Across Actors

Political work inside an organization is crowded. The decision one executive is working on is usually being worked on by someone else as well, the person who decides it has aims of their own, and whoever's sign-off is needed is running maneuvers too. An account of any one maneuver that left the others out would seem to miss most of what happened.

The Lam System for Political Interaction leaves them out of every record on purpose. A record belongs to one actor and holds that actor's maneuvers, written from that actor's side. Other actors appear in it only as the targets of its cycles or as the people whose resources a lever needs, and the space between actors, who is working on whom and what one person's lever did to another's, is in no record at all. That narrowness is what lets several records be read together exactly. A record that tried to hold the space between actors would have to hold someone's estimate of several people at once, with no one to credit it to.

One decision, two records

Illustrative. The people and the firm are invented. An engineering consultancy is setting up a team to build digital models of the assets it designs, and two directors want it. Farah Kaya, who runs infrastructure, wants the chief executive, Ingrid Castellanos, to place the team under her. Rhys Ashby, who runs buildings, wants the same thing for himself. Each opens a maneuver with Ingrid as the target.

Farah's preferred position is that Ingrid places the team with infrastructure. Her adverse alternatives are that Ingrid places it with buildings, or keeps it under her own office. Her lever is a cost model showing that the team pays for itself on infrastructure bids, and it spends the model and some of her standing with Ingrid. Rhys's record has the same shape with the first two options swapped. His preferred position is buildings, his first adverse alternative is infrastructure, and his lever is a case built with his largest client, showing what the team would add to their projects.

Both directors have one pursuit open, so the same addresses appear in both records (the target of the only interest, its preferred position, its first adverse alternative), and in the two records they name opposite things.

Where an address stops

Every address in a record is read like a path from the agenda down, and the agenda belongs to the actor. Nothing in the path says whose agenda it is; the actor is the context in which it is read, as the essay on the actor sets out. Within one actor's record, no two constituents share an address and every constituent has one. Across records the system claims nothing. An address in Farah's record and the same address in Rhys's are two constituents, and whether they have anything to do with each other is a question the address cannot answer.

Ingrid is one person and two constituents: the target of Farah's interest and the target of Rhys's, each holding the readings and the selection that one director recorded. The target essay notes that an actor who pursues several things with one person meets that person at several addresses and gathers what they know of them by hand. Across actors the gathering is harder, because the two records were written by different people, from opposite sides, and neither was written to be read with the other.

Even the option the two directors label alike, Ingrid keeping the team under her own office, is two constituents. The words match and so does the address, and nothing in the system makes Farah's second adverse alternative and Rhys's the same thing. Within a record, sameness is decided mechanically. Across records, deciding that two descriptions name one option is a judgment someone has to make.

Keyed, never merged

An engagement that looks at several actors at once keys every constituent by two things: the actor whose record it sits in, and its address within that record. The pair is unique where the address alone is not. "The preferred position of the target of the only interest" names nothing until someone says whose; with Farah's name beside it, it names her one option.

The key is kept outside the address, by whoever puts the records together, and putting records together this way changes nothing inside any of them. Each stays as its actor wrote it, nothing written in one is added to another, and each actor's holdings are counted in their own record. A path quoted on its own names nothing at all. An adviser working with a leadership team who says "the second lever is stalled" has said nothing, in a room where three people have second levers.

Keying is what prevents a merge. Lay Farah's and Rhys's records together without it and every address under the only interest names two things at once: the preferred position is both options, the selection is both a win and a loss, and the count of what was spent belongs to nobody.

What one record cannot show

Suppose Ingrid had read Farah's cost model differently from the way Farah projected, because Rhys got to her first and the client case had already persuaded her that the team's value lay in building projects. Farah's record would show a failed perception and nothing about its cause, since the cause sits in Rhys's record and in a conversation that is in neither. Farah could respond in the ways the system allows, with a new lever, by mooting or by abandoning, and the reason she gave herself for the choice would be hers to carry. The record has no place for "Rhys got there first" except as Farah's judgment, written into her own cycle in her own terms.

Resources do not cross either. Farah's lever spends her standing with Ingrid, and the spending comes off her holdings and nobody else's. It does not appear in Rhys's record as something he gained, or in Ingrid's as something she now holds, because the count of what an actor holds is one actor's count and has no term for anyone else. Standing one director spends is not standing the other receives, and nothing in the system says what the spending did to anyone's position except the spender's.

The selection is the plainest case. Ingrid places the team with infrastructure. Farah's record shows a selection of her preferred position and the team flowing back to her. Rhys's shows a selection of his first adverse alternative. Both entries are exact, they describe one decision, and neither record says so. A reader who sets them side by side has to establish that the two entries are one event, which is a reading of the world like any other.

In the illustrative sorting above, three of the eight things a reader might want to know can be read from one record. The other five lie between the two, and each needs a judgment as well as both records.

Why the space between stays outside

The system has no channel to anyone except through the actor. Every entry about the target is the actor's reading of the target, credited to the actor, and that is what makes a record worth reading later: each judgment in it has an author, who can be measured against what followed. State held between actors would have no such author. That Rhys's case landed before Farah's could be Farah's conclusion after the fact, or the view of an adviser who saw both, or nobody's, since Rhys may never have known Farah was working on Ingrid. An entry with no single author cannot be set beside its author's later record, so nobody can learn from it.

The labels point the same way. Every label in a record comes from one actor's want, and Farah's adverse alternative is Rhys's preferred position because each is measured against a different interest. A record of the space between them would need a vantage point from which neither option was preferred or adverse, and from there the labels the system runs on would mean nothing. The system keeps each record at the one vantage point where every label has a meaning, the actor's.

A picture of several actors is therefore built by someone, as their own judgment, from records each kept exactly. An adviser who noticed that Farah's failed perception came the week after Rhys's execution would have made a reading, and in the system's terms it would be the adviser's, with no place in Farah's record unless Farah made it hers.

What reading across records gives

Kept apart and keyed, several records show what none of them shows alone. Side by side, Farah's and Rhys's records reveal two actors aimed at one target with mirrored decision matrices, and tell each of them that an option they listed as a possibility had a sponsor working for it. They also hold two readings of one person by two actors who saw her differently, Farah recording that Ingrid weighed cost and Rhys that she weighed clients, both written down and neither overwriting the other.

That disagreement is information about the two readers as much as about Ingrid. Over several maneuvers, an adviser keying the records of a leadership team can see which members read the chief executive accurately and which read her the way they hoped, because every reading is still where its author wrote it, beside the selection that answered it.