You were told to cut three people by Friday. Nobody told you how to live with it.

The directive came from above. "Restructuring." The budget requires a 15% headcount reduction in your department. You have to choose who goes. You've been staring at the list for two days.

The Economic lens is the one they gave you: budget targets, severance costs, productivity modelling per remaining head. But that's one lens. You need six more.

The Social lens shows the ripple effects — the remaining team's trust collapses when they see colleagues leave, and the "survivors" often perform worse for months. The Ethical lens asks: are you cutting the most expensive people or the most vulnerable? Is "last in, first out" fair or lazy? Is performance-based selection honest when performance reviews were never rigorous? The Political lens maps the office dynamics after the cuts — who gains power, who loses protection, who becomes indispensable by default. The Cultural lens examines what kind of company you become after the layoff — and whether the story management tells ("we're stronger now") matches what the floor believes. The Technological lens asks whether automation or AI tools could absorb the workload without cutting humans at all.

You might still have to make the cuts. But you can make them with seven dimensions of understanding instead of one spreadsheet and a knot in your stomach.