Episode Description
In this episode, Tim and Dr. Binder discuss his work at the Performance Thinking Network and how they use principles of applied behavior sciences in the facilitating work they do with a variety of diverse organizations. Tim and Dr. Binder also steer the conversation toward the ABA world and what changes Dr. Binder sees coming down the line. Tune in for a great conversation!
Full transcript
0:09 Tim Crilly:
Hello and welcome to another episode of ABA Unfiltered. I’m your host, Tim Crilly, as per usual. And today we are joined by another uh friend of Amanda Fullbright. I think this is the third guest she has booked, and she has not let us down yet. And I think she’s going to keep the streak alive with our guest, Dr. Carl Binder. He’s the CEO of the Performance Thinking Network. And if you listened to a few episodes back, Shane Isley was on. He’s associated with that group. And we only got a chance to touch on the work that they do on a real sort of brief conversation. So this is really a great opportunity for us as a community to learn a lot more about the work that they’re doing. So, and I was just saying to uh Dr. Binder before we got started, I’m a little extra nervous about this one because you know it’s good to get out of your comfort zone. But I think these topics and and uh the the work that they do is maybe two or three steps over to the side of what I’m accustomed to. So just forgive me if I stumble over any concepts or anything, but I think part of the the cool thing about getting to host this is I get to learn along the way with the listeners. It’s not just about you know me spewing out information. It’s about us as a community learning from the guests we have. So I’m really looking forward to that today. So uh Dr. Binder, thank you for joining us. And if you don’t mind, um, could you give the uh audience a little bit of background on on who you are and on how and how you ended up where you are today?
1:42 Dr. Carl Binder:
Okay, I’ll try to make it short. It’s a long and winding story, but thank you so much for asking me to do this. Um, I started, I was a philosophy major in college. Uh I read Skinner’s Walden 2 and got and sent him a fan letter, actually, and uh got very excited about behavior science because of its elegance and because it appealed to me philosophically, and because it looked to me like if we uh did behavior science, we could help education, therapy, management, you name it, anything that involved people. So through a bizarre series of events, I wound up a student with Skinner at Harvard. Um, bizarre in that I it’s based on the fact that I sent him a fan letter and met with him, actually, that I sort of reached out to him. But in any case, I was um I wanted to work with humans, and when I finished uh with Skinner, sort of the coursework stuff, I wound up working with a woman named B. Barrett for 10 years. And some of you may know her name, but most people don’t. She was a very important behavior uh scientist, pioneer who had been a postdoc with Skinner. And she had a laboratory uh at the Fernal State School for severe people with severe disabilities, lifelong institutional residents. And so I started operant conditioning laboratory work there with her, but then I very quickly moved into a classroom setting, which up to that point had been almost entirely programmed instruction, very, very nicely sequenced instruction for residents of the institution who pretty much had never had really instruction to speak of at all. And I be that was the 70s, that was early 70s. And I became, I started to apply Ogden Lindsley’s standard acceleration chart and became kind of an early contributor to precision teaching. And I spent 10 years doing that, and I was training teachers and I was doing consulting and agencies and I was doing curriculum research, and I was the guy that came up with my dissertation was on behavioral endurance, which was a critical piece of precision teaching. But toward the end of the 70s, we um we had wanted to change regular education, and we were having an impact to some extent in uh special needs education, but uh you know, we were failing. We were introducing stuff into the regular educational system, and it would be flavor of the year for a year or two, and then it would fall apart, even though it would be profoundly effective. So Og Lindsley, but speaking of getting out of your comfort zone, basically kicked me out. He said, I want you to go and work in the business world and apply what we’ve known, we’ve learned from precision teaching and standard acceleration charting. I thought, okay, I don’t know anything about that, but let’s see what happens. So, over a period of a couple of years, I first my I left Barrett’s lab and I started my first consulting business, and I and I spent the first gig I had actually was with a national health management program that was run by a behavior therapist. And I showed with the standard acceleration chart that we could chart the revenues and and patient census at about 20 different clinics, and we predicted, I was able with the standard acceleration chart to predict their annual revenues better than their guys up in uh in the computer department with their mainframes, were which blew them away a little bit. But I kept talking about what had come out of our precision teaching work, behavior fluency. That word was appealing in a very effective way to communicate about what we learned by applying Skinner’s measure, rate of response to behavior and in instruction. And I got involved in sales. I got somebody who came to me, they were, they were uh uh I was talking and writing as much as I could and supporting myself partly by house cleaning because I couldn’t didn’t quite know how to get business yet. And uh I had somebody come to me who was uh a VP at a the largest bank training company at the time. And they were accustomed to training bankers in uh things like risk management and financial analysis and