Everyday Futurism: How to Read a Pivot Before It Has a Name
In 2008, I had recently returned from maternity leave. My youngest daughter had just turned one. I also had a two-and-a-half-year-old. The commute was three hours a day. I was still breastfeeding and seeing my kids for about an hour before bed. I was exhausted in the particular way that has no clean solution, only the next day.
It was in those first months back that I had a conversation with a woman whose eighteen-year-old son was trying to decide whether to go to university or enlist in the Marines.
She had quit her job to take a year off with him.
I remember the specific weight of that sentence landing. Here was a woman who had walked away from her career — not for a baby, but for an eighteen-year-old. I didn't understand it yet.
She explained it this way: everybody wants to be home with their babies. But the life-changing decisions happen when they're eighteen. So how do you want to parent? Do you want to be the parent who's home with the babies — because that work is distributable — or do you want to be the parent who helps them make the decisions that actually change their lives?
That question rearranged something.
Not because she was right about what I should do. Because she had clearly already done the work of examining what she actually believed before the pressure of the moment forced a decision. She hadn't reacted to her son being eighteen. She'd been oriented toward that moment for years. The year off wasn't an impulse. It was the execution of a long-held, examined conviction about where she was specifically needed.
That's the distinction. And it took me years to name it.
I didn't quit. I couldn't, and I didn't want to. But I took the principle and found my own version of it.
If the moments that required me most were coming later — if the distributable work could be distributed — then the question wasn't whether to go back to the office. It was whether the structure I returned to would still put me in the right place when it mattered. And the answer, if I examined it honestly, was no.
So I started asking different questions. Not how do I manage the transition back, but what does the next decade need to look like so that I'm actually present for the decisions, not just the days. The answer pointed toward flexibility. Toward working from home. Toward a kind of presence that wasn't geographic but was genuinely available when it counted.
The pilot started in 2012. This was not a popular idea at the time. Workplace flexibility was not a mainstream conversation. I was advocating for something that wouldn't become obvious to most organizations for another decade. I wasn't predicting the pandemic, or the great resignation, or the normalization of remote work. I was building toward a specific future I'd identified as the one that required me — and finding the institutional path to get there.
My kids don't remember me working in an office. The future I was orienting toward in 2011 is just their childhood.
The assumption that served you expires.
Recently my husband was talking to me about how I want to work now. My kids are in university. The daily logistics that once structured everything have dissolved. And he was describing what mattered to me — that I needed to be home, that flexibility and proximity were the core of what I'd been building — and I felt it in my body before I could articulate it. A mismatch. A clear, physical signal that the story he was telling about me was no longer true.
What I want now is different. I want to travel. To attend conferences. To be in rooms with people who won't say in writing what they'll say in person, who only share the things that matter in the moments when they've decided to trust you. Over a decade of working from home, which gave me everything I needed when I needed it, can feel confining now in ways I didn't anticipate and wouldn't have chosen. The irony is precise: I built a structure so well suited to one future that I can feel when it's no longer the right structure for the next one.
My husband was holding the old map. He was describing the person I'd been, accurately. My body knew the map had expired before I had the language to say so.
This is what the practice actually is. Not a direction you commit to. Not a goal you achieve and maintain. The practice is the capacity to notice when what you built has done its job, when the assumption that was generative has finished generating, and when the next pivot is already forming in you before you've named it.
None of this resolves cleanly. The assumption expires and you're already building toward the next future before you have the full picture. The principle the woman gave me still holds. The specific execution has to be found again, each time, by the person living it.
This is also what I do with organizations.
People make up organizations. Which means organizations run on the same dynamic: someone is holding a map that used to be accurate, describing the institution to itself in terms that were true in a previous chapter, and the people inside it are feeling the mismatch before anyone has named it.
The recent decline in organizational trust isn't surprising. It's the predictable result of that gap going unaddressed. Trust doesn't erode because organizations make hard decisions. It erodes when what leadership says it sees doesn't match what employees witness every day — when the stated story and the live situation have separated, and no one in authority is acknowledging the distance. People can tolerate difficulty. What they can't sustain is being told a story about their own experience that they know isn't true. That's not a communication problem. That's an assumption problem. Somewhere, a belief about how the organization works — what motivates people, what presence means, what the implicit contract is — stopped being accurate and kept being acted on anyway.
