Dea / Leave a comment
Sharon, in a cream cardigan and jeans, smiles as she stands in the bobsleigh track. The curved concrete wall beside her is covered in graffiti in pink, purple, green and teal, and tall pines rise behind.
In Sarajevo (Photo: me)

Above Sarajevo, at the top of the Trebević cable car, there’s a bobsleigh track built for the 1984 Winter Olympics. On Tuesday, I skived off work for the afternoon to walk down it.

When it opened, it was state of the art: a triumph of Yugoslav engineering, built for the country’s first Winter Games and beamed around the world as evidence of a modern, confident state that could pull off the technically difficult business of firing people down a mountain on a tiny sled at 80 miles an hour.

And it worked. That’s the important bit.

There was nothing wrong with the track. Nobody had cheaped out on the concrete or forgotten to consult the bobsleigh stakeholder group. It did precisely what it had been designed to do, extremely well.

Eight years later, the country it had been built to showcase was tearing itself apart.

The front line ran across Trebević and the track acquired a rather different use, as an artillery position for the forces besieging Sarajevo. The curves built to shave hundredths of seconds off an Olympic run turned out to offer useful cover in a war. You can still see the bullet holes in the concrete.

Now it’s more than a kilometre of cracked track curling through the trees. Moss grows over it. Graffiti covers almost every surface, new layers appearing over old ones. People walk it, cycle it, spray-paint it, photograph it. Nobody bobsleighs.

There’s something almost indecently neat about the timeline. State-of-the-art Olympic infrastructure. Artillery position. Ruin. Tourist attraction. All in forty-odd years. Most enterprise software doesn’t manage that many changes of purpose without a rebrand and a licensing review.

The people who designed the track weren’t wrong about what it was for. They just couldn’t design for what happened next.

I’ve been thinking about that a lot this week.

We have a habit of looking at old systems and assuming their current state tells us something about the quality of the original decision. Look at this mess. Who designed that? What idiot thought this was a good idea?

Plenty of today’s messes began as perfectly sensible answers to yesterday’s problems. The organisation changed. The technology changed. People found new routes through it. New requirements arrived; old ones developed the organisational equivalent of squatters’ rights. Somebody added a workaround, then a platform to fix the workaround, then another platform to join up the platforms, and eventually everyone forgot which bit was the workaround.

Nobody sat down with a blank sheet of paper and designed the resulting horror. It accumulated. That’s the bit we tend to miss. We judge inherited systems as if they were commissioned yesterday in their current form, rather than deposited gradually, layer by layer, by years of individually defensible decisions. Organisational geology.

Eventually you end up looking at something nobody would build today and wondering which idiot designed it like that.

Quite possibly, nobody did.

The bobsleigh track certainly wasn’t badly designed. It was exceptionally well designed for a world that ceased to exist.

Graffiti on the bobsleigh track's mossy concrete wall: a grinning yellow cartoon character in a cap, with a speech bubble reading "Sloboda narodu!" (Freedom to the people!).
The underside of a raised section of the bobsleigh track: a rust-stained, moss-streaked concrete trough on angled concrete supports, tagged with graffiti, in a clearing among pine trees.
Looking along the bobsleigh track as it curves away under a bright blue sky. The walls are covered in overlapping graffiti, and concrete supports stick out above among the pines.
A curve of the abandoned 1984 Olympic bobsleigh track on Trebević, its concrete walls covered in layers of bright graffiti. Trees crowd in overhead and concrete supports jut out above the track.
Two graffitied concrete pillars at the bobsleigh track. One has a huge grinning yellow cat. On the other, a stick figure in a hat holds a heart above the words "For all war victims".

This week at work

We kicked off a discovery with a new client this week. Their channel mix has grown the way most do: one thing at a time, each added for a perfectly good reason, almost nothing ever taken away. No villain. No single terrible decision. Just years of reasonable people solving the problem immediately in front of them until, collectively, they’ve created something nobody would ever design from scratch.

It works, sort of. It’s just not designed for what comes next.

Discoveries are my favourite kind of work. Many projects start with an answer: build this, launch that, write the strategy. A discovery starts with a question, and you’re being paid to take it seriously. You get to look at the platforms and the data, then at how people actually find things rather than how the org chart, governance deck and person who bought the software insist they do.

You nearly always find the thing that wasn’t in the brief.

That’s usually the thing that makes the difference..

Obviously I would say bringing in an outsider is a good idea. I run a consultancy. Please apply the appropriate discount for vested interest. But hear me out.

People inside an organisation have learned the routes. They know which channel really means it, which folder contains the actual version, which search result to ignore, and who to ask when all three fail. This knowledge is hard-won, enormously useful and almost completely invisible to the people who have it. After you’ve stepped over the same loose floorboard every day for five years, you stop thinking of the floor as broken.

An outsider walks in and immediately trips over it. That’s useful intel.

We can ask the obvious question without looking daft. We have no emotional attachment to the SharePoint site somebody spent eighteen months getting approved. People tell us things they’d never say in the meeting where its owner is sitting three seats away. And because we’ve looked inside a lot of organisations, we can tell a problem peculiar to you from one that practically everyone has.

It’s usually the second, which people find oddly reassuring.

Timing matters too. The moment to look is before the next thing gets added: the new platform, the new app, the new channel promising to tidy up all the other platforms, apps and channels. This is the workplace technology equivalent of buying another storage box because the cupboard is full.

You have not solved the storage problem, you have simply purchased more storage problem.

Another big piece of work this week sits at the opposite end of the lifecycle. This organisation’s intranet is relatively new. The paths are still clean and not many people have wandered off them yet. They’ve asked for advice on structure now, before it grows, which is rarer and smarter than it sounds.

Most organisations only ask for directions once they’re lost.

Partly this is for the humans. Increasingly, though, it’s for the machines.

Everyone wants AI that can answer staff questions. Fine. But the answer will only ever be as good as the information the machine is pointed at. Clear structure. A named owner on every page. A date somebody last checked it. An agreed source of truth, rather than six documents called FINAL_v7_USE_THIS_ONE.

None of this is sexy. Nobody is putting “we know who owns the expenses policy” on the keynote stage at an AI conference (but if you really want to, you know where I am). For years we’ve called it housekeeping, which is perhaps why organisations have been able to avoid doing it with such determination.

Now it’s AI infrastructure.

People eventually learn to stay on the paved path. They know Dave’s folder is ancient, that the policy on the old intranet is only there because nobody has the permissions to delete it, and that “FINAL” is, at best, an expression of optimism.

An AI assistant has none of this institutional scar tissue.

It will cheerfully wander off-trail, find the 2019 expenses policy in a folder everyone else knows to ignore, and read it back to you with the serene confidence of something that will never personally have to explain the rejected claim.

Also this week

Bosnia: Mostar, then Sarajevo. Country 93.

I was eleven when the war began and fifteen when it ended, which means Bosnia occupies a very particular bit of my mental filing system: the evening news of my childhood. Sarajevo was one of those place names I knew long before I had any idea where it actually was. Mostar. Banja Luka. Srebrenica. Snipers. Siege. UN peacekeepers in blue helmets looking variously concerned.

Occasionally the war escaped the television and turned up at school, when a new kid with little English arrived from a place I’d previously only heard about from a man standing in front of some rubble on the Six O’Clock News.

Thirty-odd years later, I went to five museums about it in three days. This is, even by my standards, quite a lot of museum-based misery.

Three were in Mostar: the Museum of War and Genocide Victims, the War Photo Exhibition and the Mandate of Memory. Two were in Sarajevo. Much of what they showed looked exactly as I remembered it: grainy and grey, all mud and smoke and rubble, filmed from a distance or shot through a long lens. War as it arrived in a British living room in the 1990s, somewhere between John Major’s cones hotline and the nation’s apparently endless wait for Wet Wet Wet to relinquish the number-one spot.

Then, early one morning in Mostar, before the day trippers arrived, I squeezed through a gap in a fence and climbed the old sniper tower.

It wasn’t built as a sniper tower. It was a bank.

