Obliquity: Why Our Goals Are Best Achieved Indirectly by John Kay

Obliquity: Why Our Goals Are Best Achieved Indirectly by John Kay

Franklin’s Gambit

If people are predictably irrational, perhaps they are not irrational at all: Perhaps the fault lies not with the world but with our concept of rationality. Perhaps we should think differently about how we really make decisions and solve problems. Perhaps we should recognize the ubiquity, and inevitability, of obliquity.

# Chapter 1 - OBLIQUITY—Why Our Objectives Are Often Best Pursued Indirectly

“I call it the principle of obliquity: Goals are often best achieved without intending them.” Obliquity describes the process of achieving complex objectives indirectly.
In general, oblique approaches recognize that complex objectives tend to be imprecisely defined and contain many elements that are not necessarily or obviously compatible with one another, and that we learn about the nature of the objectives and the means of achieving them during a process of experiment and discovery. Oblique approaches often step backward to move forward.

# Chapter 2 - FULFILLMENT—How the Happiest People Do Not Pursue Happiness

Csikszentmihalyi reports that people are happier when they are at work than when they’re caring for a child, and researchers observe that reported happiness increases sharply when children leave home. Yet many people also say that bringing up their children was the best experience of their life. Perhaps, under social pressure to applaud the experience of child rearing, people say their children make them happy even though that is not how they really feel. But it’s more likely that people who say that bringing up their children has made them very happy are telling the truth. And when the same people say that much of the time they spent with their children was not happy, they are also telling the truth.
Mountaineers like Messner do not say that being cold, starved of oxygen and at frequent risk of injury or death makes them happy. They confirm the commonsense assumption that such experiences are unpleasant. But the experience of having accomplished a difficult climb makes them immensely happy. They are not contradicting themselves, because happiness is not simply the aggregate of happy moments.
Nozick thought not only that oblique approaches were the best route to happiness but also that they were the only route to real happiness. Happiness is where you find it, not where you look for it. The discovery of happiness, like the discovery of new territory, is usually oblique.

# Chapter 3: THE PROFIT-SEEKING PARADOX—How the Most Profitable Companies Are Not the Most Profit Oriented

That profit-seeking paradox, like the conundrum of happiness, illustrates the power of obliquity. The rise in the market capitalization of GE during Welch’s tenure represented the greatest creation of shareholder value ever. Ten years into retirement, he told the Financial Times: “Shareholder value is the dumbest idea in the world.” Elaborating his thought to Business Week a few days later, he explained: The job of a leader and his or her team is to deliver to commitments in the short term while investing in the long term health of the business. . . . Employees will benefit from job security and better rewards. Customers will benefit from better products or services. Communities will benefit because successful companies and their employees give back. And obviously shareholders will benefit because they can count on companies who will deliver on both their short term commitments and long term vision. The route to profit was an oblique one.

# Chapter 4 - THE ART OF THE DEAL—How the Wealthiest People Are Not the Most Materialistic

The richest men are not the most materialistic. Nor has it ever been otherwise.
The motives that make for success in business are commitment toand a passion for business, which is not at all the same as love of money—a lesson that Lehman did not learn.

# Chapter 5 - OBJECTIVES, GOALS AND ACTIONS—How the Means Help Us Discover the End

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.
In that imperfectly understood world, high-level objectives are best achieved by constantly balancing their incompatible and incommensurable components—through obliquity.

# Chapter 6 - THE UBIQUITY OF OBLIQUITY—How Obliquity Is Relevant to Many Aspects of Our Lives

The computer is very good at solving the problem we have specified and asked it to solve, but less useful when we are not quite sure what the problem is. In other words, the computer is an efficient decision-making aid, not an efficient decision maker.
The oblique solution complicates the problem to simplify it: The direct solution is inefficient, the oblique more direct. Invented puzzles frequently have this paradoxical character. They are a response to the everyday pleasure we take in obliquity.
The complexity of the relationship between the whole and the parts is an important reason why obliquity—the process of adaptation and discovery—is, as it was for the foresters, the best means of promoting the health of the whole. Yellowstone blazed, and Lehman failed, because those who imposed direct solutions to problems did not appreciate the complex relationships among objectives, goals and actions. Extinguishing all fires made the forest more vulnerable, and the bonus culture destroyed the organization that fostered it.

