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. Keith Jarrett’s desire for a perfect piano was one example of this tidiness temptation. Others include the public speaker who cleaves to a script; the military commander who carefully strategizes; the writer who blocks out distractions; the politician who sets quantifiable targets for public services; the boss who insists on tidy desks for all; the team leader who makes sure everyone gets along. We succumb to the tidiness temptation in our daily lives when we spend time archiving our e-mails, filling in questionnaires on dating websites that promise to find our perfect match, or taking our kids to the local playground instead of letting them run loose in the neighborhood wasteland.*

The most likely winning approaches will be a blend of randomness with hill-climbing. You might start by trying purely random coordinates for a while. Then, with time ticking on, you pick the highest you’ve hit so far and try some more random coordinates within a few kilometers of that point—hopefully, by now, you’re fishing in a mountain range. Finally, you pick the highest point so far and switch to a pure hill-climbing algorithm until time runs out.

This is like Bayesian Inference

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 upward again: the climb finishes at a new peak, perhaps lower than the old one, but perhaps unexpectedly higher.

A few years ago a team of researchers including Shelley Carson of Harvard tested a group of Harvard students to measure the strength of their ability to filter out unwanted stimulus.13 (For example, if you’re having a conversation in a busy restaurant, and you can easily filter out the other conversations going on around you and focus only on the conversation at hand, you have strong attentional filters.) Some of the students they studied had very weak filters—their thoughts were constantly being interrupted by the sounds and sights of the world around them. You might think that this was a disadvantage. Yet these students were actually more creative on all sorts of measures. The most striking result came when the researchers looked at precociously creative students—those who had already released their first album, published their first novel, produced a stage show of sufficient prominence to be reviewed by the national press, been awarded a patent, or some similar achievement. There were twenty-five of these super-creatives in the study; twenty-two of them had weak or porous attention filters. Like Brian Eno, they simply couldn’t filter out irrelevant details. But then, who is to say what is irrelevant?

Clearly, these people were not so completely incapable of focus that they couldn’t finish the album, the poem, or the script. There needs to be at least some hill-climbing between the random leaps. 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.”

“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.”20

This sudden sharpening of our attention doesn’t just apply to pioneering artworks. It can be seen in an ordinary high school classroom. In a recent study, psychologists Connor Diemand-Yauman, Daniel M. Oppenheimer, and Erikka Vaughan teamed up with teachers, getting them to reformat the teaching handouts they used. 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 , the florid , or the zesty . 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.21

In 1993, several years after Bernice Eiduson’s death, her colleagues published an analysis of this study, trying to spot patterns. A question of particular interest was: What determines whether a scientist keeps publishing important work throughout his or her life? A few highly productive scientists produced breakthrough paper after breakthrough paper. How?26 A striking pattern emerged. The top scientists switched topics frequently. Over the course of their first hundred published papers, the long-lived high-impact researchers switched topics an average of forty-three times. The leaps were less dramatic than the ones Erez Aiden likes to take, but the pattern is the same; the top scientists keep changing the subject if they wish to stay productive. Erez Aiden is less of an outlier than one might think. As Brian Eno says, the friend of creative work is alertness, and nothing focuses your attention like stepping onto unfamiliar ground.

Eiduson’s research project isn’t the only one to reach this conclusion. Her colleagues looked at historical examples of long-term scientific achievers, such as Alexander Fleming and Louis Pasteur, and compared them to “one-hit wonders” such as James Watson, co-discoverer of DNA, and Jonas Salk, who developed the polio vaccine. They found the same pattern: Fleming and Pasteur switched research topics frequently; Watson and Salk did not.

In the business world, too, different fields can cross-fertilize. Dick Drew was a sandpaper salesman at the Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company. In the 1920s he noticed the challenges of painting automobiles, and with a leap of intuition he realized that sandpaper could help. All he needed to do was produce a roll of sandpaper without the sand: the result was masking tape. Later, Drew saw DuPont’s new wrapping paper, “cellophane.” Again, he saw an opportunity. Cellophane didn’t have to be a wrapping paper at all: it could be one more product to be coated with glue and stored on a roll. Thus was Scotch tape invented.29 These days Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing is called 3M, one of the most consistently innovative companies in the world. Given its origins, should we be surprised to discover that 3M has a “flexible attention” policy? In most companies, flexible attention means goofing off on the company dime. In 3M it means playing a game, taking a nap, or going for a walk across an extensive campus to admire the deer. 3M knows that creative ideas don’t always surrender to a frontal assault. Sometimes they sneak up on us while we are paying attention to something else.30 3M also rotates its engineers from one department to another every few years. This policy is one that many companies—not to mention some employees—resist. Why make someone with years of expertise in soundproofing or flat-screen displays work on a vaccine or an air conditioner? For the company it se...

