Empowerment Is a Lie: History, Hollow Workdays & Depleted Org Resources

[00:00:09] Welcome to Frequency, I'm Chuck Gose And I'm Jenni Field. Frequency is your go-to for real talk about comms, culture and employee experience, beyond the buzzwords and straight to what matters. And this week we're going to be talking about the history of internal comms, what an education that's going to be. We're going to be discussing the word empowerment and what that really means, some inspiration from Colorado River and what that's teaching us about organisations, and also the disappearance of the 9 to 5.

[00:00:39] Before we get into that though... We have both been travelling about. I believe I saw on Instagram you were gallivanting around Amsterdam. I believe I saw. I was gallivanting. I was. Meanwhile, I've been back here doing the real work. I've been in New York last week, I was in Chicago recently. So I hope you enjoyed your travels while the rest of us have been doing the real work.

[00:01:04] Yeah, to be fair, all I saw of your real work was I think you out for dinner and, you know, chilling out with your mates. You're just seeing the selected pieces. You're just seeing the selected pieces. I was on holiday in my defence. The other thing I wanted to talk about was I am absolutely loving this new whiplash on AI.

[00:01:26] So I, this is unverified, but it seems to be, I guess, maybe it is confirmed, but not like a real source, that apparently there's a company out there that had zero guardrails around their employee use of Claude. And they racked up a bill of $500 million in a month.

[00:01:50] It would essentially be like if you had a house full of teenagers and they're all running the hot water 24 hours a day. Like it's, it's just insane to hear that, that there are no guardrails. But I think this shows the infancy, the immaturity of companies saying, no, go use AI, go figure things out and not understanding the financial consequences of that.

[00:02:15] Also, apparently Microsoft, which rolled out Claude to its employee base, which I thought was interesting because you would think Claude might be a competitor to Copilot, but maybe they recognize this better. It's now, it's now like shutting off the use of Claude for it and, and now requiring them to use Copilot because the costs were getting so high. And the ultimate punchline to all of this is apparently Jenni companies are learning.

[00:02:44] It is actually cheaper to have people do the work. I do the work. Oh, there's something just so glorious. It's delicious. It's absolutely delicious. And as, as I was thinking about this, I was thinking about like this punchline that's out there. I looked up, did you know the origin of the word punchline? No. I didn't either.

[00:03:15] Apparently, per the internet, and this is a source I'm going to trust on this. It dates back to the vaudeville days, where they equated a joke to like a physical punch, like an impact. Okay. So you would have that impact and then the line being the script. So the joke here, the punchline is that companies are all about AI efficiency. And in fact, it's doing the opposite of what they think. I love that. So that's the impact. And you said in the beginning of this, it's unverified.

[00:03:43] Is the bit about the cost verified though? But it was, this was from a consultant who's working with a company and they would not share who the company is. But they said the bill was $500 million. Wow. Not, and imagine, let's say that's a little bit of exaggeration or even a gross exaggeration. Yes. I doubt companies have budgeted $100 million or $15 million, but $500 million.

[00:04:13] Yeah. That's terrifying. The punchline is just delicious. It's just delicious. But as we're talking about work and what's going on, let's kick off with the first story, which is about the end of nine to five. So it's talking about AI and hybrid work and how that's transforming enterprise culture. It's a piece in the economic times. Now they're saying that the modern work day looks very productive from the outside, packed calendars, constant notifications. Everyone's always available. We've talked about this a lot, but underneath that busyness is that really uncomfortable reality.

[00:04:42] Which is that people are spending a lot of time kind of in motion, but without ever reaching any meaningful depth. So for decades, productivity was built around visibility, presence signaled performance, time at a desk implied contribution. And that model has made sense for industrial work and it's made sense for a number of years. But knowledge work never got redesigned around it. And this has been my soapbox since COVID. So today, this article is saying that value is created through concentration rather than activity.

[00:05:12] So a product breakthrough may emerge from an hour of uninterrupted thinking. A designer may produce better work after stepping away from constant communication. But the modern workplace is increasingly rewarding responsiveness over reflection. So employees move between meetings, updates, approvals, message threads, all of that at quite high speed. Spending more time coordinating work rather than doing it. So the attention starts to fragment. The work day becomes just this chain of reactions.

