Productive Disorder: The Hidden Power of Chaos, Noise, and Randomness

In the early 1700s, Central Europe faced a crisis: the forests were running out.

An explosion in mining, shipbuilding, and early industry had devastated old-growth forests that had stood for many centuries. Meanwhile, the population was exploding as well, creating demands on forests that clearly couldn’t be sustained for long.

The kingdoms of Prussia and Saxony decided to apply the emerging methods of science to the problem, developing what would eventually become known as Scientific Forestry. In order to maximize timber production for the state, forestry officials turned their wild and messy woodlands into outdoor timber factories.

They began by meticulously cataloguing every tree in the forest by species and size. They analyzed growth rates and wood quality to identify the most productive species, settling on Norway spruce to yield the maximum volume of timber per square foot. They then cleared the existing forests and turned them into monocultures – endless rows of evenly spaced, identically sized spruce.

What had once been an impossibly complex tangle of diverse kinds of vegetation – oak, beech, fir, and countless others – became a “planned forest.” It was the biological equivalent of a spreadsheet, with straight rows of trees laid out in a precise geometric grid ready for bureaucratic regulation.

At first, it worked beautifully. Forestry officials could now predict with extreme accuracy the exact yield of every patch of forest. The new plantations produced more lumber, at a faster pace, to a more precise standard. Harvests came in on schedule and in uniform sizes ready for sawmills. Logging boomed and the revenue flowed into state coffers.

But something strange began to happen after the second or third generations of trees were planted. The first generation had flourished in the absence of competition for soil and nutrients, but in the following generations, those same ecosystems collapsed, with dramatic production losses of 20-30%.

In order to make the forest more productive, the underbrush had been cleared of smaller trees, bushes, and shrubs. That underbrush had fertilized the soil with decomposing leaves and wood; without this undergrowth, the soil soon became depleted. The disappearance of fungi, worms, and insects caused pollination and soil aeration to crash.

Pests like the pine looper moth and bark beetle raced through identical strands of trees, encountering no obstacles or predators. Storms damaged vast swathes of the forest, toppling over the shallowly rooted spruces like “bowling pins.”

It turned out in retrospect that the messy diversity of the forest had been the source of its resilience. When stresses such as storms, disease, drought, fragile soil, or severe cold struck, a diverse forest with its full array of different species of trees, birds, insects, and animals was far better able to survive and recover. A windstorm that toppled large, old trees would typically spare smaller ones. An insect attack that threatened oaks might leave lindens and hornbeams unaffected. The rigidity and uniformity of the system meant that failures were not small and contained but systemic. 

By the late 19th and early 20th century, forest plantations had become “a pale shadow of their previous ecological richness.” After all the effort and resources invested, the forests of Central Europe were now producing less timber than the wild forests they had replaced. All these changes culminated in what Germans grimly came to call Waldsterben, or “death of the forest.” 

The supposedly “scientific” management of forests led to ecological problems so severe that multiple generations of restoration ecology have been needed to restore the previous diversity in insects, flora, and fauna. Germany continues to struggle with the lasting effects of monoculture forestry to this day, most recently in 2018 due to the mounting effects of climate change.

This story is recounted in James C. Scott’s Seeing Like a State, and in his book, Scott notes that far from being a unique or isolated incident, scientific forestry was one incidence of a far broader movement, which he dubs Authoritarian High Modernism. 

Across many facets of the modern world, from urban planning to public health, from transportation infrastructure to online social networks, we’ve sought to “rationalize” and “optimize” the messiness and complexity of the world. From the way we organize our cities and homes to how we manage the economy, all the way down to the systems and routines we create for our personal productivity, we’ve tried to impose rational order on complex systems based on a narrow vision of efficiency.

In this piece, I’ll argue that the results of that effort have been disastrous, and it’s time to return those systems to their natural, messy state.

An optimal level of mess

I first read the story of scientific forestry in a blog post by Venkatesh Rao in 2014. It was a paradigm-shifting moment for me. I saw in myself much the same attitude as 18th century German forestry officials – an unquestioned belief in order, reason, and systematic thinking.

I had always believed that anything I wanted to achieve in life was to be found on the other side of “getting organized.” My assumption was that there was one “best” path to achieving any goal, which was to follow a highly specific, structured, step-by-step plan with objectives and metrics. It was the “one true way,” as universal and unquestioned as my childhood religious faith.

