About Novel Local
Understanding the Relationship Between People and Place
Novel Local studies how geographic environments influence human performance, stability, and well-being.
Most decisions about where people live or where companies place talent are made using surface variables such as job offers, cost of living, or lifestyle preferences.
But environments influence far more than convenience.
They influence stress levels, social integration, daily friction, and long-term stability.
Novel Local was created to help individuals and organizations make more informed location decisions by analyzing how environments interact with human behavior.
What We Do
Novel Local develops Environmental Compatibility Modeling™, a framework for evaluating how geographic environments influence human outcomes.
Our work focuses on two areas.
For Organizations
We help companies evaluate how geographic environments affect workforce stability, relocation success, and leadership retention.
Our flagship service, Executive Relocation Compatibility Analysis, helps organizations assess whether a senior leader is environmentally aligned with a destination city before relocation occurs.
For Individuals
We also help individuals evaluate major relocation decisions through services such as City Fit Snapshot and Move or Stay Sessions.
These tools help people understand whether their current environment is supporting their mental health, relationships, and long-term energy.
About the Founder
“If Your Location Holds You Back, Leave It Behind.”
Novel Local was founded by David Ray Williams, whose background spans artificial intelligence, enterprise data platforms, and behavioral decision systems.
Across these fields, a consistent pattern emerged: human outcomes are strongly influenced by the environments in which decisions occur.
Alongside his work in technology and data systems, David has long had a strong interest in fitness and wellness. Over time he began noticing how dramatically different cities affected energy levels, training consistency, mental health, and daily habits.
Some environments made healthy routines easy. Others made them feel like a constant uphill battle.
These observations reinforced a simple insight: wellness is not only behavioral, it is environmental.
This realization led to the development of Environmental Compatibility Modeling™, a framework that combines behavioral analysis with geographic and environmental data to evaluate how well people and places fit together.
Our Perspective
The idea behind Novel Local is simple:
Where people live influences how their lives unfold.
For individuals, that affects wellness, relationships, and opportunity.
For organizations, it can influence retention, leadership stability, and workforce performance.
Novel Local exists to help make those environmental dynamics visible before major location decisions are made.