You've been right about something before the room caught up. You've felt it — that early read on a situation that turned out to be accurate. What you may not have is a reliable system for doing that consistently, or the language to make it legible to the people around you when it counts.
Futurism doesn't require a crystal ball. It requires a practice — woven into your daily life, not bolted on top of it. Make It So is an 8-week seminar that builds that practice underneath the instincts you already have. By September, you're not someone who learned about futurism. You're already running.
Not sure yet? Take the 4-minute Futurist Readiness Assessment — it tells you where you're starting from before you decide.
Most of the analysis reaching your desk has already passed through someone else's assumptions — filtered before it got to you. Trend reports, strategy recommendations, market research: all of it shaped by what the author treated as settled before they started writing. The questions those documents don't ask are usually the ones that matter most.
Futurism isn't prediction. It's preparation. And preparation starts with examining what you're already assuming is true.
That examination has a name: the Assumption-Ground Audit (AGA).
Here's what it looks like in practice. A senior leader is building a case for a new direction — a pivot, a restructure, a new product line. The strategy is sound. The data supports it. The team is aligned.
The AGA doesn't start with the strategy. It starts one layer back: what are we treating as settled that we haven't examined? Maybe the market conditions that made this direction look right six months ago have shifted. Maybe alignment actually means compliance. Maybe the people who built the current model are the last people who should be redesigning it.
None of those are visible until you look for them. The AGA makes them visible before they harden into a commitment that's expensive to reverse. That's the intervention point — before the commitment.
Here's the same audit at a different scale. A solopreneur has been building — more content, more case studies, more proof — operating on the assumption that credibility needs to be accumulated before authority can be claimed. The offer keeps growing. The price stays where it is. They're waiting until they've earned the right to charge what they actually want.
The AGA surfaces the assumption underneath: that authority is something the market grants you rather than something you practice. That the people who aren't buying would buy if they just saw more evidence. That the offer needs to be bigger before it earns a higher price.
When you name that assumption, a different question becomes visible: what would it look like to lead with the authority you already have, rather than keep building toward an authority you've decided you don't have yet?
Make It So brings that same rigour to your individual leadership practice — eight weeks, starting with identity and trust, moving through noticing and meaning-making, closing with a practice already running. No learning management system. No modules you'll complete and forget. Just the work, a small group of serious people, and September arriving with something already built.
Most leadership and foresight programs work inside assumptions you've already made — they help you execute better within a direction already chosen. The Assumption-Ground Audit operates before that. Before the commitment. Before the assumption hardens into strategy or policy. That's a different intervention point entirely. No other program is built around it.
Most leadership programs are remedial — designed for people who missed something. This one is for the leader who already senses things before the room catches up, operates with a forensic instinct, and wants infrastructure for what's already working. That includes solopreneurs and small business owners navigating consequential decisions alone — without a strategy team to pressure-test assumptions, the cost of an unexamined one is higher, not lower. Different person. Different program.
Every other program in this space hands you a model and tells you to apply it. This one starts from the other end — your identity as a thinker, your trust architecture, how you actually process information in the real conditions you work in. What you build here is configured to you specifically, inside the context where you actually work. By week eight, the orientation has already shifted.
Mathematics plus forensic historiography — the discipline of examining what sources assume, not just what they say — applied forward rather than backward. That's the formation behind the AGA, and it's not a background any other futurism practitioner brings. It produces a methodology that is structurally different from trend-watching, scenario planning, or strategic foresight as it's usually practised.
You lead — by title or by practice — and you take that seriously regardless of what your org chart says
You've been ahead of something before it was obvious, but you don't have a reliable system for doing that consistently
You're navigating constant change and you want better infrastructure for your instincts, not just more information
You want to connect with other people who think this way — and you're far enough from a major centre that those people are hard to find in person
You want a practice you can actually implement — not a course you'll complete and shelve
You're a solopreneur or small business owner making high-stakes directional decisions without a strategy team — and you feel the weight of getting those calls right
A note on what gets better results: participants who are open, self-aware, and genuinely willing to examine what they've been treating as settled go further faster. You don't need to arrive there — but being willing to get there matters.
Five questions. Four minutes. The Futurist Readiness Assessment tells you where you're starting from before you decide anything.
