Aperture Book of the Month - April 2025

John Kay, ‘Obliquity: Why Our Goals are Best Achieved Indirectly’. Profile Books, 2010

For our Book of the Month for April 2025, we go back to 2010 and re-discover John Kay’s entertaining and insightful argument for ‘Obliquity’. Sir John takes us beyond the concept of lateral thinking, to outline the way in which events transpire in an evolving, and often surprising, chain of connection that often ends up in a different place than we’d imagined. One can be comfortable with this, and accommodate its opportunities, or one can seek to control one’s environment directly in search of causality and determination. ‘Obliquity’ has it that to take the latter approach is a forlorn hope.

And yet, it is the direct approach that is still favoured by many, if not most, strategic management processes. As Kay states, ‘Many people who seek to build ever more centralised business organisations, or to institute a global financial architecture, still do not really take the implications of the evidence on board’.

Introducing Franklin’s Gambit, which selects evidence to support conclusions after opinions are formed, narrows the scope of possible choice, and thereby contradicts the very essence of strategy design, Sir John says, ‘The hope that rational design by an omniscient planner could succeed…swept across many fields in the course of the 20th century’. More often than not the direct approach fails when the environment changes (which it can always be relied upon to do).

‘Obliquity’ has its roots in economic models, which often support Franklin’s Gambit. Such decision support tools work reasonably enough when dealing with bounded interaction between known entities. They struggle, however, when faced with complexity, where objectives are imprecise and potentially incompatible, and where knowledge of the environment is lacking. When faced with most markets, therefore…

An ‘oblique’ strategy works by creating the conditions out of which the desired outcome is likely to emerge. This is, in fact, exactly the approach taken by our own ‘Four Frames’ methodology. It’s intuitive decision-making placed within a context, and is actually a natural approach to problem solving; learning, adapting, and adjusting in order to close in on a desired outcome. We share Sir John’s focus on the importance of context and emergence.

Along the way Sir John explores the role and nature of purpose, the limits to rationality, and stresses the need to avoid a fixation on targets and metrics (which leads to neglecting other ‘weak’ but important signals). He also warns that ‘computers don’t solve problems the way people solve problems’. Citing examples from business, politics, and from everyday life, Sir John introduces a fascinating cast of characters, making ‘Obliquity’ entertaining as well as informative and provocative.

Perhaps the most compelling strand of Sir John’s argument deals with the relationship of objectives, goals, and activity. Most ‘conventional’ strategy processes depend upon causality, making a mechanistic and direct linkage between activity and objective. Executives believe that ‘if we do this, we will achieve that’. In fact, real life doesn’t work like that, most simply because there are many other activities, planned and unplanned, taking place at the same time. And so it is the sum total of all those activities, seen and unseen, that must be influenced to achieve ‘this’.

‘Obliquity’ is one of the few works of which we are aware that clearly defines such a relationship. It suggests that there is a simultaneous and ever-changing interaction between the trilogy of actions, intermediate goals, and high-level objectives. Balancing that dynamic relationship - and recognising the effect upon it from external influence - is the role of strategic management and is the essence of the indirect, or oblique, approach.

The last word comes again from Sir John, and provides us with the single most telling observation on why we’re delighted to ‘rediscover’ ‘Obliquity’: “The skill of problem solving frequently lies in the interpretation and reinterpretation of high-level objectives. It is hard to overstate the damage done in the recent past by people who thought they knew more about the world than they really did. Acknowledging the complexity of the systems for which they were responsible and the multiple needs of the individuals who operated these systems would have avoided these errors.”

Given current events, need we say more?