Obliquity

Summary

Economist John Kay’s case for ‘obliquity’: that many goals are best reached indirectly, especially where the ground is hard to read. Ranging from business and town planning to football and forest fires, he argues that the most profitable companies aren’t always the ones most fixated on profit, nor the happiest people those chasing happiness.

Rationale

Obliquity fits what we found: contexts shape deep dispositions “whether they’ve been designed with culture change in mind or not”, so much of the work that matters is aimed elsewhere.