Nature had come into her own again and, little by little, in her stealthy, insidious way had encroached upon the drive with long, tenacious fingers. The woods, always a menace even in the past, had triumphed in the end.

— Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca

I had seen the park advertised on Instagram and decided it was worth the drive to check out a new walking area. I’m fortunate to have so much choice but when you walk a dog 4-6 times a day, 365 days a year, it’s nice to have different places to investigate. I often choose the forest when neighbourhood small talk is getting on my nerves. I integrate meditation practices into my walks and spend a lot of time noticing. There are fewer interruptions in the forest. This was a rich day for noticing. Halfway through, streetlights appeared. Dark standards with modern industrial curves but rising from the earth looking like they had never lit anyone’s way. It would have been more fitting if they had been gothic. We found clearings, a new picnic table, bat boxes, but also dark, dense sections of forest that made me feel like there really could be a mansion burned down, hidden in the shadows. At the end of the second path, there was another set of gates and two men getting out of their truck with their dogs. Always a question whether you engage in the middle of nowhere, but my dog is very large and very protective. He didn’t raise any alarm, so I let my curiosity lead. They commented that they didn’t understand why the parking lots were full so I told them about Instagram and the new urban park designation.

“You really couldn’t find nowhere better?”

Then they told me the whole thing. A rich man. A planned housing development that never got final approval. Infrastructure installed for a future that didn’t arrive — the interlock, the lights, the gates, pipes sticking out the forest, connecting nothing. Staff who used to power-wash the paths weekly. Eventually a land swap with the province. And yes, there had been a house. It burned down. They laughed about that too. “You can feel it, huh?”

Infrastructure for a future that never showed up, being quietly rewilded by a landscape that never needed it.

Local legend, a sanitized history remembered only by the people who lived it, who remembered the disputes, the discussions about required infrastructure. There would be records in archives if I really wanted to investigate but I like the story as it is. It has the taste of truth, of lived experience told to me, a stranger, by a long-time resident with deep roots and a long memory. The details don’t really matter. It’s the difference between the truth and curation. Where does the story start? According to the locals? 1980s. Ontario Parks? 2024. If you consider what I’ve said before about witnessed trust, you know where I’m laying my bet on what’s true.

So how do you know what’s truth?

A podcast guest of mine, Meagan Williamson, posted a picture of her kids playing on an old-fashioned metal slide. The caption said something like “I gave them the 80s childhood experience.” I DM’d her: they must have loved that :) She said “yes, once they stopped asking me for things.” I responded, “Cognitive weaning.”

As a parent, I know to value boredom. I was an only child and yes, Gen X. I did drink out of the hose; I was a latch key kid (found it not too long ago on the same ribbon I used to wear around my neck). And I played on slides like the one in Meagan’s picture. You can’t find many anymore. They often date back to the 50s or 60s and they are tall, rickety; an insurance nightmare. The last time I saw one was at the old drive in on the edge of Queensville. My kids loved it too.

When I looked at her picture, I could hear the kids in the playground. I could feel the burn of the metal against my legs, see the glint of the sun, the woosh of air in my hair. It felt like truth. It’s a memory for Meagan and myself but present moment for her kids. What’s different is that Meagan had to step back and create the space, the freedom from supervision and mediation that Gen X had baked into our childhood.

Have I mentioned Meagan has a background in psychology? She used to work for the school board doing psych assessments and designing Individual Education plans before she had to redesign her whole world because her kids had high care needs as babies and she couldn’t work the way she used to before they were born. My daughters both have IEPs and I’m very familiar with that role. I don’t have a psychology background, but I’ve had to educate myself to advocate for my kids.

Meagan thought cognitive weaning was the perfect phrase. She went one further and shared it on Threads and Instagram and credited me. Called it genius.

Meagan has a background in psychology, runs a marketing business built for the long game, and she’s a parent. When something resonates that hard with her, I pay attention.

I know cognitive weaning in my own body too. I breastfed both my daughters. The first I weaned at ten months — I had two months left on my leave and the timeline was external, the decision practical. Hard, but clean. The second was different. I’d been back at work since eleven months. By the time I weaned her at fifteen months, the feeds had narrowed to the threshold hours — early morning when she woke, late evening before sleep. And I knew, sitting in that early morning quiet, that the ritual had become something I was no longer sure was entirely for her. I knew I wasn’t having any more babies.

