Obliquity: Why our goals are best achieved indirectly [Paperback]

On the cover of John Kay's new book (hardback edition), Tim Harford pronounces it "persuasive". Yet Harford's approach and argument in his subsequent column in the FT on March the 18th, 2010, titled "Political Ideas Need Proper Testing" suggested that he is far from persuaded by Mr Kay's argument. That wasn't a good start to reading this book.

John Kay's core thesis is that in any setting, there are multiple, often conflicting, goals; and that instead of a linear rational model, the best approach to problem-solving is oblique, an approach for which he coins the neologism `obliquity'.

The book is organised in three parts. Part one explains how the world abounds in obliquity, citing specifically how success in finding happiness and profits (in a business setting) does not come from direct pursuits, and how the rich people are not the most materialistic. There are amusing stories but Mr Kay cherry-picks the arguments, that bolster his thesis, and ignores how some of the least materialistic rich men cited were also single-minded in their pursuit of money.

Part two explains why problems cannot be solved directly. Here he dwells upon how rational models fail to capture the real dynamics of political decision making. He devotes time to demonstrating why this is the case where plural outcomes may exist, and where complexity and incompleteness mar our understanding of the problem. He also proposes that obliquity is a better term for Charles Lindblom's coinage,"muddling through", as an explanation of political decision making. Further he makes the case that the more one participates in or studies something, the better one understands and abstracts its complexity, its essence. Having spent several years in my doctoral research on political decision making, I felt he once again picked Lindblom because his point is most amenable to his thesis. Several better explanations of political decision-making have followed Lindblom's and they cover more ground and do so in a more granular fashion than Mr Kay does in this section of the book.

The third section, comprising shorter chapters, explains problem-solving in a complex world using stories from the real world. This was the quickest read in the book yet I found myself feeling dragged through it. Stories from several unconnected walks of life are great for anecdotes and dinner party conversation, but make a book feel like a jigsaw being forced together.

To those given to seeking single labels for people, it is seductive to see Mr Kay as an economist. His wider philosophical grounding and interest is visible in the book as he illustrates his points using examples from history, urban design, football and evolutionary theory amongst others. Yet despite such ambition and possibility, the book is perhaps best described as a "light" read. One gets the feeling that Mr Kay tried to do a Gladwell on the topics of complexity and decision making but did not get far enough.

Usefulness note: The book's length and organisation would make it a good read in a long-haul flight. I'd not recommend it strongly though.

John Kay has jumped on the Malcolm Gladwell/Tim Harford/Freakonomics bandwagon, and no doubt most people buying this book will be those who read and enjoyed those others. If that's you, then I suggest you do yourself a favour and give this one a miss. Kay came up with the name Obliquity to encapsulate the idea that problems (large problems at any rate) are best solved with an indirect approach. He takes this approach to writing the book. "Get it down. That is how this book was written..." and my goodness it shows. He just jumps around all over the place without any sort of clear idea of a structure to his narrative. Just whatever idea comes into his head is immediately splatted down on the paper. It's a jumble and it's hard to follow the thread of what he's saying. Maybe because there isn't a thread - what he has to say is an idea that can be encapsulated in one sentence and doesn't need a whole book of exposition.

In the way that Gladwell writes in such a wonderful, lively style, so you can't wait to turn the next page, Kay's writing plods on in a semi-academic fashion. You struggle to work out what he's saying, keep having to re-read passages to get the gist of it. And the words oblique and obliquity, never the prettiest of words, are there in every flipping paragraph, jumping off the page and hitting you between the eyes so you get to the point where you're just waiting for the next one (and trust me, you never have to wait very long) and missing the point of whatever it is he's driveling on about. Here's an example to give you a flavour of what I mean, and I picked this page at random - "The achievement of high level objectives, intermediate goals and basic actions needs an oblique approach, based on interactions that value and make use of the parallel objectives, goals and actions of the individuals who are asked to contribute to their realisation." If that gets your juices flowing then you'll be rushing to buy this but if not, trust me, this is the standard of prose in this book. It's one advantage is it's so unutterably dull that it makes great bedtime reading. One page and you're asleep.