stuff, but banks had been deregulated, so now they had to turn their loan officers into salespeople. So they were teaching them sales skills, but they said to me, Does this fluency thing apply to product knowledge? And I said, I don’t know, you know, because I don’t really know anything about that. And so I started to look at it and I realized it could if we totally changed what people thought product knowledge was. It’s not just learning facts about products, it’s learning how to identify problems and needs that your customers have, and then show how the solutions that you have addressed them and the whole bunch of stuff there. And so we started applying that to bankers and we trained uh bankers using a fluency-based approach, and we just knocked the tops off of anything they’d ever seen before. And we we had guys saying, Well, I sold this stuff for five years, and these kids know it better than I do, you know, stuff like that. So we published, I published a couple articles about our results, and I started getting people from other industries interested, like high-tech. And so I started getting business doing the same thing from computer companies, and again, this was the late early 80s by now, from computer companies, from telecommunications, from pharmaceuticals, from all these companies. And so I started a second company, which was a joint venture called Product Knowledge Systems. And we I worked there almost 10 years. I was chairman and I built a team where we would go into large corporations, uh, Microsoft, Genentech, Chase My Hand Bank, large multinational, sometimes companies, and they would have product launches and they needed to get their salespeople up to speed on sales knowledge fast, and they were willing to spend money. And so we became kind of the guys that people knew. If you wanted to do that, you came to them because this whole fluency thing they did, plus a whole set of other tools we had, made a big difference. So that that was going until the late 90s. I started that company in ’92. And over that period, I had been introduced to Tom Gilbert’s work by Eric Hotton, who was one of my precision teaching mentors. And I’d read Gilbert’s book, Behavior uh Human Competence, which I think probably a lot of our behavioral colleagues have. It’s taught in some of the graduate programs and so forth. And Tom was a brilliant iconoclastic character. I and I got to know Tom pretty well because I got involved in the International Society for Performance Improvement, which is where all the behaviorists who did performance improvement and structural design went. Uh, people like Bob Mager and and and uh you know um Breath Auer and Rumbler, and those guys were all there. And I would go and stick to them like glue and learn from them. And I learned from Tom Gilbert a couple of important things. I learned, first of all, about the shift to accomplishments, because what he said is, you know, behavior is costly, and uh everybody thinks it’s the most important thing, but actually it’s the products of behavior, what he called accomplishments, the valuable products of behavior that we really ought to be caring about. So I learned to start approaching analysis of performance that we tried to improve by looking at the accomplishments or what we now call the work outputs. And those could be concrete things like deliverables, documents, but they could also be stuff like relationships, uh, decisions, uh, descriptions of things, et cetera, et cetera. That was a big thing that I learned from Tom. And then the other thing was he has a model called the behavior engineering model. And again, people have probably maybe become familiar with it. And it took the three-term contingency from behavior analysis and sort of expanded it out for what Tom called the world of work. Because what he recognized, you know, he didn’t quite put it in these terms, but I do, which is that the three-term contingency is a beautiful framework when you have 80%, you know, rats and pigeons starve to 80% body weight, and you know food is a reinforcer, when you know what lights and so forth people are sensitive, or pigeons and rats are sensitive to, when you build the manipulandum to meet, you know, the organism. But when you work in the world of work, you don’t know what the consequences that are gonna work are, and that’s why we, of course, do functional analysis in the behavior analysis world. But we also don’t know what’s gonna work as antecedents or as expectation setting things. And we surely don’t. We have all these tools and resources and processes and software and all the rest of it, and a lot of it’s really bad, and a lot of it doesn’t support performance. So the behavior engineering model gave us a way to look at all the variables in a much more robust way that support or get in the way of the behavior needed to produce the accomplishments. And the trouble with it was I and my team members that we were working on consulting projects where we’d go in and analyze performance, we loved it because we were down in the skills and knowledge component, or what he called knowledge, I think. And we could look at all these other variables and we realized that if management didn’t arrange conditions on the job, we could train people till we were blue in the face, but it wouldn’t really have much impact. Uh, but the problem was when we introduced the language of Tom’s model to um corporate clients who were pretty much smart, but you know, ordinary folks, they were not nerds like we were, they didn’t get the words. Words like like, for example, instruments was like, well, what is that? Does that mean like an ohm meter or a personality test? Or what is that? Or or um uh what was what was the first one? Data. Like, what is that about, you know? And so we I spent about three or four or five years tweaking the language for naming the cells of his model. Uh and I was highly influenced by just Steve Jobs, actually. Simplicity and user experience was