Weeknote 2026/13

March 29, 2026March 29, 2026 / Sharon O'Dea / Leave a comment

Colorful landmark sign reading 'CURACAO' with a woman standing in front, surrounded by vibrant houses and a clear blue sky. — *Wandering the streets of Willemstad this week.*

There’s a certain kind of wrong that turns out, in the right context, to be exactly right. Jetlag that becomes a productivity hack. A brain that can’t distinguish between languages, accidentally fluent. A notification arriving at precisely the wrong — or possibly perfect — moment.

Curaçao will do that to you. It’s a place that shouldn’t quite work — Dutch colonial architecture in the Caribbean heat, a language built from five others, an island that looks like Delft and feels like nowhere else — and absolutely does.

This week at work

Started Monday strong with a 5am planning workshop — client in Europe, colleagues in Asia, me in Curaçao calculating whether I could make it to the beach by nine. The answer was yes. There’s something to be said for jetlag as a productivity strategy: brutal early start, done and dusted before the Netherlands has made it to lunch, the rest of the day entirely your own.

It works both ways, too. My business partner Jon is in the UK. When I’m east — Japan, say — I’d have the day’s work wrapped before he’d had his first coffee. Now I’m west, he picks things up first, gets them moving, and hands them to me to finish off. Use it well and the timezone gap stops being a problem and starts being a relay baton. As regular readers may have noticed, this is a hack I deploy fairly regularly.

Same client, different challenge: we started mapping out our approach to digital employee experience testing on their new digital workplace. This is the stuff that gets skipped in favour of launch day announcements and gets missed the moment something doesn’t work for real humans in real contexts. Good to see a team treating it as foundational rather than optional.

Thursday brought the formal kick-off with a new client — at the comparatively civilised start time of 7am — and it generated an excellent pile of actions. Early days, but already I’m struck by their pragmatism and genuine appetite to move at pace. That last bit always comes with caveats in a sprawling corporate context, where the gap between ambition and organisational physics can be considerable. But the intent is there, and intent is where it starts.

Friday was more mixed. A conversation with a vendor about fronting some talks — one I’m still turning over. The book needs promoting, and I know the months ahead require me to be more visible, more vocal, more out there. But there’s a version of this that tips into “comms influencer” territory, and I’m not at all sure that’s who I am or want to be. Practitioner first. Sizeable social following, yes, but that following exists because I say things I actually believe. I need to be clear on where the line is before I cross it.

On a more straightforwardly enjoyable note: a good conversation with a public sector organisation thinking hard about launching a new social platform. These projects are tricky anywhere — but in public sector there’s an extra layer of scrutiny that goes beyond “will people use it?” and straight to “can we justify people using it?” The fear that investment gets undermined by employees being too engaged, too social, too human, and the Daily Mail does not like that.

I printed off the book’s manuscript and proofed it on the plane here. Genuinely not bad. I’d buy it. The book website is live — digitalcommunicationsatwork.com — and the marketing machine is slowly cranking into gear. More on that in the weeks ahead.

Also this week

Also this week, in between the early starts and 5am workshops: Curaçao itself. Clear blue water. Sand between the toes. Caves and coves. Jumping into the sea. And the genuinely disconcerting experience of wandering the streets of Willemstad, which looks exactly like a Dutch canal town, except it’s 30 degrees and there are flamingos.

It’s also a genuinely odd linguistic proposition — and an unexpectedly validating one. My brain, when abroad, does not distinguish between languages. It just goes “you’re abroad! Try foreign!” and fires whatever it has. Dutch in Germany. Spanish in Italy. Usually both at once, nouns from one, conjunctions from the other, meaning somewhere in the middle.

It makes no sense anywhere. Except Curacao. Because Papiamentu — the local creole — is built from Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, English, and West African languages. Purity was never the point. It evolved to be understood, by these people, in this place.

At one point this week, the sentence “Spaans of Holandés is fine” came out of my mouth. And somehow, it was.

Consuming

I have a habit of reading the history of a place before I visit. History being, largely, the story of bad men doing awful things, this means my travel reading list is a reliable parade of war, repression, dictatorship, and genocide. I thought Hell’s Gorge — Matthew Parker’s history of the building of the Panama Canal — might be a cheerier proposition. Epoch-defining infrastructure. Human ingenuity. That sort of thing.

Reader, it was not.

Connections

This week’s unexpected connection: I ended up sharing an apartment in Curaçao with Meri Williams — ex-GDS/Monzo, and one of the more interesting people on the internet. This is the second time in six months I’ve ended up on holiday with someone I met on LinkedIn. I’m choosing to see this as a feature of how I socialise now, rather than a symptom of anything.

Coverage

New piece out this week in Reworked: the argument that the HR–IT partnership everyone’s so excited about is missing a third leg. Internal communications keeps getting invited to the table at the announcement stage, long after the decisions are made. That’s not a seat at the table. That’s a chair by the door. The piece is about what genuine shared accountability across all three functions actually looks like — and why AI makes getting this wrong considerably more expensive than it used to be.

I was quoted in the FT this week, in Isabel Berwick’s piece on the rise of ‘third spaces’ as co-working spots: “There was something quite fun about working in a bathrobe and breaking up a hard day’s PowerPoint with a dip in a pool and ten minutes in a sauna.”

I got the notification about this while Working From Yacht, somewhere off the coast of Curaçao. The irony is in no way lost on me.

Travel

Next stop: Panama. Country 89, which is a perfectly normal number of countries to have visited and I will not be taking questions. The plan is a genuine week off — no workshops, no 5am calls, no Working From Yacht. Just me, the Canal, and a book that has already comprehensively disabused me of any romantic notions about what building it involved.

Wish me luck.

This week in photos

A person standing against a bright teal wall with white shutters and a hanging plant, wearing a white shirt and denim shorts.

Close-up of the steeple of a yellow building with a pointed roof and decorative windows against a blue sky.

Weeknote 2026/12

March 23, 2026March 23, 2026 / Sharon O'Dea / Leave a comment

View of a tropical resort pool with two people relaxing in the water, surrounded by palm trees and a beach with lounge chairs in the background. — *Where your email finds m*e *this week.*

This week kept asking the same question in different accents: are you actually there?

I was in London in a room with real humans, which felt notable enough to comment on. I’m ending it in Curaçao, about to spend a week on calls that start before the island wakes up. A client I last worked with a decade ago just came back — presence over a very long arc. I contributed to a piece about organisations failing to show up for employees scattered across a region in crisis. And I watched a lecture (remotely, natch) making the case that where you are has never mattered less, and also never mattered more.

The thread running through all of it: being present isn’t about being in the room. It’s about whether people can feel you’re actually there — as a colleague, a communicator, an organisation. The technology keeps changing. That question stays the same.

This week at work

Where to start? A client I worked with a decade ago is officially back. Which is either a testament to the long game of doing good work, or a reminder that enterprise tech gets replaced roughly as often as a cathedral gets renovated — slowly, expensively, and only when something starts visibly crumbling. Let’s get to work.

Some promising conversations with a long-standing partner about what we might do together later in the year. Nothing to announce. Watch this space.

Hotfooted it over to London for a webinar with employee app Blink on building a successful business case for your internal comms programme. The core argument we made: most comms practitioners either undersell themselves with vague benefits (“it’ll improve culture”) or overclaim with metrics nobody believes. The more useful move is getting specific about what the organisation is actually trying to achieve — retention, speed of change, reduction in noise — and building the case backward from there. Easier said than done, and that’s kind of the point. The Blink team were a great bunch, and there’s something genuinely energising about being in a room with actual humans. (That might have been the studio lights, but I’m choosing to credit the people.)

