In a Mess?
The world can be divided into two kinds of people. Now, I know you’ve read this before, but on this occasion, I am serious. There are two kinds of people, and I have an infallible test to prove my point. However, to get there, I’d like to explain how I know about this.
It all began back in the early 1970’s when a psychologist, Liam Hudson, set up a Research Unit on Intellectual Development at the University of Edinburgh. It was the next stage of his work on convergent and divergent thinking. He had discovered that these two styles of thinking were associate with a preference for the sciences or the arts. Convergent thinkers would pursue a path, doggedly even, sorting out issues, solving puzzles, and, not surprisingly this seemed to be an approach characteristics of many who were interested in maths, physics, chemistry and the like. The converse was true for divergent thinkers. Made sense to me: I was convergent, obviously.
I joined the research unit. I can’t remember why I was invited to apply for a position there, but, looking back, I suspect he thought I might be a useful researcher, as well as having some ability in keeping things organised. Prior to then, my academic life had been about social anthropology and developing managers’ capabilities, an odd mixture, especially as social anthropology was going through turmoil, abandoning old functionalist models of society, way ahead of any thinking about the task of management. No matter, my life was going to continue to go in different directions, and up in Edinburgh I managed to study innovation in university teaching, ways of thinking and artistic expression, medical education, thinking styles and intimate relationships, and the relationship between dream recall and women’s hormone levels!
In the middle of those stimulating, confusing and sometimes problematic years, I would spend time with Liam Hudson and the other members of the team talking. Just talking, listening to music, and letting our minds wander. It seemed a little thing at the time, but one day he told us about a session he had held as part of his research on thinking styles. His research involved school students completing a creativity test, and he was not surprised to find his convergent thinkers came up with few innovative ideas. However, one day he asked science students at a prestigious private school to take his test, but invited them to complete the test as “‘John McMice.’ McMice was established as a well-known artist; an uninhibited, rather bohemian figure who often said things for effect, and who liked to shock people with coarse or gruesome jokes.” [i] Freed from the conventions of their normal lives, the students generated a proliferation of creative responses, may cruel, sadistic, or obscene. The formerly convergent had changed!
However, it was dream research that caught my interest, and I went from Edinburgh to Australia, keen to set up a sleep laboratory there (where I could do what was not possible in Edinburgh, which was to have female subjects in the sleep lab). Of course, things moved on, and a few years later I joined Shell. In Edinburgh and Adelaide I had continued my interest in management development and I felt it was time to give leadership and management training a sustained focus. To start I took a two-week training course on how to teach managers problem analysis and decision-making skills. It was, to put it mildly, a shock. Far from the life I had led to that point where teaching was about seminars, and seminars were to explore ideas, here I had to follow a fixed format for the training course. There was a right way, only one, and this was it.
It was, perhaps, the first time I confronted some of the implications of the work with which I had been involved in Edinburgh. This was training in convergent thinking, and, despite my love of science, I balked at the idea. As I saw it, you didn’t learn by following the one path, learning it and repeating it; you learnt by discussing, assessing and weighing ideas, exploring every possibility, willing to set first thoughts aside and try other perspectives. Ugh. Fortunately, Shell wanted me to set up a senior management course, a ‘Policy Studies Program’, and that allowed me to sustain my interest in encouraging learning, the value of seminars, and the like.
Serendipity saw my next position was working for the Australian Federal Government, in a policy institute, an advisory body concerned with migrants and ethnic affairs. Once again, I found myself dealing with a fascinating boss. If Liam Hudson had been quizzical, embodying the effete amateur, Oxbridge to his core, Petro Georgiou was aggressive, demanding, singularly focussed. Sitting at his desk, a round table covered with paper (and a bottle of Black Label Johnny Walker and an ashtray), we worked for hours, trying to find the right way to marshall the data to determine a better policy to move forward. Convergent rather than divergent?
