Came up with a useful term: intent collapse.
Context collapse is salvageable. Intent collapse is not.
If people start to believe you’re aiming at something different from what they thought, you’ve lost them.
Behavior: what you actually hit
Context: what it looks like you were aiming at
Intent: what you prove you were actually aiming at
What you miss matters more than how wide off the mark you were
This is basic in short term adversarial domains like sports, war, and stage magic. Feints and misdirections and stuff. But it’s not basic in long-term cooperative domains like business leadership. Disguising real intent gets hard longer term and under presumption of cooperation.
I imagine this combines nicely with personality types of ready/aim/fire vs ready/fire/aim. RAF types might judge others more harshly for intent than RFA types, since everyone assumes others are like them.
I've been thinking about smth analogous to it; the willingness to deploy/believe obvious lies as motivation. "Spend more time with family", "our incredible journey", "[thing I have naked self-interest in] is vitally important for [fashionable constituency]"