Sharon O'Dea and Georgie Scott are smiling at the camera in a studio setting, with a green 'Blink' sign in the background and green microphones in front of them.

A young man sits in a studio setting, operating a camera on a tripod. In front of him is a laptop displaying a video call. A microphone and a green pen are placed on a round table, alongside a sheet of paper with a doodle design. The room features modern decor with large windows visible in the background.

A genuinely new client is moving from “we might want to work with you” to “what would that actually look like” — which is progress, even if there’s still plenty of road between here and a signed SoW. I really hope this one makes it. The project has the potential to be ridiculously interesting in the nerdy way that I like.

And on the platform pilot front: moving from ideas into something we think is achievable and defensible. The gap between those two things is where most pilots go to die.

The publisher sent the book proof for final amends. I had it printed — there’s something about reading it on paper that cuts through the screen-blindness you get after staring at the same words for so long they stop meaning anything. Odd to see it all there, solid and sequential, like it’s a real thing now. Which I suppose it is.

Now I write it all down, I can see why I’m so tired.

Also this week

Caught the live-stream of Prithwiraj Choudhury’s inaugural lecture at LSE — The World Is Your Office: AI and the Evolution of Work from Anywhere — and it was excellent. His core premise: talent is equally distributed everywhere. Opportunity isn’t. Work from anywhere (not the same thing as work from home — he’s particular about this) is one way to close that gap, and the evidence on productivity, diversity of applicants, and employee loyalty is genuinely compelling.

The part that stuck with me most was on AI digital twins — the idea that you can now operate physical infrastructure remotely, from a factory floor to an ICU, because the digital layer has caught up with the physical one. And then there’s the CEO bot: an AI trained on Zapier’s Wade Foster that employees couldn’t distinguish from the real thing. (They also rated its responses higher when they knew it was AI. Make of that what you will.)

Plenty to chew on for anyone thinking about how organisations communicate with distributed workforces — which, as it happens, is sort of my whole thing.

I voted in the Gemeente elections. There’s something genuinely refreshing about proportional representation — being able to read the policies, find the party that actually reflects your views, and vote for them. Rather than the eternal British ritual of plumping for the least worst option in your seat to stop the one you really hate getting in.

Saw The Divine Comedy at the Paradiso. Neil Hannon remains one of the great underrated songwriters. That’s all.

Coverage

Contributed to this piece on how internal communicators are navigating the Gulf conflict. Two things I kept coming back to: first, the segmented communications problem — the moment you send targeted, empathetic messages to employees in one geography, you’ve created a discoverability problem, because people talk and share screenshots. Most organisations haven’t solved this. Many haven’t even acknowledged it.

And second: stop trying to standardise the narrative. Standardise the values instead — how you treat people, what support you offer, what you stand for — and trust employees to apply those to the context they’re actually living in. That’s the job.

Travel

This week took me on five planes and to five countries.

I’m writing this while supping a frankly ridiculous cocktail in a bar in Curaçao, which feels like an appropriate way to decompress after a week that required a database to keep track.

The next seven days are nominally remote working, which in practice means brutal jetlag, several 5am calls, and being utterly insufferable on Instagram. You’ve been warned.

This week in photos

Neil Hannon of the Divine Comedy performs on stage with an acoustic guitar, surrounded by musicians and a captivated audience in a well-lit venue.

A person holding an election envelope in Amsterdam, with buildings and a street visible in the background, and a voting sign nearby.

Weeknote 2026/11

March 15, 2026 / Sharon O'Dea / Leave a comment

Four individuals wearing safety gear stand in a messy room filled with debris, holding various tools and equipment. — *Demolition Den: Destroy With Joy*

My ‘key learning’ this week is that there’s something deeply satisfying about smashing things up with a crowbar.

I don’t mean that in a general sense — although, frankly, sometimes I do. I mean that this week I did it literally, in a Rage Room in Tilburg, and it turns out the satisfaction is immediate, physical, and considerable. Highly recommended. Therapeutic, even.

It also got me thinking about why we don’t do it more often in the comms world. Not with crowbars, necessarily. But with content. With the accumulated cruft of years of benign neglect — pages nobody owns, words nobody reads, information that may or may not still be true and which nobody has checked since 2017. We treat it like a priceless Ming vase: migrate it carefully from system to system, preserve it reverently, carry it forward into whatever comes next as if its survival is the whole point. The result is bloat. Confusion. Digital workplaces so cluttered with the sediment of previous decisions that nobody can find anything because everything is there.

Here’s a radical thought: what if we just smashed it up?

Not literally. But yes, occasionally literally. The instinct to preserve, to patch, to apply the sticking plaster and move on is costing us. The organisations doing interesting things with AI and digital workplace aren’t the ones who digitised their filing cabinets. They’re the ones who had a good hard look at what they actually needed, took a crowbar to the rest, and started from something solid.

It’s also, it turns out, remarkably good fun.

This week at work

Spent some of this week reviewing a client’s existing digital workplace. Most people only see their own, so it’s hard to make comparisons. We see loads, so it’s hard not to. This is pretty typical of many we come across: nothing obviously wrong at first glance, but as soon as you start looking in depth, a historic lack of governance becomes visible on the pages. Each one is fine on its own. But with no consistent content guidelines and editors adding their own flourishes over the years, every page is slightly different. Users are left unclear where to look for information — or what’s up to date, or how they’d even confirm that.

This client has huge ambitions for the next iteration of their digital workplace, which we’re (nerdily) excited to bring to fruition. But much of that journey is the slow-but-essential grind of getting solid foundations in place. AI is only an amplifier: if you’ve got solid foundations, the sky’s the limit. If you don’t, you risk chaos.

With the book’s publication imminent, I’m getting ready to promote the shit out of it. I’m doing a bunch of events in the coming months, starting with one this week with my pals at employee experience platform Blink. I’ll be talking about how to successfully ask for budget for your comms platform or programme. Comms folks are often bad at this — we don’t make a credible enough case, using numbers that matter to the business, showing how our plans will add value in areas that matter. We often have shonky numbers too: asking for money for a platform then leaving ourselves £27.50 and a few colouring pens for the content that actually makes a platform worth using. I can rant about this for hours. Or an hour, on Wednesday. Sign up to join in.

Also this week

I took a day off midweek for a day out with my best friends. My best mate came over from the UK, and a bunch of us went down to Tilburg to Demolition Den — a Rage Room, which is exactly what it sounds like. Four perimenopausal women, armed with the accumulated grievances of a shared WhatsApp group, a mildly irritating train journey, and several decades of being professionally reasonable, were handed crowbars and pointed at a room full of tired furniture and glassware.

Reader, we destroyed it.

Heavy metal roared as we cleared shelves with baseball bats, hurled plates at walls, threw bowling balls at shelving units and wailed like banshees. There was glass everywhere. There was screaming. At one point someone hit something so hard it ceased to exist as a recognisable object. It was, without question, one of the most cathartic experiences of my adult life.

Ridiculously good fun. Genuinely therapeutic. Possibly necessary on a biological level. Ten out of ten, would smash again.

A large banner reading 'DEMOLITION DEN' with the tagline 'DESTROY WITH JOY', set against a backdrop of wooden panels. Below, a chalkboard sign directs visitors to 'WAIT HERE' and 'PICK UP', surrounded by illuminated wooden pieces.

Four people in protective gear holding various tools in a cluttered indoor space, featuring damaged walls and furniture.