[00:05:38] And that's where this traditional nine to five model begins to kind of lose its relevance. At the same time, AI is accelerating this reckoning as automation handles repetitive execution faster than ever. The real competitive advantage may shift toward judgment, creativity and problem solving. These are all forms of work that depend heavily on clarity of thought.

[00:05:59] So my question is, if the competitive advantage is now judgment and creativity rather than output and hours, what does this mean for how leaders should actually be measuring and communicating performance to their people? I'm going to readjust your statement there. The competitive advantage is judgment and creativity rather than output and hours. I think it's leaders are the ones that are questioning that.

[00:06:24] I don't think they can get their mind around or their head around the fact that, oh, this is how we should be judging our competitive advantage. Not are we producing this more being more efficient here? These data signals. What are we doing with this time? So I think that's the challenge. I believe that the advantage is creativity. I believe that advantage is judgment and working on the right things at the right time in the right way with the right people.

[00:06:51] It's not so much that I put in 80 hours this week. The correct leadership would be to look at employees and say, wow, that person worked 40 and created more, got more done, was more efficient with their time than saying that person who worked 80. Because I forget what the report was, but there was something about where after 60 some hours, 67 hours or something in a week, like it actually starts to decline from it.

[00:07:20] So we know that there's this optimum amount. It's I don't believe in I have never read the book that was like the four hour work week or whatever it was called. I got that didn't quite add up to me. I think that's a bit liberal with things. But I that's where I would question leaders look at the decisions your employees are making, what they're putting out, not necessarily how much and how long they're spending doing it. And I still think this is the transition that's that's really hard.

[00:07:50] So when I was reading the article, I was there's nothing necessarily new in here. But I think that the the value piece around concentration rather than activity, the value around judgment and creativity rather than output. All of that has been around for a long time. But there is something about hybrid work that's going to nudge that because you're not can't do the presenteeism and AI is going to nudge that because it's going to take away some of those tasks.

[00:08:15] I think until leaders are looking at the whole culture of the organization and what the organization is trying to do and achieve in terms of its purpose or meaning, and then how you go about doing that and reimagining that. I think that's still the issue. And I said this in Covid where we were just lifting and shifting work into a different place rather than reimagining it. And that's what they did in the Industrial Revolution. They just lifted and shifted how they would design factories with, you know, different mechanisms to do it rather than thinking, oh, we could do this differently now.

[00:08:44] We've got different technology. And I it's been six years and I sort of feel like how much how much longer is it going to take people to go? Hang on a minute. What is it we're really trying to do and what's the best way of doing it? And I know we've talked the other week about leaders getting in a room and having a conversation. Some people are really with me on that on LinkedIn, but I would love to see people having this bigger conversation. So not necessarily just the strategy, but reimagining what work needs to be. That's surely within your gift as an organization, as a leader of an organization.

[00:09:14] You don't have to have the construct of nine to five. You could tear that up and do something completely different. Surely. But let's be clear about one of the people are with you on LinkedIn with a list of caveats. It's like all these asterisks, all these. Yeah. And if this and then this and then this. Anyway, I'll let that go. I think going back to an earlier part that you talked about with all these things that people are moving between meetings and approvals and being responsive.

[00:09:41] And I think the people that if you're one of those individuals who wears the I'm a good multitasker badge on your sleeve. Yes. You need to stop. You need to stop. The brain actually can't multitask. It can only do one task at a time. So what you're doing is actually being less efficient, less productive, but somehow bragging about it. Sort of like that culture of busy. Yeah. Busy is not productive. Busy is not successful. Multitasking is not successful.

[00:10:10] So let's stop parading that around as a badge of honor. Yeah. And if you want to read about that, there's a really good book called Busy by Tony Crabb, which I read about 10 years ago and have talked about ever since where I first came across the data around multitasking and stuff. But it's excellent if you feel that you struggle with busyness. Now, our next story is the Colorado River story. This is from Inc.com. So it's talking about the fact that the Colorado River is running dry and saying that's a perfect metaphor for how organizations quietly hollow themselves out.

[00:10:39] Lake Powell is currently just 24% full and Lake Mead is 32%, with 2026 on track to be the driest year in over a century of records. Yet the seven affected states still can't agree on new operating rules. Every state knows the system is failing, but they're not doing anything collectively to really fix that. Now, the article uses this as a lens on what economists call the tragedy of the commons.

