Obliquity: Why Our Goals Are Best Achieved Indirectly

"I’ll tell about how I came to John Kay’s work. I actually read Nassim Taleb’s book Fooled by Randomness first, which is a different book but with some connections to Obliquity . Then I read John Kay’s review of it in the Financial Times , which was very interesting, and I began to follow John Kay’s work. What Kay writes about business and finance often applies to other spheres as well. Like Taleb’s work, it has a universal quality. You can substitute business for sport and the model holds up very well. I’ve certainly found there are often parallels between what John Kay writes about in the financial world and what I’ve experienced in the world of professional sport. The central argument in Obliquity is a brilliant insight that many of the greatest achievements of the business world come about not exactly by accident, but the outcomes evolved from people who weren’t thinking about outcomes. They’re actually trying to do something else, and the fantastic outcome evolved by obliquity. In other words, things are best achieved quite often by not focusing on them. It’s wonderfully counterintuitive, particularly in an era of ultra-professionalism, of constant planning and strategising. Kay says that if you try to expose yourself to different things, and are open to different experiences, then many of your best ideas will evolve by obliquity. This is absolutely the case. The classic example being in business – don’t try for profits, try to have a good business. If you have a good business, the profits will happen. But it’s much broader than that. The best way to seek happiness is not to try to be happy, but to absorb yourself in an activity which is fulfilling. Happiness will then follow. It’s quite a profound insight, which he explores deeply, both psychologically and in life. Yes, that’s right. It’s a lovely story. The money may follow. One of the things you must always allow for is the fact that even if you do the right things there are no guarantees. The correct analogy is: You definitely don’t want to be a second tier banker with reasonably good financial rewards but no fulfilment, when you could be the best artist you could be with a shot – probably no more than a shot – of getting big returns financially. It’s actually a version of “control the controllables”. If you do what you enjoy and do what you’re good at, as long as you can pay the bills no one can interfere with your fulfilment and you might also be giving yourself a chance of serious success. . Yes, some luck. One of the insights that Kay explores is the metaphor of evolution. In life, it’s impossible to say what percentage of success is luck and what percentage is design or agency. If you look how evolution has developed, you’ll see that it’s the interplay of chance and adaptation that leads to progress. It’s almost as though the influence of chance or luck creates a new thing. Going back to the metaphor of the stream and the boulder, when chance enters the equation you create a new thing. It’s not a mixture, it’s a compound. Talent and effort plus chance create a compound, an entirely new thing. “In life, it’s impossible to say what percentage of success is luck and what percentage is design or agency.” I think that the implication of Kay’s work is that you have to be open. Openness is as important as effort, strategy or planning. You have to be open to chance. You have to be open to good things happening to you. That’s something that is often undervalued in the corporate and sporting worlds. They want to wrap everything up. They want to feel that it can’t go wrong because they have done all the planning and the strategy. But it isn’t like that. Success isn’t like that. You have to be open to the influence of chance."

"He argues that a lot of the time, our goals are best achieved indirectly. He starts the book by pointing out that the Panama Canal wasn’t built from east to west. The shortest route is an oblique one, and you have to think differently to get there. I really like this book. It’s quite unique because it’s got an incredibly broad frame of reference—from literature, philosophy, business, politics, and psychology. He gives tons of examples in life and covers so much ground. He says that the approach to solving problems that a lot of us use is that you have a big goal, which you break down into little bits. Then you come up with plans and goals and targets to achieve each of them in order to achieve your overall goal. That often doesn’t work. That rationalistic approach is a cause of many policy failures, because we don’t operate in a stable environment with full information about what we’re doing, and often there isn’t a linear relationship between causes and effects. In a complex system, a big effort can lead to no impact, and a very small effort can lead to a massive impact because of all the connections you can’t see. I think that’s a very profound lesson for policy and organizations, and I’ve used it a lot since I read this book 15 years ago. It’s very concise. It covers the same ground as other books, but in much less time, and in a very well-written way. It’s very wise. He talks about well-run businesses, and how focusing on purpose, not profit, will actually give you more profit and how maximizing shareholder value destroys shareholder value. To build a successful business, it’s about some general principles that you iterate or experiment towards. He talks about how, in policy, you shouldn’t try to program exactly how a community will function, but to create the conditions so that people in that community can work it out themselves. Trying to program everything may backfire."