6. The ubiquity of obliquity
The Germans defeated the Maginot Line by going round it. Japanese invaders bicycled through the Malayan jungle to capture Singapore, whose guns faced out to sea.
Like Brunelleschi, Wolfe and the German and Japanese high commands simply saw the problem differently. The solutions the found appeared oblique, but, as with Brunelleschiâs egg, they seemed direct once identified. Directness was the product of obliquity.
Related Quotes
14. The Stockdale paradox
Obliquity was forced on Stockdale and Churchill. But it is forced on all of us. The illusion that we have more control over our lives than we possess, that we understand more about the world and the future than we do or can, is pervasive. No position in the modern world carries more power and authority and greater scope to determine the environment within which the holder operates than the presidency of the United States. Surely presidents donât have to be oblique.
But they do. When Stockdale was captured, Lyndon Johnson was president. As senate Majority leader, Johnson had been a master of obliquity, displaying Machiavellian aptitude in his ability to handle people and secure agreement.
16. The blind watchmaker
If there is a one-line explanation of the power of obliquity, it would be: âEvolution is smarter than you are.â
Evolutionary models show that complex organismsâ well-ordered corporations, well-functioning societies, prosperous economiesâ could be produced without omniscience, not that, they were produced without omniscience. So planners, business executives and political leaders who have such omniscient knowledge, or believe they do, have no need of obliquity. The rest of us, however, do.
Conclusions
21. The practice of obliquity
There is not, and will not be, such a science. Our objectives are typically imprecise and multi-faceted, and change as we work towards them, and properly so. Our decisions depend on the responses of others and on what we anticipate those responses will be. The world is complex, imperfectly known, and our knowledge of it is incomplete, and theses things will remain true however much we learn and however much we analyse it.
We do not solve problems in the way the concept of decision science implies because we canât. The achievement of the great statesman is not to reach the best decision fastest but to mediate effectively among competing views and values.
The managers and financiers who destroyed great businesses in the unsuccessful pursuit of shareholder value. The architects and planners who believed that buildings could be designed from first principles, that vibrant cities could be drawn on a blank sheet of paper, and that expressways should be driven through the hearts of communities. The politicians who believed they could improve public services by the imposition of multiple targets. Acknowledging the complexity of the systems for which they were responsible and the multiple needs of the individuals who operated these systems would have avoided these errors.
What would a politician or banker thinking obliquely have done instead? To understand obliquity requires perceiving that the answer to that question is to present not an alternative solution but an alternative way of thinking. The alternative to rebuilding Paris to Le Corbusierâs crazed design was not to rebuild Paris according to some other grand design, but rather to grasp that Paris would develop, as it had for centuries, through a process of constant adaptation. Most construction survives at most a few generations, but Notre Dame, two centuries in the building, remains magnificent seven hundred years later. The Eiffel Tower, intended as a temporary structure, has been the cityâs most distinctive landmark for over a century. The Gare dâOrsay regains relevance in an entirely different function as the MusĂ©e dâOrsay. Paris grew by muddling through, Brasilia by design; Paris is a great city, Brasilia is not.
The direct approach to problem solving requires us to know the method of solution before we start.