Making Better Decisions: Every Decision Is a Hypothesis to Be Tested in the Future Every decision you make is a hypothesis about the future. Many decisions are small: umbrella or hat, one poop bag on the dog walk or the whole roll? At work the timeframe stretches to six months, a year, or a project that takes two or three years to land. Nobody can see that far ahead. You decide, you watch, and you adjust. This episode is about making those longer decisions better. I start with bias, and with the one I see most often: the project that exists because the CEO wants it. The CEO may have the full picture. But when you're eight levels down, you rarely get that kind of transparency. You can still list the assumptions you can see and test them yourself. My example is AI adoption. Per-seat pricing is cheap right now, so what happens when it changes? Margaret Heffernan calls it the drug dealer's business model: free, then cheap, then hooked, then the price goes up. That's why I only test AI where I could recover if I had to replace it or pay more. And when you hear that you'll be left behind if you don't adopt, ask who benefits if you believe that without question. Then there are incentives. AI adoption asks people to change how they work. If the story is "this will help us cut headcount," then for the people doing the work, the reward is losing their job. Some companies that made deep layoffs on that story are now rehiring. I also cover: Goalposts and metrics that tell you when you're off track Watching for convergences: what would have to be true for this to emerge? Who makes the final decision, and how input and feedback get in Psychological safety, learning from failure, and avoiding the blame game My convergence tracker is at https://nolasimon.com/signal-tracker. It's one of the rabbit holes hidden in the footer links on my site. A year-end post on the convergences I'm seeing is coming. This is my last solo episode for a while. Guest episodes come next, then a fresh start in 2027. Questions? Email [email protected] or leave a review on any podcast player. Don't forget to subscribe!

 I'm futurist Nola Simon, and this is Hope and Possibilities, a choose your own adventure guide to everyday futurism, exploring strategic foresight, self-trust, and leadership. I connect the dots between what's happening, what's hiding in plain sight, and what might happen next. Through a distinctly Canadian lens, I challenge the assumptions we take for granted and the stories that shape how we understand the world. Featured in Maclean's and CBC, I help curious leaders question their perceptions, recognize what they've misunderstood, and discover possibilities they might otherwise miss. Because how we see the present shapes the future we imagine and the choices we make. Made in Canada.    ​

Show Notes: Finding the Through Line in Your Career, Leadership, and Future In this episode of Hope and Possibilities, I explore something I've been noticing among respected authors, thought leaders, and experts: they're pivoting. Not by abandoning their past, but by reinterpreting it. The inspiration for this conversation came from a LinkedIn post I wrote about how people connect their past expertise to future opportunities. Within minutes of publishing it, two experts I follow closely announced new directions in their own work. The timing felt like a signal worth paying attention to. It also reinforced a question that many professionals, leaders, and organizations are asking right now: How do you move toward the future without starting over? Why Expert Pivots Matter One of the people I've been watching is author and executive coach Dorie Clark. What's interesting to me isn't simply what she's doing. It's how she's positioning herself. Dorie has built an impressive career. She's a bestselling author, speaker, educator, coach, and recognized thought leader. Yet recently, she's been showing up on Instagram with a very specific focus. She's creating short videos that analyze communication moments from celebrities and public figures, breaking down what worked, why it worked, and what viewers can learn from it. A Taylor Swift interview becomes a lesson in communication. A celebrity interaction becomes a lesson in influence. A public mistake becomes a lesson in leadership. What stands out is how carefully she connects every example back to her expertise. She introduces herself as a communications expert, a former presidential campaign spokesperson, and someone who taught at Duke University. Every credential directly reinforces the message she's delivering. At the same time, she's emphasizing some aspects of her background while placing less attention on others. That's not accidental. That's positioning. Following the Signals When people begin reframing how they talk about themselves, I pay attention. Because often what they're highlighting reveals where they believe future opportunities exist. Communication is a universal skill. Everyone communicates. Whether you're a CEO, community volunteer, entrepreneur, healthcare worker, government employee, or student, communication matters. That makes it a topic with broad relevance and broad appeal. Looking at her content strategy, I find myself wondering if she's preparing for a larger audience than the executive and leadership audiences she's traditionally served. I could be wrong. But that's what signal spotting is all about. It's about looking at patterns and asking what they might mean. It's about observing what's changing before the official announcement arrives. The Through Line Years ago, I named my LinkedIn newsletter The Through Line because I've always been fascinated by the connections between our past and our future. Most people think of career transitions as dramatic reinventions. I don't. I think they're acts of interpretation. The real challenge isn't becoming someone new. The challenge is understanding what has always been true about you. What strengths have consistently followed you throughout your work? What skills show up regardless of your title? What expertise do people seek you out for over and over again? Those are the threads that matter. Those are the strands that make up your through line. The strongest pivots aren't built on abandoning your history. They're built on understanding it more clearly. What This Has to Do With Leadership This is true for individuals, but it's also true for leaders and organizations. Strong leadership isn't about reacting to every change around you. It's about understanding which capabilities are enduring and which assumptions need updating. Many organizations struggle with transformation because they become attached to how they've always done things. Many leaders become stuck because they define themselves by their current role instead of their deeper capabilities. The future doesn't usually require us to throw everything away. It requires us to reinterpret what we already know. That's a very different mindset. It's also a much more practical one. How I Approach Foresight This episode is also a window into how I think as a futurist. People sometimes ask me how I identify emerging opportunities or spot trends before they're obvious. The answer usually starts with observation. I pay attention to language. I pay attention to stories. I look at what people say. I look at what they don't say. I watch how experts position themselves. I watch how organizations describe change. I pay attention to assumptions, narratives, and signals. Then I start asking questions. What future are they preparing for? What opportunity do they see? What problem are they trying to solve? What assumptions are driving their decisions? Those questions often reveal far more than