The Ljubljanska Banka building was a modern office block on what became the front line, tall enough to command a view across the city. During the war, that made it useful for something its architects presumably hadn’t included in the requirements.

Today it’s a shell: cracked concrete, exposed floors, bullet holes, broken glass. No reassuring visitor-centre arrows telling you where to stand or laminated panel explaining what you’re looking at. Getting in involves climbing through a hole in a fence, which is generally a fairly reliable indication that your travel insurer would prefer you didn’t. Mostly, these days, it’s where people with nowhere else to go end up sleeping, and using.

The whole building is covered in graffiti now. Huge, lurid, constantly changing graffiti, in colours the footage never had. At the top there was nothing between me and a perfectly clear blue sky.

I stood where the guns had been and looked down at the streets I’d watched on the news, on a beautiful sunny morning.

It was troubling in a way I still haven’t quite found the words for. Perhaps because the pictures in my head had always been grey. History had helpfully stayed there, in the grainy footage, where I’d filed it. Finding the same streets sitting under a blazing blue sky, full of people drinking coffee and going to work, made the distance between something that happened on television when I was a child and something that happened to actual people in this actual place collapse rather abruptly.

Looking up at the gutted concrete shell of the Mostar sniper tower. Floors are open to the air and a skeletal staircase zigzags up the side. Faded letters painted along the top read "ZAVADI PA VLADAJ" (divide and rule).
Inside the sniper tower, a bare concrete staircase with graffiti on every step leads to an upper floor. A neon-green graffiti piece covers the wall, and through the open side you can see modern Mostar and bare mountains.
A huge graffiti cat with a red face and round yellow eyes fills a pillar inside the sniper tower. Beside it, an open window frames a sunlit view of Mostar, a tall church bell tower, and a green hill topped with a cross.
A dim concrete room inside the sniper tower, its walls layered with graffiti tags and cartoon characters. Piles of rubble and rubbish cover the floor, and daylight falls through holes in the ceiling.
Another view of the graffiti-covered staircase inside the sniper tower. Behind it, a wide open floor with graffiti-painted parapets looks out towards green hills and apartment blocks.
A low-angle shot across a rubble-strewn floor in the sniper tower: broken concrete, shattered glass, plastic bottles and cigarette packets. On the far wall, among the graffiti, someone has written "I remember when I was a window".
A breeze-block wall with "They told me to find a hobby" spray-painted in black, beside a red and blue graffiti star.
A bullet-pocked concrete wall inside the sniper tower. Through an empty window frame you can see a bright election poster of two smiling politicians on the street outside.

Sarajevo kept doing this to me.

The War Childhood Museum is built around objects donated by people who were children during the war, each accompanied by a few lines of their story. No grand sweep of military history. No arrows moving across maps. Just the stuff children had.

Amina was born in 1980, the same year as me. For her thirteenth birthday, in 1993, her friend Jelena made her a soft toy out of old clothes, because you couldn’t just go to a shop and buy a present. They were both too old for toys by then, Amina wrote, but she kept it somewhere she could see it. Its bright colours made the war days more beautiful.

I turned thirteen in 1993 too. I couldn’t tell you what I got.

I was holding it together until the binder clip.

Damir was younger, born in 1986. One summer he got hold of a permanent marker, which gave him a certain status among his friends. His friend Mirnes, a year older, offered to swap it for a binder clip, the way their parents swapped a bag of flour for a lamp. Before handing the marker over, Damir used it one last time to draw a smiley face on the clip.

Mirnes died a few years later.

That’s when I started crying.

There is something particularly brutal about seeing a war through the things children decided were valuable. History deals in borders, armies, treaties and casualty figures. Children deal in permanent markers, homemade toys and the important business of whether a binder clip constitutes a fair swap.

Two days later I walked past the Genocide and War Crimes Museum and kept going. It turns out even I have a limit on misery museums.

Consuming

Whenever I travel I try to read something set where I’m going. For Bosnia, on Emma Duke’s recommendation, that was Black Butterflies by Priscilla Morris.

It’s set in Sarajevo in 1992. Zora, a painter, sends her family to safety in England and stays behind, sure it’ll all be over in a few weeks.

It isn’t.

Halfway through the trip I visited Vijećnica, the old National Library, which has an exhibition about its burning and rebuilding. A few days later I reached that part of the book: the library in flames, its books drifting across the city as scraps of black paper. That’s where the title comes from.

Normally reading something set in a place gives me a better picture of it.

This time it worked the other way round. I didn’t have to imagine the room, or the building, or where it sat in the city. I’d stood there, and that hit hard.

Connections

On Tuesday I hosted an IABC EMENA session on communicating with digital nomads. Tony Stewart joined from Hong Kong, Simon Cavendish from London, and I dialled in from an apartment in Sarajevo, which felt like either excellent commitment to the premise or an elaborate tax-deductible visual aid.

The audience was a mix of people already working on the move, the nomad-curious, and communicators trying to work out what happens when someone on their team announces they’re going to spend six weeks working from another time zone.

We’d set out to make it a conversation rather than a presentation, and it was. Thanks to everyone who came and asked questions. I’ve written up what we talked about, and so has Simon.

Travel

At home this week, prepping for two talks. After that I’m heading to London for Unily Unite, then Ljubljana for Dan PR, Slovenia’s top communications conference, where I’ll be talking about building communication that holds an organisation together when the ground keeps shifting.

This week in photos

Sarajevo from the hillside at dusk. Thousands of white headstones fill a cemetery in the foreground, and red-roofed houses, minarets and tower blocks stretch towards the mountains, where a band of orange sunset breaks under heavy grey cloud.
Looking up inside Vijećnica, Sarajevo's rebuilt City Hall and former National Library. A hexagonal stained-glass skylight in bright blue, yellow, green and red geometric stars sits above tiers of painted arches and slender columns.
Sarajevo's Orthodox cathedral, a pale yellow building with a tall clock tower, a dark onion-shaped spire and several domes topped with gold crosses, under a grey sky. People walk past on the pavement below.
Bosnian coffee on a pink-and-copper engraved tray: a small copper pot with a long handle, a cup, a lidded sugar bowl and a glass of water decorated with roses. A plate of shredded-pastry dessert sits behind, on a café terrace.
The ornate entrance portal of the Gazi Husrev-beg Mosque in Sarajevo. Carved honeycomb stonework fills the arch above dark wooden doors with geometric panels, framed by faded blue floral painting and gold calligraphy, with a red-and-white kilim on the floor in front.
The Sebilj, an ornate wooden Ottoman-style fountain with a green copper dome, in Sarajevo's Baščaršija square. Pigeons crowd the paving, and a mosque's dome and minaret rise behind the old shops.

Weeknote 2026/37

/ Sharon O'Dea / 1 Comment
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.
Sharon and a bearded man in a navy zip-up top taking a selfie beside a printed floor sign in a venue stairwell.

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
A floor-length dress on a mannequin in a gallery, the skirt covered in padded red flaming hearts with glass eyes set into them, other visitors and paintings in the background
Sharon standing beside a business bookshop shelf, hand resting under a copy of Digital Communications at Work, shelved face-out among other management titles.
Sharon bent over a bookshop counter signing the title page of Digital Communications at Work, a service bell and stacks of new releases beside her.
A mirrored board reading SUSPICIOUS propped outside a shop on a wet cobbled Amsterdam street, reflecting the photographer in a hooded raincoat holding a phone.

Weeknote 2026/35

/ Sharon O'Dea / Leave a comment
Pre-festival dog walks (Photo: me)

“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:

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

Designing channels for complex organisations

/ Sharon O'Dea / 1 Comment
A quiet surrealist office in muted grey tones. A woman in a grey suit stands with her back to us, facing five identical open doors. Each doorway reveals a different sky: blue and sunny, dark and stormy, warm evening light, pouring rain, and bright clouds. A sparse wooden desk and lamp sit to one side as she stands motionless, choosing none of the doors.

Somewhere in your organisation there is a person wearing one organisation’s uniform, carrying a second organisation’s lanyard, and logging into a third organisation’s systems with a password only the first can reset.

They are doing a job that at least two of those organisations believe belongs to somebody else.