a big focus of mine at that time. And what we came up with was language for each of the cells in Tom’s model, which, if we introduced it to virtually anybody, people would begin to get, they wouldn’t make category errors, and we could go from there without running into a lot of obstacles in terms of language. So we started using that at product knowledge systems, working with sales and service sales organizations. And then in the 80s, the end of the 90s, I moved back home to the West Coast from the Boston area, and I formed a third company with my with a business partner, Binderia Associates. And what we did there is two things. We um we um began to apply what we’d learned for sales performance to customer service, and customer service is kind of cool because it has all the same kind of verbal repertoires that you need, but you also got to be using a lot of different software typically, possibly while people are yelling in your ears, you know. And so it’s a whole nother set of things to be fluent with, and it’s also an environment where there’s pretty close in management, and so you can start to look at all the behavior influences fairly carefully. Um, and then the other thing was we built a program called the Fluency Building Workshop. And so, what we would do is, for example, we went into ATT Wireless and we used the workshop to teach uh the people there that were doing training and supervision how to build fluency, how to design fluency-based materials and procedures and coaching and practice for their client for their employees to bring them up to speed. And we were able, again, to knock the tops off of things. We at ATT Wireless we published an article where we it used to take them two months to get their new customer service reps up to benchmark productivity. We were able to get them there in two weeks and then surpass that benchmark by 60%, or like uh Amazon.com, who wouldn’t officially share their data, but they told us that we improved their call center productivity by 35%, et cetera. So we made a big impact there. But what we started to what happened was in about in the Great Recession, actually before that, the internet bubble at the turn of the century, companies quit. Uh there’s a lot of challenges with uh with buying stuff, frankly. And so we had some glitches from our business point of view. So we moved during that period, we realized we’re gonna teach other people how to do this stuff. And so the performance thinking network was born out of that in the early 2000s, where we said, instead of doing a lot of consulting projects, which I’d been doing for 30 or 40 years with teams of people, we’re going to teach other people how to be so-called performance consultants using this accomplishment-based approach with the plain English models that we had developed. And we’re going to coach them through projects. And then we also, because there’s a lot more managers than there are performance professionals, we developed a coaching and management set of programs where we would go in, like, for example, Change Healthcare is one of our larger clients. We train, we’d certify them to train in the case of Change Healthcare, something like 400 managers how to coach using this approach. We did the same thing at Easter Seals Bay Area, for example, at one point. And so that’s how we got to where we are. And what we do now, the Performance Thinking Network, basically is a we now are sort of, I mean, I don’t want to brag because it’s still pretty small, but it is a part of the purpose of coming on here.
14:24 Tim Crilly:
So yes, please.
14:25 Dr. Carl Binder:
I get it. Uh but it’s it’s it’s a global community. We’ve got we’ve got people who certified as practitioners and most continents. I was just talking to Umid, who’s in the program, and he’s in Ukraine right now working for the Centers for Disease Control and trying to improve vaccination processes. We’ve got people in India and Africa and so forth, most of them in America, North America. But we’ve developed practitioners, we’ve implemented our coaching programs, and now, as you mentioned earlier, with the help of Shane Isley, who has been a colleague of mine for a long time, and I’ve known him since he was before he was in college, actually, and also Kirsten um Kirsten Urick, who is working closely with him, and she used to run Vista, and she’s the co-author with Rick Kabina, the precision teaching book and stuff. And we’ve got a few other folks. What we found in the ABA world, to bring it back home here a little bit, is that as ABA companies are growing at insane rates, both organizational, both organically, and also you know, by acquisition, sure. Yeah. Is that people who started out kind of like I did, as clinicians or behavior scientists, all of a sudden have to manage people, they have to have processes, they have to have all these things that they really weren’t trained to do. And we think that what we do goes beyond OBM because it’s not just about people’s behavior. We look at process improvement, we look at the outputs or accomplishments, and we arrange conditions, we help people arrange conditions to perform. So we have been more and more finding that processes in ABA companies, which may be fine when you’re just at one location, you know, and it’s kind of travel knowledge, but all of a sudden you pop out another location or you’ve got another program or you acquire all of a sudden you’ve got to document these things and make them work well. Because if you don’t, you’re gonna get audited, you’ll have lousy, you know, treatment plans, you’re gonna have bad whatever it is. And that supervision is something that’s also very spotty, and that we can introduce a form of accomplishment-based coaching to clinical supervisors and managers so that they can do a better job. So that’s kind of how we’ve wound up with an arm of our business in addition to our corporate type stuff being an ABA. Yeah, I think that’s probably more than you wanted to know.