Gruber and Davis call this pattern of different projects at different stages of fruition a “network of enterprises.” Such a network of parallel projects has four clear benefits, one of them practical and the others more psychological. The practical benefit is that the multiple projects cross-fertilize. The knowledge gained in one enterprise provides the key to unlock another. This is Erez Aiden’s advantage. He moves back and forth across his network of enterprises, solving an impasse on one project with ideas from another, or unexpectedly fusing two disparate lines of work. Dick Drew did much the same at 3M. Or as David Bowie once put it, “The idea of mixtures has always been something that I’ve found absolutely fascinating, using the wrong pieces of information and putting them together and finding a third piece of information.”33 The psychological advantages may be just as important. First is the point emphasized by Brian Eno, that a fresh context is exciting; having several projects may seem distracting, but instead the variety grabs our attention—we’re like tourists gawping at details that a local would find mundane. The second advantage is that while we’re paying close attention to one project, we may be unconsciously processing another—as with the cliché of inspiration striking in the shower. Some scientists believe that this unconscious processing is an important key to solving creative problems.34 John Kounios, a psychologist at Drexel University, argues that daydr...

Here’s one practical solution, from the great American choreographer Twyla Tharp. Over the past fifty years she has won countless awards while blurring genres and dancing to the music of everyone from Mozart to Billy Joel, and somehow has found the time to write three books. “You’ve got to be all things,” she says. “Why exclude? You have to be everything.”37 Tharp uses the no-nonsense approach of assigning a box to every project. Into the box she tosses notes, videos, theater programs, books, magazine cuttings, physical objects, and anything else that has been a source of inspiration. If she runs out of space, she gets a second box. And if she gets stuck, the answer is simple: begin an archaeological dig into one of her boxes. She writes: The box makes me feel connected to a project. It is my soil. I feel this even when I’ve back-burnered a project: I may have put the box away on a shelf, but I know it’s there. The project name on the box in bold black lettering is a constant reminder that I had an idea once and may come back to it very soon. Most important, though, the box means I never have to worry about forgetting. One of the biggest fears for a creative person is that some brilliant idea will get lost because you didn’t write it down and put it in a safe place. I don’t worry about that because I know where to find it. It’s all in the box.38

I have a related solution myself, a steel sheet on the wall of my office full of magnets and three-by-five-inch cards. Each card has a single project on it—something chunky that will take me at least a day to complete. As I write this, there are more than fifteen projects up there, including my next weekly column, an imminent house move, a standup comedy routine I’ve promised to try to write, two separate ideas for a series of podcasts, a television proposal, a long magazine article, and this chapter. That would potentially be overwhelming, but the solution is simple: I’ve chosen three projects and placed them at the top. They’re active projects and I allow myself to work on any of the three. All the others are on the back burner. I don’t fret that I will forget them, because they’re captured on the board. But neither do I feel compelled to start working on any of them. They won’t distract me, but if the right idea comes along they may well snag some creative thread in my subconscious.

This is similar to my work board

“Honor thy error as a hidden intention,”

Such strategic isolation can be brutally effective. If you want your teammates to be committed to one another, one way to achieve that is to give them no alternative. The

That is a kind of magic, but there have been many gifted individuals in twentieth-century mathematics. Erdős had a more important spell to weave: the Hungarian wizard was quite simply the most prolific collaborator in the history of science. The web of cooperation around the world and across the twentieth century spreads so far it is measured in an honorific unit: the “Erdős number.” People who wrote articles jointly with Erdős himself are said by mathematicians to have an Erdős number of one. Over five hundred people enjoy this distinction. If you wrote a paper with one of them, your Erdős number is two. Over forty thousand people have Erdős numbers of three or less, all spinning in intellectual orbit around this astonishing man.

In 1973, Mark Granovetter, an American sociologist, introduced the paradoxical idea of “the strength of weak ties.” Granovetter looked at a simple sociological question: How do people with good jobs find those jobs? To answer it, he did something new: he looked at the structure of their social networks. After all, as the cliché goes: it’s not what you know, but who. Granovetter observed that the most irreplaceable social connections were the distant ones. Jobs were often discovered through personal contacts, but not because they were handed out by close friends. Instead, the jobs were rooted out by following up leads from distant contacts—old acquaintances from college, perhaps, or colleagues from a previous job. More recent data-driven research—for example, using millions of mobile-phone call records—backs up Granovetter’s claim that the vital ties are the weak ones.6

Most tasks require a combination of bonding and bridging: flashes of inspiration to identify the right approach, and long effort characterized by selfless teamwork to put it into practice. That means a compromise between bonding and bridging—a willingness to allow a degree of messiness into a tidy team. This chapter is all about why getting the best of both approaches can prove very challenging indeed.

