About me and what I do
My name is Barry Morgenstern and I’m a Board Certified Behavior Analyst-Doctoral. I’ve been working with people with autism, developmental disabilities, traumatic brain injury, and a variety of other diagnoses for over 25 years.
Education
I have a master’s degree in Behavior Analysis and Therapy from Southern Illinois University and a PhD in Special Education and Applied Behavior Analysis from The Ohio State University
My Introduction to the POOGI
POOGI stands for Process Of On-Going Improvement (Pronounced POO-Ghee).
When I was a young behavior analyst, I was busy trying to learn everything I could. I saw Aubrey Daniels, the founder of Performance Management, make an offhand comment in a presentation about a popular business book The Goal by Eliyahu Goldratt. Maybe it was an article he wrote? Not sure about that. But I thank the great behavior analyst for leading me down this path. That was about 1996. Clearly Aubrey didn’t agree with everything in the book, but he thought it had some interesting things to say. I went to the book store to pick it up and was surprised to find it was a novel. Not only that, but it was $20. Turns out it is a romance novel about a guy who works in a manufacturing plant. I thought there is no way I’m paying twenty bucks for a romance novel. But I took the book off the shelf and sat down to look at it. Before I knew it, I had spent hours at the book store and finished the book. It seemed there was something so similar about the problems Alex faced at the factory and the problems we have in autism intervention. Of course, I bought the book.
One concept in the book (and the subtitle) was the Process of On-Going Improvement (POOGI). This has become the foundation of my practice in behavior analysis. We are never at a point where we are so good that nothing can be improved. My teams have found it useful to use the term in a variety of ways:
When a problem comes up:
How are we going to POOGI that?
As a name for meetings:
The POOGI Meeting
As a praise statement:
Wow, there has been so much POOGI!
As corrective feedback:
I have some ideas about how we can POOGI this in the future.
What this Blog is about?
I have worked in a variety of settings including public schools, private schools, home programs, group homes for adults, large institutions, community settings, job coaching, university teaching, Birth-to-3, and more. I have a lot of ideas after spending 25 years in the field trying to constantly POOGI. This is the place where I’ll share what I’ve learned. I suspect you’ll find some useful ideas that you haven’t heard before.
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