Goals, facts and common ground

The questions

In the order they came up. Each opens to a short answer, the sources behind it, and what is still unresolved. Select a source to find it in the reading list.

What the ontology covers, and what it might be missing

Goals and actions sit at the center, with strategy, identity and a world model around them. The hatched outer nodes, marked with a yellow plus, are candidates from other fields that bear on why facts move identity. Switch between the ontology as described and the version with candidates.

Identity and facts

How identity is assembled from goals, and why arguments about it so often become arguments about facts. The chain is a synthesis. The layers and mechanisms draw on the research cited in the questions above.

How identity forms from goals

What a loaded claim is made of

A claim such as “the country is being invaded,” or “the crisis is a hoax,” bundles four layers. People tend to argue the top one, but much of what is at stake sits below it. Choose a layer.

Why construed facts get picked up

Candidate common ground

Benevolence, meaning care for close others, ranks near the top in Schwartz’s value surveys across cultures. Self-determination theory lists autonomy, competence and relatedness. Moral foundations work suggests care and fairness are endorsed across the spectrum but weighted differently, though that theory is contested. Tradition ranks low on average, yet the tradition versus openness-to-change axis is where political groups tend to differ most. The divergence is over whose circle counts and which risks matter.

Two loops: pursuing goals, and creating them

The goal loop explains why pursuit stalls. The creation cycle asks where goals come from, which planners and goal models take as given. Evidence labels are my rough summary, not a systematic review.

Needs, wants and interviewing for obstacles

Several fields converge on one move: ask why to climb from a stated want to the need behind it, and ask how else to come back down to other ways of meeting it.

People can share the need and the want while using different satisfiers. Conflicts tend to appear between satisfiers (a smoky fire) more than between needs, which is why common ground is often found one level up.

A six-step interview sequence

My synthesis of the methods behind the questions below, not a validated protocol. With several parties, interview each separately first, map interests side by side, look for shared needs with compatible satisfiers, and apply objective criteria.

Question bank

Pitfalls

• Leading questions and your own frame can manufacture goals, and power asymmetry distorts what people say.
• “Why” can invite justification, so “what” and “how” questions often work better.
• Stated wants are weak evidence: wanting and liking come apart, people mispredict what will satisfy them, and they often confabulate their reasons.
• Coaching has moderate effects in meta-analyses, but GROW, nonviolent communication and jobs-to-be-done have thin controlled evidence.

Coding interviews, and measuring a shared need

A goal ontology is already a codebook, so structured coding fits. The pipeline is a design sketch. The matrix is an interactive illustration with invented data.

A pipeline for AI-assisted coding

A starter codebook

Core codes come from the goals-and-actions ontology. Additions come from the research above and capture beliefs, trust and values that the core misses.

Showing community around a shared need

Suppose everyone is trying to stay warm and building fires. Keep the need and the satisfier on separate levels, count people, and tick cells to watch the measures change.

Also worth reporting: importance times gap, conflicts between satisfiers (smoke against clean air), and saturation. Publishing the overlap creates common knowledge, which helps people coordinate. A convenience sample cannot estimate prevalence.

Priorities in a loop

The House of Quality as a matrix, and what changes when problems feed back into wants. Hang the graph on needs, with wants and features as satisfiers, so the roots stay stable while features churn.

Related methods

Cautions for looped priorities

• Fixed-point priorities can reflect graph structure, such as hub nodes, more than real importance.
• Recursion over noisy inputs creates false precision, so use ranks or intervals and test sensitivity.
• Use damped updates, since aggressive updating can oscillate or run away.
• Take importance from behavior (usage, tickets) and trade-off surveys, not from self-rating.

Aligning people: what exists beyond listening

Reflective listening, where one person speaks and the other repeats without adding, is one technique among many. Sorting techniques by what they change shows where it fits and what else is available.

Every lever here works in both directions. The knowledge of goals, identity and channels that supports alignment also supports manipulation, and the difference is largely transparency and consent. Influence operations, including the Russian concept of reflexive control, pull the same levers without consent.

Arguments and rebuttals

Open disputes that cut across the questions, with both sides at their strongest and a note on where things stand.

Reading

Curated, not exhaustive, and cited largely from memory. Level runs from accessible to specialist. Check editions and dates before citing; works marked “check details” are the ones I am least sure of.

Open questions

These are my synthesis of where the research leaves gaps, not findings. Each comes with a way to test it.