# Chapter 7 - MUDDLING THROUGH—Why Oblique Approaches Succeed

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 light of defined objectives. The oblique approach was characterized by what he called successive limited comparison. “Muddling through” was a process of “initially building out from the current situation, step-by-step and by small degrees.” Lindblom contrasted muddling through with a more direct approach, but unfavorably. “The root method, the ‘best’ way as a blueprint or model, is in fact not usable for complex policy questions, and administrators are forced to use the method of successive limited comparison.”
Obliquity is a process of experiment and discovery. Successes 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, Buffett—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 comparison rather than a comprehensive evaluation of all available options.

# Chapter 8: PLURALISM-Why There Is Usually More Than One Answer to a Problem.

Berlin’s philosophy is pluralism, its essence “the notion that there is more than one answer to a question,” in contrast to monism, “the ancient belief that there is a single harmony of truth into which everything, if it is genuine, must fit.” Pluralism is naturally oblique in its approach to objectives, monism direct. Berlin is surely right to say that the question “How should I live?” like the question “What is the objective of education?” and so many others, has more than one answer.
The goals we struggle to attain are often incommensurable and even incompatible with one another. We are rarely even sure exactly what these goals are, and the goals appropriate to our high-level objectives change over time. Great artists do not only break the rules; they redefine them. Such obliquity is a key part of what makes a painter great.
The epitaph on men such as Henry Ford, or Bill Allen, or Walt Disney, or Steve Jobs reads instead: “He built a great business, which made money for shareholders, gave rewarding employment and stimulated the development of suppliers and distributors by meeting customers’ needs that they had not known they had before these men developed products to satisfy them.” By approaching high-level objectives in an oblique manner, they achieved many supporting goals.

# Chapter 9: INTERACTION Why the Outcome of What We Do Depends on How We Do It

The actions of the man who buys us a drink in the hope that we will buy his mutual funds are formally the same as those of the friend who buys us a drink because he likes our company. But it is usually not too difficult to spot the difference, and the difference matters. One way in which the difference matters is that we are more likely to buy the mutual fund from the friend. That is why the salesman adopted the oblique approach of giving us a drink rather than engaging in a direct pitch for his fund.
“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, he or she 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.
All we do know is that the introduction of measurement and control distorted the information needed to implement that measurement and control. This phenomenon is known as Goodhart’s law, after the British economist who observed that as soon as governments adopted monetary targets the aggregates they targeted changed their meaning and significance.

# Chapter 10: COMPLEXITY - How the World Is Too Complex for Directness to Be Direct.

Franklin knew that moral algebra was generally a rationalization for a decision taken more obliquely. That is why as well as Franklin’s rule he set out what I earlier called Franklin’s gambit-“ So convenient a thing is it to be a reasonable creature, since it enables one to find or make a reason for everything one had a mind to do.”

# Chapter 11: INCOMPLETENESS: How we Rarely Know Enough About the Nature of our Problems

Almost all real problems are incompletely and imperfectly specified, and to tackle them we have to try to close them in some way. Closure means deciding what to bring in and what to leave out. Even when faced with what appear to be simple choices, we have to create our own description of the problems we try to solve.
Most companies spend time discussing the question of what is their “core business.” But to close that problem you have to define your categories.
We suffer not just from ignorance of the future but also from: limited capacity to imagine what the future might be.
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.

