Speak not with people, speak with roles ​

You must determine the actor's work method based on their actions and statements as the "agent-performer of the role," and based on this method, determine the role. This should be done regardless of how this performer of a project role is called in life - what position they hold, how they call themselves, how they are named in some project documents, how they are called by people around them, and whether they are a human being or an organization, or a robot of some organization. A rose smells like a rose, even if you call it something else or not. If a person is repairing a toilet, then this is the role of a plumber, even if the person repairing the toilet calls themselves a cardiothoracic surgeon. You need to look at what agents do, not at their names - names can be chosen for various reasons.

Next, you absolutely must understand what is the subject of interest of the role at the moment and determine role preferences for this subject of interest. After that, you will understand what allies and opponents (also roles) the role has, and also determine for yourselves (since you also have a role with its own subjects of interest and preferences, and you also need to qualitatively perform the work method of this role!) - whether you are an ally or an opponent.

Then you need to find a suitable method of description/viewpoint for discussing the subject of interest. The Method of description (viewpoint) - is like a legend on a map, showing what objects and their relationships will be depicted on the description map. You have already learned how to create and document descriptions of various formalities in the course "Modeling and Integrity."

Then in your statements, documents, actions, provide descriptions (the actual map in accordance with the chosen legend), strictly adhering to the subject of interest of your interlocutor::role and show what will happen in the project with the implementation of their preferences in terms of an important characteristic for this role, and also negotiate with other agents, as it will be necessary to consider the interests of other roles.

If you hear something about finances::"subject of interest", then you must understand that you are dealing with a financier::role, and at the same time, you need to abstract from how the actor implementing::the financier's relationship looks - in other words, ignore the appearance, age, gender, religion, intonations, and level of animosity, although you need to understand the expertise of this actor in financial discussions. You must further understand what important characteristic currently interests the financier, and then choose a description method that adequately reflects it: balance sheet, profit and loss statement, cash flow - these are three different description methods to answer different subjects of interest within the general area of "finances." Do not make a mistake when choosing a description method: if a question of the financier is about a cash gap, it is useless to talk about the balance sheet! Therefore, you need to have somemethodological/labor/engineering understanding of the work methods of many roles that are necessary for the project's success. At a minimum, complete a course in systems engineering, personality engineering, systemsmanagement, although this alone is not sufficient, it is better than not having an understanding of engineering methods at all.

This is true not only when communicating with a human actor, but also with robots and organizations (when you ask questions through a chat and receive answers, or vice versa - questions are asked to you, and you send answers, then regardless of who is at the other end of the chat: the number of people talking, whether they are human or a robot).

Always talk not to the agent (person, firm, their computer, their profile), but to the role, although track the agent's emotional state (if it is a person) and the situation with the conversation resources. For example, if you are in an elevator, it is not worth starting a conversation for a couple of hours - it is useless, and it is also useless to talk to Vasya Pupkin about his attitude towards Desdemona in the role of Othello at the moment when Vasya is fully immersed in playing Prince Hamlet: his unexpected answer may be, "I will ask Desdemona whether to be or not to be" - do not be surprised, you poorly understood the roles and confused Vasya with your question.

For example, when you are modeling within our course, remember: the modeling you are being offered by the "teacher" has a task to teach you something from the course, train you in a skill from the course. There is no task to test your general knowledge, or practice something that is not included in the course - so you need to give answers along this line of reasoning, respond to the "role of the teacher," rather than the agent playing the role of the teacher as a citizen of their country, the organization of the course as a legal entity in a jurisdiction, the computer program as something soulless and aimless, etc. - there can be a huge number of meaningless choices of possible roles, and this is where the understanding of roles comes in handy! "What wants the questions asked or the modeling proposed by the teacher to train?" - respond to this hypothesis related to the role!

It is important not just to answer the specific single question asked by the actor in an unclear role, but to respond to the interests of their current project role in general, giving a detailed description of the subject of interest according to the chosen (and preferably agreed and explained) description method, so that the chances of realizing the preferences in the important characteristics of the participating systems are clear to the actor. Respond not to the question asked, but directly to the interest! If asked, "Did you use gold in your system?" after understanding "why this question", the correct answer is not "used/did not use," and not even "there is one and a half grams of gold per three tonnes of the system," but "the price of a system unit will be no more than $300 when ordering over 1000 pieces." This will significantly shorten the conversation time!

