u/hurryup_weredreaming

This story was told to me by a LSE family relative, I shared it because it matches Augusta's "When this element is in the leading position, the individual has the ability to plan his and others’ work, understand the logicalness and illogicalness of processes, and correct the work activities of other people in accordance with this understanding. And the ability to apply personally and convey to others the most rational ways of doing things." to the Te.

My relative works in the public procurment department of a company.

"A few days ago I went to work and my department manager told me to help a collegue, Mike, with a problem that arose with the procurment commitee he was in charge of. The president of the commitee, John, had gotten sick a week earlier and Mike replaced him with Dave. Requests of clarification entered the night before from bidders and the current day was the only day the committee could send the clarification responses without incurring penelties. The current president was complaining work overload and wanted to be removed from the commitee. Luckly the previous president had returned from the medical leave earlier so I drafted the documentation for the change of committee president.

Everything was going smooth but while drafting the final documentation that would give the committee green light to start preparing the clarification responses I noticed my collegue, Mike, made the mistake of removing John as a backup member from the committe list, this meant John could not be appointed as president again without a series of administrative operations that due to the usual delays in bureaucratic processing were imposible to complete in one day.

So I went back to Dave and exaplained the nature of the situation and why he needed to remain the president of the committe. When he still refused I reminded him that the penalties are paid by the members of the committe themselves, including him. After he ultimately accepted the situation I sent one of the best people, Emma, from my department to help the committe draft the clarification responses. When Emma finished helping with the drafting and came back I went to check how the committee was revising the documents. I found the comitee members going back and forth between stacks of papers with no clear direction. I helped them organize the workload, went through the entire documentation with them and assisted them in integrating eveything into the public procurment platform."

The story serves as a example of Augusta’s description of Te lead showing the ability to maintain the functioning of a process by aligning actions, people and procedures. He planned both his own work and the work of others by coordinating the committee, assigning personnel where they were needed, corrected the work of his colleagues by reorganizing responsibilities, restoring a workable sequence of actions and conveing the most rational way of completing the task by structuring the committee’s workload and guiding them through the documentation and procurement platform until the clarification responses were submitted.

Ps: While this behaviour may not be exclusive to any single type, the speed and clarity with which he navigated the situation and restored the workflow suggests a natural inclination twoards this Te like style.

In my example objects should be read as principles and properties as obligations.

Example: A hospital's ethics committee proposes two principles by which doctors should perform their duties: one is that "doctors have the duty to preserve all life" and the other one is that "doctors should respect the autonomy of patients".

The problem is that in a situation where a competent patient refuses treatment the two principles inside the system are in conflict because one says intervene and the other one says don't intervene. The contradiction isn't in the principles themselves but in the relationship between them. An easy fix is adding a meta rule: "Respect for autonomy overrides preserving life".

Note: this does not mean autonomy is given priority because it is more important but because it provides a consistent way to apply these principles in a way that prevents the system from generating irreconcilable conflicts.

But the solution is an incomplete local fix because it assumes every patient is capable of making autonomous decisions so what about under age patients, unconscious patients (for example after accidents), psychiatric patients or patients with fluctuating capacity? Adding another condition "If the patient is competent, respect for autonomy overrides preserving life" and defining what is meant by "competent" becomes necessary.

Now I'm gonna push the system further and make it fall apart by stress testing it: what happens if a competent pregnant patient, ready to deliver, refuses C-section despite medical recommendation? This situation shows that the system is no longer dealing with a simple clash between autonomy and life preservation, it is a layered situation involving the future mother, the fetus and the medical team so the simple "just prioritize one" breaks down. Now rethinking how autonomy, dependecy and harm fit together in this situation becomes a necessity.

Note: this example isn't a moral stance. It's a demonstration of how Ti operates when a system has many overlapping relationships and constrains that all need to stay consistent. So the Ti like pressure I'm describing is “can this system still remain noncontradictory under expanded constraints?”

Each additional condition creates new relationships that must also fit coherently within the existing system and as it grows maintaining consistency becomes increasingly complex. Systems are simply larger structures made of many interconnected relationships so Ti naturally extends from analyzing individual relations to analyzing entire systems.

This is how I interpret Augusta's statement on Ti lead “He also has the ability to change the interrelations between properties of different objects according to his wishes, and through this influence objects themselves as carriers of these properties".(given how she describes Ti as logical rather than emotional or arbitrary I think "according to his wishes" is related to internal logical consistency and avoiding contradiction).

I asked a Ti lead friend what they would do in the hypotetical medical problem of the pregnant patient with the given principles and he answered: “You lose autonomy every day, just think about seatbelts and various regulations, so I’d perform the surgery anyway”.

His answer shows he is not rejecting autonomy, he is reclassifing it. He places the medical problem inside a larger societal system where autonomy is already limited by various regulations and by doing so the conflict disolves. A easy way to understand "according to his wishes" is the ability to remodel and reconfigure relationships between objects in such way that internal logic is preserved.

All of these raise the following question: Is a facet of Ti better understood as a form of structural relational cognition focused on maintaining internal consistency between concepts?

Ps: the core mechanism of adjusting relationships between elements in a system to reduce contradictions or improve coherence operates in a similar way across different domains (physical, abstract, ethical and so on) as well as within ideas in a text. I chose an ethical system because it involves more complex real life constraints and I added these constraints gradually to make the underlying structural dynamics easier to see.