Messy: How to Be Creative and Resilient in a Tidy-Minded World

by Tim Harford

The argument of this book is that we often succumb to the temptation of a tidy-minded approach when we would be better served by embracing a degree of mess.

But often we are so seduced by the blandishments of tidiness that we fail to appreciate the virtues of the messy – the untidy, unquantified, uncoordinated, improvised, imperfect, incoherent, crude, cluttered, random, ambiguous, vague, difficult, diverse or even dirty.

algorithm, which is a recipe for a computer to work through different possibilities. A good algorithm will get you a decent solution without taking for ever.

It’s human nature to want to improve and this means that we tend to be instinctive hill-climbers. Whether we’re trying to master a hobby, learn a language, write an essay or build a business, it’s natural to want every change to be a change for the better. But like the problem-solving algorithms, it’s easy to get stuck if we insist on never going downhill.

Messy disruptions will be most powerful when combined with creative skill.

‘The enemy of creative work is boredom, actually,’ he says. ‘And the friend is alertness. Now I think what makes you alert is to be faced with a situation that is beyond your control so you have to be watching it very carefully to see how it unfolds, to be able to stay on top of it. That kind of alertness is exciting.’

the friend of creative work is alertness, and nothing focuses your attention like stepping on to unfamiliar ground.

Two leading creativity researchers, Howard Gruber and Sara Davis, have argued that the tendency to work on multiple projects is so common among the most creative people that it should be regarded as standard practice.

peripatetic,

‘There’s a lot of empirical data to show that diverse cities are more productive, diverse boards of directors make better decisions, the most innovative companies are diverse.’ The logic behind these results is that when dealing with a complicated problem even the smartest person can get stuck. Adding a new perspective or a new set of skills can unstick us, even if the perspective is off-the-wall or the skills are mediocre.

People think harder when they fear their views may be challenged by outsiders. Other researchers have found similar effects. For example, when experimental subjects are challenged to write an essay, they write better, more logical prose when told their work will be read by someone with different political beliefs rather than someone like-minded.

When deliberating with a group, then, we should be seeking out people who think differently, who have had different experiences and training, and who look different. Those people may bring fresh and useful ideas to the table; even if they do not, they’ll bring out the best in us – if only by making us feel awkward and forcing us to shape up. That messy, challenging process is one we should embrace.

Faced with a choice of more cohesion versus more openness, our temptation to be tidy-minded means we’ll go for cohesion every time. Cohesion makes us feel more comfortable. We mistakenly think that diversity is getting in the way even when it’s helping.

The modern world is full of opportunities to meet new people. We rarely take them. We’re timid about who to date, who to hire – even who to schmooze with at corporate networking events.

In principle the modern world gives us more opportunities than ever to forge relationships with people who do not look, act or think the same way that we do. Travel is cheaper, communication is free and instantaneous, and a host of tools exist to help us reach across previously unbridgeable social divides. But what do we do with these opportunities? We keep our social networks nice and tidy by seeking out people just like us.

But while our attraction to people who share our outlook is not new, what is new is that we’re far more able to indulge that desire. Women are now far freer, better educated and better paid, which is good news. But one unintended consequence of that freedom is what economists call ‘assortative mating’. Executives with MBAs used to marry their secretaries; now they marry other executives with MBAs. And just as people choose ever more similar spouses, they also choose ever more similar neighbourhoods in a process called ‘assortative migration’. In the United States, neighbourhoods are increasingly segregated – economically, politically, almost any way one cares to look at the data.

There’s the Internet, of course, a cornucopia of news and opinion, but we sample its riches selectively – often without realising how the selection is made. Consider the way the troubles of Ferguson, Missouri, were covered by social media in the summer of 2014 after a police officer, Darren Wilson, shot and killed a young black man, Michael Brown. Night after night of confrontation between police and protesters barely made a ripple on Facebook. The most likely explanation for this is that Facebook was set up for sharing good news. (This was before Facebook’s introduction of other one-click responses.) You signalled your approval of a post by clicking ‘Like’, which feels like an inappropriate response to a photograph of a masked protester or a line of riot police. Because such photographs aren’t ‘Liked’ much, Facebook’s algorithm doesn’t tend to display them much; Facebook users might also self-censor, avoiding grim and controversial topics.

In contrast Ferguson did trend widely on Twitter, which posts an unfiltered feed and offers ‘retweets’ instead of ‘likes’. But the story here is not much more cheerful. Emma Pierson, a young statistician based at Oxford University, dug into the data and found that tweets about Ferguson were clearly divisible into two groups: the ‘blue tweets’, which claimed that Brown’s death was an outrage and the police response to protesters was oppressive, and the ‘red tweets’, which claimed that police officer Wilson was being scapegoated and the protesters were looters. (Many of the tweets made false claims, which were rapidly retweeted.) Pierson’s analysis showed that the two groups, with very different views of the world, barely interacted.

From the middle of one of these groups, surrounded by outrage expressed by like-minded people, it is easy to believe the world agrees with you. Of course the Internet is full of contrary viewpoints that might challenge our assumptions and encourage us to think more deeply, but...

When our stream of social media updates fits tidily into our preconceptions, we are hardly likely to mess it up by seeking out the people who disagree.

