North
Join the listDecide your year together, on purpose.
North is a guided planning experience for the two of you, at one laptop. You each answer on your own, then decide together and certify what you decided — and the plan stays with you all year. Software does the analysing; there is no bot to talk to.
00 — The founding cohort
You don’t need anything to be wrong to want this.
This is for two people who’d rather decide their year than let it happen. Leave your address and one of us will read it — a person, not a system.
This is the list we pull from as we take more couples on.
01 — Where this happens
It happens at one laptop, the two of you together, with kids in bed.
You log in, open where you left off, and a recording runs — calm and visible, with pause and “park this topic” on screen from minute one. One prompt at a time, and you talk to each other rather than to a bot.
Stop any evening you like. The screen tells you what tonight covered, that it is saved, and exactly where next time picks up — never a percentage, and never that you are behind.
02 — What actually happens
Ten exercises, four to six weeks, at whatever pace the two of you set. Each one runs the same way:
You are each asked the same question — how do you want life to be different a year from now? — across twelve areas of life. Some prompts open with a two-minute silent moment: you each write your own answer on your own phone before either of you speaks, then read it aloud. A follow-up comes when something isn’t clear.
You are both in the room the whole time, so there is no private channel and nothing to cross over. You can pause the recording or park a question at any point — “not there for us” is a real answer, and it is taken once.
Once you’ve both had your say, North lays both your answers side by side — where you agree, where you don’t, and what neither of you has raised. The conversation itself is yours, and yours alone.
That conversation becomes a document. Every line is either your own words, quoted — or marked as ours. If a line is wrong, say so and it is written again. Then you both certify it — with each other, not with us.
The plan carries its own dated waypoints and a first step for this week, with your check-in dates written into it by you. Both documents stay on your home page, and if something needs to change, tell us at your weekly call and we’ll open it up with you — and you both re-sign what changed. There is a fifteen-minute call each week for whichever of you wants it.
03 — What this asks of you
- Three or four evenings
- the two of you, at one laptop, at your own pace
- Both of you
- one partner’s work doesn’t make a plan
- Honest feedback
- including what we won’t enjoy hearing
04 — Where the method comes from
One methodology, and the man who wrote it.
Software analyses the transcript against Dr. Doug’s framework — that is how your documents get built and how the follow-up questions get chosen. There is no bot to talk to here; you are talking to each other.
The methodology is Dr. Doug Howe’s. North works only from material Doug has checked and approved — never from advice found on the internet. We draft; he corrects. When it reaches something he hasn’t covered yet, it stops rather than improvising, and one of us picks it up with you in person.
05 — What this won’t do
During the founding cohort we keep your recordings and transcripts, so if something goes wrong with your document we can fix it from the source instead of asking you to redo the work. Nothing you say is ever used to train models.
North works only from material Dr. Doug has checked. When it reaches something he hasn’t covered yet, it stops rather than improvising, and one of us picks it up with you.
A plan is never built from one side of the story. One partner doing the work does not produce one.
You won’t see the methodology’s example answers until you’ve both finished your own. Not a rule that can be talked out of — the examples are out of reach until then.
It can’t write down an agreement it can’t ground in something each of you actually said. When it shows you your words, it’s pointing at what you said or wrote, not retyping it. Where it draws a conclusion of its own, it says so — and shows you what it drew that from.
You are each asked, out loud, whether this is a year you can actually carry. If it isn’t one you can carry, you don’t sign — and nothing is certified until the two of you have talked it through. Nothing papers over it either: where you differ, that goes on the page as a difference. It is the most valuable conversation the whole thing produces.
If this sounds like you, leave your address.
Join the listWe’re starting with ten couples. A person reads every address that comes in — there’s no autoresponder on the other end of this.