[00:11:06] Every actor optimizes for their own benefit, but the shared cost is invisible and the resource collapses one rational decision at a time. So the Colorado River Compact actually allocated more water than the river produces. States drew on those reserves that were never really there. This feels quite familiar in terms of organizations because inside organizations, the shared resources being quietly depleted are talent pipelines, team capacity, market trust. The trap isn't about the negligence.

[00:11:35] It's the rationality applied at the wrong scale. So there's a lot of similarities here about how we can take this analogy and put it into the organization. So the key points in the article about how you would address this in terms of leaders and what leaders need to do is around naming the shared resource and giving it a number, building system level accountability. So individual managers aren't just rewarded for their own team's output and act before the options disappear.

[00:12:04] All of this for me is just around making sure that you're looking at the whole piece and not your individual piece. And I think in an individualistic culture, which a lot of the world is, that becomes even more challenging. So my question for you, Chuck, is when you look at organizations you've worked with, what's the shared resource that gets depleted first? And do leaders ever realize it's happening before it's too late? Yeah, I love this concept of the tragedy of the commons.

[00:12:30] And when I think about where I've seen this, Jenny, I don't know if you've heard of this little upstart country called the United States of America. But this is exactly what we are going through now. This is why we are in the situation we are in because people have voted in their own interests without looking at or actually not even in their own interest sometimes, but they think it's their own interest. That's actually causing problems down the line.

[00:12:56] And so this is a situation I get capitalism, you could say, as a great example of this, where people are in it for themselves and not really looking at the big picture, the environmental movement, which is as part of this Colorado River thing. When I was thinking about this from a company's standpoint, you look at that burnout from employees. You look at that energy that every individual is putting in that shared resource that people are just they're exhausted. They're exhausted.

[00:13:24] They the company isn't looking down the line to see what is this causing? Is their own Colorado River going to run out of water at some point? So I think this is a great thing to think about. And when you look at whether it's individual goals, team goals, company goals, if everyone is focused on that individual goal, is that laddering up to the team goal? Is that then laddering up to the corporate goal?

[00:13:49] Or is it causing a problem somewhere else that people aren't looking at? They're not seeing that vision on it. And it feels like if I think about the conversations I'm having with clients talking about communication, culture, leadership behaviors, there seems to be a continuous theme about collaboration, silos, being able to see across the organization. That isn't necessarily new. I feel like collaboration has been a conversation for a long time.

[00:14:14] But I do think that it's harder now to do that because there is something hard about not all being in an office together. And I think you just hear stuff and you catch stuff that might be going on that you might not have been aware of. But I think there is just a I think everything became so isolated and you became so focused on yourself during COVID to some degree that we've forgotten about thinking about your stakeholders and the impact and all of those knock on effects to things.

[00:14:44] And I don't think leaders are doing that. I don't think leaders are going, hang on a minute. I know I'm responsible for this function, but I'm also a director of this organization. And that means I'm responsible for all of it. So I don't think people are shifting that hat. And I think that makes it harder for employees to really understand that, because that's not necessarily the job of, you know, Fred, who's an analyst to be able to know that he's just cracking on with what he's doing. But the leaders have to have that visibility.

[00:15:10] And I'm not sure I'm seeing that as well as I used to see it maybe about eight years ago. I think it feels like everyone is not in a malicious way, but just very focused on my task, what I need to do and not thinking bigger picture and impact. And maybe, Jenny, maybe. I think I heard this on a podcast recently that if leaders talk to other leaders.

[00:15:35] That then they would know when these things are happening, but they're not talking to each other. So I think this is where we run into this situation, this tragedy of commons. Like I said, I'm fascinated by this concept to see what are all these individual actions that every person is taking that they think is the right thing to do. It's either they're right or it's benefits them. We're not looking at the bigger picture. We're seeing that play out every single day here in the US with the consequences of it.

