Obliquity

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.

1. Obliquity

Visionary companies pursue a cluster of objectives, of which making money is only one— and not necessarily the primary one. Yes, they seek profits, but they’re equally guided by a core ideology— core values and sense of purpose beyond just making money. Yet paradoxically, the visionary companies make more money than the purely profit driven companies.

— Jim Collins and Jerry Porras, Built to Last

They follow a trajectory that is oblique. Obliquity describes the process of achieving complex objectives indirectly.

In general, the oblique approaches recognise that complex objectives tend to be imprecisely defined and contain many elements that are not necessarily or obviously compatible with each other, and that we learn about the nature of the objectives and the means of achieving them during a process of experiment and discovery.

An oblique approach recognises that what we want from a home, or a community, has many elements. We will never succeed in specifying fully what they are, and to the extent that we do, we discover that they are often incompatible and inconsistent. The interactions between a home and its occupants, or between the people who make up a community, are complex and uncertain. The experience of both previous and current problems guides the search for answers. Many people contribute to the outcome, and even after that outcome has been realised none of them necessarily

holds a full understanding of how it came about.

The environment— social, commercial, natural— in which we operate changes over time and as we interact with it. Our knowledge of that complex environment is necessarily piecemeal and imperfect. And so objectives are generally best accomplished obliquely rather than directly.

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.

Oblique problem solvers do not evaluate all available alternatives: they make successive choices from a narrow range of options. Effective decision makers are distinguished not so much by the superior extent of their knowledge as by their recognition of its limitations. Problem solving is iterative and adaptive, rather than direct. Good decision makers are not identified by their ability to provide compelling accounts of how they reached their conclusion. The most complex systems come into being, and function, without anyone having knowledge of the whole.

Part 1: The oblique world

3. The profit-seeking paradox

George Merck and Robert Johnson created great businesses which, in consequence, made remarkable amounts of money for their shareholders. ICI and Boeing were more successful as profit-making companies when they ‘served customer’s internationally through the responsible application of chemistry’ or ‘ate, breathed and slept the world of aeronautics’ than when they tried to ‘maximise value for our shareholders’ or ‘go into a value based environment’.

5. Objectives, goals and actions: how means help us discover the end

An old story tells of a visitor who encounters three stonemasons working on a medieval cathedral, and ask each what he is doing. ‘I am cutting this stone to shape,’ says the first, describing his basic actions. ‘I am building a great cathedral,’ says the second, describing his immediate goal. ‘And I am working for the glory of God,’ says the third, describing his high-level objective. The construction of architectural masterpieces required that high objectives be pursued through lesser, but nonetheless fulfilling, goals and actions.

But they were wrong. The Soviet Union collapsed, the Pruitt-Igoe project was demolished, and the people who transformed the business world were not the men who employed armies of re-engineering consultants. The people who did transform the business world were those, like Google’s Sergey Brin and Apple’s Steve Jobs, who adopted a more oblique approach to business transformation. They invented new businesses rather than re-engineer old ones, they adapted and improvised endlessly, and they carried employees and customers along with them on a waver of enthusiasm.

Ed Smith expresses it well: ‘I am not saying that personal development is more important than winning; on the contrary, I am saying that enjoying the journey of self-discovery, by removing some of the pressure and angst associated with winning at all costs, is one way of helping you to win more often.

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.

The traditional job of the artist is to represent his subject— the view from the Grand Canal, the passion of Christ, the wife of an affluent patron. But the skill of the artist, like the talent of the poet, lies in the originality with which this goal is interpreted. Dürer’s engraving (see page 48) is a memorably realistic picture of a hare. The artist’s skill gives it a three-dimensional quality. It looks— like a hare.

We frequently learn how to solve problems by tackling them. The National Park Service, US Department of the Interior, has learned to protect America’s natural environment in the hundred years since it was established. One of the responsibilities of the service is forest management. We might agree, roughly, on the meaning of the objective of good forest management. That objective needs to be translated into intermediate goals necessary for the achievement of that high-level objective. A good forest is beautiful and accessible, and it has healthy trees.

One desirable intermediate state that contributes to these goals and objectives is the absence of destructive fires. From the early twentieth century, the policy of the NPS was one of zero tolerance. Every outbreak of fire, however small, would be extinguished— the basic-level action. But the incidence of fire did not fall: it increased.