They are not an edge case. Not any more.

Research by SAP and Oxford Economics, surveying 2,050 executives across more than 20 countries, found that only 58% of workforce spend goes on employees. The other 42% buys contingent workers and service providers: contractors, agencies, IT outsourcers, consultancies. More than half of those executives said their organisation couldn’t conduct business as usual without them.

And yet we still draw the organisation as a pyramid.

One person at the top, everyone else arranged obediently underneath, solid lines and dotted lines and a surprising amount of money spent arguing about where they should go. Then we design internal communications for that picture: one intranet, one all-staff email, one audience, one direction of travel.

The picture was always a simplification. What’s changed is how much of the actual organisation now sits outside it.

The organisation on the slide isn’t the organisation people work in

Real organisations are messy.

Work runs through partners, contractors, shared services, joint ventures and outsourced back offices. Two organisations can share a finance function and approximately none of a culture. A team is fully shared across two employers while HR is shared only transactionally. Someone is employed by one entity, works exclusively for another, and consequently can’t see either one’s internal communications properly.

This isn’t unusual, and it isn’t a temporary state of disrepair on the way to something tidier. It is the organisation.

In Digital Communications at Work, Jonathan Phillips and I describe today’s internal audience as including contractors, freelancers, agency staff, suppliers and partners: people who sit inside the working life of an organisation without sitting on its payroll.

The boundary around “internal” has got very fuzzy indeed.

Then add all the people your internal communication channels were never particularly good at reaching in the first place. Frontline and deskless colleagues make up around 80% of the global workforce, and many have no corporate email address and no reason to spend their working day lovingly browsing the intranet.

Access is uneven. Context is uneven. Someone who has worked there for fifteen years has a completely different map of the place in their head from someone who has worked fifteen shifts.

Enterprise software doesn’t much like any of this, because enterprise software has generally been designed for an organisation tidier than any organisation that has ever existed. Even now, major platforms struggle with someone holding multiple affiliations inside a single institution, never mind across several (working across two or more instances of Teams, for example, remains a PITA).

So we design channels for the diagram and then wonder why the people who don’t fit neatly inside the diagram aren’t using them.

This is an internal communications problem before it’s a technology one

When the channel estate isn’t working, the instinct is usually to go shopping.

New intranet. Better search. Employee app. AI assistant. Something with a reassuringly expensive implementation partner attached.

But a systematic review of 77 studies of digital internal communication found the same problem recurring: channels rolled out top-down without enough attention to whether they fitted how people actually worked.

The tool was rarely the interesting bit. The assumptions underneath it were.

And the bar for changing people’s behaviour is high. Gourville’s rule of thumb suggests people need to perceive a new system as roughly nine times better than the habit it replaces before they’ll switch.

Against an existing workaround — a WhatsApp group, a noticeboard, asking Sandra in Finance because Sandra actually knows — nine times better is a demanding standard.

Against nothing at all, the bar is practically on the floor.

Which is worth remembering before spending a year replacing something that works reasonably well for the people at the centre while leaving the people at the edges with bugger all.

Complexity doesn’t make channel design impossible. But it makes guessing impossible.

Start with what communication needs to do, not which platforms you own

The trouble with mapping your internal communications channels as a list of tools is that it tells you what you’ve bought.

It doesn’t tell you whether any of it works.

You get an inventory when what you need is a diagnosis.

The five-layer model we use in the book maps the capabilities a communication ecosystem needs rather than the products that happen to deliver them:

  • Plan: where campaigns, priorities and editorial calendars get coordinated. Invisible to employees; essential to communicators.
  • Collaborate: where content gets drafted, reviewed and signed off.
  • Publish: the source of truth. Structured, accurate and searchable.
  • Distribute: getting the right thing to the right person at the right time.
  • Discuss: dialogue, feedback and sense-making.

These aren’t five little boxes into which you must now dutifully sort Microsoft 365. They overlap. They reinforce one another. A single announcement might pass through all five.

The useful thing about thinking in layers is that the layers survive the platform churn.

Tools come and go. Names change. Products get bundled, rebranded, sunsetted and occasionally transformed into an AI assistant nobody remembers asking for. But these five jobs still need doing somewhere.

And in a complex organisation, the model lets you ask a much more useful question than should we have one intranet or several?

You can ask: what actually needs to be shared?

Shared or local? It depends what you’re sharing

Every complex organisation eventually has this argument.

Central control gives you accuracy and consistency, but can feel distant and generic. Local ownership gives you nuance, relevance and speed, but also duplication, contradiction and the occasional page last updated during the Cameron administration.

Choose entirely one or the other and you lose something you need.

At the level of “should we have one intranet or two?”, this is almost impossible to resolve because it isn’t really a technology question. It’s a question about identity, brand, budget, power and who gets to decide things, wearing a SharePoint hat.

Break it into layers and it gets much easier.

I ran this exercise recently with communications, HR, digital and transformation leaders across two organisations that shared much of a back office and very little else. The resulting pattern is one I’d expect to see in a lot of complex organisations.

Publish pulls hard towards shared.

Policy, terms, anything with legal or regulatory weight: you want one authoritative version. Copying the same information across multiple estates is how you end up with two confidently contradictory answers to the same question.

This is the layer I’d consolidate first.

AI has made this more important, not less. When an assistant starts surfacing intranet content directly, stale and duplicated pages don’t merely sit quietly being wrong somewhere nobody visits. The machine can now fetch them and be wrong on your behalf.

Discuss stays stubbornly local.

This is where culture lives. You can establish minimum standards for conduct and moderation, but you can’t centrally procure a community.

People have an irritating tendency to decide for themselves who they want to talk to.

Design this with them, not for them.

Plan sits awkwardly in the middle, because of course it does. Different leadership cycles, priorities and approval chains make fully shared planning difficult even where everyone is notionally committed to it.

Collaborate follows the work. Different brands, different style guides, different approval processes. Making all of that shared generally requires senior decisions considerably bigger than “where shall we put the Word document?”

And then there’s distribution.

Your distribution problem is really a people-data problem

Distribution is the layer that catches people out because its unit isn’t an organisation.

It’s a person.

A particular person, with a particular contract, role, location, device and set of permissions, who may work for two organisations and be properly represented in the directory of neither.

Which means distribution becomes an identity and employee-data problem long before it becomes an internal communications channel problem.

If you can’t reliably answer who is this person, what should they be able to see, and how can we reach them?, then targeting is mostly decorative.

You can spend weeks designing beautiful audience segments. If the finance officer employed by Organisation A but working full-time for Organisation B isn’t correctly represented in the underlying systems, no amount of clever channel strategy will make them magically appear on the right list.

Get identity right and all sorts of things become possible: one publishing estate with personalised views, targeted distribution that actually reaches contractors and frontline staff, and clear rules about who gets access to what.

Get it wrong and you can rebuild the intranet every three years until retirement and remain faintly disappointed by the results.

The bit of the digital workplace nobody sells you

There is a part of all this no vendor will quote for: Identity. Navigation. Search. A shared design language. The connective tissue that makes a collection of separately procured tools feel, to the unfortunate person trying to use them, like one place.

You can buy an ITSM platform, an HR system, a CMS and an employee app. You can give each of them a cheerful name and launch them with cupcakes.

But you can’t buy coherence.

The average organisation now runs well over a hundred applications, each perfectly sensible on its own terms and together producing an experience like an orchestra warming up: every instrument playing its own tune, quite competently.

In the book we describe the intranet as the wrapper, not the chocolate bar. I’d go further: the important bit isn’t any single platform. It’s the experience created at the joins.

Somebody has to own that.

Not each tool. The whole.

Because choices made in isolation get paid for at the joins, and the joins are where employees actually live.

Design an internal communications ecosystem that survives the next reorganisation

Complex organisations reorganise. It’s practically a hobby.

Shared services get created, merged, renamed and unpicked. Partners arrive and leave. Business units combine. Someone unveils a new operating model with pleasingly rounded rectangles and announces that it will make everything simpler.

If your internal communications architecture depends on the current organisation chart remaining true, start the countdown.

