This morning, I was sitting on my couch enjoying my coffee – the quiet kind of morning before my husband woke up, before the dog needed to go out, before my kids slogged out of bed in search of something to eat. I have a routine in those moments. I check my email, skim through a few business journals, search for any updated research studies, and then mindlessly scroll social media.
This morning, though, there seemed to be a theme.
HBR served up an article titled “The Case for Finally Cleaning Your Desk,” confidently suggesting that when your space is a mess, you are too. Moments later, as I moved on to social media, I was met with a post from a prominent innovator that declared, “When you don’t know what to do next, clean your desk.”
I felt attacked.
Because my desk is a mess. Not the charming, slightly cluttered kind – but real, unapologetic chaos.
And yet, that reaction made me pause. Not because I suddenly felt inspired to organize, but because my desk (messy as it is) has been one of my most effective thinking tools.
I should probably start with a disclaimer: my desk is a disaster. Papers pile into precarious towers, notebooks are stacked in semi-conscious order, and sticky notes sprout from every surface like wildflowers in spring. Pens tend to vanish without warning, whatever I was just working on seems to grow legs and wander off, and somehow I can never find the one thing I’m actually looking for.
Some might look at it and see chaos. I see a map of my mind in motion – a living, breathing representation of how learning, experience, and innovation actually happen. And surprisingly, this messy desk has a lot to teach me about the work I do.
Here’s the thing that makes all of this a little ironic: I genuinely love order. I love rules. I love standards. I love structure. I love the world of manuals, checklists, and clearly defined processes where everything has a place and a purpose. There’s something deeply comforting about knowing there’s a proper sequence, a tested method, a documented way forward.
And yet…my desk refuses to cooperate.
No matter how much I value structure, my own workspace never seems to fall in line. My brain works a lot like my web browser: forty tabs open at once, no obvious logic to the order, and at least three things are running in the background that I forgot I opened. Ideas scatter. Notes pile up. Thoughts jump tracks mid-sentence. It’s not tidy…but it sure is active.
To be honest, it’s probably that contradiction that pulled me toward structured training in the first place.
The Illusion of Order
When I first stepped into the world of structured training, I was completely taken by it. Manuals. Procedures. Flowcharts. Everything neatly organized and clearly labeled. No gray area. There was something so reassuring about it – like if I could just learn the system well enough, follow the steps in the right order, then I’d be ready for whatever came next.
At the time, I genuinely believed that. (Sometimes I still embrace naïveté).
But then the field got involved.
Because once you’re in it, you quickly learn that no checklist is going to fully prepare you for what you’re going to be up against. There’s no pause button, no moment to flip pages and find the answer. Things are loud, messy, fast, and unforgiving.
That’s when I started noticing something familiar.
My desk looks a lot like that! The manuals and standards are there…the neatly printed guides, the binders, the folders that represent what we know. But surrounding them are piles of notes, half-written ideas, field observations, and “this almost worked” moments. That mess isn’t failure. It’s everything I haven’t figured out how to formalize just yet.
The Beauty of the Margins
I talk about margins a lot, but only because there’s real magic there – in the space where theory meets reality and where experience pushes back on what’s “supposed” to work. And I see it every time I dig through my notes.
One notebook holds a boarding drill we modified after watching students work through a scenario, realizing the steps that made sense on paper broke down under pressure. Another is filled with notes from a course where student feedback and after-action discussions led us to introduce a new scenario that better reflected how crews actually communicate and make decisions in the field. I don’t always know which of those instructional tweaks will matter years from now…and honestly, I don’t really need to.
Because that process (where trying something, watching it break, adjusting it, and writing it down) is how expertise actually forms.
Specialization lives in those unpolished spaces. Just like the surface of my desk, where ideas from unrelated projects bump into each other, field-driven innovation happens where the manuals stop offering answers. That’s where responders adapt in real time, and where tomorrow’s standards usually begin.
Lessons in Iteration
If my desk has taught me anything, it’s that nothing important works perfectly the first time.
That boarding drill? We didn’t get it right on the first run (or the second, or the tenth). We adjusted hand placement, timing, communication, safety checks. Each iteration added something small, and over time those small changes made a real difference.
My desk tells that same story. Scribbled notes, overlapping drafts, sticky note reminders that no longer make sense out of context…it’s all evidence of thinking in progress. It’s not disorder; it’s iteration made visible.
Training works the same way. Specialized teams don’t become effective because they memorized a manual. They become effective because they practice, improvise, evaluate, and adjust (again and again) until the response feels intuitive.
Cross-Pollination Matters
Another thing hidden in all that clutter is connection.
On my desk, tactical law enforcement sits next to search and rescue, and just around the corner is BUI enforcement and incident investigation. Then there’s interagency coordination notes overlapping with reflections on organizational culture. Sometimes an idea from one project quietly reshapes another without me even realizing it at first.
That’s exactly how field innovation spreads.
When specialized teams share what they’ve learned, whether through course discussions, instructor exchanges, or after-action reviews, the impact multiplies. A technique refined by a small coastal unit might first show up as a discussion point in a class, then quietly reshape how boarding procedures are taught across the fleet. A search and rescue adaptation introduced as a new training scenario can influence how crews think about risk, communication, and decision-making long before it ever appears in doctrine.
So yeah, the margins are messy – but they’re where instructional ideas move, evolve, and spread. And when they do, the entire system gets stronger.
Embracing Imperfection
My messy desk is a daily reminder of a hard truth: imperfection isn’t failure…it’s part of the process.
You can’t produce polished doctrine without first working through chaos. You can’t anticipate every scenario with a checklist. And you can’t capture lived experience without giving people room to experiment, improvise, and sometimes get it wrong.
And then there’s that tension I wrote about not too long ago, between standards and specialization. Standards give us consistency and a shared baseline. Specialization pushes us forward. But that space in between, uncomfortable as it may be, is where growth actually happens.
(It’s also where my desk lives).
From Chaos to Clarity
Every so often, I clean my desk. Papers get filed. Notebooks stack neatly. The surface looks calm again.
But the thinking doesn’t disappear.
I can trace almost any idea back to its messy beginning – a note scribbled during a course debrief with a Program Manager, a comment that I couldn’t quite let go, a half-formed question that surfaced during an after-action review. Over time, those fragments turn into revised drills, new scenarios, or adjustments in how something is taught. Order eventually emerges, but only after the training environment has had room to surface the chaos first.
That’s the real lesson though: expertise doesn’t come from choosing order or mess. It comes from knowing when each is needed.
The Takeaway
So why is my desk a mess? (Aside from the fact that I can’t manage to keep it clean of course). Because life is messy. Because complex work doesn’t move in straight lines. And because learning rarely happens in the clean, linear way we pretend it does.
And that’s okay.
If there’s a takeaway here for anyone working in training, policy, or field operations, it’s this: don’t ignore the periphery. Pay attention to the clutter, the improvisations, the half-finished ideas. They aren’t distractions…they’re signals.
A messy desk isn’t just a desk. It’s a record of thinking, adapting, and learning in real time. It’s where ideas take shape before they’re ready. And honestly? I wouldn’t trade that for a clean surface any day.
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