Another old favourite band of mine, Suede, played their sole Netherlands show in Tilburg, which seemed like as good a reason as any to make a proper trip of it. The band were amazing. The crowd, on the other hand, were a masterclass in collective joylessness. Standing stock still. Arms at sides. Expressions suggesting they’d arrived at the wrong venue and were too polite to leave. Suede are one of the great British live bands — all drama and sweat and Brett Anderson doing things with a microphone stand that probably shouldn’t be legal — and this lot watched it like they were waiting for a connecting flight. At one point Anderson said “if you’re gonna come down the front then at least dance!” He closed the show by suggesting people might try streaming the music before they come next time, so they actually know it. When a frontman starts negging the audience during the encore, something has gone badly wrong.

I don’t think I’ll be going to a gig in Tilburg again.

Consuming

I watched The Wizard of the Kremlin at the cinema. Directed by Olivier Assayas, it follows Vadim Baranov — artist, reality TV producer, and ultimately Putin’s spin doctor — through the chaos of post-Soviet Russia and into the machinery of the regime he helped build. Paul Dano is quietly unsettling in the lead; Jude Law’s Putin is controlled and cold in a way that’s more unnerving than any amount of scenery-chewing would have been. The film is at its most interesting in the detail of how it’s done — the blurring of truth and performance, the way manipulation becomes infrastructure, the point at which a man who knew exactly what he was doing stopped being able to see it clearly.

Mixed reviews, and I can see why — it rushes, and it doesn’t always trust its own material. But it left me unsettled in a way that felt valuable. Because the mechanics on screen — chaos exploited, power consolidated, reality managed — didn’t feel like history. They felt like a playbook currently in active use somewhere else.

Connections

A fab call this week with Julian Mills, a Toronto-based comms pro with a seriously impressive background.

We covered a lot of ground. A couple of things stuck with me. We talked about the demands on on employee attention, and how we consistently overestimate how much bandwidth people can (or want to) devote to being communicated with. His point about AI surfacing years of outdated content with misplaced confidence also landed, not least because I’d spent part of the week looking at exactly that problem in a client’s digital workplace.

The bit I found most interesting: the career risk many communicators feel when the honest recommendation is to do less. That tension between giving good advice and protecting your own position is real, and not talked about enough.

We’ve got a follow-up scheduled, and if all goes to plan, coffee in Toronto in June when I’m over for IABC World Conference. One of those conversations that ended too soon.

Travel

A quick dash to London midweek for the Blink event. In, rant about comms budgets, out.

This week in photos

Exterior view of Tilburg train station featuring a modern architectural design with a prominent sign displaying 'Tilburg'.

A live concert scene with a band performing on stage, dramatic green lighting, and a large backdrop featuring black-and-white images of people. The audience is visible in the foreground, enjoying the performance.

Weeknote 2026/10

March 8, 2026March 8, 2026 / Sharon O'Dea / Leave a comment

*In my Zero F*cks Era* (photo: random man in the audience, thanks)

On Monday night, I saw Belle & Sebastian play their album Tigermilk at the Paradiso. An album I bought on cassette from the Music Exchange in Notting Hill Gate, on my way home from school.

At some point during The Boy With The Arab Strap — a song that namechecks a cock ring and features a recorder solo, and is a certified indie disco banger — I was on stage. Dancing. In front of 1,500 people. Not giving a single shit what any one of them thinks.

It’s my favourite song. I dance on stage to it every time they play it. It makes me unreasonably happy.

Because I’m 45, and I’m all out of fucks.

Just the happiest.

And then I did it all over again at the second Belle and Sebastian gig on Tuesday. And it was pure happiness. 10/10, cannot recommend enough.

A woman giving a thumbs up while standing in front of a musician performing on stage, with colorful lighting and a shadowy background.

The rest of the week looked a bit different. International Women’s Day was coming, and I had an idea to upgrade my now-traditional IWD antics.

In previous years, this meant a Google Form and a spreadsheet. Then, last year, a bit of pre-work with ChatGPT to take some of the legwork out. This year, I knew I could go further. With help from a few good men — male allies, doing the thing rather than just posting about it — we turned my vibe-coded idea into an actual functioning site. People nominate a company they think is saying one thing and doing another on IWD. Behind the scenes, AI does the research: gender pay gap data, leadership representation, discrimination and harassment cases in the news, flexible working policies, the works. All of it compiled automatically, so that I can focus on what I do best.

Being sarcastic on the internet.

By the time of writing (Sunday afternoon): 107 nominations from 10 countries. Everything from small businesses to massive multinationals. I’ve replied to every one that’s posted about IWD. Twenty-six replies posted, with more to come — I’ll be watching for stragglers all week.

The nominations themselves are something. I haven’t totted up the numbers yet, but the pattern is already visible: there’s less to reply to than in previous years. I wish that were progress. It isn’t. Companies are getting better at saying nothing — stepping back from DEI commitments, going quiet, calculating that silence is safer than scrutiny. The problems haven’t gone anywhere. The stories shared with me through the nomination form are heartbreaking and, frankly, enraging. Women underpaid, undervalued, quietly sidelined after maternity leave. Women dealing with harassment while their companies post pink graphics on LinkedIn.

Then there’s the other story — the one that sits alongside every single nomination. A woman who has serious concerns about her own company’s record, but feels more comfortable raising it with me, a stranger, than flagging it internally. I understand that completely. I was in exactly the same position when I was in-house. Raging privately about male colleagues being paid more and getting better bonuses. Feeling not just powerless to say anything, but certain that saying something would see me labelled a troublemaker.

Which brings me back to Monday night.

Belle & Sebastian played Tigermilk — the whole album, start to finish. One of the tracks is called “We Rule the School.” It’s about social hierarchy. It fades out on a repeated lyric: you know the world is made for men / you know the world is made for men / you know the world is made for men.

So there I am, dancing on stage, giving absolutely zero fucks. And I’m also entirely aware that not everyone can do that. That the system — the same one that underpays women, sidelines them, makes them afraid to speak — doesn’t particularly want me to either.

I’m lucky. I’m on the other side now. And I use that freedom, and this platform, for the people who aren’t.

Because we rule the school. Happy IWD, friends.

This week in photos

A woman giving a thumbs up while smiling in the foreground with a musician playing an instrument in the background under stage lighting.

A live music performance with a band on stage, featuring vibrant lighting in red and green hues. The lead singer is singing passionately, while other band members play instruments. The audience is visible in the background, enjoying the show.

Weeknote 2026/09

March 2, 2026March 2, 2026 / Sharon O'Dea / Leave a comment

*Tunis, from a different perspective (photo by me)*

A lot of this week came down to vantage point.

The same road looks completely different depending on whether you drive it every day or have never sat behind a wheel in your life. The same TV show looks completely different from twenty years on — what read as entertainment then reads as something considerably darker now. Even your future self looks different depending on when you do the looking. Sometimes a stranger; sometimes, if you’re lucky, someone you recognise. This was a week for viewing familiar things from unfamiliar angles. I’m not sure I arrived at any grand conclusions. But it’s worth paying attention to when the angle shifts.

This week at work

First edits back from the production editor at Kogan Page. There’s something a bit surreal about watching a collection of documents start to look like an actual book — like, a real one, that will exist in the world and everything.

Which means it’s time to actually tell people about it. We’ve got the bones of a social media plan together, and I’ve accepted the inevitable: the algorithm demands video. I’ve invested in a lavalier mic and made my first one. I still hate it. We’ll see how that goes.

Had a great conversation with Georgia at Blink about a webinar I’m doing for them in a couple of weeks — one of those calls that left me genuinely buzzing afterwards. The talk’s on one of my favourite topics: making the business case for investment in comms.

It’s an area where communicators tend to fall into one of two traps. Either they reach for the fluffy stuff — engagement, culture, vibes — which sounds unconvincing to anyone holding a budget. Or they overcorrect and wheel out large, suspiciously precise numbers: our intranet costs $16 million in lost productivity. Credibility: also not great. What actually works is harder and more interesting — genuinely understanding what matters to the business, and being able to articulate clearly how your plans will deliver real value or solve real problems for the people you’re trying to persuade.