direct statements ever could. Reading Between the Lines The analysis I share throughout this episode isn't based on secret information. It's based on observation. When someone publishes a series of videos, launches a newsletter, changes their messaging, explores a new audience, or starts emphasizing a different expertise, those actions communicate something. Not everything is being said directly. But often the clues are visible. This is true in organizations as well. A strategic plan tells a story. A hiring decision tells a story. A rebrand tells a story. The challenge is learning how to read those stories. Why Experimentation Matters One of the biggest misconceptions people have about reinvention is that it's risky. What I've observed is that the strongest reinventions usually happen through experimentation. People test ideas. They try different approaches. They explore adjacent opportunities. They gather feedback. Then they adjust. Using Dorie as an example, if her communication-focused content doesn't deliver the outcomes she's hoping for, she's still a respected communication expert. Her credibility remains intact. Nothing has been lost. Instead, she's gained information. That's the value of experimentation. Not every experiment succeeds. But every experiment teaches. And learning is essential if you want to remain relevant in a changing world. Other Experts Making Moves The timing of this episode became even more interesting because, almost immediately after publishing my LinkedIn post, I noticed other experts beginning to signal changes as well. One was Jennifer Singh, a communications and PR professional whose career began in journalism before evolving into public relations. She has started hinting at a new direction, though she hasn't yet shared the full details. Another was Rachel Botsman, whose work on trust and technology has influenced leaders around the world. She recently announced that she is working on something new as well. Neither pivot has been fully revealed. But that's precisely what makes them interesting. We're seeing the signals before we're seeing the destination. What Got You Here Won't Get You There There's a famous leadership idea that what got you to your current level of success won't necessarily take you to the next one. That doesn't mean your past no longer matters. In many ways, your past matters more than ever. The key is learning how to reinterpret it. The skills that brought you success may still be valuable. The way you apply them may need to change. The story you tell about them may need to change. The audience you serve may need to change. But the capability itself often remains incredibly valuable. That's why understanding your through line is so important. Questions Worth Asking As you listen to this episode, consider a few questions: What is the through line in your career? What strengths have remained consistent across different roles? What expertise are you known for? What assumptions might be limiting your next move? What future are you quietly preparing for? If someone analyzed your work today, what would they conclude you're building toward? The answers may reveal more than you think. Final Thoughts One of the biggest challenges in both career development and leadership is figuring out how to evolve without abandoning who you are. The people I admire most aren't starting over. They're finding the thread that has always run through their work and reinterpreting it for a changing world. They're taking the credibility, expertise, and experience they've already built and connecting it to a future opportunity. That's what I see when I watch experts like Dorie Clark, Jennifer Singh, and Rachel Botsman. They're not discarding their past. They're reframing it. They're clarifying what they want to be known for next and creating visibility around that future direction long before they officially arrive there. For me, that's what strategic foresight is really about. It's paying attention to the signals, stories, assumptions, and patterns that indicate where opportunities may be emerging. Whether you're leading an organization, building a personal brand, or navigating a career pivot, the question isn't, "How do I become someone entirely different?" The question is: What is the through line that connects who I've been to who I want to become? Because the future isn't built by rejecting your past. It's built by understanding which parts of your experience matter most and carrying them forward with intention. And sometimes the clearest signals about where you're going next are already hiding in plain sight.

The short version The Institute for the Future, where I did my futures thinking training, has released its Ten-Year Forecast for 2036. One of the ten forecasts says discernment will be the most essential human skill by then, replacing empathy as the soft skill we most want to teach in schools, train for at work, and build in our personal lives. In this episode I read that forecast, talk about why it caught my eye, and share how I practise discernment now: in low-stakes conversations about TV and culture, in the groups I belong to, in how I choose podcast guests, and in the moments when my own judgment was wrong. I also tell the story of how IFTF ran a pandemic simulation about ten years before COVID, and why that's the best case I know for practising the future before it arrives. Why a forecast about discernment stopped me I've been talking a lot lately about the skills we need for the future of work. People keep pointing out that soft skills are anything but soft, and the way IFTF defines discernment proves it. Here's the heart of the forecast, in my paraphrase. The era of "seeing is believing" is over. You can't just provide the receipts anymore, because receipts are easy to generate and fake with AI. So we need a new skill set to make sense of the world and decide what is right, what is real, what is good, and what is wise. That skill is discernment: the ability to judge what is trustworthy, relevant, and meaningful when evidence alone isn't enough and the facts themselves are unstable or contested. IFTF describes it as a combination of: critical thinking contextual awareness social sense-making taste moral judgment Put together, those help you decide what is real enough, right enough, good enough, and ultimately wise enough to act on. There's a piece of the forecast I keep coming back to, which IFTF calls neighborism. It means prioritizing local human truths, first-hand judgment, and accountability to the people you deal with every day over national media or online discourse. The forecast names the drivers too. Photos, video, audio, and data are easy to fake, so the authority of evidence collapses. Technical fixes like AI watermarks fail. And none of that changes the basic human need to know what's real and true so we can act and make good decisions. I don't think you can separate who you are at work from who you are at home, and discernment is a good example of why. It's an adaptive skill. It shapes your relationships, how you work, who you trust, how you make decisions about the future, and how you make sense of the past. That reach is exactly why it caught my attention. Read the forecast: IFTF Ten-Year Forecast 2036 — What We Choose Next Practising taste and judgment when the stakes are low I've written a few posts and recorded a few episodes about the human skills AI is bad at, especially taste and judgment. The question I keep asking is: how do you show those skills on an ongoing basis, in a way other people can see? One answer is that you practise them where the stakes are low. Art, culture, books, movies, and TV give us endless chances. How we talk about