Ask an executive what they want from a contested decision and the answer usually names the decision. Lena Ortiz's answer would be that she wants Daniel Okafor, her freight company's chief operating officer, to approve the move: night dispatch out of the depots and onto the customer operations budget she runs. That is what she hopes Daniel will do. What she wants is what his approval would give her: the dispatch budget and control of the desks.
The Lam System for Political Interaction calls that the interest, and builds the cycle on it. Daniel's approval is his act, and Lena cannot hold it, count it or spend it next quarter. The budget and control of the desks are resources she will hold once the maneuver closes and can put to work in the next one. The whole cycle is measured against the interest: what comes back at the close is checked against it, and what goes out along the way is only worth spending in proportion to it.
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.
InterestThis essayι / 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 interest is
The interest is what the actor stands to gain from the cycle: the resource the actor wants, which some target's decision controls. Often the target controls it directly, so that what the target gives up is what the actor gains, as when a budget moves from one line to another. Sometimes the resource is a means to something further, such as a standing or an authority the actor needs before a maneuver with someone else can begin. Either way the interest is the reason the actor wants the target to choose one way. The preferred position is the option the actor hopes the target takes, and the interest is why the actor hopes it.
The interest is one of the operations the actor performs, and nobody else in the cycle declares one, the target included. A cycle has exactly one. Lena may want several things from Daniel over the years, and each one she pursues becomes its own cycle with its own interest, numbered under her agenda, so that two pursuits never share an address.
The cycle's name
In the system's addresses, every other constituent of the cycle hangs from the interest. Daniel is written as the target of the interest, his decision matrix as the matrix under that target, and Lena's second lever as the second lever under the interest's objective. Read any address in the cycle from the left and the interest comes straight after the agenda, so nothing in the cycle can be addressed until it exists.
That is why the interest always comes first. The record writes one entry when a cycle opens, and the next is its interest. Detection cannot ask who controls a resource nobody has named, and the objective, the levers and the outcome have nowhere to be written until the interest gives them an address.
The symbol and two lines
The interest's operation is the lowercase Greek iota, ι, and as an address it is the Latin i. The letter is lowercase because an interest is a single thing, one to a cycle. Lena's interest, in the system's notation:
Read aloud: the actor performs the interest operation on the agenda's only interest, and assigns it one thing, the resource that interest is to obtain. The capital Q is the letter for obtained resources, the same letter the record uses when resources flow back at the close. So the interest is written as what the cycle is meant to return, at its own address, before any of the cycle has happened.
A sub-cycle's interest is written differently. When Lena's second lever fails its gate for want of the controller's sign-off, the cycle she opens with Priya Natarajan declares:
Read aloud: the actor performs the interest of the cycle opened under the second lever, beneath the objective of the only interest, and assigns it the second lever's required resource. The lowercase q is the letter for a required resource. The sub-cycle's want is written in the parent's own terms for what it needed, at an address that says which lever it serves.
A want the actor does not choose
At the top of a maneuver the actor chooses the interest freely. Every interest below the top is fixed by the failure that opened its cycle. However much else Priya could do for her, the sub-cycle wants the sign-off, because the gate found it missing and will test for it again when control comes back.
The essay on escalation argues why the narrow aim makes the handback checkable. Seen from the interest, it means a maneuver holds one want the actor chose and any number of wants the maneuver chose for them. Anyone reviewing a nested maneuver afterward can then keep apart two questions that otherwise blur. One is whether the top-level interest was worth pursuing. The other is whether each sub-cycle delivered what its parent lacked, which is a question about how the sub-cycle was run, since the actor never chose its want.
Measured at the close and along the way
When a cycle closes, what the actor obtained flows back into what they hold, and the record writes it down. On the normal path it is the resource the interest named. Lena's cycle opened wanting the budget and the desks, and those are what flow back. The match is a property of a cycle that ran its course, and the system never manufactures it: the flow back records what was obtained. A cycle that is mooted or abandoned obtains nothing, and the record then shows the interest at the top and an empty close at the bottom.
The interest also sets the scale for the spending. Lena's maneuver cost her the overtime data, her standing with Daniel and her standing with Priya; the sign-off came in through the sub-cycle and went straight back out through the second lever. Her gain from the cycle is the budget and the authority, less everything she spent to get them. The record lists both sides exactly, and it cannot net them, because standing with a controller and authority over a dispatch desk share no unit. Whether the trade was worth making is Lena's appraisal, a qualitative one, and the record's contribution is that she makes it with every item in view.
Some interests are defensive. An actor may care less about what the preferred position offers than about avoiding an alternative that would be costly. Had Lena's only aim been to keep the automation program away from dispatch, the cycle could close exactly as planned and still leave her holding less than when it opened, because what it bought was protection against a loss that never happened. That can still be a good trade, and only the actor's appraisal of the alternative avoided can say so, since the record shows the spending and nothing of the loss.
How it goes wrong
The commonest error is the executive's first answer: an interest written as the target's act. "Daniel approves" cannot flow back. A cycle whose interest is an approval can check only that the approval happened, and nobody asks whether it delivered anything. The essay on detection takes up the neighboring case, where the preferred position is named well and still leads somewhere other than the interest.
The next is an interest too broad to recognize when it arrives. "More influence over operations" can be said to have flowed back from almost any close, so the cycle can never fail, and its record never shows a miss the actor could learn from. The narrower interest, the budget and the desks, either flows back or does not.
An interest can also drift. Partway through, Lena might start to think of the maneuver as a bid for the day desks as well. If the change is real, the system has a move for it. The cycle's interest is revised: the new aim takes the same address, the old one is kept beside it, and detection and the objective run again. If it happens only in her head, the record still holds the interest she declared, the close is checked against that, and the maneuver she remembers differs from the one she ran.
Which of these could be written as an interest in Lena's maneuver
Illustrative. The people and the company are invented. Statements from Lena's maneuver and two near-misses: guess which ones could stand as an interest, then select each to see why.
Select each item to see the verdict.
The interest of the top-level cycle. Both are resources Lena can hold once the cycle closes, and both are what flow back.
The preferred position. It is Daniel's act, which Lena cannot hold, count or spend, so it cannot flow back.
What the first lever projects about Daniel's perception. It describes how he weighs the options, and gives Lena nothing she could hold.
Daniel's obtained utility: the target's gain from the outcome, written for the target at the close.
The interest of the sub-cycle. Lena did not choose it: the failed gate fixed it, and the gate tests for exactly this when control comes back.
Broader than what the parent lacked. A sub-cycle that delivered it could leave the gate still failing.
Lena's agenda, the longer aim that holds this cycle and any others she opens. Each pursuit under it gets an interest of its own.
What the record teaches
Over many cycles, the interests are what the rest of the record is read against. Laid beside what flowed back, they show how often the actor got what they set out for. The spending tells a slower story: what the actor habitually pays for a given kind of gain. An executive who keeps spending standing with the chief executive to win small budget lines will find the habit in that comparison, and in no single maneuver. The agenda gives a third reading, of whether the actor's top-level pursuits add up to the longer aim or whether some cycles were opened because a decision happened to be available.
What Lena wants is hers to decide. The system insists only on the form: the want written as something she could hold, before she has named a target or chosen a lever, at the address everything else in the cycle will sit under.