There are five principles I’d design around instead:

  • Adaptability: assume the organisation chart will change and the channels shouldn’t have to
  • Accessibility: including the version that means frontline, deskless and low-bandwidth access, not just WCAG compliance
  • Clarity of ownership: “who looks after this?” should be a question with an answer
  • Interoperability: content and state need to be able to leave the system they were created in.
  • Cognitive simplicity: every additional interface is a tax, and employees pay it

And I’d add a sixth, less comfortable one: mandate.

Skills you can hire. Time you can, eventually, carve out. But someone needs the authority to make decisions across the boundaries.

In a shared or complex organisation, the person responsible for the digital workplace without the authority to say no to senior stakeholders on either side owns the blame and none of the levers.

No amount of elegant architecture makes organisational politics disappear. But being explicit about who has the mandate to make decisions is usually the difference between a channel strategy that survives contact with reality and one that gets quietly negotiated into beige.

Design for the organisation you actually have

The useful shift is a small one.

Stop treating organisational complexity as a defect to be tidied away before the real design work starts. Treat it as the design constraint.

Because the mess isn’t evidence that there’s no system.

Quite often, the mess is the system.

It’s running on local knowledge, friendships, workarounds, favours, WhatsApp groups and hundreds of tiny negotiations nobody has ever written down. It’s the person everybody knows to ask. The spreadsheet somebody maintains because the official system doesn’t quite work. The contractor who’s been there eight years and still can’t open the link in the all-staff email.

Designing a beautifully logical channel architecture that ignores all of that doesn’t simplify the organisation.

It simply gives people one more thing to work around.

Nobody experiences a tool. They experience a task.

Design for the task, and for the person trying to get it done — whichever organisation’s lanyard they happen to be wearing today.

This essay draws on ideas from my book, Digital Communications at Work: Designing channels for employee engagement and experience, written with Jonathan Phillips and published by Kogan Page.

If you’re wrestling with this in your own organisation, my consultancy practice, Lithos Partners, runs discovery, designs channels and develops digital workplace strategy for organisations that don’t fit the neat diagram.

Weeknote 2026/34

/ 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.
Wooden crates of bright yellow sunflowers on a street flower stall, with a hand-lettered yellow sign reading "3 bos €10". More flowers and a clothing rail are visible behind, with parked cars on the road beyond.
Sparks perform on an outdoor stage under a canopy, the band name projected in large white letters behind them. Russell Mael sings at the front in a black polka-dot shirt while Ron Mael sits at a keyboard below, with a standing audience in front.
Rain pours in sheets off the edge of a white canopy at an outdoor concert, forming a curtain of water in front of the audience. Beyond it, people in ponchos stand watching an empty, brightly lit stage with a drum kit bearing the Sparks logo.

Weeknote 2026/33

/ 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.
A rainbow flag flying from the brick facade of a large gothic church, with pinnacles and arched windows above. A blue street sign on the corner reads "Spuistraat, Centrum".
People sitting cross-legged on yoga mats inside a candlelit gothic church, all wearing headphones glowing blue in the dark. An ornate painted and gilded altarpiece and a stained-glass rose window rise behind them.
Sharon photographed in a wood-panelled lift mirror, wearing a black midi dress with a cream brushstroke print, black sandals and sunglasses pushed up on her head.
A family of swans, two adults and five grey cygnets, swimming in a tree-lined Amsterdam canal past moored houseboats towards a low arched bridge.
View from a towel on the sand: bare feet, flip-flops and a bottle of Sol in the foreground, the low sun flaring over a busy beach and the sea beyond.
A partially eclipsed sun in a dark sky, the moon covering roughly the upper-right portion of the disc. Thin cloud diffuses the light into a broad amber halo.
Sharon and her husbandn lying on the sand in cardboard eclipse glasses with dark filters, both grinning. A striped parasol and dune sit behind them.

Weeknote 2026/32

/ Sharon O'Dea / Leave a comment
The World Press Photo 2026 exhibition inside De Nieuwe Kerk. A red entrance panel sits beside a large black and white portrait of an older woman in traditional dress. Photographs are hung on curved slatted wooden screens down the stone nave, with red banners overhead.
World Press Photo in de Nieuwe Kerk (Photo: me)

I’ve started thinking about the things that earn their place.

Not in a minimalist, throw-away-everything-that-doesn’t-spark-joy sense. I own far too many shoes for that, and my travel plans would not survive even the most cursory audit. More in the sense that addition ought to come with a burden of proof.

We’re very good at adding things. Another name. Another message. Another platform. Another feature. Another trip. Complexity accumulates almost invisibly because every individual addition can be made to sound perfectly reasonable on its own. It’s only when you stand back that you realise you’ve built something requiring a diagram, a 45-minute induction and a SharePoint page explaining which SharePoint page to use.

This week threw a few variations of that at me, from some fairly unexpected directions.

More isn’t inherently the problem. Neither is less inherently virtuous. The interesting bit is what happens when you stop assuming that adding something automatically makes the thing better.

The question is whether it earns the space it takes up.

This week at work

Four client projects, two proposals, and all the usual scaffolding of running a business — invoices, contracts, the small administrative barnacles that attach themselves to any given week. Jon is still away. So: a lot.

Everything is moving in the right direction, at least. But four projects at four different stages means four sets of context, four vocabularies, four mental models to load and unload across a single day. The work isn’t the tiring bit. The switching is. By Thursday I had approximately six organisations’ worth of information in my head and no reliable way of knowing which one any given acronym belonged to.

The consolation of weeks like this is the pattern-spotting. Do this for long enough and you start seeing the same problem turn up in completely different organisations wearing a different coat and insisting you’ve never met before.

This week’s recurring guest was naming.

Whether to give your channels names — and, if so, what — is one of the great perennial arguments of our trade. Alongside where IC should report into and whether anyone has ever successfully governed a SharePoint site by sending the site owner an annual email, it will presumably outlive us all.

I have Views.

Names can be genuinely useful. A name gives people something to hold onto. It’s a handle in a sentence: put it on Yammer, it’s in the Hub, check Connect. It makes an abstract thing tangible and gives people a shared shorthand for talking about it. This is useful. Humans like naming things. We named the moon and that doesn’t even have single sign-on.

The trouble is that intranets and employee apps actively resist being named, because they aren’t one thing. What do you call the platform that’s the news, the payslips, the policy library, the person finder, the canteen menu and, for reasons nobody can now reconstruct, the only place you’re allowed to order a new security pass?

Nothing specific fits. So you end up at Workplace. Or Engage. Or Connect. Or Hub.

Names for tools that do everything, which is another way of saying names that describe absolutely nothing.

Worse, every single one is already a product on the market. Frequently it’s also the name of another tool already inside the same organisation, bought by a different department in a different year with a different budget and announced with exactly the same adjectives.

We have been brought in more than once to adjudicate which platform gets to be called Workplace.

This is a service we provide. I would love to tell you it’s the most intellectually demanding work we do. It’s certainly the one that requires my best diplomacy skills.

My rule is simple: a name is only worth having if it saves you an explanation. If it doesn’t, you’ve just doubled your workload, because now you have to explain the service and the name — in every induction, on every intranet page, every time somebody new asks which one you mean.

Some years ago I worked somewhere with a room-booking system called Trimble.

Not a codename, nor a project name that had escaped containment. Just Trimble, because that was the vendor, and the vendor’s name had welded itself to the product the way Hoover did to vacuum cleaners, except nobody had ever heard of Trimble and nobody was going around saying they were going to Trimble a meeting room.

At some point a rule established itself: any mention of Trimble on Slack was answered with the same photograph of David Trimble. This one:

A black and white photo of Northern Ireland politician David Trimble, in the 1970s.

Same photo. Every time. No comment.

Nobody agreed to this. There was no meeting. No governance model. No launch plan. It simply became true, the way the most successful bits of workplace culture generally emerge while somebody elsewhere is writing a 34-page launch strategy.

It fired constantly, because most mentions of Trimble were people asking what Trimble was.

And that was precisely the problem, right there: the name was prompting the question it should have answered.