[00:16:03] It is absolutely playing out inside every single company out there. Yeah. And as you were just talking then about the little things, it made me think of the 1% stuff, which we talked about a few episodes ago when I got the 1% diary. And it's almost like there's lots of little 1% going on, but not necessarily the incremental gains. So no, yeah. Not in a positive way. We're just doing 1% things in a weird, different way and it's just not helping. The next article is called Why Empowerment is a Management Lie. Hi. This is from Fast Company. It says,

[00:16:31] The word empowerment gets thrown around constantly in leadership conversations, but this Fast Company piece makes a pointed argument. In most companies, job descriptions promise autonomy. Leaders proudly talk about their empowered teams and meetings end with, you've got this. Yet that same work still runs through a gauntlet of approvals, sign offs and second guessing. The language suggests freedom. The system reinforces control. And I see this all the time.

[00:16:57] Just the other week, I ended up doing a 10, 15 minute session with a leadership team on the difference between autonomy and empowerment. The article is saying that empowerment is just dependence with better branding. So the authors of the article use an analogy to explain what actually happens. They talk about how you would treat a rental car. So you don't worry about the long term maintenance of that. You don't take extra care beyond what's required. And that's how people behave at work when they don't feel true ownership.

[00:17:25] When every meaningful decision still needs approval, even high performers begin to operate within the limits of the system instead of pushing beyond it. They wait. They hedge. They protect themselves. The distinction they draw is between responsibility and authorship. Most organizations give people responsibility. Outcome is theirs to deliver. But they hold on to the authorship of the decision making path. And that gap is where the ownership is really starting to break down.

[00:17:49] So their proposed fix is for leaders to act as system architects rather than micromanagers. I'm a big fan of freedom in a framework. Feels like what we're talking about. Providing clarity on outcomes rather than instructions and replacing approval checkpoints with guardrails. Letting people make reversible decisions with roughly 70% of the information they wish they had. So, Chuck, if empowerment is just dependence with better branding, what does real ownership actually look like in the organizations that you've seen get it right?

[00:18:18] And what did the leader have to give up to make it happen? If you've ever seen it, in fact. The, the, the, I'm going to go to that second question first. They, they have to give up control. And that's what we've seen so many leaders simply fail to do. When you see this thing about, Oh, I'm like you mentioned in this article, I empower my team to do all these things, but then really in action, they have to run it by the, the, the team manager, the boss, the director first.

[00:18:46] That's not real empowerment, but it is a really good label to put on it. I don't know that I've really seen it play out. Well, I don't think people are good at empowerment. Just like, I don't think people are really all that strong at delegation. A lot of time, that's a word we didn't really bring into this. So I think as a part of this empowerment autonomy control. One of my talks that I give a lot of centers on scarf, which is a mental model created by this neuroscientist, David Rock.

[00:19:14] And the A and scarf is autonomy where that is a reason that people will engage or disengage, but it's going to be have different lovers for different individuals. So for some people, autonomy is a big driver. They want that control. They want that responsibility. Other people, autonomy is actually quite scary. They don't feel like they've got the good guardrails in place. So I think we could very easily point to our favorite topic that we talked about so much on frequency, which is return to office.

[00:19:43] Where during COVID people were empowered to work from home. Oh, let's give you this power because you can't go into the office. So where else are you going to go at that point? But then all of a sudden they lost that autonomy because leaders weren't willing to give up the control. So I think there are layers to this because I think you're right. Are these more caveats? No, I'm just going to have an asterisk tattooed on my face.

[00:20:12] No, I just think there are, I think there are layers to this that the ladder up to kind of where we are. So you said leaders, what do leaders have to give up? They have to give up control. Leaders aren't going to do that. Like, let's be honest, there is an element of risk, reputation, their responsibility, accountability, that just giving up control is never going to happen. But I think part of that comes from a place of not trusting and extending trust to your team.

[00:20:37] And I think that's the trust deficit that we're seeing in organizations at the moment that leaders don't trust their team, their team don't trust leaders. And that's leading to this inability to delegate or give people that space. I think there's also a layer to this, which is leaders aren't being clear about what it is that needs to happen. Whereas if you can say, this is our strategy, these are the five pillars of our strategy. This is what each one of those pillars means. And this is where we want that to go. How you get there is totally up to you. But that's that's the goal, right?

[00:21:06] I don't think people are articulating things like that to give people that clarity and ability to do it. And I think if they are, I think they are micromanaging that middle bit. But I don't see a lot of the time this is the strategy. This is where we're going, how you get those up to you. And that is when it works. That's how we did strategy in an organization I worked in. And we had huge engagement from our frontline colleagues who had the autonomy and empowerment to decide what they were going to do to achieve that goal.

