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 the individuals inside an organization are likely to respond to a specific change, by resolving the workforce into anonymous individual profiles inside its real network and playing the change forward. See the full explainer.
Anonymous individual profiling
Representing each person as a role-coded, masked profile with no personally identifying information. The profiles exist only to run a simulation, never to evaluate, rank, or name a real individual.
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 anonymous profiles to estimate the human response.
Personality as a moderator
Individual differences tune how strongly a person responds to a pressure, but they moderate the response rather than drive it. They are never used as a label or a score for any individual, and the model needs no personality test.
Trajectory
How a measure such as stress, morale, trust, or performance is likely to move over time after a change, and where in the organization it concentrates, rather than a single before-and-after number.
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.