It’s something we go into in depth in the book, and honestly I could talk about it for hours. I only have an hour for the webinar, though — so do come and join me virtually.

Been working through a partnership project, which I always find satisfying in a slightly nerdy way. Mapping out where our respective strengths lie, how they fit together, what the overlap produces. Good work, done well, by people who complement each other. That’s the dream.

Both of our big client projects are moving. We’ve spent time on the unglamorous essentials. RACIs, communication processes, all the scaffolding nobody wants to talk about but everything depends on. With that in place, the pace has picked up noticeably.

Also this week

Finished off my trip to Tunisia with a morning of quad biking — threading through Djerba’s back alleys, out to the beach, and at one point, onto an actual road. Alongside actual cars. I have never had a single driving lesson in my life. It was unexpectedly, almost embarrassingly, thrilling.

It got me thinking about how something utterly ordinary to most people — something they do every day without a second thought — can feel completely novel, challenging, even a little scary, to someone else. Familiarity is so relative.

*Me, in charge of an actual vehicle. No one was harmed.*

Back home, on to something more grounded: a workshop with leadership coach Neil Schambra Stevens on kindness as a tool for grounding and resilience. He made the case for being deliberately unstimulated — giving your brain space to actually think, analyse, create, rather than just react to the next notification. The science backs him up: acts of kindness at work reduce cortisol, increase serotonin. Being nice, it turns out, is good for you.

One of the exercises involved visualising your perfect day ten years from now — which reminded me of something similar I did on a Futures Thinking course with Jane McGonigal at Stanford. Jane introduced a finding I’ve never quite let go of: psychologically speaking, our future self is essentially a stranger. UCLA psychologist Hal Hershfield found that when people think about their future selves, the same brain regions activate as when they think about a stranger — someone neurologically other. We routinely make sacrifices for the people we love, and even for strangers. The one person we reliably fail to look after is our future self.

So it surprised me, doing the visualisation today, to find that my perfect day in ten years looked remarkably like now. Not identical, but recognisable. Continuous. It’s not something I could have said a decade ago. And that left me oddly reassured that the path I’m on is one I’m happy with.

Neil’s talk of digital distraction also landed close to home, given how much of my work focuses on digital employee experience. The uncomfortable truth is that digitisation too often makes the overwhelm worse — trading real relationships for mediated ones, colleagues for bots, presence for automation. Good digital employee experience should be hiding complexity, reducing context-switching, lightening cognitive load. But we also need to make the case to leaders for the value of the analogue. For the dull task that resets the mind. For boredom as a precondition for deep thinking. For understanding that a Teams presence indicator fading to amber might, just occasionally, mean someone is doing their best work.

Consuming

Finished Eve MacDonald’s Carthage: A New History of an Ancient Empire on the plane home from Tunis. A fitting end to what has become, I’ll admit, a fairly extended Punic Wars obsession. Normal service will now resume.

Which meant I arrived home ready for something more highbrow. Specifically: Netflix’s Reality Check: Inside America’s Next Top Model. A show I occasionally dipped into back in the day, apparently entirely failing to register how jaw-droppingly problematic it was. Watching it now, from a distance of twenty-odd years, is a genuinely uncomfortable experience.

The parallels with Sarah Ditum’s Toxic, which I read when it came out in 2023, are hard to miss. Ditum’s argument is that the early 2000s produced a specific, particularly vicious strain of misogyny: one that dressed itself up as entertainment, that made the humiliation of women into a spectacle, and that everyone more or less went along with because the culture said it was fine. Top Model is practically a case study. The relentless scrutiny of women’s bodies. The casual cruelty framed as mentorship. Tyra Banks telling a contestant she’s disappointed in her… for eating. What’s striking isn’t that it happened; it’s that it was primetime. That it had fans. That I was, occasionally, one of them, watching it without a flicker of discomfort.

That’s what both the documentary and Ditum’s book are really about: not just what was done, but how completely normal it seemed at the time. Which inevitably raises the question of what we’re all cheerfully consuming right now that will look equally horrifying in 2045.

Travel

Home this week and next, which is a novelty. But the diary has suddenly filled up with a fairly alarming number of trips over the coming months. I guess this is what promoting a book looks like.

This week in photos

A charming white building with vibrant blue doors and a balcony, covered in greenery, under a clear blue sky.

A colorful courtyard decorated with hanging woven baskets and vibrant fabric canopies, casting playful shadows on the cobblestone floor, featuring graffiti on the walls.

Weeknote 2026/07

February 15, 2026 / Sharon O'Dea / Leave a comment

A scenic view of a canal in a city, lined with brick buildings and parked bicycles. Several boats are visible in the water, along with whimsical, white paper-like figures resembling birds, creating an artistic touch to the urban landscape. — *Back home in Amsterdam (photo: Sharon O’Dea)*

Consulting is a game played over years, not weeks. Some engagements are about architecture and impact. Others are about helping procurement tick a box before buying what they were always going to buy.

The ratio varies depending on market conditions, how disciplined you are about qualifying leads, and whether you’re willing to walk away from bad-fit work when the pipeline looks thin. Most small consultancies say they’re selective. Most small consultancies also have mortgages.

The discipline is remembering that not every loss is a mistake — but some are instructive.

This week at work

We had the official kickoff with a new client this week, and it’s one of those projects that makes you feel the stretch in a good way. Ambitious scope. A platform that’s new not just to us, but to the industry. And a brief that isn’t “launch an intranet” but “design the foundations for an agentic-first communication architecture.”

Content structured for humans and AI agents. Governance designed with automation in mind, not bolted on afterwards. Distribution built around orchestration rather than broadcast.

It’s rare, in this field, to work on something that feels genuinely new. Most of what we do is evolutionary — cleaning up legacy, untangling compromises, retrofitting governance onto yesterday’s shortcuts. This feels different. I’m relishing it.

Less positively, we were also knocked back on a proposal this week. One we’d invested in properly.

We were recommended in by a former client. We had multiple constructive calls. We built demos. We did due diligence. We produced a draft project plan — explicitly positioned as a working document for discussion.

The moment that draft landed, the temperature changed. Silence.

Then, weeks later: “We’ve decided on a change of direction.”

Reader: there was no change of direction. There was a decision already made. Our work simply helped validate it — or more accurately, helped their procurement team tick the “we got an alternative proposal” box before buying what they’d already decided to buy.

This is a pattern small consultancies recognise instantly. You’re invited in to cost the hard bits — content, governance, migration, adoption — so a glossy platform decision can survive CFO scrutiny. You expose the complexity. You quantify the risk. You make the organisational reality visible.

And then that thinking becomes unpaid pre-sales support for someone else’s commission.

Let’s call it what it is: extracting expertise without paying for it.

It’s short-termism disguised as process. And it disproportionately hurts smaller firms, because speculative proposal work is not a rounding error for us. It’s days of senior time. It’s pulling in partners. It’s opportunity cost.

What makes it worse is the economics.

The organisation hasn’t “saved money.” They’ve simply shifted where it’s spent — typically towards a vendor backed by private equity, buoyed by marketing budgets, promising “turnkey” simplicity that rarely lives up to reality.

They will still need content. They will still need governance. They will still need adoption work. Software does not generate clear ownership, accurate information or disciplined lifecycle management by magic. It just generates invoices more efficiently.

You can underpay for advice or overpay for consequences. The invoice arrives either way.

The only guaranteed winner in this dynamic is the vendor.

And that’s the part that leaves a faint sadness beneath the anger. Because we actually want these programmes to succeed. We care about the long-term architecture, not the quarter’s sales target. Which is precisely why we’re less convenient to hire.

