Lena Ortiz's second lever puts the controller's signature on the savings figure before the figure reaches Daniel Okafor, her freight company's chief operating officer. When Lena writes down what that lever needs, she writes one phrase: Priya Natarajan's sign-off on the savings figure. A few entries later the gate fails, a sub-cycle opens, and its interest is that phrase exactly. What the sub-cycle with Priya would be for was settled when Lena named the lever's need, before she knew she lacked it.
In The Lam System for Political Interaction this declaration is the required resources. It sits between choosing a lever and testing it, and from there it gives the gate its only question, fixes what the lever will spend when it is played, and, if the actor comes up short, writes the aim of the next cycle down. How well it does each depends on the words the actor chose, and on when they chose them.
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 ResourcesThis essayθ / 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 a lever needs
A lever forecasts a shift in how the target weighs the options, and a shift of that kind is made with something: a set of figures, a relationship, a signature, an authority. The required resources are those means, declared for one lever: what the actor must hold for the lever to make its change in the target's decision matrix. The actor declares them, and only the actor; the target has no part in this step.
They are declared lever by lever, and a lever may need more than one. Lena's first lever, the case that one desk would cut Daniel's overtime, needs two things: the overtime data, and her standing with Daniel. Her second needs one. Each need sits under its own lever in the record, with an address of its own, so the overtime data under the first lever and the sign-off under the second can never be mistaken for each other, and a reader can always say which lever a resource was named for.
Detection, the objective and the lever itself are all claims about the target: who decides, what they will choose, how they will see the options. Required resources are the one step in choosing levers that turns to the actor and asks what the actor has.
When the need is named
The order of the cycle fixes that a lever's required resources come after the lever and before its gate. Between those two points, the moment is the actor's to choose. A need can be named the moment its lever is declared, after the actor has declared other levers, or after another lever has been played and read. The system records whichever the actor does.
Lena named the first lever's needs at once. She named the second lever's only after she had played the first and watched Daniel take it. Had she named both at the start and tested the second lever's gate first, the sub-cycle with Priya could have run before she ever sat down with Daniel. Naming late has its own advantage: by the time she came to the second lever, she knew how Daniel had read the first, and could have found that the second needed more, or less, than she would have guessed at the outset.
The choice decides when a shortfall is discovered, and so how much time the actor has to do something about it. A target goes on with their own work while the actor fetches a resource, and a sub-cycle that starts late may return after the decision has been made. Actors handle this according to their stance toward uncertainty, which has an essay of its own; the system takes no view.
The symbol and one line
Required resources are written with the lowercase Greek theta, θ, when the actor declares them, and the lowercase Latin q when the record points at what was declared. The declaration for Lena's second lever reads:
Read aloud: the actor declares the required resources of the second lever, under the objective of the only interest on the agenda, and the declaration names one thing, that lever's only required resource. The dot after q says there is one; a lever that needed two would number them.
Lowercase theta is one lever's need. Uppercase theta, Θ, is everything the actor currently holds. The gate sets the lowercase against the uppercase and asks whether everything in the first is in the second. And lowercase q, what a lever requires, has an uppercase partner, Q, what a closed cycle obtained. A sub-cycle opened by a failed gate begins wanting a lowercase q and, if it succeeds, closes with an uppercase Q that is the same resource.
What the declaration decides
The gate, which has its own essay, tests what was listed. It checks every resource the lever was declared to need, all of them, and nothing else, so a resource the actor forgot to name can never fail it, and a short list produces a pass that means less than it appears to. Execution spends what was listed: when a lever is played, the resources declared for it leave what the actor holds, one of each, so the declaration sets the lever's price before it is paid.
If the gate fails, the missing resource becomes the interest of the sub-cycle, in the words the declaration used. The sub-cycle wants exactly that, and when it delivers, the parent's gate finds it by the same address. This is what makes the handback mechanical: no one has to judge whether what came back is close enough to what was needed, because the need and the delivery have one name.
One phrase, followed through Lena's record
Illustrative. The people and the company are invented. The need Lena wrote under her second lever, Priya's sign-off on the savings figure, at each entry that uses it, in order. Select a step to see what happens to the phrase there.
Declared
- Whose entry
- Lena
- What happens to the phrase
- Lena writes it under the second lever as that lever's only need, after she has played the overtime case and watched Daniel read it. From here it is what the gate will test and what the lever will spend.
Gate fails
- Whose entry
- The cycle
- What happens to the phrase
- The gate looks for it among what Lena holds and does not find it. Nothing is spent. Lena escalates, and Daniel's cycle waits at its gate.
Sub-cycle's interest
- Whose entry
- Lena
- What happens to the phrase
- The sub-cycle with Priya wants exactly this phrase. Lena chose its words at the declaration, before she knew she lacked it.
Flows back
- Whose entry
- Lena
- What happens to the phrase
- Priya signs, the sub-cycle closes, and the sign-off joins what Lena holds under the same name.
Gate passes
- Whose entry
- The cycle
- What happens to the phrase
- Daniel's cycle picks up at its gate, which finds the sign-off by the name it was declared under. Nobody has to judge whether what came back is close enough.
Spent
- Whose entry
- Lena
- What happens to the phrase
- The signed figure goes to Daniel, and the sign-off leaves what Lena holds, one for one, as declared.
How the declaration goes wrong
A list can be too short. Suppose Lena had framed her second lever as putting the savings figure in front of Daniel, and named only the figure, which she holds, without Priya's signature on it. The gate passes, she plays the lever, and Daniel asks whose number it is. The shortfall surfaces in the meeting, where Lena can no longer go and fetch anything. The omission leaves no entry: the record shows a lever that passed its gate and a perception that came out wrong, and nothing at the point where the mistake was made.
A need named too broadly fails differently. "Finance's support" sounds like a reasonable thing for the second lever to need, but no gate can be tested against it, because nobody can say when it is held. If the gate fails, the sub-cycle inherits the vagueness: it wants finance's support, and it could win a warm meeting with Priya and still leave Lena without the one signature Daniel would ask about.
The list can also hold the wrong thing. A lever cannot need Daniel's approval, because his approval is the selection the lever is meant to bring about, and a lever that requires its own result could never pass its gate. Nor can it carry the next level's need. Lena's standing with Priya is what she spends in the sub-cycle to get the sign-off, so it belongs to the lever in that sub-cycle. Listed under the parent's lever, it would be charged to the lever that went to Daniel, which never used it.
What the record teaches
Because the record overwrites nothing, every declaration stays where it was written, beside what followed it. Over time the comparison shows how well the actor prices their own levers.
One signal is a lever added after a perception fails, whose required resources include something an earlier lever could have used. If Lena's overtime case had landed badly because Daniel wanted to know whether finance agreed, and her next lever needed Priya's sign-off, the record would hold the evidence that the first lever was under-priced: what was missing from it turned up as the need of its replacement. When the pairing recurs across maneuvers, the record also shows which kind of resource the actor keeps leaving off: the signature from another function, say, or data another team owns.
An actor whose gates keep failing for resources they named at the outset has the opposite profile: their prices are right and their holdings are thin. The two profiles call for different work, one on how levers are priced and one on what is held before a maneuver starts, and anyone looking only at results would see the same thing in both: levers that did not carry the decision.