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

by Tim Harford

There are some situations in which a relentless hill-climbing search for marginal improvements seems to work well even without the occasional random leap. For example, the fortunes of British cycling were transformed by adopting a philosophy of ‘marginal gains’, searching for tiny improvements in training, diet and exercise. (The most glorious example: electrically heated cycling overshorts to keep the athletes warm as they waited for the starting gun.) Thanks to this approach, British cyclists won seven out of the ten gold medals available on the track at the 2012 Olympics – as well as winning the Tour de France in 2012, 2013 and 2015 after almost a century of failure.

Marginal Gains continual improvements kaizen

something better. Messy disruptions will be most powerful when combined with creative skill. The disruption puts an artist, scientist or engineer in unpromising territory – a deep valley rather than a familiar hilltop. But then expertise kicks in and finds ways to move upwards again: the climb finishes at a new peak, perhaps lower than the old one, but perhaps unexpectedly higher.

Messy disruption ad creativity

Look in the small print and he is everywhere, a zephyr of cerebral chaos blowing back and forth across the frontal lobes of pop.

Like the word zephyr

But looking at these achievements, the word ‘hyperactivity’ takes on more positive connotations. One is reminded of the sardonic headline in The Onion: ‘Ritalin Cures Next Picasso’.

Hyperactivity

Half their classes, chosen at random, got the original materials. The other half got the same documents reformatted into one of three challenging fonts: the dense Haettenschweiler, the florid Monotype Corsiva or the zesty Comic Sans Italicised. These are, on the face of it, absurd and distracting fonts. But the fonts didn’t derail the students. They prompted them to pay attention, to slow down and to think about what they were reading. Students who had been taught using the ugly fonts ended up scoring higher on their end-of-semester exams.

Handouts

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

Alertness

On the larger campus, students were able to seek out their ideological twins; on the smaller campuses people made friends with people very different from them.* Forced by circumstance to befriend people at least somewhat different from themselves, they did so. And they made the friendships work: those at the smaller colleges were actually closer and lasted longer than the friendships at the larger university. Offered a wider choice of friends, students at larger schools chose sameness. It’s astonishing how widespread this tendency to homophily can be, and it can be both deep-rooted and absurdly superficial.†

Homophily

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.

Dissonance in tems

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.

Proem solving

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.

Jobs design

The bright colours, different architectural zones, clusters of couches interspersed with large tables, and use of mobile technology to free workers have all been widely copied. Chiat’s desire to make the office more like a university campus – ‘The idea is, you go to lectures, gather information, but you do your work wherever you like’ – was also ahead of its time. Microsoft and Google each now refer to their corporate headquarters as a campus. Overall, however, his far-sighted experiment was not a success. The results – as described in a superb article by Warren Berger – were ‘petty turf wars, kindergarten-variety subterfuge, incessant griping, management bullying, employee insurrections, internal chaos, and plummeting productivity. Worst of all, there was no damn place to sit.’

When the workplace is a campus

Entrepreneur Gerald Ratner managed to self-destruct more quickly. Ratner had spent the 1980s building the largest jewellery chain on the planet. He destroyed it with a couple of jokes. Speaking to a prestigious audience of business leaders in 1991, Ratner joked that one of his products – a crystal decanter – was ‘total crap’ and that a set of earrings he sold were cheaper than a prawn sandwich, ‘but probably wouldn’t last as long’. The comments hit the front pages of the newspapers and sales at Ratners collapsed. Ratner was defenestrated; the company even jettisoned his now-toxic name. The cost of his slip was estimated at half a billion pounds – three quarters of a billion dollars. Gerald Ratner himself lost everything.

Ratner defenestrated

Demanding procedures such as the use of forceps gave way to the more predictable use of the caesarean section, in which the mother’s abdomen is sliced open to retrieve the baby. Done well, the forceps delivery can spare the mother a major piece of surgery. But the C-section is simple, routine and easily taught. It’s a tidy, one-size-fits-all approach, because no matter why a baby is stubbornly stuck, the C-section will get it out. 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. This is the logic of the factory floor, and it emerges once a simple score becomes available to the factory managers. But C-sections are no joke for the mother, who does not have her own Apgar score as she recovers from having her lower abdomen cut open.

Quantifiable targets

Alas, there are many ways to win a game and not all of them involve respecting the spirit of the rules. Four economists, David Dranove, Daniel Kessler, Mark McClellan and Mark Satterthwaite, looked at the impact of these report cards on elderly patients who had suffered heart attacks. They discovered that the cards had a most unwelcome side-effect. Surgeons were avoiding operations on seriously ill patients, preferring to operate on patients who did not need surgery at all. This makes sense within the logic of the report card system. After all, who wants to operate on a very sick patient who may die and spoil your rating as a competent heart surgeon? And conversely, who is more likely to thrive after surgery than a patient who was in decent shape before the operation began? Dranove and his colleagues concluded that, overall, the report card system pushed surgeons into performing more expensive treatments, but patients were sicker as a result. As Tony Blair might have said, obviously it shouldn’t work like that.

Perverse incentives

In 1995, Peter Smith, an economist at the University of York, attempted to provide an exhaustive list of all the ways in which targets might have unintended consequences. It’s a sobering array of potential calamities.

