Brynn Biddle and the art of knowing what comes next

The first audience was thirteen neighbors. The subject was water, arriving where water had no business being. In January 2024, a pipe connected to the sprinkler system in Brynn Biddle’s Seattle condo building burst during a freeze. An alarm sounded. Water rushed down the stairs. Biddle, the building’s homeowners association president, had a phone call to make and a message to send.

She told residents there was a flood and that she was calling the fire department. Over the following hours, she coordinated with emergency crews, contacted contractors, and kept neighbors updated. Owners away from home received individual calls. Once the immediate emergency passed, she moved the continuing updates to email. There would be repairs, insurance questions, and an inconvenient amount of drywall.

It was a communications assignment with unusually wet working conditions. It also made a largely backstage profession visible. Neighbors could see what a clear message, delivered promptly, did for them. Biddle could see her professional skills working somewhere far removed from a corporate meeting.

The beginner with a work history

Biddle now works in CEO executive communications at F5. Her route there includes a decision that deserves a second look: after years of full-time employment, she became an intern again.

In 2015, she moved to Washington, DC, for full-time graduate study. At KRC Research and Weber Shandwick, she joined traditional internship programs alongside undergraduates. She had already finished her own undergraduate education in 2009. Explaining the difference became part of the introductions.

The agency setting gave her unfamiliar work to learn: research interviews, client projects, pitches, and the discipline of recording time in fifteen-minute increments. Prior experience did not eliminate the value of those lessons. It helped her approach them with a clearer sense of what she wanted from the placement.

She completed graduate school in 2017 and wrote about the choice soon afterward. There is an appealing lack of ceremony in the decision. A person can arrive with a résumé and still need someone to show her how a different workplace works. The useful question is what she will know when she leaves.

Her explanation of the move was practical. Internships offered time inside industries she had not worked in before, with the chance to apply classroom lessons immediately. She was willing to spend part of an established career acquiring a different set of tools.

A business argument for doing some good

Her earlier writing had already found a subject that could accommodate both business questions and human ones. In a 2016 essay about conscious capitalism, she examined the relationship between commercial benefit and social contribution. She argued that a company’s motives did not have to be purely charitable for its work to produce useful results.

Another essay that year considered employee engagement. Her interest was in how people connect their daily work to a larger purpose, and how employees might communicate that connection themselves. These were subjects involving the business, the workforce, and the people outside its walls. Communications sat among all three.

By 2019, she was answering students who wanted careers in social impact. A Penn State business ethics course had introduced her to corporate social responsibility. Her subsequent experience at Dell Technologies suggested that the work could belong to many departments.

Engineers, supply-chain specialists, and communications professionals could each contribute through their own skills. For students, her advice began with identifying those skills. In describing her own, she emphasized learning, organizing, and teaching. She saw communications as a way to understand complicated work and help other people understand why it mattered.

“I never set out to become an executive communicator.”

Brynn Biddle, February 2023

The classroom had no walls

In August 2019, Biddle wrote about an all-women National Outdoor Leadership School course in Alaska. Navigation and backcountry skills were part of the expected curriculum. Conversations among the participants supplied another one.

The group included women from engineering, business, the military, medicine, and outdoor guiding. They compared experiences in workplaces where women could face similar obstacles despite very different job descriptions. Strangers became people who had to rely on each other through a week of backpacking.

Biddle connected that experience to her interest in inclusion. The setting gave a workplace subject physical dimensions: people moving together, making decisions, and helping one another through difficult terrain. A useful conversation could happen a considerable distance from a conference room.

That same summer, she described her first Explore Austin wilderness trip as a mentor. The Adventure Seekers team brought fifteen girls and five mentors to Colorado Bend State Park in Texas for six days of camping and backpacking.

She noticed how quickly unfamiliar activities became manageable. Girls who initially shrieked at insects became interested in looking for them. Canoeing, caving, and mountain biking offered repeated chances to attempt something new. The changes were small enough to observe over a week, and large enough to make an impression.

Her account gave the young participants the action. The mentor’s job included paying attention. Someone who had signed up to help teach could return with a few lessons herself.

A workday with a different view

In 2020, Biddle put another proposition to a practical test: how much travel could fit around a remote job? She had wanted to try living in Seattle, visit a new state, and add a national park to her list.

Her eventual road trip lasted ten weeks and covered more than 5,000 miles. She spent a month in Seattle, a week in Idaho, and visited five national parks. Across the trip, she took five days off to explore or drive.

The arrangement depended on support from her Dell colleagues and managers. Meetings began with questions about her location. Weekend plans became something the team could follow from a distance. Her account made room for the people who helped the experiment work, alongside the landscapes that made it worthwhile.

The details give the trip its interest. This was an attempt to fit unfamiliar places into ordinary working hours, with the planning that required. Even a good view has to coexist with the next meeting.

Room for an unfinished climb

Mount Rainier supplied a less cooperative itinerary. In 2023, Biddle trained for nearly five months for a summit attempt. Then her guiding company canceled trips after warm conditions reduced the snowpack needed for safe ascents.

She wrote about the cancellation in September. Preparation had been within her control; the mountain’s conditions had not. She supported the decision to cancel and allowed herself to describe the disappointment.

At the time, she did not promise another attempt. Training had changed the character of hikes she normally enjoyed. She considered the appeal of simply going hiking again, without measuring every outing against a summit goal.

A later chapter arrived in August 2025, when she shared an account of reaching Rainier’s summit on August 9. Her husband, Cameron Smuck, had trained with her. In telling the story, she emphasized his encouragement and the support of others who had helped her prepare.

Read together, the two accounts have an unusual honesty. The later success does not erase the earlier uncertainty. Each describes what she knew and felt at the time, without making the ending inevitable.

From a company meeting to a coffee order

When Biddle announced joining F5’s executive communications team in August 2024, she described a first week that included quarterly earnings, a global all-company meeting, and a Seattle office happy hour. The scale of the audiences changed; the calendar stayed busy.

Her title, Director, CEO Executive Communications, places her work close to the company’s leadership. Yet one of her most accessible public explanations of F5 began with a convenience-store app.

At AppWorld 2025, she met Sheetz’s Tyler Smith and wrote about the connection between F5’s technology and the transactions customers make through the Sheetz app. Coffee, gas, and a made-to-order sandwich gave readers somewhere familiar to begin.

Her enthusiasm for the Pennsylvania chain supplied the humor. The post’s practical achievement was to connect application security with an ordinary purchase. A technical subject became easier to follow because someone had chosen an example a reader could picture.

That choice echoes her earlier description of communications: learn the complicated thing, then work out how to explain its relevance. In this instance, the explanation came with a coffee order.

And then an oil painter joined the assignment

In February 2026, Biddle described collaborating with Seattle oil painter Chris Holt on a custom piece commemorating F5’s thirtieth anniversary. Her usual collaborators included engineers, finance professionals, lawyers, and human-resources leaders. An artist expanded the list.

She enjoyed the variety. She also teased employees about always reading the Monday Minute newsletter, where they could find information about prints. Even a commemorative painting has a distribution question.

The project adds a useful final detail to the portrait. Communications can take the form of a speech, a newsletter, an explanation, or an artwork. The audience and the occasion help determine which one makes sense.

Back in the flooded building, the appropriate form had been a quick text, followed by calls and continuing updates. The common work was deciding what people needed to know next. Sometimes that meant explaining a company’s technology. Sometimes it meant telling the neighbors when the contractors were coming.