Messy
Tim Harford
There is a strong drive to get organized and efficient. The premise of this book is that disorganized mess has an important role in making us effective, and that in many cases organization does not even work as advertised. A number of examples shows that embracing the messy elements of life can increase the long-term potential for success.
Harford describes the consequences of excess order and/or sufficient messiness in 9 areas of our lives. He makes clear that this is not a call for chaos so much as a call to preserve some disorder in our lives.
Creativity – When we have creative ideas, they almost always represent a change from the routine. People get into routines that become scripts for how they think. Brian Eno recognized this problem and created a set of cards to take to the music studio. When things felt a bit stale, he would pull a card at random from the set and use it for inspiration. The result of the card could be that the group went for supper or that people tried to play another’s instruments. What he called “Oblique Strategies”, acted like a random input to jolt participants out of their routine. People exposed to this input did not like it one bit and really struggled with it. But they also created some of their best work. Zen-like phrases like, “Emphasize the flaws” or “Be the first not to do what has never not been done before” are not obvious advice, so they do not immediately call for particular obvious responses. You must think differently when confronted in this way.
Some problems in mathematics and engineering are too complex to solve rationally; for example, design of an efficient computer chip. Instead, designers use a process called simulated annealing which is analogous to finding the latitude and longitude of the highest point on Earth without a map. Basically you pick some points, and then pick random points nearby. This helps you find mountains (large deviations between heights). You can then, repeat the process to find the highest parts of the highest mountains and ultimately create a routine where you keep finding higher points. Without random points, you would search for an unreasonable time, but randomness yields a quicker resolution.
Random input can be thought of as a form of forced distraction. In general, we think that we perform better when we are allowed to focus. It is also possible that we perform better when we are open to distraction. Academic studies have suggested that people with weak filters against distraction are also more creative. For example, adults with ADHD tend to perform better on creativity tests than those who are not. Applied to the majority of people, we have a chance to be more creative when we allow a little randomness interfere with our organized focus time. One of the claims of organization is that be making things easier, we can use our energy more effectively. In fact, when things are easy – we go on autopilot. We don’t pay as much attention to what we are presented and we do not think as well. Text in a “bad” font is more easily remembered than text is an “easy” font. One explanation is that thinking is hard and our brains are lazy. So when things are well organized for our lazy brain, our brain gets bored and inattentive. Adding some difficulty to the task breaks the boredom and increases our alertness. This is a recurring theme of the book.
In domains where creativity is prominent, leading practitioners often change their focus routinely. Scientists move from one discipline to another or juggle 2-3 different projects. After a period of focus on one project, a change acts like a vacation providing something fresh and different. What is learned on one project provides inspiration for another. Often, scientists work on one project until they hit a major snag. Rather than battering themselves by staying on the problem, they switch to another project where they feel they can make progress. This is one driver of scientific collaboration – developing options to provide a “creative distraction”. By building a repertoire of solutions and methods across domains, they become more skilled overall. Some companies, like 3M, encourage exactly this kind of experience by transferring people between departments regularly – building “a network of experiences” and spreading learning. Basically, this is now a standard practice among creative researchers.
Collaboration – hen groups want to improve their performance, they sometimes cut themselves off from others to enhance their own interaction. This form of simplification can yield the desired result. This is a form of collaboration called “bonding social capital” that works by creating strong bonds between the participants. An alternative form of collaboration is based on weak social connections is called “bridging social capital”. Often people use a mix of these forms of capital. Work that depends on coordination may benefit from bonding while work that depends on perspective and insight may depend on bridging. So developing and executing on an idea will ultimately use both. The combination and the constant balancing makes this feel messy.
Video game creation has this mix of elements. A good game should be innovative in some aspects and it must be conventional in others. Study of the developer networks that create good games shows that they are created by a network of teams. The teams working on different aspects of the games comprise people who have worked together for some time. They have high bonding capital. Different teams come together for the project, and they may not have worked together before. They depend more on bridging capital built up during the project. The tension between teams helps sort out problems and insures that the ultimate product is coherent. This puts a lot of strain on the bridges and most such network-of-teams structures can’t persist beyond the project. In other words, the messiness of this form of organization is much more creative than more conventional structures but more unstable.
