0:02 Nola Simon: Hi, I'm Nola Simon and I'm the host of this podcast. Now, this podcast you may know by a couple of different names. Initially when I started it way back in what, December of 2021. I was calling it the Janus Oasis or the Janus Oasis. I. Discovered there are two ways that people like to pronounce that word. So that's what sparked the initial change of name to the hybrid remote center of excellence. And that served its purpose it focused on the topic that I really wanted to emphasize at that particular time, because that's how it was building my consulting business around the experience that I'd had in. Advocating and facilitating hybrid remote work.

0:45 It's a mouthful. Hybrid remote center of excellence is a long name. It's, it doesn't roll off the tongue easily. And it's like going out to the park and when you're naming babies shouting out, you know the name that you're gonna have to shout when you want them to get off the slide or finish on the swings and come to see you. You have to test it out and I've done now a hundred episodes and that tongue, that name does not roll off the tongue easily. I, when I'm in the playground and I'm telling people that this is the name of my podcast, it feels I chose the wrong name for my kid because it's not.

1:26 Something I wanna use on a daily basis. So I'm gonna rename it again, and I'm gonna put it in line with the newsletters that I've created for new LinkedIn and for Substack, and that's hope and Possibilities. And the subtitle of that is A Love Letter to the Future of Work because I really still do believe that flexibility is important to the future of work. I don't believe that we will be in the office. It's not a future of work that I wanna see. I think that we need to look at. It more broadly, but also more deeply at the same time, right? Like we're in a process where there's a lot happening in the world that we didn't necessarily expect.

2:07 I'm in Canada, so a lot has changed politically since January, and that has not necessarily being expected. So how do we make sense of what's happening in the world? How do we curate and. Focus on the things that are actually going to help us build to a future of work that we want to see, that we feel we can live within. How do we put, ideas into impact, right? How do you take an idea that exists right now and build it out into a future of work that you wanna see? And that can be used with scenario planning, with, a strategic foresight.

2:47 It can also be backcasting. So if you can imagine a possible future. Imagine what that is like in the future, but then what steps do you need to take now to actually get to that future? There are a couple of different future futurist capabilities that we can employ to really understand how you take ideas and put that into to context and put that into, nuance, right? So it's about exploring the possibilities and exploiting the opportunities and figuring out how we do that in a different way. So I'm gonna change the format of the podcast a little bit this year. I'm not taking guests. I had announced that already. For one.

3:28 Pitching podcast guest. It's a lot, some of it's intense, so it's a lot easier for me to say, Hey this year I'm just not doing guest. And it's not that I don't enjoy guests. Part of the reason I started the podcast was because I really enjoyed the opportunity to talk to the people who were writing the books that I was reading and exploring those topics in more depth. I enjoy that. It's not that I don't, but I'm not sure that it gave me the opportunity to go into some of these topics as deeply as I wanted to. Or it, it didn't necessarily allow me to cross pollinate within a same episode.

4:08 So that's another thing that I'm going to be looking at, is how do we take a particular topic. One that I'm actually working on right now is, the future of music and what the, what fandom looks like, and what does that mean for. Wellbeing of artists and if we're turning to artists to help us understand what's happening in society and culture, how can we protect them when we know that fame is a hell of a drug? And that's an interesting aspect to me because music. In lots of ways, as in asynchronous industry a lot of times collaborations happen and people aren't even in the same continent, nevermind the same building.

4:55 Producers are across the world. It's an industry that's being built it lots of ways to facilitate remote access to talent cross borders, but it also has one heck of an emphasis on in-person. With the touring and live concerts and live music. So it's an interesting industry to, to look at because for one, a lot of people enjoy music. They understand it intuitively. They understand the business model. They know a lot about the musicians and the art that sustains it. So it's an interesting topic to look at. In a holistic way and apply some of the things that we've talked about before, right?

5:40 So that's what I'm gonna be starting at. But there's other things that I can use to explore that, right? So that's what I'm interested in. I what does work look like? When the changes don't stop, it's just becoming more complex. It's. I'm going to change again because of the advent of AI and AI is going to really impact in ways that we don't yet understand. So how do we look at that in context? How do we look at it with nuance, how do, how are we going to be more flexible in the way that we think about things?

6:21 How do we make connections from trends that we're seeing in one industry across to another industry in different areas of work and life? But then, how can we also look at it in different ways? So looking at how art facilitates it, how humor facilitates it, some of the things that we're sarcastic about. That's an avenue of interest, right? Because if we can laugh at things. It helps us process the deeper meaning of change. So that's what I'm interested, where I'm interested in taking the podcast this year is to look at it in a different way and how I'm gonna be setting that up. So this is just an intro that I wanted to give you so that you know what to expect for March of 2025.

7:07 I'm still gonna be publishing on a quarterly basis now what that looks like. It's almost the end of March and I haven't published yet. This is the first thing I've published. As I said, I'm working on the music thing. I'm probably gonna be releasing those episodes fairly soon. I'm gonna take my time. I am, I'm still gonna stick to quarterly. You'll get something, but. I'm going to let the rabbit holes take me where it does. So I recommend that. If you like the podcast, if you're interested in what I'm talking about, you wanna subscribe and make sure that your podcast app is going to notify you when the newest episodes are dropping. I'm also gonna be looking at how older episodes and see how they actually work together so that if you're interested in pairing them and you want to learn from them, maybe we can create like playlists of three or five that work together well, so that you can learn from them and go in depth from them.

7:59 How can I repurpose a lot of that content in ways that I haven't yet made available? I just feel that there's an awful lot of work that has been done that I haven't necessarily taken advantage of to really. Go more in depth on particular topics that can be useful and helpful. So how do I do that in a way that's going to be interesting and timely and impactful? But overall how do I create value so that I'm helping people who are interested in the future of work and navigating. What's happening at work in life in the moment, but also for the future, right?

8:41 So that's the goal. And I hope you follow along and as always, if you can rate review, give me feedback give me suggestions. It's. I'm open to anything that you'd like to discuss. The problem for me is I don't necessarily get an awful lot of that, so I'd love to engage you more. I'd love to feature questions that the audience actually asks and I. That would be fun for me to be able to do. So I just haven't had the opportunity to really focus an awful lot on questions that come in from the audience. So I'd love to, to focus in on that. So you can send me an email if you want, NOLA at Nola nola@nolasimon.com.

9:23 Or you can DM me on LinkedIn Substack. I'm available in lots of different places, so it's easy to get ahold of me.