Weeknote 2025/51

December 21, 2025December 21, 2025 / Sharon O'Dea / Leave a comment

A nighttime view of traditional Dutch buildings lining a canal in Amsterdam, illuminated by warm lights, reflecting off the water. — *Christmas week on the Prinsengracht. Photo by me.*

Today is the shortest day of the year. Winter’s nadir. The moment the light turns back in the right direction, however grudgingly.

I find winter utterly miserable at the best of times, and this year more so for having skipped the opening act by being in Japan, only to return and take the full European version in one concentrated hit. It’s faintly reassuring to know that, technically, things improve from here, even if January and February — the grimmest months — are still very much ahead.

Still, direction matters. And as it happens, this week has been full of looking back at moments that felt bleak, uncertain, or poorly timed at the time — and recognising them, with the benefit of distance, as the point at which things quietly started to turn.

From here on in, it gets brighter.

This week at work

We kicked off a new project with a new client, which is always a small thrill. We have a fairly standard approach to kick-off meetings — getting clear, early, on who actually needs to be involved, what we’re trying to achieve at a high level, realistic timelines, and the immediate next steps that stop everything dissolving into “we’ll come back to that”.

What’s exciting about this one is the ambition. The brief talks openly about building an AI-ready — even AI-first — communications infrastructure. But crucially, there’s a shared recognition that none of that will be achieved by simply bolting on new tech and hoping for the best. Instead, the foundations are the unglamorous but essential things: well-managed content, clarity on roles and responsibilities, and governance that enables rather than constrains. Get those right, and you create the conditions for a genuinely flexible, hyper-personalised channel ecosystem — one that adapts to people’s needs, preferences and ways of working, rather than forcing everyone through the same narrow funnel.

I’m already very excited about making this real. Proof, if any were needed, that I am a massive nerd.

Less exciting: the inevitable end-of-year admin scrum. Last-minute requests, frantic emails, and invoicing going right down to the wire. Very much the yin to the project work’s yang.

And while we submitted the final three chapters of the book last week, this week marked the start of the second review pass — looping back to the opening chapters to tidy, tighten and make sure the full narrative holds together as a coherent whole. Less triumphant finish line, more careful stitching. Which, in many ways, feels about right.

Also this week

It marked ten years since I left my job, with nothing to go to, a few days before Christmas. At the time it felt reckless, frightening, oddly calm — and also inevitable. The kind of decision that only makes sense once it’s already been made.

It felt like the right moment to reflect properly on what happened, how it felt then, and what’s unfolded since. So I wrote a short series of three blog posts: not a triumphalist origin story, but a more honest account of discomfort, drift, relief, uncertainty — and the slow accumulation of orientation rather than any single turning point.

Here’s the three posts

The Break covers the decision to leave
The Long Middle looks at the aftermath, and the years of working out where to go next
Orientation, Not Arrival covers how I look at things now

The response has been… a lot. The comments have been generous, but it’s the DMs that have really been on fire. So many women saying how closely it mirrors their own experiences: the erosion of confidence, the sense of being managed out rather than supported, the quiet calculation that leaving might be less costly than staying.

On the one hand, it’s reassuring to know I’m not alone. On the other, it’s deeply depressing that this pattern is so common — and that so many talented, experienced women end up circulating through the freelance market not out of burning entrepreneurial ambition, but because organisations make it structurally and culturally difficult for them to remain. Not a talent pipeline so much as a slow leak.

In London this week, I went to the annual Christmas Carol fundraiser for The Food Chain — a small but vital charity providing nutritional support to people living with HIV. The charity was formed in 1988 by a group of friends who simply delivered Christmas dinner to people living with HIV, who faced stigma and loneliness as well as as the illness.

The service struck a thoughtful balance: a lovely choir, extremely enthusiastic singing from me and friends, a genuinely funny speech from Jay Rayner (the charity’s patron), and a more sombre one from the CEO on why this work still matters — even now, when HIV is clinically manageable but inequality, isolation and food insecurity remain.

Somewhere between the carols, the message about feeding the hungry, and the sheer warmth of it all, it finally put me in a Christmas mood.

Consuming

📺 Watching

In what has now become an annual tradition, I hosted my Feminist Film Club. The format is simple: we re-watch a classic film and drink whenever we spot an instance of problematic behaviour. It is, as methodologies go, robust.

Previous years have seen us reassess Love Actually through a feminist lens (spectacularly problematic; blind drunk) and Pretty Woman (surprisingly progressive; mild surprise all round).

This year, we tackled Dirty Dancing. And to my surprise holds up remarkably well. Bodily autonomy. Class politics. A woman allowed to want things, choose things, and not be punished for it. A quietly feminist film hiding inside a watermelon-based cultural memory.

We still got drunk, obviously — it was the weekend before Christmas. But it was a genuinely lovely girls’ night in, equal parts cultural critique and joyful nostalgia.

Connections

Also in London, I caught up with fintech OGs Sarah Kocianski and Harriet Allner for lunch and the traditional end-of-year ritual of putting the world to rights.

A close-up selfie of two women smiling at the camera, with a blurred background of bright overhead lights. — *With Sarah Kocianski this week*

Coverage

My latest piece appeared in Reworked this week. This month’s editorial theme — next-generation self-service — finally gave me the excuse to write something that’s been brewing ever since I first came across Jamie Bartlett’s idea of “techno-admin”.

The piece isn’t really about self-service so much as the quiet redistribution of administrative work onto employees. Technology doesn’t remove the work; it just relocates it — updating records, fixing errors, navigating opaque systems — all framed as empowerment, and rarely acknowledged as labour.

I argue that genuinely next-generation self-service should reduce admin rather than disguise it, designing around human reality instead of system convenience.

Travel

My trip to London marked my last trip of the year. According to Flighty, that makes 59 flights in 2025 — which is bad, even by my standards. A frankly unhinged amount of time spent hurtling through the sky, drinking tiny cups of bad coffee and being a #LoungeWanker.

But here’s the strange bit: for the first time in… I don’t know, a couple of years? I have no travel booked. Nothing pencilled in. No flights lurking ominously in January.

It feels deeply unnatural. Like I’ll wake up like the mum in Home Alone with the sudden realisation I’ve forgotten something important.

Until then, I’ll enjoy being gezellig at home with my favourite people. Merry Christmas, Fijne Feestdagen to you and yours.

This week in photos

A laptop with stickers on it is placed on a table next to a bottle of Coca-Cola and an Irish passport, with a view of a pebble-strewn ground outside.

A side view of an EasyJet airplane at the airport, showcasing its distinct orange branding under a cloudy sky.

Orientation, not arrival

December 20, 2025December 20, 2025 / Sharon O'Dea / Leave a comment

A person walking along a dirt path towards a city skyline, with a signpost indicating the direction, under a clear blue sky.

This is the final piece in a three-part series reflecting on ten years of self-employment — what led me to leave my last employed role, what came after, and how I now think about work, identity, and change.

(if you haven’t read Part One and Part Two, read those first)

Ten years on, I’m not especially interested in tidy origin stories or triumphant endings.

What I have instead is orientation.

For a long time, I thought comfort meant stability: a role you could explain in one sentence, a trajectory you could sketch on a whiteboard, a sense that you were “on track”. I no longer think that. Comfort, as it turns out, isn’t the absence of change. It’s the ability to exist inside change without being overwhelmed — or taking it personally.

That distinction has taken years to learn.

Earlier in my career, I absorbed the idea that legitimacy had to be earned constantly. In the banking environment I worked in, surrounded by people who seemed far more confident, polished, and socially assured than I felt, I carried a low-level sense of being a chancer. Someone who’d slipped through a side door and needed to justify their presence.

