Ep24 A Day in the Life of an OBM Senior Consultant with Dr. Cloyd

Hello fellow knowledge seekers and welcome to the A-Typical Behavior Analyst. Before we get into today's episode, let's go through some quick housekeeping. First, we are ace approved, so if you're listening for continuing education units, jot down the two key words and are spurs during a talk, and then take those over to our website where you can purchase CEUs. Speaking of our site, you can locate us at at atypicalba.com. There you'll find additional resources, citations, and references for each of the episodes, and more information about each of our guests. Next, if you'd like to stay up to date with our upcoming talks and live events, you can always find and follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn. Check out all of our links in the show notes. Lastly, stay tuned after the talk for a preview clip from our next episode. And now, onto a discussion with my favorite teacher, baker, and organizational systems maker. Dr. Klaid Heighton from Aubrey Daniels International regales us with his experiences in the organizational behavior management universe. If you've ever been curious about how behavior analysis can be implemented with organizational systems, this talk is sure to provide some enlightenment. Dr. Heighton has an extensive background in teaching and consulting and provides great discussion about incorporating behavioral analytic principles during his day, improving safety and high hazard work settings. So adjust your earbuds, check your coffee levels, and get ready to hear from Dr. Heighton in episode 24, "A Day in the Life of an OBM, Senior Consultant." Awesome, alright, so yeah, so we are recording, and I do want to welcome you guys more officially to this wonderful Friday live talk with the atypical behavior analyst and Dr. Heighton. So for those of you who don't know, I am Kelly Tate, and we created ATBA to like I said kind of show the vast array of behavioral and principles that people might not be as familiar with. And so this is a topic that I see brought up frequently on Facebook pages, Reddit threads, LinkedIn groups, just asking about, you know, what organizational behavior management is, how do you get into it, and so I figured why not go to someone that I know has a wealth of information on it, and was one of my professors, and so if you saw our little post, I referred to him as the teacher, the baker, and the organizational systems maker. Teacher, he taught OBM at UNT, and he also taught why people believe weird things, which we are going to come to at some point, because it's an amazing discussion. And the baker, if you were, and I don't know if you still do, bake cakes that were delicious and beautiful, and yeah, I do all forms of, all forms of cooking, but over the holidays, it tends to be a lot more baking kinds of things, so that's beautiful. And then as our organizational systems maker, another word that I cannot say correctly, he works with Aubrey Daniels, our national as a senior OBM consultant, so I am super stoked to have you on with us today, and have such a fun group, and like I said, a lot of familiar phases, so this is going to be rad. So as we start out, I really like to have our guests just kind of give their history, kind of your story of how you got into behavior analysis, what path you took, and then what you're doing now. Yeah, thanks Kelly. Probably like not just a few of you, but I sort of stumbled into behavior analysis as an undergraduate at the University of Florida, and it was just one of those things of, hey, I think I'll take an interesting sounding site course and ended up in Panipackers course, which was a personalized system of instruction, self-paced kind of intro to behavior analysis, and I like the content, and I actually like the whole format of what we were doing in there. If you got an A in the course, which was pretty much mandatory because his only course criteria at the time were you either completed everything, and you got an A, or you didn't finish going back and getting an A, so you had an incomplete, and so there were only two possibilities in that class, so I got an A rather quickly, finished out, and then he invited you back to be a tutor for the subsequent quarters students, and that was very engaging, so that was kind of a fascinating intro. I didn't really know what path forward there was in behavior analysis at the time. Luckily, I knew a few graduate students who were ahead of me, one of them was Greg Gelbicka, and Greg said, "Well, you have to go to graduate school," and I didn't really know what the graduate school was, and he said, "Well, you study more about this," and I said, "Well, okay, that sounds cool." That sounds like something fun, and he said, "Yeah, but you've been here a lot of years at Florida, so apply other places as well." I did one of the places I applied to was West Virginia University, and they had a thing which they still do, which we copied it at UNT called an interview weekend, and they had us come up and go through interviews up there, which was a fascinating experience, and they accepted me, and I went up there to the program in Morgan Town, and that's what got me into two areas, really, into EAB, that was my first love. Basic research was what the behavior analysis program was probably the most well-known for of the four PhD programs in the psych department, because