If the interests/preferences of different roles, even of a single actor for a single interest, are different, and especially the different preferences of different roles performed by a group of actors, this is a reason to negotiate the alignment of 1. the description method first, which is one negotiation topic, and 2. the actual values of the important characteristic that needs to be agreed upon. This is an opportunity for inventive activity during these negotiations (conflict resolution methods, inventive problem-solving theory can be very helpful here).

This is a typical way of applying methodological (in this case) thinking: important objects and their relationships from the meta-meta-model give a checklist of what needs to be thoroughly thought about and what you need to do during the conversation:

• Divert your attention from the actor to their work method, define the method by their deeds and words.
• Rename the agent by their work method.
• Understand the subject of interest of your interlocutor::role at the moment.
• Understand the preference of your interlocutor::role in the subject of interest (for example, a particular architectural characteristic).
• Separate negotiations on the description method reflecting the subject of interest and the value of the important characteristic (complex negotiations on two topics at once are much worse than two simpler negotiations on different topics).
• Consider the presence of other roles with similar subjects of interest in these negotiations, involve actors playing these roles in the negotiations. You cannot "reach an agreement with everyone"! Any subsequent agreement between these "everyone" will disrupt their agreements with you. The only way out is to reach an agreement with everyone around you! The subject of interest may be the same for these "everyone," but the preferences are different! Moreover, priorities in interests can change along the project: at one point, "the price is everything", but then after a month it turns out that "we won't compromise on the price, but the weight of the system is everything!", be prepared for such changes.

This checklist is just another form of presenting the material from the previous paragraphs. The method/way of implementing it is gained during each conversation, participation in each meeting, work in each collective project. It is the typical application of the fundamental thinking methods of the intellect-stack (conceptualization, semantics, ontology, ethics, rhetoric, methodology, systems engineering, and only some of them are listed here): the objects of the disciplines/theories of these fundamental thinking methods allow you to reason routinely about what is important in the current situation, ignore the unimportant, and thereby significantly save energy and time. Hence, during negotiations other than this role-playing discussion, you will invoke the culture of rhetoric, where you will pay attention to your interlocutor's neural network rather than to the dry computer (meaning you will manage the level of formality of statements, consciously use different conceptual theories in your statements), take into account the emotional state of the agent, and evaluate their current level of knowledge (you may need to explain something additionally, especially in the case of low qualifications of the actor-interlocutor in performing their project role). And consider whether you are talking to people at all, whether you are familiar with them personally, or communicate with a "circle of unknown individuals" or even computer "lifeless entities."

Why coordinate interests? Remember: systems thinking says that the created system and its project will only be successful if there is an agreement on the important characteristics and interests/preferences about the system. Agreeing on interests significantly reduces the time to reach agreements, reduces the complexity of this work:

• Conversations are not with people::actors, but with their roles regarding the subjects of their interests and description methods of these subjects of interest, interests themselves as preferences in the values of the important characteristics of participating systems, - Predicting the intentions of the actors and their possible strategies and plans for realizing intentions in their explicitly and implicitly manifested roles,
• Separating complex communication into individual questions (the "separation of concerns" principle will be discussed shortly),
• Using systems thinking to find what is necessary in the discussion topics of interest (this will also be touched upon later in our course),
• Activating the full intellect-stack (for example, rhetoric as a convincing speech method).

After transitioning to these kinds of “role conversations” (instead of conversations with actors), those people :: actors you've previously struggled to communicate with will start having conversations with you. They previously did not understand your value in clarifying the situation concerning their areas of interest, the realization of their preferences in the important characteristics of the systems participating in the project (including the characteristics of numerous creation systems), so they were not interested in talking to you. All you needed to do was recognize that people-performers of roles do not act on their whims as "people" or AI agents, but act according to the preferences dictated by their roles in the dictated roles' important characteristics in culturally conditioned preferences in the subject of interest of the roles. People-actors are not interested in everything, but they will not reject the preferences in the subjects of interest of their roles, nor will they "forget" about their role interests --- these role interests/preferences are culturally conditioned, and you should rely on them not so much on the personal characteristics of the agent, especially if it is a living person, but on the labor culture developed by humanity engaged in the role-play.