Lena Ortiz has written down the decision she means to change. Daniel Okafor, the chief operating officer of her freight company, can approve moving the night dispatch desks onto her budget, leave them with the depot managers, or hand them to the automation program. Against each of the three she has noted what it would give Daniel and what it would cost him. Approval brings the cut in overtime that one desk can deliver, and a fight with the depot managers who run dispatch now. Leaving things alone asks nothing new of him and leaves the overtime, and the criticism he takes for it, where they are. Automation promises savings of its own, in Lena's reading later and less certain.
The Lam System for Political Interaction calls this the decision matrix, and files it under Daniel: its address runs through him, as the target, before it reaches the matrix. It is his decision, and almost nothing in it comes from him. Lena named the options, and every benefit and cost in it is her appraisal. Daniel's part is to read the comparison once her levers, which the system calls intentions, have landed, and to choose. Neither act reports a single cell: his reading says which option now comes out ahead, and his choice says which one won. So the matrix every lever is aimed at is one the actor never sees from Daniel's side, except as the direction in which it tipped.
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 MatrixThis essayΔ / 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.
What the matrix holds
The decision matrix is the target's choice laid out as a grid, with the options open to the target down one side and two considerations across the other. The considerations are benefit, the favorable conditions an option brings the target, and cost, what the option requires the target to spend or give up. Each option's benefit net of its cost is its utility to the target, and the target chooses by comparing utilities.
The options are of two kinds. The preferred position leads to what the actor wants, and the adverse alternatives lead away from it. A matrix needs at least two options, since a target with one has nothing to decide, so even the smallest has four cells: what the preferred position gives and costs the target, and what the alternative gives and costs. Every option is whole. The preferred position carries its costs to the target along with its benefits, and an actor who leaves those cells blank because it is the option they want has left out part of what the target weighs.
The matrix also holds the target's perception. Its address sits inside the matrix, beside the options, because a perception is a reading of the matrix: how the target sees the options' worth against each other. The selection sits one level up, under the target and beside the matrix, because it is a verdict on the matrix as a whole, the moment the comparison stops being read and becomes a choice.
Nobody performs it
Detection, the objective and each lever are acts. Someone performs each of them at a moment, and the record writes an entry when they do. The matrix is written with the capital Greek delta, Δ, and the Latin D, and the Greek form never appears with an argument, the way an operation would. Nobody performs the matrix: not the actor, not the target and not the cycle. It is a name only, a place where acts land. The capital marks it as the whole grid, where detection's lowercase δ marks the single event that names the grid's members.
Several acts write into that place. Detection names its options. Each lever, when it is executed, records its effect on the matrix, so Lena's overtime case adds to what approval gives Daniel. Daniel's perception is written at an address inside it, and his selection reads it whole.
The matrix therefore has no entry of its own in the record. At any moment it is what the entries written so far add up to, and any earlier state of it can be rebuilt by reading the record up to that point, as The Record sets out. It follows that the matrix holds what the actor wrote and nothing else. If Lena hears in a corridor that Daniel has promised the depot managers a quiet year, and never writes it in as a cost of approval, her matrix does not contain it, however well she remembers it.
The address and one line
Because the matrix is a place, it appears in the notation only inside addresses. Here is one cell of Lena's matrix, and the address of Daniel's reading:
Read aloud, the first: the cost to the target of the second adverse alternative in the target's decision matrix, under the target of the agenda's only interest. That is what handing dispatch to the automation program would ask of Daniel. The second: the target of that interest performs the perception, and its address lies inside his own decision matrix. The D appears in both as a step on a path and in neither as something done. The cell's address carries no value. What the cell holds is Lena's appraisal, in words, and the system keeps the address exact so that the appraisal can be pointed to later.
What the target supplies
Daniel's perception is a comparison. It says whether the preferred position's utility now comes out ahead of an alternative's, and the actor sets it beside the comparison the lever projected. It does not say what any cell holds. When Daniel reads the overtime case as the lever projected, Lena learns that approval now beats leaving dispatch with the depots in his eyes. She does not learn that it does so because of the overtime.
The selection reports less again: which option won. Between them, these two acts carry everything the target contributes to the matrix, and both are about the ordering. Every cell stays the actor's appraisal from the moment it is written until the close.
Who supplies each entry in Daniel's decision matrix
Illustrative. The people and the company are invented. Entries that make up Daniel's decision matrix in Lena's maneuver: guess who supplies each one, then select it to see why.
Select each item to see the verdict.
Lena's detection names the options. Daniel may never have thought of the matter as a choice between three things.
A benefit cell, written as the effect of Lena's first lever when it is executed. It is her appraisal of what approval gives him.
A cost cell of the preferred position. Lena writes it because the option is whole, costs and all, even though it is the one she wants.
A cost cell of the first adverse alternative, in Lena's appraisal. Daniel never states it.
A benefit cell of the second adverse alternative, as Lena reads it. Its sponsor would write it differently.
The effect of Lena's second lever, recorded when it is executed. It is still her account of how the option changed.
Daniel's perception, written at an address inside the matrix. It is an ordering of the options, and it reports no cell.
Daniel's selection. It sits under him, beside the matrix, as a verdict on the whole grid, and it says only which option won.
- Supplied by Daniel
- 2 of 8
Of the eight entries in the figure, two come from Daniel, and neither of them is a cell.
The arrangement matches how political work goes, since targets rarely say how they weigh a decision and often could not if asked. The system keeps the actor's appraisal where it can be checked against the only evidence the target gives, and it keeps that evidence in the form it arrives in: an ordering, set beside a projected ordering.
How it goes wrong
If Daniel weighs something Lena never put in the matrix, perhaps the depot managers' standing with the chief executive, and his reading comes out against her, her matrix has no cell to blame, so she blames one it does have, usually the one her lever worked on, and concludes that the overtime case was weak.
The ordering can also come out as projected for a reason the matrix does not hold. Suppose Daniel favors the desks because the automation program's sponsor has fallen out of favor that month. His perception matches Lena's projection, the cycle closes in her favor, and the record shows a lever that worked. She will reach for the overtime data with Daniel again, trusting a cell that may have done nothing, because a perception that matches its projection confirms the ordering and says nothing about which cell moved it.
Arithmetic can go wrong as well. If Lena wrote the overtime saving into what approval gives Daniel, and also wrote the continuing overtime into what leaving the depots costs him, she would have counted one difference twice. Each cell would be accurate, and the gap between the two options would look wider than it is. The system cannot catch this. It keeps the cells as the actor writes them, and the weighing is the actor's.
What a run of matrices shows
Matrices kept from cycle to cycle become evidence about the actor's appraisals, though indirectly, through the orderings they predicted. One perception that matches its projection says little about any cell. The same kind of cell, worked by levers aimed at different targets and read as projected time after time, says more: the appraisal behind it is probably sound. Several failed perceptions in cycles where the actor's matrix had the preferred position comfortably ahead point to a consideration the actor keeps leaving out, and because the record holds each matrix as it stood, the actor can look across them for the cell that is never there.
The same holds for one target over time. Lena will decide other things with Daniel. Each matrix she writes for him is a small model of how he weighs a decision, and each selection he makes tests it. Over a year the record holds a run of those models beside his choices, and the considerations Lena keeps writing for Daniel that his choices never seem to answer to can be read off it.