Lena Ortiz's preferred position is that Daniel Okafor approves the move: the night dispatch desks come out of the depots and onto her budget. She chose it for where it leads. Approval brings her the dispatch budget and control of the desks, which is what she opened the maneuver to get.
That is how The Lam System for Political Interaction defines the preferred position: the option, among those open to the target, that leads to the outcome the actor wants. The definition belongs to the actor, and the option belongs to the target, carrying the target's benefits and costs like any other. When the cycle closes on it, the system writes down what the target gained, and what it writes is the preferred position's utility to the target, as realized. The preferred position is therefore the actor's offer as much as the actor's aim, and the record states its terms at the close.
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 PositionThis essayπ / 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.
One option, two gains
Lena's gain and Daniel's come out of the same option, one both of them came to favor for their own reasons. If Daniel approves, Lena obtains the budget and the authority, and Daniel obtains lower overtime and a cleaner organization. The two gains differ in kind, and the system keeps them at different addresses: hers flows back into what she holds, and his is the utility he realized from his own choice.
An actor who treats the preferred position only as a destination writes down the half they care about and estimates the other half loosely, if at all. The target selects on the other half. Daniel will approve if, as he sees it, approval is worth more to him than leaving dispatch with the depots or handing it to the automation program, and Lena's gaining a budget enters that comparison only as something it gives or costs him. The levers, which the system calls intentions, can move the comparison, but every lever starts from what the preferred position is already worth to Daniel, and a position worth little to him leaves the levers to carry the whole difference.
The cost side is the one actors tend to underrate. A preferred position is a whole option, and its costs to the target sit in it beside its benefits. In many maneuvers one of those costs is the very thing the actor wants. Moving the desks onto Lena's budget takes a budget line away from the depots, and Daniel is the one who will answer to the depot managers for it. What Lena counts as her gain, Daniel counts among the costs of approving. An actor who writes nothing in that cell, because from their side it is the point of the exercise, has misjudged the option by the size of what they are asking for.
The same holds one level down. In the sub-cycle Lena opens for the controller's sign-off, the preferred position is that Priya Natarajan signs, and what Priya gains by signing is that option's worth to her: a savings claim finance has tested before it reaches the chief operating officer. Lena's lever there, walking Priya through how the figure was built, works by making signing worth more to Priya, and the record writes what she gained as the utility of the preferred position in her own matrix.
Named, never performed
Nobody performs the preferred position. The system writes it with the lowercase Greek pi, π, and the Latin P, and the Greek form never takes an argument. It is a name only, a member of the target's decision matrix. The lowercase marks a single thing, one position in one matrix, where the matrix that holds it takes the capital.
It is still the busiest address in a cycle. Detection names it. The objective projects that the target's selection will yield it. Each lever projects that its utility will come out ahead of an alternative's, and each perception records whether, in the target's reading, it did. The outcome records the selection that yielded it, and the target's obtained utility is its utility realized. The adverse alternatives appear in detection and in the comparisons. Only the preferred position appears in the objective, the outcome and the target's gain, so what the actor projected at the start and what the target realized at the end are both written at its address.
Where approval is written in Lena's cycle
Illustrative. The people and the company are invented. The six kinds of entry that write the preferred position, Daniel approving the move, in the order they come. Select one to see what it says about approval and whether it is a forecast or a fact.
Detection
- Whose entry
- Lena
- What it says about approval
- Approving the move is the option that leads to the budget and the desks. It is named beside the depots and automation, and nothing yet is said about what it is worth to Daniel.
- Forecast or fact
- Neither. It is a label, Lena's word for one of Daniel's options.
Objective
- Whose entry
- Lena
- What it says about approval
- Daniel's selection will yield it.
- Forecast or fact
- A forecast, marked as projected.
Levers
- Whose entry
- Lena
- What it says about approval
- Once the lever lands, approval will be worth more to Daniel than one alternative: the depots for the overtime case, automation for the signed figure.
