Lena Ortiz has two levers on the chief operating officer, Daniel Okafor. One shows him that a single night dispatch desk cuts the overtime that has drawn criticism of him. The other puts the controller's signature on the savings figure. Both work on the same thing, which is what Daniel weighs when he decides.
The Lam System for Political Interaction names what he weighs with three constituents. Benefit is what an option offers the target. Cost is what the option asks of the target. Utility is the option's benefit net of its cost. Each is defined through the others, utility from the two considerations and the considerations only for the sake of the net, so the three are taken together here, under the first of their names. Every lever is aimed at one of them, and none of them is something anybody does.
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.
Actorα / 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.
What the target weighs
The target appraises every option on two considerations, and each is a sum: benefit gathers everything an option offers in the target's favor, cost everything it requires the target to spend or give up. Each belongs to one option. The preferred position has a benefit and a cost, and so does each adverse alternative, which is why the map draws the same three beneath both. A target choosing between two options is weighing at least four things, the cells of the decision matrix, and a matrix with a single option has nothing to weigh against.
In Lena's account of Daniel's choice, approving the move brings down the overtime his critics keep raising and leaves him a cleaner organization; that is the preferred position's benefit. Approving also costs him two things: a quarrel with the depot managers, who lose the desks, and his name behind a savings figure nobody in finance has tested. Leaving dispatch with the depots means nothing to change and nobody to quarrel with, while the overtime and the criticism stay. Handing dispatch to the automation program brings lower overtime too, at the price of the program's own budget and timetable.
Daniel could probably list his options if asked. He would have a harder time saying how he weighs them, and he would not say it in Lena's terms. The considerations are the actor's account of how someone else nets a choice, and they are only as good as what she knows of him.
That account leaves out what Lena spends: her standing with Daniel, used up on the overtime case, is counted in what she holds, because cost in this system always means the target's cost. It leaves out what she wants as well, except through its effect on him. The budget and the desks are her interest, and Daniel weighs them only through what moving them costs him, which is the quarrel with the depot managers. When the resource an actor wants is one the target has to give up or take from someone, part of the preferred position's cost to the target is the actor's gain.
What belongs in Daniel's decision matrix
Illustrative. The people and the company are invented. Statements from Lena's maneuver: guess whether each is something Daniel weighs, then select it to see where it belongs.
Select each item to see the verdict.
The benefit of the preferred position, approving the move. The overtime lever adds to it.
The first cost of approving. It is also how Daniel feels Lena's gain: moving the desks is what costs him the quarrel.
The second cost of approving. Priya's sign-off is the resource that takes it away.
The benefit of the first adverse alternative, leaving dispatch with the depots.
The cost of the same alternative, and the reason doing nothing is not free.
What a lever costs the actor is counted in what the actor holds. Cost in the matrix is always the target's.
Lena's interest, the resource the cycle was opened for. Daniel weighs it only through what moving it costs him.
That sits in Priya's own matrix, in the sub-cycle Lena opens to get the sign-off. Daniel's matrix sees only the signature's effect, a smaller cost.
- In Daniel's matrix
- 5 of 8
Of the eight statements in the illustrative figure, five belong in Daniel's matrix. The other three are what Lena spends, what Lena wants and what Priya weighs in a decision of her own.
Nobody performs them
Roughly half the constituents are things somebody does. The actor detects, sets the objective and executes; the target perceives and selects. Each of those acts has a moment in the cycle and an entry in the record. Benefit, cost and utility have neither. They are names only, at the bottom of the tree, and they reach the record only inside other entries: the comparison a lever projects, the effect an execution records, the comparison a perception reads.
Weighing goes on in the target's head, at no particular moment, and an entry claiming to record it would be the actor's guess written down as an event. The record can show what Lena did to a consideration and what Daniel's reading was afterward, and nothing of the weighing in between.
Benefit is written with the Greek beta, β, cost with the kappa, κ, and utility with the lambda, λ, with b, c and u as the Latin forms. All three are lowercase, because each is one consideration of one option. The Greek forms exist in the vocabulary and are never written as operations, since there is no act to write; the Latin letters do the work, as the last segment of an address. A position with more than one cost worth telling apart numbers them, so Lena keeps the quarrel with the depot managers and the untested figure as the first and second costs of approval.
