Lena Ortiz begins her maneuver for her freight company's night dispatch desks holding three things it will use: the overtime data, her standing with the chief operating officer, Daniel Okafor, and her standing with the controller, Priya Natarajan. Kept in her head, that would be a list with no counts on it and nothing to say when each item was last true.
The Lam System for Political Interaction keeps that list as current resources, and keeps it counted. Everything a lever touches belongs to some cycle, except this. What the actor holds sits directly under the actor, beside the agenda, and every cycle the actor opens, at every depth, reads from it and writes back to it. It also changes less often than the amount of work in a maneuver would suggest. Over a whole maneuver, only two kinds of entry alter what the actor holds: an execution, which spends, and a flow back, which returns. A failed gate moves no resource, and neither does a sub-cycle opening or a target deciding in the actor's favor.
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 ResourcesThis essayΘ / R · A name only, performed by no oneWhat the actor holds now, counted.
A name that nobody performs
Current resources are what the actor holds now: the means available for levers, each kind counted.
Most constituents are acts. The actor detects, sets an objective, declares a lever, names what it needs and executes; the target perceives, selects and gains; the cycle resolves its outcome. Current resources are a name only. Nobody performs them, and no entry in the record declares them. The acts that change what is held belong to other constituents: the execution that spent a resource, the flow back that returned one.
The holdings are therefore read from the record, and the system keeps no running balance. Her holdings at any moment are her opening stock with every return added and every expenditure taken off, and each of those is an entry in the record. Asked what she held the moment before her second lever was played, a machine keeping the record replays it to that point and counts. The guarantee behind this, that nothing leaks out of the count and nothing enters it twice, has an essay of its own.
Counted, one by one
Counting matters because political resources come in quantities even when nobody numbers them. Suppose Lena judges that her standing with Daniel is good for two asks of the size she is about to make. Then she holds it twice. The overtime case spends one, and she still holds one. A plain list, where an item is either there or not, would say either that she had spent her standing with Daniel and had none left, or that she still had it and could spend it again on anything. The count says she has one more ask of that size in her. The gate before the overtime case finds none missing, and the gate before her next request of that size will find none missing either.
The number is Lena's judgment. The system cannot tell how much goodwill Daniel bears her; it can only take her at her word and keep the arithmetic straight afterward. Counting forces the judgment into the open: a good relationship with Daniel can survive any number of asks in the telling, while two asks are gone after the second.
The count also keeps kinds apart. The system never adds the overtime data to her standing with Priya, or weighs the dispatch budget against either. Each resource is counted as itself. Whether a maneuver that cost three resources and returned two left the actor better off is a question of value, and value is the actor's to judge.
Lena's standing with Daniel, counted in asks
Illustrative. The people and the company are invented. The count is Lena's own judgment of how many asks of this size her standing with Daniel will bear: two at the start, one used by the overtime case, one needed by her next request. Move the sliders to change any of the three. A lever that needs more than she holds fails its gate and spends nothing, and whatever is left after the overtime case is all her next request can draw on.
Where it is read and where it changes
The holdings are read at the gate. Before a lever is played, the gate asks whether everything the lever was declared to need is among what the actor holds. It reads the same holdings at every level of a maneuver: when Lena's sub-cycle with Priya tests its own gate, it looks into the same pool as the cycle with Daniel.
Walk through Lena's maneuver and the holdings move at five entries. The overtime case goes to Daniel, and the overtime data and one ask's worth of standing with Daniel leave. Lena walks Priya through how the figure was built, and her standing with Priya leaves. The sub-cycle closes, and Priya's sign-off arrives. The signed figure goes to Daniel, and the sign-off leaves again. Daniel's cycle closes, and the dispatch budget and control of the desks arrive.