# Chapter 12: ABSTRACTION - Why Models Are Imperfect Descriptions of Reality

Abstraction is the process of turning complex problems we cannot completely describe into simpler ones that we think we can solve. But gauging which simplification is appropriate requires judgment and experience. Our simplifications are idiosyncratic and subjective.
You arrive at a bus stop, and you believe that the service operates every few minutes. After several minutes, no bus has arrived. What should you do? A simple model helps with this decision. If the bus arrives at exactly ten-minute intervals, the probability that a bus will arrive in the next minute rises steadily with the length of time you have been waiting. The probability that it will come within a minute of your arrival is 0.1; after five minutes, the probability is 0.2; and after nine minutes, you can be perfectly certain the bus is about to arrive within a minute.
Of course, this model is crude. Not even the best-run bus company can make its buses arrive exactly ten minutes apart, and if the average interval is ten minutes you will sometimes have to wait eleven minutes. A more complex mathematical model can allow for randomness in actual arrival times, but a basic property of the simple model continues to hold: The longer you have already waited, the shorter the time you can expect to wait.
The list of reasons why the model might fail is long and necessarily incomplete. After some length of time fifteen minutes, twenty, twenty five-most people conclude that their model is, in fact, irrelevant and look for another route. Anyone waiting at a bus stop is acting on a mental model that governs his or her decision. Perhaps only a sad mathematician would formalize it in the way I have outlined, but almost everyone appreciates the general properties of the model even if they have not spelled out the mathematics.
The uncertainty about the bus’s arrival has two components. There is risk derived from the randomness reproduced within the model: the known unknown. There is uncertainty about the appropriateness of the model as description of the world: the unknown unknown. The first of these components allows an objective description; the second does not: There is not, and cannot be, any analysis that shows that it is right to wait for twenty minutes but wrong to wait for twenty-five. When new data arrives-in this case, the information that the bus hasn’t—we always have the problem of whether to treat it as new data about the parameters of the model or new data about the relevance of the model. The bus problem is tricky because these alternative interpretations of the data lead to quite different decisions. Within the model, the failure of a bus to arrive encourages you to wait. But the nonarrival of the bus encourages doubt about the relevance of the model in the first place.
In the first decade of the twenty-first century banks persuaded themselves that risk management could be treated as a problem that was closed, determinate and calculable-like working out when the bus will arrive. We, and they, learned that they were wrong. The most widely used template in the banking industry was called "value at risk" (VAR) and elaborated by JPMorgan. The bank published the details and subsequently spun off a business, RiskMetrics, which promotes it still.
These risk models are based on analysis of the volatility of individual assets or asset classes and crucially on correlations, the relationships among the behaviors of different assets. The standard assumptions of most value-at-risk models are that the dispersion of investment returns follows the normal distribution, the bell curve that characterizes so many natural and social phenomena, and that future correlations will reproduce past ones. The assumption of normal distribution of returns seems to work well in times that are, well, normal. The more sophisticated institutions test their own models against their own experience. But that experience is, of necessity, drawn from a period when the institution did not encounter the problems the models are designed to anticipate. The managers who used these models until their banks collapsed are like the people who are still waiting at the bus stop after an hour.
One thing we know with certainty about the banks, insurance companies and hedge funds that compete for our investments is that they did not go bust in the period from which their historical data is drawn. The risk models that financial institutions use ensure that it is very unlikely that these institutions will fail for the reasons that are incorporated into these models. That does not mean that they will not fail, only that if they fail it will be for other reasons. Which is, of course, what happened.
In the ultimatum game, two people have to agree how to share one dollar; otherwise they receive nothing. There is an argument that you should accept anything you are offered-one cent is better than nothing and because that is true for the other player also, you should demand ninety-nine cents. But that isn't what usually happens. In practice, many people reject low offers, even if the consequence is that they get nothing. Many trials of the game end very quickly with the two players agreeing to share the dollar. Why do people behave in these "irrational" ways?
Only a few economists and game theorists find that question difficult. 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 derisory offer; we think that an equal division is fair. The experimenters have tried to eliminate these subjective factors. They lock their subjects in a room where they can't see the other person. They tell them they only have to play the game once. They are trying to create a problem with defined objectives that is closed, simple and divorced from any social or economic context. What they are trying to do, of course, is to construct a problem to which the direct approach gives the correct answer. They are substituting a problem their methods can solve for the problem we actually face. They think about their subjects as agents, or players, not peopleand there is a big difference. We operate in a world in which we may sometimes be uncertain about our own objectives and will frequently be uncertain about the other player's objectives. Real ultimatum games only superficially resemble the experimenter's problem; hence we use oblique methods that depend on our interpretation of the context of negotiations, and anger and a sense of fairness influence our responses to ultimatum problems. Models are simplifications, and the appropriate simplifications are subjective.

