Enjoying economist John Kay’s Obliquity: Why Our Goals Are Best Achieved Indirectly, from which comes this tidbit.
In business, in politics, and in our personal lives, we do not often solve problems directly. The objectives we manage are multiple, incommensurable and partly incompatible. The consequences of what we do depend on responses, both natural and human, that we cannot predict. The systems we try to manage are too complex for us to fully understand. We never have the information about the problem, or the future we face that we might wish for
Satisfactory responses in these situations are the result of action, but not the execution of design. These outcomes, achieved obliquely, are the result of iteration and adaptation, experiment and discovery. “Reengineering”–“tossing aside all systems and starting over”–is called for only when systems are seriously dysfunctional. And in almost all cases, the best means of reengineering is not “going back to the beginning and inventing a better way of doing work” but trying models that have been successfully tested elsewhere. This is equally true of our personal lives, our corporate organizations and our social and economic structures.
A Few Reasonable Words 