The job of the artist or the poet or the educator or the business person is not just to paint what we want to see, write what we want to read and hear, teach what we want to learn or produce what we want to buy. Their role is to interpret the underlying high-level objectives that we seek from art, poetry, education, or goods and services more fully than we could ourselves articulate them. Success in recasting problems to achieve our objectives more effectively than we had conceived distinguishes the great from the merely competent and demonstrates why the direct approach is so often banal.
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The environmentâ social, commercial, naturalâ 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 Lindblomâs phrase âmuddling throughâ invited Dr Ansoffâs 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, âintuitiveâ decision making. Lindblomâs vision of âmuddling throughâ is a disciplined, ordered process. Picasso, Sam Walton, Buffetâ each âmuddled throughâ, in Lindblomâs 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.
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.
When faced with a task that daunts you, a project that you find difficult, begins by doing something. Choose a small component that seems potentially relevant to the task. While it seems to make sense to plan everything before you start, mostly you canât: objectives are not clearly enough defined, the nature of the problem keeps shifting, it is too complex, and you lack sufficient information. The direct approach is simply impossible. Every writer has experience of sitting at a blank page, waiting for inspiration. The wait is often lengthy. Get it down. That is how this book was written, and it couldnât have been done in any other way.
This is the paradigm shift that might be required â that organisations and systems can be like people, having purposes without a single goal. An artist doesnât have a successful career by maximising their art; they do it by repeatedly producing work that they are proud of.
Thatâs what the world could look like if we got rid of the blind spots. Business ought to be like artists, not paperclip maximisers. The economic concept of optimisation, and the institutions of management and government which enforce its use, effectively act as a brutal information reducing filter. By taking away the pressure to maximise a single metric (and therefore to throw away information that doesnât relate to it), organisations could apply their decision-making capabilities much more effectively. They could innovate more, design more sustainable solutions and build less adversarial, longer-term relationships with their people.