The Benefits of Being Messy

When football fans hear the word “messy”, their minds might leap to the elegance and effortless brilliance of Argentinian superstar Lionel Messi dancing through defences. In most other contexts, though, the connotations aren’t usually positive.

A cluttered desk, an untidy house or a chaotic schedule can feel like personal failings we need to fix. We’re conditioned to see tidiness as a virtue and order as the foundation of success.

But if you’re feeling bad that your desk looks like it has been hit by a tornado, it could be time for a rethink. In his brilliant book Messy: How to be Creative and Resilient in a Tidy-Minded World, economist Tim Harford argues that, rather than trying to fix mess, we should embrace it. It might just be our secret weapon.

Here’s why…

Chaos as a catalyst

Messiness isn’t always a distraction; sometimes it’s the spark that lights the fire of innovation. 

Consider Google, famous for its minimalist homepage and sleek and stylish Googleplex headquarters in Mountain View, California. The search giant’s origins were far less neat and glamorous. Sergey Brin and Larry Page started in a garage with improvised desks made from doors balanced on sawhorses. They would rile up their landlord Susan Wojcicki (who would later run YouTube) by stealing from her fridge.

When Eric Schmidt became Google’s CEO in 2001, he didn’t try to rein in the scruffy student aesthetic. Instead, he said: “Don’t change a thing. Make sure it looks like a dorm room.” And that’s exactly how Google’s early operating base stayed – a messy, engineer-driven space where creativity flourished – and business skyrocketed.

“When a company comes up with an idea, it’s a messy process,” Jeff Bezos once said. He wasn’t exaggerating. The early days of the world’s largest online retailer took messiness to a whole new level.

As Harford writes: “The story of Amazon is a long series of crazy goals, brutal fights, and squandered billions – an utter mess.” Jeff Bezos’ frantic ambition led him to promise customers goods he wasn’t even sure how he’d deliver. Warehouses overflowed, finances collapsed, and employees worked beyond exhaustion. 

When Bezos decided, back in 1999, that Amazon should start selling kitchen equipment, it was a recipe for chaos. Warehouses designed for storing and dispatching books suddenly had naked carving knives plunging down the chutes into sorting machines. Meanwhile, the company’s database tried to determine whether they should be classified as hardback or paperback.

In another farcical incident that same year, employees were sent into branches of Toys “R” ’Us across the U.S. before Christmas to bulk buy stock and drive it to their nearest Amazon warehouse. But the company’s systems couldn’t cope – products got lost and orders went unshipped. They failed to sell almost half of the toys they’d bought and made a big loss.

To an outsider, it looked like a disorganised disaster. Toys “R” Us must have been delighted. But by being willing to embrace this kind of messiness, Amazon outmanoeuvred rivals, seizing opportunities that others were too cautious or organised to capture. 

In the early 2000s, the company weathered the dot-com bust and major concerns about its financial health. Where others might have responded with caution, Amazon ploughed headfirst into a range of other new ventures with the same gung-ho attitude it had shown with toys and kitchen knives. The next few years saw the launch of the Kindle, Fire Phone, Marketplace, and Amazon Web Services.

Today, Amazon is the second-largest company in the world. Toys “R” Us filed for bankruptcy in 2017.

Accidental discoveries

Messiness and disorder have historically delivered some surprising benefits and breakthroughs. Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin in a famously untidy lab when he noticed mould growing on neglected petri dishes. It’s one of the most notable examples of how innovation often doesn’t follow a neat path from problem to solution. Post-it notes are a staple of almost every office, but they were invented by accident. Scientists at 3M were actually trying to develop a glue strong enough to hold an aircraft together!

Distractions can be a potent form of messiness. Following a decades-long study of scientific breakthroughs, psychologist Bernice Eiduson discovered something fascinating about the most successful scientists: they rarely stick to one tidy topic. Instead, they regularly switch between projects. Far from diverting them, it allows ideas to cross-fertilise, turning one project’s potential dead-end into another’s creative solution.

French chemist, pharmacist, and microbiologist Louis Pasteur changed the world with his discoveries on vaccination, fermentation, and pasteurisation. These remarkable breakthroughs owed much to his restless juggling of multiple projects across different disciplines. Pasteur’s investigations into wine and beer fermentation led to his revolutionary insight that diseases are caused by tiny microorganisms called germs.

Working on several things at once is now considered an essential ingredient for innovation. As Harford explains:

Two leading creativity researchers, Howard Gruber and Sara Davis, have argued that the tendency to work on multiple projects is so common among the most creative people that it should be regarded as standard practice [...] Gruber and Davis call this pattern of different projects at different stages of fruition a ‘network of enterprises’.

