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

by Tim Harford

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.

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.

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.