Every step of Lena Ortiz's maneuver leads to one moment: Daniel Okafor, the chief operating officer, decides whether the night dispatch desks move onto her budget. It is the step everything else in the cycle exists for, and it is the one step she cannot take. In The Lam System for Political Interaction that moment is the selection, and it belongs to the target alone.
None of the actor's levers is aimed at it. Each lever is aimed at the target's comparison of the options, and the selection follows from the comparison as the target sees it. The system has no say over what the target chooses. Its one rule about the selection concerns timing: the choice is written last, after the levers. Daniel still decides when he decides. The rule governs the record, which has to account for every lever before it can hold his choice.
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.
- SelectionThis essayΣ / 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 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 selection is
Selection is the target's choice among the options in the decision matrix. The Greek capital sigma, Σ, is the act of selecting; the Latin S is the selection as something the record can point to. The capital marks an act taken across the whole matrix, since a target chooses among all the options at once.
Its address sits under the target, beside the matrix. Perception, the target's reading of the options, sits inside the matrix, because it is a reading of it. The selection is made from the matrix and is not one of its parts, so it hangs from the target directly. The matrix is the target's situation as the actor has described it, and the selection is what the target does with it.
Only the target selects, and an entry that attributes a selection to the actor, or to anyone else, is refused. Daniel chooses among the options as he sees them, for reasons that are his, and the choice depends on nothing but his own agency.
That is why no lever touches the selection. Lena's objective projects one: that Daniel approves. The objective is a forecast, though, and her two levers are aimed at his comparison: one at what approval would do about his overtime, the other at whose name stands behind the savings figure. Influence in this system runs from a lever to a perception and from a perception to a selection, and the actor reaches the choice only through the target's view of the options.
The same holds one level down. In the sub-cycle Lena opened for the sign-off, Priya Natarajan's signature is a selection: she chose between signing and declining, over a matrix of her own, and her choice waited until Lena's one lever there had been read.
The one line
The selection is written as the position it yields:
Read aloud: the target of the only interest performs the selection over his decision matrix, and it yields, in the selection, the only preferred position. The argument in the brackets is the matrix itself, so the line says that Daniel chose over all the options. The arrow reads "yields". The path on the right puts the position inside the selection, which gives it a different address from the same position as an option in the matrix.
This clause appears twice in a finished record. Primed, inside the objective near the top of the cycle, it is Lena's forecast of Daniel's choice. Unprimed, inside the outcome near the bottom, it is the choice he made. When Daniel decides, the record marks the moment, and the clause saying what he chose is carried into the outcome, where it sits at the same address as the forecast and differs from it by the prime.
When a selection can be written
The selection waits until every live lever has been read or set aside. In Lena's maneuver that meant a long wait. The overtime case was played and Daniel's reading of it recorded. The second lever's gate failed, a sub-cycle with Priya ran to get her sign-off, the gate passed on the retest, the signed figure went to Daniel, and his reading of that was recorded too. Only then could his approval be written.
Once the condition holds, the selection is the only entry the cycle can take next. The actor has nothing to decide at that point. Every choice that bears on the selection's timing was made earlier: which lever to play next, whether to add another, whether to set one aside.
The passage is one-way. After the selection, nothing in the middle of the cycle can happen again. No lever can be declared, resourced, tested, played or read. The cycle runs on to its outcome, the target's gain, the close and the flow back, and whatever Lena still has in mind for Daniel belongs to a later cycle.
The reason for the wait is the unit. A cycle has one target and one decision, and the target decides once, on the comparison as all the levers have left it. A selection written while a lever was still live would claim that the lever had no bearing on a decision it was meant to shape, and the record would have no way to say whether that was true.
When the target decides first
Targets do not wait for the record. Suppose Daniel had been ready to approve on the overtime case alone, before Lena had even named what her second lever needed. The decision is his to make whenever he likes. The record cannot hold it while the second lever is live, so Lena has to say what became of that lever. She moots it: the lever stays on the record as declared, an entry says it was set aside, and with nothing left in play, Daniel's selection is written.
