Every maneuver has someone behind it, and in Lena Ortiz's that someone is plainly Lena. The prize is her freight company's night dispatch desks, which she wants on her customer operations budget, and she does nearly all the work of getting them there. Of all the constituents, the actor looks the least in need of explaining: the actor is whoever is doing the maneuvering.
The Lam System for Political Interaction treats the actor more strangely than that. The actor performs more of a cycle than anyone else, seven of its eleven acts, and has no act of its own. The actor's mark appears in front of every one of those acts and in none of the addresses they act on. Both absences are deliberate, and between them they decide what a record can be trusted to say about whose judgment each entry holds.
The constituents of a maneuver
Structure. Each line joins a constituent to one it contains.
The map shows what contains what in one actor's maneuver, from the actor down to what flows back when the cycle closes. It illustrates the structure only.
ActorThis essayα / a · A name only, performed by no oneThe person who opens the cycle and acts within it.
AgendaΑ / A · A name only, performed by no oneThe actor's long-running aim, which holds every cycle the actor opens.
Interestι / i · Performed by the actorWhat the actor stands to gain from the cycle.
- Detectionδ / d · Performed by the actorThe actor finding out who controls the resource wanted.
Targetτ / t · A name only, performed by no oneThe person whose decision completes the cycle.
Decision MatrixΔ / D · A name only, performed by no oneThe options open to the target, each weighed by what it offers and what it asks.
Preferred Positionπ / P · A name only, performed by no oneThe option that leads to the outcome the actor wants.
Adverse Alternativeψ / X · A name only, performed by no oneAn option that leads away from the outcome the actor wants.
- PerceptionΓ / G · Performed by the targetHow the target compares the options' worth before choosing.
- SelectionΣ / S · Performed by the targetThe target's choice among the options.
Objectiveω / o · Performed by the actorThe direction the actor wants the target's choice to take.
Intentionγ / g · Performed by the actorA specific action the actor chooses to move the target's options. A cycle holds one or more.
- Required Resourcesθ / q · Performed by the actorWhat the actor must hold to carry out the intention.
- Executionε / e · Performed by the actorThe actor carrying out the chosen action.
- A sub-cycle's interest, when the gate fails↺ Interest, under AgendaWhen the actor lacks a resource the intention needs, a sub-cycle opens whose interest is exactly that resource. It is an ordinary interest, drawn here a second time.
OutcomeΩ / O · Performed by the cycle itselfThe state the cycle closes in, one of the futures that were possible.
- Obtained ResourcesΦ / Q · Performed by the actorWhat the actor gains when the cycle closes.
- Obtained UtilityΛ / U · Performed by the targetWhat the target gains from the outcome.
- Current ResourcesΘ / R · A name only, performed by no oneWhat the actor holds now, counted.
The one who starts it
The actor is the individual who initiates the cycle. The target completes it by selecting; the actor begins it by wanting something they do not hold and the target's decision controls. One cycle has one actor, and in this system the actor is a person. A department or a leadership team may share an aim, but standing, information and favors owed are held by people, and the record counts what one person holds.
The map puts the actor at the root, holding two things. One is the agenda, the actor's long-running aim, under which every cycle the actor opens is filed. The other is what the actor holds now, counted. So Lena's pursuits all sit under her agenda, while what she pursues them with sits under her directly, outside any one cycle.
Who performs what
In Lena's cycle, she declares the interest: the dispatch budget, and with it control of the desks. She detects that the chief operating officer, Daniel Okafor, decides, and that he is choosing between approving the move, leaving dispatch with the depot managers and handing it to the automation program. She sets the objective, that Daniel approves and the approval brings her the desks. She chooses the levers, names what each one requires and executes them, and when the cycle closes she takes in what flows back. Daniel performs three acts: he perceives, he selects and he realizes a gain. The outcome belongs to neither of them; it is the cycle's own.
Whose act is it?
Illustrative. The people and the company are invented. The eleven acts in Lena's cycle with Daniel, in the order they fire. Guess whether each is Lena's, then select it to see who performs it.
Select each item to see the verdict.
The interest. The actor declares what the cycle is for.
Detection. It describes Daniel's choice, from Lena's side of it, and only the actor detects.
The objective. It describes Daniel's selection, but as Lena's projection, so it carries her mark.
An intention, the first lever. Choosing how the target is to be moved is the actor's.
Required resources, named by the actor for each lever before its gate is tested.
Execution. The actor plays the lever and spends what it used.
Perception, Daniel's. Lena can project it and judge whether it matched, but the reading is his.
Selection, Daniel's alone. An entry for it under Lena's mark would be refused.
The outcome, which belongs to neither of them. It is the cycle's own.