So I worked harder. Stayed later. Took on more. Put my hand up when others didn’t. I treated exhaustion as evidence that I was doing it right. If I could just make myself indispensable enough, visible enough, useful enough, then my credentials couldn’t be questioned.

It’s not hard, in hindsight, to see where that leads.

These days, I’m better at holding uncertainty without immediately turning it into a personal failure. I don’t always get it right, but I’m quicker to notice when I’m reacting rather than responding.

That difference matters. Reaction wants certainty and closure. Response allows for partial information, for waiting, for keeping options visible. I make fewer decisions in a rush to feel safe. I’m more deliberate about what I lock in, and what I leave adjustable.

I expect the ground to shift, so I design for movement.

Being multi-hyphenated is often framed as a lack of focus. For me, it’s closer to a coping mechanism in a world that refuses to sit still. I don’t treat optionality as indecision; I treat it as resilience. I commit, but only lightly. I choose depth over novelty, without betting everything on a single version of relevance.

What I notice now, more than anything, is range — the ability to move between depth and breadth without losing my footing.

I have work that still interests me — not because it’s new, but because it’s deep. I work with people I respect, on problems that are hard in ways that matter. I have space for thinking, for writing, for changing my mind in public and in private.

I have a working life that accommodates curiosity and contradiction. One that leaves room for travel, for friendships, for health, for creative detours that don’t need to justify themselves immediately — or maybe ever. None of this arrived quickly or neatly. Very little of it could have been predicted at the outset.

But it’s a life that fits — not perfectly, but well enough.

Titles still don’t quite capture what I do. They probably never will. I’ve stopped trying to compress a complex working life into a single, tidy label. Some ambiguity is simply the price of doing work that spans systems, disciplines, and contexts. And that’s ok.

What’s changed is that I’m no longer looking for a final definition.

Writing has helped with that. It’s given me a place to be authoritative on my own terms — not by pointing at outputs, but by articulating patterns, judgement, and expertise. Over time, I’ve come to trust that credibility doesn’t only come from what you reveal. It also comes from sharing how you think.

And I’m comfortable saying this plainly: I have a bloody great life.

Not because everything worked out. Not because there was a master plan. But because enough worked out. Because the work is meaningful, the people are interesting, and the days contain more choice than they once did, and I wake up every day (well, most days) feeling like I’m making a positive difference to people’s working lives.

There wasn’t a moment of arrival. There still isn’t.

What there is, is a steadier way of standing while things move. A clearer sense of what I’m willing to tolerate, and what I’m not. The confidence that I can adjust my stance as the ground shifts — because it always will.

I’m not finished. I’m not “there”.

But I’m facing in the right direction.

And, for now, that’s enough.

The Long Middle

December 18, 2025December 20, 2025 / Sharon O'Dea / Leave a comment

A surreal image of a woman standing with her back to the viewer on large stone slabs that are broken apart and floating above a reflective surface, with a wide blue sky and clouds stretching out ahead of her.

This is part two of a three-part series reflecting on ten years of self-employment — what led me to leave my last employed role, what came after, and how I now think about work, identity, and change.

(if you haven’t read Part One yet, read that first)

Leaving got me out of a toxic situation. It solved the urgent problem — but it didn’t hand me a new map.

What followed wasn’t clarity or momentum, but a long stretch of recalibration.

There wasn’t a clear trajectory. There still isn’t. What changed was my tolerance for that.

In the early years after I left, I spent a fair amount of time trying on different versions of myself. Some of this was curiosity. Some of it was necessity. And some of it was the lingering belief that “progress” ought to look like movement towards something newer, shinier, or more obviously impressive.

I flirted with adjacent worlds — product, innovation, startups — not because I was particularly drawn to them, but because they seemed to represent where the action was. In contrast, going back to intranets and the digital workplace initially felt like a step backwards. I’d internalised the office pyramid: bigger portfolios, bigger teams, broader remits. Returning to a domain I’d started in felt uncomfortably like reversing down the ladder.

At the time, I was still measuring myself by scope rather than substance. Portfolio size rather than domain authority.

That shifted once I stopped borrowing other people’s career templates.

Joining forces with my now-business partner was a turning point. Not because it suddenly clarified everything, but because working in partnership changed the texture of my working life. Ideas became conversational rather than solitary. Drafts were sharpened through debate. Momentum came not from self-discipline alone, but from shared accountability. If I promised something by the end of the day, it happened — not because of pressure, but because I’d said it out loud to someone whose judgement I trusted.

More importantly, partnership reflected my strengths back to me.

Returning fully to intranet and digital workplace work stopped feeling like retreat, and started to feel like reclaiming something I was genuinely expert in. What had once felt “unsexy” now felt deep, consequential, and hard-earned. I stopped apologising for caring about work that sits at the intersection of people, systems, governance, and power — because that’s where things actually succeed or fail in complex organisations.

One of the more disorienting parts of this period was realising that a skill I’d come to doubt was, in fact, central to my value.

In my last job, the authority to do this work — rolling the pitch, preparing the ground, building buy-in — was quietly withdrawn, and with it went my confidence. Politics was treated as something faintly embarrassing — a distraction from “real” work — rather than the environment in which real work actually happens.

After the break knocked my confidence, I lost sight of the fact that understanding how organisations function is a skill in its own right. Knowing what a project sponsor is carrying. Recognising where resistance is coming from. Being close enough to the reality of organisational life to empathise — but far enough away to offer perspective and judgement.

The first time an old colleague hired me to support them at another organisation specifically for that capability, it was a genuine eureka moment. Not because I’d suddenly acquired a new skill, but because I could finally see clearly again what I’d been doing all along.

Consultants are often accused — sometimes fairly — of proposing ideas that sound elegant in theory but collapse in the cold light of day. What I’d been led to question wasn’t a weakness. It was the craft: working with context rather than around it, acknowledging politics instead of pretending they don’t exist, and offering help that is grounded, realistic, and usable.

That balance — empathy without over-identification, distance without detachment — turned out to be the thing that makes my work stick.

That realisation didn’t instantly restore confidence. Confidence lagged behind evidence. I had to stop apologising for how I work — and that happened slowly, unevenly, over years rather than months.

Identity, meanwhile, remained unresolved. Losing a job title I’d spent a decade chasing was harder than I expected. “Head of digital comms at a bank” collapsed overnight into “freelancer”, with all the ambiguity that entails. Titles are crude, but they’re socially useful shorthand, and I missed having one that did the explanatory work for me.

Go too narrow, and you limit the range of work you’re considered for. Go too broad, and you dissolve into a sea of digital hand-waving. I still feel that tension. But I’ve stopped treating it as a problem that needs solving.

This wasn’t simplification so much as a recognition of complexity.

Another quiet shift during this period was my relationship to impact and evidence. Working for large, complex organisations means you can rarely talk openly about what you’re doing. Commercial confidentiality applied in my last role, and it still does. For a while, I struggled with that invisibility — the inability to point to outputs, launches, or neat before-and-after stories.

What helped was returning to writing. Twitter (RIP), LinkedIn, and blogging gave me a way to be authoritative without breaching confidence. I didn’t need to show the workings to demonstrate the thinking. Over time, I became more comfortable with the idea that much of my value lies not in what I produce directly, but in the choices I help organisations make — including the mistakes they avoid.

Conditions during this period were far from perfect. I still wish I’d left my last job on better terms, with a clearer plan and some savings behind me. For a long time, I was angry — not just about how it ended, but about the injustice of it all. About being made to feel like a failure by an organisation that had benefited from my willingness to stretch, absorb, and endure.

That anger was oddly clarifying.

It stripped away some of the residual self-doubt and forced a reappraisal of what I’d normalised. I could see more clearly how readily I’d equated over-extension with professionalism, and how easily I’d absorbed responsibility for failures that weren’t mine to carry.

