One Address for Everything

Six months after a contested approval, an executive sits down with their chief of staff to go back over it, and the conversation runs on phrases. "The second option" was always the dangerous one. "Dev's piece" took longer than it should have. Each phrase was exact in March, when everyone in the room knew what it meant. By September it can mean two or three things, and nobody notices, because each person hears the one they remember.

Organizations refer to the parts of political work by description and by nickname. A description changes as the thing changes: the savings figure becomes the signed savings figure, then the disputed one. A nickname stays put while the things it could mean multiply. Either way, the reference works only for as long as the people who coined it remember what they meant by it.

In The Lam System for Political Interaction, every constituent of a maneuver is named by where it sits. Its address is a path from the actor's agenda down through whatever contains it, and within one actor's record, addresses and constituents pair off exactly: no two constituents share an address, no constituent has two, and every constituent has one. Much of what the system promises about the record is stated in addresses. The gate looks for a lever's required resource by its address, a sub-cycle hands back once the parent's need, named by address, is held, and each resource the actor spends or gets back is counted by its address. If an address could mean two things, each of those promises would be ambiguous.

Named by where it sits

Illustrative. The people and the company are invented. Folake Eze is plant director at a snack-food manufacturer. In the spring she wants the chief executive, Pieter de Vries, to approve a second packaging line; his alternatives are to keep one line and run extra shifts, or to send the overflow to a co-packer. Her first lever shows Pieter the order backlog a single line cannot clear. Her second puts in front of him a price for packaging film confirmed by the head of procurement, Dev Malhotra. She does not hold that confirmation, so the second lever's gate fails and she opens a sub-cycle with Dev, in which her lever is the line's volume forecast, shared so that Dev can lock in a better price. Dev confirms, the gate passes and Pieter approves. In the fall she opens a second pursuit, asking the HR director, Wen Hui Lim, for a dedicated maintenance crew; Wen Hui's alternatives are to share the existing crew or to contract maintenance out.

The volume forecast Folake spent on Dev has this address:

Read aloud from the left: Folake's agenda; its first pursuit, the packaging line; that pursuit's objective; the second lever under it, Dev's confirmed price; the cycle opened beneath that lever; its objective; its first lever, sharing the forecast; and that lever's required resource. Read from the right, it is the required resource of the first lever in the cycle opened under the second lever of the first pursuit. Each step is something inside the step before it, so the steps cannot be reordered without naming something else, or nothing.

Nothing in the address says what the forecast contains, how good it is or whether Folake still holds it, which is why the address can stay fixed while all of those change. The forecast can be held and then spent, and the confirmation it bought can be missing and then held, while each keeps the address it was given when it first entered the record. A description would have to be rewritten each time, and the record rewrites nothing, so a name that changed with its object would leave the earlier entries pointing at something that no longer answered to them.

Numbers that mean something only inside their parent

Below the agenda, an address's first step says which pursuit. Each step after that says what kind of thing comes next, since a target, a decision matrix, an objective, a lever and a required resource each have their own letter. And where a parent holds several things of one kind, a number says which one; a dot says there is only one.

The numbers are local. Pieter's matrix has a second adverse alternative, the co-packer, and so does Wen Hui's, contracting maintenance out. Both are numbered 2, because each is the second among its own siblings, and the full path keeps them apart: one sits under the target of the first pursuit, the other under the target of the second. The address above shows the same thing inside a single path. It passes through a second lever and later through a first lever, because the 2 counts Folake's levers on Pieter and the 1 counts her levers on Dev, and neither count knows about the other.

"The second option" fails as a reference for this reason, and its address does not. A number read without the steps above it means nothing the record can resolve; read with them, it names one thing. Numbers are also given once, when the sibling is introduced, and never reused. If Folake had set her first lever on Pieter aside and declared another, the new lever would take the next number and the first would keep its own. The record keeps every entry, so a reused number would leave an old entry pointing at a new lever.

Where two addresses part

Take any two different constituents in Folake's record and trace each one back toward the agenda. At some step their lineages part, and where they part they differ in pursuit, in kind or in number, all three of which the address writes down. So two different constituents always have different addresses. The co-packer and contracting out part at the first step, the forecast and the backlog part at the number of the lever, and a lever's required resource and its execution part at the kind.

Only one place could defeat this: a lever with two sub-cycles under it. Both would begin at the same step, and nothing in either address could say which was meant. The system rules it out by how retries are written: trying again for a resource after a sub-cycle fails means declaring a new lever, with a new number, so a lever never has more than one sub-cycle beneath it; Resumption follows what that leaves open to the actor.

The pairing runs the other way too. Every constituent receives its address in the entry that introduces it, so nothing the record holds is out of reach. The reverse is just as strict: what has no address is not in the record. Folake heard in a corridor that Pieter might buy packaged product in from a sister plant, and she never listed it when she detected his options. It has no address, so no lever can be aimed at it and no reading can show it winning; Detection traces how an unlisted option comes back later disguised as a failed lever. And one thing written two ways is still one thing. An address written in shorthand, or with its steps grouped differently, is read into one form before it is compared, which Nothing Is Overwritten takes up.

What an address leaves out

"The target of the second pursuit" is Wen Hui in Folake's record and someone else in her chief of staff's, because the actor is the context every address is read in. Actor gives the reason, and Across Actors, near the end of the series, takes up what that leaves to whoever combines several records.

Nor does an address promise to appear once. Dev's confirmed price is declared as the second lever's need, tested at the gate and found missing, wanted by the sub-cycle, flowed back, and tested again. Each of those is a separate entry about one address, and the address is what lets them be gathered.

What the actor can do with it

The practical gain is that a reference never needs a meeting to settle what it meant. When Folake and her chief of staff disagree about the film price, they can name its address and then argue about the entries written there, which are fixed. An adviser who reads the record later points at the same things in the same words.

An address also gathers a constituent's history. Every entry at the second lever's address and below it, read in order, is that lever's whole life: declared, its need named, the gate failing, the cycle with Dev, the gate passing, the lever played and Pieter's reading of it. Nobody had to keep that history together, because it was written at one place as it happened. Across pursuits, the same discipline answers questions a nickname cannot carry, such as which levers stalled at their gates and what each sub-cycle was opened to fetch, since every sub-cycle's address says which lever it sits under.