Change and obliquity: how to achieve complex objectives through indirect means

You have to first take a creative and challenging detour into breakdown and chaos to achieve high magnitude change, writes Deborah Rowland

 
“Those only are happy who have their minds fixed on some object other than their own happiness… aiming thus at something else, they find happiness by the way” – John Stuart Mill

 How come so many change efforts in today’s unpredictable world fail to achieve their stated objectives – be they corporate turn-arounds, public-sector reform, or wider societal flourishing? I have contended through my practice and research over the past three decades that the reason lies at the very feet of leadership: we choose an overly-managerial, programmatic approach to “change management”; and, we externalise the change target – failing to realise that our inner-world is the primary fulcrum through which to change what we seek around us.

And so we continue, notwithstanding good intentions, to launch effortful and costly change programmes and initiatives onto others, that are tightly directed by top-down targets, getting people caught up in busy action. What if we were to consider subtler, humbler yet far more potent ways of achieving the same goals – inside-out ways that lead to deeper, genuine and more sustainable movement?

I was therefore intrigued recently to come across the notion of “obliquity”. A term originating in astronomy, describing the angle or tilt of the earth’s axis of rotation, obliquity in the human world is generally used to mean the deviation from moral conduct, or, the art of being deliberately vague. Far from these nefarious or slanting-from-the-truth meanings, however, is how the economist John Kay has coined the term obliquity to convey how complex goals are best achieved when pursued indirectly.

Put simply, I can write 3-4000 words a day far more effortlessly when I seek to intersperse my writing with long inspiring afternoon walks along the Cornish coast, rather than set myself daily numerical word count goals. Creative acuity is not the overt goal of my walks, but it is the oblique outcome.

Συνέχεια ανάγνωσης εδώ

Σχετικά Άρθρα