Messy: The Power of Disorder to Transform Our Lives

I can’t resist a new Tim Harford book. I’ve learned a lot from each of his other books, and I’ve enjoyed reading every one of them. I like his writing style, and because his voice is so familiar (he has a show on BBC4) I often hear him speaking when I read his words. It’s pretty nifty. So it was with great anticipation that I pre-ordered Messy and started reading it.Then Harford played a trick on me - he made me uncomfortable. I like for things to be organized. So there’s a certain amount of clutter I always seem to need to clear away to get down to the work I want to do. Time and again in Messy, I was told that I would be more creative and successful if I let go of the need to organize and basically did the thing I most wanted to do while having a few other projects in the background. Harford showed me how I was doing unnecessary things as a way to avoid doing what was really important. That is not what I wanted to hear from The Undercover Economist. He’s usually much more supportive of my behavior. “Let it go” is not what I expected to hear from him. Honestly, I was thinking about writing a letter of protest.But by "Chapter 4: Improvisation” I was a convert. There’s a section in Chapter 4 about not stifling the creatives. Apparently, I don’t need a cube farm dictator to stifle me. I’ve been stifling myself. In short, I had a come to Jesus moment with myself, and after reading Chapter 4, I started tearing up lists I’d been making about how I was going to structure my life and my time after I quit my full-time job to work to make a life for myself that is more creative and rewarding. Somehow, after just 4 chapters that included such disparate information as Brian Eno’s randomization card deck, examples of team harmony versus goal harmony, completely ridiculous workplaces set-ups, and a section about how to talk with dementia patients, I was a convert to messiness.I hope this all works out or at least that The Undercover Economist can, at some point, help me put my life back together if that becomes necessary.

Messy: The Power of Disorder to Transform our Lives (2016) by Tim Harford praises disorder in getting things done and being creative. Harford is an excellent economics writer and the presenter of More or Less, a number checking radio show and podcast.First Harford describes how messiness, disorder and surprise help in creativity and talks about how Brian Eno made musicians do things unexpectedly. Teams are next with a foray into the brilliance of Paul Erdos and how diverse teams do better than teams of similar people. Workplaces where serendipitous meetings happen and the futility of tidy desks make the next chapter. Improvisation and Martin Luther King then get a run.The virtue of holding the initiative with unexpected boldness, personified by Rommel is then added into the mix. Problems with targets for performance and the way people handle then are then described. The perils of automation and the crash of Air France 447 and the problems with relying on ordered systems are also described. Harford finally describes how calendars can be a prison, how there simply isn't a perfect formula for a perfect match and why we should value a bit of disorder in our conversation and that kids should play in a world with sufficient mess in order to become more resilient and more creative.It's well written but as in Adapt the book doesn't quite hang together with a particularly strong thesis. Then again for a book about mess this is probably fine. It's a fun read and any 'loyal listeners' out there would definitely enjoy it.

