I can't tell you what the best way to introduce messiness and disorder into your company might be--that would be like telling you the best way to have a messy desk. But here are a few principles to keep in mind:
Optimize mess: Being neater isn't always better, but being messier isn't always better, either. If your desk is so covered with piles that you don't have a place to work, then you're too messy. If you're missing appointments with key customers, building products with 30 percent defect rates, or renaming your company every three months, then excess order probably isn't your problem. The trick is to find the right level of messiness for you and your company. How? Easy. Be a little messier in some way. If things get better, keep going; if they get worse, neaten up, and try being messy in some other way. Bear in mind that if you're like most people, you're probably a bit too ordered--but nonetheless consider yourself too disorganized. The same applies to your company.
Consider all forms of mess: Mix things up, deschedule, unplan, be inconsistent, pile up, blur categories, make noise, bounce around, get distracted, invite confusion, add in the extraneous, let things leak in, let things leak out, embrace disruption--and do the same for your employees, work processes, and customers. Explore mess in multiple dimensions. You don't have to be messy in all ways. Maybe your office is fine as it is, but your calendar needs loosening up. Or your accounting procedures are sloppy, while your product line is boringly consistent. Figure out which aspects of the business are ripe for messing up--and which may already be a little too disorganized.
Take into account the costs of neatness: Remember, being messier doesn't necessarily have to bring improvement to make sense; sometimes it just has to not make things worse to pay off. That's because it takes resources to maintain neatness and order, and you'll recover those costs when you embrace mess. Similarly, don't exaggerate the cost of messiness. Are there downsides to being messier and less organized? Of course. Employees at the messy company may well miss more deadlines, get distracted by more projects that don't pan out, and have more irrelevant conversations. Some customers will be turned off by the looks of the place or the atmosphere. Yes, there's a cost to these sorts of problems--but it's probably not as big as people tend to assume.
So should you try to turn your company into a big mess of a business like the Book Fair? Probably not. That sort of virtuosic disorder tends to evolve over many years. But there's surely room for at least a little Book Fair in some aspect of the way you run your company. It certainly provides an interesting alternative to pouring resources into being tightly structured, predictably managed, and consistently neat, and to generally aspiring to get your company to run like a Swiss clock.
Think about that tomorrow morning after you've checked your e-mail and in between phone calls.
Consider all forms of mess: Mix things up, deschedule, unplan, be inconsistent, pile up, blur categories, make noise, bounce around, get distracted, invite confusion, add in the extraneous, let things leak in, let things leak out, embrace disruption--and do the same for your employees, work processes, and customers. Explore mess in multiple dimensions. You don't have to be messy in all ways. Maybe your office is fine as it is, but your calendar needs loosening up. Or your accounting procedures are sloppy, while your product line is boringly consistent. Figure out which aspects of the business are ripe for messing up--and which may already be a little too disorganized.
Take into account the costs of neatness: Remember, being messier doesn't necessarily have to bring improvement to make sense; sometimes it just has to not make things worse to pay off. That's because it takes resources to maintain neatness and order, and you'll recover those costs when you embrace mess. Similarly, don't exaggerate the cost of messiness. Are there downsides to being messier and less organized? Of course. Employees at the messy company may well miss more deadlines, get distracted by more projects that don't pan out, and have more irrelevant conversations. Some customers will be turned off by the looks of the place or the atmosphere. Yes, there's a cost to these sorts of problems--but it's probably not as big as people tend to assume.
So should you try to turn your company into a big mess of a business like the Book Fair? Probably not. That sort of virtuosic disorder tends to evolve over many years. But there's surely room for at least a little Book Fair in some aspect of the way you run your company. It certainly provides an interesting alternative to pouring resources into being tightly structured, predictably managed, and consistently neat, and to generally aspiring to get your company to run like a Swiss clock.