The joke ended when someone* laughed out loud in an open-plan office and had to explain why a photograph of the former First Minister of Northern Ireland kept appearing in response to questions about meeting rooms.

* it might have been me.

Eventually the organisation gave up and renamed it The Room Booking System. Everyone knew what it was immediately, forever, at zero ongoing cost. The photos stopped.

The postscript is that the software has since been sold twice and now lives inside MRI Software, where it’s called Space Scheduling. The descriptive half of the name outlasted four owners. The corporate half fell off somewhere between acquisitions, unmourned.

Call things what they are.

There’s a section on this in the Launching Channels chapter of the book, which is considerably more even-handed than I have just been: when a distinct name genuinely earns its keep, why naming competitions are a trap, and explicit permission to just call the intranet the intranet.

You do not have to call it Spark. You do not have to call it Connect. You definitely do not have to invite 14,000 employees to submit suggestions and then spend three months explaining why the winner can’t be used because somebody forgot to check the trademark.

Sometimes good design is simply resisting the urge to make a perfectly comprehensible thing more interesting.

Also this week

Saturday afternoon at De Nieuwe Kerk for World Press Photo, which I go to most years and usually leave in silence, feeling slightly worse about humanity. This year felt different, and it took me a while to work out why.

Not less bleak. There were still plenty of bombed-out streets and destroyed homes, and this year’s Photo of the Year is a family being separated by immigration enforcement in an American courthouse. Nobody’s going to World Press Photo for a restorative afternoon.

What had changed was the scale. Previous years have felt dominated by destruction seen from a distance: ruined blocks, flattened cities, the landscape of catastrophe. This year leaned much harder into resilience and resistance, told through single lives followed over months and years. Girls’ education. A 46-year-old woman living with anorexia. The lives of girls born by IVF to a 60-year-old mother. Afro-Latin communities in Colombia holding onto traditions carried from lands their ancestors were taken from centuries ago.

None of it was nice. That isn’t the shift here.

But there’s a difference between an image that shows you the size of a disaster and one that puts a person inside it and makes you stay there with them. Destruction at scale numbs you slightly, if we’re honest. At some point the numbers get too large, the rubble starts looking like other rubble, and your brain puts up a screen marked TOO MUCH.

Then, halfway round, I found the panel explaining what I’d already noticed. They’ve threaded eight projects through the exhibition under the heading Visions of Hope. The stated reason is media fatigue: audiences tell them they want to stay engaged with the world, but through stories that illuminate rather than overwhelm.

Which is a curatorial decision, obviously. But it’s also a comms one, made by an organisation whose entire purpose is bearing witness to the worst things human beings do to one another.

They’ve concluded that relentlessness is counterproductive. That if you overwhelm people, eventually they stop looking. And a record of the world that nobody can bear to look at isn’t doing much bearing witness.

It’s not a million miles from the argument I spend my working life making, arriving from a considerably more consequential direction: more information does not necessarily produce more understanding. At some point volume stops informing people and starts providing them with reasons to disengage.

The photograph I keep thinking about, though, was something else entirely.

Paula Hornickel photographed Waltraud, a resident at a care home in Albershausen, sitting across the table from Emma — a toddler-sized social robot made by a Munich startup.

German care homes are dealing with two crises at once: not enough staff, and residents who are profoundly lonely. One in five over-80s in care describe themselves as severely lonely. Emma recognises faces and remembers previous conversations. Waltraud was sceptical, then came round.

“When she tells her jokes, that’s really good.”

And there, unexpectedly, in the middle of a photojournalism exhibition, was one of the more interesting future-of-work stories I’ve encountered in a while.

We spend enormous amounts of energy arguing about which bits of knowledge work AI will automate. The lawyers. The developers. The copywriters. The consultants, who remain remarkably confident that everybody else’s job consists of repeatable tasks while theirs involves ineffable reserves of judgement and human insight.

Meanwhile, automation is turning up in care homes. At the one kind of work we tend to assume is irreducibly human because the work is being there with another person.

And it’s arriving not because somebody has produced a spreadsheet showing a 14% productivity gain. It’s arriving because there aren’t enough humans there.

I don’t know how I feel about that. I can construct the argument in both directions and dislike parts of both of them.

Waltraud seems fine about it, which is probably the only opinion that counts.

Consuming

Peaches at the Melkweg. My first gig in months, which for me is close to a personal record and not one I’m remotely proud of.

Worth the wait, though. A proper show. Giant inflatable spread legs. Dancers dressed as vaginas. Costume changes, choreography, staging that commits absolutely and unapologetically to the bit. None of the standing-behind-a-laptop-looking-intense business that passes for a live electronic set surprisingly often these days.

At one point Peaches simply walked out over the crowd, held up entirely by the audience, and carried on performing.

You either have that kind of contract with a room or you don’t.

There’s something enormously satisfying about watching someone who’s been doing this for decades know exactly what the room is for, and use every inch of it. No attempt to make herself tasteful or contemporary or slightly less Peaches now she’s in her fifties. If anything, more Peaches.

Came out sweaty, delighted, and mildly annoyed with myself for leaving it so long.

Travel

None, and I’m delighted about it.

I’m midway through a long stretch at home, and it turns out that’s exactly where I want to be. No airports. No packing. No waking up and having to spend several seconds establishing which country I’m in. Just my own bed, my own kitchen, and an entirely unremarkable knowledge of where all my things are.

The Dutch weather asks a lot of you. Months of grey, damp, low-ceilinged winter, the sort that makes you question not just your decision to move here but the entire concept of northern Europe.

But summer in Amsterdam is the finest bargain in Europe. Long evenings, terraces spilling into streets, everyone outside because we’ve collectively understood that this is temporary and must therefore be treated as an emergency. I’ve spent most of this one amazed at my luck in getting to live in it.

I could get used to this.

I have, obviously, booked an enormous amount of travel for the autumn.

This week in photos

Weeknote 2026/22

/ Sharon O'Dea / Leave a comment
A serene Amsterdam canal scene under a clear blue sky. Leafy green trees line both banks, with parked cars, bikes, and small boats (one named "Jocelle") along the water; an arched stone bridge crosses in the distance.
Amsterdam looking resplendent in the sunshine this week (photo by me)

Paracelsus, the 16th-century physician who helped invent toxicology, gave us one of those annoyingly reusable ideas: the dose makes the poison.

He was talking about arsenic. Modern life has broadened the category considerably.

This week featured debates about how many emails someone should receive, how much governance is enough governance, how much exercise compensates for too much travel, and whether every problem can be improved by adding another notification. The answer, as it often is, appears to be: less than whoever designed the system had in mind.

A surprising amount of adult life turns out not to be choosing between good things and bad things. It’s deciding when a good thing becomes too much of a good thing, then trying to hold that line while the world keeps moving underneath you.

This week at work

The question that ate most of the week wasn’t a glamorous one: what’s the right number of emails to send someone?

Every app now offers a digest. A tidy little summary of what you might have missed. And they’re useful, genuinely. They surface the thing buried three days back that you’d never have gone looking for. But each one also lands on top of an inbox that was already too full, and the cumulative effect is more noise, not less. So we spent the week on the unglamorous work: mapping what fires by default, how that lands inside the client’s particular context, and how to test our way toward a balance that actually serves people. Because the default is rarely set for the user. It’s set for some product manager’s Daily Active Users target — a number that measures the vendor’s health, not yours. Getting it right means treating “how often do we interrupt you” as a design decision rather than a checkbox.

Also caught up with a former colleague — now scaling a fast-growing, globally distributed organisation — about how comms and collaboration hold up under that kind of growth. The interesting part: the things that used to happen on their own, the hallway fixes, the overheard niggle defused before it became a feud, now have to be deliberately built. Scale doesn’t just add people. It removes the accidents that used to do the quiet work.

And I spoke at a Unily event, which was a splendid use of a morning. I’d prepped a bunch of talking points: start by actually understanding the problem you’re trying to solve, and — the less fashionable one — that governance has become more critical, not less, as the thing that maintains trust in an AI age. Reassuring, then, that ASML’s session right before mine had arrived at exactly the same place from the practitioner’s side. Always better to be the second person to say a thing.

