Think Small: The Surprisingly Simple Ways to Reach Big Goals by Owain Service
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This book has an interesting genealogy: Owain Service and Rory Gallagher are two key members of the Behavioural Insights Team or “Nudge Unit” grown out of the Prime Minister’s office in London and now with offices in Manchester, New York, Singapore and Sydney. According to their website, the BIT has been working since 2010 with the objective of:

• making public services more cost-effective and easier for citizens to use;
• improving outcomes by introducing a more realistic model of human behaviour to policy; and wherever possible,
• enabling people to make ‘better choices for themselves’.


Think Small is Service and Gallagher’s attempt to build on the last of these objectives. Drawing together all of their learning about how people think and what helps them succeed, Think Small is a manual for how to effectively set and achieve goals.

What I found particularly useful about the book is the way it filled in the small details between the more familiar building blocks of decision making and project planning. To use an example from my work as a teacher, research in education makes it clear that “feedback” is at the fulcrum of learning but we are sometimes unclear what we mean by feedback or how best to use it. Service and Gallagher offer a clear articulation of some underlying behavioural principles and a plethora of examples to help illustrate these principles. There is a lot in this book which is immediately transferrable to my classroom.

Whilst I really enjoyed and appreciated the book, I have one major reservation - to be fair it is a reservation about behavioural science in general as much as this book in particular. I was reminded as I read of a comment by Professor Frank Knopfelmacher who lectured at Melbourne University when I was an undergraduate. Knopfelmacher had some fame for his work in Social Psychology and perhaps even greater infamy for his political views and his lecturing style. He began his introductory lecture by asking students to raise their hands if they had studied the history of religion. There were a couple of half-hearted hands raised, but the vast majority of us remained still.

“Well,” he said, “there’s really no point in any of you being here. You can’t learn anything about social psychology if you don't know something about the history of religion.”

His point was that human actions always happen in contexts and that whilst the behavioural sciences are important and useful for describing human action, we risk significant blunders if we don’t also have an eye to the historical and cultural narratives in which those actions are embedded.

At times Service and Gallagher seemed to me to be uncritically entangled within a protestant work ethic that assumed a set of values which might warrant exploration. Their version of “the good life” seemed based on what made the people in their studies “feel good” and that alone seemed to justify their views of how we should plan to act.

I think Service and Gallagher might reasonably respond to my criticism by saying that they are behavioural scientists, not ethicists, and that their role in a democracy is to empower others to achieve their goals - whatever those goals may be. My response is that we all have a responsibility to see the world more widely and to inform ourselves as best we can with a broad understanding of what is right and wrong. There is a wide range of ethical assumptions embedded in Service and Gallagher's advice and we and they are unconsciously encumbered by what is not articulated.

As a Czech Jew who fought alongside the British against the Nazis and lost all his family to the Holocaust, Knopfelmacher knew better than most how important it is to be asking not just how to act efficiently, but also what do my actions mean within a wider understanding of the world.

I think the observation I am making is particularly salient at the present time as leaders such as Trump are dismantling the bureaucracies that have provided a stabilising cultural continuity to many western democracies. In the foreword to Think Small, David Halpern, Chief Executive of the Behavioural Insights Team, tells us that the soft motto of the team is: “Shunning the bureaucratic levers of the past and finding intelligent ways to encourage, support and enable people to make better choices for themselves.”

We should encourage, support and enable people to make better choices for themselves by all means, but let’s also work to understand our cultural history and improve our bureaucratic levers rather than simply shunning them.

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