From the Preface

To understand a concept, you have to understand its function, i.e., the purpose with which it is formulated and how it is shaped to serve that purpose through its structural relationship to other concepts. To understand the structures of concepts, you have to understand the activities they help us create, including whatever theories, methods, and principles they imbed and with which we navigate our lived practices in the pursuit of our goals. Understanding a concept is thus understanding a practice, and understanding a practice is thus understanding the theories, methods and principles that makes it possible….

… That is why I wrote these ‘corrective notes’ on Behavioural Insights; notes in which I will try to make everything as simple as possible, but not make it simpler than that. By ‘notes’ I mean that they are explorative and rough, rather than refined and definitive. They are the contours of an argument, the path of thought left by travelling a wild landscape for many years. Some parts are easily followed as they have been shaped and trod down by going over them again and again. Other parts are harder, thinly trod, winding through the landscape and not easy to see. Other parts are going in circles, over and over the same points again and again, perhaps because they act as roundabouts from which many thoughts flow.