- Forecast or fact
- A forecast for each lever, marked as projected.
Perceptions
- Whose entry
- Daniel
- What it says about approval
- After each lever, whether approval now comes out ahead of the alternative that lever was aimed at. Lena judges whether each reading matched its projection, and in her maneuver both do.
- Forecast or fact
- A reading, Daniel's, with Lena's verdict on it.
Outcome
- Whose entry
- The cycle
- What it says about approval
- Daniel's selection yielded it, and the desks move onto Lena's budget.
- Forecast or fact
- A fact, at the position the objective forecast.
Daniel's gain
- Whose entry
- Daniel
- What it says about approval
- What approval is worth to him, now realized: lower overtime and a cleaner organization.
- Forecast or fact
- A fact. The worth he weighed before choosing is now his.
The address and one line
Read aloud: the utility, to the target, of the only preferred position in the target's decision matrix, under the target of the agenda's only interest. The same address turns up three times in a cycle that closes. With a prime, inside each lever, it is the actor's projection of what the position will be worth to the target once the lever has landed. Without one, in the perception, it is that worth as the target read it. And it is the whole content of the target's obtained utility, which the target performs when the cycle closes: what Daniel gained is written as this address.
The dot after the P says there is only one. When an actor would settle for more than one outcome, the matrix holds more than one preferred position, numbered P1, P2 and so on, each with cells of its own, and the numbers tell them apart within that matrix and nowhere else.
More than one position
Suppose Lena would also accept a smaller outcome, in which Daniel moves a single desk onto her budget as a trial and the rest follow if it works. That option leads to part of what she wants, so it belongs in the matrix as a second preferred position, and it is a different offer. It asks less of Daniel, since one desk is an easier conversation with the depot managers than all of them, and it gives Lena less.
Naming the trial as a position changes what the record can say. The objective projects which preferred position the selection will yield. If Lena projects full approval and Daniel selects the trial, the record holds both: the position she projected and, at a different address, the one he chose, and the distance between them says how far she expected him to go. Without the second position, the same selection would have nowhere to sit. It would be neither the position she named nor an alternative she feared, and she would have to file a partial win as one or the other.
The numbering keeps the offers apart as well. Each preferred position has its own benefit and cost to the target, so a lever that makes full approval more attractive to Daniel may do nothing for the trial, or may make the trial look like the sensible middle course. With both positions named, each lever's projection says which position it is meant to carry ahead, and Lena can see from the record whether her levers were working for the outcome she projected or for the fallback.
How it goes wrong
An actor can name a position that leads exactly where they want and offers the target too little to choose. Every lever then has to make up the gap, each spending something, and the maneuver either costs more than the interest is worth or fails with every lever well made. The fault is in the offer, and the record shows it at the levers, as perceptions that keep falling short, so the actor may go on adding levers to an option that needed redesigning. Redesigning it takes a revision, which gives the cycle's interest a new body at the same address and then runs detection and the objective again, so the target's options can be written afresh.
The cost of the actor's own gain can also go unrecorded, as with the depot budget above. Then the matrix shows the preferred position comfortably ahead when to the target it is close. The actor projects an easy perception, and when the target hesitates, reads the hesitation as resistance to the levers, though it is the price of the position itself.
What the record shows about offers
At every close the record writes what the target gained from choosing the actor's position, at the address of that position's utility. Part of that gain was in the option before the actor did anything. Part of it the actor put there, because a lever that works on the preferred position spends a resource to make the option worth more to the target, and the execution records that effect. Lena's overtime data, spent on the first lever, is part of what made approval worth choosing for Daniel, and so part of what he gained.
Read together, the executions and the target's gain show how much of each gain the actor paid for. Over many cycles they show which kind of maneuver the actor tends to run: finding positions already worth the target's choosing, or spending to make a position worth choosing. Both can win decisions. The second is more expensive, and the expense is in the record, at the cells each execution changed.