Let’s talk about what I call the ‘Cost of Curiosity’. Over my years in Supply Chain one thing has remained constant: it all comes down to scenarios. In building and exploring those scenarios, very often we find ourselves navigating that tricky space between chasing perfection and racing the clock.

Here’s the dilemma: you can keep tweaking and evaluating forever, but by the time you’re ‘done,’ the world has already moved on. The perfect answer might show up late to the party (if at all), and be useless when it gets there.

Take network design. Even kicking off the scenario exploration requires a prioritization exercise on what matters most, what you have data and infrastructure to explore and ultimately what you have time to build. Not only that, you will want to pressure test them to see if they are the right scenarios at all. Each one takes time to build, run and evaluate and often each one sparks three more. Before you know it, you’re in a domino effect of ‘what ifs’ you’ll never have the time to chase. 

As a modeler, you have to start making educated guesses. The only thing you can do is prioritize. Pick your top three scenarios, cross your fingers, and hope they are the right ones. But you ask yourself, did those scenarios I didn’t explore hold the key insights, the blind spots, or even the unexpected opportunities I should have been looking for? But with deadlines looming, you have to make your bets and move on.

Imagine if you could actually chase down those ‘what ifs’ instead of letting them fade away. What if exploring a dozen or even a hundred different angles didn’t mean blowing your timeline or burning out your team? What if you could actually lean into curiosity?

Curiosity becomes an asset instead of a liability. Suddenly, it’s not about gambling on your best guesses—it’s about truly exploring the landscape, finding better answers, and unlocking opportunities you didn’t even know were there.

Planning tells the same story. Most planners aren’t solving network problems; they’re patching holes in the plans handed to them. Curiosity doesn’t stand a chance when you’re busy filling gaps left by a system that can’t keep up with the realities of the business instead of exploring what’s possible. You’re stuck reacting to whatever’s right in front of you.

And here’s the thing: a lot of that work is what AI and algorithms should already be handling. If the tools carried more of that load, planners could shift their energy to the real problems—spotting strategic gaps in the network, exploring new alternatives, and chasing the opportunities that actually move the business forward.

With a platform like Lyric Studio, that’s where things start to change. Suddenly you’re able to evaluate variability, test out alternative sourcing, try next-best options, and pull levers you couldn’t reach before. Planning stops being a scramble to keep up and finally becomes what it was meant to be: forward-looking, creative, and strategic.

When we brainstorm with customers about what’s possible in Lyric Studio, we ask: what if you could build a thousand scenarios? What if a generator could run them in minutes, a co-pilot could recommend the best ones, and the results were shared in an interface simple enough for anyone to explore your world of what-ifs?

When you build the right infrastructure and you have a scenario-focused platform like Lyric Studio, you dramatically expand the art of the possible. Suddenly, you’re able to explore a huge variety of alternatives. You can run more sensitivity analysis, try out totally new scenarios you hadn’t considered before, or even pursue entirely different solution paths. Why? Because you’ve reduced the cost of curiosity.

And honestly, the cost of curiosity is still pretty high. Today, most organizations pour months, sometimes years, into building that first solution. Going beyond those borders to test something new is a luxury most people don’t have. Or you end up building a whole team just to chase one interesting question.

But when you lower that cost and curiosity becomes accessible, the whole game changes.

With a platform like Lyric Studio, you can not only build solutions quickly and efficiently, but you actually have the infrastructure to deeply explore them. You start to find opportunities you didn’t even know existed. You spot changes in your network or operations you wouldn’t have thought to look for. And you get to capitalize on opportunities that, before, would have been left sitting on the table.

What happens when you can run scenarios at scale (not just a handful, but hundreds, or thousands)? What happens when you can use cutting-edge science to predict outcomes for solution targets you haven’t even run scenarios for yet? You move from, “Can I run two scenarios?” to “Can I run a thousand?” And then, “Can I evaluate essentially infinite combinations and actually understand the overall impact?” That level of curiosity just hasn’t been possible before in modeling or planning.

I’m not saying the cost of curiosity is suddenly free. But with the right foundation, it is lower than ever and the payoff is bigger than you think. Curiosity is no longer a luxury but a major advantage. This is the new reality for anyone who’s ready to embrace it.