Messy

Messy Plot Summary

Introduction

Keith Jarrett was in trouble. The jazz pianist had arrived at the Cologne Opera House for a sold-out concert only to discover that the piano was unplayable. It was out of tune, the black keys in the middle didn't work, and the pedals stuck. The young concert promoter, Vera Brandes, was devastated as Jarrett refused to perform. Standing in the rain, she begged him to reconsider. Taking pity on her, Jarrett reluctantly agreed: "Never forget, only for you." That night, Jarrett created magic from mess. The limitations of the piano forced him to avoid the high notes, use repetitive bass riffs to compensate for poor resonance, and play with extraordinary physical effort to reach the balconies. The result was The Köln Concert, which became the best-selling solo jazz album in history with 3.5 million copies sold. This remarkable story illustrates the central idea we'll explore: sometimes what appears to be a disadvantage can become a powerful creative catalyst. Throughout these pages, we'll discover how embracing disorder, disruption, and messiness can lead to unexpected breakthroughs in creativity, collaboration, leadership, and resilience. The messy path, though uncomfortable, often leads to greater innovation and success than the tidy one we instinctively prefer.

Chapter 1: The Creative Catalyst: How Constraints Spark Innovation

Brian Eno, the legendary music producer and artist, was frustrated. In 1976, he was collaborating with David Bowie in Berlin on what would become groundbreaking albums like "Low" and "Heroes." During these sessions, Eno would pull out cards from his "Oblique Strategies" deck and relay their strange instructions to the musicians. "Be the first not to do what has never not been done before," one card might say. Or "Change instrument roles." Following these directives, Carlos Alomar, one of the world's greatest guitarists, was told to play drums instead. Another time, Eno stood beside a blackboard with a list of chords, pointing at them randomly while musicians followed along. These disruptions drove the musicians crazy. "This experiment is stupid," Alomar complained. The violinist Simon House remarked that sessions often "sounded terrible." Yet these chaotic working methods produced some of the decade's most critically acclaimed albums. By deliberately introducing randomness and constraints, Eno was forcing the musicians out of their comfort zones and into new creative territory. This approach mirrors what scientists have discovered about creativity. Researchers at Harvard found that students with "weak attentional filters" – those easily distracted by surrounding stimuli – were significantly more creative. In another study, people who were deliberately confused by mixed signals produced more original word associations. When our brains encounter unexpected obstacles or contradictions, they're forced to work harder and explore new pathways. The power of creative disruption extends beyond music. Charles Darwin alternated between research in geology, zoology, psychology, and botany throughout his life, maintaining what creativity researchers call a "network of enterprises." This cross-pollination of ideas helped him develop his revolutionary theory of evolution. Similarly, the company 3M rotates engineers between departments every few years, allowing insights from one field to spark innovations in another – like when a sandpaper salesman invented masking tape after observing challenges in automobile painting. What these examples reveal is that creativity thrives not despite constraints and disruptions, but because of them. When we encounter obstacles, our brains become more alert, more engaged, and more likely to make unexpected connections. As Brian Eno puts it: "The enemy of creative work is boredom, and the friend is alertness." By embracing the mess – whether it's an unplayable piano, a random directive, or an unfamiliar field – we activate the very mental processes that lead to breakthrough thinking.