Also this week

The gym, relentlessly. Strength, HIIT, boxing, four spin classes (two back-to-back). This is, I’ll admit, not a regime so much as a series of overcorrections. On the road I’m too busy and too tired to do anything. Then I come home and attempt to settle the debt in one go, as though the human body operates on the same accounting principles as an Amex card. It does not. But I have become the sort of person who has opinions about kettlebells, so something is working.

A mirror selfie in a dimly lit, dark grey gym studio with wall sconces and ceiling light strips. A woman in all-black workout gear holds up a red-cased phone; kettlebells and mats are visible on the floor.
A dark indoor spin studio lit by red and purple lighting, with a V-shaped neon tube on the mirrored wall. Rows of stationary bikes are occupied by a class of riders; candles in glass holders line the instructor's platform in the foreground.
A woman stands in a pink-walled corridor lined with arched gold-framed mirrors, taking a mirror selfie on a red-cased phone. She wears a navy tank top, black cropped leggings, and black-and-white Nike trainers, one hand on her hip.

The rest of the week was just Amsterdam doing its thing. The sun came out, and the whole city rearranged itself around it — terraces full by four, everyone suddenly somewhere with a drink and nowhere to be. There’s a version of this place in February that tests your commitment. This was not that version. When the weather turns, I’m fairly sure it’s the best city in the world, and I say that with the smugness of someone who gets to keep living here.

Consuming

A pal and I went to see The Devil Wears Prada 2 at the cinema, which was jolly fun. Tl;dr:  Script: 6/10. Styling: 10/10. Aircon: 11/10.

Good for the diehards, a fun one-time watch that doesn’t match the aura of the first. But the part I enjoyed most was Justin Theroux playing a spray-tanned tech billionaire with a receding hairline, trying to buy Runway magazine for his girlfriend after divorcing his altruistic philanthropist ex — the ex, played by Lucy Liu, then going off to solve the world’s problems with her divorce windfall. Remind you of anyone? The film isn’t even coy about it: the girlfriend wants him to buy the magazine so she can run it, which is the Condé Nast rumour with the numbers filed off.

And the script does still spark when it matters, mostly because the best lines go, as they should, to Emily. “May the bridges I burn light my way” is the one doing the rounds, and rightly so. But Miranda’s “You’re not a visionary, you’re a vendor” may be the most useful line I’ve heard all year. I’m trying very hard not to deploy it professionally.

Anyway. The styling is where it earns its ticket. The clothes are smarter and less mockingly ridiculous than the first film. Nobody’s here for the script. We’re here for a dark room, a cold breeze, and Meryl Streep in an iconic coat.

Connections

Dinner this week with Natalie Pereira, who I worked with at Standard Chartered in Asia more than a decade ago and who was in Amsterdam for Money20/20 — along with what felt like half the finance industry.

The bank itself could be a challenging place to work, but it had a remarkable talent for hiring smart, internationally minded people. Natalie was one of them. Back then she showed me around her home city of Kuala Lumpur; this week I got to return the favour, more or less, on the other side of the world.

One of the unexpected dividends of spending years inside global organisations is the network you accumulate: smart, generous people scattered across the map, ready to be caught up with whenever work or life deposits one of you in the other’s city.

We spent most of the evening talking about starting over. Natalie is rebuilding a life in Canada; I’m doing the same in the Netherlands. Different countries, same experience: the paperwork, the cultural recalibrations, the slow business of turning somewhere you live into somewhere that feels like home.

It struck me that we’d landed on the same question that seemed to run through the rest of the week. How much is enough? How much work, travel, ambition, routine, belonging? And how do you hold that balance when the ground keeps moving underneath you?

No conclusions reached, obviously. Just good food, good company, and the comfort of talking to someone a decade and a continent removed from where you first met, and somehow not removed at all.

Two women smiling with arms around each other inside a warm, terracotta-walled café. One wears a black jacket over a zebra-print skirt; the other wears a grey top and cardigan with a tote bag. A street with a parked car is visible through the window behind them.

Published

A little over a month until the book is out, and this week’s teaser is on a subject close to my heart: Why intranets fail: governance, not technology.

The post starts with a familiar story. An intranet is struggling, people are unhappy, and the hunt begins for a culprit. Usually the technology gets arrested first. Wrong platform. Bad search. Over-promised implementation. Time to buy something else.

The trouble is that technology is where problems show up, not necessarily where they begin.

Most digital workplace failures aren’t caused by one catastrophic decision. They’re the cumulative effect of dozens of perfectly reasonable ones. An exception granted here. An ownership gap there. A standard ignored because everyone was busy. Over time, the system becomes harder to manage, harder to trust and harder to change.

Which is why I’m increasingly convinced that governance gets more important as technology gets more capable, not less. AI doesn’t remove the need for guardrails. It raises the stakes when they aren’t there.

My favourite line in the piece is one I’ve shamelessly recycled all week: governance should be cycle lanes, not roadblocks. The goal isn’t control. It’s confidence.

And when it’s working properly, nobody notices it at all. Which is, rather inconveniently, how you know it’s succeeding.

Travel

Nothing this week. I stayed in Amsterdam and, for once, resisted the urge to turn every free weekend into a boarding pass.

Which, given the theme of the week, may have been the correct dose.

A few days at home. Some decent weather. A city that reminded me why I chose it. Not every problem requires a flight.

The reprieve won’t last long. The IABC World Conference in Toronto is suddenly less than a fortnight away, and my preparations remain at the classic stage of “flight booked, details pending”. If you’re in Toronto, Ottawa or Montreal and fancy talking comms, intranets, AI, governance or any adjacent flavour of workplace geekery, give me a shout.

The human side is always the real reason to cross an ocean for a lanyard.

This week in photos

Two people sit facing each other in a discussion. Behind them a large screen reads "Lithos Partners – AI Hotseat with Sharon O'Dea" with the Unily and EX Forum logos. A man in a pink striped shirt sits on the left; a woman in a black-and-white patterned dress and platform heels on the right.
A close-up selfie of three smiling people indoors. Two women on the left (one in a black-and-white patterned top, one in a striped shirt) and a man on the right in a pale pink striped shirt.
A panel discussion at a Unily EX Forum event. Four panelists sit on chairs in front of a screen showing an ASML intranet homepage; a woman in a maroon suit on the right is speaking. A banner reads "Unlocking Business Value from Employee Experience."
An outdoor close-up selfie of two women in sunlight. One has straight brown hair and a white top; the other has sunglasses pushed up on her head, a denim jacket over a floral dress.
A street mirror selfie in Amsterdam, the mirror lettered "BY1OAK" at the bottom. A woman in a light blue striped shirt, denim shorts, and blue trainers holds up a red phone. A souvenir shop and sunny tree-lined street are reflected and visible behind.
A rooftop view over Amsterdam under a clear blue sky, looking across canal-house rooftops toward the Westerkerk tower. A small square with cyclists and a canal sits in the foreground.
A street mirror selfie in Amsterdam, with "SUSPICIOUS" lettered across the mirror. A woman in sunglasses and dark workout clothes makes a peace sign while holding a red phone. A sunny street with café seating and bins is visible behind.
A hand with green-painted nails holds a packaged pair of "7-ELEVEN SOCKS" — white crew socks with orange, green, and red stripes, labelled "comfortable socks with wide opening," against a deep red velvet background.
A dim, intimate cinema with plush tan velvet armchairs and small lit table lamps between rows, facing a blank screen. In the foreground, the photographer's bare feet are propped up; a couple sits near the front.

