Emergenetics: The ground-breaking new way to identify your personal profile and achieve succes

Emergenetics: The ground-breaking new way to identify your personal profile and achieve success
Author: Geil Browing
Price: £14.99
Publisher: Piatkus Books
ISBN 07499 2659 7

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Emergenetics is a way of describing people by using four thinking attributes and three behavioural attributes.

Author Geil Browning lists the thinking attributes as: analytical (logical and sceptical), structural (practical and cautious), social (sympathetic and intuitive), and conceptual (creative and innovative). Running alongside these are the behavioural attributes of expressiveness, assertiveness and flexibility.

Each of these attributes is independent of the others and can be measured separately. An emergenetics profile, which is said to reveal how someone learns and approaches new situations, illustrates the way an individual mixes and matches the seven attributes.

The author works hard to cover how the brain works and is structured but I was suffocated by the detail in the first half of this book. We are taken through a tiresome device of colour-coded attributes and personalities to show how, for example, structural thinking Ms Green would talk to analytical Mr Blue.

But as the book progresses it gains coherence, or perhaps I became more attuned to Browning’s approach.

A use for emergenetics gradually becomes more apparent. For example, there are sections on recognising thinking preferences and how to use them.

The ideas of how to decide if a new job would be right for you are novel as are the pairings of office design and thinking approaches, or the plan for assembling a team of people with different attributes.

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I would recommend Emergenetics to junior managers, the extremely curious or anyone with enough time on their hands to follow its advice.
For example, a 21-day plan to improve structural thinking advises: “Prioritise your grocery list to correspond with the layout of the store.”

So, if you have time to waste on mapping out supermarket aisles then wrestling with emergenetics will probably seem like another fun activity.

Useful? 3 out of 5
Well-written? 3 out of 5
Value for money? 3 out of 5