We naturally divide ourselves into tribes (we’re the marketing department, they are the accounting department). Even if we rarely steal from these rival tribes or insult them to their faces, the annoyance we feel is quite real, and often owes more to our tribal feelings than to any genuine offense the accounting team may have committed.

The cure for this groupthink? Even a single dissenting voice broke the spell, and the experimental subjects felt much more able to express their own dissent.

More recently, complexity scientist Scott Page published The Difference,17 a book that uses a mathematical rather than a psychological framework to explore similar questions. Page showed that in many problem-solving contexts, “diversity trumps ability.” For example, if you already have four brilliant statisticians working on a policy problem, even a mediocre sociologist or economist may add more to your team than another brilliant statistician. If you’re trying to improve your tennis game, you may do better working with a tennis coach, a nutritionist, and a general fitness trainer rather than three tennis coaches. And, adds Page, “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.”18

While this all sounds very reasonable, the truth is that facing up to these different views can be messy and awkward. For example, in 2006 the psychologist Samuel Sommers examined the decision-making processes of juries, some all-white and some racially mixed. (These were mock trials based on real cases.) Deliberating the case of a black defendant, the mixed juries did a better job of working through the information presented to them. This wasn’t just because the black jurors brought a fresh perspective to the deliberation room. It was also because white jurors were less lazy in their thinking when black jurors were present, citing more facts about the case and making fewer mistakes.19 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.20

what economists call “assortative mating.” Executives with MBAs used to marry their secretaries; now they marry other executives with MBAs.28 And just as people choose ever more similar spouses, they also choose ever more similar neighborhoods in a process called “assortative migration.” In the United States, neighborhoods are increasingly segregated—economically, politically, almost any way one cares to look at the data.29 We have an unprecedented choice of news outlets. Americans, Canadians, Australians, and Brits can easily read The Times of India or The Japan Times. But we don’t. Instead, conservatives watch Fox News and liberals watch MSNBC.30

raditionally, corporate attempts to promote collaboration have emphasized “team building.” These efforts are fine up to a point, but we can’t expect too much from them. Most team-building attempts simply involve hanging out together, or participating in some fairly trivial activity.

So if we want to embrace a messier social setting, to get out of our bonding comfort zones and start bridging, too, what do we need to do? Four lessons suggest themselves.

The first, and most straightforward, is to recognize this tendency in ourselves to spend time with people who look and sound just like us.

A second lesson emerges from the work of de Vaan, Stark, and Vedres on how networks of different teams were able to come together and produce excellent computer games: we should place great value on the people who connect together disparate teams.

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

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 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.

I think this often takes the shape of a common enemy/

In 1923, Henry Frugès, a French industrialist, commissioned a rising star in the field of architecture to design some homes for the workers who labored to build packing cases in his factories in Lège and Pessac, near Bordeaux. The brightly hued houses were pieces of pure modernism, concrete cuboids shorn of decoration. They were starkly beautiful, in the way that modern architecture at its best can be. The architect’s name was Charles-Édouard Jeanneret-Gris. Today we know him as Le Corbusier.

Jobs had become fascinated by the idea of serendipitous interactions. How to make sure that everyone mingled together? He hit upon a plan: Pixar’s headquarters should have just a single pair of large restrooms off the main lobby. People would make new connections or revive old ones, because everybody would have to head to the lobby, brought together by a shared human need to urinate.6

This is fascinating because he had the example of Bell Labs where they accomplished the same serendipity by long wide corridors and round tables in the cafeteria. Also, Bell Labs put together very diverse teams and often more than one so they would compete with each other.

The “5S” system of management—Sort, Straighten, Shine, Standardize, and Sustain—has long stood for efficiency through tidiness and uniformity. The 5S system began in precision manufacturing spaces; clutter was discouraged because it might cause errors or delays, as were distracting personal effects. But 5S has somehow begun to bleed from car assembly lines and operating theaters and semiconductor manufacturing plants, where it might make sense, to the office cubicle, where it does not. Management gurus sing the praises of the “lean office.”

This comes from the Japanese production systems of the 1980s, when Japan was the source of all that is good. It fits the Japanese culture very well.

This might seem intrusive, but as a management consultant breezily explained, “If managers clearly explain why they’re doing something, I think most people will understand the rationale.”

