Obliquity

Obliquity tries to be a bit bigger than it really is, though actually it is up-front about this. In the acknowledgements, John Kay informs the reader it was a newspaper article later fluffed out into a book. This stayed with your reviewer as she leafed through twenty odd chapters, few of them more than ten pages each, with a quite a few blank-page divisions included in a sub-200 total. But since she missed the original incarnation, it's probably a good thing that a more lasting record was created. Several Malcolm Gladwell books could perhaps usefully have remained as "New Yorker" stories, except that she then wouldn't have read those either.



Also--having something repeated to you over and over (in as many different ways as one author can conceive) at least helps you get it. Which is sort-of the thesis here. Directness doesn't always work too well. Maybe not very often. Sometimes it screws things right up and self-defeats. The happiest people don't set out to achieve happiness. Likewise the wealthiest people with wealth (take note, corporations). Or the most artistic. Or something else. Here the total is not the sum of the parts. It might not even have a lot to do with the parts (What did Reinhold Messner actually want to achieve when climbing Everest unaided by oxygen?).



So far, so impractical. But when objectives, or requirements are actually direct, as they have a habit of being in the commercial world, the recommendation seems at first to be to "complicate problems in order to simplify solutions" (paradoxes sell books, especially if they are in the title, or are the title). What this seems to mean is that someone will not necessarily do something better if she intends to do it, than if she doesn't. And this boils down to adaptation and discovery and what is rather modestly described as muddling through. But later it is characterised more grandly in reference to the actions of Richard Dawkins' blind watchmaker--with appropriate recognition that a single entity behind those actions (evolution) doesn't actually exist (as it does not for the economy, the market or an ant colony).



This seems to be a cool mechanism for great things happening by pure accident, which would still be relatively unuseful. Kay attempts valiantly to tie this back to having a vision of outcome in the first place, and the answer, much like “Zen and the Art of Archery” is that the best candidates for objectives are living one’s values. Experiment with what you really like, if it doesn’t achieve the vision, switch it out but for something else that is also value-aligned. There is nothing much you can learn from David Beckham (or Steve Jobs, or Warren Buffet for that matter) other than they had a deep internal commitment do doing the stuff they actually wanted to be doing.



Not only is this adaptation-with-values-in-mind helpful in achieving medium-level objectives where a direct approach requires a level of prediction that can't be achieved (such as "get top quartile performance this month"), it is apparently the only way to realise exalted but very imprecise ones like "Be happy", "Live well", "Create a good society" or "Be a pre-eminent investor/researcher/author/inventor". On this treatise, most forms of central planning, including those ubiquitous to private businesses, and common to teams within those, run aground on unintended consequences, which can themselves be the result of other agents' adaptations to the directness that themselves go on to thwart it. Natural science ought to tell us that attempting to measure stuff (even inanimate stuff) alters what's measured. Doing the same in the realm of human decision making encounters this problem, but several orders of magnitude larger.



In building his thesis of obliquity (which he didn't do directly, by the way), Kay installs a conclusion along the way that your reviewer also holds dear--that many so-called examples of natural human irrationality are really nothing of the sort, but rather flawed ideas of what irrationality is (see her reviews of Dan Ariely's books, among others). This arises from incompatibility of models of rationality to describe reality, which happens sometimes, but which is not always distinguishable from randomness errors within models. And this is no different from model failure anywhere else. A bus not arriving at the advertised time encourages someone to wait (it's more likely to arrive as time passes) but simultaneously encourages doubt about the relevance of the timetable. At some point an over-ride, which can't be pinned down as much other than common-sense, will step in and the passenger will abandon her attendance. The implication is that in commerce (or investment) this over-ride probably does not happen soon enough, or often enough (because the timetables are mostly a product of ego-possessing leaders’ imagination anyway)



It gets less pedestrian, figuratively and literally. David Beckham was not only unable to articulate the model he uses to score goals, but was also apparently ignorant of what it was. Yet, importantly, not ignorant that he had a model, and that it worked quite nicely. The author draws parallels with Gary Klein's firefighters and doctors (in "Sources of Power") and Malcolm Gladwell's fake kouros spotters (in "Blink") and works up to the same conclusion as these writers--that expertise which looks like magical intuition is in fact a product of huge databases of experience that reside just out of consciousness. And these databanks are built from repeated processes of the expert doing something, even if she didn't know precisely what to do but did it because “that’s what I do / that’s who I am”. Not only fools rush in.

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