there was adult clinical PhD, child clinical PhD, developmental PhD, and a behavior analysis PhD, and we had the Raton Pigeon Labs, so I was running animals for a number of years. Then I decided I wanted to study some human-related topics, some verbal behavior topics, and ended up running human subjects for that, and that's sort of what led to my job coming down at UNT. I had been in contact with Sigrid Glen, and she said that they wanted to start a human operant lab at UNT. This was before there was a department, and before there was a major, and before there was a graduate program going, so it was really basically a startup operation that she invited me down to, and I took a gamble on it, and it paid off because Sigrid was just very dogged and determined and persistent in navigating the university bureaucracy to get us established into a department with undergraduate major, and then a graduate, actually we got the graduate program first and got the undergraduate major approved after that, but then we had a department of behavior analysis, which at the time was the only department of behavior analysis so named anywhere. We were not in arts and sciences, we were not in the psychology department, we were our own department, and so we were free to put together our curriculum there, and at that point I was into designing what kind of graduate courses we wanted to have. So that was my academic side of all of this, where I was an academic for 2021 years at UNT, although I was a graduate student for far too long at West Virginia because we were having a lot of fun in graduate school, renting our research studies, and all the other things that graduate school has with it up there in West Virginia at the time was a very lively department, and the job market wasn't that great at the time coming out in the mid 80s, so I was able to stay on some grants and continue working up there and doing all kinds of fun stuff without having the responsibilities to publish a parish, which would come later, but that was my long, very long, you know, preparation to become an academic. Kelly, you're out, you still have to find my mute button. I talked to myself too, so you guys will watch me just have animated moments. It's funny, because I tried the same thing at UNT. I went until they were like, no, Kelly, you literally have to graduate this year. You cannot. Otherwise, you have to take the courses again, and I went, can I pick and choose which ones? Because I got a couple of things that I'd like to know all of them. Okay, fine. So yeah, yeah, there was a recycle requirement that came in. Some of those were put in because of the earlier things that people had done at West Virginia, we had no timeline when it first got there. So those of us who were grad students reps on the department committee actually had to push for getting timelines and schedules as a framework for going through graduate school, because we could have just stayed there messing around in the lab forever. I mean, talk about free, operant behavior. Like, let's just play. It was. It was great. We could run our own research studies. It was just way too much fun. So if anyone is ever considered going to grad school or, you know, other advanced degrees, these are incentives. Go explore, be creative, and you'll play around. So with this fantastic academic background, the shift into what you're doing now, can you kind of explain a little bit about OBM, kind of just a brief, and then what it looks like in your position and kind of what Aubrey Daniels International does. Yeah. Well, OBM was something that was, when I first went to graduate school in 1978, there were a series of articles and then books coming out about OBM where the people coming out of the 60s, including Dale Breathauer, who just passed away a couple of days ago, had been developing this application of behavioral principles to organizations and kind of formalizing it. So that was sort of coming together when I was starting out in graduate school. And I remember we read Tom Gilbert's book, Human Competence, shortly after it came out. And it took me several times to go through Gilbert's book, by the way, to extract what I found to be ultimately the most useful information in there. But something was clearly happening. So at West Virginia, this was another one of those department's structural things, Kelly, and everybody that was interesting about the graduate program. West Virginia, they encouraged you to do both in the behavioral analysis program, to do both basic research and to have an application area, if you wanted to. And we couldn't do clinical work because that was, we had two clinical PhD programs. So that was kind of ruled out. And I wasn't really interested in anything clinical. And the other options were community work, which was early also, community behavior analysis very early. And organizational. And I happened to become more interested in the organizational systems side. That's actually where we read Breathauer's early work as well. So it wasn't after I came to UNT that I developed the interesting OBM. It was actually all there all along from my graduate school days. And that was because it was looking at human performance as an element of what businesses are trying to accomplish in providing services and goods to their customers. And it was, it was more about the management side of things than anything else. And I thought