People like stability and one form that stability takes is tribe formation. Marketing might be one tribe and Finance another. In the absence of some reason, people stick to their tribes. Studies of groups of people in “tribal” situations show that people naturally build stronger bonds between each other which takes the form of greater agreement and less moderation of thought. Tribes become less diverse in their thinking. So tribes within an organization resemble the cohesive teams in a network. The higher the integration of those teams, the greater the potential strain on the larger organization. The right balance of building bonding and managing bridges must be developed and this is a complex ongoing effort. Studies of organization suggest that “diversity trumps ability”, so efforts to decrease tribalism and increase connectivity create greater benefits. Suppose you have a team with four superior data analysts. Adding another superior analyst probably yields less benefit than adding an average economist or marketer. People with common backgrounds can get lazy, but the presence of a different perspective forces them to sharpen up and make fewer mistakes. Interestingly, teams think that they are more effective when things go well and things go well for homogeneous teams. When teams are more diverse, they perceive that they were less effective, but they may just be judging the ease of effort.
Companies try to promote collaboration by “team building”, which rarely works. The author suggests that there are four things that do. (1) Recognize a tendency to seek similarity and increase the time that different people work together. (2) Recognize those people who sit in more than one group, and make sure the value they create through both bonding and bridging is recognized across the organization. (3) Accept the tension and strain that comes from having more diverse teams. Be suspicious of the work from teams that really gel. In fact, teams can get too aligned over time and lose their edge. (4) Have goals that make the pain of collaboration worthwhile. Team harmony may be overrated, when goal harmony is what you really want. Teams work when the work of the team is worth it.
At work – In 2010, two psychologists set up four office spaces and asked people to do administrative tasks for an hour. They measured the productivity in each case. One case was called the lean office and consisted of a desk, a chair and writing materials. It was neat, orderly and unornamented. The second case was called the enriched office which had some decorative elements – basically colored prints on the wall and potted plants on cabinets. People working in the enriched environment got more work done and it was done more accurately. When asked how they felt, people in the enriched environment felt better in the enriched environment.
The remaining two environments were variations of the enriched environments. One was the most productive and the other was the least of all four. The difference was choice. In the most productive environment, the people were invited to place the decorative elements where they wanted before beginning work. In the most despised space, they were asked to move things around, but then as the work began the experimenters went around putting things back where they had been before. The first option was called empowered and it is not hard to understand that when people have a sense of control over an enriched environment, they feel empowered and productive. It is also easy to understand that when people feel like they have no control. They are disempowered which leads to lower productivity. The enriched environment got 15% more done than the lean office, and the empowered office got 30% more done than the lean office. This disempowered office was less productive than the lean office. Strikingly, some people chose to create a lean office and were as productive as those who chose an enriched office. The more powerful force was choice. A mania for neatness can’t be justified by productivity and yet this is increasingly common practice. Clean desk policies imposed on employees risk deep resentment. Permitting modest flexibility in modification of spaces gives people the sense of empowerment that allows them to create their own productive environment. The spaces may be less homogeneous and tidy – and some will see that as messy.
At the other end of the scale, a number of companies have gone out of their way to create “innovative environments” that have no desks, vivid colors and designs, and unusual amenities. They look more like avant-garde kindergartens than offices. These have not worked because, though visually enriched, they were also disempowering; there was no choice. The book details a number of examples of controlling approaches to office design, and the consequences of this control. What unifies them is that central planning imposes a vision of the office space with the intent of impressing visitors to the office rather than helping employees create a workspace that enhances their productivity. Choice might not be predictable and different employees might seek different things. An ideology of uniformity will clash with the individual wants/needs of people and sorting this out is a mess for managers.