The next ten years of my life were about being a manager, not developing leadership and management skills in others. I was saved, in the early 1990s, by the opportunity to attend a seminar at The Aspen Institute. It was being saved: back around a table with a few other curious people, debating extracts from the work of ‘great thinkers’, I realised I had forgotten how much I loved the seminar format. Our moderator was a little fond of knowing the ‘answer’ to some of the debates, but, no matter, we could still walk away from each session with our thinking enlarged, and better able to understand each other’s perspectives and ways of making sense.
One paper we read had been written by an Aspen moderator, Jim O’Toole, who tried to pull the whole endeavour together in an analysis of the ‘four poles of a good society’. [ii] If ever an idea struck home, that one did. Rather than trying to find answers, why not see ideas in tension with one another, as points on continua (for example, a continuum between ‘liberty’ and ‘equality’). The challenge is to find some balance between essentially incompatible but equally important issues, an approach which led me to write ‘How Shall I live’, exploring several such essentially irresolvable yet important issues. Wasn’t convergence-divergence another such continuum?
So now I spend my time at my desk, writing blogs, exploring ideas. No longer a convergent thinker (if ever I was), the science I loved at school remains in my commitment to logical thought, empirically based science, and a respect for organising frames of reference. Not really a divergent thinker, but I know I prefer to wander along, picking up ideas and sorting out a path that makes some kind of sense. Messy, really.
In a mess. There’s the answer: the world is divided into two kinds of people, and they are defined by messiness: those that have a clean desk, and those that don’t. The desk’s my infallible test. It divides humanity, and differences in tidiness excite strong emotions.
In defence of a messy desk we have the examples of Albert Einstein and Steve Jobs (or so I’ve read). “However, the notion that a clean desk makes you more productive is absurd twaddle. … [Researchers] recently tested how well students came up with new ideas when working in orderly versus disorderly work areas. The study showed: “Participants in the messy room generated the same number of ideas for new uses as their clean-room counterparts. But their ideas were rated as more interesting and creative when evaluated by impartial judges.” … The notion that a clean desk means a productive worker is an artifact of the mid-20th century. Historically, geniuses were always pictured with a cluttered desk …Back in the day, a clean desk was considered a sign of slothful laziness. Busy people, and smart people didn’t have time to straighten up.” [iii] So there.
On the other hand, “Do you feel stressed or distracted as soon as you get to work? Here’s one cause you may not have considered: not having a clean desk at work. Sure, you’ve probably heard things like “yeah, my desk is messy, but so was Einstein’s”. This idea that having a cluttered desk is a good thing has become much more common in the last few years. But alas, that doesn’t make it right and we’re going to do a bit of debunking … It Creates Stress: When you start the day feeling like you’re behind, that can be deeply discouraging. That’s exactly what happens (even subconsciously) when you’ve got unsorted piles all over your workspace. It’s Distracting: A mess can stop your flow. If you find your eyes drifting to the odds and ends strewn around your desk, those moments are lost time. More importantly, it’s an interruption. This can be particularly counterproductive when you’re “in-the-zone” and cranking out fast, quality work.… It Reduces Self Confidence: In addition to affecting the way others see you, a messy desk can impact how you see yourself. Don’t miss the importance of this. Having confidence can have a profound impact on how you present yourself and pursue your work. A clean desk at work is a very simple step that can have a variety of benefits in your professional life.” [iv] So there, again?
Confession time. I have a clean and tidy desk. It’s always been like that. It has nothing to do with stress, distraction or self-confidence. Nor, as some of my friends would suggests , is it the sign of a latent obsessive-compulsive disorder! On the other hand, nor is it a handicap to innovative or creative activity, or evidence of mis-used time tidying up!
Let’s start again. Liam Hudson belonged to the clean desk brigade, and his thinking was astonishingly creative, innovative and insightful. Petro Georgiou’s desk was close to a rubbish tip, and I would dutifully try to impose some kind of order when he was away (always a mistake!), yet he was also creative and divergent in his thinking. Both pursued their thoughts with purpose. As I see it now, both needed quick access to the material relevant to their current task: Petrp Georgiou could look at the piles of paper on his desk, and pull out the sheet he needed; Liam Hudson would think about what he needed, and also knew how to get it quickly.