Obtained utility, Daniel's. The record keeps the target's gain under the target's mark.
Obtained resources. The actor takes in what flows back, and it lands in her holdings, outside any cycle.
- Lena's act
- 7 of 11
- Daniel's, or the cycle's
- 4 of 11
Seven of the eleven belong to Lena, and still the actor has no operation. In the system's terms it is a name only, like the agenda and the target. Interest happens at a moment and leaves an entry, and so does detection. The actor has no moment of their own in the cycle and no entry; the actor is the one performing the acts that do.
What the actor does have is a mark. Each of the seven acts is written with the actor's mark in front of it, and the system refuses an act that carries the wrong one. Lena cannot record a selection, because selecting is Daniel's, and Daniel cannot detect, because detection is hers.
The mark does its most useful work on entries that describe the target. Lena writes a great deal about Daniel before he does anything. Her objective describes his selection: Daniel approves. Each lever describes how he will see his options once it lands. All of it is about Daniel and all of it carries her mark, because all of it is her projection. Daniel's selection arrives later, under his mark. The record separates forecast from fact by marking each projection as one, and before that it separates them by authorship: what Lena expects of Daniel is her act, and only what Daniel does is his.
The symbol and two lines
The actor is written with the lowercase Greek alpha, α, and the Latin a. Lowercase marks one particular person. The Greek form never appears, since the actor has no act. The Latin form appears in two places.
Read aloud, the first: the actor performs the execution belonging to the first lever, under the objective of the agenda's only interest. The actor's mark stands in front, outside the address, and the address itself starts at the agenda and never names Lena. The second: what the actor holds. This address does start at the actor, because what Lena holds is hers and belongs to no particular cycle. The dot after each letter says there is only one of that kind: one actor, one set of holdings.
Why no address names the actor
No address in a record says whose record it is. "The target of the only interest" is Daniel in Lena's record and would be someone else in anyone else's. Within one actor's record no two constituents share an address, and across records the system claims nothing: the actor is the context every address is read in, as the paper on what the system guarantees sets out.
The omission follows from where the labels come from. Every label in a record is drawn from one side of an exchange. The preferred position is Lena's word for the option that leads to what she wants. Were Daniel running a maneuver of his own, the same options would carry other labels, or would not be options at all. An address that named its actor would imply that it could be read from anywhere. Leaving the actor out says that the record makes sense only from the side it was written on, and that anyone reading it, an adviser included, has to read it from there.
No budget per maneuver
Because what the actor holds hangs from the actor and from no cycle, the system has no such thing as a maneuver's own budget. When Lena's gate tests whether she has the overtime data and her standing with Daniel, it tests everything she holds. The sub-cycle with Priya Natarajan, the controller, spends Lena's standing with Priya out of the same holdings the parent reads. And the budget and the authority that flow back at the close flow to her, ready for whatever she opens next.
Executives often speak of political capital as if each initiative had its own allocation, and the record has no place for the idea. The standing Lena spent with Daniel on the overtime case is standing she no longer has for her next ask of him, whatever she meant to set aside for it. Her holdings are a single count that runs across every cycle under her agenda, and Capital Is Conserved sets out why that count stays exact.
How it goes wrong
One error is a plural actor. Suppose Lena and her deputy work the dispatch move together, and the record is kept as theirs. The deputy spends standing with a depot manager, Lena spends standing with Daniel, and the record shows both coming out of one set of holdings that belongs to nobody. The count can balance while matching neither person's holdings. In the system, the deputy's part is either a resource Lena obtains from the deputy, which takes a cycle of its own, or the deputy's own maneuver, written in the deputy's own record.
Records also go wrong when they are merged. An adviser who keeps records for several executives holds several records written in the same addresses. Laid together without saying whose is whose, "the target of the only interest" names several people at once, and every entry beneath it becomes ambiguous. Nothing inside the address can fix that. The tag has to be kept outside it by whoever puts the records together, and the essay Across Actors takes up what the system leaves out there.
What the actor learns
Once the marks are read, a record divides cleanly. Seven kinds of entry are the actor's own acts: what she wanted, whose decision she took it to be, what she expected, the levers she chose, what she thought they needed, what she spent and what came back. Three are the target's, as she read them, and one is the cycle's.
When a maneuver goes badly, the division tells the actor where to look. An error in one of her seven acts is hers to correct: a list that left out an option, a lever aimed at the wrong comparison, a resource she thought she held and did not. An entry under Daniel's mark that surprised her is evidence about Daniel, kept for the next time she needs him. The outcome is the fact both are measured against. Read this way over several maneuvers, the record shows Lena which of her own seven acts most often failed her, and keeps the target's entries for what they are: an account of how particular people decided.