About submove

Last updated: June 2026

submove is a decision-intelligence diagnostic, a flight simulator for organizational decisions. Before a company commits to a big people-change, submove plays the change forward across a model of your real organization and shows how the people inside it are likely to respond, while the decision is still on the table.

What it is

A pilot rehearses the storm in a simulator before flying through it. submove gives leaders the same rehearsal for the decisions that move people.

You name a specific change, a new manager, a restructure, a return-to-office mandate, a round of layoffs, and submove plays it forward across a model of your actual organization. It reports the likely trajectories for the things that decide whether a change lands: stress, morale, trust and performance, mapped to where in the organization they move and how they ripple outward.

It is a decision-support and rehearsal tool, not a crystal ball. The output is not a verdict on any person and not a prediction of a single individual's future. It is a structured read of how a change is likely to travel through your organization, so the conversation about it can happen before the change is irreversible rather than after.

The problem

Organizations make the decisions that matter most to their people, who leads, who reports to whom, where work happens, who stays, and usually learn the human cost only afterward, from surveys, attrition and the quiet things people stop saying. By then the decision is made and the cost is already being paid.

Spreadsheets and org charts treat a workforce as headcount. People are not headcount. They respond to the same change in different ways, and the way one person responds shapes the people around them. That human response is the part of a decision leaders most often fly blind into, and it is usually the part that decides whether the decision works.

Seeing the likely trajectory while a decision is still reversible changes what you can do about it.

When you can see where the strain is likely to land, who will carry it, and where the first cracks tend to show, you can shape the rollout, sequence it differently, or intervene early, instead of reading the damage in an exit interview six months later.

How it works

submove resolves the people inside your organization into anonymous, governed individual profiles, and places each one inside your real reporting and collaboration network. The change you name is then played forward through that network, person by person and relationship by relationship, so the model can show not just who is affected but how the effect spreads.

• Anonymous, governed profiles. Each person is represented by a role-coded, masked profile. No personally identifying information is used in the model. Profiles exist to run the simulation, never to evaluate, rank or name a real individual.
• Your real network. Profiles sit inside your actual structure, who reports to whom, who depends on whom, where the load already concentrates, because change travels along those lines, not down a flat list.
• Personality as a moderator. Individual differences shape how strongly a person responds to a given pressure, but they are a moderator on the response, not a label and not a score. They tune the simulation; they are not the point of it.
• Calibrated, not validated. The model is calibrated on 1,102 pooled studies of organizational behavior. Calibrated means its assumptions are anchored to a broad evidence base; it does not mean it has been validated to predict any specific individual or outcome. We are deliberate about that distinction.

The result is a cockpit, a readable view of the trajectories a change is likely to produce, with the strain points and ripple paths made visible. You read it with us, and use it to make a better-informed call.

Who we work with

submove is built for the leaders who own people-decisions and have to live with the consequences: executives, people and HR leaders, transformation and change teams, and the advisors who guide them through a restructure, a leadership change, a return-to-office decision or a reduction in force.

It is most useful when a change is named but not yet committed, when there is still room to shape how it happens, and when the cost of getting the human side wrong is high enough to be worth rehearsing first.

How an engagement runs

submove is invitation-only and consulting-led. We take on a small number of focused engagements at a time and build a model for your organization and the specific change you name, rather than handing over a generic product and walking away. A typical engagement moves through a few clear stages.

Frame the question

We work with you to name the change precisely and decide what a useful answer would look like, so the simulation is aimed at a real decision rather than a vague worry.

Build the model

We construct anonymous, governed profiles inside your real network from the materials you provide and a short intake. No PII enters the model; identifiers are masked and role-coded.

Run the simulation

We play the named change forward and produce the trajectories, stress, morale, trust and performance, along with where the strain concentrates and how it spreads.

Read the cockpit together

We sit with you to interpret the results, pressure-test alternatives, and translate the read into how you might sequence, soften or rethink the change.

Our principles

The tool only earns its place if the people it models are protected. These are not aspirations; they are constraints we design and operate against.

• Anonymous by design. Role-coded labels and masked identifiers. No personally identifying information is used in the model, ever.
• Never for individual judgment. submove is not used for hiring, firing, promotion, or evaluating any person. That line is not negotiable.
• Honest about certainty. Calibrated, not validated. We describe likelihoods, not guarantees, and we do not inflate what the model can claim.
• Isolation and least access. Each engagement's data is isolated, protected by row-level security and per-engagement storage, and handled with the minimum access needed to do the work. See our security and privacy pages for the detail.
• Foresight, not surveillance. No tracking cookies, no visitor profiling, no ad-tech. The purpose is a better decision, not a closer eye on people.