Stockdale embraced a Genius of the AND in his leadership: You must retain unwavering faith that you can and will prevail in the end, regardless of the difficulties, and at the same time you must confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be. You must believe you can survive the camp and will live to see your loved ones again, and at the same time you must stoically accept that you will not be out by this Christmas or the next Christmas or even the next Christmas after that. Never fall into the leadership trap of creating false hopes soon to be destroyed by events. Yet equally, never capitulate to despair and lose faith that you will prevail in the end. You need the Stockdale Paradox to go from start-up to great company. You need the Stockdale Paradox to lead a company from good to great. You need the Stockdale Paradox to navigate turbulence and disruption. You need the Stockdale Paradox to reverse decline and engineer a return to success. You need the Stockdale Paradox to continually renew a successful company so that it might endure. Level 5 leaders confront the brutal facts before they set vision and strategy, and they create a climate where the truth is heard. Failure to confront the brutal facts is a precursor to catastrophic decline, always. (Directed reading: Good to Great, Chapter 4.)

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 Brunelleschi’s egg, they seemed direct once identified. Directness was the product of obliquity.

Johnson and Nixon both enjoyed great power, yet still they overrated that power. They believed they could engineer a Great Society or world peace when in reality they were muddling through. They overestimated their authority, and imagining they were able to control their environment, failed to perceive how far their actions were constrained by their current realities. Having translated their high-level objectives into goals and actions, they became fixated on these goals and actions, even when the search for them had come to jeopardise rather than sustain their higher level objectives.

As we read a modern account of Roosevelt gently edging his country towards the inevitable war, we wonder constantly today: ‘Why doesn’t he get on with it?’ Roosevelt knew better. His goal could be achieved only if approached obliquely.

Roosevelt, like Lincoln before him, understood that the scope of his authority was inescapably limited by the imprecision of his objectives, the complexity of his environment, the unpredictability of the reactions of others and the open-ended nature of the problems he faced. All these factors mean that even the most powerful men in the world must proceed by choosing opportunistically from a narrow range of options.

The intelligence agents who anticipated the attack on the Twin Towers were not praised for their prescience, and the risk managers who warned banks of impending nemesis were fired. It is good for reputation to succeed against the odds. But it is often better for reputation to fail against the odds than to improve them. In an uncertain situation the effect of improving the odds is never obvious, either before the event or after it.

Captain MacWhirr, limited man though he was, understood that dilemma. Machiavelli, the epitome of the oblique decision maker, was the archetypal fox. Five centuries before Tetlock confirmed it empirically, Machiavelli understood that to be an effective decision maker it was wise not to seek public credit for the success of your decisions. Yet another of obliquity’s many paradoxes.