Mooting

Some levers stop being needed before anyone pulls them. An actor plans two ways of moving a decision and plays the first, and before the second is ready something outside the maneuver does its work, as when a customer forces the issue or the decision-maker's own superior weighs in. Sometimes the whole decision goes. The person who controlled it moves to another role, the option the actor wanted is withdrawn, or the question is absorbed into a reorganization and settled by someone else.

In The Lam System for Political Interaction both are mooting. To moot is to write into the record that a lever, or a whole cycle, has nothing left to do. The move spends nothing and returns nothing. It is the actor's judgment, made from what the actor can see outside the record, and once it is written the lever or the cycle is set aside for good. Of the failure moves, mooting is the one that most often belongs to a maneuver that is going well. It is also the easiest to use as cover for one that is not.

A lever, or the whole cycle

Whether the actor moots a lever or the whole cycle depends on one thing: whether the cycle can still go on.

A lever is mooted when the cycle can do without it and at least one other lever in the cycle is still live. Its purpose may have been met another way, by what another lever or a sub-cycle achieved, or by someone outside the maneuver altogether. Events may have made it unnecessary. Or the actor may judge that it now costs more than it adds while the other levers can carry the cycle. The cycle continues on the levers that remain. Mooting a lever is open at any point after the lever is declared, so long as a sibling is still live.

A mooted lever also releases the target's selection. The target decides once, on the whole comparison, so the selection waits for every lever the cycle still counts on to be played and read, and a lever that will never be played would otherwise hold it indefinitely. Once mooted, it counts as set aside.

A cycle is mooted when there is nothing left for it to do. The target no longer controls the decision, or the preferred position is no longer among the options the target can choose, or every lever has been read without moving the target and the actor can see no lever that would (the case Perception Failure follows). A mooted cycle stops short of its close: no selection is written and nothing flows back. At the top of a maneuver, the actor's agenda is then free to open its next cycle. One level down, a mooted sub-cycle leaves its parent without the resource it was opened to fetch, so the parent's gate stays failed and the parent cannot pick up where it stopped. The parent can be given up in turn. Whether it can try another route to the same resource is a question the system has not yet settled, and the essay What the System Cannot Yet Represent names it.

The last live lever

The system will not let an actor moot the last live lever in a cycle. That can look like a technicality, since an actor whose only remaining lever has had its work done for it seems to be in the same position as an actor mooting the second of two. The difference is in what the entry would claim. Mooting a lever says the cycle goes on without it. With no other lever live, the claim is false, because nothing would be left to carry the cycle to a selection. What the actor has to say is something about the cycle: that it has nothing left to do, which is mooting the cycle, or that they have chosen to stop, which is abandoning, a different move with a different meaning.

Organizations are full of maneuvers that ended the other way. Each tactic was dropped in turn, each for a reason that sounded good at the time, until nobody could say whether the aim had been reached, given up or forgotten, and the people who had been asked for help were left waiting on a decision that was never announced. The record cannot hold that state. A cycle with every lever set aside and the cycle itself still open would be a cycle whose end nobody had stated, and the system makes the actor state it.

Two levers, one set aside

Illustrative. The people and the company are invented. Noor Haddad runs procurement at a specialty foods manufacturer, and she wants the chief financial officer, Tobias Wren, to approve a second supplier for the company's main cocoa ingredient. His adverse alternatives are to keep the single supplier, or to defer the question to next year's budget. She declares two levers at the outset. The first is to show Tobias what last spring's three-week supply failure cost the plant in lost output, which needs the plant's downtime figures and her standing with him; she holds both. The second is to show him that the company's insurer would cut its premium if the ingredient were dual-sourced, which needs the broker's written quote. She does not hold the quote, and getting it would mean a sub-cycle with the broker.

She plays the first lever, and Tobias reads the downtime cost as she projected: a real loss, and a reason to see the single supplier as the riskier option. Before she reaches the second lever's gate, the buying director at the company's largest retail customer writes to Tobias directly, asking for a named backup source before the next contract is signed. The second lever was meant to show Tobias that single sourcing carries a price people outside the company will charge for it. The customer's letter has just shown him that, more forcefully than a premium quote would have. Noor judges the lever's work done and moots it. The first lever is still live, so the cycle goes on. With the first lever read and the second set aside, Tobias selects, and he approves the second supplier.

The moot saved Noor a sub-cycle. She spent no standing with the broker and told him nothing about what the quote was for, and Tobias's budget round never had to wait on it. Had she already fetched the quote before the letter arrived, it would now sit in what she holds, unspent: mooting gives nothing back, and it spends nothing either. The mooted lever's declaration and its required resource stay on the record above the moot, so anyone reading it later can see what she had planned and the point at which she stopped needing it.

A judgment the record cannot check

Nothing in the record says the customer's letter did the second lever's work. The letter is not in the record at all; it passed between two other people. What the record holds is Noor's lever, never tested, and her entry saying it had nothing left to do. Whether it had is a reading of Tobias, and only she was placed to make it.

The reading can be wrong. Tobias might take the letter as a sales matter, a customer to be managed, and draw no conclusion about what single sourcing costs. Then Noor has given up a lever that still had work to do, and a mooted lever does not return. To make the insurance point after all, she would declare a new lever at a new address, and the record would show the first one mooted and its replacement declared afterward, which is an accurate account of a call made too early.

The temptation runs one way. Every lever costs something to play, so an actor short of standing or patience always has a reason to find that a lever's work has been done for it. A moot made on hope looks the same as a moot made on evidence when it is written. The two separate later, when the selection goes the wrong way, or when the actor finds themselves declaring a new lever to make the case the mooted one was built to make.

Under pressure, mooting is easy to confuse with abandoning. A moot says the maneuver does not need something: this lever, or this whole cycle. An abandon says the actor will not go on, whatever the maneuver might still win. An actor who writes the first when the second is true has recorded a fact about the situation that was really a decision about themselves, and the record will teach them the wrong lesson.

What moots show across many cycles

Every moot is kept beside what it set aside, so an actor's moots can be read as a set. An actor who moots the second of two levers in most cycles is planning more levers than their targets need, which costs nothing while the extra levers stay on paper and a good deal once the actor goes to fetch their resources before finding out they were not needed. Cycles mooted because the target lost control of the decision point further up, to detection: the actor keeps aiming at people whose hold on a decision is weaker than it looks. The plainest pattern is a moot followed, a few entries later, by a new lever making the same case as the one set aside. That actor has been mooting on hope, and the record shows each instance in the order it happened.