• The difference between a strategy and a plan

    I watched an Instagram clip the other day. It blew me away with what I thought was an ingenious strategy. It led to a thought captured in the title of this post. And to unearth a now widespread video published by Harvard 2 years ago. It nails the thought perfectly and the title is: A…


  • Designing messages for impact

    It’s something that arguably is going to be taken over by AI in the not-too-distant future, but the discerning human eye will always be needed to finetune things. Or so I believe. This post is about the various aspects of design I have been playing with alongside AI to determine the current possibilities. From a…


  • Video for communicating with attention sapped employees

    As if TikTok, Instagram’s Reels, and Snapchat haven’t zapped Gen Z’s attention spans enough, YouTube is now experimenting with a feature that allows users to automatically jump to the best parts of a video. How to create effective employee communications in light of such an environment is what prompted this post. I work with customers on many aspects…


  • Dont outsource all reasoning and communication to AI

    Charlie Munger (may he RIP) once said on AI: ‘I think old-fashioned intelligence works pretty well’. He was well known to have been sceptical of many things related to AI. Think what you may of him, he was a rather successful businessman who made many good decisions in his life, so I’d be inclined to…


  • Microsoft 365 customer questions – Viva Amplify boosting internal comms

    I have written about Microsoft Viva before, in relation to an employee experience trend report I am working on as well as in answer to other customer questions on the multiple Viva modules being rolled out. As that roll out continues, I continue to address the new opportunities and questions that arise. Past posts below…


  • Content management with WordPress evolved – full site editing 1

    Last month WordPress announced that full site editing was coming to its WordPress.com users of which I am one. I’ve been meaning to take it for a spin but haven’t managed to until now. This post is an attempt at documenting my experiences as I try and learn the new functionality as well as get…


  • Internal Communications is more important than ever but missing a trick

    If you’ve been following anything I have written in the last few months around employee experience, you’ll see that it is equally as important and indeed crucial to customer experience but often lacks attention, although that is now changing. It’s similar to enterprise software which has often lagged behind end consumer software in terms of…


  • Considering Microsoft Teams as a Platform – get started with App templates

    In several foundational pieces I have written about Microsoft Teams as a Platform (disclosure). This post gets to some of the detail and focuses on a simple way to get started with use of App templates in Teams. This is a big focus of my work with customers at the moment and I give an…


  • The innovation train and how best to lubricate the collaboration tracks

    It has been almost 20 years since the birth of the social web and maybe a little less for the enterprise which caught up later. In this brave new world, especially in the enterprise, email was to be replaced in favour of tools that were simple, social and collaborative. I’ve been in the business all…


  • How to make your activities pop in Microsoft Teams 💥

    I’m often asked by customers how they can make things stand out in their Teams activities. It’s often when things have taken off on Teams in their organisation and activities starts to explode. Standing out when things are quiet is easy, when there is a flood of information and messaging, not so much. So I’ve…


  • Microsoft Teams Live Events and the new channels of work

    I’ve just come off a week of successfully helping a customer run a Microsoft Teams Live Event for an annual event they run. The nature of the event they ran last week was to showcase innovation by the IT department to the rest of the organisation. This was the 5th such event being run in…