An example of the reverse situation is Building 20 at MIT. The building was literally designed in one afternoon in 1943 as part of the war effort. It was built as fast as possible. It was drafty, ugly and cheap. It was giving planning permission on the condition that it be demolished within 6 months of the war’s end (it was demolished in 1998). Because it was temporary, occupants modified the building for their needs on the fly. They rewired sections, built and demolished walls, and they did it themselves because it was all temporary. Because it was temporary, many short term projects were placed there and then stayed. This also meant that a wide variety of work was done there, including work on radar, microwaves, linguistics, loudspeakers, cognitive science, email, video games, acoustics, and stop-action photography (and more). During one period, 20% of the physicists in the US spent time there working.
The building was terrible and it was hugely successful – and these two things are probably linked. Because projects came and went, unrelated work was side-by-side. Because the numbering system of the building was chaotic, people got lost and met people they would not expect. The model railroad club was placed next to an electronics group – and they developed the first arcade video game. Some musicians were set up next to some acoustic scientists, so they developed high quality speakers. Modern buildings are fairly reconfigurable, but the residents of Building 20 were in control of their own configuration. Building 20 was not the prime space that high status projects would typically seek; it was where the fringe work was sent (originally) because that work was less “interesting” to the administration. So while the inter-disciplinary, spontaneous interaction of the building certainly contributed to the productivity of the building, the role of local control and chaos should not be under-estimated. This was not enforced interdisciplinary contact, but enabled contact. Modern organizations try to create spontaneous interaction while restraining spontaneous action.
Building 20 was eventually replaced with a $300MM Frank Gehry designed building. Widely acclaimed as a novel design, the building was designed and built over more than 5 years. One occupant from both eras who was asked what he thought of the new building replied, “I did not ask for it.” When you consider your image of a start-up, consider that one element of their office design is that the employees chose it not from any overall philosophy, but because that is what they chose to do with what they had. They modified or moved to get what worked for them. The environment did not create them; they created the environment.
And that leads to a funny story. The modern cubicle can be traced back to a designer named Robert Probst who worked for Herman Miller. He designed a modular office space with low walls that formed at angles of no less than 120 degrees. This provides a flowing environment with long walls to post things on. The wall angles could be modified by office residents to reconfigure their space any time. Office managers demanded wall angles be fixed at 90 degrees and the walls be kept short (for tax reasons). Probst was horrified; a design created to give employees some control and empowerment became the symbol of disempowerment.
Improvisation – It seems that improvisation has an obvious link to messiness. There are people who plan intensively and then improvise their actual work. One example is Martin Luther King’s famous “I have a dream” speech. King had the habit of extensively preparing, practicing, and perfecting his speeches. He was quite good. This is what he did before the big speech in Washington DC. In the run up, he had given a variety of speeches using some different themes. He arrived for his speech with a complete prepared text and began to give it. It went as expected, but it the audience reaction was moderate. He made a small modification to give it more effect. Mahalia Jackson shouted “tell them about the dream” - twice. On the spot, he improvised the famous passages that we remember today. The title originally given to the speech was “Normalcy, Never Again”, but we know it by the improvisation.
Jazz provides a contrasting case of improvisation. One of the most famous jazz albums is “Kind of Blue” which was recorded in 9 hours. Most of the pieces were the first complete performance of the music. One of the more famous pieces contains a mistake but since the rest of the performance flowed - they treated the mistake as a choice. Miles Davis, the band leader, had a different vision for the album. But the performances that the group improvised were better than what Davis has envisioned and he embraced the new outcome. This may indicate a main feature of good improvisers, they suppress their inner critic to see what happens. This loss of control is central to improvisation. Theatric improvisers develop “the habit of yes” so that they can continue conversations started by others rather than shutting them down. Not every branch created is productive, but some are. The book gives some stories of improvisations that went wrong, so improvisation is not risk free. You must overcome your fear of rejection or failure to improvise in this way and it is hard to predict the outcome. You might have a different speech or performance that you planned. On the other hand, a certain amount of improvisation may be the key to creating truly superior outcomes.
