Messy: The Power of Disorder to Transform Our Lives

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.

The combination of gradual improvements and random shocks turns out to be a very effective way to approach a host of difficult problems.

John Kounios, a psychologist at Drexel University, argues that daydreaming strips items of their context.35 That’s a powerful way to unlock fresh thoughts.

Paul Erdős was the quintessential weak tie. He made the connections that nobody else could. He never stayed long in any particular university department or in any particular home. He was peripatetic, staying as a houseguest with one mathematician after another—his motto was “Another roof, another proof.”

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.

constantly remind yourself of the benefits of tension, which can be easy to forget when all you want is a quiet life.

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 having members get along with one another.

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.

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. So that filtering is a good thing. But you can have too much of a good thing, says Charles Limb; too much filtering. “Taken to the extreme maybe it squashes creativity. So rather than suppressing all these ideas the improvising brain lets them go.”

Improvising musicians shut down their inner critics. Improvisers stop filtering their ideas quite so assiduously, and allow the mess of new ideas to flow out. The improvising brain is a little like the tipsy brain, although alcohol is much cruder, making us clumsy as well as disinhibited. It is no wonder that at its best, improvisation can produce flashes of pure brilliance. No wonder, either, that with the internal censor asleep, it sometimes feels like a messy, reckless thing to risk.

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. As the philosopher Gilbert Ryle wrote, “To a partly novel situation the response is necessarily partly novel, else it is not a response.”

But perhaps the most important element in successful improvising is simply this: being willing to take risks and to let go.

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.

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

Anything specific enough to be quantifiable is probably too specific to reflect a messy situation.

making targets more complex doesn’t stop their being gamed—it merely leads to their being gamed in more complex and unpredictable ways.

(By definition, history will offer few examples of rare events—perhaps no examples at all.)

The complex rules are like the overfitted line: designed with too much hindsight, but poor foresight. A cruder rule—draw a straight line or a smooth curve—doesn’t fit the old data so well but will often do better when fresh data arrive.

The world’s toughest exam isn’t so tough if everyone is carrying a cheat sheet. A simple question from an unexpected direction can prove far more searching.

The better the automatic systems, the more out-of-practice human operators will be, and the more unusual will be the situations they face.

“Automation will routinely tidy up ordinary messes, but occasionally create an extraordinary mess.”

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

driving through his home country of the Netherlands with the writer Tom Vanderbilt, Monderman railed against their patronizing redundancy. “Do you really think that no one would perceive there is a bridge over there?” he would ask, waving at a sign that stood next to a bridge, notifying people of the bridge.

(In urban environments, about half of all accidents happen at traffic lights.

According to the ecologist Chris Maser, merely removing fallen logs and dead trees would result in the loss of almost a third of non-bird wildlife species in a forest. These losses seemed irrelevant to scientific foresters, who targeted maximum “sustained yield” and, tellingly, “minimum diversity.” Yet over time they altered the ecology of the forest and exposed the trees to fungi and other invasive species. The new, tidy forest, with each tree the same size and the same species, was easily exploited, not just by foresters but by parasites.

In nature, mess often indicates health—and not only in the forest.

Researchers at the University of Toronto found that it was easier to stay slim in the 1980s: looking at data about diet and exercise for tens of thousands of people since the early 1970s, they found that people today seem to be heavier than their forebears, even when they ate the same and were equally as active. One of the favored explanations for this is that young people today have denuded gut bacteria; a separate large study of European microbial genes has shown that a less diverse microbiome is correlated with a tendency to be obese.

the early lessons of the new science of the microbiome chime strikingly with what we’ve already discovered: If you try to control a complex system, suppressing or tidying away the parts that seem unimportant, you are likely to discover that what seemed unimportant turns out to be very important indeed.

The story of the “broken windows” theory of urban decay is another example of how we instinctively overestimate the benefits of tidying up certain kinds of urban mess.

The truth is that social science has not been able to muster much support for the broken windows theory of policing, nor for the idea that it deserves credit for breaking New York City’s crime wave in the 1990s.

In our organizations, politics, marketplaces, and personal lives, we continue to enjoy the apparent convenience, neatness, and short-term profits of imposing order, and fail to notice when it is sowing the seeds of fragility.

Our categories can map to practical real-world cases, or they can be neat and logical, but rarely both at once.

A plan that is too specific will soon lie in tatters. Daily plans are tidy, but life is messy.

Real creativity, excitement, and humanity lie in the messy parts of life, not the tidy ones. And an appreciation of the virtues of mess in fulfilling our human potential is something we can encourage in our children from an early age—if we dare.

Hammers and hoists and open fires and trees and all the rest can actually be dangerous, after all. But it turns out that children adjust for risk: if the ground is harder, the play equipment sharp-edged, the spaces and structures uneven, they will be more careful.

Learning to be alert to risk is a better preparation for self-preservation outside the playground than bouncing around like a pinball in a padded funhouse.

When we overprotect our children, denying them the opportunity to practice their own skills, learn to make wise and foolish choices, experience pain and loss, and generally make an almighty mess, we believe we’re treating them with love—but we may also be limiting their scope to become fully human.

We’ve seen, again and again, that real creativity, excitement, and humanity lie in the messy parts of life, not the tidy ones.

A good job, a good building, even a good relationship, is open and adaptable. But many jobs, buildings, and relationships are not. They are monotonous and controlling. They sacrifice messy possibility for tidy predictability. And too often, we let that happen, because we feel safer that way. That is a shame.

Openness and adaptability are inherently messy.