Try to read this article

A few years after the crisis had broken, one of central banking’s most imaginative figures asked a daring question. His name is Andy Haldane; he is chief economist of the Bank of England. His question was this: what if these ever more refined attempts to quantify risk were useless – or worse? Haldane reviewed what was known about banks that had gone bankrupt in the crisis, and how safe they had looked earlier according to the various sophisticated criteria laid out in Basel II and Basel III. He compared those numbers to the crudest possible measure of risk: had the bank borrowed a lot of money? At an annual convocation of central bankers at Jackson Hole, Wyoming, Haldane presented his conclusions: every single way you sliced the data, the highly rational, hyper-quantified risk management methods were less effective than a crude rule of thumb: ‘Beware indebted banks.’ Perhaps Basel I hadn’t been too crude in dividing leverage into only five categories; perhaps instead, it had been too clever in dividing it up at all. Rules of thumb like Haldane’s have proved surprisingly effective in a variety of environments: the psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer has assembled a large library of simple heuristics that rival or even outperform complex decision rules that are widely thought to be theoretically optimal. Here are just three examples: avalanches, heart attacks and investment portfolios.

Behavioual economics heuritics sikmple rules of thumb

So Lee Green and his colleagues developed a simple decision tree, throwing away most of the detail in the diagnostic table and focusing on a few obvious clues. The decision tree asks three yes/no questions: first, does the patient display a particular anomaly on a heart monitor? If so, straight to the coronary care unit. Otherwise, question two: is the patient’s main complaint about chest pain? If not, then there is no need for coronary care. But if so, then a third question tells the doctor to look for one of five obvious clues – any one of them is enough to send the patient to coronary care. The decision tree can be written on a postcard. Unlike the sophisticated algorithm, it requires no calculator. But it works. In fact it seems to work better than either the doctors or the complex diagnostic tool, referring almost every single patient with a heart attack – even more than the defensively minded doctors – yet generating fewer false positives than the diagnostic. More important, it saves time and effort in an urgent situation – which means that unlike the complex diagnostic, it gets used.

Use of heuristic decision tree behavioural economics

This problem has a name: the paradox of automation. It applies to a wide variety of contexts, from the operators of a nuclear power station to the crew of a cruise ship to the simple fact that we can’t remember phone numbers any more because we have them all stored in our mobile phones – or that we struggle with mental arithmetic because we’re surrounded by electronic calculators. The better the automatic systems, the more out-of-practice human operators will be, and the more unusual will be the situations they face.

Paradox of automation

their error only when he threatened them with the inconvenience of a court case. We are reminded of an old joke: ‘To err is human, but to really foul things up takes a computer.’ On the very same day that Victor Hankins’s car was snapped, Google unveiled a neural network that could identify house numbers in photographs taken by the Google Street View cars. Give the network an hour, announced Google’s research team, and it could read every house number in France with 96 per cent accuracy. That sounds impressive – but even a low error rate produces a vast number of mistakes. There are twenty-five million homes in France, so another way to describe Google’s new neural network is that it can misidentify a million street numbers an hour.

Computers fuck up

Our learned helplessness in the hands of technology is sometimes more amusing than horrifying. In March 2012, three Japanese students visiting Australia decided to drive to North Stradbroke, guided by their GPS system. For some reason the GPS was not aware that their route was blocked by nine miles of the Pacific Ocean. These things happen, of course, but the reaction of the three tourists was extraordinary: in thrall to their technology, they drove their car on to the beach and across the mud flats towards the ocean. As the water lapped around their Hyundai, they realised, to their embarrassment, that they were stuck. With astonished ferry passengers looking on, the students abandoned their car and waded to shore. The car was a write-off. ‘We want to come back to Australia again,’ said one of the men. ‘Everyone is very nice, even today.’ It’s fun to laugh at incompetent tourists. But it is also worth asking how on earth three sentient beings can drive into the Pacific Ocean on the instructions of GPS gone haywire.* Automated systems tend to lull us into passivity. In other contexts, we have a well-known tendency to accept whatever defaults are being suggested to us – for example, in countries where people are signed up by default to an organ donor register unless they tick a box to opt out, almost everyone accepts this default.

Automated systems

In the large warehouses so common behind the scenes of today’s economy, human ‘pickers’ hurry around grabbing products off shelves and moving them to where they can be packed and dispatched. In their ears are headpieces: the voice of ‘Jennifer’, a piece of software, tells them where to go and what to do, controlling the smallest details of their movements. Jennifer breaks down instructions into tiny chunks, to minimise error and maximise productivity – for example, rather than picking eighteen copies of a book off a shelf, the human worker would be politely instructed to pick five. Then another five. Then yet another five. Then another three. Working in such conditions reduces people to machines made of flesh. Rather than asking us to think or adapt, the Jennifer unit takes over the thought process and treats workers as an inexpensive source of some visual processing and a pair of opposable thumbs.

Automation humans as an inexpensive resouce with opposible thumbs

But it creates unusual situations where individuals have to battle to get an unlikely sounding story accepted: ‘I wasn’t parked illegally, I was stuck in traffic’; or ‘That’s not a terrorist group, it’s an alumni association.’ Does more efficient service in the majority of cases justify trapping a small number of individuals in Kafkaesque battles against bureaucracy? That is a question with no easy answer. But it does tell us we should strive to listen to people who say they have fallen victim to a rare and unusual error and set up mechanisms to sort out these errors quickly. With fly-by-wire, it’s much easier

Kafkaesque Trade-offs