But then the very next day, we got the green light on a new project with a far more interesting client. One where the conversations are candid. Where the problem is complex in the right way. Where substance beats theatre. Where we’re building something durable, not decorative.

But that’s the gig. One minute you’re being picked clean like a buffet carcass by people who consider “market research” a legitimate use of your skull contents. The next, you’re signing something that actually matters. The whiplash is simply the cost of staying solvent.

Also this week

Accidentally had a week of AI immersion. Three sessions, three lenses — but a surprisingly consistent message.

The first focused on protecting our “human OS”: judgment, stance, taste, sense-making and responsibility. AI can inform and accelerate. It cannot own consequences. (Though it’s certainly convenient for those who’d prefer not to.)

The second, at Work/Shift, made the uncomfortable observation that individual productivity gains aren’t translating into organisational value. People are faster. Teams are not. AI is amplifying whatever system it enters — including half-finished transformations and fuzzy accountability. If your organisation isn’t legible to itself, it certainly won’t be legible to machines.

Kim England shared an instructive example from Pearson: a five-day reduction in customer response time only happened after fixing broken processes. AI layered on top of clarity works; AI layered on top of chaos simply scales it at premium margins.

The third was the launch of IABC’s AI Special Interest Group — communicators recognising that we’re now in the room for governance and ethics whether we like it or not. The tone was less “how do we deploy this?” and more “how do we remain human while we do?”

Across all three, the pattern was clear.

There’s a growing murmur that AI isn’t living up to enterprise hype. Gains are localised, uneven, individual. The transformation dividend hasn’t shown up in the quarterly numbers.

But that often precedes normalisation. The dip before the Plateau of Productivity. Or the bit where everyone stops mentioning the initiative while still paying the licence fees. Which makes this moment less about disappointment and more about architecture.

If AI is going to move beyond personal productivity hacks and into collective capability, the foundations matter. Governance. Context. Team coherence. Legible decision-making.

In other words: exactly the sort of agentic-first communication architecture we kicked off this week. Funny how these things converge.

Consuming

Work didn’t leave much time for TV or reading this week, but I did re-watch the original Star Wars in preparation for our forthcoming trip to actual Tatooine.

Not “inspired by.” Not “filmed near.” Actual Tatooine.

There is something deeply pleasing about revisiting the 1977 version — before the CGI accretions, before the franchise industrial complex metastasised into a content vertical, when it was just slightly wonky world-building, questionable haircuts and a desert that genuinely looked like it might ruin your moisturiser.

Watching it now, you can see how much of modern storytelling muscle memory it created. The pacing is almost quaint. The practical effects hold up alarmingly well. And the optimism — that scrappy, analogue rebellion energy — feels oddly refreshing in an era of algorithmically optimised content engineered to perform well in A/B testing.

It also turns out that once you know you’re going somewhere that lent its name to Tatooine, every sand dune becomes a scouting exercise.

I cannot promise I won’t hum the theme tune the entire time.

Travel

On Thursday, we’re heading to Tunisia for the first time.

Roman ruins. Star Wars geography. Sahara edges. North African food that I suspect will permanently recalibrate my spice tolerance.

It’s a short trip, so this week is all anticipation. Next week: sand, ruins, and (inevitably) reflections.

If you’ve got Tunis tips, send them quickly. Binary sunsets pending.

This week in photos

Two kayakers paddling in a canal surrounded by historic buildings in Amsterdam, with a cloudy sky overhead.

A downward view of a spiraled wooden staircase leading to an exit, surrounded by vintage signs and dark wooden walls.

Weeknote 2026/06

February 8, 2026 / Sharon O'Dea / Leave a comment

A laptop on a wooden table next to a Heineken 0.0 beer bottle, with a view of a lounge area in the background. — *Back on the road this week (photo: Sharon O’Dea)*

One of the more unexpected joys of writing a book is watching the pre-orders trickle in — each one a small, specific vote of confidence from someone who’s decided they’d like to read what you’ve written before it actually exists. It’s encouragement from the future, which feels oddly fitting for a week spent largely planning things that haven’t happened yet: workshops, proposals, projects that may or may not materialise. Much of the work was invisible, preparatory, and entirely unshowy. But it was there. And sometimes that’s enough.

This week at work

This week brought a flurry of conversations about potential new work, all via people I’ve worked with before who’ve since moved on to new organisations. Which is a pleasing reminder that doing good work, and not being a pain to deal with, remains the most reliable marketing strategy available.

Those conversations have already turned into two live proposals. Each proposal we do is entirely bespoke — no rinse-and-repeat templates here — which means they take a minimum of half a day to pull together, and often stretch over several days once the thinking, shaping, and sense-checking are properly done. I always underestimate how long these take, despite all available evidence.

We’ve got a workshop coming up this week, and spent a good chunk of time planning how to use that time well. Workshops are often treated as the work itself, when really they’re about setting the tone for the many months of work that follow. The challenge — and the point — is creating enough structure to help a diverse group of stakeholders with genuinely divergent views get to alignment and agreement, without flattening those differences or rushing to false consensus. Much of the real work happens before anyone enters the room: designing the flow, deciding where decisions actually need to be made, and being very deliberate about what doesn’t need to be debated on the day.

I also had a great call with the team from an employee experience and intranet app vendor. It’s always refreshing when vendors are open and thoughtful in response to the more awkward questions — recognising that edge cases are simply the price of doing business with the kind of complex organisations we advise. We’re never asking those questions to trip anyone up; we ask them because those messy, inconvenient realities are exactly what make a platform work, or not, in practice.

We also kicked off a promotion plan for the book. It’s been genuinely heartwarming to see how many people have already pre-ordered it — a small but steady drumbeat of encouragement from the future.

Also this week

Otherwise, a relatively quiet one. Gym sessions, and a new Sanctum class location — in a nightclub near my house. My first time setting foot in a nightclub in many years, and the fact it was for an exercise class says a great deal about my gentle but unmistakable slide into decrepitude.

A trip to the UK also meant I finally got to catch up with my brother and his wife, who I hadn’t seen in far too long.

All in all, one of those weeks that felt busy in the head, quieter on the surface, and better for the balance of the two.

Consuming

Pretty light this week, but I have been mainlining Irish Traitors to fill the Traitors-shaped gap in my life. It’s exactly the right level of drama: suspicious looks, mild hysteria, and strategic betrayal, all played out with just enough restraint to stay entertaining rather than exhausting. Add in the Irish lilt, a healthy fondness for swearing, and a cast who sound permanently on the verge of telling someone to cop on, and it’s been the perfect comfort watch.

Connections

I met with the founder of Statement to talk through plans for the next phase. It was great to shoot the breeze in person, and it reminded me why I was excited by the concept and vision in the first place — one of those conversations that leaves you a little clearer, and a little more energised, than when you arrived.

Travel

Incredibly, I made it all the way to February without setting foot in an airport. Normal service has now resumed; I’m writing this weeknote from an airport lounge.

The next six months will see me heading to three different continents, and I promise to be as infuriating about it as ever.

This week in photos

View from a gym window overlooking a cityscape at sunrise, with a treadmill interface displaying various workout options.

Close-up view of feet in white socks standing on a gym floor next to a barbell with yellow and green weight plates.

Weeknote 2026/05

February 2, 2026 / Sharon O'Dea / 1 Comment

Night view of a canal in Amsterdam with illuminated buildings, boats, and a dome-shaped structure in the background. — *Amsterdam, Monday (photo: Sharon O’Dea)*

January is finally behind us. And yesterday was St Brigid’s Day, which for Irish people marks the start of spring. Not actual spring, obviously (it’s still absolutely baltic) but the promise of spring. A loosening. A sense that the light is thinking about showing up again, if it can be arsed.