them, who we talk to, and how we use them to make sense of the world are all small exercises in discernment. Over the last few weeks on Threads, we've been talking about Slow Horses and The Diplomat. I've been writing about spoilers, the art of anticipation, and why we hate spoilers but love Easter eggs. All of that is taste and judgment on display, along with critical thinking about what those choices would mean if the stakes changed. When the stakes change: Ed Sheeran Here's an example of how quickly the stakes can shift. Earlier this year, Ed Sheeran told the world he had a Letterboxd account. It was charming. It made him relatable: yes, he's famous and wealthy, but he watches movies and wants to share what he thinks, just like the rest of us. People found the account fast, and as I understand it he ended up shutting it down because it got overrun. Low stakes. Then came the summer and the Macklemore situation. Macklemore declared his support for Palestine and was removed from the tour by the owners of the stadiums. Ed's response, as I read it, was not to get involved. Staying silent is a stance, and it blew up on him. No one expected Ed Sheeran to resolve the conflict in Gaza. But he has an enormous platform, millions of followers, and he has spoken out on other political situations before, like Ukraine. People expected him to use the accountability and authority he'd already taken on. To my mind, this is where the layers of discernment show up. Ed is one of the most successful musicians in the world, and his money still pales next to the people who own those stadiums and effectively run the business of live music. Discernment means understanding who actually makes the decisions, who is being coerced or intimidated, and who is showing courage in the face of impossible choices while people are dying. The stakes weren't just about who goes to a concert and who makes money. They were about whether you support a cause where people's lives are on the line. This is why you practise in advance. You don't control how the stakes change or how you're perceived, and you need to move deftly between what's nice to have and what's essential. I don't envy anyone in the public eye. Narratives shift. Words get misread because there often isn't enough context. Even with the best advisors in the world, the only thing you can really do is own who you are, what you stand for, and what your values are, and work from there. How I practise discernment: adjacent skills When I want to grow a skill, I look at the things next to it. Calm and meditation. I've built meditation into my walks, and a big reason I love it is that it improves my ability to notice. Noticing is central to futurism. You're watching for signals, building scenarios, applying foresight, and paying attention to how separate things converge. Listening. I'll be honest about why I started this podcast. I noticed I was interrupting people a lot. I didn't feel heard, I needed an outlet for my ideas, and that need was coming out as interruptions. So part of why I started the podcast was to learn to listen better, and then to trust the situation enough to express myself in a way that was productive. That's how this whole body of work came to be. I didn't start a podcast for the heck of it. I started it to practise a skill I wanted to improve: critical thinking, contextual awareness, listening. Are you listening so you can say something, or are you listening deeply, learning, making people feel seen and heard, and asking questions that move the conversation forward? There are levels of listening. What are you listening for? Language. I'm part of a linguistics group, a PR and crisis communications group, and a group focused on trust and leadership. Most of my futures work centres on communication: how we use language, how we understand, how we remember, how we anticipate, how we notice. Those groups are where I keep sharpening that. And of course there's the direct practice: futurism, consulting, advising. A key part of all of it is listening, noticing, and understanding that the people I work with need to practise these skills too. Trust, transparency, and going first The forecast talks about deciding what is right, what is good, and what is wise. That brings up trust. Who do you trust, and why? If you need to know everything, you aren't trusting anyone, and that's my problem with the idea that more transparency builds more trust. If you can see everything, you don't need to trust at all, because everything is disclosed. You're doing something else in that situation. So how do you learn to trust? The irony is that you usually have to be trustworthy first. You go first. You behave in ways other people can trust. The more trust you give, the more you earn. Choosing guests, and being wrong anyway When I'm deciding whether to invite someone onto the podcast, I'm looking for consistency. I follow people for a long time. I read their books, listen to their podcasts, and watch how they comment and engage. I usually only invite someone once I feel that who they are on one platform is who they are everywhere, that they are who they say they are. And it can still change once you're in the conversation. I had one guest I really wanted to like. On paper we had a lot in common. He showed up with slides and presented to me like it was 2010 and I was a student in his university class. When I questioned some of his data and how he presented it, he got upset. I had another guest who, in the middle of a video-recorded conversation, kept checking his phone. It was an hour-long call. Would you do that with the CEOs you advise? Who are you, and how do you decide who deserves your attention? I'd read all his books. I'd had productive conversations with him before. He still showed up in a way that made me feel like I didn't matter. I was floored. You can think you have the best discernment in the world and still be wrong. That's where self-awareness comes in: being open to feedback, rethinking what you thought you knew, unlearning, relearning, and continuing to reassess. That ongoing reassessment is discernment too. Waking up in 2036 This connects directly to Everyday Futurism, the idea I talk about all the time. How do you wake up inside a future scenario, whether that's six months, a year, 18 months, or ten years from now? Try it. Ten years from now: Who are you living with? What does breakfast look like? What are your habits? What does your work look like? Do you leave the house to go to work? Do you walk there? What does "work" even mean to you? Imagining your ordinary routines when certain things have changed helps you see what you'd need to work on now to make a future come to life. The pandemic simulation that came ten years early This is my favourite example of why this practice matters. About ten years before COVID, IFTF ran a social simulation of a respiratory pandemic, led by Jane McGonigal, a game designer and futurist. Thousands of people imagined waking up inside that scenario and described how they would live, cope, and adapt. Then the responses were mined for what people had in common. Jane writes about this in her book Imaginable. I read it and spent three years participating in the community around it, and what stayed with me is how clearly people anticipated the loss of ritual. Going to church and praying together. Weddings. Funerals. Being present when babies are born. Christenings. The rituals that keep us connected and mark the transitions in our lives. You can move some of that online, but it looks and feels very different, especially for someone who has never been online. When COVID arrived, people who had taken part in the simulation recognized it, and government