16:36 Tim Crilly:
Well, no, it’s fine. I mean, we’re we’re out of time, but uh, thank you for joining us. Uh no, I’m I’m kidding. But and also if you had um Walden 2 and Stater Acceleration Chart on your ABA unfiltered bingo card, you you definitely scored big today. So I think those are the first time we’ve we’ve had those mentioned. So I appreciate that. Uh I kid. Um, but I think it’s important that the ABA organization, I’m just curious. Like when you come in, are you know, given your behavioral background and sort of all those things that you’re bringing in, but you’re also bringing in sort of this management training, this, you know, all those things. Do you feel like those groups are more um open to what you want to do rather than an ATT or anything like that?
17:22 Dr. Carl Binder:
It’s a good question. You know, first of all, the thing that I and our work is known for is plain English. So, for example, the the names we have for Gilbert’s behavior engineering model cells are expectations and feedback, tools and resources, consequences and incentives, skills and knowledge, selection and assignment, and motives and preferences. Those are not nerdy behavior science words. So, what for example, or when we talk about work outputs and define them. So when we go to a place like ATT, especially if we’re working in areas that are very close to performance, like like sales or customer service, people get it. They get it really fast. They don’t even know we’re talking in some nerdy language because we aren’t. Um, in the behavioral world, it’s a kind of an interesting thing because, first of all, as behaviorists, we’re all trained, we’re focused so much on behavior that the shift from behavior to accomplish output is a little challenging. It is for everybody, frankly. I’ve I’ve learned that it isn’t just behavior, it’s as humans. I think, I think as you know, as pre-humans on the plains of Africa, whatever, we were always watching each other’s behavior, the predator’s behavior, you know, da-da-da. We weren’t behavior scientists, but I think we’re very sensitive to activity, and we’re not that sensitive to the concrete and not so concrete products of behavior. So there’s a shift. That’s one thing. The second thing is that I think some folks in organizational behavior management sort of think they have it covered. And I think what we’ve learned is this accomplishment-based approach could take you somewhat further than at least the classic focus on on just on behavior, not to diss any of my colleagues in OBM because they do a lot of beautiful work. Um, I think what we find is that there’s quite a lot of acceptance in some places. And the other thing that, by the way, one of the good things about working with Shane and Kirsten both is they’ve both run and owned significant ABA businesses. So they have business experience as well in this field. And um, and then people come to me because I have a few publications and because you know they kind of know about binder from some something or other. And so people are interested. Um, and by and large, what we find the thing I love about our behavior analyst colleagues is that by tendency, we are, you know, we’re analysts. We got attracted to this work, maybe because we wanted to help children or whatever. But if we made it through, we got pretty good at being detailed analytical folks. And so when you make the shift to the focus on accomplishments and using the six boxes model, once you get there, then you’ve got a really fine-grained analytical, to use the current buzzword mindset, which my behaviorist friends I’m sure don’t like, and I don’t really either, but you know, a perspective that takes you into doing really fine analysis. So we find some fantastic people become practitioners and managers using this work and people who’ve gone with it for a while, uh, people like you know, Holly Raman and uh I mean, I don’t want to go out in names, but there’s a lot of people out there who have been through our programs and been applying them, or people who work for Shane, for example, and they’re doing beautiful work. So, on the other hand, there’s other behaviorists like I have another very close friend who’s the owner of a pretty large ABA company, and his response is to be silly about it is like we don’t need no stinking six boxes, we can do it with a three-term contingency, you know. So that’s fine. Yeah, but you know, but we have different, but it’s in bl in general. I love working with our behaviors colleagues, you know, because of the precision.
21:04 Tim Crilly:
You know, it’s an interesting thing because I think the average BCBA or someone that’s studying you know behavioral sciences, they they probably picture themselves working with clients, individuals, um, you know, sort of the normal things that we we do as BCBAs and in the community. And not that I’m advocating because we need as many BCBAs out in the ABA field as possible, but it is an interesting concept to think like, well, there are different avenues uh that this knowledge, if I just sort of think about it from a different perspective and you’re applying it to an organization as opposed to an individual, because you know, oftentimes you’re working with a family. That’s a basically an organization itself, or you’re working within a clinic setting, all those things are very sort of mirrored that sort of organization. Do you find people sort of like asking? Asking you, like, hey, what’s this all about? You know, is this an alternate route? Okay. Yes. Yes. What’s your answer? No, stay where you are. We need you in the ABA field.