That feels about right for this week: decisions made, things taking shape, and the faint sense that we might be emerging from winter with our critical faculties mostly intact. SharePoint is still not free, AI is still raising more questions than answers, and I’m still promoting a book with the shamelessness of someone who’s made their peace with being insufferable. But at least we’re moving in the right direction.

This week at work

We’ve been helping a client weigh up building a SharePoint/Viva Engage digital workplace versus buying something off-the-shelf. Comms teams get nudged—shoved, really—towards SharePoint on the basis that it’s “free,” which is a bit like saying a puppy is free if you ignore the food, the vet bills, the training, and the fact it’ll outlive your sofa.

A genuinely good SharePoint site takes time, skill, and ongoing investment. Off-the-shelf platforms are quicker to deploy and deliver a noticeably better experience out of the box—but at the cost of flexibility and an annual licensing bill that makes finance wince. We’ve been walking stakeholders through the real benefits, drawbacks, and long-term costs so they can actually just… decide. And move on.

I also sat through a Gartner webinar on the future of work which was—unexpectedly—genuinely useful. One thread stuck with me all week: the growing cognitive impacts of GenAI use.

We’re enthusiastically embedding AI into everyday work, but doing far less thinking about what that does to judgement, decision-making, and sense-making over time. Not a dystopian meltdown—something subtler and arguably more worrying. I shared some thoughts on LinkedIn, going against platform orthodoxy by posting troubling questions rather than easy answers. Because there aren’t any.

Alongside that, I started planning an upcoming client kick-off workshop. This is a phase I genuinely love: the careful choreography before everyone arrives clutching their assumptions like emotional support animals and their strong opinions like concealed weapons.

And with the book now submitted, we’ve started thinking about how to promote it. Prepare for sustained, shameless self-promotion. I will not be taking questions about my dignity at this time.

Also this week

I’m trying to try more things this year. Doing things, making things, learning things. Fewer hours doomscrolling through other people’s catastrophes, more hours with actual materials that can’t algorithmically enrage me.

This week that took the form of an assemblies workshop, where the founder of Sets Studio helped us make a lamp, loosely inspired by the sculptural work of Issey Miyake and Isamu Noguchi.

The process was fun, genuinely interesting, and harder than I expected—always a good sign. A pleasingly absorbing way to spend an afternoon, and a chance to make something with my hands rather than my opinions.

I also now own one more object that will clutter up my house until I inevitably chuck it in a guilt-purge sometime around 2027.

A woman presenting with a laptop in a meeting room, with a projector screen displaying an image, while attendees sit at a long table with drinks and notebooks.

A metallic mesh sculpture resembling a pyramid, set on a table with various glasses and utensils in the background.

Consuming

A friend and I went to the cinema to watch Cover Up, the Netflix documentary on the life and work of Seymour Hersh. It was heavy going, and I was glad not to watch it alone—very much the sort of film that needs a decompression chat afterwards, ideally accompanied by wine.

It revisits Hersh’s biggest stories, particularly My Lai and Abu Ghraib, and keeps circling the same unsettling question: how normal people dehumanise others, and what conditions make that kind of abuse possible. The film doesn’t flinch from Hersh’s own mistakes either, which saves it from the usual Great Man bollocks and gives it a welcome sharpness.

What landed hardest were the moments interspersed with him speaking to sources in Gaza, watching the same patterns repeat in real time. The central argument—about the role of a free press in protecting human rights—felt stark enough on its own. The timing made it worse, coming amid fresh headlines about journalists being arrested in the US, because apparently we’re speed-running every authoritarian playbook simultaneously now.

Uncomfortable viewing, but important. The kind of important that makes you want to lie on the floor afterwards.

Connections

This week I finally met up with Alexis Jimenez, who I first met on Twitter back when it was full of wonderful humans rather than Nazis and grifters, but had somehow never crossed paths with in real life. He was in town for a work event, so we did the sensible thing and prioritised dinner over whatever corporate nonsense had brought him here.

We covered Amsterdam, sales, Dutch food, running, and the absolute state of everything—which feels like the correct agenda for finally turning an internet acquaintance into an actual person. One of those reminders that some of the best professional relationships start as tiny avatars with opinions, before the platform inevitably goes to shit.

*Alex and me in a freezing cold Amsterdam street*

Coverage

Another week, another podcast—this one with a pleasingly quick turnaround, because this book isn’t going to flog itself and I’ve fully accepted my fate as a relentless self-promoter.

I joined Cofenster’s Chris Brennan for a conversation about navigating digital communication in an era of suffocating noise. We talked infobesity (yes, I’m still pushing that term), why quality actually matters when everyone’s drowning in content, and what human-centred communication looks like when people are stretched, distracted, and operating at 60% capacity on a good day.

We also covered video, experimentation, audience insight, and where AI genuinely helps—spoiler: personalisation—without falling into the usual breathless “AI solves everything” nonsense that’s currently clogging LinkedIn.

Available on all your favourite podcast platforms, assuming you still have the attention span for podcasts.

Travel

It’s been over a month since I last left the country—the longest uninterrupted stretch at home since 2020, when “staycation” stopped being aspirational and became a legally enforceable lifestyle. It feels profoundly wrong, like I’ve forgotten how to perform my natural habitat: departure lounges and budget airline coffee.

But this week normality resumes. I’m off to the UK for meetings that will definitely justify the carbon emissions. And there’s plenty more travel after that, because I’ve apparently committed to a lifestyle that involves eating meal deals in hotel lobbies. Normal service (by which I mean “perpetual motion with occasional invoicing”) restored.

This week in photos

A nighttime view of a canal bridge adorned with glowing lights, reflecting in the water, surrounded by illuminated buildings and bicycles.

A gym scene reflecting through a glass partition, showing a person sitting on a bench taking a selfie with a phone, while another person is working out in the background.

Weeknote 2026/04

January 25, 2026January 25, 2026 / Sharon O'Dea / Leave a comment

A vibrant display of red and green tulips stacked on a market table, with a blurred background featuring a red car and boxes of flowers. — *It’s tulip season again (photo: Sharon O’Dea)*

A Wall Street Journal story caught my eye this week, showing a striking gap between how much time CEOs claim AI is saving them, and how little difference it’s making to working lives for everyone else. Which makes sense: if you’re senior enough, saved time comes back to you. If you’re not, it just creates space for more tasks to rush in and fill the gap in your to-do list.

It’s a useful test for most things we currently label as “progress”. AI. Trust initiatives. New ways of working. Not whether they sound impressive, but who actually gets the gains. This week I found myself on both sides of that equation.

This week at work

The work that actually landed this week reinforced how new doesn’t always mean shiny — and the most interesting work often happens in the gaps nobody’s quite bothered to map yet. We’ve been working with a client on preparing their internal content for an agentic-first future, which sounds like the sort of consultant waffle that should come with a health warning but actually just means: what happens when your systems stop passively sitting there like well-meaning idiots and start doing things with your content? Making decisions. Taking action. Possibly developing opinions about your governance framework. It’s been genuinely exciting to think through. The sort of work that makes you sit up slightly straighter because it feels like you’re operating at the edge of something that hasn’t quite settled yet, which is either thrilling or deeply unnerving, depending how your week’s going.

Predictably, it’s also reinforced the least fashionable truth in comms: none of this works without solid foundations. Clear content. Sensible structure. Agreed ownership. The boring stuff. The stuff that makes people’s eyes glaze over in workshops. It was never about the tools, and it still isn’t.

