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:

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