as an application area, that's, that's as complicated as you want to get. So it was challenging as anything. And there were just infinite varieties of application to all kinds of organizations. And so I thought, well, I'll make that my, you know, interest area in the applied zone. And started doing things, working on projects. I remember at one time, we had a department chair at West Virginia who said, who was, was going to partner up with someone. And at the time, they said, they were thinking of moving to Houston. And I'm an Army brat. So I lived all over the country. But he knew I lived in the South, lived in, in Georgia, a little bit, lived in Florida. And I could probably get a way, say an oil gas, like they say in Houston. So he said, you said, and can you say y'all? And I said, oh, yeah, we say y'all time at four. So he said, ah, you're right. If we go to Houston, you're coming like that. Well, that never really panned out. You ended up going to Chicago. And I couldn't do a Chicago accent from my, from my life. So I ended up doing other things organizationally. But ultimately at, at UNT, that leads into starting to teach OBM courses and starting a graduate student group to do some consulting opportunities in the DFW area. So that was where that led to. And that's where, you know, a lot of the people here, we were students at UNT. That's where you encountered probably me teaching OBM when I wasn't teaching EAB and, and why people believe we're things going into, into OBM work. So the OBM stuff was, was, again, very broad. It was any kind of performance-related topics where human behavior was at least one of the critical components involved in the performance improvement. That was, you know, a target for organizational things. Later as I went to, left UNT went to Arbiteranials, then the vast majority of what I do, since coming to Arbiteranials, because that's one of our big marketing niches. There is safety. So we're, the behavioral safety was something I wasn't doing at UNT. And it was something that I'd learned to do when I went to ADI from there, because it's, it makes up a substantial portion of our, you know, our, our book of business at ADI. And is, there's actually gotten us through some rough times with the recession in 2008, about the only clients that, during an economic downturn who still need your services are going to be safety-related clients. So that's a, a good thing to have in your portfolio, or in your book of business, is to be able to do some work in, in safety. It does require some learning to come up the speed on what some of the critical elements are. And what we, we can contribute to it, you know, as taking what we know from behavioral analysis and applying it to safety settings, then we're kind of merging two things. It's almost like what you do in behavioral pharmacology. In behavioral pharmacology, you know, you, you study drugs, how they work the neuro, you know, fizz side of all of that, the receptor mechanics and things like that. And then you incorporate behavioral principles to understand how drugs interact with behavior and so on. And in our safety word, you have to understand what organizations are doing out there, what their safety management system is that they are currently using. And then what they're struggling with out there and what you can do to help them from the behavioral standpoint. So we're not taking over safety operations in a company. They've already got a lot of very good things going, but they have some sort of predictable pain points in those organizations where they struggle with specifically around, as you might expect, around the behavior management side. Right? They've got, they've got all the usual things in place. They've got safety rules, they got policies, they got equipment, they got procedures, they got processes, they got all of these things, you know, designed and built up over years in place. And the one thing that they struggle with is getting people to consistently follow the procedures or adhere to the rules or what to do when people violate the rules or, you know, things like that. And why are they violating those rules? I mean, you know, most people are completely stumped. If they don't understand behavior and you go, look, we told you that you need to wear this, this gear to prevent you from falling to your death here. And so most people assume that if you tell people, you know, you could die if you don't do this right, then that they would surely then do everything you told them to do. And that's just not the case. So if you don't understand behavior, you're always stumped by that. They would fall back on that, well, that's, as Aubrey, you know, said for many years, let's fall back on the antecedent and tell them, but tell them louder, longer and meaner. And that's never going to be the solution. You're going to have to take a look at why they're doing it the way that is unsafe and figure out what kind of solutions you can come up with. It will help it make the probability of them doing it correctly, more likely. And it's a complicated bit of thing. There's some analysis tools that we use in there to understand those things. But if they really don't have a sophisticated understanding of behavior, they're going to keep making the same mistakes, management wise, and they're not going to be getting the behavior change or the behavior, you know, sustainment that they