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.