# Chapter 13: THE FLICKERING LAMP OF HISTORY - How We Mistakenly Infer Design from Outcome

The human mind is programmed to look for patterns and to seek causes, and this approach is often valuable. But that 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.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb describes how people in business and finance are repeatedly “fooled by randomness,” inferring skill from runs of success although neither statistical analysis nor conversation with them reveals evidence of such skill.
They mistakenly believe that things happen only because someone, somewhere, meant them to happen. The teleological fallacy, which infers causes from outcomes, is one of the oldest mistakes people make. Today we are less inclined to make this error in observing the natural world, but in the business and political spheres the assumption that the good or bad outcome derives from good or bad design remains pervasive.
Today we call these interpretations, and misinterpretations, halo effects. The mistake is to make inferences about the relationships between outcomes and processes when we cannot observe and do not understand the processes themselves.
Eighteen months later he was driven from office, a broken man, and he died of cancer a few months after that. Winston Churchill delivered a characteristically powerful epitaph to the House of Commons: It is not given to human beings-happily for them, otherwise life would be intolerable-to foresee or predict to any large extent the unfolding of events. In one phase men seem to have been right, in another they seem to have been wrong. Then again, a few years later, when the perspective of time has lengthened, all stands in a different setting. There is a new proportion. There is another scale of values. History with its flickering lamp stumbles along the trail of the past, trying to reconstruct its scenes, to revive its echoes.

# Chapter 14: THE STOCKDALE PARADOX—How We Have Less Freedom of Choice Than We Think

Roy Jenkins described the issue well: “Clutching at straws is only dangerous if, when they fail to offer support, the wishful thinker abandons resistance and sinks with them.”
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.

# Chapter 15: THE HEDGEHOG AND THE FOX-How Good Decision Makers Recognize the ... (7)

In a famous essay, Isaiah Berlin adopted Tolstoy’s distinction between the hedgehog who knows one big thing and the fox-who knows many little things. Hedgehogs move slowly and directly, foxes quickly and obliquely. There are important roles for both kinds of attribute. If Roosevelt was a fox, Churchill was hedgehog, yet both were obviously great leaders: Roosevelt, like Lincoln, steered his country through troubled years, Churchill led his country to victory in its greatest crisis.
The hero is not the captain who sails obliquely round the storm but the captain who takes his ship through it. The diplomats who might have dissuaded an invasion of the Falklands through oblique approaches would not have been congratulated on their achievements, but the politicians who attacked the resulting crisis directly were admired for their resolution. The intelligence agents who anticipated an attack on the Twin Towers were not praised for their prescience; 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. Yet another of obliquity’s many paradoxes.

# Chapter 16: THE BLIND WATCHMAKER - How Adaptation Is Smarter Than We Are

And yet the success of obliquity remains paradoxical. Surely you must do better if you intend to achieve something than if you don’t? The metaphor of the blind watchmaker illustrates that the answer to that question is often no. If the environment is uncertain, imperfectly understood and constantly changing, the product of a process of adaptation and evolution may be better adapted to that environment than the product of conscious design. It generally will be.
In complex systems, the blind watchmaker may be more effective than the sighted one. The ant colony is a social and economic organization of subtlety and complexity, and no one planned it. Small children judge the size and speed of an approaching object with an accuracy that complex optics and computers find hard to emulate.
If there is a one-line explanation of the power of obliquity, it would be “Evolution is smarter than you are.” Perhaps there is a better one-sentence resolution of the paradox of obliquity: “Adaptation is smarter than you are.” 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.

# Chapter 17: BEND IT LIKE BECKHAM-How We Know More Than We Can Tell

David Beckham cannot solve differential equations. He is not only unable to articulate the methods he uses to score goals but apparently ignorant of what they are. Through some oblique process, Beckham has stumbled on the solution to which he would have been led by the—impossible—direct approach, which would have involved a deep understanding of sports engineering and mathematics. Dr. Carré found this difficult to comprehend (as do I) . Yet there is no doubt that Beckham’s skills are real.
The same message emerges from the biographies or autobiographies of successful businessmen. They (or at least their ghostwriters) are more articulate than Beckham. But like Beckham, they describe their achievements rather than explain them.
Few responses seem more direct than the reflex that pulls our hand away from a hot stove. But the process that nature and nurture equipped us with is extraordinarily oblique. We don’t pull our hand away because the heat will damage our tissue and our bones. We pull our hand away because it hurts. We probably pull our hand away even before it hurts, because we know that it will hurt. If we know the stove is very hot we will not put our hand on it in the first place.
They do not tell us the secret of their achievements because they do not know. But to say we do not fully understand why people are better than computers at solving so many practical problems or understand why the oblique approach so often outperforms the direct one is not to say we know nothing. Kasparov, Beckham and the paramedics are good at what they do not only because they have exceptional talents but because they have trained and been trained to be good at it over many years. We often describe our response to pain, or actions such as Beckham’s, as intuitive or instinctive. Kasparov’s expertise is intellectual, not physical, and it is less likely though not unusual for us to describe his moves as “instinctive” or “intuitive.”
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 appalled colleague 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.

