submove / behavioral simulation / glossary
Glossary of behavioral simulation terms
Last updated: June 2026
Plain definitions for the vocabulary of behavioral simulation for organizational change. For the full picture, start with what is a behavioral simulation engine.
Behavioral simulation engine
A system that models how an organization is likely to respond to a specific change: the workforce is represented as pseudonymized, role-coded profiles inside its real network, the change is played forward, and the model projects banded trajectories for that scenario. See the full explainer.
Pseudonymized role profiles
Each person in scope is represented by a role-coded profile whose direct identifiers are masked before anything reaches the model. Pseudonymized data is still personal data under the GDPR, so the profiles are handled under our privacy notice. They exist only to run a scenario, and the results are read at team and role level.
Calibrated, not validated
Calibrated means a model's assumptions are anchored to a broad evidence base; validated would mean it has been proven to predict specific outcomes. submove is calibrated, not validated, so it describes likelihoods rather than guarantees. See the numbers.
Organizational network
The real structure of who reports to whom and who depends on whom. Change travels along these lines, so a behavioral simulation places profiles inside the network rather than treating people as a flat list of headcount.
Monte Carlo run
Running a simulation many times with varied conditions to produce a distribution of likely outcomes rather than a single point estimate. It is why results are expressed as ranges and likelihoods, not as one confident number.
Digital twin of an organization
A model that mirrors an organization's structure, process, and operations. A behavioral simulation engine adds the human-response layer on top, modeling how people are likely to react rather than how processes run. The two are complementary.
Agent-based model
A simulation in which many individual agents each follow simple rules and interact, so collective behavior emerges from the bottom up. Behavioral simulation of an organization is a people-focused, network-aware agent-based approach.
People simulation / workforce simulation
Looser synonyms for modeling how a workforce behaves under different conditions. Behavioral simulation is the change-focused form: it plays a specific named change forward across pseudonymized role profiles and projects the likely response in bands.
Personality as a moderator
In the model, response parameters tune how strongly a simulated profile responds to a change; they moderate the response rather than drive it. They are parameters of the simulation, informed by published organizational research, not measured attributes of any real person. No personality test is involved, and no individual is labeled or scored.
Trajectory
How a modeled quantity such as engagement, trust, or the load on a role is projected to move over time under a specific scenario and window, and where in the organization it concentrates — expressed as a band, not a single before-and-after number. A trajectory describes the scenario, not a standing attribute of anyone in it.
Load
The demand a scenario places on a role or position: how much change, coordination, and dependency a given seat absorbs under a specific plan. Load is a property of the work allocation, which the employer controls. It is not a statement about how any person feels, and it is not a clinical or health measure of anyone.
Work engagement
The model's measure of how positively a simulated profile is oriented toward its work under a scenario, in the sense used in organizational research on work engagement. It is bounded to observable work behavior in the model and is never a clinical, medical, or psychological assessment of a real person.
Decision rehearsal
Playing a specific, named decision forward against a model of the organization before committing to it, so the plan can be compared, sequenced, and stress-tested while it is still reversible. Recommendations from a rehearsal attach to the plan — the sequencing, the communication, the exceptions — never to a person.
See a change before you make it
If you are weighing a people-change, you can request a simulation and tell us the situation. Engagements are invitation-only. Read more about submove or how reaction to a reorg is rehearsed.