A Perfect Mess
Posted on Thursday, October 23, 2008
A Perfect Mess: The Hidden Benefits of Disorder: How Crammed Closets, Cluttered Offices, and On-the-Fly Planning Make the World a Better Place
by Eric Abrahamson and David H Freedman Weidenfeld & Nicolson London 2006
Look at the front of women’s magazines or the TV schedules, and we quickly come across experts who’ll tell us how to declutter and bring order to our messy lives by buying boxes and gadgets, or paying them to teach us how to be neat. But what’s wrong with a bit of messiness, ask Abrahamson and Freedman? They set out to show that not only are ‘the advantages of being neat and organized typically outweighed by the costs’, but ‘moderately disorganized people, institutions, and systems frequently turn out to be more efficient, more resilient, more creative, and in general more effective than highly organized ones.’ (p.45) The ‘expert declutterers’ tell us how much time we waste looking for odd bits of paper or things, whereas if these were filed away, we’d find them immediately. But what about all the time we spend putting in the filing system and keeping it up to date?
The problem is that we think of neat and organized as good, mess as bad: ‘many of us are already operating at a more-or-less appropriate level of mess but labour under the mistaken belief that we’re failing in some way because of it.’ (p.53) The authors aren’t saying that messiness is automatically better, it’s absolutely the wrong thing in many areas – brain surgery or air-traffic control come to mind. But we should be ‘achieving the optimal level of messiness’ because ‘people and organizations are at their best when they’ve achieved an interesting mix of messiness and order.’ (229 & 230)
One thing I like about this book is the acknowledgement that people cope with mess in various ways, and that it can be creative. We shape our environments over time to conform to the way we’re most comfortable working, and apart from extreme cases, we shouldn’t worry or make judgements if this isn’t the way the experts do it. Abrahamson and Freedman have nice descriptions of different types of messiness. I recognise the ‘cosmetically neat messy’, who pile things into drawers or cupboards when visitors come round. (I collect everything up in a laundry basket and stick it in another room, a strategy which fails if the door swings open at the wrong moment.) There’s the ‘sloppily messy’ who don’t stick to an established scheme of order, and the ‘structurally messy’ who don’t have an established scheme of order.
There are descriptions of strategies for dealing with mess such as ‘the Tower of Power’ and ‘the Archaeologist’, which are self-explanatory! My own preference is to have a semi-messy desk, with several boxes and a couple of piles of papers, and to go through and file or clear out every few months. Why file everything immediately when in a few weeks, many things will be out of date and can be thrown away? (The book quotes Calvin Coolidge: ‘If you see ten troubles coming down the road, you can be sure that nine will run into the ditch before they reach you’. (p.121) A small pile of papers which you look through most days can be a better filing system than labelled files in a drawer, because it gives a visual clue as to what needs doing, and if you’ve seen a paper recently, you’ll know where it is. And you’ve saved all that time not filing everything!
Abrahamson and Freedman also offer their own strategy, slightly tongue in cheek, under the acronym ACE: Aw, relax. Carve out time. Eject some stuff. Simple really!
Problems arise with mess if stops us living our lives, if the chaos is so great that we can’t function. Abrahamson and Freedman give some examples of seriously dysfunctional behaviour. We’re not so much talking clutter on the kitchen table, but not being able to get into the kitchen at all because of the mess. There’s also a problem if we live with other people and there’s a ‘mess mismatch’. Couples with differing views on mess and neatness; parents who can’t stand children’s mess.
A Perfect Mess is very readable, it’s helped me to feel content that my own mixture of creative mess and organization is fine, if it works for me. In a messy kind of way, it’s also got me thinking about implications for different areas of my work, for example, for my coaching. Abrahamson and Freedman make a critical aside about the way that the Myers-Briggs inventory classifies people into those who are planned and orderly and those who are flexible and spontaneous. I don’t like fitting people into rigid boxes, but I do think people often show a preference to be ordered or spontaneous, J and P in Myers-Briggs terms. And it helps to know that about them when, for example, expecting them to arrive at a certain time. When I’m coaching using the SIMA process, it’s helpful looking at how clients actually behave, whether, for example, they thrive on instability and would die inside if nothing every changed, or if they need order in every aspect of their lives in order to thrive. This isn’t a right or wrong, it’s about understanding ourselves and using that understanding to find solutions which work for us.