Breastfeeding is an identity. A responsibility. A role. A performance. Embodied competence — something that was agony at first, that you learned, that became effortless, that your body eventually just knew. When it ends, you are retiring a skill at the top of it.

And the protest is real. The reaching, the asking, the expectation that someone will answer. You have to hold your ground through all of it. Which requires its own kind of trust — that the discomfort is not damage, that they will find the slide eventually.

Weaning is always bilateral. Meagan stepping back from her kids. Me weaning my daughter. The two men in the forest letting the property tell its own story instead of correcting Ontario Parks’ version. Somebody has to hold the space and somebody has to walk into it.

How do we create space so we can take advantage of the benefits of boredom?

By embracing another concept I’ve been noticing. Negative capability. It traces back to John Keats.

Negative capability is Keats’s term for the ability to remain present inside uncertainty, ambiguity, and the unknown without rushing to resolve it. It is the disciplined capacity to withstand not knowing — and to stay open, receptive, and imaginative rather than collapsing into premature certainty. Yes, this comes from Wikipedia. It’s clean, it’s clear, and best of all, you have permission to find that Henry Cavill gif and use it well. You know the one.

I don’t have a love of poetry. I couldn’t quote a Keats poem. But I’ve noticed other people writing about this concept recently. Rachel Botsman, an expert on trust, wrote about it 3 years ago. She points out that Keats used “negative” not in the pejorative sense, but to connote the ability to not do something. The capacity to not jump, not answer, not engage defensively, not shoehorn.

The interesting thing about Meagan is that she’s really observant about the current state of marketing and she’s very generous with sharing what she notices. It’s because of her that I first heard about a furniture flipper who had a $1.2 million launch teaching people to yap on camera. At first glance, furniture flipping and yapping on camera don’t seem to be a match made in heaven. But it’s what happens when your skill at getting people to pay attention to the thing you do exceeds your skill at the thing you do.

What caught my attention is that Meagan was ignoring it.

Watching the launch industry collectively lose its mind teaching everyone how to be “louder online” while the smartest business owners I know are quietly building search assets and disappearing for the summer. The contrast is wild.

She is naming negative capability. The ability not to do something.

My response was: it’s a different understanding of control and trust.

We don’t have to do all the things. We don’t have to absorb all the things. More content isn’t going to be the magic. There’s too much. The number one complaint I saw about the woman with the successful launch was that everyone had jumped online and started yapping. I have no idea if any of this works because I mostly avoid talking head videos unless you are teaching me to contour makeup I’ll never wear. Just kidding. Sometimes I watch people I know.

Because there is so much uncertainty about algorithms, AI, the change to search, SEO, AEO, GEO (do I even know what that one is?), people who earn an income online are leaning into fear when they do all the things. More things means more control. Spray and pray. It’s a defensive manoeuvre, not future-focused strategy.

And the yapping isn’t just defensive. It’s the producer offloading the discomfort of their own uncertainty by transferring the cognitive load to the reader. The flood asks the consumer to do the sorting and the filtering, to decide what mattered. The producer gets to feel productive. The reader gets to feel buried.

We all need to experience cognitive weaning to know what we really think and feel.

It’s the same pattern I get consulted on — in the moment before a major commitment, before the technology gets adopted, the function restructured, the contract signed. The moment most people skip.

The problem in those rooms is never intelligence. It’s the distance that has grown between what people know and their willingness to act on it. The vendor’s assurances. The consultant’s framework. The benchmark data. The fact that everyone else is doing it. The urgency that arrived from somewhere upstream and was never examined.

The extended data-gathering often has less to do with decision quality than with distributing responsibility for it. More input means more people implicated. It buys a longer runway before anyone has to commit. And when the thing goes sideways, you can point to the process.

The work isn’t to give them the answer. It’s to hold the ground while they find the slide.

The view that arrives before all the input is usually the view the room ends up with. The information gathering changes the language. It rarely changes the direction.