The anger didn’t vanish quickly. It lingered. It resurfaced, often out of nowhere. For a while, it was part of how I made sense of what had happened.

But over time, it loosened its grip.

It stopped being the engine of the story and became part of the context instead — something I could acknowledge without letting it define how I saw myself or what came next.

This phase of my career wasn’t about reinvention. It was about unlearning — letting go of borrowed hierarchies, inherited measures of success, and my habit of treating uncertainty as a personal failing.

The long middle taught me to live without a script. To value depth over novelty. To accept that some careers don’t resolve into clean arcs, and that progress is sometimes a matter of stance rather than speed.

The ground kept shifting. I learned to stand differently.

Now read Part 3, Orientation, not arrival.

The Break

December 16, 2025December 20, 2025 / Sharon O'Dea / Leave a comment

A surreal painting showing a woman in a dark business suit, seen from behind, stepping through an open door that leads into a blue sky filled with clouds. Behind her is a dim office interior with a desk and lamp fading into shadow.

This is part one of a three-part series reflecting on ten years of self-employment — what led me to leave my last employed role, what came after, and how I now think about work, identity, and change.

I didn’t leave my last employed role because I was brave, burned out on corporate life, or driven by some entrepreneurial calling.

I left because staying had become untenable.

By the time I quit, I was exhausted, unwell, and out of road. Not in a dramatic way — but in the slow, grinding way that comes from trying to make an impossible situation workable for too long.

For over a year, I’d been doing the work of two, arguably three people. I spent a year living in a hotel on the other side of the world to deliver a project against an unrealistic deadline, with neither enough resources nor senior support. Alongside that, I was managing two teams across eight time zones — a logistical and emotional load that never let up.

I did all of this willingly. Partly out of professional pride. Partly out of ambition. And partly because I believed (and was quietly encouraged to believe) that if I proved myself hard enough, everything would eventually resolve.

I was chasing a promotion I thought I needed, and a bonus that had been dangled just far enough ahead to keep me running. Early in that financial year, I discovered that someone in my team, with significantly less responsibility and a lighter workload, was being paid more than I was. When I raised it, I was told it couldn’t be fixed — but that it would be rectified at bonus time.

In retrospect, I was a mug.

Then came the reorganisation.

It was badly handled, driven more by internal politics than how teams actually function. My team was disbanded — a fact I didn’t learn in a meeting, or even on a phone call, but via a text message from a junior team member, because my manager had forgotten to invite me to the meeting.

Shortly afterwards, I was moved under a new manager who neither understood nor valued digital, and who had little appetite for making a success of a platform I’d spent the previous year delivering. Because it wasn’t their idea, it was quietly undermined — along with the person responsible for it.

By then, my body had already started to register what I was still trying to rationalise. I barely slept. I was constantly tense. I was ill with stress in a way I’d never experienced before. I took a few days off sick — the only sick leave I took in the whole time I worked there — and received an email from HR informing me that if I remained off, my pay would be withdrawn.

It wasn’t framed as concern. It was framed as process.

That was the moment the spell broke.

Up until then, I’d still been operating under the illusion that if I just worked harder, explained myself better, or endured a bit longer, the situation would right itself. That email made it clear this wasn’t a misunderstanding or a temporary rough patch. The system had made its position known.

I didn’t quit because I was brave. I quit because I had reached the limit of what I could reasonably absorb.

At the time, it didn’t feel like a career decision so much as a physical and emotional necessity. I didn’t leave on good terms. I didn’t have a plan or a financial cushion. I left carrying a messy mix of anger, relief, fear, and a deep sense that I’d somehow failed.

Looking back, I wish I’d been kinder to myself.

I wish I’d trusted my own signals sooner, rather than forcing my body to escalate the message. I wish I’d recognised that enduring harm isn’t professionalism, and that loyalty to a system that isn’t reciprocated is rarely rewarded.

Ten years on, I don’t romanticise that moment — but I respect it. Walking away wasn’t a career move. It was an act of self-preservation.

And everything that followed began there.

Part two, The Long Middle, is here.

Weeknote 2025/50

December 14, 2025 / Sharon O'Dea / Leave a comment

A collection of vinyl records displayed on a shelf, featuring album covers from various artists including Sepultura and Suicide Silence. — *Amsterdam Vinyl Club this week Photo by me.*

This week had a strong clearing space energy to it.

Not in the sense of bold new beginnings or fresh starts, but in the quieter, less Instagrammable way: finishing things, tidying edges, and letting go of what no longer needs to be carried forward. Less about acceleration, more about reduction.

French writer and fellow airport departure lounge regular Antoine de Saint-Exupéry wrote that perfection is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away. That line kept resurfacing for me this week, not as an abstract ideal, but as a practical reality. Editing rather than drafting. Removing rather than accumulating. Accepting that some things have done their job.

Some of that showed up as work. Some of it looked suspiciously like procrastination. Some of it was simply recovery after intensity. All of it, in one way or another, was about making space. Mentally, professionally, and occasionally quite literally.

This week at work

We submitted the final three chapters of Digital Communications at Work. After months of living with these ideas — in offices, airports, trains, hotel rooms, borrowed desks, co-working spaces, OneNote thought-dumps, half-finished Notes apps, a thousand Teams chats, Slack messages, voice notes, screenshots of whiteboards, comments in Word, comments on comments, and the occasional “I’ll remember this later” (I did not) — the moment of pressing send on the email to the publisher was an odd mix of momentous and underwhelming.

The chapters focus on the unglamorous but decisive end of the digital workplace lifecycle:

Launching channels — not as a moment, but as a process. How organisations communicate value, build habits, and avoid the familiar post-launch fade where “new” quietly becomes “ignored”.
Measurement and management — moving beyond vanity metrics and zombie stats towards evidence that actually helps teams make better decisions, course-correct, and earn trust over time.
What’s next — less about shiny tools, more about the slow forces reshaping work: demographic change, automation, trust erosion, and what all of that means for internal communication as a profession.

The book is no longer hypothetical. It exists now as something that has to survive editing, disagreement, and the uncomfortable process of being read by people who weren’t in my head when I wrote it.

Also this week

With a book deadline looming, I indulged in a familiar form of productive procrastination and cleared out my wardrobe.

It’s a decade since I left my last corporate job. The pandemic killed off the corporate suit for me and, it appears, consulting more generally. And yet some things had been hanging in there for years — not because I wore them, but because of what they might one day be for.

Maybe I’d go back into corporate. Maybe future-me would finally be that person.

On the floor lay the ghosts of a life past… and a few imagined futures that never quite happened.

There was also something telling about how easy it was to part with things that are now too big — a decisiveness I notably did not show in the opposite direction.

Undeniably work avoidance, yes. But also an oddly appropriate companion to a week spent finishing a book about legacy, change, and what we choose to carry forward.

A close-up image of a colorful assortment of fabrics and clothing items, featuring various patterns and textures, folded and layered together.

A colorful assortment of clothes hanging on a closet rack, showcasing various patterns and textures.

Consuming

📺 Watching

After a week of intense writing, thinking, and deadline-brain, I deliberately switched my higher functions off and let television do its thing.

I watched the entire second series of Welcome to Wrexham and became genuinely, embarrassingly invested in the fortunes of a football team in a town I’ve never visited and, realistically, probably never will. It’s an object lesson in narrative engineering: take stakes, characters, time, and a sense of shared jeopardy, and you can make anyone care about anything. Football is almost incidental.

And like any good Swiftie, I watched the first two episodes of the The End of an Era docuseries released on Disney+ on Friday. I was caught off guard by how emotional it made me, reliving a tour that already feels oddly historic. There’s something about watching collective experience back through a screen — tens of thousands of people moving in sync, night after night — that hits harder in retrospect than it does in the moment.

