Stability Has Always Been An Illusion
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. My doctor told me it was dangerous to drive so that meant I started working from home. There was no formal 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. That's a different essay.
In 2015 my father-in-law died. In 2016 my mother was diagnosed with dementia. We were just wrapping 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 I made a million people late. Not a metric anyone ever wants to own.
I have 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 was even directly affected when Mel Lastman called in the army to clear the snow in Toronto one really bad winter (or as the rest of Canada called it, Tuesday). 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. I've lived it. Many people haven't had to so they just have never perceived the possible reality.
And then January 2020, I was taking a three week Panama Canal cruise with my father that had been planned a year in advance. Somewhere in the middle of the Pacific, we heard a word for the first time. Coronavirus. It didn't have weight yet. It was just a word someone mentioned. I had limited internet access so I only saw headlines and I had no real context.
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 pleasure 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 but wrong about who I thought deserved it.
I just stopped working. No drama. No performance. I withdrew the thing they'd forgotten to question — that my commitment was unconditional. They called it restructuring. I called it constructive dismissal. My lawyer agreed.
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.
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.
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