officials reached out to Jane asking about what it had found. That's what futurism can do when it's grounded in how people actually live. It isn't about flying cars. It's about small decisions that snowball into bigger ones and eventually become who we are as a society. We know more than we realize. Much of it isn't about knowing at all. It's sense-making. We know our lives. We know how we'd react. Discernment is what lets us use that knowledge. Read the article: 10 Years Ago, She Predicted COVID. Here's What She's Worried About Next (Next Big Idea Club) Read the book: Imaginable: How to See the Future Coming and Feel Ready for Anything — Even Things That Seem Impossible Today by Jane McGonigal Want to learn futures thinking? I took IFTF's Futures Thinking specialization on Coursera, taught by Jane McGonigal, and it's where I'd send anyone who wants to start. The courses are free to audit, and they walk you through the same kind of practice I've described here: spotting signals, imagining scenarios, and turning foresight into action. Start here: Futures Thinking Specialization — Institute for the Future on Coursera Questions to sit with Where are you practising taste and judgment right now, where the stakes are low? What would change in how you'd act if the stakes went up overnight? Who do you trust, and is that trust built on consistency or on disclosure? When did your own discernment last turn out to be wrong, and what did you do with that? If you woke up in 2036, what would your ordinary Tuesday look like? Help me put Canadian voices on the charts The skills I talk about are deeply connected to careers, and they're also about society and culture. So I've changed the podcast's categories to reflect that, and I'm running an experiment to land on the Canadian charts. I believe speaking up as a Canadian about the signals, trends, and scenarios I see playing out is a civic duty, especially when it comes to our sovereignty and our future as a country. That takes visibility, and amplifying Canadian voices is my goal. The easiest way to help is to subscribe to Hope + Possibilities on whatever app you listen on. And I'd love to know what you think: what does discernment look like in your life right now? Links from this episode IFTF Ten-Year Forecast 2036 — What We Choose Next 10 Years Ago, She Predicted COVID. Here's What She's Worried About Next (Next Big Idea Club) Futures Thinking Specialization — Institute for the Future on Coursera Imaginable by Jane McGonigal

Spoilers, Easter Eggs and How We Pay Attention to the Future In this solo episode, I follow a question I couldn't let go of: why do so many people hate spoilers but love Easter eggs? And what might that tell us about how we react to signals, trends and possible futures? This podcast is where I follow my curiosity and look at things I think need more attention. This one starts somewhere unexpected: arguments on Threads about TV shows, movies and books. I should say up front that this is a theory. There isn't much research behind it yet. It's an idea that needs fleshing out, so I'm asking for your patience while I work through it out loud. I'm a spoiler person I grew up on Choose Your Own Adventure books. I read each one once the way it was meant to be read, then went back and read every other path. I wanted to see how the story was built, what changed when you made different decisions, and how those choices made the story feel different. That's still how I enjoy storytelling. I love spoilers. If I can't find them, I go looking. I check IMDb. I look for hidden cameos and what they might mean ahead of time so I can spot the craft while I watch. Why do people get so angry? On Threads, people either love spoilers or hate them, and the people who hate them can get angry. Some get abusive, insulting and completely unpleasant. My first reaction was about accountability. You choose where you put your attention. If spoilers upset you, you can hide comments, mute the show's name, mute the actors. You have some control over your feed. Then someone pointed out that if your work is on social media and you have to engage professionally, you don't always have the option to look away. Being able to disengage is a privilege. That was fair. I could feel myself getting pulled into the divide too. But when I started having the same kind of interaction over and over, I got curious. That's usually my signal that something more than one person's instinctive reaction is going on. So I started asking complete strangers online what the difference is. What a spoiler does From those conversations, a spoiler seems to be anything that changes your perception of what the story is and what the outcome could be, in a way the original artist didn't intend. One woman told me she also appreciates the craft. For her, reading other people's interpretations online means experiencing the work through the filters of thousands of other people. They have biases. They misinterpret things. They're less talented than the artists who made it. Reading spoilers filters the work in a way she doesn't enjoy. That made complete sense to me. I read the spoilers, but I always filter them through my own perceptions. Spoilers and anxiety My other thought was about anxiety. My older daughter has anxiety, and she's explained to me over the years that she likes rewatching stories because there are no surprises. She knows exactly how the episode goes and how the movie ends. There's comfort in that reliability. So which way does it run? Do I like spoilers because I'm trying to find the one story that actually matters and set the rest aside, as a way of managing my own anxiety about how it ends? Or do people who hate spoilers love sitting with all the possibilities, and a spoiler narrows those down to one before they're ready? Either way, it might be about managing anxiety around what it means to go from many possibilities to one story. I don't know. I've been reading about the science of anticipation, and the research is limited. Before, during and after the story When we read or share stories, we're anticipating how they'll go, how they'll be revealed, how we'll feel along the way, what the outcome will be and what it will mean to us. Then there's what happens after. I almost never rewatch TV or movies. I might reread a book five years later. I've been rewatching '90s rom-coms lately because they're available and sometimes there's nothing else on, and I've forgotten enough that it feels new. But generally, once I've gotten everything I can out of a show or movie, I'm done. I find new things in the written word that I don't find in visual mediums. Is an Easter egg a spoiler? My younger daughter, who's 19, had a good take on this. A spoiler narrows the story down to one. It reveals constraints on what the story could possibly be. An Easter egg preserves the possibilities. Nothing is confirmed until you see the final product. The artist is directing your attention, but you're still free to wonder. Taylor Swift is the obvious example. She uses Easter eggs in her marketing to keep people excited about her music and the decisions she's making in her career. She's also set no-go zones. She has said she doesn't plant Easter eggs about her personal life. Album details, number of songs, themes, colours, release dates: those are fair game. Some of them we probably never notice. During the Eras Tour, the stage became a chessboard for "Mastermind," and most people didn't get it. She disclosed it in a book she published after the tour. Easter eggs give you agency. You go looking for them. They spark your curiosity, make you feel empowered and connect you with a community of people looking for the same answers. Nobody