Obliquity— John Kay

Preface

But it isn’t just economists who make that mistake. Politicians, investors, bankers and business people believe that although they don’t solve problems according to a standard model of rational decision making, they ought to. So they pretend that they do— to others, and perhaps to themselves.

The modesty of Lindblom’s phrase ‘muddling through’ invited Dr Ansoff’s 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, ‘intuitive’ decision making. Lindblom’s vision of ‘muddling through’ is a disciplined, ordered process. Picasso, Sam Walton, Buffet— each ‘muddled through’, in Lindblom’s 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.

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.

16. The blind watchmaker

If there is a one-line explanation of the power of obliquity, it would be: ‘Evolution is smarter than you are.’

Evolutionary models show that complex organisms— well-ordered corporations, well-functioning societies, prosperous economies— 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.

The superiority of one writer over another is not just in the quality of language; but also in the quality of the story and the storytelling; the quality of enchantment; and the timelessness of that enchantment. It is therefore futile to speak of superiorities. There is only that which lives, and which keeps on living.