"If a cluttered desk is the sign of a cluttered mind… . "
Disadvantages:
"… . of what, then, is an empty desk?" (Albert Einstein)
Recommend to potential buyers:
yes
Full review
If you could see the room in which I am writing this review, I suspect you might think it a tad disorganised. The desktop is covered with jotted notes on heaps of half-used pads and scraps of paper, with pens, markers, calculators and the like jumbled in amongst them. There are piles of papers and files on the floor. On the shelves books, stationery, ornaments and more piles of papers are arranged, or disarranged, in no apparent order. My wife sometimes shows visitors my lair, and they always cluck and say things like: “but how can anyone work in such a mess?”
The answer is: easily enough. I occasionally have difficulty locating the pile under which I’ve buried the particular piece of paper I need, but not much and not very often. In the days when I was constrained by the need for confidentiality, security and the policies of the company for which I worked to use an office filing system, I found it much, much harder. Once a document was hidden in a filing cabinet, it was out of sight and out of mind, as good as lost.
For people like me, a book like “A Perfect Mess” is manna from heaven, if only because it primes us with arguments to defend ourselves against clucking critics. It not only justifies our apparently aberrant resistance to a tidiness that most people assume to be beneficial, but it argues strongly that there can be positive advantages to disorder.
In truth, it is not the first place in which such a case has been made. There have been two articles in The Economist in the course of the last dozen years on the same theme. I tore them out of the relevant issues of the magazine and had them safely stored amidst the pile on the third shelf up nearest the window on the left (rough category: interesting oddments, items for which I don’t have any other particular place and things I’ve put there by accident) until that pile became too high for the shelf-space and I thinned it out, discarding them among other stuff. My mistake, because I would have found it useful to refer to them now. It all goes to show that you should never, ever, throw anything away.
*
A Perfect Mess is not only about personal messiness in such matters as paperwork. It’s about messiness in general: in business, in the home, in politics, and in many other spheres, even in the way people think. Indeed, essentially in the way people think, since this affects all the other aspects covered.
The background of the two authors is in business theory. Eric Abrahamson is a professor at Columbia Business School, and David Freedman is a journalist who writes predominantly for business magazines in the USA. It is therefore natural that they should give particular attention to the application of their ideas in a commercial setting.
They cite numerous examples of companies that are successful despite – or, rather, because of – not being conventionally organised. For example, bookshops and hardware stores that just pile up their wares for customers to browse rather than having them all neatly catalogued and displayed according to type; organisations that operate without formal management structures; enterprises that decline to plan ahead. The authors point out that companies that don’t devote a lot of time to “getting organised” save the concomitant costs, which often outweigh any benefits. They also retain their flexibility to evolve in new ways and respond agilely to unexpected changes in their marketplaces. Too much structure and discipline hinder rather than help.
In the home, many people tend to act as if neatness equates to virtue. Everything is stowed in cupboards while floors and surfaces are kept bare. But why? A home is a place for comfort and functionality. Whatever helps the residents enjoy being in the home is all that matters. Of course, if, for whatever imponderable motives, you enjoy having your home neat and tidy, that’s fine, but it is not intrinsically virtuous, and you will pay a heavy cost in time and effort for your enjoyment. Personally, I prefer to leave things out where I stand of chance of being able to find them when I next need them, rather than hiding them away. That’s not intrinsically virtuous either, but it does save time and effort.
In the world of science and ideas, examples are given of progress being made, not by systematic research, but by inspired accident. The classic instance is, of course, Fleming’s discovery of Penicillin by having left dirty Petri dishes mouldering in his laboratory, but there are many others: x-rays, vulcanised rubber, nylon and so on. Orderliness tends to funnel thinking down narrow, pre-determined channels; disorder opens the mind up to new ideas.
In the political sphere, tidy-mindedness, taken to its logical conclusion, results in totalitarianism – an entire society marching uniformly to a single step. In practice, totalitarian societies are neither efficient nor pleasant to live in. Messiness, taken to its logical conclusion, would, I suppose, imply anarchy, and probably not many of us would want to go that far down that route either. But most of us would prefer the relative messiness of representative democracy to the imposition of order by an autocrat. And democracies tend to function better too.
