PRODUCT · EXPLORE THE FUTURE
Explore the future.
"What if" at the scale of an entire population. Age a profile, inject an economic shock, replay a past decision: so many ways to observe what will happen, what will move, who will tip, before the future closes.
THE FUNDAMENTAL SHIFT
A study reports what you already know. An exploration reports what the future produces.
Classic studies question a panel about its intentions or feelings and come back with a snapshot: a photograph the decision-maker must then project alone onto the months ahead. Predictive models extrapolate the future from past regularities, an extrapolation that breaks at the first regulatory or geopolitical shock.
A synthetic population enables a third gesture: building a possible future and having coherent humans live through it, observing what they decide and where they give way. You come back with an observation, not a prediction.
THREE WAYS TO EXPLORE
Age the population, inject a shock, replay a decision.
Aging the population. Time passes in the population as it does in real life. Cohorts age, families recompose, careers transform. A health insurer projects its policyholders ten years out and discovers that today's 40-to-50-year-olds will become 50-to-60-year-olds whose risk profile, care habits and exposure to chronic conditions will look nothing like what classic actuarial calculation suggests.
Injecting an exogenous shock. An outside event enters the population. Prolonged inflation, a tax reform, a geopolitical crisis, new sector regulation: the same population is re-interviewed in a modified world. A bank exposes its retail customer base to a scenario of 5% inflation for three years and watches how savings, consumer credit and debt burden deform. The result is not a forecast: it is a geography of the breaking points.
Replaying a decision already made. A decision made a year ago can be replayed with today's information. Not to redo it, but to understand what diverged and why. Two versions of the same population, six months apart, measure the real effect of a real event. A manufacturer had projected its employees through a pension reform before the bill was passed. A year later, it compares the simulation with observed reality and calibrates its assumptions for the next projections.
WHAT IT CHANGES
A study photographs. An exploration films.
| Classic study | Future exploration | |
|---|---|---|
| Nature of the result | A state of opinion at time T | The observation of a constructed future |
| Time horizon | The present at the time of fieldwork | From a few months to several years |
| Events taken into account | Those that had already happened at fieldwork time | Those the decision assumes or anticipates |
| Reuse | New fieldwork for every new hypothesis | A preserved population, exposed to successive scenarios |
| Epistemology | Measuring what is | Exploring what could be |
PUBLIC POLICY
PUBLIC POLICY
Introducing a carbon tax on fuel without triggering a social crisis.
A public authority was preparing the vote on a fuel carbon tax. The question was not to measure current opinion on carbon: it was to know what would happen in the six months after entry into force, under several possible designs of the tax. We built a population of 3.2 million households exposed to four variants of the tax and observed over the following months. The exploration revealed that the rejection was not fiscal but symbolic: 68% of its intensity was explained by a feeling of political exclusion, regardless of the amount. The design ultimately chosen changed the perceived governance of the tax, not its amount. Acceptance rose from 41% to 67%.
Read the full case →INFRASTRUCTURE RATHER THAN A DELIVERABLE
A scenario is never spent.
A study is paid for once and expires on delivery. A synthetic population does not expire. It can be reopened in six months, a year, five years, with assumptions that will have evolved and events that will have become facts. What you had explored as a scenario becomes a point of comparison against observed reality. What you had decided can be replayed against what you now know.
This persistence changes the economics of exploration. You dare scenarios you would never have commissioned as studies, you test futures you deemed improbable, you keep a record of the bets you made and the ones you set aside. Your accumulated scenarios become a decision asset that grows with the company. That is what makes the interaction the product's unit of account, and its use an exercise that compounds.
An exploration adapted to your decision.
Every exploration is scoped on the parameters of the decision it informs. The dynamic agents build with you the scenarios relevant to your situation: time horizon, events to inject, variants to compare, replay protocol. From initial brief to the delivery of the inquiry dossier, allow 20 to 30 minutes.
See the case library →