I delete Threads, Instagram, and TikTok on a rotation. Not in a rage, not as a statement. Just when I notice the space where my own thinking used to form has filled with other people’s framings and I can’t tell anymore which observations are mine.

The feeds aren’t bad. The DM about the metal slide started on Instagram. Two phrases arrived fully formed because the context was right. But there’s a colonizing quality I’ve learned to feel before I can fully name it. And the only move that works is deletion. Not a pause. Not a notification mute. The app, gone, until the signal clears. The parasocial pull is what makes deletion the only move that works. You can’t mute someone you feel you know.

This is cognitive weaning as ongoing practice, not one-time transition. Sometimes you come back.

So the convergence I’m testing this summer is cognitive weaning, negative capability, and witnessed trust. Less reaching. Less filling. Less performing the work in real time so the algorithm can see it. More forest. More friction. More boredom. More noticing what my own body and pattern-reader already know before I let whatever shows up next in the feed decide for me.

The two men in the forest knew the story because they had lived nearby long enough for it to settle into them. The kids on the metal slide knew what to do because their mother trusted them to figure it out. I weaned my babies because independent feeding is a step towards normal development.

The discomfort is the mechanism. Not the malfunction.

How much input do you need to know what you think?

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Someone commented on a post I wrote about everyday futurism.

Today my mom told me she thinks in the present timeline and I in the future. my wonder/ideas brain is always seeing what's next. Does this mean I'm a futurist?

Yes. And also — welcome to the relationship dynamic I’ve never heard another futurist talk about:)

What her mother described wasn’t criticism, exactly. It was observation. One person’s attention is on what is. The other’s is on what could be. These are genuinely different cognitive orientations, and they produce a specific kind of friction that’s hard to name when you’re inside it.

The present-focused person often reads the future-focused person as naive. “That’s not how things work” is usually what it sounds like. And they’re not wrong that the future-focused person sometimes underweights existing constraints. Meanwhile, the future-focused person is quietly frustrated because they can see a better version of the system and still have to live inside the old one anyway. Nothing about having a clearer view of what’s possible exempts you from interacting with what exists.

The future is defined differently for everyone. It depends entirely on what you’re responsible for and how much of it you can actually influence.

An emergency room doctor is one of the most intensely future-oriented people but they are at a resolution most of us never operate at. Every decision is a projection: if I do this, then that. If I don’t move now, here’s what happens next. The window might be sixty seconds. It might be the first step in a recovery that takes months. Either way, the doctor is constantly running forward simulations under conditions where being wrong has immediate, visible consequences. That’s not present-thinking. That’s future-thinking compressed to its most urgent focal length.

The same doctor, walking out of the hospital at the end of a shift, might find it genuinely difficult to think about what their life looks like in five years. The daily practice of the job has trained their future-orientation to a specific distance. Zoom in that far for long enough and the wide angle becomes hard to access. The skill is real. The focal length is just fixed.

This is true across most work. A trader is thinking seconds ahead. A project manager is thinking quarters ahead. An urban planner is thinking decades ahead. None of them would necessarily call themselves futurists. All of them are practicing future-orientation at the resolution their context demands.

Which means the mother’s observation — you live in the future, I live in the present — is probably less about orientation and more about focal length. And focal length is shaped by context, by profession, by what you’ve been trained to be responsible for.

Here’s the part I think gets undersold: everyday futurism is already everywhere. It’s just not labeled. The couple who builds a wedding registry for a life that doesn’t exist yet — that’s future orientation. The person who starts divorce paperwork before they’re ready to tell anyone — that’s future orientation. The parent who opens an RESP the week the kid comes home from the hospital. The label never entered into it. The relationship with time was already doing the work.

The question of whether to claim the identity publicly is separate from whether you practice it. I say I’m a futurist in my work because it’s accurate and because my work lives in that territory. But in a lot of regular conversations I just say “writer,” and it’s not because I’m hedging. It’s because the response to “writer” tells me almost everything I need to know before I decide whether to go further. Do they get curious or dismissive? Do they ask what you write or what you make from it? Do they light up or get slightly uncomfortable because they always meant to write something themselves? Or does it lead to an AI rabbit hole about how writing is dead?

