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’.

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 don’t 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.

The most successful twentieth-century US president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, understood very well that goals and actions must constantly be revised if high-level objectives are to be achieved. Roosevelt described his approach as one of ‘bold, persistent experimentation’. ‘Try something,’ Roosevelt went on. ‘If it fails, admit it frankly, and try another.’

Roosevelt’s achievement was based on combining a strong general sense of high-level objectives with an equally marked absence of commitment to any specific intermediate or basic goals or actions.

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.

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 can’t. The achievement of the great statesman is not to reach the best decision fastest but to mediate effectively among competing views and values.