TODO: This is a mess. Leave it so!

(Thanks to Saul Betmead de Chastaigner for inspiring me to post this)

How much mess is needed to think/work/create effectively?

As a parent and as a consultant I spend a lot of time tidying up. As much in both capacities I have to point out where things are messy, and how we could tidy them up. Are they messy because they don’t belong anywhere, or are they new things that have yet to earn themselves a sensible resting place? Perhaps that place doesn’t exist yet. Are they “messy” because they’re rubbish and shouldn’t exist at all, or my favourite category is “messy because part of active (messy) thought process”.

My job is mostly telling people how messy their stuff is and how to start tidying it up. Often with kids we say «tidy your room!» but we dont tell them how or what the criteria for judgement are. What we see as mess they see as a thriving ecosystem of imaginary landscapes, half-finished escapades interspersed with living detritus. What we’re really saying is «stop thinking out loud!». Why is a thing’s place on a shelf, or in a box? What does this have to do with shadow-IT and digital transformation? Everything. Whose box are you going to put your X in? Whose idea of «tidy» are you going to adhere to? Does everything need to be sorted or just the parts people should never have to think about?

When I work, or tidy at home, I spend a lot of time moving things from a state of local order (neat piles of things waiting to be moved back to where they belong) to a state of general chaos but high accessibility, and then hopefully into a state of general (albeit temporary) order. The nature of the order changes over time depending on what’s currently occupying my thoughts.

Creating order out of chaos requires an affinity with that very chaos. Hold your friends close and your enemies closer.

Clarity begins at home

I feel we do ourselves a disservice by writing clearly about things that aren’t clear.

I follow paths, get distracted, reminded of why I piled the things up in the first place and new potential orders present themselves. My thoughts aren’t tidy, wilfully so. They are often a mess of affordances, loosely composed with burred edges that catch onto other thoughts. When I write things clearly I get suspicious that I’ve preferred local order to general order. This can be problematic if, like I do, you prefer writing in short aphorisms.

Like the anti-library, a lot of what I write can be anti-thoughts, or things I haven’t thought yet that I want to think in the future. Thoughts that remind me of how many things there are to think. A lot of questions, words on their way to a thought that becomes outdated before it’s hit the paper.

Things aren’t simple. Things are generally very messy, but cognitively we’re trained over time to filter out the noise and recognise signal. However it’s ALL signal. What we think of as signal is just that part of it that’s relevant to us. By retuning our antennae we perceive differently, sometimes you need to drop your guard and stop tuning in, just listen to all of it before you start to focus.

Wallow in the mess, get to know it and enjoy it.