I’m hitting sending on this newsletter to you from London!

Three rooms. Two countries. One week.

Monday, I was in Basel, Switzerland with 75+ communicators from one of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world.

Wednesday, I was in a small conference room at IBM's London office with Sam Knowles, running a hands-on data storytelling workshop.

Friday morning, I was standing in front of a room of communicators who had never met each other — running a DDC Masterclass in London with the help of Antony Cousins.

I want to tell you what happened. Because the same thing happened in all three rooms. And I didn't expect it.

Nobody asked about building a better report. Nobody wanted to talk about boolean queries or missed clips. 75+ people from different functions, different teams, different countries — and every single conversation after the session was about strategy.

One person showed me a measurement framework they'd built that followed the input-output-outcome model almost exactly. Channel performance. Perception shift. Business impact.

Not the same words I use to teach DDC, but it’s the exact same structure.

They'd already proven it worked for product communications — where the metrics are cleaner, the outcomes more obvious.

But they were stuck on the harder stuff. Brand. Reputation. The work where proving impact gets messy and ambiguous.

They'd tried. They knew connecting to business outcomes was the answer.

They'd even done it successfully in one part of the business. But without a documented path for the rest, they stalled out. Figured maybe it wasn't possible.

Then I walked them through the DDC framework. The compass. The four pillars. How to overlay brand performance with audience perception with actual business behavior. Input, output, outcome — step by step.

And it clicked. Not because I changed their minds. Because they recognized what they already knew.

Afterwards, someone asked how to turn the session into a course for a Corporate Affairs Academy they're building. They're done paying top dollar to poach talent from competitors. They want to develop their people internally — give them a reason to stay.

That conversation told me everything.

This wasn't a conversion. It was a meeting of the minds.

And I think a lot of teams out there are just as close as this one — they've just stalled because the path wasn't spelled out.

The next day at IBM, I watched it happen differently.

Sam Knowles was teaching data storytelling — how to take a number and make it land with someone who doesn't think in your language.

Someone who works on IBM's research and innovation communications raised a real problem. Every year for Wimbledon, they collect 18.4 million data points. How do you make that mean something to a tennis fan who just wants to watch the match?

The room came alive. People jumping in with analogies, suggestions, counterarguments.

Someone brought up the Steve Jobs iPod launch — "1,000 songs in your pocket." Someone else pushed back. The whole team was building on each other's thinking, trying to crack it together.

I loved it. But I expected it. They're colleagues.

Same company, same brand, same challenges.

Of course they'd rally around each other.

Then it happened again the next morning. And I didn't expect it.

Then on Friday, the London DDC Masterclass was a room full of strangers. Different companies, different industries, different roles. Nobody knew each other.

One of them was Amy.

Amy is a team of one. The only communicator in a company of 7,500 people. Every challenge she faces, she faces alone. No peer to pressure-test ideas with. No colleague who understands what it's like to defend a budget to a CEO who doesn't get why comms matters.

But on Friday morning, Amy had a team of 8.

Eight strangers who couldn't help but lean in. Who offered their perspective, their experience, their hard-won lessons — to genuinely help her figure it out. Nobody asked them to. Nobody assigned it. It just happened.

Because when you put communicators in a room and make it safe to be honest about what's hard, they don't compete. They help.

I've been doing this for 16 years and that's the thing that still gets me. The best support networks in this profession don't come from your org chart. They come from rooms like this — where people who have no reason to help each other, do.

Speaking of people who help. Devin helped build Gong's brand from the ground up and became one of the most respected voices in B2B content and marketing.

He taught me about the 95-5 rule — at any given time, only 5% of your market is ready to buy. The other 95%? That's where brand lives.

That's where trust is built.

That's where communicators do their most important work — even when nobody's measuring it.

If you've ever struggled to justify work that doesn't have immediate, measurable ROI, this session is for you.

After Devin:

Roadshow — next stops:

See you there!

(I’m off to my first premier league game… wish me and Tottenham luck please!)