Opens in a new tab. Takes about 4 minutes.
The program opens by examining who you are as a leader and what you actually trust — before anything else earns its place. Then it builds outward: how you notice, how you make meaning, and finally how you make it stick.
Who are you as a leader, and what assumptions are load-bearing in that identity? We start here because the lens shapes everything you'll see in the weeks that follow.
Who and what do you trust to tell you what's real? Your trust architecture determines which signals you allow yourself to receive — and which ones you filter out before they reach you.
What counts as a signal and what's just noise? How to develop a reliable scanning practice that works with how you actually think and move through the world.
The gap between what you observe and what it means. How to sit with ambiguity long enough to build a real model rather than defaulting to the nearest familiar explanation.
The program doesn't move to meaning-making before you've had time to actually notice. This week belongs to you and your context — bring what you've been observing since week one into a structured reflection. What signals have you been receiving? What assumptions have you been working around? This is where the thinking becomes personal.
How you narrate the future — to yourself and to others — determines what becomes possible. Scenario thinking as a leadership tool, not just a planning exercise.
The assumptions that are hardest to examine are the ones built into the language your organization uses and the hierarchy that decides whose observations get named. Power shapes what gets seen.
The practice isn't a system you set up — it's a way of being. How you notice. How you think. How you move through ambiguity before anyone else has named what's happening. This session is about embedding that orientation into your daily life. Technology can support it, but it's never the goal. You leave not with a configured tool stack but with something that has already shifted in how you see.
Most of this program runs through Telegram — not as a compromise, but because you shouldn't have to clear your calendar to build a futurism practice. Nola leads the thinking and the discussion. The cohort does the rest. The conversation happens on your time, in a space that works anywhere in the world.
Everything else in this space — the books, the trend reports, the free channels — reaches you the same way it reaches everyone else. The Telegram channel doesn't work like that. Nola responds to your thinking specifically, in real time. There is no other access point at this price.
The cohort lives in Telegram. Nola shares signals she's tracking, questions she's sitting with, and patterns worth naming. The cohort responds, pushes back, and takes threads somewhere. It's a thinking space, not a content feed.
Optional drop-in on Google Meet. Times rotate across 8 weeks — North America, Europe, and Asia-Pacific each get a live window. Always recorded.
Sensemaking at scale doesn't work. Twenty people means everyone's thinking lands, gets challenged, and shapes the room.
Open to participants anywhere in the world. Nola's audience already spans Singapore, the UK, Germany, Australia, and North America. Async-first means time zones aren't a barrier. All sessions in English.
On live sessions: come as you are. Camera on or off, mic on or off — your call, every time. Participation in the chat is equal to verbal participation. There is no right way to show up, only that you do.
Implementation without groundwork fails. Most leaders know this — they've lived it.
You can't build a futurism practice in the middle of a busy quarter. You need some distance from the urgent to actually examine the assumed. Summer gives you that — not because things slow down, but because the rhythm shifts enough to let something new take root.
June and July are the groundwork. You're building the practice while the calendar is still forgiving. By the time September hits — when the energy shifts and the quarter fills back up — it's already running. You walk into that season oriented, not scrambling to implement something from a quieter month.
September is when leaders implement. Make It So is what makes that implementation land differently — because the assumptions underneath it have already been examined.
This is not a course. No certificate, no content library, nothing to revisit on a rainy Tuesday. Make It So is a working seminar — you show up, you think with a small group of serious people, and eight weeks later the practice is there because you built it.
You'll receive a Telegram invite within 24 hours. The cohort channel opens June 1. First week begins the same day. No onboarding maze, no pre-work package. Just show up.
Nola Simon is the founder of Everyday Futurism, an independent keynote speaking and strategic advisory practice. She works with C-suite and senior leaders at the pre-adoption stage — before organizations commit to directions and before assumptions harden into policy.
Her named methodology, the Assumption-Ground Audit, emerged from seventeen years at Manulife/John Hancock spanning cross-border Canada-US operations and billion-dollar vendor relationships. Her academic formation — an Honours B.A. in Mathematics with a History minor from Glendon College, studied in French — gave her the combination of structural thinking and forensic historical method that grounds the AGA.
