Stances Toward Uncertainty

An executive with two good arguments for a decision has to decide what to do with them before making either. They can make one, watch how it lands and choose the next in light of it. They can settle both at the start and work through them in turn. Or they can settle both, find out everything each one needs, and go and get what is missing before the decision-maker hears any of it. Asked why they work the way they do, most executives describe a temperament: they are cautious, or they like to move fast.

The Lam System for Political Interaction treats the choice as a judgment about something specific. When an actor has more than one lever for the same decision, the order in which they declare the levers, name what each needs and test whether they hold it is a stance toward one uncertainty: whether the levers will be enough. The system recognizes three stances. Each suits a different reading of where that uncertainty lies, and each pays for what it learns early with something it learns late. The system takes whichever one the actor adopts and ranks none of them.

Where a stance comes in

With one lever there is nothing to sequence, because every phase of the cycle fires once in its fixed order. A second lever gets its own pass through the middle of the cycle, from its declaration through what it needs, its gate and its execution to the target's reading of it, and the order inside a pass never varies. What varies is when each pass begins and how far it runs before the next one starts, and that is what a stance decides. The Maneuver sets out why the rest of the shape is fixed.

Three ways to run one maneuver

Illustrative. The people and the company are invented. Celia Brandão runs the fleet at a car rental company and wants the chief financial officer, Viktor Ekdahl, to approve replacing a third of the airport fleet with electric cars at the next renewal, with the budget and the choice of models under her. Her preferred position is that Viktor approves. His adverse alternatives are to renew the fleet as it stands, or to approve a trial at a single airport. She has two levers in view. One is to show Viktor that the electric models' resale values have held, using auction results that belong to the remarketing manager, Joel Nwosu. The other is to bring Viktor a charging company's offer to fund the airport chargers, which needs a signed term sheet from the company's partnerships lead, Anouk Verhoeven. Celia holds neither the results nor the term sheet.

Run adaptively, the maneuver starts with the resale lever alone. Celia names what it needs, finds that the gate fails, escalates to Joel, gets the results and puts the case to Viktor. He reads it as settling the resale question and still prefers the trial, because the chargers would cost capital he has not budgeted. The perception fails. Only now does Celia declare the charger lever, aimed at the concern the reading brought out, and take it through its gate, a sub-cycle with Anouk and an execution. Viktor reads the second case as she projected, and approves.

With the careful stance, both levers are declared at the start. Celia names the resale lever's needs, fetches the results, plays the lever and reads Viktor, and only then turns to what the charger lever needs, finds it missing and fetches it.

With the batched stance, she declares both levers and names everything each needs before testing either gate. Both gates fail, one after the other, before Viktor has heard anything. She escalates for one and then the other, since only one sub-cycle runs at a time, and then plays both levers.

All three runs take twelve steps, make the same four declarations and two escalations, and end with Viktor approving. They differ in where the declarations fall. Celia first sees how Viktor reads her case at the sixth step in the adaptive run, the seventh in the careful run and the eleventh in the batched one. In the batched run she knows both of the resources she lacks by the sixth step, and in the other two not until the ninth. The numbers in the cells count the levers she has committed to and not yet seen read: never more than one in the adaptive run, two for five steps in the careful run, and two for nine steps in the batched one.

What each stance buys, and what it pays

The adaptive stance bets that the uncertainty is in the target. The actor does not know which of the target's concerns will decide the matter, so a second lever committed before the first has landed would be chosen blind. Each reading informs the next lever, and a lever the target turns out not to need is never declared, so its resources are never fetched and nobody holding them learns of the plan. Had Viktor's first reading validated, Celia would have closed with one lever and one sub-cycle. What it costs is paid in front of the target. A lever declared alone is asked to carry the whole decision, so a failed reading is how this stance ordinarily learns, and every failed reading is a lever already played and its resources already spent, while the target decides on their own clock.

With the careful stance, the actor bets that the levers are known and the uncertainty is in the resources. They have read the target well enough to commit to the set, perhaps because the target has said what worries them, and they spend effort on each lever's resources only when that lever comes up. Each lever is projected to do its part and no more, and if the first lever's reading makes the second unnecessary, the second can be given up before anything has gone into fetching for it. The weakness is late discovery. Celia learns that she lacks the term sheet after Viktor has seen half her case, and a target who has heard one argument and is waiting for the other has started to form a view.

The batched stance bets that the uncertainty is in whether the plan can be resourced at all, so the actor finds every shortfall and goes after all of them before the target hears anything. Celia shows Viktor nothing until she knows the whole bill, and had Anouk refused to sign, Celia could have rethought the plan with nothing yet spent on Viktor. Here the cost comes first. Every holder of a missing resource learns what the maneuver is attempting before the target does, so Joel and Anouk both know before Viktor has heard a word, and a resource fetched for a lever that later proves unnecessary has cost what it cost.

Any of the three can be the cautious choice. The adaptive actor risks least before learning about the target, and the batched actor risks least before learning about the resources. What separates them is a judgment about which ignorance costs more to carry: not knowing how the target will read the case, or not knowing whether the case can be built.

Why the system receives the stance

The system's rules leave the order open where it belongs to the actor. A lever can be declared at the outset, after another lever, after an execution or after a perception fails. Resourcing a declared lever is a standing option until its gate is tested, and when two gates have failed, the actor picks which to escalate first. Each stance is a path through those openings, and so are mixtures of them, such as two levers declared at the start and a third added after a failed reading.

The rules are permissive here for the same reason they are permissive at the readings. Whether the uncertainty sits in the target or in the resources is a fact about Viktor, Joel and Anouk, known to Celia as far as anyone knows it and absent from the record. A system that chose the stance would be claiming to know where the uncertainty lies, about people it has never met, and one that made any stance awkward to write would have chosen just as surely. The system holds itself to a strict test here: an open choice counts as the actor's only if every legitimate way of proceeding can be written through it, so a rule that left the adaptive actor no way to be recorded would be a defect. Interpretation and Sequencing takes up that test and the forks it governs.

The stance is chosen afresh in each cycle. A sub-cycle is a cycle, and one with several levers of its own faces the same question a level down, so Celia could plan everything for Viktor and still adapt with Joel.

What the record shows about a stance

Since all three runs reach the same close, the outcome cannot show which stance was taken. The record can. Each declaration is written at the moment it is made, so where every lever and every requirement fell relative to the gates and the readings can be read from it afterward.

That changes how an actor reads their own failures, because each stance leaves its own pattern of failed entries. The adaptive record shows failed perceptions, since a lever declared alone is asked to do the whole job and often does only part of it. In the batched record, gates fail in a row at the start, because testing every gate first is how that stance finds the whole bill. The careful record shows a shortfall surfacing in the middle, at a lever the target is already waiting for. Each pattern is the stance working as intended. An actor who counted failed perceptions without looking at where the levers were declared would mistake an adaptive habit for a habit of misreading targets. The projection behind each failed perception still counts when the actor checks how well they read people; the stance explains why there were more of them. Of the seven illustrative patterns below, four are a stance at work and three point at a judgment.

The record can also show whether a stance fitted the situation. An adaptive actor whose first levers keep failing on concerns the target had stated in advance was adapting to an uncertainty that was not there, and paid for it in front of the target. A batched actor who keeps fetching resources for levers they later give up was buying certainty about a plan larger than the decision needed. Across many cycles, an actor who takes the same stance whatever they know going in will find that as well, in declarations that fall in the same places from one target to the next.