Remember that our students are often surprised when they write down their experiences with each chapter’s credo. You might try the same thing each week. The discipline of analyzing your experiences brings new light.

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.

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.

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.

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 can’t: 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 couldn’t have been done in any other way.