Yet, in my early 20s, I began to run up against the limits of my blind faith in order. I began to see more and more examples of how it failed – in my own life, the lives of my friends and peers, and even in the business world and in society. The pitfalls and weaknesses of highly ordered, rationalized systems started to become ever more glaring, especially in a world that seemed to be changing faster and becoming more ambiguous and uncertain.

What if, I began to wonder, the costs of being neat and organized outweighed the benefits? What if there were hidden advantages to being messy, informal, loose, and even chaotic?

Last year, I picked up a book called A Perfect Mess: The Hidden Benefits of Disorder, by Eric Abrahamson and David H. Freedman, that finally addressed my longstanding question. Their striking conclusion after studying dozens of disciplines was a strong affirmative yes: that “moderately disorganized people, institutions, and systems frequently turn out to be more efficient, more resilient, more creative, and in general more effective than highly organized ones.”

They argue instead for an attitude toward organization that takes into account its costs, by asking yourself: Will more effort spent organizing be worth what it costs me in time and other resources? They suggest that there is an “optimal level of mess” for any given person and every given situation…and that it is just as common for people to err on the side of overorganization as underorganization.

This assertion is akin to heresy in our productivity-obsessed world. And for me personally, as someone who’s dedicated my career to teaching people how to be more efficient and organized, it felt like the portal to a hidden, subversive world.

The surprising benefits of disorder

This may seem counterintuitive, but you can think of “mess” not as simply the absence of order – like a vacuum of nothingness – but as a phenomenon in its own right, with its own qualities.

You can even conceive of mess as a valuable resource you can draw on or a strategy you can proactively apply when needed.

To understand when and where we might want to employ messes, we need to identify its unique benefits. Abrahamson and Freedman suggest six of them: flexibility, completeness, resonance, invention, efficiency, and robustness.

Messes are flexible in that they can adapt and change more quickly, more dramatically, in a wider variety of situations, and with less effort than would be required by highly ordered, formal systems. 

For example, the messiness of a jazz ensemble enables improvisation, as any musician can shift at any moment to address any other, whereas a symphony orchestra has to play the music as written. Neat systems struggle to fight off randomness, and when randomness inevitably leaks in, the system is thrown off.

Messes are more complete (or comprehensive) since they can comfortably tolerate an exhaustive array of diverse entities. 

Neat systems tend to whittle away at the diversity of their elements (as we saw in 18th-century German forestry). As another example, Thomas Edison tried any and every material in his quest to invent a workable lightbulb with a long-lasting glow, without regard to elegant theories as to why they might work. His approach to experimentation was wide-ranging and messy.

Messes are resonant, as in they facilitate surprising connections between overlapping, heterogenous elements. 

Alexander Fleming happened upon the discovery that led to the invention of the first antibiotic, penicillin, because his lab was notoriously messy. A small, ragged circle of mold had invaded one of his petri dishes, but the staphylococci culture it contained seemed to steer clear of the mold, his first clue that the bacteria couldn’t tolerate it.

Messes facilitate invention by randomly juxtaposing many elements in unexpected, unconventional ways. 

Neatness tends to limit novelty and the unexpected and sweeps them aside as aberrations when they do occur. A sobering example: a major reason modern terrorists are so hard to fight and defeat is because they are constituted by loose, constantly shifting, non-hierarchical, i.e., messy groups.

Messes are efficient, able to accomplish goals with a modest consumption of resources. 

Consider the “productivity” of the wild forests before scientific management took root – they produced immense value for a wide variety of human and non-human species, despite the complete lack of an organizing scheme. Neatness tends to require a constant expenditure of resources just to maintain itself.

Messes are robust in that they tend to weave together and interlace many disparate elements, making them more resistant to destruction, failure, and imitation. 

For example, competitive runners benefit from “inconsistent” workouts that mix up the speed, length, difficulty, frequency, and inclination of their running routines, leading to muscles that are more adaptable. Mixed-breed mutts are often hardier than purebred dogs thanks to the random interweaving of genes from their unlike parents. Neat systems, in contrast, tend to be more brittle and more easily disrupted or copied.

Later in the book, Abrahamson and Freedman introduce a seventh benefit: messes can be fun!

Consider the joy of sorting through antiques and doodads at a flea market, browsing a stack of random magazines, or spelunking through a messy collection of notes and finding something you didn’t even know you were looking for. Messy situations inherently include many qualities we find enlivening and interesting: surprise, delight, exploration, and discovery.

Adding disorder to a system can make it more effective

It’s one thing to believe that messes have some intriguingly positive qualities in theory. It’s quite another to realize those benefits in real life.

Let’s get one level more concrete and look at practical ways we can use the benefits of disorder in our daily lives.