“Futurist” skips that entirely. It arrives pre-loaded — techno-optimism, TED talks, disruption culture, AI — and suddenly you’re managing their version of the word before you’ve described your actual work. You’re not having a conversation. You’re doing triage on their assumptions. And depending on the room, that triage can take a while. How much time do you really want to spend talking about flying cars and The Jetsons?

So “I just say writer” is the more deliberate move. It’s a way of reading the room before you decide what to put in it. And depending on what you find, you either go further or you don’t. Not every relationship is structured to absorb the gap between your perspective and someone else’s, and you don’t have to force it.

Some of what keeps me calibrated happens in places nobody sees. I integrate meditation into my walks rather than separating it out as its own dedicated thing. No cushion, no streak, nothing visible to anyone else. But I want to be precise about what I mean by calibrated, because it’s not primarily about emotional regulation. That’s a real byproduct and I notice the difference when I’m doing it consistently versus when I’m not.

The practice is fundamentally about noticing. What’s actually changing and what isn’t. What’s predictable and what’s genuinely uncertain. What’s moving fast and what’s moving so slowly it only looks stable. Not everything requires a futures lens. Some things are load-bearing precisely because they don’t change, and treating them as if they might is its own kind of error.

The pace of change matters as much as the fact of change. Climate change and evolution are both real. One is accelerating faster than human systems can adapt to. The other moves so slowly it’s functionally invisible within a human lifetime. Confusing the two — treating slow change as urgent, or urgent change as inevitable and therefore untouchable — is where a lot of futures thinking goes wrong. The noticing practice is what keeps the focal length honest. It’s a continuous low-level audit: what’s the actual rate of change here, what horizon does this problem require me to scan, what am I treating as new that’s actually ancient, what am I treating as permanent that’s already shifting.

Meditation works for me because it’s grounded in science and I notice how it affects my thinking. But the underlying capacity — something that keeps you accurately oriented to what’s stable and what’s in motion — doesn’t have a single form. Running, cooking, a weekly conversation with someone who only talks about what’s happening right now. The form is less important than the function. What you’re looking for is something that returns you to an accurate reading of the present reliably enough that the future doesn’t become the only place you live.

Neither practice requires a label.

Your relationship with time is not a credential. It’s a characteristic. How you think about time, which horizons you naturally scan, which futures you’re already living inside before anyone else has noticed them — that’s not a job title you apply for. It’s just who you are. The label is available whenever it’s useful and something you can drop when it isn’t.

Which is maybe the thing worth saying to the woman who commented — the one whose mom had clocked her relationship with time before she had language for it. Her mom is right that she’s thinking from the future. That’s real. And also — she gets to decide if and when to disclose and how much of the gap between her perspective and someone else’s she wants to spend her energy bridging on any given day.

A futurist orientation doesn’t require an audience. It was already hers before she had a word for it. Sharing it is generous. Guarding it is understandable. Like nurturing a candle flame against the wind.

It’s operational trust. And it’s built through things most practitioners treat as administrative.

The payment link is a good example.

Your credentials say you’re serious. You have case studies that demonstrate your approach is effective. You have testimonials that say others trust you.

But the moment someone clicks to pay and lands on a clean Stripe page — that’s a different kind of confirmation. It says: this person has structured their business to receive money. There’s a paper trail. Dispute mechanisms exist independent of their word.

It’s not exciting infrastructure. That’s the point.

In Canada-US work specifically, there’s an extra layer. A USD-only link puts a decision tax on Canadian buyers. A CAD-only link stops American ones cold. Multi-currency checkout removes the buyer from a calculation they shouldn’t have to do.

The irony is that none of this is about the product. It’s about whether you look like someone who’s been paid before.

I may have vibe coded my website but I’m not collecting personal or payment information directly on it — even if I think I’ve done my due diligence. I’m trusting Stripe for that. It protects you. It protects me.

The AGA equivalent: before you ask whether someone trusts your methodology, ask whether your operational choices are answering questions the buyer isn’t asking out loud. Your payment link is one of the places those assumptions get confirmed or rattled.

What else in your operations is doing trust work you haven’t named?

Sign up for Make It So closes tomorrow.

Take these Stripe links for a spin

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

What are you taking for granted?

