POOGI for ABA

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.

The BP Oil spill happened in 2010. The environmental, health, and economic consequences were severe. What you might not know is that in 2007 the company publicly made a big commitment to focus on safety. In fact, the company declared that safety was the company’s number 1 priority.

Did the company make any changes to focus on safety? They sure did. They put up signs in the company offices! The signs said things like:

• Don’t walk and carry hot coffee.
• Use marked walkways in the parking lot.
• Hold banisters while climbing the stairs.

The investigations after the spill found that very little had actually been done to improve safety on oil rigs. In fact, they were still extremely dangerous with poor safety practices.

I think the lesson here is that it is often easy to set the right goal (safety is our #1 priority) and still fail miserably. Setting the goal is deciding on what results you want to achieve. But after you pick the results that you want to achieve, you also have to select the right behavior changes that will have a significant impact.

I think this problem happens in behavior analysis all the time. We want the children we work with to “learn to communicate,” “live an independent life,” “make friends,” or lots of other great-sounding results. The next problem is to decide what behavior changes will lead us to those results. In any practical case, there are almost always an enormous number of possible choices. Narrowing down those choices is an incredibly underrated skill.

There are numerous Organizational Behavior Management (OBM) articles on how to increase staff cleaning up after themselves. I’ve also been in numerous presentations where the examples used involve staff cleaning their work area, cleaning the break room, etc. Why? Are people interested in behavior analysis naturally slobs?

I understand this is not a trivial concern. There might be funders, parents, or other visitors, so we want the workplace to look professional. Food on the floor might lead to bugs. Toys on the floor might be a safety hazard. Sure, no problem. We have to make sure our work areas look reasonably good.

Still, I strongly suspect another reason for the focus on cleaning. The real mission and why we come to work—to make a socially significant difference in the lives of children—takes a long time and is much harder to measure. Likewise, it is hard to measure staff performance. Sure, we can take measures of how well the staff are implementing the treatment. But the subtleties of measuring things like shaping skills and facilitating social interactions is very difficult. Getting measures of those results are even harder.

There are lots of other examples in addition to cleaning. It is not just that sloppiness bothers people so much. Many OBM studies in the literature focus on relatively trivial staff behavior changes. Often, the studies don’t even bother to measure whether it had any impact on the clients or does so in a very trivial way. It isn’t that these studies aren’t needed or important. We do need studies like this in order to effectively study complex phenomenon like management. In order to do that, it is essential that the targets selected are easy to measure and the results can be achieved in a relatively short period of time. Many of these studies don’t demonstrate any practical improvement. That’s probably OK, that’s often not the main purpose of those studies.

The trap comes for those of us who are completely focused on Poogi and want practical improvements immediately. I think that sometimes we are so focused on the measurements, that we emphasize what is easy to measure instead of what’s really important. It’s essential to first decide what’s really important. Only after that should you then start to focus on measurements.