On reading John Kay’s Obliquity

stoweboyd:

I am reading John Kay’s Obliquity with deep enjoyment, and the fragment below may demonstrate why.

Obliquity, as Kay defines it, ‘describes the process of acheiving complex objectives indirectly’. The idea is derived from the philosophic principal that trying to find happiness directly seems to fail, but those that work toward that end obliquely – like finding something worth doing with your life, and doing it – arrive at happiness without striving for it. As Victor Frankly said,

Happiness cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side effect of one’s personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one’s surrender to a person other than oneself.

The more a man tries to demonstrate his sexual potency or a woman her ability to experience orgasm, the less they are able to succeed. Pleasure is, and must remain, a side-effect or by-product, and is destroyed and spoiled to the degree to which it is made a goal in itself.

The fragment below, from the first chapter, preceeds from a characterization of the failures of Le Corbusier’s modernism, a top-down, rationalist attempts to squelch all evolution from designing places to live. That’s a jumping off point to a discussion of Hammer and Champy’s reengineering notions:

John Kay, Obliquity

An oblique approach recognises that what we want from a home, or a community, has many elements. We will succeed in specifying fully what they are, and to the extent we do, we discover that they are often incompatible and inconsistent. The interactions between a home and its occupants, or between the people who make up a community, are complex and uncertain. Experience of both previous and current problems guides the search for answers. Many people contribute to the outcome, and even after that outcome has been realised none of them necessarily holds a full understanding of how Notre Dame was built, by many hands over several centuries.

Reengineering the Corporation by Michael Hammer and James Champy was one of the bestselling business books of the 1990s, and Hammer and Champy were as radical in inspiration as Le Corbusier:

These ideas, we believe, are as important to business today as Adam Smith’s ideas were to the entrepreneurs and managers of the last two centuries. Reengineering means asking the question “If I were re-creating this company today, given what I know and given current technology, what would it look like?” Reengineering a Company means tossing aside old systems and starting over. It involves going back to the beginning and inventing a better way of doing work.

Re-engineering was the substitution of design for adaptation and discovery – preferring the direct to the oblique. The demand for such a direct approach found a manifesto in Lenin’s What Is to Be Done?“*The future Russian leader argued that political and economic reform could be achieved only if imposed by a close-knit revolutionary cadre with a single vision. And although Le Corbusier was as far to the right as Lenin was to the left, and Hammer and Champy were certainly no Marxists, Le Corbusier would have approved wholeheartedly. Re-engineering was the essence of his conception.

It has been drawn up by serene and lucid minds. It has taken account of nothing but human truths. It has ignored all Current regulations, all existing usages and channels.

I cannot read such words without thinking of Pol Pot, Who proclaimed that the Khmer Rouge takeover of Cambodia marked year zero, when everything began anew (two centuries earlier, the French Revolutionaries made the same claim). A reign of terror followed in both cases. Pol Pot not only destroyed the fabric of society, he killed or caused the deaths of some 1.5 million of his countrymen.

Hammer and Champy are not bad men. Perhaps they do really mean what they appear to say, and re-engineering should be seen as a thought experiment, a way of asking questions about the relevance of current practice, not a literal prescription. Still, Lenin and Le Corbusier did mean what they said. What they believed to be the height of rationality, the creation of ‘serene and lucid minds’, was not rational at all, because based on a false and oversimplified picture of the world. The environment – social, commercial, natural – in which we operate changes over time and as we interact with it. Our knowledge of that complex environment is necessarily piecemeal and imperfect. And so objectives are generally best accomplished obliquely rather than directly.

I’m certain that I will write a longer form article on these ideas, especially since the current mania regarding ‘designing culture’ that has taken hold in the shortcircuited world of startup entrepreneurialism. It’s now a given – not subject to discussion or reflection – that

1. organizational culture is an object, a thing subject to design and crafting,
2. leadership should decide what the business culture ought to be,
3. and impose that idea on the organization like an architect designing and constructing an airport, a hospital, or a shopping mall.

More to follow.

“Objectives are generally best accomplished obliquely than directly.”

This is what I mean when I say that I disagree with radicals (whether they are Le Corbusier, Lenin, Bannon, or a variety of neo-Marxists) and I hate revolutions.