Winning – Unpredictability creates stress in competitive situations. It is easy to plan for an opponent when they are predictable, but when they are liable to change tactics or behave irregularly – planning becomes impossible. Erwin Rommel routinely took unorthodox decisions that created confusion among his enemies. In a 2.5 day period of World War I, his detachment of about 200 men captured 9000 Italian soldiers, captured strategic high ground occupied originally by the enemy all while outnumbered and surrounded. When sensible commanders would have escaped the trap, he attacked. Rommel sought to create chaos in the enemy’s’ mind and to attack before the enemy reacted. Sometimes this was stressful for his troops, but casualties were often low thanks to surprise. Magnus Carlsen is the world’s top chess player, but deep analysis shows that he does not make the best moves from a purely strategic sense. He makes moves that make his opponents make mistakes, and the mistakes arise because the moves are unexpected and apparently illogical. His opponents lose their focus because he times these unexpected moves to occur late in the game when there is less time to adjust.
Amazon provides another example of sowing confusion to gain advantage. Started in 1995, by 1999 they were branching out. One branch was toys, but Amazon did not make this decision until too late in the year to place orders with manufacturers. They held a press conference in New York to announce their intention to sell toys for Christmas, but did not have any toys. Executives went to local Toys R Us and bought whatever they could find for the press conference and then went online and bought their inventory from Toys R Us and Costco, which they then sold at a discount compared to those companies. Their inventory system and warehouses could not handle the product. Employees were sent out to warehouses to help with the rush and more than a third of the inventory went unsold that season. By almost any standard, this should be a disaster. Except Amazon gained millions of customers who now saw Amazon as a place to buy toys – and lots of other stuff. He had undercut pricing at competitors, who had to cut their prices to compete. Within a few years, there was Kindle, Marketplace, and Amazon web services and more. Who knew Amazon could go in all these directions and with so little warning? You don’t want to find them invading your space.
“OODA loop” is a bit of air force jargon that stands for observe-orient-decide-act. The context is air battle between fighter planes which takes place in three dimensions at high speed. If your opponent is repeatedly slow to react to your actions, you will eventually be in position to shoot them down. The concept of OODA loop was developed by John Boyd to explain why some planes outperformed apparently superior planes or why some pilots performed better than apparently higher skill pilots. If you can disorient your opponent forcing him to stop and figure out what was going on, you gained an advantage. And if you could do this relentlessly, your opponent would be almost paralyzed with confusion. Harford points out that this could be a description of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. It looks crazy, but it got well inside the OODA loop of his competitors, resulting in confusion and inability to regain control of the public conversation.
The sort of chaos that is created is not just suffered by the opponent. Things can go wrong and impose significant costs. Amazon lost a lot of money making the leap into toys, but it paid off. Rommel could have lost his troops if his enemies had been quicker. Eventually, Rommel’s troops in North Africa (during World War II) did break down after a run of successes because they were over-taxed and could not maintain their equipment or supplies (the breakdown was helped by a small group of British commandos who created chaos in German forces using Rommel’s own tactics against him). That risk forces many people and organizations to choose the planned, coordinated approach instead. As long as nobody else embraces the messy possibility of chaotic improvisation, being conventional can get by.
Three principles of messy tactics might be: get yourself into a position of opportunity…improvise your way around obstacles…speed counts for a great deal….An unexpected corollary of this third principle is that while your team should understand their broad goals, they shouldn’t waste time trying to coordinate with one another. Remember the context here is defeating an opponent by subjecting him to multiple chaos inducing attacks. The fact of coordination decreases the chaos-inducing potential.
Incentives – People and organizations set targets to try to promote the behavior they want. But this can backfire. For example, at birth a baby can be given an Apgar score that quickly and subjectively assesses the health of the baby. But administrators began to use the score to judge doctors’ performance. A good way to improve Apgar scores is to deliver by caesarian section. So a measure intended to guide doctor’s treatment became an incentive to use a procedure that has negative effects on the mother and perhaps the child. Similarly, doctors in New York were given report cards on their outcomes for patient treatment. To maintain a high score, doctors avoided operating on seriously ill elder patients. Doing surgery on healthy patients kept scores higher. Northeastern University wanted to improve its rankings in college standings. One factor in ranking is selectivity. So Northeastern sent out 200,000 letters to high school seniors asking them to apply. This allowed them to reject the majority and rise in the rankings. Business can hit short-term targets by skimping on long term development of staff or maintenance. And of course targets can lead people to lie and cheat. Auto emissions, student scores and emergency response times have all been manipulated to deceive authorities who have set targets.
