In most organizations an objective is whatever someone is trying to achieve. The Lam System for Political Interaction gives it a narrower meaning, and a harder one to write down: the choice the actor expects the target to make, and the position that choice will yield. In the running example, Lena Ortiz wants the night dispatch desks at her freight company, and the budget that pays for them. That is her interest. Her objective is about what someone else does: that the chief operating officer, Daniel Okafor, choosing among the options in front of him, approves moving the desks onto her budget.
The entries before it forecast nothing. The interest is a want, and detection is a description of Daniel's decision, which can be wrong without predicting anything. The objective is the cycle's first forecast: a claim about another person's choice, made before the actor has settled how to influence it. Every lever that follows is filed beneath it and answers 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.
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.
ObjectiveThis essayω / 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 objective declares
The outcome the actor wants will come about only if the target makes a particular selection. The objective names that selection: this target, choosing from this decision matrix, will land on this position. For Lena the target is Daniel, the matrix holds his three options, and the position is the preferred one, approving the move, which brings the desks and their budget to her.
Lena declares it and Daniel never does, though the choice it forecasts is his. A cycle has exactly one objective, however many levers it later holds, because a cycle has one target making one decision, and there is one selection to forecast. It follows detection, since it forecasts a choice among options detection has named.
Every cycle has its own objective, sub-cycles included, and there the contrast with the interest is sharpest. When Lena's second lever fails its gate for want of a sign-off and she opens a cycle with the controller, Priya Natarajan, the failure fixes that cycle's interest: she wants exactly the sign-off. It fixes nothing about the objective. That Priya, choosing between signing and declining, will sign is a fresh forecast about a different person, and it can be as wrong as any forecast about Daniel.
An actor's declaration with the target's act inside it
The objective's operation is the lowercase Greek omega, ω, and as an address it is the Latin o. Lena's objective, in the system's notation:
Read aloud: the actor performs the objective of the only interest, and it is equivalent to this. The target's selection from the target's decision matrix, as projected, yields the preferred position as the target's selection, as projected. The arrow reads "yields", and each prime marks a value expected once the anticipated effect has happened.
The interest and detection are written with a colon and an equals sign, which assigns them their members: this interest has this resource, this detection names these four things. The objective uses a different sign because it makes a different kind of statement. The line opens with the actor's mark and then, inside the braces, carries the target's. The triple bar between them states that one party's operation is equivalent to another party's, which is exactly what an objective is: a declaration Lena makes whose whole content is a choice Daniel makes. She cannot perform the selection on the right-hand side, and the line does not pretend she can. Everything she does after this entry is an attempt to make that side come true.
Every lever is filed under it
The objective's address is short, and a great deal hangs from it. Lena's first lever is written as the first lever under the objective, and her second lever as the second. The sub-cycle she opens with Priya when the second lever's gate fails sits under that second lever, so it too sits under the objective. Every means the actor adopts to move the target, and every smaller maneuver opened to resource one, is addressed as serving this single forecast.
The objective also opens the part of the cycle in which levers can be declared. Before it is written there is nothing for a lever to aim at. Once it is written, the actor can add levers until the target selects. Each lever projects how the target's weighing of the options will move, and the comparison it projects has to lead to the objective's selection, so a lever is only meaningful as a means to this one end.
That arrangement has a consequence when the aim changes. An actor who revises the cycle partway through gives its interest a new body at the same address, and detection and the objective run again. The levers already declared continue, at their old addresses, under the new objective. They were chosen for the first aim, and whether they still serve the second is a judgment the actor has to make, since the system will not make it for them.
Answered by the outcome
At the close the cycle writes its outcome, and the outcome contains the same clause as the objective without the primes: the selection Daniel actually made and the position it actually yielded. The Record explains why the two are kept side by side and never merged.
What is particular to the objective is who writes the realized half. Neither Lena nor Daniel writes it: the outcome belongs to the cycle, the point at which his decision stops being a projection and becomes a fact. A lever's projection is answered by the target's perception, and whether a perception matched its projection is a judgment about how the target saw things. The objective is answered by the selection itself, so its check rests on no one's reading of how a meeting went.
How it goes wrong
One error is an objective that restates the interest. "Lena gets the dispatch budget" says nothing about Daniel's choice, so the levers have no selection to aim at and the outcome has nothing to confirm. The cycle runs, and when it fails, the record cannot say whether Lena misread Daniel or whether he chose as she expected and the choice delivered less than she hoped.
Another is an objective written as a perception. "Daniel sees the case for the desks" is what a lever projects, and Daniel can see the case perfectly well and still give dispatch to the automation program. An objective of that kind can be met while the selection goes the other way, and the actor will be tempted to count the maneuver a partial success.
An objective can also hedge. "Daniel approves, or at least shelves automation" names two selections, and a forecast that covers nearly every outcome cannot be falsified by any of them. If Lena would settle for something less than approval, such as a single desk on trial, detection can list it as a second preferred position, ranked below the first. The objective still has to say which choice she expects Daniel to make.
The hardest to see is an objective written after the levers. An actor who starts with the overtime case and only later says what the case is for tends to describe what the levers already seem to be achieving, and an objective written that way will be confirmed by almost any close. The cycle's order forbids it: no lever can be declared until the objective is on the record, so the forecast is fixed while the actor still has no means committed to it.
Can the close check this objective?
A reading aid for the actor's judgment; the system applies none of it. Take a draft objective, check in order, and stop at the first that is not true.
What the record teaches
An objective kept as it was written is the actor's forecast of a decision made before any lever existed. Across many cycles those forecasts, laid beside the outcomes, show how well the actor reads decisions themselves, separately from how well they move people. The reading can be broken down further. An actor may forecast the chief executive's choices well and the chief financial officer's badly, or call decisions that turn on money and miss those that turn on reputation. Each pattern is a fact about the actor's picture of a particular person or a particular kind of decision, and each shows only in a record where the objective was fixed before the levers and the outcome was written by the cycle.
The objective is also where a maneuver's ambition is visible. It says which choice the actor set out to obtain, and an actor whose objectives are always the modest option, or always the most the target could give, will find that in the record too.