Miles's Law

"Where you stand depends on where you sit." Rufus Miles, a federal budget official, said it in the 1940s. Your position — role, department, incentives — shapes your view. The same policy looks like a win to the agency that gets the budget and a waste to the one that gets cut. The same product decision looks right to engineering (elegant) and wrong to sales (hard to sell). Miles's Law doesn't say people are dishonest. It says perspective is positional. You see the world from your seat. When you're trying to understand why someone disagrees, or why an organisation is stuck, the first question is: where do they sit? What do they see from there? What do they get rewarded for? The strategic move is to map positions before you judge. The person who "doesn't get it" may get it perfectly — from a different seat.

In negotiation and leadership, the law is operational. To move someone, you need to see their position — not just their stated position, but the seat they're in. What would they need to be able to say yes? What would make them look good or bad in their role? To align a team, you need to make positions explicit. Sales wants one thing; engineering wants another. That's not dysfunction; that's Miles's Law. The fix is to either align incentives, change seats (reorg), or create a process that integrates multiple positions. Ignoring the law — assuming everyone sees what you see — guarantees friction. Using it, you can predict conflict, design better processes, and craft proposals that give each seat something they can support.