The Upside Explorer helps a team find the value that makes a project pencil. The Outcomes Explorer is its twin. It helps a team understand the outcomes a place and its people actually need, then aligns the upside exploration with those outcomes, so a project is designed to deliver them.
Early thinking · planned, not yet builtNow City Labs is building two connected assumptions engines under one roof we call NCRDI, Now City Regenerative Development Intelligence. Each one takes a set of assumptions that usually stay buried and makes them explicit, sourced, and open to a group to explore together.
The financial assumptions engine. What to build, what it costs, what it earns, and how to make it pencil, with the source behind every number.
The outcomes assumptions engine. What a place needs, who needs it, and whether the project is designed to deliver it, held against what the community actually said.
A developer does not only make financial assumptions. They also make a long list of quiet assumptions about what people want, what the neighborhood needs, and what counts as a good result. Those assumptions are rarely written down, rarely sourced, and rarely checked with the people who will live with them. A project can pencil cleanly and still get this part wrong, and when it does, the place struggles for years. The Outcomes Explorer brings those assumptions into the open, the same way the Upside Explorer does for the money.
The honest version. Earlier Now City sketches of an "outcomes" tool were really precursors of the Upside Explorer, focused on the development and the money. This is a clean break. The Outcomes Explorer is about the desired outcomes first, and about aligning the upside work with them.
It mirrors the Upside Explorer on purpose, so the two feel like one tool and share the same discipline: a baseline that holds the truth, agents that propose within rules, fixed scoring, and a source behind every input.
An anchor agent gathers what the place and its people actually need, from residents, the city, and health and ecological data, not from the developer's guess. It holds that as the baseline and flags any design that drifts from it.
The needs become a set of dimensions a group can read and score, across people, economy, and ecology, so "a good result" stops being a slogan and becomes something you can point at.
Focused agents, each on one outcome or one stakeholder, propose design and program moves that improve it, the way the Upside composers propose moves that improve the return.
Outcomes pull on each other. Affordability touches health, mobility touches the local economy, ecology touches resilience. The tool shows those couplings, so trade-offs and the wins that lift several outcomes at once are both visible.
The same firewall as the money side: the agents only propose, a fixed model does the scoring, and every input carries its source. No agent talks a score up.
The result is a clear, sourced statement of the outcomes a project is designed to deliver, scored across the dimensions, that a room of stakeholders can interact with and align on, paired with the financial pro forma.
The dimensions we are starting from, across people, economy, and ecology:
This is the point. The two are not separate reports. They run as one loop, so the money and the outcomes shape each other instead of being argued about at the end.
Outcomes set the targets. The Outcomes Explorer establishes what the place needs and turns it into objectives and constraints.
The upside exploration works within them. Those objectives become rules the Upside Explorer's agents compose within, so the financial moves are aimed at the outcomes from the start, not bolted on after.
The money checks the outcomes back. An outcome that cannot be financed is not real yet, so the upside work grounds the outcomes in what a deal can actually support.
The team converges. The group moves the levers on both sides until they find a design that delivers the outcomes and pencils, with the trade-offs in plain view.