Political advice usually treats the person being persuaded as the object of the exercise: someone to read, approach and move. In Lena Ortiz's maneuver that person is Daniel Okafor, chief operating officer of the freight company where she heads customer operations, and the decision in front of him is whether the night dispatch desks leave the depots for her budget. Most of what the record holds about the maneuver is hers.
The Lam System for Political Interaction gives Daniel more standing than the advice does. He is the target, the individual who completes the cycle, and three acts in it belong to him alone: he perceives the options, he selects one and he realizes a gain. The actor can project each of them and can perform none. The cycle Lena began cannot end until Daniel has done all three. The system also insists that a cycle has exactly one target. Committees, joint sign-offs and decisions taken together all come apart in the record into one person's selection and other people's resources, and that turns out to be the more accurate description of how such decisions get made.
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.
TargetThis essayτ / 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 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.
The one who completes it
The target is the person whose decision controls the resource the actor wants. The actor initiates the cycle by wanting; the target completes it by choosing. Which option the target chooses is entirely the target's affair. Daniel may lean toward one option from the start, and Lena's levers may change how he weighs them, but the choice is his and the system records it as his.
In the map the target sits under the interest and holds two things: the decision matrix, the options in front of Daniel with what each offers him and asks of him, and his selection among them. The matrix is his in that it describes his choice. Its labels, preferred position and adverse alternative, are Lena's, as the essay on detection explains.
Three acts that only the target performs
Like the actor and the agenda, the target is a name only, with no act of its own. Three acts carry the target's mark, and the system refuses any of them under the actor's: perception, how Daniel sees the options' worth against each other once a lever has landed; selection, his choice; and obtained utility, what he gains from the outcome.
Lena writes a good deal about Daniel before he acts, in her objective and in each lever's projection, and all of it carries her mark, as the essay on the actor sets out. The three acts are where the maneuver reaches Daniel's own judgment, and there the record changes owner.
No cycle, then, is complete on the actor's work alone. Lena can declare, choose her levers, pass every gate and execute every lever, and the cycle stays open until Daniel has read the options and chosen.
The symbol and one line
The target is written with the lowercase Greek tau, τ, and the Latin t. Lowercase marks one person in one cycle. The Greek form never appears, because the target as a constituent has no act. The Latin form appears in addresses and, less obviously, as a signature.
Read aloud: the target of the agenda's only interest performs the selection over that target's decision matrix. The part in square brackets says who acts. For the actor the mark is short, the actor and nothing more, because a record has one actor. The target's mark is an address, the target of this interest, because a record holds a target for every cycle and the mark has to say which one.
Daniel therefore appears in Lena's record as a position within her agenda. The system keeps no entry for Daniel the person, only for the target of this interest. If Lena later pursues something else with him, he is the target of that pursuit as well, at a different address, with readings and a selection of his own there. Gathering what she has learned about Daniel across those cycles is Lena's work. The record keeps each entry where it was written, and the grouping by person is hers.
Priya Natarajan, the controller, shows the same thing inside one maneuver. In the sub-cycle Lena opens to get Priya's sign-off, Priya is the target, with a matrix, a selection and a gain of her own. Seen from the parent cycle, she is the holder of a resource the second lever needs.
One target per interest
A cycle has one target, so a want that depends on two people's decisions is two cycles. If Lena also needs the depot managers to cooperate, that is a second target with a decision of its own, and a second cycle. When the second lever depends on Priya's sign-off, Priya's decision gets a sub-cycle of its own under that lever.
That rules out the joint target. Organizations are full of decisions said to belong to several people: a steering group's recommendation, a change two executives must both agree to. The system puts one question to each: whose selection does the outcome follow from? Suppose Daniel says he will discuss the move with the executive team. If he decides afterward, he is the target, and what the team tells him bears on how he weighs his options. If someone else decides, Daniel was never the target, and detection named the wrong person. Either way, the record has one selection to write.
Is this person the target?
Illustrative. The people and the company are invented. A reading aid for the actor's judgment at detection; the system applies none of it. Try it on Daniel, on Priya and on the executive team Daniel says he will consult: check in order and stop at the first that is not true.
The rule exists because perception and selection have to belong to someone. A perception is one person's reading of the comparison, which Lena sets beside what her lever projected to judge whether the lever did its work. A perception attributed to a group has no single reader for her to watch, and a selection attributed to a group hides whose choice it was. The gains separate the same way. Priya gained a savings claim that finance had tested before it reached the chief operating officer. Daniel gained lower overtime and a cleaner organization. Written as one target's gain, the record could not say what each of them was given, or what each might want the next time.
The addresses carry the same rule. Daniel's options are written under him, as the target's decision matrix, with his perception beneath the matrix, because a set of options is always somebody's choice. Since each interest has one target, an interest has only one matrix under it, and the system can read the common shorthand that skips from the interest straight to the matrix as passing through the one target there is. With two targets under one interest, the same shorthand would point at two matrices, and nothing in it could say which.
How it goes wrong
The joint target is the error the system blocks most directly, and actors still make it in their heads. An actor who thinks of the executive team as the target designs levers for a room. Each lever lands on nobody in particular, and when the decision goes the wrong way there is no single reading to set beside the projection.
Treating the target only as an obstacle is another. The record keeps the target's gain beside the actor's because the target chooses by weighing what each option is worth to the target. Lena obtains the dispatch budget because Daniel obtained something worth choosing, and an actor who cannot say what the target gains has not yet found a reason for the target to select the preferred position. The essay on obtained utility takes this further.
Speaking for the target runs the other way. Lena may write Daniel's reading of the overtime case as favorable because she hoped it would be. The system can refuse her mark on a perception. It cannot check whether the perception she attributes to Daniel is the one he formed. If she writes her hope under his name, the record's comparison of projection and reading sets two of her own entries side by side.
What the actor learns
The target's three entries are the only ones in the record that describe what someone else did. Every other entry is the actor's reasoning or the cycle's own. Read target by target over many maneuvers, those entries become the actor's knowledge of particular people: how Daniel weighs a cost his critics keep raising, what Priya needs before she puts her name to a figure, what each of them gained the last time they said yes. Nothing else in the record holds that knowledge, and none of it can be rebuilt afterward from what the actor intended.