22:08 Dr. Carl Binder:
Oh, no, no, that’s not my answer. There’s a bunch of things about it. First of all, you know, we have this box six called motives and preferences. And what we think is that it helps if people are doing work that lines up with their motives and preferences. So that’s one thing. Now I think this you you mentioned kids and parents. Well, even that, as I’m sure you’ve known, I’ve I’ve known some behavior analysts who are brilliant at working with kids, but actually they aren’t as good at working with adults as parents. You know, that’s one click, right? And then the next click is wait a minute, you know, we were all trained as behavior analysts. And I would I confess, you know, when I was first finished up my kind of academic background stuff, I thought, oh, I’m a behavior analyst, I can deal with anything, you know, any behavior, just throw it at me. And then you realize, nope, it’s way different working with behavior in organizations in managing people, you know, professionals than it is, you know, helping a kid learn how to do whatever. And um, and so what happens a lot of times is I get BCBAs who come to me, just sometimes they just find me on Facebook or whatever, and they say, you know, I’d like to get in. What they often say is I want to get into OBM. And what I usually say is, well, there are no jobs in OBM. You can’t get a job outside of the ABA world if you say OBM is what I do. People don’t even know what it means. Yeah, you need to learn how to do performance consulting, training and development, instructional design, organizational development, HR, something which at least outside of the ABA world, if you want to go outside the ABA world, will be perceived as a discipline. And then you can bring everything, yeah, and then you can bring whatever things you learn from behavior analysis to bear, but you’re bringing it in the context of those things. Now, on the other hand, if you’re in an ABA company, and I have a fair number of colleagues who come from that perspective too, they may be, because as you, you’re a great example, actually, and other people I’ve met who maybe start out clinicians, but they rise in the ranks until they’re responsible for management or business factors or you know, supervising supervisors or whatever it is. And at that point, they have roles that require them to have some other capabilities. And so they will, or maybe they show an interest in that, and the owners of their businesses say, Hey, say, you can you keep like a half a clinical caseload and then sort of help me train people or whatever. And in fact, our mutual friend Amanda, you know, the original ask was, can you help us develop our training department? And I said, No, but I’ll help you become performance consultants. And so there’s a there’s an opportunity here, I think, to learn a set of tools that are plain English, but that are very well grounded in behavior science that can make a difference organizationally. And so you might be a clinical supervisor or maybe in charge regionally of clinical supervisors, and you have a significant opportunity to apply it there. Or you might be somebody whose job it is now that your company is big enough to like let’s nail down our processes, let’s implement new programs, let’s do stuff that really is about organizational implementation, execution, management. And at that point, uh, you know, there’s some people who love that. So I think the answer that that’s a long answer. Like, I appreciate it though.
25:30 Tim Crilly:
I think, you know, it’s the nature of of this business in a way, you know, you start out, I want to work one-on-one on the floor with with kids, and you know, you sort of you you you build up a clinical expertise, a background, all those things, and you start advancing. And for some people, that advancement is double-edged sword because it’s getting them further and further away from what they actually wanted to do. Like um, Dr. Sharon Kerr, she’s our chief clinical administrative officer. She used to always joke with me back in the I’ve known her for a long, long time. She used to joke that gosh, she just misses being an RBT sometimes. Yeah, she loves what she’s doing, but you know, she started out as just someone that fell in love with working with individuals with autism. You know, obviously now she has a bigger impact and all those things you get to do to train people. But you know, you you you brought up my my journey. Um, that was something that I it was important to me as well. It’s, you know, with the next step in my development and my career, how can I make a bigger impact on a community that I care about? So I think it’s a great point you bring up. It’s not just about like, am I getting away from yeah ABA? How am I using the things that I’m really passionate about and improving the way I work within my current role? I think that’s a that’s a fantastic answer. I think that’s what you’re you’re alluding to.
26:53 Dr. Carl Binder:
I am, and you just made a really important point there too, which I had not thought about this way, which is like when I think of my own case, I was I was I Skinner’s science appealed to me because of its elegance and its potential power. And I frankly didn’t care what the application was. And so I wound up working with B. Barrett and learned an awful lot about working with people with severe disabilities and then regular education, all that. But my my commitment was I want to help. This we can help with this, you know. And it’s interesting because when I think about my colleagues in the ABA world right now, I have some who are really, really good at working with kids, incredibly good. And they do not want to leave that, period. And in fact, if you say, hey, you know, you could start a practice or you, you know, they don’t want to do that, they just saw somebody else manage me and I just want to do this work. Then there are other people, which is more like what you just said, who say, Yeah, but I want to have an effect, I want to have an impact here. So, from my perspective, if I can help more people perform better and deliver better services in a larger scope and have a bigger impact, that’s what I want to do. So it’s kind of interesting how people play out what their real priorities, what their passion is about, you know? Yeah.