I'm not quite sure why I plodded through to the end, but when I did I came across yet more irritation. He compares Paris to Brasilia, the former a great city, compared to the latter, because, he says, Paris has developed "through a process of constant adaptation.... Paris grew by muddling through, Brasilia by design." I assume, rather shockingly, he's never heard of Baron Haussmann, the great urban planner who in the nineteenth century completely transformed Paris to the, um, planned city we see today. If he sits down and plans his next book rather better than he did this one, he might have a bit more success. Which I guess completely contradicts the message of "Obliquity".

Two related fields have seen a burst of interest in serious research and popular literature recently: the study of happiness and the application of ideas from economics to other fields. This book combines the two and is unfortunately far weaker than others of both types.

Initially I had high expectations. The author is a highly respected economist and thinker. The book is well researched, clearly written and easy to understand.

The first hint of a problem arrives early on with what I took to be an unnecessary dig at Dan Ariely's book, Predictably Irrational. Having read that book, and attended a lecture by its author, I can attest that on this subject he is as far above John Kay as a statesman is above a ranting drunkard.

"Obliquity" is a string of anecdotes of effective and ineffective planning, strategy and problem solving from which the author pretends he has identified a new idea, namely that oblique thinking is better than direct thinking. The anecdotes are sometimes interesting and insightful. The problem is that the overall thesis is utterly vacuous. Pol Pot, Lenin, City bonuses, and high rise housing were bad because they lacked obliquity, while chaotic free markets and the route of the Panama Canal, were good because they were oblique.

John Kay's trick is to switch between precise and vague meanings of his central term. In his examples where obliquity means something precise he fails to show that it has caused the good outcome. In the examples of successfully oblique thinking, the common thread is so loose that the word has lost all meaning. He might as well talk about creative thinking, lateral thinking or just being smart. How much does this matter? A lot, actually. A new concept justifies a new book in a growing market. A new name for a collection of anecdotes, most of which are old and many of which have already been discussed in books on effective thinking, is not worth publishing.

Let's examine one area in more detail - business, a field John Kay genuinely knows something about. He says companies which aim to make profits fail to make them because they lack obliquity. He cites spectacular examples such as ICI, Citibank and Lehmann Brothers and shows how shortsighted and foolish their management was. Their stated aim was direct, their strategy failed. Ra-ra for obliquity! What exactly has he proved? - that some companies focusing too much on profits failed. Stupendous. Actually some companies that don't focus enough on profits fail. And some companies that focus a lot on profits succeed. Success in business depends on an awful lot of things, such as whether the strategy suited the circumstance and whether management was smart. The examples prove absolutely nothing and, what is worse, I have a strong suspicion that John Kay knows it. Even if it were true, which I doubt, that the majority of outstandingly successful companies had oblique goals, that would not mean that all companies should have oblique goals. A more likely conclusion would be that where there was a possibility to make a huge fortune in a new line of business (such as Facebook) the way to do it was by relying on vision. The majority of companies doing mundane things like collecting waste would still need to watch their profits.

The discussion on happiness is equally fatuous. Let me paraphrase his argument. Sitting on the sofa and watching television while stuffing your face with crisps is enjoyable. Climbing a mountain makes you cold, tired and hungry, yet people who do the first (no obliquity) are unhappy while those doing the second (obliquity) are happy. Amazing! - obliquity is the source of true happiness. I beg to suggest a simpler explanation: happiness comes not from superficial pleasures but from deep and enduring satisfaction. You don't need obliquity to work that out.

If you have never read anything about creative thinking, economics in everyday life, or what makes people happy, you would like an entertaining introductory romp through a variety of disparate anecdotes, and don't care whether the thesis is meaningful, this book could be worth reading. But for a writer of John Kay's quality, "Obliquity" is, frankly, a disgrace.