Computer simulation of fire control policies suggests the explanation. Most forest fires are small and burn themselves out. In doing so, they remove combustible undergrowth, and create firebreaks that limit the spread of future fires. So the best way to reduce fire is not to extinguish all fires. The Service adopted a different view of the goals that would achieve its higher level objective: controlled burning replaced zero tolerance. But what actions does this goal require? In 1972 the Service decreed a new policy: it would put out man-made fires but allow natural ones to burn.

Sixteen years later, the largest fire in American history swept through Yellowstone National Park. In extremely dry conditions, several fires joined together. Lightning was probably the original cause, though perhaps some fires were deliberately lit by arsonists. By the time the blaze was controlled by a force of 25,000 fire-fighters at a cost of over $100 million, almost half the vegetation of the park had been destroyed. Today’s guidelines allow experienced forest rangers to use their judgement in deciding which fires should be tackled and which left to burn. Experience has shown that too much effort devoted to fire extinction is counter-productive. But some fire-control activity is essential. Time demonstrates, but only slowly, whether policy has gone too far in one direction or the other— whether actions are appropriate to states, whether goals are appropriate to objectives.

Part 2: The need for obliquity

7. Muddling through

In 1959, Charles Lindblom described ‘The science of “Muddling Through”’. He contrasted two modes of decision making. The root, rational, comprehensive method was direct and involved a single comprehensive evaluation of all options in the light of defined objectives. The oblique approach was characterized by what he called successive limited comparison. Lindblom called the latter ‘the science of muddling through’.

‘Muddling through’ was a process of ‘initially building out from the current situation, step-by-step and by small degrees’.

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.

Objectives, goals, states and actions evolve together because learning about the nature of high-level goals is a never-ending process. The distinction between means and ends, which seems obvious and important in simple problem solving, is, as Lindblom explains, not central to practical decision making. The process in which well defined and prioritised objectives are broken down into specific states and actions whose progress can be monitored and measured is not the reality of how people find fulfilment in their lives, create great art, establish great societies or build good businesses.

If the world were like Sudoku, decision making could be tackled in an equally direct way. The characteristics of Sudoku that make such an approach possible are:

• There is one and only one solution, and when it is identified we know that we have found it. Objectives are clear and constant.

• The play is not influenced by the responses of others to moves that are made. Interactions with others, if they are relevant at all, are limited and controlled or predictable.

• There is a complete list of possible actions and we know that all the potential actions we consider are in fact available to us. Even if we do not know what will happen in future, we know the range of possibilities and can sensibly attach probabilities to them. The problem is closed.

• The number of alternative ways of filling in the boxes, although running into many millions, is nevertheless sufficiently small that all can, at least in principle, be evaluated. Complexity, even if extensive is bounded.

The game of Sudoku is closed, determinate, tractable and has a clear-cut objective.

The general strategy is to tackle problems by adaptively translating the objective into intermediate goals and states— completing blocks— and basic actions— finding individual numbers. That strategy iterates, adapts, retreats when attempted solutions proves less promising than they appear. The methods of analysis that come naturally to us are oblique, and we do not use or enjoy direct, mechanical approaches. Anyone who buys a computer program to solve a Sudoku problem has missed the point of the game.

8. Pluralism

Most real-life problems have less clear descriptions. Our high-level objective— calls for achieving a variety of intermediate goals— profitability, good products, motivated employees, customer satisfaction.

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’.

Kelvin’s approach leads directly to the modern curse of bogus quantification. The United Nations produces an index of human development (HDI; see Figure 8), under which countries are ranked from Iceland (at the top) to Sierra Leone (at the bottom). The high-level objective of human development is translated into three goals or states: longevity, educational standards and gross domestic product (GDP). The longevity measure, for example, takes life expectancy at birth (L) and then calculates (L-25)/60, so that if life expectancy is 82 years the score is 0.95.

The intentions are admirable. But why should we measure human development in this particular way? Some people might suggest that a measure of human development should include personal freedom, or the strength of religious belief (or its absence), or environmental awareness. Why? Or why not? Even if we agree that health, education and income are the relevant criteria, should we measure them in this way, and weight them in this way? Why? Or why not? The problem is not just that these are questions on which people might disagree. The problem is that it is difficult to see any criteria by which their disagreements might be resolved. The supposed objectivity of the measurement of human development— which is calculated to three places of decimals— is spurious.