has the true answer until it's confirmed or there's consensus. That curiosity feels good. The possibilities give you hope. They keep you guessing and engaged. Spoilers do the opposite. They narrow things down, and you lose agency. Even if your job means you can't log off, you've lost the control to choose how you experience something you care about. Nobody agrees on what counts People do try. They post spoiler warnings. Threads has a blur function, which I've been told sometimes malfunctions. I've used it and still had people come after me for spoilers. And what counts as a spoiler? Even the broadest comment can be read as one. There's no shared definition of when it's acceptable to talk about something, what's fair game or what counts as public knowledge. My example is The Odyssey. That story is about 2,700 years old. When Christopher Nolan's film came out, people complained that the Trojan horse was a spoiler. At what point is something common knowledge? Recency bias plays a big part. So does respect. Are people giving you the choice to engage, or acknowledging that you might not have had time to watch it yet? And why can't we say "please don't tell me, this one matters to me" in a way that keeps the relationship intact and still appreciates the craft? That connects to reputation, which is a real problem on social media right now, especially on platforms where you can post under an anonymous username and behave in ways you wouldn't if people knew your real name. Christmas, time zones and streaming I expected this topic to set people off. Instead, many people engaged with nuance and genuinely advanced my understanding of how they experience art. Some were patronizing and tried to make me feel dumb because what a spoiler is should be "obvious." One woman compared it to a kid at Christmas who accidentally tells you what your present is. They didn't mean to, but Christmas is ruined. There's a lot of nuance in that example. Christmas has an agreed-upon date. There are rituals of hiding: you wrap presents and disguise them. There's a set time to open them, shaped by family tradition. My German family opens presents on Christmas Eve. Streaming has none of that. Everyone watches whenever they want. There's no agreed date or time and no global rule. Add time zones: someone who got access 12 hours earlier might think it's fair game, without accounting for people whose release landed in the middle of the night. So I think this touches how much we value storytelling. We anticipate something we believe will bring us joy, keep us curious and offer a different perspective on the world. When someone takes that from us, it feels like a loss. That's where people get nasty: "You're taking this from me." What this might mean for the future Here's the part that fascinates me. If people react this strongly to how a story ends, is that part of why some people resist imagining possible futures? I don't know that it translates directly. I don't have a degree in neuroscience. Low-stakes pop culture is very different from questions like the future of work or how AI will affect our jobs, the big strategic questions that could reshape how we live and work. But I wonder if it's a signal worth researching. Does it matter how we present change and reinvention? If we present the future like Easter eggs, does that help people trust it? If we present it like a spoiler, "this is the story and this is the only possibility," does that trigger defensiveness? It might. To me, there isn't one single future. There are many, because there are endless permutations of how people experience life and work. Scenarios are useful. They give context and help people imagine. But they also narrow a set of possibilities into one specific story. And from what I'm seeing in pop culture, that experience of narrowing can trigger defensiveness and division. That's why I want to lean into Easter eggs: the signals and trends that keep possibilities open. And it's what I want to research more. Questions for you Do you like spoilers or avoid them? Why do you write about what you watch, read or consume on social media? What reaction do you expect, and how does it make you feel? How do hints and clues affect you? Do they pull you into a story or turn you off? If you don't pay attention to those details in stories, do you also tend to miss trends and signals? How do you make decisions about the future, and is it the same process? I think we write because we're looking for connection, that collective effervescence you feel at a concert or a play, where only the people in that room share that particular version of the performance. These questions are really an exercise in understanding your worldview: how you experience ambiguity and uncertainty, and how you make decisions when you don't know. A small experiment I'm running an experiment to see whether this podcast can appear on the Canadian charts. I'm not particularly drawn to charts. But I'm asking whether it's a civic duty to maximize discoverability so Canadian voices show up. If more of us appear on podcast charts around the world, does that make us more competitive and less dependent on the United States, in a way that advances our sovereignty? It's low stakes. Subscribe on whatever podcast player you use, and we'll see what happens. I'd love to hear your questions. Email me at [email protected], or leave a comment, rating or review wherever you listen. resources: Spoilers and enjoyment Spoiler alert: Stories are not spoiled by 'spoilers' (ScienceDaily): Leavitt & Christenfeld, 2011, Psychological Science. Summary only. Spoiler alert: spoilers make you enjoy stories more (University of California): the same research, with follow-up work. Summary only. Story spoilers can hurt entertainment (Phys.org): Johnson & Rosenbaum, 2015, Communication Research. Summary only. Not all spoilers reduce enjoyment of short stories (On Fiction): Levine, Betzner & Autry replication. Summary only. Do spoilers spoil stories for everyone? (On Fiction): Rosenbaum & Johnson on need for affect and need for cognition. Summary only. Who's afraid of spoilers? (VU Amsterdam record): Rosenbaum & Johnson, 2016, Psychology of Popular Media Culture, 5(3), 273-289. Record only. Spoiler alert: why some people want to know what happens next (TODAY): read. Source of the "emotion junkies" label, which is the journalist's, not a research term. Spoiler Preference Psychology (All About Psychology, republished from The Conversation): Anjum Naweed on control as the shared motive. Read. Original at The Conversation. A study using all three spoiler types (CORE): no significant effect on overall enjoyment, some reduction in suspense. Abstract only. Rewatching and control Why We Watch the Same Shows Over and Over (Psychology Today): Robert Kraft, 2022. Read. A blog post. Russell, C.A. & Levy, S.J. (2012), Journal of Consumer Research, 39(2), 341-359, doi.org/10.1086/662996 Storytelling and the brain Brains of storytellers and listeners sync up (Discover): Stephens, Silbert & Hasson, PNAS. Small sample. Summary only. How a speaker herds the audience (Chang, Nastase, Zadbood & Hasson): 2024 follow-up. Abstract only. Neural Processing of Narratives (Jääskeläinen et al., 2020): review. Abstract only. Discovering event structure in continuous narrative perception and memory (Baldassano et al., 2017): the brain anticipates familiar narratives. Abstract only. Memory, imagination and foresight The Future of Memory: Remembering, Imagining, and the Brain (Schacter et al., 2012, Neuron): read. Overlap between remembering and imagining, with the caveats noted above. The Neurocognitive Architecture of Human Anticipation (Megan Anderson, Affective Foresight): read.  

