Tim Harford - Messy - How To Be Creative and Resilient In A Tidy-Minded World (Abacus, 2016) **

Financial Times journalis Tim Harford explains why "being messy" is an integral part of the creative process, and also helps in generating unexpected business results. On the other hand, he also gives examples of how mechanical thinking can lead to catastrophes.

Of course he is right on both accounts, but also possibly wrong. It seems critical to me to allow for lateral thinking and hence to break through the mechanistic concepts of thought, but at the same time you should also allow for some systematic approaches, and be very selective in which level of messiness you can endure. His elaboration on the dangers of automated systems without human intervention to avoid incidents, has in fact nothing to do with 'messiness', but it operates on a totally different plane.

There's a lot of name-dropping in the book, either of people Harford visited (such as Brian Eno), or whose works he read. Unfortunately, many of those quotes are only relevant at surface level. They don't add to the argument, but just serve as illustrative purposes.

In his endeavour to merge many different thoughts of sociology, business, art and psychology, he also tends to mix things up at the same time.

What you would have expected to find the right balance between messiness and order, not only that the former is important, because that's too obvious.

On the positive side, the book offers a lot of interesting anecdotes and stories. I only wish they were linked with a more rigid logic, instead of just beying a messy heap of unrelated events.