While one approach is to make targets more sophisticated or impose an audit procedure, a more effective approach might be one simple rule or checklist. Diagnosing a heart attack is tricky. For years, too many people were referred for further action at great cost and minimal benefit. Doctors put together a diagnostic guide that required a few tests, then using a probability table and a calculator, perform a calculation on whether to admit the patient. It reduced the over-admission rate, but doctors would not use it. It was replaced by a five question decision tree which had even better prediction power. At least one problem with such elaborate systems is that such approaches are statistical and there is insufficient data (people pretend this is incorrect and act as if the data is sufficient). For stock market modelling, a good 500-years of data would be sufficient. With limited data, people “overfit” to “create a signal”. Simple rules are often less precise, but more accurate.
Measuring is valuable and a prerequisite for improvement. But people who know they are being measured seek to game the measurement. If they don’t know they are being measured, the measure has meaning. The best way to defeat gaming is “impossibilizing the knowledge”. Measure a variety of things that are useful, but vary the incentives associated with success randomly. If you are going to give a test, put everything in scope for the test. Or give the test at random times. This is the point of safety inspections, where the time of testing is unpredictable. This unpredictability makes things harder for those being measured, and they are likely to complain. But it will increase attention to being prepared and decrease the opportunity to fool the inspectors.
Automation – The virtue of automation is that it makes things easy for us. But it can set up conditions that lead to failure. Called the “paradox of automation”, the issue is that automation:
- decreases our need to understand how things work
- covers up our mistakes, so they we never learn
- erodes our skills over time because we don’t do the work
- fails in unusual situations where we don’t have the skill to diagnose and react appropriately.
More than one transport disaster has been caused by over-confidence in automatic controls.
Another type of example comes is shown by use of automated terrorist databases. People were excluded from entering the United States because a database used for screening included the “fact” that a women’s professional society in Malaysia was a terrorist organization. Because databases share information, the mistake is propagated through multiple systems and becomes nearly impossible to eliminate. Nobody knows how to fix it because nobody know how it all works.
Gary Klein writes, “When the algorithms are making the decisions, people often stop working to get better. The algorithms can make it hard to diagnose reasons for failures. As people become more dependent on algorithms, their judgment may erode, making them depend even more on the algorithms. That process sets up a vicious cycle. People get passive and less vigilant when algorithms make decisions.” Since algorithm is just a fancy word for procedure or rules, this is not a problem confined to computers. People bound by rules or policy are mindless enacting algorithms as much as any computer does. This makes them relatively inflexible. We worry that robots are taking our jobs, but just as common a problem is that they are taking our judgment.
All of this is summarized in something called “Weiner’s Rule” which states that “Automation will routinely tidy up ordinary messes, but occasionally create an extraordinary mess.” An antidote for the effect of excess procedure is paradoxically none. A Dutch village called Oudehaske had experienced a traffic accident in which two children were killed. A traffic engineer was sent to study the problem and soon noticed that drivers were going too fast. He realized that signs would have little impact because drivers tune them out. There was not really enough space to segregate all the traffic streams either. So he went in the opposite direction. He made the road and sidewalks look more similar, more confusing. Drivers reacted by slowing down. In the Dutch town of Drachten where a particular intersection was a common accident site, he installed a “squareabout” with almost no signage, a mix of open paved space and features and places where cars and bicycles are forced together. Everybody who sees this design thinks it is hazardous. That is why it is safer. Nobody moves through this space at half-attention. In fact, more traffic passes through the area with less congestion than before, and with far fewer accidents. By removing automation-like structure, the situational awareness of people is used to guide traffic safely.
Resilience – The advent of antibiotics set off a tide of antibacterial effort. People tried to make everything clean. Similarly, foresters tried to grow sustainable timber by planting monocultures of trees. It is becoming clear that we are much healthier when we have a wide variety of bacteria in our guts, on our skin and in our mouths. Diverse forests are more productive than monocultural forests. A diverse system can withstand shocks better and recover. The problem we face in seeking to manage a really diverse system like a forest or the gut is that we do not understand what matters. Maybe everything matters and that is messy. The same can be said for communities or organizations. Strong ones are probably diverse in ways that are hard to detect.