Le Corbusier’s vision was revolutionary; Steve Jobs’s was exacting; Kyocera’s was petty. But in all three cases one can see a very simple mistake being made. Each had failed to realize that what makes a space comfortable and pleasant—and, to turn to the concerns of modern business, inspiring and productive—is not a sleek shell or a tastefully designed interior. Indeed, it may have very little to do with how a building looks at all.

The most successful office space was called the empowered office. Like the enriched office it offered the same tasteful prints and the same little shrubs, but participants were invited to spend some time arranging those decorations however they saw fit. They could even have asked for them to be removed entirely, perfectly mimicking the lean space, if they wanted. The empowered office could be lean, or enriched, or something else; the point was that the person working in the office had the choice.

The empowered office was a great success—people got 30 percent more done there than in the lean office, and about 15 percent more than in the enriched office. These are large effects; three people in empowered offices achieved almost as much as four people in lean offices. The enriched office was a modest success, but the disempowered office, which offered exactly the same physical amenities, produced low productivity and low morale.

The physical environment certainly mattered, and—contrary to what Kyocera or Le Corbusier might believe—decorations such as pictures and plants tended to make workers happier and more productive. But there was much more to the environment than its design—equally important was who had designed it. The best option was to let workers design their own space. (At that point, it made no difference whether the space they created for themselves was sparse or enriched—presumably because each worker chose a space that worked for her.) The very worst was to give them the promise of autonomy, and then whisk it away.

Illustrates the importance of control to people

slide to get to the lobby! Have a team meeting in a pod shaped like a clown car! Enjoy risqué art installations! The business world is capable of embracing more than one fad for office design. While Kyocera, BHP Billiton, and the UK’s Revenue & Customs agency apparently favor the lab-rat chic of minimalist desks and bare cubicle walls, trendier companies prefer crazy materials and bright colors. And no company is or ever will be as with-it as the advertising agency Chiat/Day, creators of “1984,” the advertisement that launched the Apple Mac.

While Chiat/Day’s Gehry-designed headquarters were built to symbolize creativity, truly creative spaces often look very different. If you ask the veterans of MIT what a creative space looks like, one building comes to symbolize all that’s best at the university. This building, which was demolished a few years ago, didn’t even have a proper name—it was known only as Building 20—and it could hardly have been more different from the kind of structure that star architects put together.

Building 20 story is amazing -- I think I have it in a couple of books

Building 20 was, quite literally, designed in an afternoon. In the spring of 1943, Don Whiston, a young architect and former MIT student, received a call from the university asking for preliminary plans and building specs for a 200,000-square-foot building by the end of the day. Whiston delivered. So did the builders who erected this squat, ugly, sprawling structure in plywood, cinder block, and asbestos with remarkable speed.

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

the building’s inhabitants felt confident that they had the authority (if only by default) to make changes, even messy changes.

But being a metaphor for freedom, daring, and creativity is not the same as actually being conducive to it. The cheap and cheerful Building 20 was a proper mess. But its computer-modeled replacement, painstakingly constructed at the cost of $300 million, was more of a tidy-minded person’s idea of what a mess looks like.

The offices at Chiat/Day may have looked superficially different from the offices at Kyocera, but they were managed with fundamentally the same tidy-minded aesthetic: This place should look the way the boss wants it to look. Google’s offices, like Building 20 at MIT, have been managed very differently: It doesn’t matter how this place looks. The denizens of Building 20 had tremendous power over their environment, even by the standards of tenured academics. This wasn’t because of their high status. If anything the opposite was true: the higher-status academics were placed in high-status spaces that were too beautiful, expensive, and historically significant to tinker with. (No wonder Jerome Wiesner, MIT’s president, felt trapped by the magisterial perfection of his office, and kept a messy bolt-hole in Building 20.) The lower-status academics were placed in low-status spaces, and that meant they could do whatever they wished. Nobody cared.

People flourish when they control their own space.

Some clues come from the remarkable career of Robert Propst. Propst was a sculptor, painter, art teacher, and inventor of devices as varied as a vertical timber harvester and a machine-readable livestock tag. A trained chemical engineer, he’d spent the Second World War managing beachhead logistics in the South Pacific. In 1958, he was hired by the Herman Miller company, a manufacturer of office furniture. Herman Miller’s managers thought Propst was a genius.28

I think I have more on Propst and Action Office II

Robert Propst had been committed to the idea of the empowered worker. He knew that good design meant giving workers control over their own environment. But he was helpless in the face of corporate bosses more interested in saving money than in his progressive design ideals. Propst was left to condemn the perversion of his ideas as “monolithic insanity,” “hellholes,” “egg-carton geometry,” and “barren, rat-hole places.”

like tidiness to the point of fetishizing it; we find clutter and irregularity disturbing and don’t notice when it is doing us good.