It demands habits of inward attention, and it often proceeds by indirection and obliquity.

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Managerial behavior is mapped on four dimensions: bureaucracy-to-emergence, hierarchy-to-collective wisdom, alignment-to-obliquity, and extrinsic-to-intrinsic motivation.

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We might also explore the various theories that underlie and reinforce the shift, including theories of human nature and motivation, sources of creativity, non-linearity, emergence, paradox, obliquity, ethics and social responsibility and so on.

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This line of thinking ignores the principle of indirectness (or obliquity), which shows that in a complex interactive environment, a direct focus on a single goal can elicit reactions which tend to prevent the achievement of that goal.

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The contribution of Agile to enhanced management practices for dealing with complexity is a shift towards valuing transparency, obliquity, informality, expertise and getting real-world results for customers through iterative approaches, as compared to the traditional management approaches of command, control, hierarchy, rules, formal plans, reports, predictability, short-term efficiency and a preoccupation with saving or making money.

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