From classrooms to co-authors: How a weird coincidence sparked a book
Lee Smith
Minutes
31st October 2025
Employee Experience Employee Engagement Human-centred EX Design
Every collaboration has a story. Mine with Emma Bridger — my co-author and business partner — begins not just with professional respect, but with one of those “you couldn’t make it up” coincidences.
Years ago, I was living in a tiny rural town in Shropshire, England, called Cleobury Mortimer. It's the sort of place people living just 10 miles away have never heard of.
One day, in conversation with Emma, I discovered she’d grown up there. That alone felt like a surprising link — Cleobury isn’t exactly a hub for internal communication professionals! But the real twist? The house I was living in had once been her school. Out of all the towns, and out of all the houses, I’d somehow ended up in her classroom!
That discovery made us laugh — and it also made us reflect on how life connects people in the strangest ways. But while coincidence brought a smile, it was a deeper connection that kept us working together.
I’d first met Emma a few years earlier, when she supported the Accelerate learning programme my agency, Gatehouse, ran in conjunction with the Institute of Internal Communication. Even then, I was struck by her energy and her absolute commitment to helping communicators grow. And in the years since, we’ve realised we share more than a funny backstory. We share a passion: people-first internal communication.
Both of us had seen too many organisations treat communication as a mechanical, top-down, done-to-people process — something to be pushed out, managed, or measured. We believe it should be something else entirely: a human experience that connects, supports and empowers people.
That belief has fuelled countless conversations over coffee, in pubs, and more recently, over Zoom (Emma now lives far away from me on the south coast). It’s also what led us to write People-First Internal Communication, which will be published this December by Kogan Page.
So yes, coincidence played its part. But it’s our shared conviction that communication can, and should, put people first that really brought us together. And that’s the story we’re excited to share with you.