I also read the Edelman Trust Barometer this week, found myself increasingly irritated by the conclusions, and wrote about it for Strategic. The response suggested I wasn’t alone in my scepticism. There’s something about the annual ritual of treating a global perception survey as if it were both diagnosis and cure for trust that reliably sets my teeth on edge. Plenty of people agreed with my view that we shouldn’t be too quick to congratulate ourselves on employers being the most trusted institution: it’s only because we’re the least worst in a world where everything’s gone comprehensively to shit. Edelman’s prescription — “trust brokering” — might make communicators feel momentarily useful, like we’ve been handed a purpose and a tote bag, but we’re not in any position to fix fractured societies through great workplace facilitation and a really solid Q&A format. Lots of nodding along in the LinkedIn comments, which is always reassuring (if slightly depressing).

On the book promo front, I recorded a conversation with Chris Brennan from Cofenster, an AI video company for internal comms. Regular readers will know I’m something of a workplace video sceptic. A words person. A face for text. Too old for TikTok. I resent something being shoved into a one-minute video when a single sentence would do the job, sitting there in its tab demanding my undivided attention like a needy bastard. People have limited time, limited attention, and often limited reason to care — and video is a particularly demanding format if you get it wrong. Which, let’s be honest, most people do. Despite all this barely-suppressed hostility, we found ourselves agreeing on more than we disagreed on: video has a place, but only when it’s intentional, respectful of time, and actually good. AI can help with that. It can also automate the production of absolute drivel at industrial scale, so, you know.

Also this week

Off the back of the taiko drumming workshop I did in Japan, I signed up for a class here in Amsterdam. Extremely fun, deeply physical, and unexpectedly calming — all rhythm, coordination and collective focus. I will absolutely be drumming again.

I was also delighted to get confirmation that we’re bringing 300 Seconds back to Camp Digital this year. This will be our fourth outing: five-minute talks from first-time speakers, showcasing new voices and perspectives. Camp Digital is always an absolute corker — smart, thoughtful, genuinely cross-disciplinary — and I love that it consistently makes room for people who don’t usually put themselves forward for a conference stage. If you manage or mentor talented people who have something to say but might not yet see themselves as “speakers”, please nudge them in our direction.

I’m especially chuffed to see Jane Bowyer, one of last year’s 300 Seconds speakers, appearing on the main conference agenda this year — exactly the outcome this format is designed to create. Huge thanks to the Nexer Digital team for carving out space for this again. Manchester in May: firmly in the diary.

All of which put me in a suspiciously good mood — the kind that briefly convinces you you’re on top of things. Feeling unusually competent, I made the classic error of assuming this was a good moment to finally deal with my expenses.

And in a stunning personal breakthrough: I cracked them. With AI’s help. This is not a small thing. I hate admin. I am catastrophically terrible at expenses. My avoidance of them has been a recurring source of low-level stress and occasional quiet despair. The sort where you lie awake at 3am wondering if HMRC has a special category for “tax evader through sheer incompetence and avoidance.”

But this week, I finally built myself a system that works with my brain rather than against it. And for once the efficiency actually benefited me.

Some context: I am in the unfortunate position of being both dreadful at admin and having a complex financial life. Businesses and homes in two countries, multiple currencies and accounts, frequent travel. A combination that lends itself not to calm quarterly expense management but to spreadsheet paralysis and elaborate procrastination, usually involving reorganising the kitchen.

For years, the problem wasn’t the maths. It was the ‘activation energy’. Too many receipts, too many edge cases, too much scope to get something slightly wrong and then feel dreadful about it for weeks. So instead of trying (again) to “be better at expenses” — a resolution that has failed me annually since roughly 2012 — I built a system that does the thinking with me.

The result: a task I’d been avoiding for months got done in a morning, and I could stop feeling guilty and stressed about it.

And this, I think, is the bit that often gets missed in the AI efficiency conversation. AI can make us more efficient — but only if we’re allowed to keep the gains. In irritants removed. In tasks genuinely finished. In stress not carried around for weeks and keeping you awake at night. And sometimes, if you’re lucky, in the ability to take that reclaimed time or money and reward yourself with something tangible — like booking a holiday and remembering what it feels like to be slightly ahead of your life rather than chasing it.

(If you also hate doing expenses, there’s a short note at the bottom of this post on how I did this myself.)

Consuming

Like much of the UK, I have been completely gripped by The Traitors. This is the first time in years I’ve curtailed an evening out with friends on purpose so I could be home at a specific time to watch a television programme as it was broadcast. All round, it’s top-notch TV: pacey, absurd, psychologically vicious, and impeccably cast. I now have no idea what to do with my evenings now that it’s finished. I suppose I could go back and watch the first three series, which I somehow failed to get around to at the time — a rare luxury, discovering you’ve accidentally stockpiled excellent television.

At the other end of the spectrum, I read On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century, which I picked up after hearing Timothy Snyder speak last week. It’s a short read, but a bracing one — and it feels especially urgent given events in Davos and the US this week. Not exactly comfort reading, but the sort of book that sharpens your thinking and makes it harder to wave away things you’d rather not look at too closely.

Coverage

Jonathan and I popped up on Mike Klein and Janet Hitchen’s Navigating Disruption podcast, talking about the present (and alleged future) of work. It was a genuinely refreshing conversation, mostly because it refused the usual Anglo-Saxon rut: endless RTO discourse, a light dusting of AI panic, and everyone pretending the “future of work” is being drafted in a WeWork somewhere between London and San Francisco.

This episode was recorded with me in Japan, Janet and Jonathan in two different UK cities, and Mike in Iceland — which rather made the point for us. Work is already global, hybrid, mobile and messy; the debate just hasn’t caught up. With Mike about to head to India for a study visit, we talked about demographic realities that completely reshape the problem statement: Japan’s rapidly ageing population and shrinking workforce, versus India’s surge of young people joining the workforce faster than jobs can be created. The “future of work” isn’t a singular. It’s a patchwork — and a lot of it is already happening.

We also ended up, inevitably, back in our home territory: comms and digital channels are still designed around an outdated archetype of the Western office worker, while real organisations are a mix of employees, contractors, outsourced teams, mobile workers, and people in places where the power and wifi don’t behave reliably. The challenge isn’t “how do we boost engagement?” so much as “how do we enable people to do good work, wherever and however they’re doing it?”

A note on how I finally did my expenses (without hating every second)

As mentioned above, I’ve finally cracked expenses with AI’s help. And I’m sharing the approach in case it’s useful to other admin-haters out there.

Realising that what was stopping me getting this job done was the combination of data entry and detail-orientation, I experimented with building a custom agent to do it for me.

I used AI as a patient, non-judgemental admin assistant, not as an accountant. I fed it photos of receipts, bank statements, and my often rambling explanations, and asked it to turn those into the exact structured format I needed to submit to my accountant.
I didn’t just dump everything in and hit go. I worked one statement at a time, sense-checking the outputs, confirming accuracy, and correcting it where needed.
Each pass made the agent better. I tweaked the instructions as I went — clarifying rules, edge cases, VAT treatment — so it gradually learned how my finances work.
I gave it the rules once (what counts as a business expense for me, what needs explanation, what doesn’t) and reused that context.
I asked for very specific outputs: itemised lists, totals, and notes I could paste straight into my spreadsheet
Crucially, I stayed responsible for the final check. It reduced the load; it didn’t absolve me of responsibility.

And doing that means a task I’d been dodging for far too long finally got done. Even the fiddly little ones I’d previously have decided weren’t worth the. effort.

The broader lesson (for me, at least) is that AI is at its most useful not when it’s doing flashy, impressive things, but when it removes friction from the tasks you dread, so they actually get done.

This week in photos

A group of traditional drums arranged in a circle on a wooden floor, with two individuals visible in the background. The setting appears to be a rehearsal space.

