Wonderful things happen when you follow a certain rhythm of making messes and cleaning them up. Nothing much has a chance to happen if you clean up too soon. The only things that can happen are ones you can think of in advance. And nothing much can develop if you never clean up, letting the mess grow without limit. Your ability to pounce on new, unexpected connections as they become obvious is frustrated by the failure imposed by chaos on your short term memory. In other words, you have new ideas, but you can't find the other ingredients needed to make them complete.

But if you alternate between making a mess and cleaning up, you create a fertile environment for miracles. Each mess leads you to see connections beyond those you can plan in advance. Each clean-up consolidates your gains and builds a stable platform for your next foray into the unknown.

A simple example is your kitchen. While cooking, you have to allow messes. If you refused to try anything that might result in a spill, you'd eat only plastic-coated microwave dinners. If you never cleaned up, you'd soon stop cooking, because the kitchen would be too filthy to use. But if you dive in and try cooking dishes you haven't tried before, letting the tomato sauce fall where it may, you stumble onto new, simple, wonderful things, like this miraculous dish where you cook spaghetti, drain it, return it to the pot, and then throw raw, beaten eggs right onto the spaghetti. Add clams, pepper, and Italian parsley, and wow! No one could ever have thought of that--well, not before making a mess.

A more classic example is brainstorming. When you get a group of people together to brainstorm, you have a rule: no criticism. No rejecting ideas. In fact, no judgement at all. Everyone tosses out ideas, and tries to play off what others propose. The messiness sends the participants' minds in directions they'd never explore on their own.

Brainstorming would be pointless if it didn't follow the principle of Make A Mess And Clean Up. Afterward, you have to sort out the few good ideas from the many bad ones. If you didn't sift through the results, you'd have only the mess. And of course when people knock out bad ideas too quickly, fertile chaos never has a chance to get started. It's the combination of making a mess and cleaning up that produces amazing results.

The principle also shows itself in Improv Comedy. When the players try to connect the givens (the "ask-fors") too quickly, the scene never has a chance to go anywhere interesting. On the other hand, when the players all keep plopping new ideas into the scene and never try to connect them or resolve anything, the scene dissolves into incoherence. What makes a great improv scene come together is a certain balance between adding new material and tying up existing material.

On this page, by the word miracle we mean a wonderful thing that requires more intelligence than you have.

Different activities call for different rhythms of making a mess and cleaning up. Once you've thought of the question, "What would be a good rhythm?," a good, rough answer is usually obvious.

Just think how differently many activities would run if people asked that question. Much of what people do tends to heavily favor making a mess or heavily favor cleaning up, rather than alternating them. (See Heuristic Dilemma.)

For example, most teachers tend to correct their students too soon. They want to prevent any sort of error from happening. If one does happen, they quickly clean up. So messes can't happen, and neither can much learning.

Other people boldly try stuff but never make corrections. They never consolidate their gains. For example, highly speculative entrepreneur types who never get anything done. Or kibitzers.

Make A Mess And Clean Up has obvious implications for wiki. The unexpected new ideas come from exploring an idea, letting it get messy, going wherever it wants to go. Some people post only to quibble, to clean up the smallest details before any unexpected ideas arise. And when no one ever cleans up, the page becomes such a mess that no one knows what to do with it.

Within the rhythm of making a mess and cleaning it up, you might say there are "sweet moments" of fertility when disorder yields to useful order. Human intelligence responds to those moments with thrill, a kind of reward from Mother Nature for being smart. And human instinct responds to various parts of the cycle by seeking or suppressing additional raw inputs. However, one thing to keep in mind is that one person's "complexity sweet spot" is another person's mental overload is another person's sound snooze. The better you get at mastering a level of complexity, and the more stimulation you demand from a "complexity sweet spot", the more difficult it is for others of lesser intellectual experience to team with you, or you with them.