Perhaps we complicate things for ourselves by trying to see things in linear terms when a rather more messy complex of interacting factors might be a more valid interpretation.

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.

Applied to geopolitical events, or complex businesses, the methods collapsed. These latter problems are best tackled, not by moral algebra, but obliquely: they involve high-level objectives achieved through adaptation and iteration, with constant rebalancing of incompatible and incommensurable components that are imperfectly known but acquired as the process goes on.

Most of what will be important in the future is outside our knowledge; it exists only in the future. The direct approach demands a capacity for prediction that we can never possess.

The world is radically uncertain. Information is imperfect. No contract can anticipate all possible contingencies. Not only do we not know what will happen – we often have only limited insight into the range of things that might happen. Unforeseen events will require adaptation. But by the time such adaptation is required, both parties to the contract will have committed to the relationship.