I've been watching a lot of TV lately. Reading a lot of books too. And I keep noticing something I can't stop thinking about: Canadian stories are having a moment, and I'm not sure Canadians are the ones who benefit most from it. This episode is about intellectual property. Specifically, what happens to the value of a Canadian story once it's adapted, licensed, and streamed around the world. That covers original scripts from Canadian showrunners and screenwriters, and it covers adaptations of books and articles by Canadian writers. I'm a consumer, not an industry expert. These are questions, not conclusions. But I think they're questions we need to be asking out loud. The Shows I'm Talking About A few examples to ground this: Sterling Point, developed for Prime Video Every Year After, based on a Carley Fortune book (with another of her books being adapted next year) Heated Rivalry, based on the book series by Rachel Reid, a writer in Nova Scotia. It was developed for Crave and then licensed to HBO. Below, a Netflix original starring Josh Hartnett, set in Newfoundland. It's currently number one in 53 countries. The production of Below has said that $90 million was invested into the Canadian economy. That sounds great, right? The $90 Million Is the Smallest Piece Here's what that $90 million actually represents. A lot of it comes from the Canadian government, to make investing in Canada attractive. It funds jobs and tourism. Productions source props locally, hire people to build sets, and spend money in the communities where they film. That's a real local benefit, and I understand why we facilitate it. But it's the short-term payoff. The true value is the intellectual property. Look at Rachel Reid. HarperCollins credited the sales of Heated Rivalry and the other books in her series with an 8% rise in its book sales in the first quarter of 2026. If you do the math, that's roughly $40 million. Rachel didn't get all of that, obviously. It depends on her contract, and I have no idea what's in it. HarperCollins is American. HBO is American. The reported figures say Heated Rivalry cost about $12 million to produce and HBO paid about $3 million to license it. I can't verify those numbers. They're what's coming up in industry reporting. But the long-term value, with licensing, additional seasons, and everything that follows, has to be much, much higher than the original investment. We're probably looking at hundreds of millions. So who owns that? Americans do. A Canadian story, written by a Canadian, produced in Canada, and the value of that storytelling now sits south of the border. I hope Rachel has great agents and lawyers. I hope she can renegotiate as more books come out. I genuinely don't know. And the same logic applies to Below. That $90 million is a fraction of what it's truly worth. Nobody Reports What a Show Is Worth Something I noticed while digging into this: industry reporting covers what things cost to make. Actor salaries. How much was invested. How much went back into the local economy. It doesn't talk about what the project is worth overall. I couldn't even find a number for Stranger Things. It's been around for roughly a decade. It's Netflix's flagship show. You'd assume it's worth billions at this point. I could find rough reporting that the final season cost somewhere in the range of $400 to $500 million to produce, with all the CGI, the special effects, and the actor salaries by that point. So the profit has to be in the billions. There's no number anywhere to show it. It's all tied up in non-disclosure agreements. Top secret. So how are creators supposed to understand the true value of what they're negotiating? And how is a government supposed to know what streamers are earning from Canadian stories if they're never required to disclose it? Why This Became a Trade Issue This is where it gets geopolitical. Canada's Online Streaming Act, passed in 2023, requires streamers to invest 5% of their Canadian revenues back into Canadian content, Indigenous content, and French-language content. The U.S. has named this a trade irritant. They don't want to pay it. They don't want to invest in discoverability for other languages. They preferred the deal as it stood before 2023. What I find so interesting is the timing. It usually takes 18 months to three years to develop intellectual property. So we're only now starting to see the value of Canadian projects that began filming in 2024, 2025, and 2026, after that legislation came into effect. The pushback is arriving right as the value becomes visible. The Story Changes on the Way to the Screen Here's the part that bothers me most. In some of these adaptations, the story itself changed so that not all of the characters are Canadian. In Every Year After, one of the main characters comes up for the summer and then leaves. On screen, she's American. In the book, she was Canadian, because Carley Fortune is a Canadian writer writing a Canadian story. Sterling Point has a similar thread. A character discovers their mother was Canadian, something they never knew. There's an estate issue. They have to come to Canada to resolve it, and they end up owning premier property in Muskoka. So I have to ask. What's the benefit to a company based in a country that keeps pushing the 51st state narrative, with a history of manifest destiny and American exceptionalism, of selling the value of Canadian real estate and close cross-border relationships? If we look at five or 10 years' worth of this kind of storytelling, what does it normalize? Does it support a separate and sovereign Canadian identity? Or does it normalize a perception that what's valuable in Canada is there for the taking? When does storytelling cross the line into propaganda that's used to persuade politically? Why I Notice This You may not know this about me. My mom was born in Glasgow, Scotland. My dad was born in Duisburg, Germany, in the 1930s. They were children when World War II started. So my whole childhood, and really my whole life, has been about understanding the war from different sides. I spent a lot of my childhood watching war movies. In English, obviously. I don't speak German. A lot of the Hollywood movies about World War II were propaganda after the fact. And honestly, they never presented Germans well at all. To the victor go the spoils. The victors write the history, and they write the story. Those movies didn't reflect what it was like for an ordinary German family who wasn't supporting Nazism. People trying to survive. Doing what they had to do. I don't know the full story of my own family's experience. But I learned early that there's always nuance. Whatever side you're on, you're telling the story you perceive to be true. And there's always a way to find the story that serves both sides and reach some kind of consensus. That's why storytelling has always fascinated me. It's a tool of influence. It's a tool of propaganda. So when I see strategic changes like these made across multiple shows, I start to wonder about the intention at the company level. I'd love to believe these are companies operating separately from government. But we know these billionaires are regularly invited into the White House. It's not out of the realm of possibility that some of this is politically motivated. I'm speculating. I'm saying that clearly. This is critical thinking. I'm asking questions. What Would It Take to Do This Ourselves? The bigger questions I'm sitting with: Can we renegotiate how we authorize the licensing of Canadian intellectual property? How do we negotiate access to our locations and resources for filming? How do we invest in Canadian filmmakers, and in all the artists it takes to make film and TV, in a way that's sustainable after a production leaves? Because productions come in, and then they go. They come in, and they go. In between, unless you're lucky enough to land the next project right away, it's unemployment. Where's the continuity? Where's the plan for stability? And ultimately: can we build a film and TV industry that produces world-class content without depending on the United States, in a way that respects our sovereignty? The Futurist Question This is where it becomes a scenario exercise for me. What world do we want to wake up in 10 years from now? Twenty years from now? What does it look like if we make different choices and negotiate in different ways? I think that could be really fascinating to explore. If you work in the industry, I'd love to hear from you. Tell me what I'm missing. Tell me what you're seeing from the inside. Get in Touch Email me your questions: [email protected] Leave a comment or review on any podcast platform Subscribe on whatever player you're using That last one is an experiment. I'm told subscriptions drive chart rankings, and I want to test whether charting actually increases visibility. More visibility means more people asking these questions about how we want to live and work in the future. Anyways, that's it. Thanks for listening.