I also started knitting again — largely while watching all of the above. I’m still objectively terrible at it, but it turns out keeping my hands occupied is an effective way to stop myself doom-scrolling through the credits. Parallel processing, but make it wool.

🎧 Listening

In a similar spirit, my listening was entirely functional rather than aspirational. A heady mix of cheerful pop and various flavours of ADHD Focus Music on Spotify — deployed less for deep work than for emotional regulation. Not taste so much as task support.

Connections

Earlier in the week, I met up with my old mate Peter Morley, now Head of Communications at AI infrastructure darling Nebius. He filled me in on life inside a company in genuine hypergrowth; I filled him in on the correct way to eat bitterballen.

Peter also introduced me to a former Nebius colleague, Anna Fedosova, who’s now building an HR startup tackling an achingly familiar problem: keeping policies and compliance current across multiple geographies and fast-changing legislation.

I took a selfie afterwards but, in my haste, failed to check whether my eyes were actually open in it. In retrospect, a fairly accurate metaphor for the week ahead.

Three friends smiling for a selfie in a warmly lit urban setting with holiday decorations. — *Peter, Anna and me (with my closed eyes fixed by Google Gemini with a surprising degree of competence)*

Coverage

I appeared in two industry publications this week, both circling a familiar theme: cutting through noise.

In InComms, I shared practical advice on making LinkedIn work for you without becoming beholden to the algorithm — focusing on voice, format, and visibility that serves real professional goals rather than platform theatrics.

And in HR Grapevine, I contributed to a piece looking beyond the usual AI-heavy trend forecasts for 2026, arguing instead for closer collaboration between HR and internal communications, and for designing change that people can actually understand and act on.

Travel

I was home all week, which felt not just pleasant but extremely necessary. No trains, no airports, no tactical packing.

This coming week I’m heading to London for a couple of meetings — my final trip of the year. I’ve got a little slack in the diary, so shout if you’re around and fancy a cuppa.

This week in photos

Sharon O'Dea standing in front of a mirror, wearing a blue button-up shirt over a black top and black wide-leg pants, holding a phone for a selfie in a dimly lit hallway.

A pair of black boxing gloves positioned next to a black water bottle on a windowsill with a cityscape view in the background.

Weeknote 2025/49

December 7, 2025December 8, 2025 / Sharon O'Dea / Leave a comment

A modern building with large glass windows and a surrounding plaza, featuring a prominent evergreen tree. People are walking around the area under a partly cloudy sky. — *London trying its best to look festive this week.* *Photo by me.*

I keep coming back to the same realisation this week: the future of comms isn’t just more digital. It’s more structurally complex.

Not more tools in a tidy stack. Not smarter systems in a neat ecosystem. But messier audiences, overlapping loyalties, porous identities, and workplaces that no longer contain people in the way they once pretended to. Add AI, video overload and algorithmic confidence into the mix and you don’t get clarity. You get chaos but with single sign-on.

Consider the past few days a field experiment no one asked for but everyone participated in.

This week at work

I’m currently locked in a low-grade standoff with the final chapter of the book — the one about the future of digital internal comms — which is refusing to behave like a normal chapter and instead insisting on being part travelogue, part systems theory, part group therapy session for a profession in the middle of a long, quiet identity crisis. It keeps pretending to be a chapter while actually being an accumulation of travel, interviews, unease and an unreasonable number of open browser tabs. It is, frankly, a menace.

Midweek I was back in London for the Communicate Conference, hosted by vendor Interact. It was at an Interact event, over 15 years ago, that I met my now business partner, Jonathan. So it felt oddly cyclical to be there discussing whether intranets even exist in the future.

A group of five professionals posing for a photo at an event, smiling and wearing lanyards, with a background featuring a stylish interior. — *Intranerds assemble! L-R: Lisa Riemers, Suzie Robinson, me (Sharon O’Dea) looking like I’ve been Photoshopped in at the wrong scale, Chris Tubb, Steve Bynghall*. *Photo by Lisa Riemers.*

What I hadn’t fully anticipated was how many familiar faces I’d run into who’ve been in the intranet and comms world for as long as — and in some cases longer than — I have. Which led to a steady stream of conversations that start light and get surprisingly philosophical. The shared laugh was always the same one: everything old is new again. The same overblown vendor claims we heard fifteen years ago, now wearing an ill-fitting suit called AI.

Different nouns. Same promises waiting to be broken.

But running underneath the cynicism was something much more serious. The conversations quickly turned to how the organisations we’re working with now are structurally more complex than anything we dealt with a decade ago — layered supply chains, outsourcing, platforms, regulators, global delivery, blended workforces, algorithmic management. And at the same time, the pace of change has accelerated to the point where even seasoned teams feel permanently slightly behind their own reality.

It’s a strange duality: the tech rhetoric looping, while the organisational conditions it’s being dropped into are genuinely unprecedented. Which may explain why so many “this will finally fix it” moments keep… not fixing it.

A few highlights from the conference:

Allan Tanner opened with a session on AI and the digital workplace. A quick poll showed about two-thirds of the room using generative AI weekly, but early findings from the Gallagher State of the Sector report suggest one in three are using it without any oversight, and only 40% feel confident in their skills.

What surprised me wasn’t the numbers so much as the familiarity of them. You could lift this whole section almost intact from a conference two years ago and nobody would blink. In a field that insists it’s moving at hyperspeed, that’s… odd. Is the survey already ageing in dog years? Or are comms teams simply adopting more slowly than the hype suggests?

The idea of an AI agent-first future replacing intranets floated through the room — but the awkward ownership question still hung there, unresolved. Comms? IT? HR? When everyone owns it, no one really does.

Also: we have absolutely been here before with chatbots.

The exact example used was booking leave. The endlessly cited use case where, in theory, a bot should smoothly handle what currently requires checking a team calendar, emailing your boss, verifying your entitlement, and then logging it all in some separate HR system. That was the canonical chatbot demo when I was doing a whole series of talks on this… in 2017. That’s getting on for a decade ago. If this really is an easily solved problem, we’d be living in it by now. The fact that we aren’t tells you something important.

When the tech keeps changing but the outcome doesn’t, you’re not looking at a technology failure — you’re looking at a human systems failure.

Sam Bleazard followed with employer brand as the connective tissue between HR and marketing, using Fortnum & Mason as a case study in visual storytelling and employee voice.

Then came Tom Vollmer from Cofenster with the stat that properly landed: around 23 hours of internal video uploaded every week, versus about 10 minutes actually watched. The issue isn’t underinvestment — it’s saturation. We are not video-poor. We are video-exhausted.

I fear I have crossed a generational Rubicon because I now actively resent being asked to watch a video for an entire minute. A minute of looking. Nope. I want text I can skim while emotionally elsewhere. I want bullet points, headings, and plausible deniability. Video is no longer a medium; it’s an attention hostage situation.

AI can now generate highlights, scripts and even videos from PDFs, which is undeniably impressive. But it also raises a more troubling possibility: that we’re no longer just producing noise at scale — we’re now automating it at industrial volume.

And when people can’t even keep up with the volume of information being thrown at them, it’s hardly surprising they stop engaging with it. Cognitive overload is the silent assassin of communication.

Helen Bissett shared disengagement data from Gallup that was hard to ignore: 90% of UK employees feel disengaged at work, while over 80% practise mindfulness outside of work. People are repairing themselves in their own time because work no longer does.

But this is also where I felt a quiet friction forming with some of our default assumptions. Engagement is treated as the unquestioned North Star — yet I’ve just spent weeks in Japan, a country consistently cited as having low employee engagement, alongside high levels of personal life satisfaction.

It left me, once again, with a nagging sense that we may not always be chasing the right thing.