Chapter 2: Collaborative Chaos: When Diverse Teams Outperform

In 1954, social psychologist Muzafer Sherif conducted a remarkable experiment at Robbers Cave State Park in Oklahoma. He brought two groups of eleven-year-old boys to the park, keeping them initially unaware of each other's existence. Each group bonded through activities like swimming and hiking, naming themselves the "Rattlers" and the "Eagles." When Sherif finally introduced the groups to each other and organized competitions between them, intense rivalry quickly developed. The Eagles burned the Rattlers' flag; the Rattlers raided the Eagles' cabin. Despite being similar in background and interests, these boys had formed strong tribal identities and deep animosity toward the "other" group. This tribal tendency doesn't disappear in adulthood. Researchers Katherine Phillips, Katie Liljenquist, and Margaret Neale discovered something fascinating when they asked groups to solve murder mysteries. Groups of four friends performed worse than groups with three friends and one stranger. The diverse groups correctly solved the mysteries 75% of the time, compared to just 54% for homogeneous groups. Yet when asked about their experience, members of the diverse teams felt less confident and more uncomfortable, while the homogeneous teams enjoyed themselves despite their inferior results. Similar patterns emerged in Brooke Harrington's study of investment clubs. The friendly clubs made poor financial decisions to preserve relationships, postponing sensitive decisions to avoid hurting feelings. Meanwhile, less sociable clubs had frank discussions about investment proposals, voting down weak ideas despite the discomfort. One club member muttered, "This used to be fun," but their financial returns were superior. Our natural preference for comfort and harmony in teams can actually undermine performance. When everyone thinks alike, we fall victim to groupthink – failing to challenge assumptions or consider alternatives. Diverse teams, with their friction and discomfort, force us to justify our positions, examine our biases, and consider perspectives we might otherwise ignore. Dave Brailsford, who led the Sky cycling team to multiple Tour de France victories, recognized this dynamic when performance declined: "We'd been becoming pretty aligned over the last six years working together. If you gave us a problem, we'd come back with the same answer." His solution? "Rock the boat" by bringing in people who would question everything. The team won again the following year. The messy truth about collaboration is that the teams that feel the most comfortable are often the least effective. True innovation emerges from the creative tension between different viewpoints, backgrounds, and thinking styles. When we embrace this collaborative chaos – the disagreements, the awkward moments, the challenging of assumptions – we create the conditions for breakthrough thinking that homogeneous teams, for all their harmony, simply cannot match.

Chapter 3: The Freedom of Limitation: Workspace Design and Creativity

In 1943, MIT needed a building in a hurry. The result was Building 20, designed in an afternoon and constructed with plywood, breeze blocks, and asbestos. It was meant to be temporary, housing the RadLab's secret wartime radar research. Yet this ugly, sprawling structure with its confusing layout and uncomfortable conditions would become legendary as "the womb of the Institute" – a place where innovation flourished for decades after the war ended. Building 20 housed an extraordinary mix of people: nuclear scientists, linguists like Noam Chomsky, acoustics researchers, model railroad enthusiasts, and even a homeless botanist who successfully fought eviction. Its corridors witnessed the birth of the first commercial atomic clock, groundbreaking linguistic theories, and the founding of companies like Bose and Digital Equipment Corporation. The building's occupants loved it despite – or perhaps because of – its flaws. What made Building 20 so special? First, its very messiness forced unexpected encounters as people got lost in its labyrinthine hallways. Second, its cheap construction meant people felt free to modify it however they needed. As engineering professor Paul Penfield recalled: "If you want to run a wire from one room to another, you don't call Physical Plant... instead you get out a power drill and you string the wire, and you take care of things right away." When Jerrold Zacharias was developing the atomic clock, his team simply removed a couple of floors to accommodate it. This freedom stands in stark contrast to how many workplaces are managed today. At Kyocera's San Diego offices, "5S inspectors" patrol to ensure workers don't put knickknacks on file cabinets or hang sweaters on chairs. At BHP Billiton, an eleven-page manual dictates that desks must be clear except for "monitor(s), keyboard, mouse, mouse pad, telephone handset and headset, one A5 photo frame and ergonomic equipment." Psychologists Alex Haslam and Craig Knight tested the impact of such policies by setting up simple office spaces and asking people to perform administrative tasks. The "lean office" – clean and spartan – produced the worst results. The "enriched office" with plants and decorations improved productivity by 15%. But the most productive space by far was the "empowered office," where workers could arrange decorations however they wished – productivity jumped 30% compared to the lean office. Conversely, when experimenters rearranged workers' carefully created spaces without permission, productivity and morale plummeted. The lesson is clear: people flourish when they control their own environment. Whether it's MIT scientists drilling holes in walls or office workers arranging plants on their desks, this autonomy creates a sense of ownership and engagement that sterile, controlled environments cannot match. Our most creative spaces aren't necessarily the most beautiful or orderly – they're the ones where we feel empowered to shape our surroundings to suit our needs, even if the result looks messy to outside eyes.

