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Meet the MasterMinds: Eric Abrahamson on the Benefits of Messiness

Eric Abrahamson is a Professor at the Columbia Business School and the author of Change Without Pain, which won a Best Book of the Year award from strategy+business magazine.

He’s also coauthor of A Perfect Mess: The Hidden Benefits of Disorder. Abrahamson challenges the accepted wisdom that neatness and organization are the keys to success.

Abrahamson: Yes. Your mess is perfect when it reaches the point at which, if you spent any more or any less time organizing, you would become inefficient.

If you devote all your time to organizing, you won’t get anything done. If you don’t spend any time organizing, the resultant mess bogs you down completely. When you find the ‘sweet spot’ between messiness and order, then you have a perfect mess.

And the argument also scales up to the level of the organization: some are over- and some are under-organized. The over-organized spend too much money on systems, on IT, on structures, on standard operating procedures, and so on. So you can make the argument not only at the individual level but also at the organizational level.

McLaughlin: Why do you think people are so hung up about being organized and orderly?

Abrahamson: According to our research, two-thirds of people feel guilt or shame about their own messiness. And more than half think badly of someone else who is messy and disorganized.

Most people should just relax about the level of disorder and not be so worried about it.

There are many reasons people are biased toward being organized. We have deep-seated suspicions about mess and some people are very uncomfortable living with any level of disorder.

Then you have the moral lessons of thinkers like Benjamin Franklin, who admonished people to “Lose no time; be always employed in something useful; cut off all unnecessary actions.” Many of us have been programmed to think this way.

Some of our conceptions about order come from the Industrial Revolution—the age of machination. The machine became a metaphor for organizational systems, with people as cogs.

After his book came out in 1911, Frederick Taylor’s “scientific management” approach became extremely popular. He argued that companies had made great improvements in efficiency using machines but that the messy, unpredictable human worker was the weak link that needed to be brought into line.

Of course, now we have an entire industry devoted to personal productivity, including the National Association of Professional Organizers (NAPO). People eat it up, too—enough to support forty specialties within the field of professional organizing.
 
McLaughlin: What’s right and wrong about the advice of all the productivity gurus out there?

Abrahamson: What’s wrong about their advice is that frequently they extol the benefits of organization without counting in the cost of achieving those benefits. The Six Sigma approach, for instance, purportedly takes into account the cost of implementing that system, but it doesn’t really do that. In fact, it’s very difficult to integrate Six Sigma into the DNA of an organization.

When you’re weighing the benefits of an organizational system, you need to do a cost/benefit analysis. Instead, people tend to just say organization is good…we need more organization. Certain consultants have that knee-jerk reaction.

It’s certainly true of professional organizers, who will come into your home and say, “I’m going to charge you $6,000 but you’ll be able to find things much more easily.”  You should ask, “Is it worth $6,000 to find things more easily and how long will the system last? What if being somewhat messy is a better deal?”

People have this weird tendency to look at the benefits of organization and just forget about the costs.

McLaughlin: So, being too organized has a downside?

Abrahamson: Organization can be limiting. And it’s not just about spatial organization but also about time. Compare a messy schedule, with no clear times and places you have to be, to an extremely orderly schedule, which specifies exactly where you have to be all day. Well, the orderly schedule makes sense if nothing’s going to change throughout your day.

You can spend time and money organizing and reorganizing, but if it’s not benefiting the client, it’s too much.

But if new opportunities are going to pop up, you might miss them if you stick to your planned schedule. The same thing happens to companies with very rigid strategies. They’re so busy following the strategies that they miss opportunities that serendipitously emerge.

Most of us can’t be completely improvisational but we can find a balance between rigid planning and winging it all the time. It’s not one or the other, but an optimal mix of the two. You should have a plan but be ready to junk the plan when appropriate.

Companies with strategic plans do as well as they do because they frequently ignore their plans.

McLaughlin: This Einstein quote leads into the first chapter of the book: “If a cluttered desk is a sign of a cluttered mind, of what then, is an empty desk?” What does an empty desk reflect?

Abrahamson: An empty desk can reflect a person who is spending too much time organizing and not getting an appropriate return on that investment. Order has many costs, including setting up your system, filing, and changing the system.

Order also has opportunity costs. For instance, if you’ve got an important project to complete, but your desk is a mess, what should you do, clean up your desk or work on the project? The cost of your time at that point is huge.
 