The researchers found that having a “network of enterprises” has many benefits. Like Pasteur, the knowledge gained in one can help in another. But many of the advantages are psychological – the variety helps to maintain our attention, our brains have space to subconsciously process one project while we’re consciously focusing on another, and the act of switching gives us an escape when we need a break or hit a brick wall. As Harford explains: “Having another project to turn to can prevent a setback from turning into a crushing experience.”

Messy teams and awkward conversations

Messiness extends beyond physical clutter and how we juggle our projects. A bit of disorder can also benefit our social circles and interactions.

Sociologist Mark Granovetter argued for “the strength of weak ties,” pointing out that loosely connected networks of casual acquaintances generate more creative sparks than tightly knit groups. Messy teams made up of diverse strangers might feel more awkward, but there’s good evidence that they will outperform groups of like-minded close friends.

Psychologist Katherine Phillips put this to the test with a murder mystery task. Time after time, teams made up only of friends fared worse than groups that included a stranger.

Quoted in Harford’s book, Phillips recalled that:

Given what we’ve been discovering about the advantages of cognitive diversity, it may not be a surprise to hear that the groups that included a stranger did a better job of finding the murderer [...] The friends were more careful about exploring their own conclusions, paid more attention to the newcomer and to the task at hand, and were more willing to change their views. Assumptions that might have been allowed to ride among friends had to be examined carefully under the scrutiny of a stranger.

This wasn’t a one-off finding. After repeating the experiment, Phillips found that groups incorporating a stranger correctly identified the murderer 75% of the time – significantly outperforming the homogenous groups which had a 54% success rate. Individuals fared even worse – only managing to solve the mystery 44% of the time.

The lesson? Teams of like-minded friends might have found the task more orderly and enjoyable. But working with strangers generates better results precisely because it makes the dynamic less comfortable.

Challenging comfort 

Harford’s chapter on legendary musician and producer Brian Eno offers another insight into how chaos and disorder can be cultivated to yield brilliant results.

Eno famously embraces messiness with his “Oblique Strategy” cards – cryptic instructions printed on a deck that he invites musicians to draw at random. The cards contain vague and ambiguous suggestions like “use an old idea,” “twist the spine,” or “emphasise the flaws.” They're designed to shake people out of their comfort zones and throw some unpredictability into proceedings.

When he first started using them in the 1970s, they would infuriate his collaborators. During recording sessions with David Bowie and his band in Berlin, Carlos Alomar – one of the world’s greatest guitarists – was perplexed to be told to put his instrument down and play the drums instead. 

Eno’s cards even drove Genesis drummer Phil Collins to hurl beer cans across the studio. Who’s to say whether this was an oblique instruction or an act of sheer frustration?

But from Bowie and Talking Heads to U2 and Coldplay, Eno and his chaos-embracing techniques have helped some of the world’s leading artists reinvent their sound and reach new creative – and commercial – heights.

As Eno tells Harford: 

The enemy of creative work is boredom, actually [...] And the friend is alertness. Now I think what makes you alert is to be faced with a situation that is beyond your control so you have to be watching it very carefully to see how it unfolds, to be able to stay on top of it. That kind of alertness is exciting.

In other words, creativity thrives on disorder.

How to be more messy

So if mess is the key to success, how do we throw a little more chaos into our lives?

Harford’s book encourages us to recognise the benefits of juggling multiple projects, knowing that each might spark insights in another. We’re urged to cultivate diverse and even awkward interactions, not just comfortable friendships, and to leave room in our days for improvisation and serendipity. Jeff Bezos often remarked in Amazon’s early years, “If you are planning more than 20 minutes ahead in this environment, you are wasting your time.” That may not be practical advice for everyday life, but it’s a useful reminder that disorder doesn’t always need taming – sometimes it pays to embrace it.

Ultimately, we shouldn’t feel bad about being a bit messy. History tells us that groundbreaking businesses, revolutionary scientific discoveries, and iconic works of art often emerge from situations that look chaotic or disorganised. Just think about Google’s scruffy garage origins, Amazon’s early chaos or Fleming’s mouldy petri dishes – none were tidy, but all sparked something extraordinary.

As Harford puts it:

We often succumb to the temptation of a tidy-minded approach, when we would be better served by embracing a degree of mess.

So perhaps that desk declutter I’ve been struggling to get around to can wait. After all, the mess might lead to something brilliant.