Everything else leaves the count alone. The second lever's gate fails and nothing is spent. Escalation suspends Daniel's cycle and spends nothing. Priya signs, and the sign-off is still not Lena's until her sub-cycle closes and it flows back. Daniel approves, and the budget is still not in her hands until his cycle closes. The record writes the approval as an outcome first and as a resource only at the end, and in between the cycle is decided and not yet closed.
Which entries change what Lena holds?
Illustrative. The people and the company are invented. Entries from Lena's record, in the order they were written. Guess whether each one changes what she holds, then select it to see why.
Select each item to see the verdict.
The gate is a test. It looks into what Lena holds and takes nothing out.
An execution. The overtime data and one ask's worth of her standing with Daniel leave what she holds.
A perception, the target's reading. It changes how the decision looks to Daniel and leaves Lena's holdings alone.
The failure is written down and nothing is spent. The sign-off is not among what she holds.
Escalating suspends Daniel's cycle and spends nothing. The sub-cycle draws on the same holdings as its parent.
An execution inside the sub-cycle. Her standing with Priya is spent.
Priya's selection. The sign-off is not Lena's until the sub-cycle closes and it flows back.
A flow back. The sign-off joins what Lena holds, and the parent's gate can now find it.
Resuming and testing again move nothing. The gate finds the sign-off that already arrived.
An execution. The sign-off that came in through the sub-cycle goes straight out again.
The decision is made, and the budget is still not in Lena's hands. A cycle can be decided and not yet closed.
A flow back. The dispatch budget and the authority over the desks join what she holds.
The symbol and one line
Current resources are written with the uppercase Greek theta, Θ, and the Latin R. The capital marks a whole set, everything held, against the lowercase theta of one lever's need. Θ never appears as an operation, because nobody performs it; in the notation the holdings appear only under their Latin name, where the gate looks into them:
Read aloud: among the actor's current resources is the only required resource of the second lever, under the objective of the agenda's only interest. When Lena's second lever first reached its gate, this was false, and the record wrote the gate's failure. Once Priya's sign-off had flowed back, it was true.
Every other address in a maneuver starts from the agenda and runs down through an interest. The one on the left starts from the actor and stops there. It belongs to no interest, so no cycle can claim it, and what one cycle returns is there for the next to spend.
How the count goes wrong
The count changes only when the record does, and the world changes without writing anything. Overtime data from last quarter dates, and a sign-off given on one version of a figure may not cover the next, with no entry made for either. The record goes on counting what it was told, the gate passes on the strength of it, and the lever fails when it is played. The system has no way to see that a held resource has lost its value. The only check is the actor's judgment at the gate, which is why whether a resource is held, for this lever and this target, is one of the judgments the system leaves to the actor.
An actor can also count as held something that has not yet arrived: the budget on the day Daniel approves, before his cycle closes, or a sign-off Priya has promised and not given. Committing a resource on the strength of an approval is a reasonable risk, and the record keeps it visible as one by not counting the resource until it has flowed back.
A resource that came and went is easier still to miscount. Lena ends the maneuver without Priya's sign-off. It came in through the sub-cycle and went straight out through the second lever, spent on Daniel. An actor who remembers having secured finance's backing may count it for the next maneuver too, and find at the next gate, or in the next meeting, that it was used up on the last one.
What the record teaches
Because the holdings can be rebuilt for any moment, an actor can look back over a run of maneuvers and see what each cost and what it returned, kind by kind. Lena's cost her the overtime data, one ask's worth of standing with Daniel and her standing with Priya, and returned the budget and the desks. Laid out that way, a maneuver is an exchange, and the actor can ask whether it was worth making.
Across many maneuvers, the exchanges form patterns. Some actors keep spending the same kind of resource, often standing with the people they work closest to, and keep receiving things of a different kind that do not replenish it. Their holdings of the first kind fall with every success. Others make sure some of what flows back is the kind of resource the next maneuver will need. The system counts both patterns the same way and values neither. The count shows an actor which pattern they are in, and whether it is a problem is theirs to judge.