# Chapter 18: ORDER WITHOUT DESIGN-How Complex Outcomes Are Achieved Without ... (7)

As the economists Ken Arrow and Frank Hahn put it, “The immediate ‘common sense’ answer to the question ‘What will an economy motivated by individual greed and controlled by a very large number of different agents look like?’ is probably ‘There will be chaos. But the outperformance of controlled and planned economies by decentralized, disorganized market systems is perhaps the greatest triumph of obliquity.
An anecdote tells of the Russian planner who visited the United States after the collapse of the Soviet Union. He asked his hosts: “Who is in charge of the supply of bread to New York?” Yet with no one responsible, no directing mind, New York was more reliably supplied with bread than Moscow had been with a planner in charge.
The blind watchmaker outperformed the sighted craftsman. The outcome would be hard to believe if it were not our everyday experience. Not long ago, even people who experienced it did not believe it. Like the bewildered Russians, they found it self evident that things would work better if someone was in charge. In the 1960s, as the Whiz Kids rose to power in business and politics, there was genuine fear that Russian technological superiority would overtake the West. Only in the 1980s did it become evident how misplaced these fears had been, and only after the fall of the Berlin Wall was it clear just how dismal was the economic performance of the planned economies.

# Chapter 19: VERY WELL THEN, I CONTRADICT MYSELF-How It Is More Important to be Right Than to be Consistent

Rationality is defined as consistency, and consistency is formally equivalent to maximization. So rational individuals are necessarily engaged in process of maximization. If there is a flaw in this argument, it must lie in the equation of rationality and consistency. Consistency is not, in fact, an everyday meaning of rationality. Behavior may be consistent but not rational in any ordinary sense of the word. But even if it is possible to be consistent but not rational, surely it is impossible to be rational but not consistent?
There is nothing irrational about wanting incompatible things. People want to be rich but not to have to work; they want to go to New York but not to have to stand in a security line at the airport. We might think it was irrational not to hold these preferences. Consistency as hallmark of rationality belongs to a world far more certain than the one we inhabit.
Some people believe there is, in principle, some true and complete description of the world and it is only our perception of the facts, or the accepted consensus about them, that changes. But decisions are being made in light of these properly changing perceptions, and there are no firm criteria that enable us to determine whether two situations are indeed the same or different. What is steadfastness to me may seem dogmatism to you. When you behave consistently, I label you an ideologue; when my behavior is inconsistent, I describe myself as a pragmatist. In an uncertain environment there can never be any certainty about the nature of the choices we face, and different individuals will perceive the same choices differently. Some people perceive the choices as identical; others do not.
What is consistent is subjective, and it is possible to have too much consistency, or too little. Scott Fitzgerald expressed a similar thought: “The test of a first rate intelligence is the ability to hold two 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 consistency and frequently holds contradictory ideas simultaneously.