Who pays for the ideas you trust? Keswick, Ontario might be Canada's unexpected  capital of thought leadership. Amanda Cupido launched Let's Talk Thought Leadership right here, and our conversation has stayed with me. So this episode I'm going further: what actually shapes the ideas we call "thought leadership"? Money. Power. Influence. And whether the people broadcasting ideas ever listen back. In this episode: Why I pay for this podcast myself. I don't take sponsorship. Money shapes views in ways you don't always notice until later, and I'd rather not find out the hard way. I also won't take deals from AI companies, especially American ones. I don't know their relationships with government, and I'm not convinced the current US administration is acting in Canada's best interest. Honey, bees and a blind spot. OpenAI flew about 30 creators to Wildflower Farms, a luxury Hudson Valley resort, for "OpenAI Summer Camp": farm-to-table dinners, beekeeping, the works. OpenAI says it was about teaching creators its tools and that it welcomes healthy debate. But the posts were all honey and bees. AI's environmental footprint never came up. And when the backlash hit, it landed on the creators, not the company that paid for the trip. Grace McCarrick pointed out that most of the people taking that heat were women. I don't agree with everything about how she handled it, but she had a point. When academics become creators. Institutions bring their own hierarchies and politics. I look at Adam Grant: ahead of his new book Vibe, I revisit how he partnered with celebrities like Jennifer Garner to promote his last one. Was she paid? I'd assume so, and she should be. But it's never disclosed. Broadcast isn't community. I've followed Adam's work for about eight years and learned a lot. In all that time, I couldn't get a real conversation going, until this week, when I commented that his book tour skips Canada. He replied that he loves Canada and hopes to come next year. I appreciated it. But it shouldn't take eight years. If you're the only one talking, is it really a community? Softball questions. Actors are hosting more podcasts, and I'm seeing fewer trained journalists conducting interviews. What happens to ideas when nobody asks the hard questions? Where my work lands. I learned I'm ranking on a Goodpods chart for investigative journalism, and on a writing chart too. Charts aren't the point. What matters is that the questions I ask are being read at that level, even by an algorithm, when futurism doesn't fit neatly into any one box. Human thinking in an AI world. My transcripts get scraped to train AI. I can't stop that. So I focus on putting out the best human thinking I can, and I hope the real people who find it notice and give credit. George Michael as a fixed point. His arc is complete. I know what he stood for, and that won't change. Living public figures keep shifting their partnerships, which makes me wonder: is there a cultural divide between American and Canadian podcasting? The big idea: Thought leadership shapes the future. The people who absorb your ideas go on to decide how they behave, how they run their companies, and which social norms they support. What you consume shapes who you become, and that includes the thought leaders you follow. One small ask: I rarely hear from listeners, and I'll never stop asking. If a review or a question feels like too much, just hit subscribe on whatever app you use. Subscriptions move the charts. Sharing, saving and downloading help too. Coming up: I'm taking the Canada question further with Jan Ditchfield, founder of The Show, a Canadian podcast business mastermind for women entrepreneurs. (Full disclosure: I'm a member.) Subscribe so you don't miss it. Mentioned in this episode: Let's Talk Thought Leadership and Podcasting in Canada with Amanda Cupido (Hope + Possibilities): https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/lets-talk-thought-leadership-and-podcasting-in-canada/id1602822494?i=1000734558579 Let's Talk Thought Leadership, hosted by Amanda Cupido: https://www.letstalkthoughtleadership.com/ The Show, Jan Ditchfield's podcast business mastermind for women entrepreneurs: https://www.skool.com/theshow/about Vibe by Adam Grant: https://adamgrant.net/book/vibe/ Grace McCarrick on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/grace_mccarrick/ Backlash to OpenAI luxury retreat highlights influencers' uncertain relationship with AI (CBC News): https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/openai-influencers-summer-camp-controversy-9.7296991 The Creators at OpenAI's Wildflower Farms Retreat, and the Backlash That Followed (Observer): https://observer.com/2026/08/openai-wildflower-farms-influencer-retreat/ Influencers draw backlash for attending OpenAI's first luxury trip (TechCrunch): https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/03/influencers-draw-backlash-for-attending-openais-first-luxury-trip/ Hope + Possibilities: Trust, Leadership + Strategic Foresight. A self-funded Canadian podcast. https://hopr.fm/k/xgtn2757/ Meta description: Who pays for the ideas you trust? Canadian futurist Nola Simon on sponsorship, OpenAI's influencer retreat, celebrity podcasts and AI, and why thought leadership shapes the future.

