The future isn’t predicted. It’s practiced.
I’m Nola Simon. I am the case study.
I help leadership teams see what they’re taking for granted. About strategy. About trust. About what their organization is becoming. The work has a name: the Assumption-Ground Audit. The logic underneath it is called Everyday Futurism. Trust is the subject, the method, and the outcome.
I’m not a trend forecaster. I do not give motivational speeches. I do change how rooms process information after I leave them.
What I do
I work in the window before the decision. The moment when assumptions are still visible. Before direction calcifies. Before small choices become policy nobody formally approved.
That’s the AGA. CHROs and senior strategy leaders bring me in when their teams need to see what they’re taking for granted, before that thing becomes the foundation of a chapter no one fully chose. It’s not a workshop. It’s not a strategy review. It’s not change management. It’s earlier than all of those. It’s a working relationship, not a project.
Reinvention isn’t an event. It’s a permanent condition. The convergences keep forming. The signals keep shifting. The capacity I build for organizations is the capacity to read them earlier each time, so the window opens for them instead of closing on them.
How I got here
I spent 20+ years across five complex organizations. Seventeen of those years I worked cross-border between Canada and the US, inside billion-dollar vendor relationships and two regulatory environments at the same time. Senior enough to be at the table. Inside enough to see how decisions actually get made versus how they get described in the deck afterward.
In late 2020 my role ended. Not on my timeline. An opportunity in the disguise of an ultimatum. I had names of employment lawyers ready, financial runway mapped, scenario plans I’d been quietly running for years. Severance was 17 months. I honored every day of it. Honestly? I didn’t want to save them anything.
The first chapter I built was hybrid and remote work, before either had a name. It earned media attention (Globe and Mail, CBC, Toronto Star, Maclean’s, Canadian Press), Top Voice in 2024 and 2025, and the panel at Elevate TechFest. What it didn’t do was sell keynotes. The recognition wasn’t converting to bookings. As the back-to-office push won the political fight, the inquiries thinned out anyway. The conversation about flexibility went circular.
I still believe flexibility is essential. I always will. But somewhere in that noise, my own life moved past the part of the debate I had personal stakes in. I work for myself now. My kids are in university. The version of me that needed to win the hybrid argument doesn’t exist anymore. The hybrid/remote chapter made me. It doesn’t define me.
What was underneath the conversation was a bigger question nobody was articulating: what are leadership teams currently taking for granted that’s about to stop being true? That became the AGA. That’s the work now.
How the work travels
Four tiers, low to high commitment.
The newsletter (this Substack). One essay every Sunday. Free above the paywall, paid below. Standard tier ($12/month or $120/year) opens the application section: how to actually use the thinking. Founding tier ($300/year) adds quarterly AGA conversations and the annual signal report.
The podcast. Hope + Possibilities: A Love Letter to the Future of Work. 100+ episodes, 13 seasons. Goodpods Top 100 Leadership Indie. Solo this season. Listen at nolasimon.com/podcast.
Speaking. Keynotes, conferences, off-sites. Book at tidycal.com/nola/book-a-speaker. There’s a $1 booking fee. A trust signal, not a barrier.
Advisory. The AGA itself. $25,000 to $50,000 engagements for leadership teams ready to interrogate the foundations. nolasimon.com/aga. Scoping starts with a paid intro consultation: tidycal.com/nola/intro-consultation-nola-simon.
What I won’t do
No motivational speeches. No countdown timers. No fake scarcity. No webinar funnels disguised as free trainings. No “you won’t believe what I learned” subject lines. No discounts during a launch window. When something is full, the answer is waitlist, not act now. Conversation first, no one buys without talking to me. The trust signals are real; the gates are honest.
Personal
I’m Canadian. I live my life like a Choose Your Own Adventure novel. I run scenario planning on my own life. I had lawyers’ names ready before I needed them, severance figured out before it came, a business sketched before the chapter ended.
My pop music taste runs unembarrassed. George Michael, Wham!, the boy band canon. Faith just got remastered on vinyl. I don’t even own speakers that work with my turntable anymore (streaming is my jam) but in George, we trust. Burn the jacket. Blow up the jukebox. Hire the supermodels. Same energy.
Two daughters, both in university. One dog. A small pool I float in during summer. Forest walks. Books: fiction, nonfiction, romance unapologetically, the mystery and thriller sections of any bookstore I walk into. Coffee in the morning, tea on the road. French dropped naturally where it fits. Pinterest open in another tab.
Anyways. Welcome.
Nola