Weeknote 2026/21

/ Sharon O'Dea / 1 Comment
A candid press-style photo of an audience seated in a row, half-listening, half-smiling at something off-camera. In the foreground left, a woman with shoulder-length light brown hair in a bright blue linen shirt and lanyard, laughing. Next to her, a woman with long mid-brown hair greying at the temples, in a black-and-white spotted blouse, smiles softly while holding a glass of champagne, green-painted nails visible. Beyond her, a man with very short hair in a dark navy blazer looks toward the speaker, and another woman with brown hair in a grey blazer is partially visible at the far right. To the left, a man with a grey beard and glasses, in a pink shirt and lanyard, smiles toward the front. Behind them, a warm wood-panelled wall.
People Connect London, this week (photo by Flip)

Three conferences in four days, a fringe meet-up in a repurposed power station, and a city that simply does not believe in standing still. London in late May is its own weather system: every venue full, every diary triple-booked, every conversation interrupted by someone you haven’t seen in eighteen months. By Thursday I was running on coffee, adrenaline, and the stubbornness that kicks in when home is still a train, a plane, and a cab away.

One of the conferences was at Brunel — named, fittingly, after a man who built the future by paying very close attention to the present. The materials, the labour, the awkward physical realities of how things actually get made. Not, on the evidence of the rest of the week, an approach the industry around me has entirely inherited. Most of the panels I sat through were doing the opposite: confidently speedrunning to What’s Next while quietly hoping nobody asked too many questions about Now.

This week at work

Four days, three conferences, two evening events, and approximately six hundred tiny pastries consumed while standing near branded pull-up banners. I’m writing this with the very specific exhaustion only London can produce.

Monday opened at the Institute for the Future of Work’s Making the Future Work conference — Ghost of Work Future, you might say. I know every event is about AI now; that’s where the energy and the budget have gone. But this one felt particularly captured by it. Endless talk about AI adoption and value generation, and at one point it tipped fully into The Thick Of It territory, with policy wonks enthusiastically announcing something called “Tech Towns” as if we’d all agreed what problem that was solving.

The trouble being that work is actually being reshaped by a huge range of forces: demographic shifts, the long tail of deindustrialisation, post-COVID behavioural change, economic insecurity, collapsing trust in institutions. Technology is part of that picture. It is not the picture. But “AI explains everything” is a very useful narrative for people making money from AI explaining everything.

From there, across London to Brunel for the History of Internal Communication conference — Ghost of Comms Past, and honestly a needed corrective.

“The most powerful internal communications programme in history had no comms director.” That line, from Adriana Borucka on the Gdańsk shipyard uprising, has been rattling around my head ever since. One of those lines that lands harder the longer you dwell on it.

The conference is Professor Michael Heller‘s ambitious attempt to treat our profession as something with a history worth studying. Which sounds obvious until you realise how often internal comms talks as if the field began around the invention of SharePoint.

The reality is older, stranger and messier. The Prudential was publishing Ibis magazine in 1878. Shipyard workers were coordinating with each other — and with the world — in 1980, without a steering group, governance framework or employee listening platform in sight.

A few highlights from a genuinely excellent day: Marc Wright‘s closing keynote, a fond and slightly weary tour through four decades of strategy pyramids, values-on-walls and champions programmes from someone who’s watched every trend come round at least twice. Howard Krais on the shift from paternalistic to participative listening. Yağmur Gündüz on House of Fraser’s internal magazines, which became more successful as they became more personal — funny, that. And Adriana Borucka and Edyta Blachowska making the welcome point that the history of IC is not just a British story told in one accent.

Mairi Maclean’s research on worker participation in the interwar period struck a unexpectedly personal note, as my grandfather was an active trade unionist of that era. He’d talked about participating in the very employer-worker dialogues Prof Maclean talked about, or something very much like them. He’d certainly have some Strong Views on contemporary approaches to engagement as a driver of discretionary effort, expressed with the warmth and precision of vocabulary for which the Scottish working man remains justly celebrated.

What I came away with was this: most of our “new” challenges aren’t actually new. The platforms change. The jargon changes. The consultants’ slides get shinier. But the underlying question — how people make sense of where they are, what they’re doing, and whether anyone’s telling them the truth — stays remarkably consistent.

Apparently the next conference is already being discussed. Which feels promising.

Then on to the Engage Employee Summit — Ghost of Engagement Present. Lots of sensible conversation about trust, fragmentation, relevance, overload, and the need for more humanity at work. Mostly happening directly adjacent to a vendor floor confidently offering software-shaped answers to problems that are, on inspection, almost entirely human.

You cannot platform your way out of a trust deficit. But you can absolutely buy a licence to try.

The employee app Flip invited me to their People Connect meetup — effectively the Engage fringe event — bringing together a good chunk of the London DEX/IC crowd. Lisa Riemers had some real talk on accessibility, a subject the industry still too often treats as an optional enhancement rather than the foundation everything else should sit on.

And it was hosted at the top of the newly refurbished Battersea Power Station, with ridiculous views across London. My first time inside, despite spending most of my adult working life going past it on trains.

There’s probably a metaphor in there somewhere. A vast industrial structure, built to keep the lights on for half of London, retired when the economy shrugged and moved elsewhere, left for decades as a magnificent brick carcass, and now triumphantly reopened as a venue for parting tourists from their money in exchange for trainers and protein bowls. The shell remains familiar. The inside has been scraped out and refilled with the precise commercial sediment of our age: phone shops, athleisurewear, an artisanal something-or-other. Sir Giles Gilbert Scott did not, one suspects, draw the original plans with a Lululemon flagship in mind.

Work is doing the same thing, more discreetly. The shell looks familiar — same job titles, same offices, same Monday meetings. The interior has been quietly scraped out and refilled with something the people inhabiting it are still, in many cases, the last to notice.

In the cracks between conference sessions: client meetings, project wrangling, and the deeply unglamorous work of building the coalition of support every comms programme needs if it’s going to survive contact with reality. Internal politics by another name. No vendor sells it. No keynote celebrates it. It is, however, the bit that matters most.

Also met with a prospective new client about a project that feels like the right kind of difficult — the sort where you’re not entirely sure you can pull it off, which is usually a sign it’s worth doing.

And a surprisingly encouraging flurry of inbound enquiries on top of that. Is the market actually thawing a bit? God knows. But for now I’m choosing optimism.

Also this week

Four solid days of people-ing left very little capacity for actual life-ing. But while in London I also made it to a meet-up organised by the indefatigable Lauren Currie, bringing together female authors to swap books, launch stories, industry gossip and emotional battle scars from the publishing process.

I’ll be honest: by that point in the week I could barely form a sentence. Very glad I went anyway.

A long and genuinely nourishing conversation with Anne Ditmeyer about launch parties, hype squads and book promotion managed, briefly, to tip the balance from utterly exhausted by this entire process to actually kind of excited about it. Which, given how much of my life the book currently occupies, was probably important.

Also managed a night in the pub with friends and an inadvisable number of Neck Oils, plus a proper catch-up with my parents.

The rest of the week was the exact opposite of glamorous business travel: Uber Eats fried chicken eaten alone at a hotel desk, asleep by nine, waking up wondering why every mid-range hotel room appears to have been lit by a committee designing interrogation facilities.

The week LinkedIn never shows you.

Then home. And, as if on cue, the weather lurched directly from March into August. Last week was hats and coats; this weeknote is being written on my terrace at seven in the evening while it’s still 24 degrees outside.

Long walks. Terrace wines. The slow reinflation of a completely flattened brain. On a sunny day Amsterdam really is the best city in the world. And for once, I’m here long enough to enjoy it.

Consuming

Slim pickings this week. No time and, frankly, no remaining cognitive capacity.

The conferences and author meet-up did leave me with a small stack of books though: Rachel Miller’s Successful Change Communication, Ellen C Scott’s Working On Purpose, and a signed copy of Lauren Currie’s Be Upfront.

I’m desperate to read all three, while also increasingly aware that “desperate to read” and “actually reading” have become two entirely separate hobbies.

Otherwise: Netflix. A friend recommended Legends — the British drama series about the infiltration of the early 90s UK drug dealing scene by HMRC — with the entirely accurate pitch: “exactly the kind of mindless guff you need when your brain has stopped functioning.”

Reader, they were correct.

Sometimes the brain wants challenging cinema. Sometimes it wants men in leather jackets explaining wholesale opium logistics in Liverpool circa 1991, cut to a Stone Roses soundtrack.

Connections

A bumper week for this.

