When Lena Ortiz's maneuver closes, the chief operating officer, Daniel Okafor, has approved moving the night dispatch desks onto her budget. Most accounts of a decision won this way record what the winner got. The record of the maneuver writes another entry first, before the cycle is sealed and before anything flows back to Lena: what Daniel got.
The Lam System for Political Interaction calls that entry obtained utility. It is the target's gain from the outcome, and every cycle that reaches its outcome has one, whichever option the target selected. A target selects the option they judge worth the most to them, so the selection always delivers them something. The actor's gain is the uncertain one. A record that keeps only the actor's side describes a decision with one party in it, and it loses the entry that says what moved the person the maneuver was aimed at.
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 UtilityThis essayΛ / 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 obtains
Utility, in this system, is an option's benefits net of its costs, as the target weighs them. Every option in the decision matrix has one, and the target compares them before choosing. The comparison is qualitative: Daniel does not score his options, and two careful observers can read his weighing differently. Obtained utility is the same quantity after the decision. Before the selection it is a prospect, one utility weighed against others. Once the outcome resolves, the utility of the option he chose becomes something he has.
The vocabulary keeps the two apart on purpose, as separate constituents, just as it keeps the resources an actor obtains apart from the resources a lever requires. Without the split, the record could not say whether a utility had been weighed or gained, and the two get confused easily. A lever is built to raise the utility of the preferred position in the target's eyes, and the actor who has watched it land tends to treat the raised utility as already delivered.
Daniel's obtained utility is lower overtime, which had been a mark against him, and a cleaner organization. Both were in his decision matrix as parts of the preferred position's benefits. At the close they are what the outcome gave him.
Obtained utility belongs to the target. Only three acts in a cycle are the target's: perceiving, selecting and obtaining utility. The actor declares the interest, detects, sets the objective, plays the levers and takes in what flows back, and the outcome belongs to the cycle itself. The system refuses an obtained utility entered in the actor's name, because a gain recorded as the actor's would be a claim about the actor. Lena keeps the record, and she writes this entry in Daniel's name. What it contains is her judgment of what Daniel gained, made from outside, the same way she judges his perception.
Where it comes in the close
The close runs in a fixed order. The target selects; the outcome resolves, and the selection becomes a fact; the target's obtained utility is written; the cycle closes; the actor's obtained resources flow back. Daniel's gain is on the record before Lena holds the budget.
The order follows from what each entry reads. The target's gain is what the outcome delivers to the person who chose it, so it can be written the moment the outcome exists. The actor's resources come back only once the cycle is sealed, because they are what the cycle as a whole yielded. Read in sequence, the record says that what the actor obtains comes out of an outcome that has already given the target something.
Suppose Daniel had left dispatch with the depot managers. The cycle would still reach an outcome, and he would still obtain the utility of the option he chose, the one he judged better for him. Lena would obtain nothing she wanted, and what flowed back to her would not match the interest she opened the cycle with.
The symbol and one line
Obtained utility is written with the capital Greek lambda, Λ, as an operation, and the Latin U as the thing it records. It shares its letter with utility, λ and u in lowercase: the small letter for the utility of one option as weighed in the matrix, the capital for the utility the target realizes from the outcome.
Daniel's obtained utility, in the system's notation:
Read aloud: the target of the only interest on the agenda realizes the obtained utility of that interest's outcome, and what it realizes is the utility of the only preferred position in the target's decision matrix.
The prefix in square brackets says who: the target, addressed through the interest it belongs to. The argument says where the entry sits, under the cycle's outcome, since the gain exists only once the outcome does. The body says what was gained, and it points back into the matrix at the cell every lever in the cycle was aimed at. Had Daniel chosen the depots, the body would point at that alternative's utility.
Why the record wants the other side's gain
Lena opened the cycle for the budget and the desks. Daniel's gain might look like his own business. The record keeps it because the levers were aimed at it. Each lever forecast that Daniel would rank the utilities of his options differently, and his perception showed whether the change landed. Obtained utility shows where the utility of the chosen option ended up. Lena obtains her resources because Daniel obtained his utility, and a record of her side alone would show resources arriving with no account of why Daniel agreed to send them.
The entry is also the only place the gain exists. Utility is not a resource, so it never enters what Lena holds. She cannot spend Daniel's cut in overtime, and when what she holds is checked by counting, his gain is not in the count. If she leaves the entry blank, nothing else in the system carries it.
The sub-cycle with the controller, Priya Natarajan, has an obtained utility of its own. Priya signed the savings figure, and what she gained was a savings claim that finance had tested before it reached the chief operating officer. The entry sits at the sub-cycle's address, under the lever it served. An actor who treats a sign-off as an errand leaves it out, and the next time that actor needs Priya, the record has nothing about what she got the last time.
Which of these is a target's obtained utility?
Illustrative. The people and the company are invented. Things gained, given or argued in Lena's maneuver: guess which ones the record writes as a target's obtained utility, then select each to see why.
Select each item to see the verdict.
Daniel's gain from the outcome, written in his name. It was part of the preferred position's benefits before he chose, and the outcome made it his.
Daniel's as well. His obtained utility is the utility of the option he chose, and this is one of the things that make it up.
Lena's obtained resource. It flows back into what she holds after the cycle closes, and it is counted there.
Also Lena's, and also counted. A target's gain is appraised and never enters what the actor holds.
That is his selection, which the outcome turns into a fact. The obtained utility is what the approval brings him.
Priya's gain, in the sub-cycle. She is that cycle's target, so her gain is written at the sub-cycle's address, under the lever it served.
The sub-cycle's obtained resource. It flows back to Lena, the parent's gate passes, and the second lever spends it.
Lena's own argument for the move. It becomes part of Daniel's gain only if Daniel would describe it as something he got.
How it goes wrong
Most often the entry is simply left blank. The actor records the outcome, records what flowed back to them and moves on, because the target's gain does not change what the actor holds. Each maneuver recorded this way looks complete, and the gap shows only later, when the actor tries to work out why a target agreed.
Lena could also write her own case into Daniel's column. Her view is that the desks will run better under the people who answer for them. It is a good argument, and it may be no part of what Daniel gained. The question that sorts the two is whether Daniel would describe the thing as something he got. Lower overtime passes. A better-run dispatch function, as Lena sees it, may not.
Or she could record the gain her levers projected in place of the one that came. Her first lever argued overtime. At the close she may see that what mattered to Daniel was the cleaner organization. If she writes overtime because overtime is what she argued, the record confirms her levers whatever happened, and the one entry that could have corrected her reading of Daniel agrees with it instead.
What the actor learns
Across several maneuvers with Daniel, the obtained utility entries add up to an account of what he values when he decides, written in his column and kept apart from the arguments Lena made to him. Her next detection of a decision of his can start from it, and so can her levers. Set beside the projections her levers made, the entries also show which of her arguments reached something Daniel cared about and which only sounded persuasive.
They show how decisions were paid for as well. When the gain written in the target's column is thin and the lever that carried the decision spent the actor's standing with the target, the target agreed for the sake of the relationship, and the price shows on the actor's side of the record, as the standing spent when that lever was executed.