Fluent in limits

Want

In ordinary speech one word carries three things, and the word is boundaries. People say they are working on theirs and mean a refusal, or a request, or a thing not yet said out loud at all, and all three leave the mouth in the same tone. Pulled apart, they are three objects.

The want is raw data: what should exist, before it has been said. The term is that want said so another person can meet it, a condition of taking part. The boundary is a stop put on what the other side does.

I stalled at the first of the three for years, and the stall had nothing to do with nerve.

I work with five steps: want, terms, cost, position, action. The order is forced. No term can be written for a want that was never entered, and nothing can be priced before it is clear what is being commissioned.

Even cost counted afterwards, as the distance between the want and the result, needs the want at one end of the tape, or the tape has nowhere to start, so the want cannot be folded into cost. Skip it and everything downstream stops in that place. Enter it and the rest moves fast.

Nothing can come back on a want that stays off the record. If it goes unmet, the silence can be put down to not having asked: nothing was asked, so nothing was refused, and the question stays open, which costs little to carry. Enter the want and it turns binary, met or not met, with no third way for it to come back.

The same silence is then a reply, and the reply is not about the want. It is about the one who wanted, and where that one stands with whoever did not meet it. That is what makes the entry hard.

I kept mine off the record, and nothing came back.

The sadness came in exactly that place, after the pattern was plain and before any cost had a name. I took it for something in the way.

The want is also the end of the tape an event gets measured from. Take it away and nothing that happens has a size, so the reading that gets made is the one that needs none: too much, a large thing made out of a small one. I turned that reading on myself over small things.

It fits a moved meeting as well as a broken agreement, and a reading that comes out the same at every size is not measuring anything.

A want is data, and data goes in without anybody’s second.

Acting on it is a separate matter, decided later, at position, once the ground has been looked at, and nobody grants that either. So what was the want waiting for, all that time, and whose second did I think it needed before it could count?

Term

I wrote my first terms down for a piece of work: the split follows the labour, and the money comes before the delivery. Another of mine has nothing to do with money: what is asked of me moves when my capacity moves. None of them tells the other side what to stop doing, or what kind of person they are.

Each is a condition of being inside the thing at all.

A limit is a sentence about the other side, and a term is a sentence about the conditions I am in.

What a term can do comes from the want it carries. On the record the want was binary, and said across a table it stays binary: met or not met, with the one who hears it deciding which, so the next move is theirs and the one who said it has nothing left to manage. The same two values make it the one step of the five that the other side can refuse.

And the want comes in both layers at once, the emotional one and the business one, which a term keeps in one sentence. The term about capacity is both: it is about what I have left and about what the work asks, and cut into two sentences it would say neither.

Where nothing has been agreed, provision is the default. The one who gives needs nobody’s agreement to start and has no point written in at which to stop, and a default is whatever runs when nobody chose. That is the stay with nothing agreed.

The leave with nothing agreed has no condition to point to, so the one who goes cannot tell it from abandonment, and neither can the one left behind. The two look like opposite failures, and they are one empty seat, seen from inside the arrangement and from the way out of it. A term fills it from both sides.

The stay runs on conditions said out loud, and a leave, if it comes, is a condition that was not met, named before anything started.

A sentence whose subject is somebody else’s conduct is not a term yet, however much it cost to say.

Boundary

A boundary opens with do not, or with stop, and what it talks about is the other side. It is defensive and it is negative, a refusal with an exit folded inside it.

I stated limits all my life and they held, and I saw late what held them. It was the leaving. Cross one and I was gone, adapted, moved on, the whole thing behind me.

Very efficient.

Two Moves and Nothing Between

While I kept leaving, the middle never came up. A leave is a decision with two moves in it, the pattern read and the exit taken, and I was gone before anything between them could matter.

The first stay after a run of leaving needs the middle, and nothing has been built there. Where no term was ever set, loyalty sits in the seat a term should hold, and it can sit there for years. It asks nothing of the other side, so nothing in it can come back unmet, and a stand-in that never registers a miss gives no signal.

It holds until the cost outgrows it. By then the cost is paid.