Each one of us needs access to the things that matter. We put them where we know we will find them. Some leave them close to hand, on the desk, on the floor nearby, dropped, ready to be picked up: wherever they are, some kind of muscle memory takes them to the right place. Others of us organise by categories, books on the shelves in order, folders and files in cabinets and desk drawers. The task is retrieval, being able to find the information that is needed, and there are many ways to do this. Oops, now it seems my infallible test is looking a little less definitive.
I think the key is not tidy or not, but connectedness. We find things through links, not through absolutes. Research on the brain is illuminating on this, as it turns out where data is stored is not as important as the rich set of connections that surround each point. The brain has clear areas where functions are concentrated, but we have discovered that accidents can see those traditional functional areas reduced or even lost. Despite such damage, the brain’s plasticity allows, over time, for new connections and interfaces to be established in another area. Most of what the brain does is routine processing, like that taking place as I am typing. Not that different (in some ways) from sorting out the washing or putting crockery and cutlery away. But in our brains, and in our lives, those connections also ensure order and disorder sit side by side. Without order, we would be unable to function. Without disorder, well, we’d be bored out of our brains!
One recent article captured it well: “Human beings have a conflicted relationship to this order-disorder nexus. We are alternately attracted from one to the other. We admire principles and laws and order. We embrace reasons and causes. We seek predictability. Some of the time. On other occasions, we value spontaneity, unpredictability, novelty, unconstrained personal freedom. We love the structure of Western classical music, as well as the free-wheeling runs or improvised rhythms of jazz. We are drawn to the symmetry of a snowflake, but we also revel in the amorphous shape of a high-riding cloud.” [v]
At my tidy desk, writing about this, connections are working. Jim O’Toole’s book on the four poles of the good society: I stand up, find the book instantly, and retrieve what I needed to check. Then I stop pursuing that line of thought, make a mug of coffee, and put it on a coaster. The coaster has a picture, Chinese style, and unbidden, up comes Lao Tzu, and the Tao Te Ching, whose writing is seemingly unclear, unfinished, illogical and yet through provoking. I am drawn to the logic of divergent and convergent thinking, of the differences that underly clean and messy desks, but I also revel in the opaque and incomplete writings of Lao Tzu.
There aren’t two kinds of people, as shown by clean and messy desks. We are all different, and we are all the same. Different in the sense of how we organise ourselves, our thoughts, our lives, the result of our unique biographies, each one of us developing our approach as we go along. Yet we are all the same, a mixture of logic and serendipity, sometimes leaning more one way, and sometimes more the other. On a good day, I wander happily between logic and chance; on a bad day, I try to keep disorder, mess, under control.
When I begin to write my weekly blog, it is always a mess. I start with an idea, a paragraph or so. Over the next few days other ideas pop up; some are extensions of the story with which I started. Others are peripheral, at least at first. Quickly I have a few pages, sometimes a dozen or more. Then I slowly wander through, seeing connections and a path. The eventual journey, like the one in this piece, may be far from where I started. Often, as the process unfolds, I think the exercise is like taking a random walk. Sometimes, when the deadline’s close, I’m in a mess!
We all know how this ends. There are two kinds of people in the world. There are those who think there are two kinds of people in the world, and there are those who don’t.
[i] Page 272: https://tannerlectures.utah.edu/_documents/a-to-z/h/Hudson98.pdf
[ii] Which was later published in his book: James O’Toole ,The Executive’s Compass, OUP, 1993
[iii] A Messy Desk is as Sign of Genius, According to Science., Geoffrey James, Inc, 9 July 2017
[iv] Jonathon Yarde, Dumb Little Man, September 25, 2018
[v] Alan Lightman, In Defence of Disorder, Aeon, 2019
