Messy: The Power of Disorder to Transform Our Lives

Book Author: Tim Harford

“When will you clean up your messy room?” is a question that I heard often as a child. Beyond messy bedrooms, human culture all over the world has created clear guidelines and boundaries that encourage order and structure.  

Messy: The Power of Disorder to Transform Our Lives by Tim Harford takes us on a ride beyond these guidelines and boundaries into the confusing realm of complexity, disorder, and chaos to explore surprisingly transformative benefits. Buckle up - messy rooms ahead.

Let’s start with an obvious weakness of unlimited order and structure: creativity. How many breakthroughs in art, science, or society were the result of only following a pre-approved checklist designed by a committee? We intuitively understand that true creativity requires at least some mess. Harford reviews specific examples that illuminate the dynamic process at work between a messy world and the creative process. These include the story of prolific musician Brian Eno, who uses a deck of cards with creative idea prompts to be selected randomly. Other examples get even messier, leading to the conclusion that the main obstacle to creativity is boredom and messing things up is part of the solution.

The benefits of creating a mess in competition are less obvious. Sports teams, businesses, and fighting forces all have detailed plans. In contrast, Harford identifies multiple ideas which embrace the inherent mess of competition. One of these is the OODA loop (observe, orient, decide, act) developed by John Boyd, with an emphasis on adapting more rapidly to chaos and even actively creating more chaos to confuse the opposition. An example of how this concept played out in real life is Amazon. Jeff Bezos spoke to a Harvard Business School class in 1997 and was given some advice by one MBA student. “You seem like a really nice guy, so don’t take this the wrong way. But you really need to sell to Barnes & Noble and get out now.” Instead, Bezos correctly anticipated that Barnes & Noble had neither the incentives nor the capabilities to run a loss-making website that would need constant upgrades, create a new distribution system to deal with small shipments, and invest in niche market segments like e-readers based on unproven technology. Amazon embraced a messy approach and competitors have constantly struggled to keep up.

What about safety and risk? It would be logical to assume that the optimal approach requires increasing order and structure while decreasing chaos and mess, thus leading to higher safety and lower risk. Harford challenges our assumptions by reviewing the results across multiple domains. In healthcare, for example, our ongoing use of detergents and other environmental purifiers can have unintended negative consequences. Specifically, this can result in a less diverse microbiome, which is associated with lower health safety and higher health risk. Of course, this doesn’t mean that eating bowls of dirt for dinner is ideal for health. The key message is that optimal health requires a balance between order and chaos, structure and mess. 

Messy: The Power of Disorder to Transform Our Lives by Tim Harford is an important reminder to embrace the unpredictable, unexpected, and unusual factors that we constantly encounter everyday. The next time someone asks when you’re going to complete that detailed plan or even just simply clean up your room, you can reply “I’m just practicing the all important life skill of being messy.”

Why I recommend this book

We humans like tidy stories where all the pieces fit together in simple explanations, ideally with catchy slogans to match. But if we dare to go behind these tidy stories that we invent for ourselves and for others, what do we find?

Life is messy.

Many times the mess is not fun. The desire for order and structure is understandable. 

But order without mess is an empty shell. I’ve been practicing traditional Okinawan karate for more than 20 years and enjoy the focus on discipline, order, and structure. At the same time, the training actively incorporates a healthy mix of embracing chaos and mess. In venture capital, I find it extremely helpful to have a clearly defined thesis and repeatable investment process. But each investment has a unique journey that always includes more than one mess, creating both opportunities and risks. Getting messy in venture capital is not optional, it’s mandatory.

You might want to reflect on your own life and ask yourself a simple question. “How might I practice the all important life skill of being messy?”