[00:21:35] And that's that's the bit that I think sometimes gets muddled is what are you actually giving people empowerment or autonomy to do? And actually, it should be in the how because these should be subject matter experts. They should have knowledge understanding all of these things. And I don't think that's clear. And I think actually, yeah, there's just lots of layers in this for me about why it's happening, but also what is it that you want people to be empowered to do? Yeah, I'm never expecting leaders to give up total control.

[00:22:00] I'm talking about control over these decisions and control over these things. So it could be something even as benign as, hey, we're going to try something new with our town halls. Well, if you're a leader, do you need to approve every step? Like, yeah, that's that control part. Like if you've got a person who has a ton of experiences, you mentioned that whether they're some labeled subject matter expert or they're just someone who has put a lot of thought and time into something. Maybe it's a new design on an employee experience, whatever it is.

[00:22:30] It's that maybe we're looking at this the wrong way now as I'm thinking about it. When we've talked about that, that people don't trust leaders. I think this is a great example of leaders truly not trusting their people. Mm hmm. Mm hmm. Yeah. But you made me think about the leaders having conversations together and trust and stuff like that. And I was facilitating a leadership conversation the other day with about 20 leaders, and they were talking about what decisions directors could make and what decisions the leadership team could make.

[00:23:00] So the kind of the distinction between the two. And it was interesting because there was a general consensus of these are the decisions that could be made. And then there was a conversation from one of the people on the leadership team saying, basically, I don't want to sign off the budget. I feel like my directors can do that. I don't feel like I need to do that. And it takes up a lot of my time and I don't really enjoy that. And one of his peers said, well, I don't do that. I've given that to my team for years. And he was like, oh, OK, cool. Didn't you know, didn't realize I could do that.

[00:23:29] But it's even just having the space to have the conversation of that person being made to feel that they had to do that. But actually, they could have given that away a long time ago. And it's just it's all for me about having the conversations and what you can empower, what you can delegate, what you can give away and being an adult about it and having a conversation about what's comfortable and what's not. Or if you're not comfortable, what needs to happen in order for you to get comfortable? Because I think there's a little bit of just have some faith in your team. Yeah.

[00:23:58] Like just have a little bit of faith in your team that they're going to try to do the right thing and do the right thing, especially if they've had the experience and have done the right thing in the past. Just have some faith. Well, we're going to go on a little history lesson now with the history of internal comms. Now, I appreciate that if you're listening to this, you can't see the notes that are in front of me. But I did do a massive dump of stuff to Chuck and said, I'm not going to read all this, but here's some context, which I know you've enjoyed reading.

[00:24:26] But a couple of weeks ago, there was a conference in the UK called the History of Internal Comms Conference. It was hosted at Brunel University in London and it was hosted by Professor Michael Heller, who has been looking at the history of internal comms for the last few years. Now, I was talking about the value of internal comms and how that has shifted over the years. And I shared my speech as an article on LinkedIn. So I'll pop the link to that in the show notes in case anyone's looking at value.

[00:24:54] But the reason I wanted to talk about it was because as I was sitting in the opening keynote where Professor Heller was talking through the history of internal comms and all these things. I'm going to get my notebook up that I had on the day. So I'm scribbling away. He's talking about, you know, internal comms developed due to change in organizations, changes in the environment, changes in management thinking. There's some really interesting stuff about the first time the first magazine came out, which was like 1878 was the first internal comms magazine.

[00:25:23] But everything came from workers. So it all came from this need to connect over sport or share information. It came from employees. That was the point, really. And lots of links to education. But as I was sitting in the audience, I wrote in big letters, this is never going to work and put a box around it. And then I wrote nobody wants this underneath. And I had a conversation with someone else in one of the breaks.

[00:25:49] And I said, I actually left the opening keynote with a realization that when you look at the history of internal comms, so much of it is coming from employees. And so much of the work that I'm doing and we talk about is trying to convince leaders of the benefit of internal comms. But nobody asked for it. Like at no point did a leader say, we need to do this. It all came from employees wanting to talk to each other. It came from this need for social connection. It came from sport.