We not only lack fixed criteria of what constitutes greatness in poetry: to have such criteria would be to miss a vital component of poetic greatness. When we describe a great poem, we use words like freshness and originality. Great poets do not necessarily conform to accepted concepts of what constitutes great poetry, they do not only break the rules, they redefine them. Such obliquity is a key part of what makes poets great.

The criteria that determine artistic success are ultimately determined by artists, not critics, and great art itself changes what these criteria are. Stalin attempted to define artistic merit in terms of socialist realism. The Nazis denounced art that was not directly representational as decadent. The attempt to define the quality of artistic endeavour by predetermined rules had the effect— and the intentions— of freezing creative innovation. In consequence, little work of enduring merit emerged.

What is true of art is also true of other areas of human endeavour. What made Henry Ford or Walt Disney or Steve Jobs great businessmen was that they modified the rules by which their success, and the success of others in their industry, were measured. They changed our appreciation of what is good and bad in personal transport, in children’s entertainment and in computing. They sold us products we had not imagined. What we mean today by a good means of personal transport is very different from what we would have meant by the same phrase a hundred and fifty years ago, as a result of people who conceived vehicles so different from those that had already existed. The criteria of achievement are constantly redefined by great achievers.

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.

9. Interaction

Marks was making a sincerely felt statement about the kind of business he wanted his company to be. Israel Sieff, Marks’s deputy, described the late-night discussion that followed, and focused on ‘the sense of participation, which cannot be supplied by the best of wages or the most generous bonuses, but only by the signs of personal trust […] welfare is something which is always changing its opportunities and demands— because human nature and general circumstances are always changing’.

Honesty is the best policy, a man who acts on that motive is not an honest man,’ wrote Archbishop Whately two centuries ago. If we deal with someone for whom honesty is the best policy, we can never be sure that this is not the occasion on which, perhaps after many years, will conclude that honesty is no longer the best policy. We do better to rely on people who are honest by character rather than honest by choice, because character is enduring and predictable, but policies are not. Marks and Spencer enjoyed exceptional loyalty from its staff for similar reasons.

Oblique problem solving relies on constant experiment ‘because human nature and general circumstances are constantly changing’, and it is only through experiment— putting new lines on the shelves— that we find out what they are.

10. Complexity

The mistake common to both processes is belief that a number based on the flimsiest of data is better than a qualitative, and necessarily subjective, judgement.

Of his greatest failure, Vietnam, McNamara would write:

We misjudged then— as we have since— the geopolitical intentions of our adversaries […] we viewed the people and leaders of South Vietnam in terms of our own experience […] our misjudgment of friend and foe alike reflected our profound ignorance of the history, culture, and politics of the people in that area, and the personalities and habits of their leaders.

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.

11. Incompleteness

In problem solving we bring to the task a cartload of common sense derived from nature and nurture. Juries are told to disregard everything but what they have heard at the trial, that they should close their minds to anything but the admitted evidence and the argument of the lawyers

That kind of information is what we call common sense, and people who lack it encounter serious difficulties in everyday life. The ability to make judgements of context is the skill that is deficient in autistic individuals, who interpret problems literally. Working to rule— the refusal to apply common sense in interpreting the duties of employment— is notoriously disruptive.

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.

12. Abstraction

Everyone else knows that our approach to problem solving is more oblique. We are influenced by the context. We like the other person or we want to develop a reputation as a tough negotiator. We feel angry at a derisory offer; we think that an equal division is fair.

Part 3: Coping with obliquity

13. The flickering lamp of history

The human mind is programmed to look for patterns and programming leads us to see patterns in random events and to attribute intentions where none existed. We believe we observe directness in obliquity. Sports fans believe in ‘hot hands’, technical analysts think they can predict stock market movements by inspecting charts of past prices, and fans and analysts continue to believe these things, despite repeated demonstrations that the runs of winning scores or the apparent pictures in the data can be generated by chance.