The closing case study from AMS took an 11-page PDF innovation brief and turned it into an intranet takeover with storytelling, countdowns and discussion. Strong results. But what stuck with me was structural: AMS staff often hold dual loyalty, to the company that employs them and the client organisation they sit inside. It’s a pattern on the rise: the audience for “internal” comms is often not internal at all.

Across the day, the pattern repeated: AI, video, employer brand, purpose — all accelerating. But the deeper shift isn’t technological. It’s structural. Our audiences are fragmenting, our channels are multiplying, and the idea of a single, coherent “employee experience” is becoming more theoretical than real.

Oh, and we unexpectedly landed a juicy new client. Entirely unplanned. Entirely welcome <stares at impending HMRC bill>. All systems go.

Also this week

I went to the WB-40 Christmas dinner in London. WB-40 is a podcast about how tech reshapes work, with an associated Signal group that might genuinely be the friendliest place on the internet. It was lovely to see people properly, in three dimensions, after years of being avatars in each other’s phones.

And it left me with a question I can’t quite shake: what if low engagement at work isn’t always a failure? What if, in some cases, it’s a boundary?

It certainly maps, subjectively at least, to my own experience of the last decade. I haven’t had a “proper job” in years, and I don’t look to work for belonging, identity or community in the way I once did. Those needs are met elsewhere now — through friendships, networks, odd little internet corners, shared projects.

So if people can have rich lives, strong identities and real community without work being the emotional centre of gravity, is “more engagement at work” always the right thing to chase? Or are we sometimes trying to re-inflate a social and psychological role that work can no longer credibly carry?

That Japan contrast keeps needling at me. Maybe the problem isn’t that people are disengaged from life. Maybe they’re disengaging from work — deliberately.

Some of the most important people in my life mostly exist as glowing rectangles in my pocket. Which feels odd to admit, and yet it’s completely true.

Which made the next thing I went to this week land even harder: a talk on psychological safety with Ania Hadjdrowska — and instead of feeling theoretical, it felt uncomfortably operational.

Because in a world of hybrid teams, async work, platform hopscotch and digital performativity, psychological safety now shows up (or doesn’t) first in online behaviour:

Who speaks in the channel
Who stays silent
Who only reacts with emojis
Who disappears entirely

In remote and hybrid work, participation is visibility. Silence is no longer just silence. It’s interpreted as disengagement, resistance, risk, apathy. Often unfairly. Often reductively.

The classic barriers still apply:

Fear of judgement
Fear of exclusion
Fear of conflict

But digital work amplifies all three. You don’t get tone-of-voice buffers. You don’t get corridor repairs. You don’t get the quiet reassurance of eye contact after a risky comment lands badly. Everything is logged, screenshot, searchable. Mistakes feel permanent. So people calculate. And then they don’t speak.

Before the rational brain catches up, the amygdala scans for threat — hierarchy, tone, uncertainty. If it detects danger, it triggers fight, flight, freeze or fawn. No one innovates when they’re being emotionally chased by a tiger. And no one meaningfully collaborates when every contribution feels reputationally risky.

Psychological safety, as defined by Amy Edmondson, is the belief that you won’t be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns or mistakes. Not agreement, but constructive disagreement.

That matters even more when:

Teams are distributed
Trust is assumed rather than built
People meet as avatars before they meet as humans
Employment relationships are shorter, looser, more conditional

We are asking people to be brave in systems that increasingly give them no margin for error.

The line I can’t shake is still this: silence is expensive. In digital workplaces especially, it quietly drains collaboration, learning, innovation and belonging — while looking, misleadingly, like “everything’s fine.”

And that “booking leave” example kept needling at me again. Such a small task, yet it still demands procedural obedience, reputation management, tool-hopping and emotional calibration. Multiply that across a working life and you start to see why people are tired — and why AI keeps stalling on exactly the same rocks.

Layer on the social media disinhibition effect (performance, oversharing, dunking, provocation) and it doesn’t always switch off at work. When trust thins, people retreat into safer containers: private chats, external networks, side communities. Belonging migrates. Collaboration fragments. Comms gets harder.

Consuming

(Keeping this bit short this week cos I’ve wittered on above)

Like the rest of the planet, my listening week was dominated by the release of Spotify Wrapped — the global ritual in which an algorithm holds up a mirror and everyone pretends to be surprised by what’s staring back.

Once again, mine was a window into my not-so-secret pop shame. I had solemnly vowed that Taylor Swift would not dominate my Top 10 this year. And then she went and released a banger. And Lily Allen casually dropped the confessional of the decade. What’s a woman supposed to do?

Once again, I will not be sharing my list with the wider world.

Spotify also informed me that my “listening age” is 46. I am 45 and a half, thank you very much. I refuse to be aged up by an algorithm.

Connections

Staying with the theme of where community actually lives these days, I also met up with Jenny Watts — a mainstay of another of my favourite online communities, the old FitFam crowd.

Two women smiling and posing together in a casual setting, wearing colorful clothing. In the background, a sushi restaurant sign is visible. — *Jenny Watts and me*

FitFam started life years ago on Twitter: a loose group of people talking about health and fitness, cheering each other on with our running times, gym attempts and “I went for a walk instead of lying face down on the sofa” victories. It was low-key, kind, and weirdly effective.

Given the descent of Twitter into a hate-filled sewer, the group’s now migrated to WhatsApp. Same people, different platform. The conversations are smaller, more honest, less performative. It’s a nice reminder that while platforms come and go, the communities that matter tend to quietly pack their bags and move together.

Another small data point in the same direction: belonging is increasingly something people build around themselves, not something work hands out with a lanyard.

Coverage

I ended up in the Financial Times this week. Which, in comms-world terms, is basically being knighted.

They shared a slice of my time in Nagasaki. Including my slightly surreal exploration of the future of work alongside a remote-controlled robot tour guide, piloted by a disabled operator elsewhere in Japan. A sentence I still can’t quite believe I get to write.

Screenshot of an article from the Financial Times featuring Sharon O'Dea discussing her experiences in Nagasaki, Japan, and insights on the future of work. — Screenshot

And yes, I am rightly smug about this. A positive mention in the FT is the biggest win you can get in this industry. It’s the comms equivalent of a Michelin star, an Olympic medal, and being retweeted by someone with an opinion column — all at once.

I will now be quietly unbearable about this for a while.

Travel

I’m going absolutely nowhere this week. An entire week without visiting an airport or getting up at the crack of dawn to catch a train. Bliss.

Next week, though, I’m back in London for the final time this year. I’m organising some drinks — if you’re around and would like to come*, give me a bell.

*and I actually know you

This week in photos

A person standing in a fitness studio, wearing athletic clothing and taking a selfie in the mirror.

The exterior of St. Pancras Railway Station in London, showcasing its ornate brick architecture and tall spires under a clear blue sky.

Weeknote 2025/48

November 30, 2025December 1, 2025 / Sharon O'Dea / Leave a comment

A illuminated sign on a building in Amsterdam that reads 'THE LIGHT YOU SEE IS PAST.' with bicycles parked nearby. — *Amsterdam Light Festival.*

After six weeks in Japan, this week was all about timing — or more accurately, being completely out of sync with it. My body is convinced 4am is an excellent time to start the day. My inbox seems startled that I’m replying during daylight hours. And all the ideas I’d parked while sweating my way around Nagasaki chose this week to sit up in bed like startled toddlers.

Between jetlag, a chapter that staged a full rebellion, and Andreas Wagner’s talk on dormant innovations (apparently even grass needed 100 million years to get going), I’ve been reminded how much of this job is just… timing. When a client’s ready. When a chapter clicks. When the organisation finally notices the thing you’ve been politely suggesting since 2019.

Timing might not be everything, but this week it certainly felt like the main character.

