Start here
A short orientation. Three essays to read first. The map of what's on offer.
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.
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
And although I’ve set the prices in US dollars because Substack doesn’t seem to offer more than one option at a time, DM me if you prefer to pay in Canadian. I can make that option happen for you.