A Google search of the term “office mess” is enough to convince anyone that mess is inherently bad. Countless articles exist on how to combat mess, sprinkled with confessional blogs where people whisper shamefully about their own messiness. And not just physical mess. Equally disgraceful is the chaos of a disorganized life, where planning a meeting without an agenda is considered as wicked a sin as defecating on thy neighbor’s lawn.
No more shame! Eric Abrahamson and David H. Freeman, authors of A Perfect Mess: The Hidden Benefits of Disorder, share the news: mess can be a good thing, particularly in the workplace.
Using scientific evidence as well as anecdotal proof, Abrahamson and Freeman illustrate our world--where order is unquestioned as the highest authority, even when it is at best inefficient, and at worst, costly to the company.
Examples include the management structures of most companies, where operations decisions are left to Senior Managers who demonstrate in studies that they haven’t the vaguest idea of how the company inherently functions. These managers demand the impossible (“trade this cow for some magic beans!”) and blame others for failure. Meanwhile, they lose customers and revenue.
Also mentioned are the countless hours wasted on Strategic Planning teams. They talk a lot, have meetings, and draw lots of diagrams (they love those diagrams!) but are slow when it comes to actual results. Eventually, the genius plan they conceived is no longer timely enough to work, and they’ve wasted two years of company time and resources. Much more reasonable are companies who will run with an idea right out of the starting blocks. Even if the idea is later scrapped, the overall loss is smaller than if they’d spent two years with an exploratory committee to discover it won’t work.
On a smaller scale, wonderful accidents are allowed to occur within the atmosphere of mess. Without mess, we wouldn’t have penicillin. Alexander Fleming left a petri dish of cultures by an open window when he left for vacation. Whoosh, and voila! Antibiotics.
Last, A Perfect Mess shows why a messy desk can be a highly effective system. “One of the great characteristics of a messy desk,” it says, “[is] it will tend to naturally reflect the way you think.” Instead of spending countless hours trying to conform to a system that feels unnatural, you focus on work-related tasks, and get more done.
If you’re tired of fighting naturally messy tendencies, A Perfect Mess is a must-read.