Chapter 4: Adaptive Leadership: The Power of Improvisation

In 1955, Martin Luther King Jr. found himself in an impossible situation. Rosa Parks had been arrested for refusing to give up her bus seat, and King was asked to organize a boycott of Montgomery's buses. When he arrived home from the meeting with activists, it was 6:30 p.m., and he had to be at Holt Street Church by 6:50 p.m. to deliver the most important speech of his life. The young reverend, who typically spent fifteen hours meticulously crafting each Sunday sermon, now had just fifteen minutes to prepare. King sketched a couple of thoughts with shaking hands, prayed, and drove to the church where ten thousand people waited. "We're here this evening for serious business," he began. Without notes or a careful script, his words began to flow. As he spoke, King listened to the crowd, feeling their response and adapting his message accordingly. When he declared, "There comes a time when people get tired of being trampled over by the iron feet of oppression," the crowd erupted in approval. This improvised speech, despite its imperfections, was the finest King had yet given. Seven years later, during his famous "I Have a Dream" speech in Washington, King again demonstrated the power of improvisation. He had prepared a formal text titled "Normalcy, Never Again," but as he neared the end, singer Mahalia Jackson called out, "Tell 'em about the dream, Martin!" King abandoned his script and spontaneously created one of history's most memorable speeches. The value of improvisation extends beyond oratory. When O2, a major UK phone company, experienced a network outage in 2012, their social media team faced thousands of angry tweets. Rather than sticking to corporate-approved responses, team member Chris decided to respond with humor and humanity. When one customer wrote an obscene complaint, O2 replied, "Maybe later, got tweets to send right now." These improvised responses transformed the narrative, earning worldwide admiration for the company's handling of the crisis. Similarly, at Zappos, customer service representatives are empowered to improvise solutions. When a best man faced giving a wedding speech without proper footwear because of a delivery error, a Zappos rep rushed him free shoes by express delivery. Another rep personally delivered shoes to a customer staying near their headquarters when Zappos no longer stocked the model she wanted. What these examples reveal is that improvisation allows for authentic human connection in a way that scripts and plans cannot. While preparation has its place, the ability to respond in the moment – to listen deeply and adapt accordingly – often produces more powerful results. As jazz musician Miles Davis put it, improvisation creates "freedom and space to hear things." By letting go of our scripts, we open ourselves to genuine conversation with our audience, customers, or colleagues. The paradox is that improvisation, while appearing risky, can actually be safer than rigid adherence to plans that may become irrelevant as circumstances change. The most resilient leaders, like King, know when to prepare meticulously and when to trust their instincts and respond to the moment. In our increasingly unpredictable world, this adaptive capacity may be the most valuable leadership skill of all.

Chapter 5: Strategic Disorder: Creating Competitive Advantage

In February 1941, General Erwin Rommel arrived in North Africa facing a desperate situation. His small German force was tasked with preventing the British from driving the Italians out of Libya. Rommel's men had no experience of desert warfare, and shipments of tanks were arriving too slowly. Rather than waiting to build strength, Rommel immediately began probing attacks along the coast. When he discovered the British were withdrawing, he launched a full offensive despite explicit orders from German High Command to remain defensive. Rommel's campaign was chaotic. His forces got lost in sandstorms, ran low on fuel, and became scattered across the desert. His subordinates complained about constant changes of plan. A German general noted in his diary, "Rommel has not sent us a single clear-cut report all these days, and I have a feeling that things are in a mess." Yet within six days, Rommel had captured the strategic prize of Cyrenaica, outflanking the bewildered British forces who were desperately trying to withdraw. This pattern of creating deliberate chaos to disorient opponents appears in business as well. When Jeff Bezos launched Amazon in 1995, the company was immediately overwhelmed by demand. In the first week, it sold $12,000 worth of books but shipped only $846 worth. The team worked through the night, sitting on the floor because nobody had bought tables. Despite this chaos, when Yahoo offered to feature Amazon on its homepage just two weeks after launch, Bezos accepted immediately, creating even more pressure. This willingness to embrace mess continued as Amazon expanded. When the company started selling kitchen equipment in 1999, naked carving knives were suddenly scything down chutes designed for books. During the Christmas toy season that year, Amazon employees drove across Manhattan buying whatever they could find in Toys'R'Us stores after Bezos complained about an underwhelming display. The company's warehouses choked on pallets of toys, and staff members were booked into hotels near distribution centers, working fourteen-day stretches. What connects Rommel and Bezos is what military strategist John Boyd called "getting inside your opponent's OODA loop" (Observe-Orient-Decide-Act). By moving quickly and creating confusion, they forced their adversaries to constantly reassess the situation. While everyone was in chaos, Rommel and Bezos were slightly better at navigating it because they had created it deliberately. Their opponents, meanwhile, were paralyzed by uncertainty. This approach works particularly well for underdogs. Barnes & Noble had $2 billion in sales in 1996 compared to Amazon's $16 million, but they hesitated to disrupt their successful retail business model for e-commerce. As Bezos told Harvard Business School students, "I think you might be underestimating the degree to which established brick-and-mortar business, or any company that might be used to doing things a certain way, will find it hard to be nimble." Strategic messiness isn't about being chaotic for its own sake – it's about creating conditions where your adaptability becomes your greatest asset. By moving quickly, changing direction frequently, and tolerating disorder, you force competitors to respond to your tempo rather than setting their own. This approach carries risks, but for those willing to embrace the mess, it can transform apparent disadvantages into powerful competitive weapons.