If Daniel had decided on the overtime case alone
Illustrative. The people and the company are invented, and this is a variant of Lena's maneuver in which Daniel is ready to decide before the second lever is played. Each row is one entry in the record, in the order it was written.
Cycle: Lena and Daniel
- OpenThe cycleA new cycle opens under Lena's agenda.
- InterestActorLena wants the dispatch budget and the authority over the desks.
- DetectionActorDaniel decides: he can approve the move, leave dispatch with the depot managers, or hand it to the automation program.
- ObjectiveActorDaniel approves, and the desks and their budget come to Lena.
- IntentionActorFirst lever: show Daniel that one desk cuts the overtime he has been criticized for.
- IntentionActorSecond lever: have Priya sign off the savings figure.
- Required resourcesActorThe first lever needs the overtime data and Lena's standing with Daniel.
- Gate passesThe cycleLena holds both.
- ExecutionActorThe overtime case goes to Daniel.Spent: the overtime dataSpent: some of her standing with Daniel
- PerceptionTargetDaniel reads one desk as cutting the overtime his critics keep raising, as the first lever projected.
- Moot leverActorDaniel is ready to decide now. The second lever, never resourced or played, is set aside and stays on the record as declared.
- SelectionTargetWith every live lever read or set aside, Daniel chooses: he approves the move.
- OutcomeThe cycleThe approval is fact, and the cycle's objective has come true.
- Obtained utilityTargetDaniel gains lower overtime and a cleaner organization.
- CloseThe cycleThe cycle closes. Nothing more can be added to its levers.
- Flow backActorLena holds the dispatch budget and the authority over the desks.Returned: the dispatch budget and the authority over the desks
A reader of that record a year later sees that the second lever was declared, never resourced and never played, and that the decision came first. A record that let the selection through without the moot would leave the second lever hanging, and a reader could take it for either of two maneuvers that never happened. In one, Lena played the signed figure and it made no difference. In the other, she never thought of Priya at all.
How it goes wrong
One error is treating something near the selection as the selection. A word from someone close to Daniel that dispatch is moving, or a budget line that shifts before he has decided, is evidence about what he will choose. The choice is still his to make, and a record that writes it on someone else's signal has attributed his act to whoever sent the signal.
The opposite error is waiting for a selection that has already been made. Doing nothing is always one of a target's options, and a target who lets the matter drift has usually chosen it. If Daniel never answers, dispatch stays with the depot managers, which is the first adverse alternative, chosen by default. An actor who goes on treating the cycle as open is reading the absence of an announcement as the absence of a choice.
Reading the selection as a verdict on the levers goes wrong in a subtler way. Daniel approved, and both of Lena's levers had been read as projected, so it is tempting to say the levers won it. The selection says what Daniel chose. The perceptions say how each lever moved his comparison, and only they can say which lever did the work, if either did.
Treating a selection as revisable loses something too. Daniel can change his mind next quarter and hand dispatch back to the depots. In the record that is a second decision, and a second decision is a second cycle with its own detection and its own levers. The first cycle closed on his approval and stays closed. An actor who edits the old cycle to show the reversal has lost the fact that the approval happened, and with it the chance to learn what changed between the two decisions.
What the actor learns
The plainest lesson is the comparison with the objective: the forecast at the top of the cycle beside the choice at the bottom, at one address, which the outcome makes possible.
A quieter one comes from the moots. An actor whose targets keep deciding before the last lever is played will find, across many records, a run of levers declared and set aside unplayed. The pattern says the actor is declaring more levers than the target's decisions leave time for, or declaring them in an order that leaves the strongest for last. An actor whose cycles always wait on one final lever has the opposite habit. In any single maneuver the early decision looks like luck and the long wait looks like diligence.