28:06 Tim Crilly:
Uh, you know, I used to spend a little bit of time with the the team over here that would go out and was looking at prospective acquisitions, people that were looking to sell their practice. And I think that you know, the small to medium ones, you looked at people that said, you know, I just wanted to have a caseload of 10 to 15. I just wanted to do my thing, but word gets out, we start to grow. And for those folks, the same thing, they they got so far away from what they love doing and had to step into a job that they were probably ill-prepared for, like, you know, accidentally stumbling into a business that you never had any, you know, idea could ever be this big. And so many of them just they they want to sort of sell that that that stress away and then be able to step back into something that was sort of the original thing that got them into it. So I think it, you know, it it some for some people it does end up coming back where it’s like, well, I did have a big impact, now I can hand it off, and I get to go back and be a part of something that you know gets to grow even more without the headache and the stress.
29:11 Dr. Carl Binder:
Yeah, I think the challenge for that is because you know, as I’ve been now watching, I’m inherently interested in business. And one of the cool things about doing the work that I did in companies, especially the sales-related stuff, is I probably worked across a dozen or 15 different industries. So, like, oh, I’m in the pharmaceuticals now. Oh, I’m in the, and you get to learn about so many things about how different kinds of things work. And so I’m I’m learning more really about the industry, if you will, of behavior analysis now. And it’s interesting to watch because I’ve certainly had owners who had exactly the motivation you described, and then they get acquired by a bigger company and they say, wait a minute, that’s not what I wanted. These guys are just running like a spreadsheet exercise. They want to sell out in five years and make their money. Whoa, wait a minute, you know, and then other people where they’ve said, This is fantastic, we’re getting the support we need. We’ve got leadership from, let’s say, healthcare who really understand that you need to deliver quality service and are willing to learn. And so that whole process in its own right is a little bit of a crapshoot, right?
30:11 Tim Crilly:
It’s really hard. And I think um, you know, I this is not where I thought the conversation would go, but I think it’s it’s pressing. Um, you know, knowing what you want post-deal and really, really understanding who who you’re who you’re you know getting aligned with is a very, very difficult and important process because you know we can’t deny the fact that it’s happening. There’s a lot of consolidation. I know it’s slowed down a little bit because of you know COVID and and things, but it does feel like maybe that’s the that’s the uptick is is is coming back. So I think we’re gonna see see a little bit more of that in the next next few years as it relates to you know, sort of where we were in 2019. So it’s it’s it’s a topic that I think people don’t always um we don’t talk about it as as much because it just sounds so cool. Hey, I sold a company and all these things, but there’s a lot of strings and a lot of considerations that come with it.
31:07 Dr. Carl Binder:
It’s interesting. What two things you just said, one one observation and one sort of suggestion. The observation is a really you’re talking about expectations. And one of the things I’ve learned, in fact, I was just speaking with somebody this morning. We always say this, you know, in our six boxes model, the first box is expectations and feedback. And and what I’ve learned is almost every kind of quote performance problem, whether it’s the level of an individual that you’re working with as a manager, supervisor, or at an organizational level, big hairy processes like did this giant project at Amgen some years ago. It was a big hairy process. There’s challenges with expectations. There’s conflicting expectations, there’s lack of clear expectations, there’s lack of agreement on them. Everything comes from that in terms of whether it works out well or not. So we make a really big deal about that. And then the other thing, the suggestion is something you might even find useful if you, you or your colleagues are still involved in this acquisition thing. I was, I had a joint venture company, Product Knowledge Systems, which was with information mapping, a much larger company, structured documentation company founded by another kind of behavior scientist type guy. And and the the guy who was then running the company, this is like 35 years ago now, but turned me on to this thing, which is that if each party to that kind of discussion makes their own list of what they’d like to achieve in the relationship or the deal, what they’d like to avoid and what they’d like to protect. And each partner, I mean, it doesn’t take long, you just list it. And then you get together and compare lists, it floats to the surface those things like, wait a minute, that’s not what I was looking for, we got to sort this out. And I’ve used this thing now probably 20 or 30 times with different kinds of business dealings. And it’s so interesting to be able to identify those kind of landmines that if you don’t talk through and clarify, might cause trouble down the line. So anything you can do to clarify those expectations helps two things jump to mind.