The Exit a Limit Needs

A limit is exactly as strong as the exit standing behind it. Where the one who sets it is not going to leave, it is a sentence standing on air. So for a person who means to stay, a limit is the wrong tool, and what works is a term, the tool I had not built.

The one who gets only limits learns where not to step, and nothing about what is wanted.

Every time I get it wrong you tell me, and I still do not know what you want.

Chart

The chart behind the five steps has three seats in it, and they are Michael Gerber’s, from The E-Myth Revisited of 1995: entrepreneur, manager and technician. What bears on terms is another part of that book: the program Gerber lays out for building a business, whose steps come one after another, and the sequence is the argument.

The program starts with a step that is not about the business at all. Gerber calls it the Primary Aim: a picture of the life the owner wants, drawn before anything is decided about the company, because in Gerber’s scheme the company exists to serve that life and not the reverse. Next comes the Strategic Objective, what the business has to do for that life to be reached, and only then the Organizational Strategy, where the chart gets drawn.

The owner draws the company as it will look when finished, one box for each position, and writes a Position Contract for every box: the results that position has to deliver and the standards they will be measured against. The failure Gerber describes in most small firms is a company organised around the people in it rather than around the work each position has to produce. At the start the owner’s own name goes into most of the boxes, and the contracts get written anyway, because a contract belongs to the position and not to whoever is sitting in it.

The book came out of Gerber’s own coaching firm for small-business owners, and the field kept one line from it, repeated in small-business advice ever since: work on the business, not in it.

I ran the three seats through a single decision instead of a company, with the entrepreneur’s seat called the founder’s, and each decision came out as a small company, five moves long.

1. The founder holds the want: the question of what should be there at all. It comes first for the reason the Primary Aim comes first, because the rest is built to serve it.
2. Terms travel. They are the paper that goes from the founder to the other seats, the commission in a form a seat can accept or refuse, and a Position Contract is one.
3. Cost belongs to the manager, and it comes before any work: what the commission will take, priced while it is still paper.
4. Position is also the manager’s, a look at the ground before anybody moves.
5. Action is the technician’s, and it starts only when there is an order to carry out, one with edges and a price.

Read like that, an arrangement that breaks has a seat in it that nobody sat in, and the seat can be found by asking which step got skipped. Work that runs on and on with the want still open is a technician with no founder above it. When a want goes straight into the work, with nothing written and nothing priced on the way, the founder and the technician are both present, the seat between them is empty, and the hours go in unpriced.

A clear want whose terms go round and round and never land, so that nothing is ever cut small enough to start, has a founder in it and nobody to do the cutting. And a limit belongs to the decision with two moves in it, the pattern read and the exit taken, where the seats between were not needed and so were not built.

I kept one thing from Gerber, and it is where to look when an arrangement goes wrong: at the chart, before any person. The seat left empty in mine was the manager’s. I could read a pattern early and I could do the work, and nothing stood between the two, no commission written down and no price set before the hours went in.

Provision is that empty seat seen from the technician’s side: work taken on that no founder commissioned and no manager priced, hour after hour.

A seat with my own name in it still needs its contract written.

The hours that go in across an empty seat do not wait to be priced. Mine ran to hundreds, across years. Counted afterwards, a figure like that can only describe what already happened, and it can be met by no one, since it was put to no one while there was still something to meet.

Ask

An ask leaves the mouth already wrapped: the want comes out as a question about whether it has to be said at all. The wrapping is there to catch the no before it reaches the want, and a no is possible because the want’s two values, met or not met, now sit on the other side of the table. A refusal carries nothing across.

It wants nothing from the listener, so no permission comes into it, and it can be said flat, the voice level all the way through.

Take a want nobody has entered.

It still presses, so something gets said.

A term would have to be asked, and asking can be refused.

So out comes the thing that can be said flat: a limit.

The other side receives the limit, and a limit arrives with an exit behind it, whether anybody meant one or not.

What gets answered is the exit.

What reached the other side was the last step of a decision whose first steps it was not shown. No want, no terms, no price, only the leaving, held up where it could be seen. An ask that could have been met lands as a threat, because a threat is what was on the table.

Nobody answers the want. Nobody was handed it.

So the hedging had read the situation correctly. The ask was the exposed thing, and I had nowhere built to put an exposed thing, so the armoured one went out in its place.