# Chapter 20: DODGY DOSSIERS - How Spurious Rationality Is Often Confused with Good Decision Making

What do people mean when they say it is irrational for us not to play the ultimatum game according to the game theorist’s predictions, irrational to reject proposals out of anger or to make them from a sense of fairness? They don’t mean that we would be better off if we didn’t have these reactions.
Anger was more useful once, when we often wanted people in other tribes to fear us, than it is today. Our behavior depends not just on what people do but on our beliefs about why they do it and on our familiarity with the wider social context, and for good reasons.
That is why “irrational” behavior in the ultimatum game is not irrational at all. We behave fairly if and when we expect other people to behave fairly and, in the main, not because we have computed the implications. Even if we knew how to do that, we wouldn’t have the time, and if we were the kind of people who did compute the implications, we would be different people, and others would react differently toward us.
A satisfying life depends above all on building good personal relationships with other people, but we miss the point if we seek to develop these relationships with our personal happiness as a primary goal. That is why obliquity is fundamental to our dealings with other people. The reactions of others depend not just on what we do but on their beliefs about why we do it and on their perceptions of the kinds of people we are.
Still, the notion that moral algebra is the best way to decide is deeply ingrained in us, even if we rarely use it when making decisions. So we tell ourselves we are using moral algebra when real decision processes are oblique - we play Franklin’s gambit. Franklin’s gambit is perhaps the most common fault in decision making and particularly in public decision making-today.
Franklin’s gambit—the pretense of following process rationality implied by Franklin’s rule—is how we come to have doctored intelligence reports and cost-benefit analyses that are prepared after, not before, the favored policy has been chosen. Franklin’s gambit is why we use models in which most of the numbers are made up and that can be reworked to generate any desired outcome. We devote hours to staff evaluations, quality assessments and risk reporting, but these hours are not really devoted to evaluation, assessment or reporting: They are spent ticking boxes. Our personal judgments, our assessments and our risk management are based on other criteria. Judgment and experience teach us which models to use on which occasions.

# Chapter 21: THE PRACTICE OF OBLIQUITY - The advantages of Oblique Decision Making.

The success of the physical sciences has encouraged us to believe there might be a science of decision making. All kinds of problems in our business and our financial lives, in the political and personal spheres, could then be managed objectively. Such a scientific procedure would, if done carefully enough. lead every conscientious person to the same answer. As a result, both political and personal disputes could be resolved by applying evidence and rational discourse. The distinction of the great business leader, the measure of financial acumen, would rest only in the ability to arrive at the right answer faster than other people.
There is no such science, and there never will be. Our objectives are typically imprecise and multifaceted; they change as we work toward them, as they should. Our decisions depend on the responses of others and on what we anticipate those responses will be. The world is complex and imperfectly understood, and it always will be. 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 achievement of the successful business leader is not to foresee the future accurately but to continuously match the capabilities of the firm to the changing market. The test of financial acumen, as described by Buffett and Soros, is to navigate successfully through irresolvable uncertainties.
Mostly, we solve problems obliquely. Our approaches are iterative and adaptive. We make our choices from limited range of options. Our knowledge of the relevant information, and of what information is relevant, is imperfect. Different people will form different judgments in the same situation, not just because they have different objectives but because they observe different options, select different information and assess that information differently; and even with hindsight it will often not be possible to say who was right and who was wrong. In a necessarily uncertain world, a good decision doesn’t necessarily lead to a good outcome, and a good outcome doesn’t necessarily imply a good decision or a capable decision maker. The notion of a best solution may itself be misconceived.
Many great achievements are of this kind. Alexander Graham Bell’s invention of the telephone, like Akio Morita’s creation of the Sony Walkman and Steve Jobs’s reinterpretation of Moria’s idea in the iPod, was a solution to a problem people did not know they had. London grew by muddling through, Brasilia by design; London is a great city; Brasilia is not.
The direct approach to problem solving requires us to know the method of solution before we start. Even if such a method is possible, it is often inefficient—the computer solves the sudoku problem, but in a laborious way. Iteration and experience lead us to the best principles of analysis. In obliquity, we learn we solve it. Klein’s paramedics and firefighters became competent by learning the rules and became good through practice.
When faced with task that daunts vou. a proiect that vou find difficult. begin by dome something. Choose a small component that seems potentially relevant to the task. While it seems sensible 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 stared 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. Only an oblique approach could have worked.
When Beckham scored that famous goal, when experts concluded the Getty kouros was a fake, when Picasso drew a cockerel with a few brushstrokes, these were all the considered moves of highly trained and skilled professionals. These people knew what they were doing, even if none of them could explain very well why they did it or how it contributed to their high-level goals. In retrospect, of course, we understand better what they did (and so might they). To call these processes intuition is to miss the central point, which is that what we are describing as intuition is based on evidence and evaluation and is repeatedly successful when practiced by a Beckham, an experienced art curator or a Picasso—and not successful at the feet, or in the hands or minds, of amateur footballers, casual gallery visitors or weekend artists. The more we practice the better our judgments.
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 only appropriate when the environment is stable, objectives are one-dimensional and transparent and it is possible to determine when and whether goals have been achieved. The world of politics and business today is afflicted by many hedgehogs, men and women who mistakenly believe the world is like that.