Chapter 6: The Measurement Paradox: When Targets Backfire

Tony Blair, as British Prime Minister, introduced a target that seemed perfectly reasonable: when patients called their NHS doctor, they should get an appointment within 48 hours. But during a televised discussion in 2005, a voter named Diana Church confronted Blair with an unexpected consequence. Her doctor refused to book follow-up appointments in advance. Instead, patients had to call each morning and hope to get through, because advance bookings might prevent the clinic from meeting the 48-hour target. When Blair suggested this experience was unusual, a third of the audience raised their hands to indicate they'd faced similar problems. This pattern repeats across domains. In the 1990s, New York and Pennsylvania introduced "report cards" publicly disclosing how patients fared with particular surgeons. The goal was to help patients make informed choices and incentivize better medical care. Instead, economists discovered that surgeons began avoiding operations on seriously ill patients who might die and spoil their ratings, while performing unnecessary surgeries on healthier patients who would likely survive. Even the humble Apgar score, which rates newborn babies' health on a scale of 0-10, had unintended consequences. As doctors and hospitals competed to improve their scores, they increasingly favored cesarean sections over more demanding procedures like forceps deliveries. C-sections now account for nearly a third of deliveries in the United States, far above the 10-15% that medical experts believe necessary. The problem isn't limited to healthcare. Universities game college rankings by sending personalized letters to students who have no chance of admission, simply to increase application numbers and appear more selective. UK universities exploit research assessment loopholes by hiring star academics on minimal contracts. Financial regulations like Basel II, designed to make banks safer after earlier crises, instead created perverse incentives that contributed to the 2008 financial collapse. Why do well-intentioned targets so often backfire? Peter Smith, an economist at the University of York, identified several reasons. Targets tend to be simple while the world is complex. They may reflect yesterday's problems rather than today's. Most importantly, they encourage "gaming" – cynically distorting behavior to hit the target rather than achieve the underlying goal. Andy Haldane, chief economist at the Bank of England, suggests a different approach. Rather than predictable, detailed rules that can be gamed, he proposes random, unannounced inspections: "You would turn up unannounced to a financial firm and say, 'Could you show us your stress tests for your leveraged loan portfolio?'" If the response is inadequate, there are consequences, but the timing and focus of the next inspection remain deliberately vague. This approach resembles how university examinations work. Students study broadly because they don't know exactly what questions will appear. As philosopher Jeremy Bentham put it in 1830, the deliberate ambiguity "impossibilizes the knowledge" of how to game the system. The only response is to work hard and try to be good at everything. The measurement paradox reveals a fundamental tension: our desire for tidy, quantifiable targets often produces messy, unintended consequences. The most effective systems acknowledge this complexity by embracing a degree of ambiguity and unpredictability. Rather than perfect measurement, perhaps what we need is the constructive messiness of human judgment, supported by data but not enslaved to it.

