What time adds
Two things change relative to a single conversation:- State evolves. State items in a journey can carry a recording frequency: daily, weekly, bi-weekly, monthly, or on-request. As simulated time advances, those facts update. Pain levels shift, payments are made or missed, the situation at home changes.
- The evolution is conditional. The state at session three is not a script; it depends on what the operator did at sessions one and two. A plan the client never agreed to gets quietly abandoned. A referral made early changes what the client reports later. The persona remembers, the situation compounds, and so do mistakes.
Time progression
You control how simulated time advances between sessions:
A journey also defines its overall span and the default amount of time each advance covers, so a “12 weeks of fortnightly check-ins” structure is configuration, not convention.
What you configure
Everything a conversation scenario has, plus:Worked example
An income support agency wants to know whether case managers keep clients engaged across a 12-week program, not just at intake.- Persona: a client recently out of work, cooperative at intake, with motivation that decays unless engagement is maintained
- Journey: six fortnightly check-ins over 12 simulated weeks
- Evolving state: job-search activity (weekly recording), mood and motivation (per session), a housing pressure that emerges around week 6 only if earlier sessions missed the financial strain behind it
- Outputs: an initial action plan at session one, a revised plan at session four, a program summary at session six
- Success metric: the week-6 housing pressure is anticipated, because the operator surfaced the financial strain by week 4
- Failure metric: a check-in that repeats the previous session’s plan without acknowledging what changed since