Of course, order has its benefits. If you let ten items pile up on your desk, you can make one trip and file all ten things. If you’re a clean-desk advocate then you make ten trips and file one thing at a time. But messiness does have efficiency benefits, like making that one trip instead of ten. There are also benefits of messiness with respect to creativity, power, and beauty.

McLaughlin: What are some of those other benefits of messiness?

Abrahamson: Mess can be ugly but it can also be very beautiful. Compare a Jackson Pollack painting to a representation work, or a Frank Gehry building to a set of row houses. There’s no doubt about it that messiness can be pleasing to the eye.

In terms of power, if you create a mess at work, you may be the only person who knows where things are. You become indispensable--they can’t fire you. That may be good from your point of view, not necessarily from your employer’s.

Some organizations, Al-Qaeda, for example, are very difficult to defeat because they are so messy. In a traditional bureaucratic organization, if you knock out the first and second echelons, the organization is headless and struggles to function. Nobody in Al-Qaeda knows exactly how it’s organized, so it’s very hard to overcome.

The other political example of mess is democracy. Democracy is not autocracy like the old Soviet Union with its five-year plans. It’s also not anarchy. It tolerates a certain level of messiness so that people can find their freedom inside the system.

In terms of creativity, messiness juxtaposes things that otherwise would be separated by order. For instance, let’s say you’re writing a proposal and you have many papers and documents on your desk. You can see all the relationships between the different documents and you can combine them in different, creative ways.

Creativity is spurred when things that we tend not to organize in the same category come together. When you allow some messiness into a system, new combinations can result. If you keep all your tools in the tool shed and all your kitchen utensils in the kitchen, you might never think of using a kitchen utensil as a tool or vice-versa.

McLaughlin: Do you think that, as organizations grow, their planning processes get more structured and formalized and then they lose flexibility?

Abrahamson: It’s not widely known, but the best studies on strategic planning indicate that firms with elaborate strategic planning systems do no better than firms that don’t have them. Studies have found no significant connection between more strategic planning and better performance.

In a predictable business, maybe it makes sense to have stable, multi-year plans. The casket industry, for example, should be predictable because you know how many people die.

But in a highly unpredictable environment, planning has to be revised much more often and improvisation plays a bigger role. There’s also a whole approach to strategy now that stresses experimentation. You might have a mess of different projects and you know that most of them will fail. But one could take you through to the next level.

For many organizations today, the future is uncertain so they place ten bets, knowing that six are going to die, and two are going to be what we call the walking dead. One’s going to be a long-term bet, and maybe one of them is going to be a real success.

It’s a bit like evolution: you have variation and then selection and retention. You create variations or innovations and then some of them by chance will be the ones that carry the company forward.

McLaughlin: Many consulting projects tend to be messy. Consultants try to bring projects under control with good management, tools, and processes. Is there a point of diminishing return for all that control?

Abrahamson: I think so. You have to understand how costly order is. Is that additional organization, whether it’s structural or cognitive, paying off for the client in terms of return?

You can spend time and money organizing and reorganizing, but if it’s not benefiting the client, it’s too much. You find that balance through trial and error. People automatically tend to shy away from mess, but they rarely think gee, I’m really too orderly and should be more messy, or maybe we shouldn’t have quite as many systems.

McLaughlin: One last question: If you could give one piece of advice about being messy versus organized, what would it be?

Abrahamson: Two findings pop into my mind. First, too many people feel guilty about their messiness. Clearly if you’re an unbelievable packrat or if you’re schizophrenic, that’s a problem. But most people should just relax about the level of disorder and not be so worried about it.

That’s also true for organizations and governments. If you think about it, a lot of our systems have a fair amount of messiness in them and do perfectly well. And many highly successful people are very messy. We use Albert Einstein as our poster boy.

The other surprising finding is that people with orderly desks report spending 36 percent more time finding things. You might think that it’s hard to find things in messy piles. But people who have elaborate organizing systems also have trouble finding things.

So I would emphasize those two points. Moderate messiness is completely acceptable and is, in fact, probably superior in a number of instances. And really put to the test whether a certain level of order is optimal, because more order is not necessarily better.

McLaughlin: Thanks for your time.

Click on the link to learn more about Professor Abrahamson.