Obliquity

Like many economists we believed that if our models did not describe the world, the fault lay with the world, not the model.

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We prefer to tell stories than to use analytic models, and the best and most helpful models are, at their root, narratives.

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Mistakes made by those who could find a reason for everything they had a mind to do, and did: who tried to make the world conform to their view of the world.

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The term obliquity was suggested to me by Sir James Black, the Nobel Prize–winning pharmacologist whose contribution to the development of ICI’s pharmaceutical business is described in chapter three.

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How wrong could I have been!” he told me, and went on, “I call it the principle of obliquity: Goals are often best achieved without intending them.”

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I never, indeed, wavered in the conviction that happiness is the test of all rules of conduct, and the end of life. But I now thought that this end was only to be attained by not making it the direct end.

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Tell all the truth, but tell it slant. Success in circuit lies. —Emily Dickinson4

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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.

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Oblique approaches often step backward to move forward. All these things were true of the activities that engaged Cortés (or Balboa). Like other great achievers, they tackled problems whose nature emerged only as they solved

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There were many straight lines in their drawings. The hope that rational design by an omniscient planner could supersede practical knowledge derived from a process of adaptation and discovery swept across many fields in the course of the twentieth century. This approach was generally described as modernism.6

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I cannot read such words without thinking of Pol Pot, who proclaimed that the Khmer Rouge takeover of Cambodia marked year zero, when everything began anew (two centuries earlier, the French revolutionaries made the same claim).

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Hammer and Champy are not bad men. Perhaps they do not really mean what they appear to say, and reengineering should be seen as a thought experiment, a way of asking questions about the relevance of current practice, not a literal prescription.

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Our knowledge of that complex environment is necessarily piecemeal and imperfect. And so objectives are generally best accomplished obliquely rather than directly.

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The most profitable businesses are not the most profit oriented. The wealthiest people are not those most assertive in the pursuit of wealth. The greatest paintings are not the most accurate representations of their subjects; the forests most resistant to fires are not the ones whose foresters are best at putting out fires.

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The consequences of our actions depend on the responses of other people, and these responses spring not just from our actions but from their perceptions of our motives for undertaking these actions.

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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.

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Problem solving is iterative and adaptive rather than direct.

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Good decision makers are eclectic and tend to regard consistency as a mark of stubbornness, or ideological blindness, rather than as a virtue. Rationality is not defined by good processes; irrationality lies in persisting with methods and actions that plainly do not work—including the methods and actions that commonly masquerade as rationality.

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“I can scarcely go on… . No despair, no happiness, no anxiety,” he wrote. “I have not lost the mastery of my feelings, there are actually no more feelings. I consist only of will.”1

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He sought happiness by enduring misery, he chose the most demanding route, he deprived himself of aids that would have made his progress safer and his success more probable. He achieved his objective obliquely by overcoming obstacles he had placed in his own path.

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These routes to happiness are oblique.

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The determinants of happiness are evidently complicated.

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Nozick thought not only that oblique approaches were the best route to happiness but also that they were the only route to real happiness.

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The enduring popularity of this motif is an expression of our knowledge that we often sacrifice our real objective by pursuing what we want.

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Happiness is not achieved through the frequent repetition of favorable experiences, and that is why the pursuit of happiness is a peculiar phrase.

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Countries such as Nigeria, where poverty is widespread by any standard, have average levels of reported happiness comparable to those of the United States or Western Europe. Although average happiness does not necessarily rise with average income, higher-income households consistently report greater happiness than poorer households—that is the lure of the red Ferrari.

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Happiness is where you find it, not where you look for it. The shortest crossing of America was found by seekers for gold, not explorers of oceans. The discovery of happiness, like the discovery of new territory, is usually oblique.

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