On the Wisdom of Muddling Through

As we gear up to make good on 2024 resolutions, we’re more conscious than ever that our plans are contingent. As the saying goes: if you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans.

Then again, we need some planning, right? Sure, I guess. But flying blindly without a roadmap is not without its merits. This is surprising, since our culture teaches us to set goals and impose order from the top down.

But muddling through is how human institutions naturally evolve, and there’s a perverse logic as to why, as this University of Texas article explains: Instead of a comprehensive analysis of every policy option, a much more constrained process of “successive limited comparison” is really how policies are developed.

In other words, in practice, we rarely build things from scratch, in our lives, and in our businesses. Why? Because the cost of looking at all the new options is too high.

Another analyst put it this way: How is it possible to ‘‘control’’ in the face of irreducible complexity?... We need to shift focus from goal-following behavior to stability around emerging targets of opportunity.

I don’t know whether I buy this completely. It’s scary to move forward without goals—and, instead, to simply pluck at low-hanging fruit. On the other hand, for much of the 2020s, that’s exactly what we’ve been doing. We’ve all just been muddling through. It’s nice to know that maybe there’s an underlying logic to that strategy.

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