A good conversation at IFOW with Anne-Marie Imafidon, who is always considerably sharper and funnier in person than most conference formats really allow for.

The History of IC conference was slightly emotional, in a good way. Lots of reunions with people I haven’t seen in years: intranet veteran Martin White — one of the first people who made me feel welcome in this industry, which I’ve genuinely never forgotten — plus Kevin Ruck, whose IC course I took almost twenty years ago, a sentence that should probably come with some kind of safeguarding warning for my own sense of mortality.

Also Rachel Miller, Jenni Field, Cat Barnard, Suzie Robinson, Ann-Marie Blake, Howard Krais, Katie Marlow, Emma Bridger and Nicola Hearn, and several others who I’ve forgotten to mention.

One of those rare days where half the room contains people who shaped your thinking, and the other half contains people you’ve been in the trenches with.

A long-overdue Soho catch-up with former colleague Chris Harper on a ridiculously beautiful London afternoon.

Engage Employee also threw up a lovely surprise: bumping into my Reworked editor Siobhan Fagan, over from New York. Great to see Nick Crawford, Matthew Burgess and Simone Fenton-Jarvis too, plus catch up properly with teams from vendors I work with, speak to, or mildly heckle on a regular basis — Appspace, Workvivo, Interact, Blink, Flip, Simpplr and Firstup.

A useful reminder that for all the platforms, AI roadmaps and transformation jargon, this industry is still basically the same group of people repeatedly finding each other in conference venues and hotel bars.

A close-up selfie of two women smiling at the camera in a softly lit indoor space. On the left, Sharon O'Dea, a woman with shoulder-length blonde-brown hair wearing a grey top, mouth open in a wide grin. On the right, Dr Anne-Marie Imafidon, with shoulder-length dark curly hair streaked with grey, wearing a black blouse patterned with green and cream botanical shapes, and a navy lanyard.
Two women smiling at the camera, posed close together in an auditorium with empty red seats visible behind. On the left, Sharon O'Dea, a woman with long brown hair in a pale striped shirt. On the right, Rachel Miller with shoulder-length brown hair and dark-rimmed glasses, wearing a teal blazer over a green and pink patterned top. Between them they hold up a copy of her book, Successful Change Communication: How to inform, involve and inspire employees, with the author name "Rachel Miller" visible at the bottom of the cover.
A close-up selfie of two women smiling broadly under pink event lighting. On the left, a woman with shoulder-length light brown hair wearing a pale shirt. On the right, Simone Fenton-Jarvis, with very short hair, a blue stud earring, a black top and a navy "Engage Employee Workhuman" lanyard
Three people at the Appspace conference stand under deep purple and magenta stage lighting. The selfie is taken by Sharon O'Dea, a woman with auburn shoulder-length hair on the left, wearing a blue shirt and Engage Employee Summit lanyard. Behind her, a man in a black Appspace polo shirt stands smiling, and to the right a woman with long dark hair holds up a small fluffy llama soft toy in an Appspace cape. More llama toys sit on the counter. A wall behind them reads "4.8/5 Verified excellence on G2" with a "Spring 2026 Leader" badge.

Travel

None. Three weeks with no airports ahead of me, and honestly that currently feels less like an absence of travel and more like active luxury.

This week in photos

An orange and white easyJet aircraft photographed from close in beside its fuselage at an airport stand, with the distinctive lowercase "easyJet" logo prominent. A boarding stair is in position at the door. In the background, a United Airlines plane is visible at the next stand under a grey overcast sky.
A large auditorium stage at the Institute for the Future of Work conference. On the stage screen, the title reads "Breakout 2: Young People and Work" with the panel members listed beside their photos: Chair Bethan Staton (FT), Ewan Bennie (EY Foundation), Dr Anne-Marie Imafidon MBE (Stemettes), Jessie Leigh (NHS, Cornwall and Isles of Scilly), Oliver Nash (IFOW), and Gabriel Okafor (EY Youth Voice Forum). The "Making the Future Work" branding appears top right with a QR code. Six panellists sit on stage in low chairs in front of a mostly empty audience.
The interior entrance hall of Brunel University London. In the foreground, a large dark grey doormat bears the university's crest and the words "Brunel University London / WELCOME" in white. Beyond, a clean modern lobby with pale walls leads to a staircase, with welcome signage, an easel display board, and a small reception table set up for visitors.
A woman with long red curly hair and glasses, in a black blazer, stands at a lectern beside a wall-mounted screen. The slide is titled "Where we've been: cyclical nature" and shows a grid of speech-bubble quotes with years attached, including "SharePoint will eat the world – 25 years," "Yammer will be the only social platform we'll ever need – 14 years," "Chatbots will replace search – 8 years," and "Everything we write will be from generative AI – 4 years."
A wide shot of the Engage Employee Summit main stage. A speaker in a cream blazer and dark trousers gestures from stage left, with four empty white Eames-style chairs awaiting a panel to her right. The large screen behind her shows a slide titled "The Retreat Into Insularity" with concentric arcs labelled POLARIZATION, GRIEVANCE and INSULARITY, with surrounding factors including discrimination, geopolitical tensions, cost of living, economic displacement, misinformation and global pandemic. The stage backdrop lists sponsor logos including Interact, Poppulo, OAK, Firstup, Workhuman, HiBob, Pluxee and AON. Audience members wearing silent-disco headphones are in the foreground.
A woman in a blue chambray shirt with green-painted nails takes a selfie holding her red-cased iPhone aloft on a black phone lanyard. She holds a glass of champagne in her other hand. Behind her, through floor-to-ceiling windows, a hazy view of London stretches out into the distance under overcast skies.
Lisa Riemers, A woman with short bright red hair, red lipstick and dangling orange earrings, photographed at a networking drinks event. She wears a dark dress under a vivid rainbow-patterned silk jacket and a People Connect lanyard, holding a glass of champagne with orange-painted nails. Behind her, an illuminated Searcys signage circle is visible. A second person in a pale blue shirt is in the foreground, slightly out of focus, in conversation with her.
A panoramic view across central London from a high vantage point, under a soft blue sky with scattered grey-white clouds. The London Eye is visible in the middle distance, alongside the Palace of Westminster and a dense skyline of City skyscrapers, including the Shard. The foreground shows blocks of Victorian terraces, mansion flats and modern apartment buildings stretching to the horizon.
An aerial view of Battersea Power Station's two cream-coloured rear chimneys rising from its red-brick roof, with a glass-roofed atrium and landscaped rooftop gardens in the foreground. Curved white modern apartment buildings and Frank Gehry's white twisted residential blocks sit beyond. A heavy bank of grey cloud fills the sky.
A dimly lit spin studio, awash with deep red and electric blue lighting. A large illuminated neon "V" hangs on the back mirrored wall. At the centre, an instructor with long curly hair, in a black t-shirt and shorts, stands on a raised podium in front of her bike, addressing the class. Rows of riders on Stages spin bikes line either side, some pedalling, some standing. Small votive candles flicker on the edge of the podium
A full-length mirror selfie in a gym, taken against a warm terracotta-orange wall on a black rubber-tiled floor. A woman with dark hair tied back stands with one hand on her hip, the other holding up a red-cased phone to take the picture. She wears a navy heathered sleeveless sports vest, black cycling shorts, white-and-green crew socks, and black Nike trainers, with a square smartwatch on her left wrist and green-painted nails.
A wide view down an Amsterdam canal on a brilliantly sunny day, taken from the middle of a bridge. Long lines of houseboats — red, black, blue and white — line both banks, with one in the foreground sporting a small grass roof garden. Tall leafy trees flank the water, and gabled canal houses rise to the right. In the distance, an iron lift bridge crosses the canal under a deep blue sky streaked with a single contrail.
A hand with green-painted nails and a pale grey watch strap holds up a clear plastic cup of iced coffee, frothed pale orange on top, with a black straw. The cup is branded "Specialty Coffee Bar KAFENION Amsterdam" in black text. Behind the cup, a sun-drenched Amsterdam canal stretches into the distance under a clear blue sky, lined with tall narrow Dutch canal houses, leafy trees in full green, and the white spire of a church tower rising in the background.