Where a lever lands
A lever, which the system calls an intention, reaches a decision through one of four moves: it raises the benefit of the preferred position, lowers its cost, raises the cost of an alternative or lowers an alternative's benefit. Lena's two levers work opposite sides of the same position. The overtime case adds to the benefit of approving. The sign-off takes away a cost: once finance has put its name to the figure, Daniel is no longer backing a number nobody has tested.
The effect of the second lever, as the record writes it when the lever is executed:
Read aloud: the second cost of the preferred position, in the target's decision matrix, less the only resource the second lever required. The resource on the right is Priya Natarajan's sign-off. At execution it leaves what Lena holds, and it reappears on Daniel's side of the decision as a smaller cost.
When an actor spends political capital, this is the movement the system records: a resource leaves the actor's holdings and enters the target's weighing. The record keeps both halves. The spending is counted against what Lena holds, and the effect is written against the consideration it moved. The expression says which consideration changed and with what. It records no amount, and how far the cost fell is left to Lena's judgment.
Only the nets are compared
Daniel chooses an option whole, so each consideration counts only through its option's net, and he never sets the benefit of approving against the benefit of automation, or one cost against another. An option can carry the larger cost and still win, when its benefit is larger by more, and the cheapest option on the list, leaving everything with the depots, can lose for that reason.
The system holds to this strictly: utilities are the only thing it compares. The comparison Lena's second lever is built to bring about, the desks against the automation program, is:
Read aloud: the utility of the preferred position, in the target's decision matrix, is greater than the utility of the second adverse alternative. A lever projects this comparison before it is played, and the target's perception is read against it afterward. Whichever consideration a lever moved, on whichever option, the reading lands on utilities. The sign is an ordering: the record states which option nets higher and never by how much.
A lever can therefore do exactly what it was built to do and leave the comparison where it was. Suppose the overtime case, by showing how much overtime the depots run up, makes the depot managers angrier at the prospect of losing the desks. The benefit of approving has gone up, and its first cost has gone up with it. The execution is recorded correctly, the consideration it was aimed at moved, and Daniel's reading of the two nets may not move at all.
Will moving this consideration change the comparison?
A reading aid for the actor's judgment; the system applies none of it. Take one lever, check in order and stop at the first that is not true.
Why the comparison is judged
Elsewhere utility is often a number. In a decision a person makes at speed, between considerations that share no unit, it is a judgment about how things net out, and two careful people appraising the same target can disagree. The system's own position is that utility appraisal is qualitative and cannot be replicated. Much of what is fought over inside an organization has no objective value to compute.
The system records what it can record exactly: which option, which consideration, which lever moved it, which resource was spent. It leaves the comparison to the actor, who watched the target and has to say whether the preferred position now nets higher. A machine asked to compute the utilities would need numbers nobody has, and The Boundary of Computation takes up why the system declines to invent them.
How it goes wrong
An actor can price a lever from their own side. A lever that cost Lena a great deal of standing feels weighty to her, and Daniel's matrix has no place for what she spent. A cheap lever that removes one of his costs can count for more than an expensive one that adds a benefit he barely weighs.
Another error is working a consideration the target does not weigh. If Lena believed Daniel cared about the tidiness of a single dispatch desk for its own sake, she could build a fine case for it. The execution would be recorded, the consideration would move in her account of his decision, and the perception would fail, because Daniel never weighed it.
An actor can also move one consideration and forget its partner, as in the overtime case that sharpens the quarrel it was meant to outweigh. The last error is netting the wrong ledger. Utility here is the target's. Lena's own reckoning, what the dispatch budget is worth to her against everything she spent to get it, is a real calculation, and it belongs to her agenda, outside Daniel's matrix.
What the actor learns
The record keeps, for every lever, the consideration it was aimed at and the comparison it projected, with the target's reading beside them. Within one maneuver that separates a reading that failed because the consideration did not move from one that failed because the net did not turn. Across many it shows which considerations a particular target actually weighs, whether an actor's levers tend to work benefits or costs, and which of the two has landed with whom. An actor who finds that every lever aimed at one executive's costs has landed, and most of those aimed at his benefits have not, has learned how that executive nets a decision.