Chapter 1 : Part 5

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, Ph.D., M.Ph., David H. Freedman

(Page 5 of 5)

What Is Mess?

Let's take a moment to discuss what we mean by mess. (In chapter 3 we'll spell out in more detail what we regard as the basic types of mess, but even a vague, simplified definition will do fine until then.) One could have a lengthy technical discussion about the definition and nature of mess, but most people have a pretty good idea of what mess is on an intuitive level. Roughly speaking, a system is messy if its elements are scattered, mixed up, or varied due to some measure of randomness, or if for all practical purposes it appears random from someone's point of view. That's right: mess is often in the eye of the beholder. For example, if a person arranges a CD collection from most favorite to least favorite, a visitor looking over the collection might well have trouble seeing much rhyme or reason to the order and thus could reasonably regard the collection as a mess. Almost any system can be messy. Mess is not only physical clutter, such as papers or clothes strewn about a room, or superficial disorganization, such as a desk surface covered by teetering piles of papers. A variety of systems can be disordered in many different ways. Thus, a schedule can be messy; traffic can be messy; art can be messy; an organizational chart can be messy; relationships can be messy; a process can be messy; thought can be messy; and so on.

An important distinction: mess, at least in this book, has little to do with chaos theory, complexity theory, networking, emergent behavior, self-organizing systems, distributed management, or any of the anti-centralized-control theories that have been popularized for more than a decade. Chaos and complexity theories focus on finding the hidden order in systems that might appear to be unpredictable or otherwise driven by random forces, or in showing how systems that look quite ordered can eventually evolve into something that looks quite messy. Although there can be some overlap between these theories and the sorts of messy entities considered in these pages, the difference in emphasis is significant. Chaos and complexity theorists are interested in trying to determine how an apparent mess can exhibit deeply hidden order, or how an ordered system can be characterized by deeply hidden mess.

We want to examine mess for what it is - a lack of order. Thus, chaos theorists might work hard to show how Pluto's very neat-looking orbit is in fact chaotic and will eventually change dramatically, but to us it's simply a neat orbit. Complexity theorists might study how a swarm of ants running off in all different directions is in fact driven by a set of precise rules, but to us it's a messy swarm of ants. We're basically only interested in accepting mess as plain old mess and then taking a look at what the significance of the mess might be to people and organizations. (We'll also take a look at the science of mess, where mess can simply be defined as more or less pure randomness, which again clearly distinguishes it from the domains of chaos and complexity theory, where pure randomness is generally unwelcome.)

Unfortunately, the technical term chaos, as used by scientists, is now, thanks to a legion of chaos-science popularizers, routinely confused with the everyday word chaos, which can otherwise be a reasonable synonym for plain old mess. It's a little irksome that chaos theorists misnamed their work on hidden order with a word that means an absence of order. But it is done, and so we'll avoid the word chaos in this book. Flattening organizational structures or distributing control or replacing hierarchies with networks isn't getting at what we mean by mess, either. (If you're not familiar with any of these concepts, that's fine, because we won't deal with them in any important way in this book, and you can safely skip this paragraph.) Again, there's a bit of overlap, but the fact is that flattening, distributing, or networking doesn't necessarily make a system messier, disordered, or less organized. In fact, any of these can lead to a nightmare of over organization, as many companies discovered in the 1990s.

As a simple example, consider an office where there are eight levels of management but where every manager tends to give his subordinates a huge amount of freedom to do almost whatever they want, and then compare it to an office where everyone is on the same single level of management, but before someone can undertake a task she must gain approval from the group. The former may be more hierarchical, but in most meaningful ways it's likely to be more disorganized. A gaggle of geese can remain in a formation without any centralized command, but the gaggle still isn't a mess, because each goose follows a rigid set of rules that keep the gaggle neatly ordered. The business management consultant and author Tom Peters has often exhorted managers to thrive on chaos, liberation, and disorganization but couches his advice in terms of highly specified networked "structures" that in the end are another form of order, even if it's one that's more mess friendly. For us, the question isn't so much one of how control is distributed but, rather, of how much order is in the system in any form.

Being messy and disordered and disorganized, as we mean it, is just what you probably think it is: scattering things, mixing things around, letting things pile up, doing things out of order, being inconsistent, winging it. You get the idea.

Finally, a word on entropy. Entropy is a fundamental concept in physics, roughly corresponding to a measure of a system's disorder. When people refer to entropy, it is usually in the context of the law of nature that states, in short, and again speaking roughly, that any system left to itself will probably, over time, become more disordered rather than more ordered. Or to put it another way, it takes extra effort to neaten up a system; things generally don't neaten themselves. This concept is actually important to us - it's another way of expressing the concept of the cost of neatness - but we feel no need to put that or anything else we have to say in this book in the more technical language of entropy. In fact, we'd really like to avoid it, because the various efforts to popularize the concept of entropy and apply it nonscientifically to the world around us have done so in the context of assuming that an increase in entropy - that is, mess - is a bad thing. And as you've probably noticed, we have a slightly different take on the matter.

Copyright © 2006 by Eric Abrahamson and David H. Freedman

About the Author

Eric Abrahamson is the youngest-ever full professor of management at Columbia University's School of Business, and author of Change Without Pain.

David H. Freedman is the author of three previous books, and is a business and science journalist who has written for The Atlantic Monthly, Newsweek, and Wired, among other publications.