I’ve been asking that question my entire career. But I didn’t learn it in a boardroom. I learned it the way most important things get learned — through thirty years of having the ground shift without warning.

It started in 1994. Six weeks into my first job, graduated into a recession, still on probation, still proving I belonged — my body decided to attack my own thyroid. Graves disease. The immune system committing to a catastrophically wrong assumption about what was a threat and acting on it with complete conviction. That same year a car accident sent me to physiotherapy where I met the man who would become my husband and the father of my daughters.

I was twenty-something years old and three systems had already failed simultaneously. My job security. My body. My physical safety.

I kept going. Not because I was resilient in the way that word gets used on stages. Because there was no other option.

In 1998 we got married in Antigua before destination weddings were a thing. I didn’t know I was ahead of a trend. I just knew what I wanted.

That would become a pattern.

Y2K came and went. Then 2001 and the restructuring that followed September 11th. Then 2002 and a layoff I didn’t see coming. Then 2003 and SARS in Toronto. I wasn’t reading about it from a distance. I was in the city when it shut down.

In August 2003 I started at a major financial institution — seventeen years, billion-dollar vendor relationships, cross-border Canada-US operations at scale. One week later the largest blackout in North American history took out power across the entire eastern seaboard. 55 million people. Eight US states and Ontario. I was one week into my new job when every assumption about infrastructure reliability turned out to be wrong simultaneously.

The institutional response was to offshore operations to the Philippines. Redundancy. Cost efficiency. Problem solved.

Except a decade later climate change started systematically dismantling that assumption. Tsunamis. Flooding. Mudslides. The Philippines became the vulnerability instead of the solution. Toronto — the city the blackout had exposed — became the backup for the backup.

I watched that entire arc from inside the institution. The blackout that triggered the decision. The offshoring that seemed to solve it. The climate reality that reversed it. Seventeen years of one unexamined assumption and its consequences, playing out at billion-dollar scale, from the inside.

That’s what I mean when I say I know what happens when nobody checks the ground.

Each time the assumption underneath something that was supposed to be stable turned out to be wrong. Each time I figured out what I was actually standing on and what to do from there.

In 2005 my daughter Lia was born. In 2006 my husband lost his mother, his grandmother, and his grandfather in the same year. In 2007 Taya arrived. In 2008 — while I was on maternity leave — my husband was laid off during the global financial collapse. He started a renovation business. We had two daughters under three, no institutional income, and no playbook for any of it.

I kept going.

In January 2009 we got swine flu in Mexico. Before it had a name. Before the WHO had a framework for what was spreading. Months later the world found out what we’d already been through.

In 2011 I was arguing for workplace flexibility before it was a movement. Institutions thought it was a fringe idea. I thought it was obvious.

In 2012 a car accident broke my foot. A doctor told me it was dangerous to drive. Which meant I started working from home — before there was a policy, before there was cultural permission, before anyone in a boardroom believed it was possible. The thing I’d been arguing for since 2011 became my daily reality out of pure necessity.

In 2013 a lice outbreak taught me something about assumptions that would eventually become the foundation of my methodology. But that’s a different essay.

In 2015 my father-in-law died. In 2016 my mother was diagnosed with dementia — we were still settling his estate when it happened. In 2017 she died. There was no clean break between those losses. No moment where the ground stopped moving long enough to find your footing before the next thing arrived.

In 2018 another car accident took me off work for two months and made a million people late.

I had been inside every major systemic disruption of my professional lifetime. The recession. The dot-com era. September 11th. The financial collapse. SARS in Toronto. Swine flu at the source. I wasn’t reading about these things in briefings. I was inside them.

Futurists have a name for this now. Metaruption. Disruptions that stack, feed each other, accelerate. They’re calling it new. It isn’t. It’s just new to people who never had to live it before. The stability they experienced wasn’t skill. It wasn’t preparation. It was luck. The ground was always this unstable. They just didn’t know it yet.

And then January 2020. A three week Panama Canal cruise with my father. Somewhere on the water we heard a word for the first time. Coronavirus. It didn’t have weight yet. It was just a word someone mentioned.