Life – Benjamin Franklin developed a list of 13 virtues for improving his life and being the most productive person he could be. He recorded his progress every day for most of his life. His third virtue was “order”, in which he made no progress. He was one of the greatest scientists of all time, was a key political figure in American history and he was seemingly a slob. He stacked papers on tables and floors and you’d think that this would create problems. Modern studies show that “stackers” have no problem finding things in their piles. Taking them away removes their ability to find things. Life is full of inconsistencies, contradictions and randomness. Even if you wanted to organize it, it would be nearly impossible (at least to keep organized). It turns out a stack can be a resilient organizing method. When you use a document - place it on the top; least used documents will soon be on the bottom. Eventually, throw them away. Don’t be sure a stack is not organized!
Finding a partner would seem to be a complex, messy task. There are some many candidates and so many criteria to consider. Some Harvard students put together a computer system to help fellow students find their “match”. They asked many questions about preferences, but learned along the way that people wanted someone about the same age, height and grade point who lived in the same area. That was the matching (all the other information was ignored); when these matched people were matched at random and they were with happy with the result. More recent experiments show that when people are told they are a good match, they act as if they are a good match and this makes them happy. One reason that this works is also that most people don’t know what they really want. Many answers would be acceptable. The same must be true of colleges, employers, clubs, and hobbies. A UCLA mathematician managed to put together a cluster analysis of women’s answers given to hundreds of questions, and then built his own profile to emphasize those features that would appeal to women who appealed to him. He posted the profile and date requests came in. 52 of the first 55 first dates were flops. He married his 81st first date. However, she did not appear in his top 10,000. She wanted something simple, he fit, she called, and they clicked. Life is a mystery.
Long ago, play grounds barely existed. There were maybe a few structures on an asphalt surface. Then parents noticed that it was possible to be hurt and they demanded safer play areas. In came rounded edges, soft surfaces and more novelty elements. Someone decided to test if this was actually safer and set up a contrasting play space with saws, axes, hammer and wood. Kids had more fun, got more exercise and had no more injuries in the cluttered mess than they did in the thought-out playground. It is like the automation argument, people adjust their behavior to risk and being exposed to risk teaches you how to adjust. In safer environments, kids take bigger risks.
The author is not saying that life should be chaotic and random. The point is really that there is a degree of organization that is desired and no more. Certain parts of life benefit from organization and some don’t. We need to guard against the idea that what we need is more organization, more complete organization or better organization – once we have enough. It is hard to know when enough is enough. It is especially hard because being organized often seems easier, more predictable, and safer. We need at least a bit of mess – and some of us a lot of mess, in our lives.
Comment and interpretation:
- One of the barriers to using our creativity is the belief that we have already optimized our situations. A transport strike in London in 2014 made commuters find alternative routes. Thanks to the use of fare cards, it was possible to track the pre-strike, in-strike and post-strike routes used by commuters. After the strike, 5% of commuters stuck with the new route they were forced to find.
- A cyclist names Graeme Obree sought ways to radically improve his time in track cycling. He discovered a new body position that allowed him to win a world championship and set a world one-hour record. The Cycling Federation banned the position. He then found another novel body position, won the championship and set a new record before that was banned too. What is a creative solution for one, may be a messy, undesired problem for another. When the people craving order also have the ability to enforce creativity-stifling standards, they usually do so.
- In the world of sensory science, there is a concept called sensory-specific satiety. This phenomena describes what happens when we consume something repeatedly. For example, the first bite of mash potatoes can taste great, but as we keep eating the potatoes, the attractiveness of the food declines. But if we stop to have a taste of something else, like meat or vegetable, the attractiveness of the potatoes increases again. Maybe not to the initial peak, but close. Over time, the attractiveness declines and we no longer want to eat. This is true for basically anything we eat and the real reason that there are salty snacks at the bar with your beer. The bar does not want you to lose your taste for beer, so they provide an interruption to the satiety effect. Anything would do as well as the salty snack. Chocolate, baked goods or mashed potatoes would refresh the attractiveness of beer. Presumably, any sensation follows this pattern. If you spend hours on something, you brain gets tired and needs a change. A different set of activities can send you back to the original task refreshed. Focus works – until you need a break from it.
