The art of the nudge : unlocking your hidden potential. Reviewed

By @SimonCocking. Buy the book on Amazon here. John Geraci and Christine Miles, co-founders of CI Squared, a Leadership Development and Sales Training company, have developed an innovative communication framework to inspire you and your organization to take action in these fast-paced times. Their discovery is based on two core principles: 1) Slow down to speed up, and 2) Small Nudges can inspire action. 

This book accompanies the course that CISquared.net provide. See more about the company in our Business Showcase feature here. Overall the concept seems plausible, looking at ways to make us break our ingrained patterns of behaviour. It is an important ability to have, and also a very challenging one to achieve. The book explains the techniques employed to try and ensure we don’t revert back to our previous habits, the ones that we are aiming to stop doing.

It may well be the case, as they advocate, that by slowing down, you may be able to be aware of when you are slipping back into old patterns of behaviour. They have also clearly learned a lot through delivering the course. They mention the fact that they thought they were pretty great story tellers, as apparently do a large, disproportionate number of people. The stats would suggest that it’s not possible for over a third of us to be in the top 5% of ability, however it proves to be a common human trait. Some people are unable to accurately assess their own ability, often significantly over (or under) estimating it. Naturally if you are then able to have greater self knowledge, ie are you someone who consistently under (or estimates) your own ability,  this may then help you to make better assessments of how you performed.

It is an interesting and thought provoking read. At times I just wondered how often people reverted back to their previous ‘bad’ habits. It can certainly be hard to stay on the straight and narrow in terms of doing all the things that we know we should be doing, rather than reverting to some of our less good habits. Hopefully books like this help us to gain a greater awareness of when we are doing so, and to then take measures to head off plunging back into Bridget Jones-eque troughs of less than ideal behaviour.

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