The return-to-office mandate is the clearest recent example — and a convergence nobody modeled. Leadership teams held the 2019 map — presence equals productivity, culture requires co-location — past its expiry date. But the mandate didn't arrive alone. It arrived on top of AI adoption reducing headcount, commercial real estate commitments signed before 2020 that couldn't be publicly named as a driver, and proximity bias intensifying in a smaller workforce where being seen had become a survival strategy rather than a work one. Each of those streams was already moving. None of them were in the room when the mandate was written.
What employees witnessed wasn't just a policy they disagreed with. They witnessed an institution asking them to commute for reasons it couldn't state honestly, while simultaneously replacing their colleagues with AI. The mismatch wasn't between presence and productivity. It was between what leadership said the mandate was for and what the observable conditions made obvious. That's when trust breaks in the way that doesn't easily repair.
That's the gap I work in. Not implementation, not adoption, not the roadmap. The stage before — when the assumption is still operating as invisible ground rather than visible policy, when the traces are still readable, when the pivot is still possible before the cost of changing becomes higher than the cost of continuing.
The practice I'm describing is personal because all practice is personal first. But it scales, because the people sitting in those leadership rooms are doing the same thing my husband was doing — describing the organization as it was, accurately, to people who can feel in the room that the description has expired.
The difference is that in an organization, the stakes of not naming it are distributed across everyone who works there. And the longer the gap goes unaddressed, the more of what people witness is the distance between the story and the truth.
My job is to name the gap before it gets expensive.
None of this is tidy.
You can do the work of examining your assumptions and still miss the moment. You can feel the mismatch in your body and hesitate too long. You can make the pivot and find out the new map was also incomplete. Organizations do this constantly — they surface an assumption, address it, build something new on top of it, and then that structure becomes the thing nobody is examining anymore.
That's not failure. That's the nature of practice. The goal was never to get it right once. The goal is to build the capacity to look at the assumptions again when things aren't working — to begin again without treating the beginning as evidence that the whole approach was wrong.
The RTO mandate failed for a lot of organizations. Some of them adapted — quietly, without announcement, adjusting the policy to match what the evidence was showing. Some are still holding the map. The difference isn't intelligence or intention. It's whether the organization has built the habit of returning to the assumptions when the results don't match the expectation. Whether beginning again is available as a move, or whether the sunk cost of the original decision has made it unthinkable.
This is true for individuals too. The woman whose son was choosing between university and the Marines had examined her assumption and acted on it. That didn't mean her next assumption would be equally clear to her, or that her next pivot would be as clean. It meant she had practiced beginning again once, which made it more available the next time.
You don't get certainty. You get better at not needing it.
This is what the practice actually requires — not comfort with ambiguity as a personality trait, but a structural decision to stop waiting for conditions that won't arrive. The future doesn't become clearer before you move. It becomes clearer because you moved, and now you have new information, and now you can look at the assumptions again.
That's the practice. Not a tolerance for not-knowing. An orientation toward it.
People hear the word futurist and assume it means someone who predicts things. I don't. Nobody does.
What Everyday Futurism actually is: the practice of examining your assumptions before they become the ground you're standing on. Noticing when a story someone is telling about you — even someone who loves you, even a story that used to be true — doesn't match what you already know.
Prediction is brittle. It only works if you're right. Practice builds something sturdier — not the ability to get the future correct, but the capacity to keep moving as it shifts, because you've been doing it long enough to trust your own instrument.
That's the tagline I use: the future isn't predicted, it's practiced. It's not a slogan. It's what it felt like in 2008 to hear a question that rearranged something, and in 2012 to build toward a future nobody had normalized yet, and recently to feel in my body that the map my husband was holding belonged to someone I used to be.
The next pivot is already forming. I don't have the full picture yet. That's not a problem to solve. That's the practice.
The practice described here has a structural application for organizations. If you're a senior leader who senses the current direction hasn't been fully examined — the AGA is where that work begins.
What the Assumption-Ground Audit is →
Nola Simon is a strategic futurist and advisor working at the pre-adoption stage — before assumptions become policy. Everyday Futurism is the practice of examining what you're taking for granted before it takes you somewhere you didn't choose.