Different time frames of goal setting ​

Even one role in communication can have several preferences, and if we remember that an agent can try to play several roles, then we can always confidently assume that in each communication, each participant will try to achieve several goals. They may complement each other; be sub-goals for some larger goal; be more or less prioritized relative to each other. And most likely, they will be on different time scales.

Current Goals

The current goal in communication, which must be fulfilled right now, after this conversation, which is already in itself a sufficient and valuable result.

• I want a decision to be made;
• I want to get an answer to a question;
• I want the interlocutor to move from state A to state B;
• I want the interlocutor to change their belief.

The current goal relates to the content of the communication. Through communication, I make it so that specific things happen (or are said!) inside the chosen piece of the world; for this, I say specific things to specific people.

For example: I ask a colleague to call Vasya and remind him about the report. The content of the communication is a request; this request is fulfilled. The goal is achieved.

Positional Goals

A positional goal is for the communication to influence future actions, decisions, answers, states, positions of the interlocutor or related people. I do not need something to happen right now or, at least, this is not a valuable result in itself. I want the communication now to become a link in a chain that will lead to my goal over time.

For example, a positional goal may be to establish the form/meta-language of communication. In this case, what matters to us are not answers to questions and not actions resulting from the conversation. What matters to us is how we talk about it, how the interlocutor understands us, and how this will happen in the future.

Sometimes we may use language that is too complex or too simple at the moment (and this naturally causes pain for all participants), so that later it will yield results - employees got used to speaking in this way and started supporting this level of discussion in the future, and later we were able to discuss more complex things with them in this language.

A positional goal may at some point contradict the current one: for example, right now establishing a meta-language or some seemingly boring interaction protocols may slow down the interaction at the moment, but you know that in the future, you will greatly benefit from this synchronization.

You can communicate the positional goal to the interlocutor in the same way as the usual current goals.