Solving equations of motion is a means of understanding how well-judged shots find the goal but it is not a means of making it happen. Successful firms may maximise long-term shareholder value, or at least create large quantities of it, but that does not mean that they were any more capable of calculating the outcome of their activities than was Beckham, or that attempting to emulate them will be any more rewarding than emulating Beckham. In both cases, we are not knowledgeable enough about what they do for such emulation to succeed.

In chapter 7 I described a spectrum of problems. At one end were those— like nought and crosses— best solved directly; at the other were those— the pursuit of happiness— best achieved obliquely. There is an analogous spectrum of decision-making styles, from direct to oblique.

The direct decision maker perceives a direct connection between intentions and outcomes; the oblique decision maker believes that the intention is neither necessary nor sufficient to secure the outcome. The direct problem solver reviews all possible outcomes; the oblique problem solver assembles all available information; the oblique decision maker recognises the limits of his or her knowledge. The direct decision maker maximises his or her objectives; the oblique decision maker is continuously adaptive. The direct problem solver can always find an explanation for his or her choices; the oblique problem solver sometimes just finds the right answer. The direct decision maker believes that order is the production of a directing mind; the oblique decision maker recognises that order often emerges spontaneously— no one fully grasps it. The direct problem solver insists on consistency, on always treating the same problem in the same way; the oblique problem solver never encounters exactly the same problem twice. The direct decision maker emphasises the importance of rationality of process; the oblique decision maker believes that decision making is inherently subjective and prefers to emphasise good judgment.

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.

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.

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.

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.

15. The hedgehog and the fox

The political scientist Phillip Tetlock has used his taxonomy in a long-term study of expert political judgement. Over two decades, he invited respondents to predict political events and used hindsight to assess the quality of their responses. The experts were not very good at anticipating the future. No surprise: the world is complex and uncertain, our understanding of it is incomplete.

But Tetlock’s most striking discovery is that although the foxes perform better in terms of the quality of their judgments, the hedgehogs perform better in terms of public acclaim. Hedgehogs are people who know the answers. Foxes know the limitations of their knowledge. Hedgehogs create headlines for journalists, and their confident certainties attract the attention of politicians and business leaders. Give me a one-handed economist, goes the saying, but careful judgement really is often a matter of ‘on one hand, and on the other’. Yet explicit hedgehogs who claim to predict the future will always attract a larger audience than eclectic foxes who acknowledge they can’t, even if the larger audience learns nothing useful from the predictions.

If Roosevelt was the most skillful of political foxes, Keynes was the greatest of intellectual foxes. The eclecticism of his knowledge and the breadth of his interests made him the finest commentator on economics and finance of the twentieth century. Keynes resisted any attempt to explain social and economic phenomenon with one big idea.

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.

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.

Perhaps there is a better one sentence resolution of the paradox of obliquity: ‘Adaptation is smarter than you are.

Such co-evolution— of people and their foodstuffs, of science and technology, of social, political and economic institutions— is the history of economic development.

In business, in politics and in our personal lives, we do not often solve problems directly. The objectives we manage are multiple, incommensurable and partly incompatible. The consequences of what we do depend on responses, both natural and human, that we cannot predict. The systems we try to manage are too complex for us to fully understand. We never have the information about the problem, or the future, we face that we might wish for.

Satisfactory responses in these situations are the result of action, but not the execution of design. These outcomes, achieved obliquely, are the result of iteration and adaptation, experiment and discovery. Re-engineering— ‘tossing aside old systems and starting over’— is called for only when systems are seriously dysfunctional. And in almost all cases. The best means of re-engineering is not ‘going back to the beginning and inventing a better way of doing work’ but trying models that have been successfully tested elsewhere. This is equally true of our personal lives, our corporate organisations and our social and economic structures.

17. Bend it like Beckham

Sportsmen and soldiers are trained to ignore pain. The often hurt themselves in consequence. Some people suffer a great genetic abnormality in which they do not experience pain, and they generally die young through an accumulation of tissue injuries.

But the consequence of relieving pain is the damage that results from failure to experience pain. Although there is a great deal of useless pain in the world, on balance we are better off with pain than without it.

We know more than we can tell,’ said the polymath Michael Polanyi— certainly more than Beckham can tell, and even more than the highly intelligent Kasparov can tell. We drive successfully even if, like Beckham, we struggle with differential equations of motion.

