Don't stress the mess
I have a messy office. Well, let me clarify that. I don’t think it’s messy, but a certain lady I live with thinks it looks like a group of feral cats hosted their own version of Fight Club in there. Now I will admit that I do have a couple stacks of papers - newspaper and magazine clippings and the like - on the credenza and another stack on that little pull-out portion of my desk that makes it form an “L” shape. Ok, and there’s one more stack of contacts’ business cards next to my computer, but that doesn’t really count. I think of that one more like a candle or picture frame since it’s similar in size. Other than that, there are two bookshelves full of books and pictures in the corners, a TV on one wall and artwork of my book covers on the opposite wall. Not too bad, right? But I’m often told that it’s messy and my often stated reply, as I’m sure it is with most other people that have my similar “condition”, is “messiness is a sign of genius.” Furthermore, while my lovely wife is the epitome of an organized person, her office is cluttered - yes, I use that word knowing full well that an uncomfortable night’s sleep awaits me on the couch - with candles and pictures and knick-knacks. So, isn’t that messy as well? Just because her items might conform to some feng shui type of strategic angular arrangement, does that make her office more organized?
While there will always be friction between the organized and the messy, and we — the messy — are well aware of the benefits of being more organized, I don’t think the same can be said for those who are organized. We see you, you know...cruising the aisles of The Container Store, salivating over the latest slotted interlocking drawer organizers that promise to shave .03 seconds off of your search for a certain color of fingernail polish or patterned tie. I don’t think they’re aware of the benefits of being messy. Well, if you’ve ever been called out for your lack of neatness, or you’ve ever been referred to as “Pig-Pen” from the Peanuts gang, I am here to let you know that we have our savior. His name is Eric Abrahamson. He is the Hughie E. Mills Professor of Business Management at Columbia University and co-author of A Perfect Mess: The Hidden Benefits of Disorder--How Crammed Closets, Cluttered Offices, and On-the-Fly Planning Make the World a Better Place. I recently had the chance to chat with Abrahamson about the benefits to embracing messiness at work:
Mark Fadden (MF): “What got you interested in the topic of messiness in the first place?”
Eric Abrahamson (EA): “I’m pretty messy myself and contemplating my mess, which launched me on six months of research on it. I hooked up with a friend of my brother’s, David H. Freedman, that wanted to write a book on randomness, but randomness is more about machines. Messiness is the human side of that subject.
“During that six month period I found out that messiness has a global impact. Corporate executives around the world find the topic interesting. We live in economies that generate a lot of stuff. Capitalism, for example, generates a lot of information that doesn’t come in ordered stacks. We’re drowning in mess.”
MF: “Why should we embrace messiness at work?”
EA: “There are several reasons why people should embrace messiness at work. One, order is expensive. People think that if order is good, more order is better. But, from an economic perspective, there’s an opportunity cost to clean up your desk. It means you can’t do other things. So, if the cost of order is greater than the benefit of order, then you should be messy. In other words, if it cost $100 to get organized, and you only could earn $80 in that time, you lose $20. I know companies that do a ‘purging day’ where everyone in the office takes a day to put their desks in order, which costs one day of productivity. In that scenario, management is basically betting they can make up for that lost day of productivity and then some with a more ordered organization. But again, a prudent cost/benefit analysis must be completed in order to ensure that their hypothesis is sound. If not, there’s no use to doing it.
Two, being messy can be efficient. If 10 things land on your desk, let it pile up and then make one trip to the file cabinet. Take your job as an example. What if you had a choice between moving forward with a great story or filing away files as soon as they come across your desk? You’ll choose the great story, right? Plus, it might take more time to find things that are organized. What if you create a complex organizing scheme and then can’t find things? If that happens, then you’re sunk.
Finally, messiness helps foster creativity. Henry Ford’s model of production in the Ford motor plant used wheels from bikes, undercarriages from carts, and the assembly line from a meat packing plant. He created the car by recombining these things. There are these very creative communities in Northern Italy where small firms that produce very different things combine them into new things. Silicon Valley is like that; many small firms can come together to create the next big thing. If systems are too orderly, they’re locked in that order. It’s only when they are broken apart of those relations can you make new relations between them.”
MF: “Can messy workers coexist with more organized workers?”
AE: “Whenever I talk to executives, I ask them if anyone has a great employee that is messy. All of them raise their hands. I don’t care if employees are orderly or messy. You must be tolerant of different levels of order or disorder. As long as they are producing, then why does it matter? If messiness is making things more costly, then they need to be more orderly. But forcing a highly productive person to be more orderly may not work. There needs to be a sweet spot between the two.”
MF: “Anything else you’d like to include about embracing messiness?”
AE: “Messiness happens in work environments. Markets are messy, democracy is messy. Sometimes you have to have a messy approach to messy systems. There is beauty in mess. The renowned architect Frank Gehry once said that anything of beauty comes from disorder. We’ve been conditioned to think that order is good and we feel guilty about being messy. But order isn’t the natural state of the universe.”
This story was originally published June 11, 2017 at 12:00 AM with the headline "Don't stress the mess."