The ship I was on was repurposed weeks later to evacuate passengers stranded in the canal. It became a global news story. I had been on it when it was still just a cruise.

I came home. The world locked down. My husband’s work stopped — he’s a renovations contractor, he works in people’s homes, proximity was suddenly dangerous. My ability to work remotely — built from necessity in 2012, argued for since 2011, dismissed by institutions for a decade — was suddenly the only income we had. The thing they said wasn’t viable was the only thing that worked.

And then the institution restructured me out.

In the middle of a global pandemic. While every organization on earth was discovering in real time that the assumptions underneath how work worked were catastrophically wrong. While the world was finally catching up to what I’d been saying since 2011.

They assumed I valued stability and loyalty so much that I would go quietly.

They were right about the loyalty. Wrong about what I would do with it.

I just stopped working. No drama. No performance. I withdrew the thing they’d forgotten to question — that my commitment was unconditional.

And then I built a consulting practice around the thing the institution had dismissed and the pandemic had just proven correct — hybrid and remote work. I was finally operating in public what I’d been arguing for privately since 2011. But the niche was too small for the lens I’d actually developed. This year I audited my own assumptions and pivoted. Everyday Futurism is what the practice always was underneath — before I’d named it correctly.

I am a mathematician who learned to read history backward. I spent seventeen years inside a major financial institution spanning cross-border Canada-US operations and billion-dollar vendor relationships. I have lived inside every major disruption of my professional lifetime before it had a name. The recession. September 11th. The financial collapse. SARS in Toronto. Swine flu in Mexico in January. A word heard on a ship in the Panama Canal that was about to change everything.

I wasn’t predicting any of it. I was just already there.

And here’s what that taught me about everyone else.

You’ve been practicing futurism your entire life too. You just haven’t called it that.

You sign up for daycare before your baby is born. You arrange summer camp in February. You help your teenager choose a university degree for a world that doesn’t exist yet. You build a wedding registry for a life you’re still imagining. You build a divorce registry before you file. You start a retirement fund decades before you’ll need it. You open an RESP the year your child arrives.

You book campsites 5 months in advance when there’s snow on the ground and lakes are frozen.

You arrange travel insurance, vacation coverage, emergency funds. You learn Spanish because you want to retire in Costa Rica. You lift weights so you can live independently at ninety. You build a succession plan without knowing the company will exist in 10 years. You plant bulbs in the fall for flowers you won’t see until spring. You prearrange your funeral so someone you love won’t have to. You plant a tree to give shade to grandchildren you may never meet.

None of that is prediction.

All of it is futurism.

#EverydayFuturism

That’s what futurism actually is. Not forecasting. Not trend reports. Not scenario planning documents nobody reads.

It’s understanding that the future isn’t something that happens to you. It’s built — decision by decision, assumption by assumption, in the moments before anyone thinks the stakes are high enough to examine what they’re standing on.

The decisions you make in the moment build the future.

The question is whether you know what those decisions are actually standing on.

That’s what I do. Before you commit. Before the assumption hardens. Before the disruption arrives with a name.

What are you taking for granted?

If this resonates, Make It So is the place where we do this work together. An eight-week seminar for leaders who already sense things before the room catches up — and want a reliable practice for doing it consistently.

Enrollment closes Sunday. Starts June 1. Capped at 20.

Make It So → nolasimon.com/make-it-so.html

I’ve been inside enough communities now to recognize the failure mode before it arrives.

Two, three years in, the energy shifts. Content stays the same. Host is still present. But you’re there out of habit, not because you’re genuinely getting something. I let go of a couple this year. Harder than I expected — because I actually liked the people.

What communities get wrong: they’re designed for groups, but belonging is individual. The long intro post, the shout-out, the group prompt — none of it tells you that you specifically were read, heard, noticed. The gap between joining a group and entering a relationship is where retention dies.

I’ve also made peace with the proximity problem. I’m two hours from Toronto. The current wave of “in-person is what’s reliable now” thought leadership assumes a different geography. My stronger connections have come from people I’ve never shared a room with — someone in Singapore or Germany who understands my thinking better than most people I’ve met at events.

This summer I’m running an experiment.

