Daniel Okafor has three ways to settle the night dispatch question. He can approve Lena Ortiz's move, leave dispatch with the depot managers, or hand it to the automation program. For Lena the second and third are adverse alternatives: in The Lam System for Political Interaction, the options open to a target that lead away from the outcome the actor wants.
An actor tends to think of the alternatives as the background against which the preferred position is pressed, the things it has to beat. The system writes them more exactly. Every comparison it records, whether a lever (the system's intention) projecting what it will do or the target's perception of what it did, sets the preferred position against one named alternative, by address. Each alternative is therefore half of a test the maneuver has to pass, and the actor writes both halves. A lever can pass the test by working on the alternative's half and leaving the preferred position exactly as it was.
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 AlternativeThis essayψ / 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.
What an alternative is
An adverse alternative is an option the target can select that leads away from what the actor wants. It is a whole option, with its own benefits and costs to the target and so its own utility, and the target weighs it exactly as he weighs the preferred position. The word adverse describes its relation to the actor's interest and nothing else. Leaving dispatch with the depots is adverse to Lena because it leaves her without the desks. It may be the safer course for Daniel, and the automation program may be the better bet for the company.
That is why an alternative has to be written at full strength. Its benefits to the target are whatever the target would see in it, including everything its supporters would say for it. The automation program has a sponsor making its case to Daniel, and the benefit cell Lena writes for it is her account of that case. If she writes it weakly, every lever she plans will look sufficient on paper, and Daniel, who has heard the sponsor's version, will read the comparison differently. If she writes it honestly and the preferred position still cannot be made to come out ahead, the matrix has told her something about her own proposal.
There can be several alternatives, and they are rarely equally bad for the actor. If the depots keep dispatch, nothing is settled for good, and Lena can try again another year. If automation takes it, there may be no desks left to argue about. Part of what makes the maneuver worth its cost to her is the second alternative, which she wants kept off the table as much as she wants the first one beaten. The system numbers the alternatives apart and records nothing about which the actor fears more. That ranking is the actor's judgment, and it decides where the effort goes: Lena would rather lose to the depots than to automation, so the desks against automation is the comparison she can least afford to leave unargued.
A name, and the line it appears in
Nothing in the system acts as the alternative. It is written with the lowercase Greek psi, ψ, and the Latin X, and like the preferred position beside it in the decision matrix it has no operation form: the Greek letter never takes an argument. The lowercase marks one alternative in one matrix. Detection names the alternatives and numbers them, X1 for the depots and X2 for automation in Lena's case, and from then on each appears wherever a comparison is written. A comparison always names its alternative by address, which is what lets the record say which alternative a lever was aimed at and, when a lever misses, which one beat it. A failed perception is written with the comparison the other way around:
Read aloud: the utility to the target of the only preferred position is no greater than the utility to the target of the second adverse alternative, both in the target's decision matrix under the target of the agenda's only interest. With no prime, the line records the target's reading as it came out. It is what Lena's record would hold if the signed figure had landed and Daniel still rated the automation program at least as highly as the desks: a failed reading that names the option it lost to.
One comparison per alternative
With two alternatives, Daniel's choice contains two comparisons, the desks against the depots and the desks against automation, and the preferred position has to come out ahead in both before he will select it. Each lever is aimed at one comparison or at both, and its projection says which. Lena's overtime case projects the desks coming out ahead of the depots; the signed figure is aimed at the desks against automation, which can promise savings too.
Whether detection's list is complete is the actor's judgment, and the system cannot say that an alternative is missing. It can say when an alternative on the list was never argued. If no lever's projection names it, the maneuver needed to win that comparison and never tried, and the system can point to the gap, since the alternative has an address and the comparisons that mention it can be counted.
Where does the comparison with this alternative stand?
Illustrative. The people and the company are invented. A reading aid for the actor's judgment; the system applies none of it. Take one of Daniel's alternatives, the depots or automation, check in order and stop at the first that is not true.
Working on the other half
A comparison has two sides, and a lever can work on either. It can make the preferred position give the target more or ask less of him, or it can make an alternative ask more of him or give him less. Lena's two levers both work on approval: the overtime case adds to what approval gives Daniel, and the signed savings figure takes away one of its costs to him, backing a figure finance has not tested. A lever aimed at the automation program, showing Daniel what the program would ask of him while it was being built, would have worked on the second alternative's row and left approval as it was. The comparison would move all the same. When a lever works on an alternative, its execution records the effect as a change to that alternative's cells: the lever's resource is spent, and the option the actor fears becomes dearer to the target or less attractive.
The two kinds of lever behave differently when there is more than one alternative. A lever that adds to the preferred position moves every comparison at once, since the same option sits on one side of each. A lever that raises the cost of the depots does nothing for the desks against automation. On the other hand, a lever on the alternative asks the target to believe nothing new about the actor's proposal, only to look harder at an option already in front of him, and it does not lean on the actor's standing as an advocate for their own cause, which a target has good reason to discount.
How it goes wrong
An alternative written weakly makes every lever look sufficient. The target's perception then fails, the realized comparison shows the alternative ahead, and the actor looks for the fault in the lever just played. The lever may have been sound, and was measured against a version of the alternative that only the actor believed in.
Argument can also go to the wrong comparison. With two alternatives, an actor can spend heavily against the one the target was never going to choose and leave the live one alone. The record shows the pattern plainly: levers whose projections all name the same alternative, followed by a failed perception against the other.
The sponsor of an alternative is easily mistaken for the alternative. The automation program's sponsor is a person with interests of their own, and Lena may be tempted to treat the maneuver as a contest with them. In her record the sponsor does not appear. The alternative is an option in Daniel's decision, and it is beaten when Daniel's comparison comes out for the desks, whatever the sponsor thinks. If the sponsor is running a maneuver of their own, with Lena's preferred position among their adverse alternatives, that is another actor's cycle, written in another record.
What the record keeps about losses
Because each failed reading names the alternative it lost to, the actor's record comes to hold, for every lever that missed, the option that beat it, beside the cells the actor had written for that option beforehand. Read together, they show which alternatives the actor keeps losing to and how each was underrated. An actor who keeps losing to the option of leaving things as they are, having written it each time as costing the target nothing, is finding out that standing still offers their targets benefits the actor has not been writing down.