Revising Mid-Cycle

Executives change their aims in the middle of political work often, and usually for good reasons: they learn that the decision-maker can give more than they asked for, or less, or something slightly different. What they rarely do is say so at the time. One common response is to press on with the original ask, because changing it looks like weakness. The other is to change course without telling anyone, and later describe whatever was won as what was wanted all along. The first wastes the information. The second destroys it, and the executive who does it can no longer tell, a year on, which of their aims they actually set and which they arrived at.

The Lam System for Political Interaction gives the change of aim its own move. To revise is to give the cycle's aim a new statement while the cycle is open, written into the record as an entry of its own, at the moment the actor makes it. The interest, what the cycle was opened to get, keeps its address and takes a new body. The first body stays where it was, marked as superseded. The Record sets out that discipline and what it lets an actor see across a year of cycles. Inside a single cycle, the harder question is what a revision leaves alone.

What a revision rewrites

A revision runs the top of the cycle again. Once the aim has a new body, detection runs again, because a different aim can put a different choice in front of the target: new options, or old ones weighed against something new. The objective follows, projecting the selection that would yield the revised aim. Both new entries are written after the revision, beside the ones they supersede.

A revision leaves the levers alone. It is a change of aim. It has no power to change a lever in place: a lever that ought to be different is declared as a new lever, at a new address, and the old one stays as it was until the actor plays it or sets it aside. How many times a cycle may be revised is the actor's decision, as is how many levers a cycle may carry (the subject of Several Levers in One Cycle), and levers declared before a revision still count toward that number afterward. A cycle revised three times has not been given three fresh allowances of levers.

Levers already in flight

Every lever declared before the revision carries on exactly where it stood. A lever already played stays played, its effect on the target's comparison stands, and what it spent stays spent. A lever waiting at a failed gate still waits. A lever declared and not yet played is still live. The revision moves none of them forward and rewinds none of them.

For the record, nothing else would be right. Those levers were declared, and some of them were played, before the aim changed, and the record is an account of what happened in the order it happened. For the actor, it leaves real work. Each of those levers was chosen against the old aim, and the system has no way to know whether it serves the new one. Some still help, and some have become pointless and can be mooted. A few now argue against the revised aim, and a lever in that position does damage if it is played out of momentum. Deciding which is which, lever by lever, is the actor's judgment, and it is the step an actor in a hurry is most likely to skip.

In the illustrative sorting below, three of the seven things on the record are written again after the revision, and four stay as they were.

A bigger aim, found halfway

Illustrative. The people and the company are invented. Odile Fontaine heads factual programming at a regional broadcaster, and she wants the director of content, Kenji Mori, to commission a six-part documentary series from her team. His adverse alternatives are to commission it from an independent producer, or to commission nothing factual this year. She declares two levers at the outset. The first is to show Kenji the audience her team's last series drew, which needs the audience figures and her standing with him. The second is to show him that a partner broadcaster abroad will co-fund the series, which needs the partner's letter of intent. She holds all of it.

She plays the first lever, and Kenji reads the audience as she projected. Before she plays the second, she learns from the scheduling team that Kenji has been told to fill a weekly factual slot for the next three years and wants one team to own it. What this decision can give her is larger than one series. She revises: the aim becomes the weekly slot for three years. Detection runs again, and Kenji's choice is now different: give the slot to her team, give it to an independent producer on a long contract, or fill it with bought-in programs. The objective follows: Kenji gives her team the slot.

Then she looks at the levers she already has. The audience lever has done its work and still serves; a team that draws an audience is what a weekly slot needs. The co-funding lever is a different matter. A partner's money for a single series would present her team to Kenji as a one-series producer at exactly the moment she needs him to see a team that can run a slot for three years. Played now, it would argue against her. She moots it, and the partner's letter stays in what she holds, unspent. She declares a new lever for the new aim: a three-year staffing and production plan for the slot, which she holds. It passes its gate, she plays it, and Kenji reads it as she projected. He gives her team the slot.

Revising, or starting again

The alternative to revising is to abandon the cycle and open a new one aimed at the new aim. Both are honest, and they leave different records. A revision keeps one account of one decision, with everything already spent attached to the cycle that spent it and the change of aim dated in the middle. Abandoning and reopening leaves two accounts: a first attempt that ended abandoned, and a second that began from nothing.

Which fits is the actor's judgment, and the deciding question is usually whose decision the new aim sits in. Odile's revised aim was still Kenji's to give, so her levers already declared were aimed at the right person and one of them kept working. When what the actor now wants sits in someone else's decision, every lever already declared is aimed at a person who no longer decides the matter, and a new cycle, aimed at whoever does, gives the clearer record. A cycle that has closed, or been mooted or abandoned, cannot be revised at all. After a moot, trying again with a better plan means a new cycle with a new aim. Whether a sub-cycle, opened to fetch one particular resource for its parent, may change its aim is a question the system leaves open; What the System Cannot Yet Represent names it.

Changing the aim and moving the goalposts

On the normal path, what flows back at the close is what the cycle was opened to get. A cycle that closed on something narrower or different from its interest would look, on the record, like a detection error, an aim the actor set against a choice the target was never making. Revision is how an actor changes what will flow back and keeps the match. Odile's cycle returned the weekly slot, which matches the revised interest, and the first interest stands above the revision as superseded, with the reason for the change in between.

This works because of when a revision can be written. It is an entry in sequence, and the record keeps the sequence. A revision written while the levers were still in play shows the actor changing course on what they learned. One written after the target had already chosen would sit below the selection, in plain view, and once the cycle has closed no revision can be written at all. So moving the goalposts after the result can never pass for a change of course: before the close it shows where it fell, and after the close there is no move that writes it.

Reading the entries before a revision

Whatever comes just before a revision says why it happened. When it follows a failed reading of the target, the actor is often settling for what the target seems willing to give; when it follows news from outside the maneuver, as Odile's did, the actor is learning what the decision could hold, and an actor with many revisions can count how many of each kind they make. What comes after matters too. A revision followed by a run of mooted levers means the levers were chosen too closely around the first aim, which is worth knowing before declaring levers in the next cycle.