What is it about?
According to the author, Tim Harford, Messy “celebrates the benefits that messiness has in our lives: why it’s important, why we resist it, and why we should embrace it instead”.
According to Maria Konnikova’s New York Times review, “a less catchy, but perhaps more accurate, title for the book would be ‘Control: The Power of Autonomy and Flexibility.’”
Messy is a book about systems and complexity. Harford’s general premise is that instead of trying to control complexity we would be far better off working with it.
Trying to force order upon chaos is a fool’s errand.
Book structure
Harford makes his point through a myriad of well researched stories. His examples include:
- Why a messy desk is the sign of a productive mind
- How the German Panzer commander Rommel created confusion and seized opportunities
- Why a virtually unplayable piano created Jazz pianist Keith Jarrett’s best work
- How an underground strike improved the daily commute of 1 in 20 Londoners
The underlying theme is that the world is a complex place and that complexity provides opportunities. We miss these when we start to obsess about control.
A story from the book
In 1763 Johann Gottlieb Beckmann started to count trees in Saxony (modern day Germany).
Forests were a vast source of economic wealth in the 18th century and Beckmann was trying to impart a little teutonic efficiency. He surveyed the medieval forest and developed the idea of the Normalbaum or standardised tree.
Ancient forests are confused and chaotic places. There are fallen trees, briars, undergrowth and wild animals to contend with. To improve productivity the the concept of the Normalbaum developed into the idea of a standardised forest. Beckmann’s work lead to the mass planting of the Norway Spruce (which quickly grows tall and straight) in regimented lines. Foresters cut down dead trees and dragged them away, cleared the undergrowth and instigated a monoculture.
The idea was a success, the first generation of spruces provided bumper yields and the managed forest was born. Statisticains confidently predicted yields and growth cycles over the next 100 years.
200 years later, in 1968, Richard Plochman, a German forestry professor, proved how disastrous the approach had been. The monoculture of Norwegian spruce which had been so successful in its first generation had “already shown an amazing retrogression in the second generation”. By the third generation the forests were failing dramatically.
Attempts to standardise and control the forests had backfired. The situation was so bad the Germans coined the term Waldsterben or “forest death syndrome”.
In their efforts to remove anything that wasn’t productive foresters had killed off one third of the wildlife species in the forest. The undergrowth and rotting trees had been home for a plethora of insects, fungi, bacteria and animals.
The forester’s efforts to create forests that were easy to exploit via “minimum diversity” with regular sizing and spacing of a single species had been spectacularly successful. Unfortunately the exploitation wasn’t being carried out by humans, but by parasites and pests, which, without their own predators, were running amok.
A productive forest isn’t a simple well ordered object, it is a massive system of interconnecting food chains and ecosystems.
German foresters are now trying to regain what they have lost. They are leaving dead trees standing, planting mixed species and reintroducing birds, insects and spiders. It is too soon to say if it will work, but foresters hope that their artificially created mess will increase productivity.
Ideas from the book:
- Don’t over control, you can’t legislate for the things you don’t understand, you just create side effects
- The world is complex, test your way into situations to see what happens
- Give people autonomy to try new things
Worth a read
I really enjoyed this book, but maybe it simply reinforced my prejudices.
Tim Harford’s ideas aren’t scientifically proven. I have no doubt he chose the stories that reinforced his hypotheses rather than refuted them. It is, however, a thought provoking read that will make you question your beliefs about complexity, planning and control.
You can find Messy on Amazon. They will be delighted to sell you a copy
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Sounds like an interesting read. Adding it to my reading list!
Annette :-)