[00:26:17] It came from being able to show you were doing your duty as a civilian, all of those things. And there are lots of changes. I'll put a link to the history of internal comms website in the show notes, because if you are interested in it, there's quite a lot of stuff documented about what happened, the impact of the first world war, the second world war, digital. There's loads of stuff in here.

[00:26:35] But everything that I came back to was the history of internal comms is very clearly about magazines, editorial channels, very heavily union based in there as well. But there's nothing that says really that a leader decided that, you know, I really need to talk to my people. I need to hear from my people. I need to connect my people. That doesn't feel like that ever really came up. And that's why I left the beginning feeling a little bit sad.

[00:27:03] Now, I didn't stay for all the sessions because I had to head home and do some client work. But I wanted to talk about it here because I think it's an interesting topic. And I also am interested in your perspective around, you know, this research is showing that internal comms goes back about 150 years. Is that helpful to know? Does knowing our history help us? Does it hold us back not knowing it? And if we know that we come from social connection and publishing, does it change anything about what we're doing?

[00:27:31] I think this should change everything based on your perspective. I'm loving this, Jenny. One of my, I would say it's a prize possession, I guess. I got this from my mom. It's a newsletter from a company that my grandfather worked at where it's an employee profile about him in this. Oh, nice. I would say it's probably from the, I think it's from the late 40s, early 1950s, somewhere around there.

[00:27:58] But I love this intention of that it was from the employees, for the employees. I think that's the focus that we should have. That's the thinking we should have. At no point did the company say, historically speaking, that we know of, hey, we should make sure employees stay informed. No, it was employees wanting to connect. There was employees wanting to learn from each other, know what's going on, all of those things.

[00:28:26] I mean, it talks about even some of the notes you had in here was especially a lot of this during the war, which I love this one title. Was it khakis and comrades? Yeah. Or comrades and khakis, sorry, comrades and khakis. Like, there is a moment. And it's funny you should mention the union side because there's a lot of, I would say, typically anti-union sentiment out there that I hear from just people in general, but also a lot of communicators.

[00:28:53] My manufacturing comms background was in union environments. I actually quite enjoyed working in those environments because guess who the union is really all about? The employees. That's the focus. That's what they're there for. It's not for the company leaders and the CEO or their plant manager, whoever it is. So I love this historical aspect to it. In fact, it should give some legacy to the work that we're all doing.

[00:29:22] And perhaps it might just get you to shift your focus a little bit to saying, who is this for? Yeah. And why is it for this group of people? And I think that was the realization for me was that it all kind of comes back to the social piece, really. Like it does say in the research that by the 1930s, nearly every large scale organization had some sort of company journal, but it served very operational roles. It was kind of communication, education, entertainment.

[00:29:50] And it did have some element of that corporate identity, that culture piece that we often talk about. But it was such a big part of the community element, which is ultimately what magazines should be. I remember doing magazines when I was in house and I did a magazine for a cookie brand that I worked for, and it was called Crumbs. And I hated this magazine because it was just, it felt really chaotic and it was quite messy, but it was exactly the right thing for employees.

[00:30:18] And all we talked about was who was designing what cookies and what they were. And there was nothing in there about corporate stuff. And people loved it because it was just about them and cookies, which was great. But I think we get stuck in internal comms of trying to make things very polished and very together. And I fell into that trap in my junior career of, you know, being the brand piece and it has to look like this and it has to be like this. And I just think this, it feels a bit scrappy.

[00:30:48] It feels like there were a group of people that just got together and did this, you know, on the side of their job and then just emailed it round. And now it has become a professional, you know, profession. And that's lovely. But I think it's lost something along that in terms of the point of it and what it was here to actually do. And it's become so corporatized, not a word, that it's lost that it's lost that it's lost that real people feel to it.

[00:31:16] Yeah, I used to carry this around with me. I think I've lost it over the years, but it was it was my favorite example of an employee newsletter. And I can't even remember the name. I can't remember the company, but I do remember they were catering company. This newsletter was like typed out in word basically gave financial summaries of this is how many orders we had last week. This is how many orders we did this week.

[00:31:42] This is what last month, but this month, last year, like just quick charts for people to look at. One of the things that it would highlight was recognizing employees who are basically like drivers who are driving catering orders around. If they spotted a competitors van outside of business, they were then instructed to go in and drop off like a menu and a business card because clearly that customer is buying catering business. So they should buy from us.