Specifically, let’s see how disorder can make for more creative environments, allow information systems to contain more information, make the human brain smarter, enhance one’s personal productivity, and allow us to make more consistent progress on our projects and goals.

Disorder makes for more creative environments

In his book, Where Good Ideas Come From, Steven Johnson highlights many surprising examples of how disorder has led to new ideas and inventions throughout history. In his research, he found that innovation is often driven by “the collisions that happen when different fields of expertise converge in some shared physical or intellectual space.”

Perhaps the most classic model for such a space is the eighteenth-century coffeehouse, which Johnson notes was the hotbed for Enlightenment-era innovations that transformed our world: everything from the science of electricity to the insurance industry to modern democracy itself. 

Sigmund Freud famously hosted an intellectual salon on Wednesday nights in Vienna, where physicians, philosophers, and scientists came together to discuss the emerging field of psychoanalysis. The legendary Homebrew Computer Club in 1970s Silicon Valley was made up of a ragtag group of amateur hobbyists, teenagers, entrepreneurs, and academics, who together somehow sparked the personal computer revolution.

Berkeley psychology professor Charlan Nemeth began investigating the relationship between noise, dissent, and creativity in group environments more than thirty years ago, and her research offers a clue as to why noisy cafes and amateur hobbyist clubs might have fostered so much creativity: she found that “good ideas are more likely to emerge in environments that contain a certain amount of noise and error,” ranging from mock juries to corporate boardrooms to academic seminars.

Maybe the best environment for our creativity is not sitting in a minimalist cafe, wearing noise-cancelling headphones, with an all-consuming focus on a tiny screen. Maybe there are times we’d be better served by immersing ourselves in randomness instead.

Disorder makes for more information-rich systems

Steven Johnson, in his book, introduces the field of Descriptive Complexity Theory, a branch of information science that has found that the more randomness in a system, the more information it can hold.

This may seem paradoxical, but imagine the case of two professors: one with a perfectly tidy, neat office with not a paperclip out of place, and one with a messy office full of personal items strewn all over the place. Which one provides you with more information about what kind of person the professor is? Clearly the messy one, since too much neatness and order tends to hide away the idiosyncratic details that distinguish one person from another.

Now imagine a digital notetaking app such as Notion, Obsidian, Tana, or Evernote. You might imagine that perfectly organizing your notes app – with neatly formatted text, seamless folders, comprehensive tags, and uniform headings – might allow you to fully maximize the potential of your knowledge.

But then again…maybe not. Maybe it is the very messiness that we tend to despise that makes our notes personal, intimate, and unique to us. A perfectly organized set of notes could belong to anyone, whereas a messier collection might contain all sorts of hidden clues about your unique desires and interests.

Disorder makes for smarter brains

In a 2007 study on the brain activity of children, neuroscientist Robert Thatcher and his team found that there was a correlation between the IQ of individual children and the amount of time their brains spent in “chaotic mode” (in contrast to “phase lock,” which is a more ordered and focused state of mind).

Every extra millisecond spent in chaos added as much as twenty IQ points, whereas time spent in phase lock was correlated with reduced IQ. Their conclusion is astonishing: the more disorganized your brain is, the smarter you are likely to be.

It turns out that the human brain relies on disorder for its basic functioning at multiple levels, from the processing of raw sensory data to the interplay of abstract ideas. Our brains evolved to navigate a messy world, and perhaps when we insist on organizing its activity, we rob it of that essential ability.

Consider how too much silence in a group dinner can be uncomfortable. Or that kids can knock out homework in a noisy home. Or that jiggling a telescope can help an observer’s eye pick up a faint celestial body. We are designed to thrive in chaos.

Disorder makes for higher productivity

Jane Jacobs, the famous urban planning theorist, noted a similar phenomenon at work in the design of cities. 

She noticed that planners had a tendency to substitute superficial visual order for true functionality. In other words, whether a neighborhood “looked right” became more important than whether it worked for its inhabitants. The assumption seemed to be that if an arrangement was visually pleasing, that automatically meant it would function well.

I see this tendency run amok in the personal productivity space as well: people tend to love visual order, manifesting as pleasing symmetry, clean lines, perfectly squared little boxes, and severe minimalism. Yet all too often, this order and elegance comes at the expense of functionality – Does the thing actually work? Does it work sustainably for the long term? Does it fit how your mind works? Does it provide more value than it requires in upkeep?

It’s far easier to make something superficially pretty than to answer such questions. It’s much easier to compulsively switch to a different app that promises to instantly sweep aside the digital disorder than to figure out what we’re truly trying to accomplish. It’s much easier to organize things than to decide which of those things actually matters.