The first, and most straightforward, is to recognise this tendency in ourselves to spend time with people who look and sound just like us. Instead we need to find the social equivalent of Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies: people or places or situations where we won’t be able to avoid new kinds of interaction. Perhaps it’s as simple as joining a new group, learning a skill or pastime with strangers. Perhaps it’s taking an extended trip to a distant city, somewhere where everyone is a stranger. Or perhaps it is being a little braver at the next networking event.

we should place great value on the people who connect together disparate teams.

A third lesson is constantly to remind yourself of the benefits of tension, which can be easy to forget when all you want is a quiet life. When Samuel Sommers studied jury deliberations, he found that it was the presence of the black jurors that prodded the white jurors into thinking more carefully about the case. De Vaan, Stark and Vedres argue that creative collaboration is all about a sense of dissonance. You don’t just take a nice, neatly packaged idea from a stranger and put it into a fresh context. It is the ill-matched social gears grinding together that produce the creative spark.

A final lesson is that we have to believe the ultimate goal of the collaboration is something worth achieving and worth the mess of dealing with awkward people. Brailsford says that ‘team harmony’ is overrated: he wants ‘goal harmony’ instead, a team focused on achieving a common goal rather than getting along with each other.

The message of Muzafer Sherif’s work is that when you give people an important enough problem to solve together, they can put aside their differences. A good problem contains the seeds of its own solution. Rather than lubricating people with drinks at a networking reception or getting them to play silly games at a team-building event, the way to get conflicting teams to gel is to give them something worth doing together – something where failing to cooperate simply isn’t an option.

There can be no doubt that Steve Jobs was just as committed to the ideals of beauty as Le Corbusier had been and he could be just as controlling. One of the saddest and most eloquent anecdotes in Walter Isaacson’s biography of Jobs describes him, semi-conscious after receiving a liver transplant, ripping off his oxygen mask because it was ugly and demanding the medical team bring him five alternative designs so that he could pick the best.

One perfectly competent employee is being harassed by another perfectly competent employee to satisfy the pointless demands of a company rulebook.

The saying went that the atomic bomb may have ended the war, but it was radar that won it.

Why is creativity something that happens only when the boss isn’t looking?

‘to improvise is to lose control’, that wasn’t quite right. We rarely have complete control, just a comforting illusion of control instead.

The speaker without a script may bungle his lines – just ask Rick Perry or Ed Miliband – but he is also free to change course in response to a question or to cut things short if the event is running late. Having a script makes that harder. The improviser has given up full control on her own terms; the person who relies on the script risks having control wrenched away on someone else’s terms.

What does this all mean? It suggests that improvisers are suppressing their conscious control and letting go. Most of us go through our days censoring our own brains. We respect standards and norms. We try to be polite. We don’t usually swear at people, or punch them. All this requires a degree of self-control – after all, sometimes we really want to punch people.

Trained theatre improvisers learn something called ‘the habit of yes’. The idea is to keep opening up new conversational possibilities rather than shutting them down. Always add to what has been said so far. Never say ‘no’; always say ‘yes, and …’; another way this is sometimes phrased is ‘enter their world’. The idea of ‘yes’ has applications far beyond customer service and stagecraft. Here’s one student of improv describing how it has affected her parenting:

A really good conversation is mentally demanding. Listening and responding is messy, exhausting – and exhilarating. A great conversation is a rare joy because it is full of surprises and thus requires constant improvisation.

So what does it take to improvise successfully? The first element, paradoxically, is practice.

The second element is a willingness to cope with messy situations.

The third crucial element is the ability to truly listen,

A script can seem protective, like a bulletproof vest; sometimes it is more like a straitjacket. Improvising unleashes creativity, it feels fresh and honest and personal. Above all, it turns a monologue into a conversation.

In a competitive situation, you win by beating your opponent.

And one way to win is to encourage your opponent to lose.

Stirling’s audacious raid on his own headquarters* demonstrates some of the principles of messy tactics. First, get yourself into a position of opportunity:

Second, improvise your way around obstacles.

Third: speed counts for a great deal.

The trouble is that when we start quantifying and measuring everything, we soon begin to change the world to fit the way we measure it.

C-sections are now used in almost a third of all deliveries in the United States, and a quarter of deliveries in the UK – despite medical experts believing that only 10–15 per cent of deliveries require such operations.

Blair’s waiting-time target nudged family doctors into refusing routine appointments. Scientific forestry reduced biodiversity and hurt the welfare of local peasants. Virginia Apgar’s newborn score tempted obstetricians to perform C-sections. Report cards encouraged cardiac surgeons to carry out heart bypasses on patients who didn’t need them. In each case trying to measure performance – and sometimes making it an explicit target – had surprising and unwelcome side-effects.

In the UK, universities found a different target to game: the Research Excellence Framework, which is designed to measure the quality of academic research done and hand out public money to the top performers. A loophole quickly became apparent: a university department could get credit for research conducted by an academic on a part-time contract that demanded only 20 per cent of full-time hours. Getting a full-time research credit for 20 per cent of a full-time salary is a good deal – and universities promptly embraced it.

One cluster of headaches reflects the fact that targets tend to be simple, while the world is complicated.

Sometimes a target reflects yesterday’s problems, not today’s. The world tends to change faster than bureaucracies can keep up, which causes problems for any organisation that has lashed itself to an unbending framework of performance measures.

if you try to control a complex system, suppressing or tidying away the parts that seem unimportant, you are likely to discover that those parts turn out to be very important indeed.