This week at work

A lovely vote of confidence: We won a new piece of work with an existing client — always gratifying, always reassuring, and always a reminder that just doing good work is always the best marketing.

In my first week in Japan I ended up doing a pitch. It was 9pm where I was, but still 32 degrees. I had to duck out of a group dinner to join the call. I was sitting on the floor with a fan blowing behind me to partially avoid collapsing into a puddle of sweat. Somehow, we won the gig and we start work next week. So this week we’ve been getting ready to do just that.

The chapter that fought back: Got one of the earlier chapters back from our editor at Kogan Page. On reread, it just… didn’t sing. Too many lists, not enough soul, and absolutely none of the “why should anyone care?” that Jon and I bang on about. It was also far too long.
So I did what any reasonable author would do: took a deep breath and decided to brutally rewrite the whole thing.

What I thought would be a quick tidy-up became two solid days of editing, trimming, rearranging, despairing, and eventually emerging triumphant. By Thursday it felt like a completely different chapter — tighter, clearer, and something I’m actually happy to put my name on. But it was a slog.

With that behind me, I finally pulled together the outline for the twelfth and final chapter of the book. Can’t quite believe we’re almost there — after months of interviews, diagrams, Japan detours, and existential questions about the future of workplace comms, the end is in sight. So I spent a chunk of the week writing up insights from Japan — drones, shrinking workforces, robot tour guides — and threading the best bits into the horizon-scanning sections.

Also this week

Went to this month’s Science and Cocktails talk by evolutionary biologist Andreas Wagner, on the mystery of dormant innovations — ideas or traits that emerge long before they have any impact, sitting quietly until the environment shifts and suddenly they’re transformative.

Think grasses: they appeared, did nothing much for 100 million years, and then boom, global dominance — and the basis of most human food systems. Or bacterial genes capable of antibiotic resistance long before antibiotics existed. Or early cultural ideas and technologies that only take off when society is finally ready for them.

The tl;dr is: nature – and culture – generate far more potential than they currently need, and environments act as the “prince” that wakes these sleeping beauties when the moment is right.

It made me think about internal comms and digital workplace work: how often the “innovation” isn’t the new tool, but the dormant capability already in the organisation — the half-built governance model, the underused feature, the employee insight nobody acted on — just waiting for the right conditions, leadership, or crisis to wake it.

And, frankly, how much of my job is quietly planting seeds for things that won’t catch until the organisation shifts in the right way. A slightly humbling, slightly comforting reminder that timing is half the craft.

Aside from that, I had a quiet week back in Amsterdam. Woke up at 4am several times, which is perfect if you’re a monk; less so if you’re merely someone who made poor timezone choices.

Cultural re-entry has hit me at odd times, mostly when tired. I nearly bowed at multiple Dutch people, but have avoided saying arigato gozaimasu at anyone (so far).

I’m playing catch-up on socials, sorting through thousands of photos and ten times as many memories. Realised I now possess 400 photos of fruit-shaped bus stops. No plan for them. Yet.

Consuming

👩🏻‍💻 Internetting

Two very different takes on the future of internal comms collided in my feed on Tuesday, and the contrast was so stark it felt almost choreographed.

On one hand: Unily’s “Future of the Workplace”

On the other: Mike Klein’s “Big Shift”

Unily’s view is the one most people in big, complicated organisations will recognise: grounded, sensible, measured.

The world of incremental improvements: a bit less friction, a bit more governance, modest, polite steps toward AI, progress paced by budget cycles and risk committees. And honestly, that’s where most digital workplaces genuinely are. The average intranet of 2026 won’t look wildly different from its 2016 ancestor — and that’s fine. Evolution has value.

Klein, meanwhile, is squinting at an entirely different horizon. His lens: AI compressing decision cycles, dissolving management layers, accelerating knowledge loss, reshaping coordination itself. Less “optimise the comms plan”, more “your operating model may not survive contact with the next five years”.

The key thing, of course, is that both are true — just on different timescales.

But the bit we can’t wish away: AI isn’t a shiny add-on. Used badly, it could be a workplace bloodbath. Many people are understandably nervous about automating themselves out of relevance. And demographic change is already gnawing at the edges.

Japan hammered that home. Fewer workers, more automation, and a very immediate need to rethink how work gets done at all.

Small DEEx improvements still matter. They make the day-to-day tolerable. But they’re not the thing that will get us through the real shifts barrelling towards us.

If anything, the moment calls for more boldness — in how we use AI, how we explain it, and how we help people navigate what’s coming.

📺 Watching

Finger on the cultural pulse as always, I finally started Celebrity Traitors. I intended to watch one episode as a palate cleanser after a day of editing… and then resurfaced four episodes later, blinking at the clock like someone who has accidentally time-travelled.

It really is as good as everyone says: the camp, the scheming, the sheer operatic commitment to drama over absolutely nothing. It’s the kind of show that gives you whiplash from switching between “oh come on” and “I would absolutely betray every one of these people for £120k”.

No spoilers, obviously — but I am now fully invested, irrationally suspicious of everyone, and contemplating whether a roundtable on “psychological safety and betrayal in hybrid teams” might be a useful conference talk.

📚 Reading

My copy of Lisa Riemers and Matisse Hemel-Nelis’s Accessible Communications was waiting for me when I got home — a comforting sight after weeks with only my Kindle for reading company. I’d already had the pleasure of reading an advance copy earlier this year, but there’s something about holding a hard copy (a proper dead-tree edition) that makes the material land differently. Maybe it’s the weight; maybe it’s the guilt of knowing this will outlive all of us.

Re-reading it, I’m reminded what a genuinely important book this is for our industry. Too much accessibility advice for comms people is either painfully high-level (“write clearly!”) or so technical it requires a support animal. Lisa and Matisse manage to bridge that gap beautifully. They give you the principles and the practicalities, without ever making you feel lectured or incompetent.

What I love most is that they treat accessibility not as a compliance box to tick, but as core craft — part of what it means to be good at communication, full stop. They weave in examples, checklists, real-world scenarios, and the kinds of small, humane decisions comms people make a hundred times a day but rarely interrogate.

For anyone working in internal comms, content design, digital workplace, HR, UX, or frankly anywhere words meet humans: it’s one of those books you’ll keep within arm’s reach and quietly force on colleagues. Highly recommend.

🎧 Listening

Lily Allen’s new album has been on repeat in my ears since it dropped last month. I keep intending to listen to something else — a podcast, a serious audiobook, literally anything that would make me seem more intellectual — and then five seconds later I’m back in Lily-land, tapping away like a woman possessed. 10/10, no notes.

Travel

I’m heading to London this week for the Communicate conference. Looking forward to seeing some of my favourite intranerds in 3D. If you’re coming, say hello — or buy me a coffee if you’d like to hear about robot tour guides.

This week in photos

A glowing neon radiator sculpture illuminated against a dark urban backdrop, showcasing the architectural features of nearby buildings.

A speaker presenting on stage at an event, discussing the topic of dormant innovations. A presentation slide is visible in the background with the title 'Sleeping Beauties'. The audience is seated in front of the stage, engaging with the talk.

Weeknote 2025/41

October 11, 2025 / Sharon O'Dea / 1 Comment

Interior view of the Sainte-Chapelle in Paris, featuring intricate stained glass windows and ornate architectural details. — *Sainte-Chapelle, Paris. Awe-inspiring, literally.*

A week of motion and mixed emotions: gratitude, nerves, excitement. Paris one day, Japan the next. I keep catching myself thinking how lucky I am — and then immediately worrying I sound insufferable for saying so.

The truth is, I am grateful. I get to do things my younger self could never have imagined. But I’m also anxious, tired, feeling guilty and slightly overwhelmed. Big changes always come with a wobble, even the good ones.