*
Indeed, talking of not always taking things to their logical conclusion, the authors do not argue that messiness is always an unmitigated benefit. They recognise that structure can bring benefits as well as hindrances, and that some people find it easier to work within a defined structure than without. What they are trying to do, as they explain, is to redress the balance, to present a plea on behalf of messiness against a prevailing climate of opinion that tends to be prejudiced on the side of order.
Their particular target is the host of consultants – both business and personal – that peddle advice on getting organised. Management consultants do, of course, exist everywhere and they are not all bad people. (I have to say this, since my wife is one, but it is also true.) Not all are intent on imposing their own prescriptive preconceptions of orderly organisation on their clients.
The consultants peddling personal organisation to ordinary people seem to be a particular fad in the States at the moment. As the purveyors of all fads tend to, I dare sat they will cross the Atlantic to invade our shores before long. Let’s hope the invaders are pushed back into the sea. In effect, they seem to prey on people’s needless feelings of guilt about their messiness, and the main advice given seems to be simply to throw lots of stuff out and stow away the rest in neatly catalogued cupboards or similar receptacles. Often, of course, the process will prove counter-productive: their clients will miss the things they have thrown out, or will manage no better with their new systems than with the lack of system that preceded them, but in a world in which orderly is conflated with logical and virtuous, this does not seem to be the main concern of those hawking the advice.
It is hard to see whom this process benefits, apart from the consultants of course. In my view, it would be much healthier if the clients were helped to conquer their guilt complexes, and thereby to make the most of their natural messiness and enjoy life to the full, but this service doesn’t seem to be on offer. Maybe I shall start a consultancy to provide it.
*
The style of the book is readable and accessible. It is not burdened with business or psychological jargon. It is discursive, much illustrated by anecdotes and case studies, rather than dry, abstract theorising.
Not all the anecdotes and case studies seem entirely apt as support for the points they purport to be making, but they are always engaging and enjoyable to read. Similarly, different meanings of “messiness” are sometimes treated as if they were the same, when they are not. You could say the thinking itself is messy in places, and even as predisposed as I was to accept the main thesis I often found myself with doubts and reservations, but in general it is persuasive enough.
The book is arranged into chapters, each roughly covering the various aspects of messiness (business, personal, domestic, in ways of thinking, etc). This division is not particularly tidy or clear-cut. There are places where the subjects overlap or where the authors seem to stray from a particular point. But maybe this is all done intentionally in the interests of constructive disorder. Certainly it would seem unfair to criticise a book that persuasively argues the virtues of messiness for being a bit messy in itself.
*
Which brings us to the underlying theme of messiness in the way people think. Reflecting on the lessons of the book, it is worth going back to first principles. Essentially, much of our thinking consists of trying to make sense of the universe around us. Often this is done by categorising what we see and experience. If we can classify something under a familiar heading we tend to think we have understood it.
But maybe in doing so we are not increasing our knowledge, only organising our ignorance. Maybe we are even compounding our ignorance, since in the process of pigeon-holing we constrict our ability to see the nuances and distinctions, to weave seemingly dissimilar strands together and to reinterpret things in different ways, to think “outside the box”. As one of my notes to myself cluttering my desk puts it: “everything that makes it easier for us to understand things also makes it easier for us to misunderstand them.” Misunderstanding is inefficient, causing us to draw wrong conclusions and take wrong decisions, or to miss the right ones, but misunderstanding can be the outcome of obsessive order.
To return to the personal example at the outset of this review: if I shuffle through a couple of roughly-related piles of paper from my floor, that just might help me to see a connection between half-forgotten facts and thoughts. This, in turn, might germinate ideas in a way that would never happen if I were restricted to the pre-determined categories of a filing cabinet.
That’s my excuse, anyway. It’s good to have this book to back me up.
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