There are other ideas I’d like to follow up from their discussion of the way that people try to impose order on the world around them. For example, when we’re quick to assume that anyone who suffers a misfortune must have deserved it in some way because it’s hard to take on board the idea that terrible things happen to utterly innocent people, that life itself is messy and random. Indeed, the authors say, ‘it is when our brains seem to be efficiently putting the world around us into perfect order that they are most likely to be leading us astray.’ (p.246) There’s a whole lot of stuff here about the way we try to feel in control of ourselves and the world through having an ordered environment. And that might connect with the way people make ethical decisions, wanting neat solutions when issues are so often complex. And it might connect with the idea that church should have ‘messy’ boundaries, not being so concerned with who’s in and who’s out, but welcoming. But that’s for another time.
by Eric Abrahamson and David H Freedman Weidenfeld & Nicolson London 2006
Look at the front of women’s magazines or the TV schedules, and we quickly come across experts who’ll tell us how to declutter and bring order to our messy lives by buying boxes and gadgets, or paying them to teach us how to be neat. But what’s wrong with a bit of messiness, ask Abrahamson and Freedman? They set out to show that not only are ‘the advantages of being neat and organized typically outweighed by the costs’, but ‘moderately disorganized people, institutions, and systems frequently turn out to be more efficient, more resilient, more creative, and in general more effective than highly organized ones.’ (p.45) The ‘expert declutterers’ tell us how much time we waste looking for odd bits of paper or things, whereas if these were filed away, we’d find them immediately. But what about all the time we spend putting in the filing system and keeping it up to date?
The problem is that we think of neat and organized as good, mess as bad: ‘many of us are already operating at a more-or-less appropriate level of mess but labour under the mistaken belief that we’re failing in some way because of it.’ (p.53) The authors aren’t saying that messiness is automatically better, it’s absolutely the wrong thing in many areas – brain surgery or air-traffic control come to mind. But we should be ‘achieving the optimal level of messiness’ because ‘people and organizations are at their best when they’ve achieved an interesting mix of messiness and order.’ (229 & 230)
One thing I like about this book is the acknowledgement that people cope with mess in various ways, and that it can be creative. We shape our environments over time to conform to the way we’re most comfortable working, and apart from extreme cases, we shouldn’t worry or make judgements if this isn’t the way the experts do it. Abrahamson and Freedman have nice descriptions of different types of messiness. I recognise the ‘cosmetically neat messy’, who pile things into drawers or cupboards when visitors come round. (I collect everything up in a laundry basket and stick it in another room, a strategy which fails if the door swings open at the wrong moment.) There’s the ‘sloppily messy’ who don’t stick to an established scheme of order, and the ‘structurally messy’ who don’t have an established scheme of order.
There are descriptions of strategies for dealing with mess such as ‘the Tower of Power’ and ‘the Archaeologist’, which are self-explanatory! My own preference is to have a semi-messy desk, with several boxes and a couple of piles of papers, and to go through and file or clear out every few months. Why file everything immediately when in a few weeks, many things will be out of date and can be thrown away? (The book quotes Calvin Coolidge: ‘If you see ten troubles coming down the road, you can be sure that nine will run into the ditch before they reach you’. (p.121) A small pile of papers which you look through most days can be a better filing system than labelled files in a drawer, because it gives a visual clue as to what needs doing, and if you’ve seen a paper recently, you’ll know where it is. And you’ve saved all that time not filing everything!
Abrahamson and Freedman also offer their own strategy, slightly tongue in cheek, under the acronym ACE: Aw, relax. Carve out time. Eject some stuff. Simple really!
Problems arise with mess if stops us living our lives, if the chaos is so great that we can’t function. Abrahamson and Freedman give some examples of seriously dysfunctional behaviour. We’re not so much talking clutter on the kitchen table, but not being able to get into the kitchen at all because of the mess. There’s also a problem if we live with other people and there’s a ‘mess mismatch’. Couples with differing views on mess and neatness; parents who can’t stand children’s mess.
A Perfect Mess is very readable, it’s helped me to feel content that my own mixture of creative mess and organization is fine, if it works for me. In a messy kind of way, it’s also got me thinking about implications for different areas of my work, for example, for my coaching. Abrahamson and Freedman make a critical aside about the way that the Myers-Briggs inventory classifies people into those who are planned and orderly and those who are flexible and spontaneous. I don’t like fitting people into rigid boxes, but I do think people often show a preference to be ordered or spontaneous, J and P in Myers-Briggs terms. And it helps to know that about them when, for example, expecting them to arrive at a certain time. When I’m coaching using the SIMA process, it’s helpful looking at how clients actually behave, whether, for example, they thrive on instability and would die inside if nothing every changed, or if they need order in every aspect of their lives in order to thrive. This isn’t a right or wrong, it’s about understanding ourselves and using that understanding to find solutions which work for us.
There are other ideas I’d like to follow up from their discussion of the way that people try to impose order on the world around them. For example, when we’re quick to assume that anyone who suffers a misfortune must have deserved it in some way because it’s hard to take on board the idea that terrible things happen to utterly innocent people, that life itself is messy and random. Indeed, the authors say, ‘it is when our brains seem to be efficiently putting the world around us into perfect order that they are most likely to be leading us astray.’ (p.246) There’s a whole lot of stuff here about the way we try to feel in control of ourselves and the world through having an ordered environment. And that might connect with the way people make ethical decisions, wanting neat solutions when issues are so often complex. And it might connect with the idea that church should have ‘messy’ boundaries, not being so concerned with who’s in and who’s out, but welcoming. But that’s for another time.