In this solo episode, I look at what strategic foresight really means for your career when nobody can predict what's coming: longevity, retirement, caregiving, loneliness, and why the human skills will matter more than technical ones as AI changes work. I maintain that career development is a form of futurism. How do you make decisions when you don't know what the future holds? Margaret Heffernan has a line I keep coming back to: in an age of uncertainty, planning becomes harder than ever, if not actually impossible, so flexibility, adaptability and the imagination to consider what could happen become vital skills. When things are stable, you can set a goal, watch the trends, steer toward it and land pretty close. Today, with AI and geopolitical tension, nobody can predict with any certainty how things will go. You still can't stop living or making choices. The question is what you have in place that lets you move forward and still pivot as things become clearer. So I get personal. Keith and I just turned 55. My dad is 94. My mom retired at 65 and died of dementia at 87. Longevity is on my side and my finances aren't ready for an early exit, so I expect to keep working into my mid-70s, maybe my early 80s, and I need income streams that could carry me to 100. That's why I've been reading Lynda Gratton's new book, Living the 100-Year Life. I also talk about: - Legacy. My mom took care of her family, and she had enough. I want work with resonance and impact for the next 40-plus years. - The nurture threads. I'm an only child with very little extended family, and my kids have told me they may not have kids. As a sole proprietor, I have to build friendship and belonging on purpose. Who witnesses me? Who needs what I know? - The retirement perception gap. The Old Grey Thinker, a former ship captain who writes on Substack, explores the distance between how retirement is sold and how it's lived, including what happens to your knowledge once "retired" replaces your job title. - Longevity rewrites the script. My husband's mom died at 54, when we were 34 and our oldest daughter was one. I was in the sandwich generation in my early 40s, raising young kids while caring for parents and handling estates. My dad worked into his 70s and only stopped because my mom got sick. - Out of sync and lonely. I was an older mom at 32, with nothing much in common with the mommy groups near me. I found my support online through Erica Ehm's YummyMummyClub. In Canada, we measure distance in hours. - Choose Your Own Adventure as a practice. What shaped you, what do you need right now, what has to be true to get where you want to go, and are you testing the alternatives? And the skills that matter most? Flexibility, mental agility, imagination, storytelling and knowing yourself. People call these soft skills, and they're anything but. Pure technical knowledge is what's most at risk from AI. What practices keep you imagining what's possible? MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE - Margaret Heffernan, On the Level (Substack): https://heffernanm.substack.com/ - Lynda Gratton, Living the 100-Year Life (September 2026): https://www.livingthe100yearlife.com/ - The Old Grey Thinker (Substack): https://substack.com/@theoldgreythinker - Erica Ehm (YummyMummyClub): https://www.ericaehm.com/ A SMALL EXPERIMENT I'm testing which listener actions actually move podcast charts. The simplest one is to subscribe, wherever you listen: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Goodpods. ```  

My last episode was about giving advice. This one is about the other side: how we receive it. I start with the type of advice. There's the advice you go looking for and the advice that shows up uninvited. Then there's the question of who you actually trust, and how you filter what's useful from what isn't. Advice doesn't have to come from someone who knows you. Mentorship is usually personal: parents, other adults in your life, coworkers, industry experts, even someone you're only loosely connected to. It's interactive and shaped around you. There's also thought leadership, where someone shares their expertise through books, TED Talks or videos without ever knowing you. That's a parasocial relationship, and it raises its own questions. How do you decide who gets your attention? And what happens when that person changes? I've lived this. When I first hired my coach, her focus was career advice, resumes and storytelling. Then she moved into meditation, and later went back to work full-time in leadership development. Adapting as she adapted was a real shift for me. Honestly, it turned out to be a gift, because it made me look at why her change mattered to my own story. We see the same thing with musicians and actors. When they move in a new direction, fans want more of the same. I'm seeing it in thought leadership too. Someone else's growth can threaten the story we've built about how they're useful to us. Stepping back to look at why is useful identity work, and I don't hear many people talk about it. I also talk about: A post this week asking why people who know you struggle to support you when you leave corporate work, and why they fall back on "go get a real job" Neuroplasticity as a gentler way to understand why some people can't adapt to your change, even when they care Building your own board of directors. I'm drawn to people with broad backgrounds across industries and roles, many of them 20 years older than me, and I balance that with younger voices Paying attention to people who make you uncomfortable, and working out whether the problem is their content, their delivery or your own bias A creator whose "cool millennial manager" positioning got my back up, and what I learned once I saw it as an intentional method for drawing in the audience she wants Power and influence matter in how you use them, and just as much in how you let others influence your choices. That's the part of receiving advice I don't think we talk about enough. Resources My previous episode: A Leadership Living Lab: The Future of Advice and Mentorship Rachel Botsman, Who Can You Trust? How Technology Brought Us Together and Why It Might Drive Us Apart (2017) Rethink Moments with Rachel Botsman (podcast): Apple Podcasts · Spotify Rachel Botsman's Rethink newsletter: rachelbotsman.substack.com Rachel Botsman on Instagram: @rachelbotsman Dorie Clark, Reinventing You: Define Your Brand, Imagine Your Future Dorie Clark on Instagram: @dorieclark On the Level with Margaret Heffernan (Substack): heffernanm.substack.com PR Breakdown with Molly McPherson (Substack): mollymcpherson.substack.com The PR Breakdown with Molly McPherson (podcast): mollymcpherson.substack.com/podcast Share your story Has someone influenced you, or failed to? I'd love to hear the details. Podcasts aren't usually interactive, but I never stop trying. You can reach me by: Email: [email protected] LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/nolasimon Threads: @nolasimonsayings Substack: Everyday Futurism (@nolasimon)

A Leadership Living Lab: The Future of Advice and Mentorship | Episode 1 How do I advise my kid? It's one of the questions futurists get asked most. What should they study? What skills will be in demand by the time they graduate? Honestly, it's the most approachable version of futurism there is, because almost everyone ends up giving this kind of advice. Parents do. So do aunts and uncles, godparents, neighbours, and every leader who has someone show up asking for their perspective. This episode launches a new Living Lab series about how we give advice when nobody knows the future. I start with my daughter. She spent years preparing for a science degree, including a lot more math than she was ever happy with. Then we toured the campuses, and she hated every tour. Her plan said science, but her body was telling a different story. She let the plan go, took a gap year, and ended up studying social work, with art kept as something just for her. That's the pattern I want to dig into: we prepare for an imagined future, and then the reality of living it reshapes the plan. It happened to me too. I took math, minored in history, and ended up in financial services account management, working with American customers. Not exactly a straight line, right? In this episode: Why parenting is a futurism project, and why that makes giving advice a leadership skill Margaret Heffernan on making decisions in the moment without enough data How a few campus tours changed my daughter's plan Why the day-to-day reality matters more than the plan on paper The advice we recycle ("go in early, stay late") and what happens when nobody's in the office to see it Unlearning skills, and letting go of the parts of our identity that built our careers but won't build someone else's Three questions to ask before you give the advice: Is my advice still true for their world? What will their ordinary day actually look like? What's one small thing they can test before they commit? Bring it to the Living Lab. Send me your questions, what you've tried, or your own advice at [email protected]. You can also leave a review with your question in it. I may feature it in a future episode. Want to see what a Living Lab looks like? I started investigating AI on this podcast back in 2021, and those episodes became an accidental Living Lab. You'll find them at nolasimon.com/podcast. What advice have you been asked for lately, and how much of it is still relevant?