This week at work

Still a quiet one. Began the final tranche of chapters for the book. Prepped for Japan. Did some thinking about (organisational) transformation.

Spent some time with an firm doing a discovery in a complex, multi-national setup, helping them to make sense of what they’ve seen and heard. Like many such organisations, they’re trying to find the right balance between central control, consistency and governance — and giving local teams the freedom and flexibility to create relevant content and experiences. In our experience, good governance balances both: standards set centrally, freedom within a framework. And an acceptance that, much as you’d like to, sometimes it’s best to control the things you can change and accept the things you can’t.

We also started ramping up work on a project that’s kicking off soon. Less positively, another proposal got bounced. The market’s pretty tough for everyone right now, I know, but I’m really feeling it right now.

Also this week

I went all the way to Paris for an exercise class. Which is, however I spin it, a ridiculous thing to do. The bonkers class I go to in Amsterdam announced a one-off special at Sainte-Chapelle — that extraordinary 13th-century jewel box of stained glass, in the city my grandmother called home. So I blagged a ticket and went.

Interior of Saint-Chapelle featuring intricate stained glass windows and Gothic architecture, with people gathered and soft lighting.

A woman smiling while participating in a dance exercise class inside a beautifully illuminated gothic chapel, with colorful stained glass windows in the background.

I danced to Florence and the Machine in silent-disco headphones, gazing up at the kaleidoscope of light and thinking of all the history those windows have witnessed. During the meditation at the end, I lay on my back listening to Alan Watts’ Dream of Life speech:

“Then you would get more and more adventurous and you would make further and further-out gambles as to what you would dream. And finally you would dream where you are now — the dream of living the life that you are actually living today. That would be within the infinite multiplicity of choices you would have.”

Somewhere between Paris and Tokyo, that line landed hard. What was once a dream really is the life I get to live — and I’m grateful for every improbable, ridiculous bit of it.

Consuming

📺 Watching

Rewatched Princess Mononoke to get in the Japan mood (after last week’s Silence misery-fest). Looking forward to seeing some Ghibli-esque landscapes in the Goto Islands this week.

📚 Reading

Made some slow progress on Blood in the Machine. Still grimly fascinating. A reminder that every technological revolution, from the Luddites to AI, comes with winners, losers and a lot of noise in between.

🎧 Listening

Still have Life of a Showgirl on repeat, but after hearing Alan Watts in the Sanctum class I’ve been deep-diving into more of his speeches on Spotify. Here’s the playlist — perfect plane-listening for big thoughts somewhere over the ‘stans.

Coverage

Had a flurry of messages this week telling me that a provocative LinkedIn post I wrote a few months back — asking if enterprise social networks are over — was being used by Kim England to open her talk at the Unite conference in Nashville.

When you send things out into the internet, you’re never quite sure if you’re sparking debate or just belming into the void. So it’s lovely to hear when something actually lands — and even better when it sparks thoughtful replies and reflection months later.

Turns out being a twat on the internet isn’t a total waste of time after all.

Connections

Met up with campaigner and growth hacker Pranay Manocha as he was passing through Amsterdam this week. We talked Brexit, passport privilege, growth, social media toxicity (and balanced it all out with a few Amsterdam beers).

A smiling man and woman taking a selfie outdoors, with a cafe ambiance in the background.

Travel

I’m writing this 39,000 feet over Asia, midway through a 24-hour, three-flight travel day. I’ll land in Tokyo in four hours and be in Nagasaki by the afternoon. My bag’s still in Paris, so I’m reluctantly piloting a minimalist approach to packing. Wish me luck. I fear I will need it.

Aside from that, looking forward to exploring my new city and meeting the other nomads on the trip, starting with a ferry to the Goto Islands.

Excited to explore, learn, get lost and find something new. Or, at the very least, buy some clean clothes. I’ll share it all here.

This week in photos

A picturesque canal scene in Amsterdam with a paddleboarder gliding along the water. Lush green trees are lining the banks, and colorful houseboats are moored nearby, reflecting in the calm water. It's a tranquil autumn day.

A view of a tree-lined street in Amsterdam during autumn, with bicycles parked along a canal and fallen leaves covering the ground.

Weeknote 2025/40

October 5, 2025 / Sharon O'Dea / Leave a comment

*Autumnal Amsterdam. Photo: Sharon O’Dea*

Some weeks feel like a hinge — the quiet click between what was and what comes next. This was one of them. Projects paused, others reignited, the to-do list reshuffled yet again. A reminder that most progress doesn’t look like momentum; it looks like waiting, adjusting, packing, planning.

Autumn’s fully arrived in Amsterdam, ushered in by the season’s first storm, Amy. All wind, rain, and sideways bikes. Bleak, but bracing. There’s a certain kind of forward motion in the colder air: the sense that the year’s winding down, and it’s time to get things finished, filed, or flung into motion before winter properly settles in.

The trees along the canals have started to turn, the light’s gone soft and golden, and the air smells faintly of woodsmoke and deadlines. It feels like the season for tying up loose ends — wrapping edits, clearing decks, and sketching out what’s next.

For me, that’s Japan. It’s suddenly just days away: a shift in season, continent, and perspective all at once. The perfect point, perhaps, to pause and take stock before the next chapter properly begins.

This week at work

A quieter one, though not without its twists. Two proposals we’d been hopeful about got knocked back — not lost to anyone else, just shelved as client plans shifted. Always frustrating when work evaporates for reasons outside your control, but that’s consulting life: sometimes you’re sprinting to meet a deadline, sometimes you’re rearranging the post-its and waiting for the next wave to break.

Happily, another project that wasn’t due to start until next year has come roaring back into view, so the pendulum swings both ways. If there’s a lesson in all this, it’s that flexibility isn’t just a virtue in this job — it’s survival.

Between that and chipping away at edits for the book (slowly, steadily, like a glacier), I’ve been getting ready for the Japan trip; finalising logistics, lining up interviews, and reaching out to people I’ll be speaking with while I’m there. It’s shaping up to be a fascinating few weeks of research, conversations, and new perspectives — and, hopefully, a bit of inspiration to carry back home.

Also this week

I went to a Science & Cocktails talk at Paradiso on the emergence of a post-growth society, given by Derk Loorbach. It was one of those evenings that quietly rewire your brain a little.

He spoke about how societies evolve not through steady progress but through short, chaotic bursts — moments when old systems destabilise and new ones start to take shape. The idea of “transitions” was framed as both inevitable and hopeful: collapse as transformation, not just destruction.

There were plenty of sharp takeaways: that our economy’s dependence on perpetual growth is fundamentally unsustainable; that our obsession with technological “fixes” is often an implementation illusion masking the need for deeper change; and that the real barrier is not resources or technology, but imagination — we’ve forgotten how to picture alternatives to extractive growth.

The phrase that stuck with me most: “Transition is a more hopeful form of collapse.” A useful lens, perhaps, not just for climate policy but for any complex system — from organisations to the digital workplace.

Also, I can confirm that lectures are vastly improved when preceded by smoky cocktails and a funk band.

Consuming

📺 Watching

With less than a week to go until I head to Nagasaki, I thought I’d give Silence — Martin Scorsese’s 2016 film about the Christian missionaries who came to Japan in the 17th century — a go. That was an error.

It’s a punishingly joyless three hours of mud, martyrdom, and men staring meaningfully into the middle distance while being slowly crushed by the weight of their own faith (and, occasionally, actual rocks). It’s beautifully shot, of course (Scorsese can’t help himself) but it’s the cinematic equivalent of flagellation: grim, ponderous, and utterly devoid of warmth or light.

By the end I wasn’t enlightened; I just wanted someone, anyone, to shout, “Cut! Enough suffering, lads!” I suspect the real silence here was my will to live slipping quietly away.