No doubt some situations call for a more structured approach – think of checklists used by an operating surgeon or an airline pilot. But most of us don’t face such high-stakes situations in our daily lives and would benefit from less formal tools.

Disorder helps you make progress

We normally think of “organizing” a collection of physical, visual, or digital elements, but it also applies to how one structures one’s efforts, including goals and projects.

In Tim Hartford’s book Messy, he found in his research that the top scientists tend to switch topics frequently: “Over the course of their first hundred published papers, the long-lived high-impact researchers switched topics an average of forty-three times.” 

We are normally taught that in order to achieve something great, we have to focus maniacally on a single pursuit. Yet by cultivating a variety of projects at different stages of fruition, leading scientists clearly gain four benefits:

1. Multiple projects cross-fertilize, with the knowledge gained in one sometimes unlocking key insights in another.
2. Diverse pursuits provide variety that captures our attention, whereas a single-minded pursuit can become monotonous and boring.
3. Each project provides an “escape” from the others, giving you something to turn to when you face an impasse, instead of it becoming a crushing experience.
4. Turning our attention away from a project gives us a chance to process it subconsciously, which some scientists believe is an important key to solving creative problems.

This last benefit was designated by the philosopher Søren Kierkegaard as “crop rotation.” One cannot use the same field to grow the same crop indefinitely. Eventually the soil must be refreshed by planting something new or simply giving it a break.

This agricultural metaphor brings us back full circle to James C. Scott’s ideas in Seeing Like a State, where he makes an intriguing observation: “The rule seems to be that the more rigid and exclusive is the specialist’s boundary, and the stricter the control within it, the more disorder rages around it.”

In other words, you can’t really ever eliminate disorder; you can only move it around. So perhaps the greatest cost of creating a highly organized environment is that everything just outside its borders – which includes the rest of your life, your body, your family, other people, the natural environment, and human society generally– becomes flooded with externalities for the sake of that perfect system.

Practical takeaways for your productivity

So what does all this mean for our personal approach to order and organization?

Here are some actionable takeaways I can offer based on the findings and examples above:

1. Don’t feel guilty about putting off organizing

The authors of A Perfect Mess note that there’s an advantage in putting off organizing: it’s more efficient to organize a larger batch of items all at once than to do it a little at a time. 

This is known as “batch processing,” and I tend to save it for my weekly, monthly, and annual reviews, when paradoxically, the more stuff that has piled up, the better!

Don’t feel guilty about postponing your organizing to a later date, or only doing it occasionally, because in the meantime, you’re benefitting from all the advantages of mess I highlighted above.

2. Notice and embrace the odd, eccentric ways you tend to organize

Many people say they don’t have time to get organized, but in reality, they are constantly engaging in a wide variety of ingenious organizing strategies. Our propensity to seek shortcuts, find the path of least resistance, and expend as little time and energy as possible to achieve an outcome are some of the most reliable ways to find little tips and tricks that may seem eccentric or odd but work for us.

Abrahamson and Freedman present multiple examples of how most people, since they aren’t aware of the ways they naturally stay organized, tend to misjudge how a technology system might help them. They assume that the laid back, informal methods they already use are suboptimal and that they need a piece of software that only adds a lot of burdensome formality.

3. Satisfice instead of maximize

One of the subtle implications of the ideas in this piece is that we don’t ever truly have control. If we try to fully organize our surroundings, we fall into the traps and pitfalls noted above. If we instead accept the messiness, then we don’t have full control over it either.

What’s left then is to accept the reality: that we are all careening through a chaotic void, with at most brief moments of stability and fleeting periods of agency. Instead of trying to order and control our lives, we can use this inherent randomness as an excuse to satisfice, which has long been recognized as an essential ingredient for happiness.

As Nicholas Nassim Taleb puts it, “Having some randomness in your life can actually increase happiness: it forces you to satisfice, instead of maximize. Research shows that those who live under self-imposed pressure to be optimal in their enjoyment of things suffer a measure of distress.”

Living in the balance

It’s all a balance, all masculine and feminine, yin and yang. When the benefits of order start running out, it’s time to switch to disorder. And vice versa – when disorder starts careening out of control, try adding a little structure to the problem. 

There are no “right” ways that work universally in all situations; only tools that work better or worse depending on the job.

It’s not that order, reason, and efficiency are bad – it’s that they are sometimes extolled as inherent virtues when, in fact, their opposites can be just as valuable and useful.

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