Author: Barry Morgenstern

In most cases, when BCBA’s make a behavior change, they will have one graph corresponding with each behavior change made to evaluate the effectiveness. Usually, that is completely appropriate. However, problems can arise because just about any behavior change you make may have multiple, unplanned effects on other behaviors. If you don’t look for these potential negative effects, your data may be seriously misleading.

Goldratt, who wrote a book on thinking skills, uses a tree metaphor for many of his thinking processes. If you add a positive branch (e.g., effectively help a child with autism), but your procedure has unintended negative consequences, Goldratt refers to that as a negative branch–extending the tree metaphor.

Some simple and common examples:

1. You taught the child to request (mand), and now there are tantrums when the parent says “no.”
2. You successfully potty trained a child, but now they are pulling down their pants before they get into the bathroom and close the door.
3. You taught the child to label (tact) cows, but now previously mastered animals are also being called cows.
4. You taught the child to have a conversation with peers at lunch, but now he is annoying the peers by talking about the same things too much.
5. You taught the child to follow a rule like “raise your hand in class,” and now the child acts as the class policeman, yelling at children who aren’t following the rules.

In my experience, this happens very frequently in everyday practice. There are two simple and practical things you can do to prevent this from causing problems. First, anytime you implement any new program, try to predict negative branches the program could cause. Then, plan for them:

• What should the parent do when they can’t say yes to requests?
• If we teach this new language skill, is it likely to be confused with anything that we have already taught? How can we prevent that?

Second, when reviewing data, don’t rely solely on the graphs. Ask the team if any new problems are occurring. Often, at least some of those new problems are related to some part of our programming.

During my first internship in behavior analysis, I was worried that I wasn’t going to make it as a behavior analyst as it seemed one of the most critical skills was drinking coffee in the office, and I don’t drink coffee. When I was at that internship, I would joke with my girlfriend (now wife), Cheryl, that I didn’t drink any coffee at the office.

That was way before there was a BCBA certification, but often you will find there are some BCBA’s that rarely work with the actual individuals being served. They are always in the office drinking coffee. The “office BCBAs” might be doing valuable and necessary work. We all need to be in the office some of the time for report writing, data analysis, planning, training, administrative tasks, and or some types of Deep Work.

But too often BCBAs become consultants who attempt to make organizational changes mostly in the office. Some are extremely reluctant to ever work with a client. The thinking goes that my job is to “expand capacity” and to “train the trainer” so that more clients can be served. Those are fine activities and well worth pursuing. But in my view, there are at least four reasons that BCBAs should be actively working with clients at least some of the time:

1. Often staff and parents don’t respect people who can’t work with a client. That’s especially true if you are talking about something like toilet training or dealing with problem behaviors. If you want to be an effective trainer, you have to be able to demonstrate the skills you are suggesting.
2. New research comes out and best practices change over time. If you haven’t implemented a procedure in many years, you probably are not on a Poogi.
3. Some cases are complicated and require high-level expertise. The best outcomes sometimes require the BCBA doing some of the therapy.
4. It is fun to work with clients. If you don’t enjoy working with clients and just want to direct others, you are probably in the wrong profession.

It is easy to get distracted by a variety of contingencies that keep you away from the clients. That might happen from time to time and isn’t usually a problem. It is also not a problem if a BCBA decides that their individual goals are somewhere different; like financial management, administration, systems, or even university teaching that might not require much client contact.

Just don’t be the person that only wants to tell staff and parents what to do and never actually work with a client.

Right out of college with a Bachelor’s degree in psychology, I was off to a good start in my career with a McJob, where I learned valuable skills such as knowing the entire menu in Spanish. That job didn’t last too long for me, but one thing that impressed me immensely is how simple they had made following their procedures. Everything you did had clear instructions with the materials ready-made so that it was really hard to screw things up. For example, when mopping the floors, the buckets, the soap, and the mop were set up beautifully so that it was easy to drain the water, get clean water, put in just the right amount of soap, etc. If you mopped floors at other jobs as I had, you could easily see how much better the system at McDonald’s was compared to other companies. I didn’t flip burgers; instead, there was a giant George Forman-grill-type device. Throw the burgers on the grill and press down with the lid; the lid would rise automatically and then beep when completed. No flipping required. Smart people often try to copy McDonald’s procedures. I’ve often said that if you see someone doing something effective, it is OK to steal it—it’s one of the best ways to improve. You don’t have to invent everything yourself.

This is relevant to behavior analysis because making procedures as simple as possible for parents, teachers, and others is very important if we want to get things implemented in the real world. If the procedures are too complicated, people without extensive training are likely to implement them incorrectly, and they won’t get good results. Also, it is possible that it might make behavior or learning problems worse. It would be amazing if behavior analysis could teach therapists and parents to follow procedures as consistently as McDonald’s.

