What does freedom actually feel like when you have it? How do money, time, identity, and purpose shift once the routines of full-time work fall away?
These are questions many people carry long before retirement is near. They are not only practical, but deeply personal, and often left unexplored until the moment of change is already close.
In this member call, Christopher Justice, author of 55 & Out: How to Retire With Life to Spare, joins us for a book launch conversation on what happens when work stops being the main structure around which life is organised.
This is not only a conversation about leaving work. It is about shaping what comes next with more intention. The session will introduce the ideas behind 55 & Out and open up a warm, reflective exchange with space for questions and shared perspectives from the group.
Read moreDigital sovereignty has moved from slogan to strategy. In 2026, it is no longer about abstract positioning, but about deliberate choices in procurement, governance, cost, and collaboration.
Across our government and higher education peer group outside the US, this shift is now visible in day-to-day decisions. The same applies in parts of the private sector, particularly in banking and other regulated industries, where questions of control, risk, and compliance are already shaping technology choices.
The practical challenge is replacing dependency with sustainable control. That does not come from isolation, but from more deliberate procurement and management decisions across platforms, vendors, and internal teams. These choices increasingly involve trade-offs between cost, capability, and control.
In a recent member call, Mathias Bolt Lesniak, Project Ambassador at TYPO3, and Jeffrey “Jam” McGuire, Partner at Open Strategy Partners, explored what it takes to turn principle into practice.
Read moreThe conversations shaping the future of the web are shifting.
At CloudFest last month in Germany, with its sheer scale, that shift became easier to see. Two topics stood out across almost every conversation: AI and digital sovereignty.
AI is no longer discussed as experimentation. It is shaping expectations, roadmaps, and investment decisions. At the same time, digital sovereignty is moving from policy discussions into practical concerns about dependency, control, and local alternatives.
This is where attention is, and where budget is flowing.
Yet something more fundamental is emerging. The real change is structural. It is about who controls the systems we depend on, how ecosystems are governed, and where value is created. In open source, initiatives like FAIR point to new ways of organising shared responsibility, and new ways to create and capture value within the ecosystem.
CloudFest was new to me this year, and hard to ignore. The conference takes over an entire theme park
Read moreA few themes kept surfacing this quarter:
* AI and digital sovereignty stand out as areas where organisations are willing to invest significantly. Budgets are being found, and in some cases expanded, as decisions, discovery, and web traffic patterns are reshaped.
* Digital sovereignty is moving from policy into practice, influencing everyday choices about platforms, vendors, and control.
* Many teams are no longer reacting to change itself, but to accumulated complexity. Tools, processes, and expectations layered over time. The question is increasingly where to simplify.
Read moreA new type of user is emerging, and most organisations are not yet set up to recognise them.
AI agents that search, evaluate, and make decisions on behalf of others are beginning to shape how people interact with digital services. This is not a distant trend. It is already visible in shifting traffic patterns and in how decisions move away from the journeys many of us have spent years refining.
I was reminded of this when I received an advance copy of The Invisible Users by Tom Cranstoun. The book explores how AI agents use the web to make decisions, and what that means for how we design and operate digital experiences.
It is a useful lens. It also makes something else harder to ignore.
Read moreAI is already reshaping how work gets done. That much feels obvious now. What is less obvious, and harder to navigate in practice, is how uneven that change is across organisations.
In some places, AI is already embedded in daily workflows. In others, it remains something people experiment with quietly on the side. The gap between those two realities is growing, and with it a new kind of organisational tension.
I was reminded of this in a recent session with our Hamburg employee experience group hosted by Haillo. The conversation leaned heavily human, but with AI threaded through almost every topic.
There is a lot of change happening at our door right now. The more interesting question is whether organisations are actively shaping that change, or simply trying to keep up with it.
Read moreAcross Canada, many municipal RFPs specify open source platforms such as Drupal as a requirement for their CMS.
These requirements are typically well-intentioned. They aim to protect public investment, ensure long-term ownership, and avoid vendor lock-in.
Yet in practice, they often fall short of those goals.
Read moreLeadership is rarely tested in calm, spacious moments. It is tested when pressure is visible, time is short, and emotions are running high.
In those moments, emotional intelligence becomes a practical leadership skill rather than a nice-to-have. The ability to notice what is happening internally, regulate your response, and choose how you show up can make the difference between clarity and friction, trust and defensiveness, progress and stall.
This conversation with Jasmin Guthmann, VP Composable Consulting at Accenture Song and Community Chair at MACH Alliance, focuses on emotional intelligence where it matters most
Read moreContent engineering is entering a new phase. In 2026, it is no longer only about structure and reuse, but about designing content so it can work effectively with AI, systems, and people across complex environments.
In this member call, Rafaela Ellensburg will share how she is thinking about content engineering right now, grounded in practical experience rather than predictions or hype. The focus is on what is genuinely changing, what still matters, and where teams risk overcomplicating their work.
Read moreClear strategy. Strong communication. Leadership alignment.
And yet, change still stalls.
In this member call, behavioural expert Nina Dyrberg explores why so many well-intended change initiatives struggle to take hold. The missing piece is rarely the strategy itself.
Read moreLong before UX became a familiar term, people were already wrestling with a central question: how should humans interact with computers in ways that feel useful, usable, and meaningful? In the early days, interfaces were often created as a by-product of engineering effort rather than as experiences designed for people.
In this member’s call, we will explore how that began to change. Through the lens of Danish HCI history, Morten Lund will trace how researchers and practitioners started to treat interaction design as a discipline in its own right, and how this work influenced the development of systems, methods, and standards.
It is also a story about people and collaboration.
Read moreOver the past few days I had the privilege of spending time with digital experience leaders across Vancouver, Toronto, and Montréal.
The conversations reflected themes that are becoming increasingly common across the community: human-centred experiences, responsible AI, and growing interest in digital sovereignty. Leaders across industries are navigating a rapidly changing landscape where technology is evolving quickly and expectations around digital experiences continue to rise.
What stood out most during the visit
Read moreEarlier this week, I had the chance to join another gathering of the Boye & Company Digital Experience Leaders group, this time hosted in Toronto at the offices of Havas.
Havas is a global digital agency with more than 2,300 employees across 19 locations, and it served as the perfect backdrop for a day of conversation about the present—and future—of digital experiences.
The meeting opened with introductions from the group and remarks from Janus Boye, setting the tone for what these gatherings always seem to deliver: open dialogue among people who are navigating similar questions across agencies, brands, and platforms.
Read moreWednesday's CMS Experts / Digital Leaders meeting in Toronto was one of those afternoons that reminds you why showing up in person still matters. It was also a great excuse to get out of the home office for the day. I grabbed coffee at the excellent Jimmy's, walked through a foggy downtown, and even spotted a former office space that Agility CMS once occupied. Sometimes you need to be out in the world to think clearly about the world.
Hosted by Andrew Baker and Ben Switzer at Havas, with about 15 of us around the table, the conversation covered ground that I think every digital leader needs to be paying attention to right now.
Read moreIt's time to stop asking what AI can do, and start asking what it ought to do.
Those tensions surfaced clearly during the recent CMS Experts and Digital Leaders session in Vancouver on March 10, where digital practitioners gathered to share experiences and compare notes on the realities of digital platforms, content systems, governance, and AI.
These gatherings are intentionally small. No stage. No selling. Just a room full of people who spend their days dealing with complex digital systems and organizational change.
And when the right people sit around a table together, the conversation tends to get honest very quickly.
Read more