Make It So is eight weeks, asynchronous on Telegram, built around everyday futurism — what assumptions are you actually operating under, right now, about work and direction and what’s coming? The AGA as a living practice, not a framework you apply once and file away.

But it’s also a test: what actually creates belonging inside a group container when you remove proximity entirely?

I’m designing it with care. The basic tier belongs fully — they just don’t get my time. The 1:1 tier gets direct access and the quarterly AGA conversations starting June 15 — the founding member conversations you’ll recognize from here. And the founding cohort layer is meant to mean something beyond “you paid early.”

The capitalist tension is real. I want people who’ll show up whether money is on the line or not. I’m not sure you can design for that. But I’m trying.

I’ll document what I learn.

What have you been treating as settled about how people connect across distance?

Twenty people. Enrollment closes Sunday. Starts June 1.

Founding cohort pricing: $800 / $1,200 / $1,600 USD. The September cohort pays double. Plans also available in Canadian dollars. Message me if another currency works better. US dollar has been the online standard for so long but I know that’s changing.

Program + 1:1 ($1,600) includes the quarterly AGA conversations — small group, 75 minutes, four times a year, starting June 15. If you’ve been watching the founding member tier here on Substack, it’s included.

Reserve your spot →

Not sure yet? The 4-minute Futurist Readiness Assessment tells you where you’re starting from.

Take the assessment →

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. The pattern I’m tracking right now is what I call Witnessed Trust: how trust is shifting toward unmediated, unscripted moments that institutions can’t manage at scale. Trust is the subject, the method, and the outcome.

This Substack is where I think out loud about it. Cross-domain pattern recognition, signal scanning, and what’s assembling itself underneath the decisions that feel obvious. One essay every Sunday. Free above the paywall, paid below.

Three places to start

Witnessed Trust: A Case Study. The macro piece. The Coldplay kiss-cam moment, the Astronomer crisis response, and the Reynolds-Paltrow campaign. Witnessed Trust applied at organizational scale. What it actually is, why it can’t be manufactured, and why distraction is not resolution. If you’re a CHRO or strategy lead, this is the AGA running on territory you’ll recognize immediately. The institutional version.

Witnessed Trust: Receipts (Ben Affleck and Reese Witherspoon). The micro piece. Same framework, individual scale. Two people in the same industry facing the same crisis (AI) with completely different receipts. What that gap reveals about why coherence, not disclosure, is what trust actually rests on now. Read with the case study above. They’re the same logic at macro and micro.

The Assumption-Ground Audit. The methodology essay. What the AGA actually is: a way of surfacing expiring assumptions before decisions harden into policy. How it’s different from a strategy review or change-management exercise. Why most leadership teams need it but won’t ask for it. If you want the framework directly after the case studies, this is where it lives.

How the work is layered

Free. The Sunday essay above the paywall. Read it whenever. No urgency.

Standard. $12/month or $120/year. Same essay, plus the application section below the paywall: how to actually use the idea, the worked example, the prompt for your own team.

Founding member. $300/year. Adds quarterly AGA conversations (small group, four times a year, 75 minutes, peer thinking and direct work on what’s in front of you) and the annual signal report (long-form, drops late August, the kind of thing you’d forward to your CEO).

The 2026 founding cohort has a launch kickoff on June 4. Virtual, small group, the start of the year. Subscribers who join after June 4 still get the four annual conversations and the signal report. They just miss the kickoff.

Pricing page →

What’s not on Substack

The advisory work lives at nolasimon.com. The AGA itself, the keynotes, the 1:1 by invitation. Substack is where I think. The site is where the consulting lives. The podcast (Hope + Possibilities: A Love Letter to the Future of Work, 100+ episodes, 13 seasons, Goodpods Top 100 Leadership Indie) is on its own page at nolasimon.com/podcast.

If you want to talk: paid intro consultation at tidycal.com/nola/intro-consultation-nola-simon. The fee is a trust signal, not a barrier.

If you want me to speak at your event: tidycal.com/nola/book-a-speaker. $1 booking fee. Same logic.

What you won’t find here

No countdown timers. No fake scarcity. No webinar funnels disguised as free trainings. No “you won’t believe” subject lines. When something is full, the answer is waitlist, not act now.

In George, we trust.

Nola

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