I love Messy: The Power of Disorder to Transform Our Lives by Tim Harford for three reasons. The first is that the worst boss I ever had was an absolute clean desk freak.He insisted that your desk should be completely clean of everything except what you were working on right then. At night, he expected the top of your desk to be clean, with everything properly put away. He would come to check on you and he would say, “A messy desk is a sign of a messy mind.”One day after he left, my officemate, Charlie, looked at me and said, “I wonder if he’s ever considered what an empty desk is a sign of?”The second reason I love this book is that I come from a generation that learned and believed that you could plan the error out of things. We believed that with enough attention, and enough equations, and enough planning, we could create action plans that never had to be modified. I got over that pretty early, but I find that I still must fight the concept in my head.I also love this book because I learned a whole lot about a whole lot of things from reading it.The book is not simply about tidy desks versus messy desks, or tidy plans versus messy plans. It’s about the way our attempt to impose order on a naturally chaotic world has bad outcomes. Early in the book, Harford states his idea of what the book is about.“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.”That brief quote contains a key concept. Harford is not suggesting that things should be messy instead of tidy. He suggests a degree of tidiness and a degree of messiness in the proportion that best serves you at the time.Here’s what’s in the book. Chapter one is about creativity. You’ll learn why breaking your normal work pattern sometimes leads to your best work. In Chapter two, Collaboration, you learn how teams can mix messy and tidy to be both creative and effective.Chapter three is about workplaces. In most of the places I worked before I started my own company, there were rules about how you would do things, including, keep your desk and files. The most important point in the chapter is that people crave control of their own environment and when we force them to be tidy in our way we often gain tidy at the expense of engagement.Chapter four is titled “Improvisation.” I made my living as a professional speaker for a decade or so. I learned that one of the most important things I could do was prepare to a certain point but to be engaged with the audience while I was speaking. The best improvisation is the improvisation that lets you take your abilities and preparation and apply them exactly the way your experience tells you at the time. I’m a jazz fan, so getting the story of Miles Davis’ classic album, “Kind of Blue” was a plus.Chapter five, “Winning,” brings together the study of an improbable triumvirate, Jeff Bezos, Erwin Rommel, and Donald Trump. This chapter is about what is sometimes called “maneuver warfare,” specifically John Boyd’s OODA loop, to move more quickly than the competition and, thereby seize advantage. You can think of it as the way you adapt to changing circumstances and set the pace of the action.Chapter six is about incentives. You’ll learn that sometimes our desire to impose order on a situation creates problems that we cannot foresee. You’ll learn how it’s easy to game any system where performance measurement is reduced to a single number. And you’ll learn why so many of the things we think should be incentives turn out not to be.Chapter seven is titled “Automation.” The key story is the tale of Air France Flight 447, which began in Brazil and ended in the Atlantic Ocean. The subject of the chapter is how automated systems that aid decision-making can weaken our decision muscles. Toward the end of the chapter, Harford asks the following powerful question: “Why then do we ask people to monitor the machines and not the other way around?” Think about it.Chapter nine is titled “Life.” One of the motivational books I read early in my career implanted the idea to “do it now.” Given my training and background, that was a powerful insight. Instead of planning every little action, things would work better if I just did them as they came up. That’s the key point of this chapter. Often, we say that we’re too busy to get organized, but if we just concentrate on practical action we might not need all that organizing effort.Bottom LineThe title of this book is somewhat misleading. It’s not about simply being messy versus being tidy. It’s about how mixing messy and tidy, ordered and disordered, planned and spontaneous, can make for a richer, more meaningful, and more effective life. That’s the reason you should read Messy: The Power of Disorder to Transform Our Lives by Tim Harford.

excellently-written and very important book. very validating for messy people like myself, but also very important for non-messy people to see the value in mess and that it has a place in the world. to sum up the central point - some of the best things that have happened came about as a result of things not going according to plan, and the subsequent mess.

I've just started reading it, but my daughter and son both read it and loved it

Que Buen libro. Pude ver que el desorden está asociado a la creatividad y no es nesesariamente malo. Puede conectar bastante con el tema.

Interesante, en ocasiones hace honor al titulo y llega a parecer contradictorio. Un libro más sobre la diversidad màs que sobre el desorden, no edperes que justifique tu caos de salon para reconfortarte....o si

This book was recommended to me when I was on a training course – I looked it up on the Amazon Shopping app on my android phone and bought the kindle version straight away (much to the astonishment of the other delegates on the course).It’s not often that I read a business book from cover to cover – I generally dip in and out – but this book is an exception. I took it on holiday with me the week after I bought it, and simply devoured it from start to finish.Every chapter had a wealth of interesting, memorable, and often quotable stories that held my attention and which have provided me with useful material for my work – particularly the chapter about Incentives and the harm that can be done by setting and monitoring the wrong targets.I recommend it to everyone who will listen to me!