Book 10: Obliquity – Why Our Goals Are Best Achieved Indirectly

This book is one of my favorite books and somehow I found myself in this book. I am the kind of person that never makes plans, of course I have some alternative ideas (options) but not plans because not realizing them makes me sorry so I better do not plan. And similarly I never promise anything to anybody, I just say that I will try to do my best since the result is mostly not depending on me, it is God who makes possible the final result. As the author mentions in the book “there are no predictable connections between intentions and outcomes”.

The book explains the ‘why?’ and the ‘how?’ Obliquity is necessary because we live in an world of skepticism and intricacy, the problems we face aren’t always clear – and we often can’t locate what our goals are anyway; circumstances and conditions change; people change – and are hard to predict; and direct approaches are often self important and unimaginative.

Also related to decision making, as we discussed in the class “we deal with complex (perfect) systems whose structures we can understand only imperfectly”. And as the author argues “the mistake is to make inferences about the relationships between outcomes and processes when we cannot observe and do not understand the processes themselves”. He added that we often cannot solve problems directly because of their inherent complexity, the incompleteness of our knowledge, the interdependence of the actors and the environment, and the fact that most models designed to assist decision-making are highly imperfect descriptions of reality. . So we often get closest to our ultimate goal by pursuing intermediate objectives, or working towards some higher goal that may have the side-effect of delivering what we need, be it more profit, more market share, or success in politics or war. Moreover he argues that business success is not of course as simple to pursue or even to measure as some like to argue, of course the main thing that has the most significant influence is destiny, fate or as someone calls chance or luck. So as the moral of the book I think that we should broad are “plans” or objectives, give ourselves more opportunity, do what we like, and try to do our best then the rest is left to God.