Scenic view of a canal in Amsterdam, featuring historic buildings reflected in the water during early evening.

Weeknote 2026/03

January 18, 2026January 19, 2026 / Sharon O'Dea / Leave a comment

Night view of a historic clock tower beside a canal, with illuminated buildings and street lamps in Amsterdam. — *Amsterdam, again (photo: Sharon O’Dea)*

This week involved a disconcerting amount of physical reality.

People materialised in actual rooms. Ideas escaped their Google Docs and did things to other humans in real time. Work happened in ways that required shoes—sometimes even presentable ones. Collaboration, usually a distributed affair mediated by timestamps and emoji reactions, briefly acquired mass and occupied three-dimensional space. It was all very analogue, in that faintly unnerving way analogue things are when you’ve forgotten they exist.

I hadn’t quite realised how thoroughly my working life now exists as a theoretical proposition rather than a physical practice until this week gently but firmly dragged me back into corporeal form.

This week at work

We delivered an ‘infobesity’ workshop with Swoop at ING—their term for information overload, and a very good one, which resonated immediately with me, a middle aged woman who has tried and failed at every diet known to (wo) man.

The morning brought together a collection of comms people from pleasingly complex organisations. And I’ll admit it: I love running workshops. The architecture of ideas, the careful choreography, that electric moment when something actually lands in a room full of people who’ve heard everything before. It went well. People were open, honest, collaborative, generous with their ideas and tolerant of our extended metaphors. And that’s the best I can hope for.

It was also my first public outing of the “Infozempic” concept, which I’d been nursing like a potentially embarrassing joke at a wedding. The collective intake of breath when I said it—that visceral ohhh—was gratifying in a way that probably says something unflattering about me. The metaphor hit a nerve. Possibly because everyone’s drowning and I just named the water.

A presenter speaks to an audience during a presentation about obesity, with images of food displayed on a screen behind her. — *Me at the workshop this week. Photo: Gemma Saint*

The feedback was effusive enough that I immediately carved out time to write an extensive blog post on the same theme. Yes, responding to a workshop about information restraint by producing more information is ironic in a way that would make Alanis Morissette weep. But when an idea has heat, you chase it. Better a considered piece written in the moment than another half-arsed thread abandoned at 11pm.

With Jon in town for the workshop, we seized the opportunity to tick off two remarkably adult tasks. First: professional photographs. Despite speaking daily across international borders, we’ve somehow amassed approximately zero visual evidence of existing in the same postcode. Given the book’s imminent arrival, it seemed prudent to acquire proof that we’re not an elaborate catfishing scheme before journalists start asking reasonable questions about whether we’ve ever actually met.

Second: actual strategic planning for book promotion. We discussed what we want to say, who might conceivably care, and how to avoid becoming just another desperate voice howling into the digital void come launch day. The bar is low, but we’re hoping to clear it.

Mid-week brought a pitch to a potential new client. Early omens were promising, which means we’re now in that delightful purgatory between “I think that went well?” and “now we wait while they ghost us or don’t.”

Simultaneously, we’re spinning up two new projects, doing the unglamorous but essential work of actually understanding the organisations before swanning in with hot takes. It’s the bit that doesn’t make for good anecdotes, but it’s where most projects are quietly sentenced to success or failure.

And the book continues its stately procession through the publisher’s approval machinery, advancing without us like a child you’ve sent off to university. It’s oddly pleasant and faintly unsettling to watch something you’ve made take on independent life, trundling along tracks you’re no longer steering.

Also this week

I also went to hear Timothy Snyder talk about tyranny and freedom, which is exactly the sort of thing a normal person voluntarily does on a weeknight. I left genuinely uncertain whether I felt enlightened or simply more anxious about everything—probably both, which I suspect was rather the point. He positioned Ukraine not as just another crisis to scroll past between doom updates, but as the philosophical hinge point for Europe. No pressure.

A speaker, Timothy Snyder, is presenting on the topics of freedom, tyranny, and democracy at an event in Paradiso, with Roxane van Iperen in conversation. The background features a large screen displaying the event details and an audience is visible in the foreground.

What lingered was his insistence that resistance requires an actual vision of what you’re for, not just what you’re against. Freedom, properly understood, isn’t just the absence of interference—that thin, negative American definition—but the conditions that let people become what they want to be. Europe, he noted, practices this reasonably well while barely mentioning it, which leaves us ideologically underprepared when someone shows up to actively dismantle it.

The framing stuff was grimly compelling: Trump understanding sovereignty purely as property rights, immigration as pretext for building an unaccountable federal force, oligarchy and surveillance capitalism aligning beautifully with authoritarianism. None of it felt theoretical. All of it had the unfortunate coherence of something that’s already happening, which—Snyder argued—is exactly what makes it resistable if you can see the pattern.

He was bracingly blunt about media deference letting US presidents set Europe’s agenda days in advance. And he positioned history not as a warning label we slap on things, but as a reservoir of actual meaning alongside art and culture. Protest needs art, he said, especially now that AI can churn out infinite aesthetic slop. Human unpredictability still counts for something.

Oddly, the hopeful bit came last: talk to people in real life, including the racist uncle. Don’t try to win—plant seeds. Build coalitions with people you agree with 85% of the time, not 100%. Fascism is never defeated intellectually; you have to actually win things. Elections, institutions, minds, power.

I didn’t leave reassured. But I did leave thinking the catastrophe is at least comprehensible, which means it’s not inevitable. Small mercies.

Connections

Ahead of the workshop, with Jon and the Swoop team already in Amsterdam, I did something dangerously close to networking: I organised drinks for comms and digital workplace people. Actual, three-dimensional humans gathered in a bar—a concept that still feels faintly experimental post-pandemic.

It was genuinely lovely meeting people I’ve known online for years but never actually stood near, plus a few I’d met once years ago, and had since reverted to being profile pictures who occasionally like my posts. Always a relief when your LinkedIn feed materialises as actual thoughtful, funny folks rather than the corporate avatars you’d half-convinced yourself they were. We complained about vendors, and I demonstrated the ancient Dutch art of eating bitterballen without incinerating your entire mouth (secret: patience bordering on the superhuman, waiting until the molten core drops below lava temperature).

Coverage

I appeared on the WB-40 Podcast this week, talking nomad working with Lisa Riemers—podcast host and regular Lithos co-conspirator. The conversation emerged after she’d read my Yearnote, specifically the bit cataloguing the increasingly ridiculous places I’d worked from last year, and decided this warranted interrogation.

Her challenge was entirely fair: just because you can work from a capsule hotel in Fukuoka doesn’t mean you should, or that anyone else wants to. What about people who need routine, a proper desk, the psychological comfort of consistency? I didn’t argue. In fact, I have a half-finished blog post festering in my drafts that’s essentially a litany of everything that doesn’t work about nomad working—the friction, the exhaustion, the endless low-level admin of simply existing somewhere new.

But that doesn’t make it pointless. Working from Japan isn’t viable for most people—it’s barely viable for me much of the time. People like me are early adopters operating at the extreme edges of what current work systems can tolerate. And that’s precisely the point. If you can make work function for nomads, you make it work better for a vastly larger group: parents, carers, people nowhere near major cities, people whose lives categorically refuse to conform to a 9-to-5 tethered to a single postcode.

We already have most of the tools. What we haven’t managed is loosening our death grip on time the way we’ve started—barely—to loosen it on place. Until we do, we’ll keep extracting a fraction of the potential value while excluding far more people than necessary. But at least we’ll all be in the office on Tuesdays.

This week in photos

Two people posing for a selfie in front of a modern building with large windows and the words 'do your thing' displayed prominently.

A group of people seated in a modern meeting space with tiered seating, engaged in discussions and note-taking.