33:03 Tim Crilly:
I, you know, I think part of what you know plagues this industry is a lack of an accreditating body. You know, there isn’t really a standard of um sort of model for care, whether it’s from a backroom, you know, administrative standpoint and also sort of clinical process. You know, I think you know, two clinicians can see the same child and both come up with completely different recommendations, and there’s no way to sort of determine who’s right and who’s wrong. And I think it’s something that people are talking about more often now than they ever were, and we’re getting there. So I think when you go and you’re looking at these agencies, you don’t really know um, you know, who they are. And I think that’s true. And um, you know, and I think the other thing is, you know, we would we would have a lot of meetings, we would talk to people and and we would know right off the bat, well, no, their their sort of process and philosophy. Um, oh no, we don’t do caregiver guidance because the parents don’t really like it. Okay, well, that’s not gonna work for us. We’re not gonna be a good partnership. And so, you know, you probably need to go find somebody else to partner with. So, you know, I think you run into a lot of you know, disconnect in this industry as it is. I do think it’s improving. I think people are out there and they’re working on it. Um, and I think, you know, it’s not going away from an insurance mandate process. So, you know, I think it’s it’s it’s old enough now within the healthcare world where you can see, okay, they’re starting to take more of an active role. How do we get to, you know, sort of performance-based reimbursement and sort of maybe a case rate models, things like that. But right now, I don’t know if we have the answers to provide them to say, well, this is what it should look like. But the conversations are starting. And I think if we can get there, you’re gonna see a little bit better alignment across across the industry. Now, not everyone’s gonna get on board because you’re always gonna have outliers, but you know, if enough of the people that really care about it get in line, you can start to see an improvement there.
35:06 Dr. Carl Binder:
That it’s interesting, that’s a really interesting point. The one of the things uh about is about the speed of change. And I’m struck that an awful lot of, especially owners who start out a small clinical practice and that gets pretty big and it’s a target for acquisition, there’s a lot of naivete too. People really don’t know what they should be looking at. They’re all excited because somebody wants to buy their business or whatever. But you know, there’s there’s and I think I think some of the professional organizations that I’ve not really been involved in, some of the leadership groups, I think are helping with that. I think there’s a kind of an education that’s going on. So people are getting, I’m just kind of an outsider, but I think that’s that’s a a relevant issue. Of course, I have this is this is just an opportunity to stick in my particular thing, but you know, my view about applied behavior science, to me, Skinner’s science is about his measurement. You know, he said that rate of response and the standard, in his case, cumulative recorder, was the most important contributions that he made. And all of the things that we discovered since then, whether it’s you know, schedules of reinforcement or way we use shaping or discrimination learning or whatever it is, were all based on that measurement framework. And one of the things that’s disturbing to me when I look out in our field, the application of the science, this is why I’m a precision teaching guy, is that um we’ve abandoned that to a large extent. And so we see things like percentage correct out there, which are used in the education system. And one of the reasons the education system has failed miserably is because percentage correct can’t distinguish between a third grader and a person with a PhD when it comes to like math facts. Uh, you know, that time is a relevant dimension, and that’s what Skinner saw. And so one of the concerns I have when you talk about standards and is that the measurement systems that people are using are pretty loosey-goosey. You know, they’re like rating scales and such, which are not natural science. So that’s I don’t want to go on on because I can go on on that topic, but I think one of the fundamentals across the industry is let’s take a look at what we think we’re applying when we talk about applying science. Because everybody’s all hot about you know, evidence-based practice. But unfortunately, more often than not, that means it was proven to work someplace. Yeah. So, hey, we can do that now, and then we don’t measure it in a way that we can be sure it’s working with this kid. But this group is like, ah, we’ve missed the whole point.
37:28 Tim Crilly:
Yeah, uh, you know, going back to what you said about, you know, people doing caregiver um guidance stuff, I think that that plays into it. I think part of part of what we we end up doing as clinicians is okay, work for family A. So I’m going to automatically go in and make sure I do it with family B and not necessarily check to see if it’s having the right impact. Um, I think that’s a that’s a great point. And that’s that’s just like the little sort of microcosm, but you you apply that across across the board and it could be real problematic.
38:00 Dr. Carl Binder:
Well, and all yeah, the uh the the thing is when you grow so fast, when you scale, you’re looking for efficiencies. And so templates are potentially efficiencies. But if you don’t measure those templates and tweak them, you could go down some really nasty paths, you know. And and the other thing, of course, the other issue around our field, if I if I step into it now, apply behavior analysis, is I think that when you certify people based on passing a test, uh you sometimes, I mean, I don’t want to be too critical of anybody, but you know, so you sometimes get people who got their credential but really are not skilled at changing the behavior of kids at all.
