...our success is forwarded or limited by our ability to speak and listen.

We deal with complex systems whose structure we can understand only imperfectly. The problems we face are rarely completely specified, and the environment in which we tackle them contains irresolvable uncertainties.

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’.

Most of what will be important in the future is outside our knowledge; it exists only in the future. The direct approach demands a capacity for prediction that we can never possess.

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.