A well-known joke tells of the economist in the wilderness who, when he sees a bear approaching, pulls out his computer and begins to calculate an optimal strategy. His colleague, appalled, says: ‘We don’t have time for that!’ ‘Don’t worry,’ replies the economist smugly, ‘the bear has to work out an optimal strategy too.’ Behind the joke lies a deeply serious point. The bear gains a decisive advantage by not suffering the illusion that the approach based on calculation might work.

18. Order without design

The evolved complexity that Darwin had observed in nature was also true of economic and social systems. Hayek observed that:

Nobody has yet succeeded in deliberately arranging all the activities that go on in a complex society. If anyone did ever succeed in fully organising such a society, it would no longer make use of many minds, but would be altogether dependent on one mind; it would certainly not be very complex but extremely primitive— and so would soon be the mind whose knowledge and will determined everything.

The achievements of the directing mind would be limited to the knowledge it could absorb and the analysis of which it was capable.

Businesses do not maximise anything. The most successful business leaders such as Marks or Walton or Gates pursued the unquantifiable, but entirely meaningful, objective of building a great business. A great business is very good at doing the things we expect it to do— rewarding its investors, providing satisfying employment, offering goods and services of good quality at reasonable prices, fulfilling a role in the community— and to fail in any of these is, in the long run, to fall in all of them.

Very well then, I contradict myself

F. Scott Fitzgerald expressed a similar thought: ‘The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold to opposed ideas in the mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.’ The oblique decision maker, the fox, is not hung up on inconsistency and frequently holds contradictory ideas simultaneously.

20. Dodgy dossiers

The neuroscientist Antonio Damasio made famous the case of a patient who, after brain damage, retained his cognitive abilities but operated at a very low level of emotional response. The patient wasn’t a better decision maker in consequence: he found it almost impossible to make any decisions at all.

The dinner guests explained that the London Transport Underground map was simply the wrong model for the journey of Paddington to Hyde Park Gardens. But if I had asked, as I might have done, the question, ‘When should I use the Underground map?’, the only sensible answer would have been, ‘You’ll learn as you get to know London better.’ Judgement and experience teach us which models to use on which occasions.

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.

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.

What would a politician or banker thinking obliquely have done instead? To understand obliquity requires perceiving that the answer to that question is to present not an alternative solution but an alternative way of thinking. The alternative to rebuilding Paris to Le Corbusier’s crazed design was not to rebuild Paris according to some other grand design, but rather to grasp that Paris would develop, as it had for centuries, through a process of constant adaptation. Most construction survives at most a few generations, but Notre Dame, two centuries in the building, remains magnificent seven hundred years later. The Eiffel Tower, intended as a temporary structure, has been the city’s most distinctive landmark for over a century. The Gare d’Orsay regains relevance in an entirely different function as the Musée d’Orsay. Paris grew by muddling through, Brasilia by design; Paris is a great city, Brasilia is not.

The direct approach to problem solving requires us to know the method of solution before we start.

Iteration and experience lead us to the best principles of analysis. In obliquity we learn about the structure of a problem by the process of solving it.

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.

Good decision making is pragmatic and eclectic. Oblique approaches rely on a toolkit of models and narratives rather than any simple or single account. To fit the world into a single model or narrative fails to acknowledge the universality of uncertainty and complexity.

Good decision making is oblique because it is iterative and experimental: it constantly adapts as new information, of many kinds, becomes available. Much of that information comes from the process of decision making itself.

Obliquity is the best approach whenever complex systems evolve in an uncertain environment and whenever the effect of our actions depends on the ways in which others respond to them. There is a role for carrots and sticks, but to rely on carrots and sticks alone is effective only when we employ donkeys and we are sure exactly what we want the donkeys to do. Directness is appropriate when the environment is stable, and objectives are one-dimensional and transparent, and it is possible to determine when and whether goals have been achieved. And only then.

Bibliography

Sennet, R., The Craftsmen, London, Allen Lane, 2008

Solomon, R. C., Ethics and Excellence, New York, Oxford University Press, 1994 (new edition)

Tetlock, P. E., Expert Political Judgement: How Good Is It? How Can We Know?, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2005