[00:32:10] It was just this very simple like every communicator was just like clutching their pearls at the design or lack thereof of this thing. But if you're that employee, it delivered exactly what you wanted. It gave you exactly what you needed. And it gave the recognition of saying, hey, this is or hey, we just got this business because Jenny dropped this menu off at this thing. It just told a very basic story to people.

[00:32:36] Yeah, but I love this fact that employees started it and what we would now probably call shadow comms. We're now like dumping on this thing. And this is actually the history of our profession of employees doing it in their own circle, which is now something that we denigrate. Yeah, maybe we are the shadow comms. Ooh. Ooh. But yeah, I mean, I could talk about this quite a lot. And I am very interested in it.

[00:33:04] It's really good work in terms of the history and hearing a conference that was a blend of academics and professionals. There was something quite lovely about those two parts of what we do kind of coming together. And I think it's easy to focus on the channels, which I think is more is interesting, but I also think it's limiting. I think it's more important to focus on the intent because yes, back in the late 1800s, you're not going to email anything. You're not going to post anything on an internet, right? It's going to be print, but that's the history.

[00:33:34] So let's learn from that. Yeah. And in fact, it would be interesting to know for companies, for communicators at companies who have been around since this time, do you have any kind of archives? Like a lot of these companies do have some element of that, like go see what you can find out, like, and then republish some of that stuff. Yeah. Because I think that's the stuff that your employees would be really interested in seeing. Yeah. I've still got my old company magazines from when I was doing them in places.

[00:34:02] And I had a little trip down memory lane reading them the other day. But I think the last episode we did, I just did like the that's all folks on the front cover, which was sort of the last one before, you know, digital came over and took it all away. Anyway, that's the end of all of our articles this week. What are you freaking out about? Well, as I mentioned, when we started out. I was in New York supporting work Vivo at their engaged New York City event. I was also in Chicago supporting blink at their breakfast club event.

[00:34:30] So it's always great to be at those events because I get to be in the room with communicators for the day. Mm hmm. But being in those two places, that's just a reminder to me. And it's something my wife, Chris and I talked about all the time. We love cities. We love cities. I don't know if it's it's the pavement, the noise, the energy, whatever it is. Like when I was in New York, I did a two mile walk to dinner, had my AirPods in, put in some great 80s new wave as I'm walking through the city.

[00:35:00] I felt like I was in a movie, Jenny. Like there's just something about these things. The weather was great. Like the people are going about there. It's just it's basically something we've we've decided as a as a couple that when we are when the birds have left the nest, which was just a couple years away from that, we're going to just sell everything and just live downtown somewhere.

[00:35:27] Just be walkable, be a part of this like fabric of a city instead of out in the suburbs. And it's just something I've been thinking more and more about is like how much I enjoy being in a city. Yeah, I agree. Like, in fact, I was walking through London the other week, had my AirPods on and I was almost doing a little dance to the music as I was walking along because I was having such a lovely time.

[00:35:50] So my freak out this week is that we are just a few weeks away from comms reboot in Toronto, which seems to be creeping up on me very quickly. And so I'm very excited. I get to see you in person, which will be a joy as well as a few other friends over in Toronto. So it was that's what I'm freaking out about, which is comms reboot on the 17th of June.

[00:36:09] So if you are in Toronto or nearby and want to come along to the communications conference, I shall pop a little link in the show notes for you and even a little secret code for you to get a little discount as well. Thanks for adding some stress because I was trying to keep my freak out very positive, Jenny. Oh, it's not bad. No, no, no. Now you've reminded me of like, I've got this coming up and then this coming up and then Toronto after that. You're going to have to get that whiteboard back out because you're going to have to have it. I can see it now. You're going to have to get it sorted with all your plans.

[00:36:39] Well, thank you for joining us this week. We hope that the articles and insights will help you think about how to improve comms, leadership and culture in your organization. And if you don't yet subscribe or follow, please do as it helps make sure you won't miss an episode. All the links to all the articles we've mentioned today are in the show notes. So you can grab those to read if you want to explore anything further. We'll be back with you on Monday with more news, insights and opinions about everything comms and leadership in workplaces today. Appreciate you being here with us.