- One of the Oblique Strategies is “Honor thy error as a hidden intention”. This is beautiful and reminds us that many advances begin as mistakes or reverses. We think we understand how things work and try something. In reality, we did not understand and by accepting the unexpected outcome, we come closer to understanding how things really are. When younger, I was an aspiring (amateur) painter. My best outputs came when I made a mistake (lack of deft touch) and stopped to examine the result. Sometimes the accident was better than my intention. The same has happened in my scientific career where the “plan failed” but the outcome was superior and something to be exploited.
- A few years back I was working at a “remote” site of my company’s. To accommodate a surge in the number of people at the site, we needed to remodel and this meant some painting was needed. We were going from mostly individual offices to some shared offices which made those people unhappy. Because we were remote, the facilities management group could not be bothered to check on us and we took advantage. People in each group office worked out how to arrange the desks and they chose the color of the walls. We ended up with one lilac, one mint green, one pale blue, and one peach colored room. Each chosen by the occupants, who were happy as a result. What was interesting was that the effect on their attitude began when they were given the choice – not when they moved in. People were excited to move in to “their” space.
- People sometimes think that improvisation means not preparing and having no plan. There must be examples of this, but the more common case seems to be people who clearly have a plan in mind, but who go off plan with ease. I like to say that you must be prepared to adapt. The preparation immerses your mind in the “problem” and detailed planning allows you to consider alternatives (consciously or unconsciously) and generally prepares your mind for the task. I suspect that most people would report, after a successful improvisation, that it just flowed out of their mind without effort. Being unprepared does not build the capacity to improvise. Being prepared and being willing to abandon plan A seem to be necessary.
- Many companies are interested in greater agility and ability to respond quickly to competitor or environmental changes. However, they are less interested in the sort of chaos that might be associated with this sort of action. Equally, it is hard to disrupt your own business first. This is probably part of why entrepreneurish small companies are a problem. They have less formal process or value-at-risk to protect. The book comments that at multiple points in Rommel’s career, his own commanders did not know where he was or what he was doing. You can imagine how this went over in the German army (at least as we would stereotype an army anywhere), but the effectiveness of these tactics could not be doubted.
- I was struck by the idea of “impossibilizing the knowledge” as a method of incenting the desired behavior of being prepared broadly. Students seeking a PhD in most science fields face what are called preliminary exams. Generally, the scope of the exams is set, but anything is in bounds within the scope. Students generally study for months and the questions can be very open ended. This is followed up by oral final exams where there are even fewer limits. For a few days or weeks, students facing these exams really are quite expert in a broad area of science. The memory of the details fade, but the general structure remains. I am occasionally surprised by the odd detail that is accessible to me from this period that I would not know except for this intense, open-ended study. Every student is forced to fail at some point in these exams. There is too much to know and there is a committee to devise questions. Done right, it becomes a right-of-passage.
- My professional career spanned a transition from idiosyncratic instrumentation to pre-built automated systems. Chemistry & biochemistry students needed to learn glass blowing, machining and electronics to build the equipment that was needed for experimentation then. It was common at that time for a doctoral dissertation to rest on development and validation of an analytical method. This made students very aware of artifacts. Today, most equipment can be bought with disposable components that are much more efficient to use. However, it is harder to know when things have gone wrong and your results are nonsense. The advances in supply have enabled administrators to change safety standards to eliminate laboratory hazards. However, this change means that certain materials or procedures are now out-of-bounds. No more open flames (for glass work), machine shop (for building apparatus) or electronic shop (to build, modify or repair devices) because this work is better left to professionals for safety reasons. The point is not that improved safety is undesirable but that the lost knowledge of instrument design means that scientists can’t recognize the risk of artifacts. By rejecting accidents (which training could mitigate), we also lose understanding.
*text in italics is directly quoted from the book
Recent Comments