Citizen and Official: What the Tool Looks Like in Practice

One natural question about my system is:

what exactly is the practice here?

If someone says, “officials are different” or “you should complain to the boss”, this is already known. Where is the tool?

Let us examine a simple case.

The Situation

There is a citizen and an official. Between them there is a gap.

The citizen has come with a task: to obtain a certificate, permission, signature, payment, registration, or access to information.

The official may be of different kinds.

For example, an honest official follows instructions. In the language of levels, this is level 4: rules, order, procedure.

Another official may be corrupt or may play with the ambiguity of rules. Then levels 3, 4, and 5 appear in the situation: goal, rules, pressure.

The numbers are not meant to be spoken to the official.

The numbers are an internal map of the situation.

Outwardly, the person uses not numbers, but speech, documents, maneuvers, and behavior.

What to Do with a Level-4 Official

If we are dealing with a level-4 official, then direct speech at levels 7 or 8 usually does not work.

It is useless to appeal to universal human values, conscience, philosophy of law, or broad legal reasoning.

A level-4 official does not answer to that.

He answers to rules, instructions, authority, documents, procedure, and responsibility.

Therefore the strategy is built around neighboring levels:

• level 3: hold your goal clearly;
• level 4: know the rule, instruction, or right to action precisely;
• level 5: show readiness for pressure, complaint, escalation, and a written trace;
• level 1: if necessary, calmly repeat one phrase.

For example:

“I need a written reason for the refusal.”

“Please show me the relevant clause of the instruction.”

“If you cannot resolve this, please invite your supervisor.”

“I will submit a written complaint addressed to the supervisor.”

This is not magic. This is work with the level of the situation.

The Rule of Elementary Conflict

In its simplest form, the rule is:

• equals compete;
• neighbors cooperate;
• distant levels fight;
• the older one dies or flees.

If a person approaches a level-4 official with moves from level 7 or 8, the distance is too great.

Such a conversation easily becomes a war of worlds rather than a solution of the task.

But if the person works near the official’s level - 3, 4, 5 - he enters the zone where a maneuver can be understood and accepted.

And if the situation gets stuck, descending to level 1 - calmly repeating one phrase - may be stronger than a complex argument.

How the Tool Differs from Intuition

Intuitively, a person usually finds two or three moves.

For example:

• ask politely;
• apply pressure;
• complain.

The system forces us to see more variants.

For one question there are eight answers. Intuitively we find two or three. According to the theory, we must search for all eight.

This is the practical value of the tool.

It does not tell a person the banal fact that “officials are different”.

It forces us to:

1. mark the situation;
2. see the level of the other participant;
3. choose maneuvers near that level;
4. discard beautiful but useless moves in advance;
5. obtain not one piece of advice, but a field of possible actions.

Why This Must Be Tested

Of course, such a scheme requires practice.

We must take real situations: citizen and official, student and teacher, employee and boss, author and editor, person and community.

For each situation, we must ask:

• what task is being solved?
• who are the participants?
• what levels do they demonstrate?
• which maneuvers work?
• which maneuvers look beautiful but do not work?
• can success or failure be predicted in advance?

If such predictions begin to work reliably, then we are no longer dealing merely with an internal language of description, but with a tool of behavior.