An oblique approach recognises that what we want from a home, or a community, has many elements. We will never succeed in specifying fully what they are, and to the extent that we do, we discover that they are often incompatible and inconsistent. The interactions between a home and its occupants, or between the people who make up a community, are complex and uncertain. The experience of both previous and current problems guides the search for answers. Many people contribute to the outcome, and even after that outcome has been realised none of them necessarily

holds a full understanding of how it came about.

The environment— social, commercial, natural— in which we operate changes over time and as we interact with it. Our knowledge of that complex environment is necessarily piecemeal and imperfect. And so objectives are generally best accomplished obliquely rather than directly.

The modesty of Lindblom’s phrase ‘muddling through’ invited Dr Ansoff’s scorn. The phrase involves intended, but misleading, self-deprecation, and Ansoff fell into the trap. I think that obliquity is a better term. Obliquity is a process of experimentation and discovery. Success and failures and the expansion of knowledge lead to reassessment of our objectives and goals and the actions that result.

Oblique approaches to high-level objectives should not be equated with unstructured, ‘intuitive’ decision making. Lindblom’s vision of ‘muddling through’ is a disciplined, ordered process. Picasso, Sam Walton, Buffet— each ‘muddled through’, in Lindblom’s sense. None relied on a root analysis of defined objectives. Each improvised, constantly. Each pursued a combination of high-level objectives, intermediate goals and basic actions. Each drastically limited the alternatives that were reviewed and relied on successive limited comparisons rather than a comprehensive evaluation of all available options.

Because the process of achieving high-level objectives is necessarily iterative in this sense, the path to these objectives is bound to be oblique.

When you cannot measure something, said Lord Kelvin, ‘your knowledge is of a meager and unsatisfactory kind’.

Obliquity is the best approach whenever complex systems evolve in an uncertain environment and whenever the effect of our actions depends on the ways in which others respond to them. There is a role for carrots and sticks, but to rely on carrots and sticks alone is effective only when we employ donkeys and we are sure exactly what we want the donkeys to do. Directness is appropriate when the environment is stable, and objectives are one-dimensional and transparent, and it is possible to determine when and whether goals have been achieved. And only then.