Ogden Lindsley often used the term HINIBUS (Horrible If Not Invented By Us). Often, I see BCBAs want to invent their own version of everything from programs, to data sheets and graphs, materials, and more. As I have encouraged before, if you see someone doing something great, just steal it.
My question is: Why do BCBAs want to create their own version of everything? Other professions don’t do that. Every cardiologist doesn’t have her own procedure for doing heart surgery. Every dentist doesn’t have his own cavity-filling technique. Why is behavior analysis different?
It is probably because we don’t have strong standards in behaviors analysis. Most of us can look at our data, see that the children we work with are making “good” progress, and don’t feel any urgent need to improve. We think that it is obvious that what we are doing works well.
That might be the case. There isn’t a good procedure for measuring your success as a behavior analyst–yet. But I strongly suspect if you are a HINIBUS, you are probably not doing nearly as well as you might. Stealing when you see someone doing something great, reading a great research article –you get the idea–is the fastest and easiest way to Poogi.