If the goal was to get me in the mood for Japan, it failed spectacularly — though it did make me grateful for central heating, antibiotics, and the fact that nobody’s currently boiling Christians in Nagasaki Bay.

📚 Reading

After listening to a podcast about the Levellers — the 17th-century political movement, not the 90s crusty band — I picked up Blood in the Machine by Brian Merchant. It traces the parallels between the early industrial revolts of the Luddites and today’s tech-driven upheavals, arguing that resistance to automation isn’t anti-progress but a fight for dignity and agency.

I’m about a third of the way through and impressed so far. It’s well-researched, surprisingly pacey, and full of eerie echoes: the concentration of power, the myth of innovation as inherently good, the way workers’ rights get trampled in the name of efficiency. You could swap the textile mills for data centres and the rhetoric would barely need editing.

It’s one of those books that makes you glance uneasily at your laptop and wonder which side of history you’re really on.

🎧 Listening

On Thursday my bestie and I caught the sold-out final show of Little Simz at AFAS — the North London rapper, actor, and all-round force of nature. She was magnetic: precise, powerful, utterly in command, with a crowd that sang every word back in adoration.

But the week’s real soundtrack belonged to Taylor Swift, whose much-anticipated new album dropped on Friday. I devoured it immediately. Unconvinced at first, but by the time of writing it had properly lodged itself under my skin — the kind of slow-burner that keeps revealing new layers every listen.

Saturday morning saw me at a special “Swiftie Saturday” spin class — 66 of us belting along on stationary bikes like a pop-powered peloton — and by evening I was at the cinema for the album launch film. Immersion therapy, basically.

It’s not a cult. It’s a group of like-minded individuals engaging in synchronised cardio and light emotional processing.

Connections

I had the pleasure of catching up with Amsterdam-Canadian communicator Cassie Jorgensen this week. We chatted about the challenges of building a professional network as a blow-in from another country and the merits of agency vs in-house.

Travel

Six days till Japan (and two of those involve a side-quest to Paris). Packing lists are being honed, chargers located, adapters counted, and contingency plans made in case the airline decides my suitcase needs a longer layover than I do.

This trip has come around quickly, but it feels like the right moment for it: the book nearing its final stretch, work shifting gears, the season turning. If this week’s talk on transitions had a message, it’s that change rarely happens neatly — it’s messy, unpredictable, often inconvenient — but also full of possibility if you keep your eyes open.

I’ll be spending the first week between Nagasaki and the Goto Islands, talking to people about how work, technology, and community are evolving in Japan — a country that’s long been living the future the rest of us are only now stumbling towards.

More on that next week, from the other side of the world.

This week in photos

Two musicians performing on stage with keyboards, illuminated by purple lighting, and an abstract background projection.

A narrow Amsterdam street lined with traditional buildings, featuring a rainbow flag hanging on the left and the tower of a church visible in the background, under a cloudy sky.

Weeknote 2025/39

September 29, 2025 / Sharon O'Dea / Leave a comment

A scenic view of a canal in Amsterdam, featuring trees with autumn foliage, a clock tower in the background, and boats floating on the water. — *Autumn in Amsterdam. Photo: Sharon O’Dea*

Some weeks are about routine, others about momentum. This one was about spotting opportunities and grabbing them before they slip past.

As Seneca put it: “Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.” I’ve never been much for masterplans — my career has been more patchwork than roadmap — but I’ve learned that when the right thing comes along, you say yes and work the rest out later.

And while there’s a bigger adventure brewing in the background, the week itself had plenty to get stuck into closer to home.

This week at work

The book keeps marching forward, as has the season. Amsterdam has taken a sudden autumnal turn, the light thinner, the mornings chillier. The shift feels like a metaphor: the year heading into its final quarter just as the book does. Another week, another chunk wrangled into something that (hopefully) resembles prose. This time I’ve been working on the chapters that shift from platforms to messy and unpredictable people, which means wrestling both with frameworks and with the practical realities of how organisations actually operate. Let’s just say it’s one thing to cite the Barcelona Principles, it’s another to translate them into something a harried comms team can actually use on a Tuesday afternoon.

I’ve also been thinking a lot about multilingual content. European Day of Languages was a neat reminder that we default far too often to the assumption that “everyone speaks English.” They don’t, and even when they do, it’s rarely the language of the heart. For intranets and employee comms that aspire to feel genuinely inclusive, that means more than slapping machine translation on your news pages—it means designing governance, content types, and workflows that respect linguistic diversity from the outset. I’ve blogged about that here.

Back from holiday I’ve also thrown myself back into Statement, focusing on the narrative and comms. The app’s core idea — authenticity through verified transactions — is resonating, but the story around it needs to land as strongly as the product itself. So I’ve been sharpening the positioning, and working out how to talk about Statement in a way that’s both clear and compelling.

Towards the end of the week I virtually sat down with Jack Aspden from The Company You Keep to talk about my career. Which will never not be funny to me, as (as I wrote about in Week 28) I’ve been working for over a quarter of a century and am still to have anything close to a plan. My career is less a trajectory and more a Jackson Pollock spray-painted across a life. A series of (occasionally good) decisions and some sheer dumb luck. We spoke for over an hour, a conversation that felt more like a session with a therapist at times. I wish him the best of luck editing that into something resembling useful career advice. As Helen Keller said, “Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing at all.”

Finally, proposals. We have a couple on the go, in that place where we kick them back and forth between us and the client until the shape of the project feels right. This where I get excited about the work itself and slightly queasy about the potential workload if they all land at once. It’s the consultant’s eternal dilemma: complain about the pipeline being too quiet, then panic when it starts filling.

Also this fortnight

Remember back in Weeknote 38 when I said I had some big news? Here it is: I’m off to Japan.

Starting next month I’ll spend a few weeks living and working there as part of a digital nomads programme with the Prefecture of Nagasaki. It’s a proper experiment in how regions can attract and support place-independent workers — and for me, a live case study in the future of work.

Japan is already grappling with challenges others are only just waking up to: ageing populations, shrinking talent pools, automation, AI, and the redesign of work for wellbeing and productivity. Those forces shape our comms, processes and platforms — the digital workplace is just a mirror of that reality, and the reflection is shifting fast.

I’ll be based mainly in Nagasaki (with some time on the Ghibli-esque Goto Islands) before wrapping up in Tokyo. I’ll keep client work ticking along (just seven hours in the future), while also writing, researching, and learning from innovators, business leaders and fellow nomads.

The future of work is being written everywhere. For a few weeks, my chapter will be from Japan.

If you know of anyone doing interesting things in the comms, collaboration or future of work space in Japan or the broader APAC region, I’d be grateful for an intro.

Consuming

👩🏻‍💻 Internetting

Unusually for this section, a podcast. WB40 is a long-running show about tech, but what makes it special is the community around it: regular listeners who are collaborative, generous, and always up for sharing advice.

This week’s episode features my friend — and occasional Lithos Partners associate — Lisa Riemers, talking about her new book Accessible Communications. I was lucky enough to get an advance copy, and I love how she and her co-author Matisse Hamel-Nelis not only make the case for accessibility in comms, but show how achievable it can be.

Listen in… and then go and buy the book.

📺 Watching

I dipped into Alice in Borderland on Netflix, partly to whet my appetite for all things Japan. It started off promising — stylish, intriguing, Tokyo-as-character — but it veered into Squid Game territory faster than I expected. Not sure yet if I’m hooked or just mildly traumatised.

📚 Reading

Somehow didn’t have much of a book mojo this week.

🎧 Listening

Bret McKenzie’s new album turned out to be an unexpected treat. Best known as one half of Flight of the Conchords, he’s gone solo here with something warmer and more musically layered. I put it on out of curiosity and ended up staying for the melodies — witty, yes, but also surprisingly tender. Proof there’s more to him than business time.