38:43 Tim Crilly:
Absolutely absolutely. I don’t think you’re you’re not speaking out of turn at all. We had uh Dr. Leslie Neely from the University of Texas San Antonio on last week, and we, you know, or yeah, last episode, and we were talking about just that that thing, you know, and that there’s there’s two kinds of pressure out there. There’s the pressure for an organization like like Blue Sprig, I’ll I’m not afraid to say it, where we’re gonna take it slow, and it might not be the most financially beneficial process to to train those people and get them ready for the real world and what they have to do, or you have the path of I need BCBAs, we’re drowning in caseloads, whatever, and you’re pushing people into situations that don’t necessarily make sense for them at that point. And then I think there’s actually a third rail to it where you know we ask these people sort of just to be a kind of good at everything, and we’ve sort of lost the ability to help people specialize in specific things so you can be excellent at assessment or caregiver guidance direction. You know, not everybody is good at managing other people, you know. So why put them in that situation? So I think that’s that’s also a conversation that I, you know, I think we need to have is we’re we’re rushing people to the finish line because the need is there. And that’s just a fact. It’s a fact. Um, but we’re also pushing them to be a little bit of everything without maybe taking a step back and saying, you know, these 10 people are really good at this. And with 10 people being excellent at this one thing, we can actually cover all the families we need and provide even better care. So that’s that’s a topic that’s really good point. Real passionate for me.
40:24 Dr. Carl Binder:
So I can see that. That’s a really good point. I’d never thought about that way, the specialization thing. I mean, what I’ve noticed, for example, Shane, Shane’s company, his original company, Blueprints, was a boutique company. They worked, they did a family systems thing with kids who were kind of out of control often. And it wasn’t just about the kid, it was about the whole environment. And they sort of applied a kind of a combination of uh gold diamond and six boxes and a systems view and made a huge impact. And that was a particular model that worked really well in some contexts, and they got really good at it. But of course, when you try to expand, then you got to be able to deal with everybody that shows up and the waiting list and all that, and they may not always be that good at it. And when you, as you were just thinking about it, I know people who are masterful at early intervention, right? They’re just brilliant at it. You know, they can get those kids seeming to be normal sometimes, but so-called normal or you know, regular kids by certain age. And then you get people who are really good with working with the transition, you know, from teenagers to adults. And then you say, Well, okay, but we’re all, you know, we’re all supposed to do everything. I guess in any field, as it matures, specialization becomes a thing. And so so-called sort of it’s funny because in a certain way, being a BCBA started out as the specialization, right? We’re just saying that’s not it. So now we so that’s really important what you just said. I really like that. Yeah, that’s a big one.
41:55 Tim Crilly:
Yeah. Uh it’s it’s it’s a topic. Uh, I think it’s it it, you know, where we are as an industry, we’re not probably there yet. Um, but you know, we’re not going anywhere. Um, so it’s it’s it’s a it’s a good, it’s a good time to maybe start pulling the string on on a few of those things. Okay. Um I I could probably talk for uh another hour, uh, but we are up against it a little bit. Um is there any sort of last-minute takeaway? And and can you maybe give people information on where they can find you and read a little bit more about what you guys do?
42:29 Dr. Carl Binder:
They can find our our website at performance thinking.com and they can find our YouTube channel, which is kind of cool, I think, at performance thinking.tv. That’ll get, or sixboxes.tv. Either of those will get. And so there you’ll find our we have free monthly webinars you can sign up, but we also have a bunch of playlists. So they’ll learn these days probably more by watching YouTube than they will by reading stuff. And one other thing I would say, and this is the final sort of pitch for our stuff, is that we teach people, whether they’re managers and leaders, or whether they’re performance professionals, or whether they’re supervisors and coaches, this simple, we say two pictures and 21 plain English words, this way of thinking about performance. And built into it is really what came out of Skinner’s single subject design, which came out of uh Lindsley and Precision Teachings notion that what you talked about as mistakes, as learning opportunities, is the notion of iterative continuous improvement. And so what we push very hard in our work with at any level in organizations is use this framework to continuously improve the conditions to try to get the accomplishments or outputs you want. And it seems to me if you can come in, if you can sort of ride into the scene with that perspective, which in the business world these days they call agile and all that, then you got something because you will continuously improve under those conditions. Yeah. Anyway, okay.
43:50 Tim Crilly:
Um I could we could talk forever. I I find the work you’re doing fascinating. Uh you know, I I hope our paths cross again. I’d I’d love to, you know, kind of pick another topic and and pick it apart. That would be easy down the road. Okay. So thank you again. Um, you know, if if if you’re out there listening and you you you got something out of this, I I I hope you did, but you know, pass it on to someone that you think we’d find it interesting. And uh I appreciate you tuning in and listening. And uh stay tuned for more great content uh down the road.