Chapter 7: Human-Machine Balance: Navigating Automation's Pitfalls

On May 31, 2009, Air France Flight 447 took off from Rio de Janeiro bound for Paris. Three hours into the journey, ice crystals formed on the wings, causing an airspeed sensor to fail. The autopilot disconnected, and the fly-by-wire system downgraded to a mode that gave the pilots less assistance. Faced with this situation, co-pilot Pierre-Cédric Bonin made a fatal error: he pulled back on his control stick, causing the plane to climb steeply and eventually stall. Despite seventy-five automated warnings of "STALL STALL STALL," none of the three pilots recognized what was happening. Four and a half minutes later, the plane crashed into the Atlantic, killing all 228 people aboard. What went wrong? The Airbus A330 was one of the world's most advanced planes, with sophisticated automation that made it nearly impossible to crash under normal circumstances. But this very safety feature created what psychologist James Reason calls "the paradox of automation." First, automatic systems accommodate incompetence by correcting mistakes, allowing inexperienced operators to function without their weaknesses being exposed. Second, automation erodes skills by removing the need for practice. Third, when automatic systems fail, they often create unusual situations requiring particularly skilled human responses. This paradox extends beyond aviation. In Bradford, England, Victor Hankins received a parking fine when an automated camera photographed his car at a bus stop. The problem? He wasn't parked – he was stuck in traffic. The city initially dismissed his complaint, relenting only when he threatened legal action. More seriously, Rahinah Ibrahim, a Stanford doctoral student, was wrongly placed on a no-fly list, possibly due to confusion between a terrorist group and a professional association with a similar name. It took nine years and $4 million in legal assistance to clear her name. The danger isn't just that automated systems make mistakes – it's that they make us passive. In 2012, three Japanese tourists drove their car into the Pacific Ocean because their GPS told them to, despite the obvious visual evidence that their route was blocked by water. This "automation bias" – our tendency to trust computer recommendations unthinkingly – becomes more dangerous as systems become more reliable. The rarer the exception, the less gracefully we handle it. Dutch traffic engineer Hans Monderman found a counterintuitive solution to this problem. Instead of adding more signs, lights, and explicit instructions to make roads safer, he removed them. In the Dutch town of Drachten, he replaced a dangerous traffic light intersection with an unmarked square where cars, cyclists, and pedestrians had to negotiate their way through. Accidents fell by half. By creating a messy situation that demanded attention, Monderman forced drivers to engage their brains rather than operate on autopilot. Similarly, meteorologist Rebecca Pliske found that veteran weather forecasters maintained their skills by making manual predictions first, then consulting computer models as a second opinion. This approach – having humans lead and computers support – reverses the typical relationship where humans passively monitor machines until something goes wrong. The lesson isn't that we should abandon automation, but that we need to design systems that keep humans engaged and skilled. As automation spreads through our lives – from self-driving cars to algorithmic decision-making – we must remember that the tidiest technological solution may create the messiest human problems. The most resilient systems will be those that harness both machine reliability and human adaptability, maintaining our skills for those inevitable moments when the automation fails and we must navigate the mess ourselves.

Summary

Throughout our exploration of mess and disorder, we've discovered a powerful paradox: the very qualities we often try to eliminate are frequently the source of our greatest breakthroughs. From Keith Jarrett creating transcendent music on an unplayable piano to scientists finding that diverse, uncomfortable teams solve problems more effectively; from the creative chaos of Building 20 spawning decades of innovation to Erwin Rommel's deliberate disruption confounding his enemies – mess consistently proves its value when embraced rather than avoided. This insight offers three transformative principles for our lives and work. First, constraints and disruptions aren't obstacles to creativity but catalysts for it – seek out unfamiliar challenges rather than comfortable routines. Second, discomfort often signals growth – whether in diverse teams that feel awkward but perform brilliantly or in Hans Monderman's confusing intersections that made drivers more alert and roads safer. Finally, control and tidiness can create dangerous fragility – from German forests dying after being arranged in neat rows to automated systems that leave humans unprepared for inevitable exceptions. The path to resilience lies not in eliminating mess but in developing the adaptability to navigate it. By embracing the beauty of mess – its creative potential, its honest feedback, its reflection of life's true complexity – we discover not just survival strategies but pathways to unexpected success in our wonderfully disordered world.

About Author

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Tim Harford

Tim Harford is a member of the Financial Times editorial board. His column, “The Undercover Economist”, which reveals the economic ideas behind everyday experiences, is published in the Financial Times and syndicated around the world. He is also the only economist in the world to run a problem page, “Dear Economist”, in which FT readers’ personal problems are answered tongue-in-cheek with the latest economic theory.--from the author's website

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