She is a LinkedIn Top Voice (2024, 2025), host of the Hope + Possibilities podcast (109+ episodes, Goodpods top 10 leadership), and has been featured in Maclean's, CBC, CTV, and Canadian Press. She lives north of Toronto, near Lake Simcoe — which means she has built her entire practice in the same condition she's working in: doing serious cross-border work from the middle of nowhere.
"What I appreciate about you, Nola, is you sense things before they happen. A true Futurist Thinker."
"Nola, you are really one of the smartest I know. Like well-rounded intellect with deep emotional intelligence. You are not the average user. You think beyond the surface."
"Nola was absolutely pivotal in the communications space. She has an engaged network and understands how to leverage various mediums to rally an audience. Her innate talent for change management was enormously helpful."
These are founding cohort prices — the first 20 pay less because they take the bet without the track record. The 1:1 tier also includes something the September cohort won't get: quarterly trend presentations, extended from the paid Substack to these 20 spots only. The September cohort pays $1,600 / $2,400 / $3,200. All prices in USD. Canadian pricing also available. If currency is a barrier, message Nola.
Eight weeks of program material and a Telegram community. Work at your own pace, on your own schedule.
Everything in self-paced plus optional weekly drop-in office hours. Times rotate across 8 weeks so every time zone gets a live window.
Everything in the Office Hours tier, plus two private sessions and quarterly trend presentations — a paid Substack exclusive extended to these 20 spots only. The 1:1 sessions are for your actual context: the constraints and conditions the group can't address.
Questions before enrolling? nola@everydayfuturism.ca
Leaders — by title or by practice. If you're accountable for outcomes, you influence direction, and you're the person others come to when things are ambiguous, you qualify. C-suite and senior leaders are the natural home for this work, but so are solopreneurs and small business owners — people making consequential directional decisions without a strategy team or institutional buffer to catch a bad assumption before it becomes a bad bet. The deciding factor is how you think, not what your business card says.
One honest note: participants who get the most from this work tend to be open, self-aware, and genuinely willing to examine what they've been treating as settled. That's not a prerequisite — it's a predictor. If that describes you, you'll go further faster.
No. The program is designed for leaders who are curious about how futurism applies to their actual work — not people who already have a foresight practice. If you're starting from scratch, you're exactly who this is for.
Roughly 2–3 hours per week. Most of that happens in Telegram — Nola leads thinking, shares models in progress, and opens threads the cohort takes somewhere. You engage on your own schedule. The two live Google Meet sessions are 90 minutes each, recorded for any time zone that can't make it live.
The practice is a way of being — how you notice, how you make meaning, how you move through ambiguity before anyone else has named what's happening. It's not installed; it's built. Technology can support it — some people journal, some use voice notes, some track in a spreadsheet — but the tools are beside the point. By week 8, something has shifted in how you orient to the world. The practice is running because you've been doing it.
The program includes two live group sessions where there's time for questions from the cohort. If you want direct 1:1 time — to run the Assumption-Ground Audit (AGA) on your specific context, think through how the work lands in your particular organization, or bring your real constraints — the Program + 1:1 tier includes two private 30-minute sessions with Nola over Telegram.
You're enrolling in a first cohort — without the track record of people who've been through this before you. That's a real bet, and it deserves a straight answer.
All sales are final. The practical reason: spots in a capped cohort of 20 are committed the moment you take one. The more honest reason: the value of this program isn't in materials you receive — it's in the work you do. The assumptions you surface, the signals you start to notice, the practice you build — those belong to you from the moment you start. That's not something that can be returned.
If your circumstances shift, your registration is transferable — message Nola directly to arrange it.
Still weighing it? Take the readiness assessment — it tells you where you're starting from before you decide.
Yes — and the program is built for it. Participants can join from anywhere. Nola's existing audience spans Singapore, the UK, Germany, Australia, and across North America — so if you've found this work through the podcast or LinkedIn, you're already in good company. Async-first format means time zones don't gate your access. All prices are in USD — the standard for online programs. Canadian pricing is also available. If currency is a barrier, message Nola directly.
Please note: all program content, discussion, and sessions are conducted in English only.
Questions? nola@everydayfuturism.ca