The problem is that I don’t work at McDonald’s any longer and neither do you. There is a famous quote possibly attributed to Albert Einstein–“Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.” It is wonderful to try to make things simple so non-experts can implement the procedures. We should do that whenever possible. But don’t dumb them down so much that they are minimally effective.

Unfortunately, based on our current state of knowledge, some of our procedures need to be implemented by experts. That might seem obvious, but I often see people implementing procedures poorly—yet they are doing it exactly the way they were trained. This happens when people attempt to take the systems lessons of McDonald’s too far. Some things are just not going to work on a consultant model–you need to get in there and do it yourself.

When working with children with autism, some procedures are going to be too complicated to implement by just anyone. We don’t yet know how to simplify them, so we need people who have extensive training. It is important that we recognize this and be the person on the floor, not the one back in the office drinking coffee.

I once ate out at a restaurant with a large group. Everyone ordered all kinds of different things; meals, appetizers, drinks; some people asked for special orders or substitutions. The waitress didn’t write a single thing down, yet everything came out perfect. She had an amazing memory.

Many people don’t realize that memorization is a learnable skill. When people are given practice and training on different memory tasks, they dramatically improve. This might be useful for a variety of reasons; students studying for a test, card players, or trying to learn a foreign language.

People often think memory training would probably give them a tremendous advantage in their professional life. It might, depending on what type of work that you do. But it is somewhat unlikely. In most professional jobs, the value you create comes from a focus on Deep Work. Memory requires a lot of concentration, so attempting to memorize irrelevant details will likely distract you from your most critical tasks.

In the television show The West Wing, the characters frequently interacted while on the go. This walk and talk technique might have made for interesting television, but one thing you’ll notice is they generally never took notes. Everyone remembered what they had to do. But, of course, that is not the way it works in the real world.

Even if you could remember everything that comes on your plate, you probably shouldn’t try. As a BCBA, you have tasks that require follow-up phone calls, emails, and texts from parents, teachers, insurance companies, supervisors, and on and on. When you have this stuff in your head, it causes stress and probably reduces focus on your more critical BCBA related skills. What we all need is a capture system. You need a simple, trusted system where all the tasks you have to do are captured and you don’t have to worry that you are going to forget about them. This might be a pad, text file, calendar, or whatever system you trust to check that you won’t forget items. Cal Newport’s work is a great source for selecting the right target behaviors to improve organizational skills.

The waitress at the restaurant probably got bigger tips due to her amazing abilities, and thus memory training was probably very useful for her. For BCBAs and most professionals, your value comes from other abilities–attempting to keep everything in your head is a bad idea.

At one of my first jobs, I was told I needed to substantially improve my public speaking skills. I spent a lot of time building those skills and I’m happy to report that it was time well spent–I was able to improve significantly. There is still much more to learn, but you can’t Poogi everything. I’ve given many talks at conferences, school districts, and other events. Without the training I received, it wouldn’t have been possible.

Many jobs BCBAs hold involve doing at least a bit of public speaking (e.g., presenting at meetings, conducting trainings). Unfortunately, many never get the necessary feedback and take the time to improve this critical skill. One great place to get training is an organization called Toastmasters.

At Toastmasters you can learn all the basic skills in a safe comfortable environment. I believe the training is quite consistent with what we might do if we were training this skill as behavior analysts. At a Toastmaster’s club, they will start you off with easy tasks, take some data on your performance, and as you gain skills the tasks become more challenging.

One such challenge that likely leads to fear of public speaking is dealing with people who respond rudely to your talk. If you speak frequently, it is bound to happen at least occasionally. A few examples I can remember include:

• A lawyer challenging my expert witness testimony.
• Someone repeatedly interrupting my talk to bring up things that were completely off-topic and then loudly complaining that I wasn’t addressing the questions.
• A graduate student loudly complaining about university requirements in a public forum.

I recommend that all BCBAs get some public speaking training. It is well worth the time. But the real lesson I’m focused on today is that beginner skills are usually pretty easy. At first, focus on getting comfortable in front of an audience, what constitutes a good opening, not having your head buried in your notes, etc. Those skills are relatively easy to practice and learn compared to much more challenging “advanced” skills like dealing with a heckler disrupting your talk.

Sometimes when we work with children with autism, we focus on the easy beginner skills and consider something “mastered” without testing it under challenging conditions. Maybe the child no longer has problem behavior throughout the school day. The child has gone months without a problem behavior and we think the issue has been solved. But you don’t know until you test under challenging conditions. What if the 1-1 is out sick? What if the cafeteria is out of chicken nuggets? What if a peer says he doesn’t want to play at recess today?

This lesson applies to anything you might teach; social skills, language, academics, and motor skills. Until you have tested whether the behavior works in real-life challenging conditions, you don’t know if you are finished.