Summary

<aside> 💡 The principle of obliquity states that complex objectives are often best achieved indirectly.

• Happiness is not achieved through the pursuit of happiness. The most profitable businesses are not the most profit oriented. The wealthiest people are not those most assertive in the pursuit of wealth.
• Obliquity describes the process of achieving complex objectives indirectly. Oblique approaches often step backward to move forward.
• Oblique problem solvers do not evaluate all available alternatives: they make successive choices from a narrow range of options.
• The identification of high-level objectives, intermediate goals, and basic actions is relevant in many contexts.
• Direct approaches make a distinction between means and ends that often does not exist in reality.
• The successful completion of complex projects often requires the simultaneous pursuit of interacting basic actions, intermediate goals, and high-level objectives.
• Obliquity is a process of experiment and discovery. Successes and failures and the expansion of knowledge lead to the reassessment of our objectives, goals, and the actions that result.
• Objectives, goals, states, actions evolve together because learning about the nature of high-level goals is a never-ending process.
• Most real-life problems have less clear descriptions. Good problem solving and decision making is necessarily oblique because in the process of solving problems we learn not just about strategies for achieving our high-level objectives but about the nature of the objectives themselves. </aside>

Notes

Franklin’s gambit, after Benjamin Franklin. He wrote: “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.” (Location 63)

These failures of both policy and prediction have encouraged economists and other social scientists to look at what people actually do rather than imposing on them models of how economists think people should behave. One popular book with this approach adopts the title Predictably Irrational.2 But this title reflects the same mistake that my colleagues and I made when we privately disparaged our clients for their stupidity. 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. (Location 80)

“I call it the principle of obliquity: Goals are often best achieved without intending them.” (Location 93)

Chapter 1 OBLIQUITY—Why Our Objectives Are Often Best Pursued Indirectly (Location 96)

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. Those only are happy (I thought) who have their minds fixed on some object other than their own happiness; on the happiness of others, on the improvement of mankind, even on some art or pursuit, followed not as a means, but as itself an ideal end. Aiming thus at something else, they find happiness by the way. —John Stuart Mill, Autobiography1 (Location 98)

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 I. Porras, Built to Last2 (Location 103)

He is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention. By pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it. —Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations3 (Location 108)

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. (Location 128)