need around those things. And they'll always be puzzled by it. So that's where we come in and work with them on, it depends on what we're called in for. But if it's the soup the nuts kind of intervention where they come to us and say, hey, can you take a look at our safety culture? And we'll try to, you know, get them to pinpoint that a little bit more specifically, tell us what kinds of issues you're having and things like that. And we'll do an assessment with talking to people interviewing, going on site, looking at their physical setup and trying to understand the nature of their operations like this. But I don't have to be an expert in how they make x, y, and z, whatever they're making. Okay. Even though I like that part, I think one of the coolest parts of being a consultant is the kind of side knowledge, you know, that you get to pick up about how stuff works. It's actually not critical that I am an expert in, in say, railroad logistics or in chemical manufacturing, you know, and petrochemical plants or oil and gas refining operations, like that. I have to know, what is it that you are trying to get people to do? Why is that important? And what are you trying now? And let's look at why that's not working. And so I'm there as the doing behavior engineering, basically, looking at that saying, what do we need to to get people to do the right thing out of these circumstances? And sometimes it's, you can get a wide variety of solutions because sometimes there is a procedure change required. Sometimes there's a personnel change required. Sometimes there's management skills, sometimes there's equipment, all kinds of possibilities going into that. But we come on board to help them with the things which they've generally done a good job. There's very few organizations we run into these days who are absolutely clueless about safety. I mean, it's, it's not 1950. They are well aware of the mainstream things you need to do in safety. And they've generally done a good job with those things. So they have safety training and all the things that we talked about like this. But the one thing they haven't mastered is really anything about managing behavior. That's still, for some reason, none of that is taught, apparently, in most business management courses or in MBA programs or anything like that. So you get people, even at high levels in companies who fundamentally don't understand behavior. And so they think that putting up signs is going to change behavior and lead to people permanently, you know, ever after doing that. Or if we just explain it to them and we explain, do a good job explaining, surely they'll do the thing we've talked about before. And that's just, that's just so naive. You know, it's, it's astonishing when you understand behavior that the, you keep seeing the same mistakes. It's like there really isn't a whole lot of, you know, any other engines for societal learning going on out there around some basic things about, about why people do things. So they keep trying the same, you know, organizational tools going back, you know, let's, if somebody screws up and ends up not following a procedure and they have a near miss or they get hurt, they'll still default to, we'll send them back to training. And I'm going, hello, they've already been to training. Okay, do you think the reason why they made this mistake or didn't follow this procedure was because they forgot what you told them in training. Is that what you think? Now there are a few occasions where that's the case, but the vast majority of them, they already know what to do. They're just not doing it. And they're not doing it for other reasons that have named it to do with the contingencies, you know, surrounding that behavior versus doing the right thing. And that's the part they don't understand. So they tend to throw the same solutions at the problem again and again and again. And, and don't solve it without eventually they'll come to us, reach out to us and say, well, what do you have about this? We're stuck. We tried X, Y, and Z, and we're not getting anywhere. So, you know, what do you have? And we'll say, well, we've got some stuff. Okay. So we can work with you on that. And that's what that's what we do in the organizational consulting side, at least with, with safety related issues in, you know, high hazard environments where they have the most crucial need. I mean, we have done as part of other interventions, we've occasionally done safety interventions, where it included the, say, the administrative people, you know, in an office. And they did have some safety concerns. I was, I was working with a gas producer. And they had an office building that was on campus. It was essentially it was, they had the gas operations side of the plant over here where they're doing refining. And they had an administrative office over here with a bunch of their admin people and accounting and finance and marketing and communications and stuff like that. But because the layout of their office floors, they had a problem with coming out of their cubicles, entering, this is like merging onto an interstate, coming out of their cubicles, entering a rapidly moving human stream and running into people. Or, and there were four corners. There was a square. So people would come around corners and we said, well, what's the problem? They said, well, we run into each other. You know, because just like cars, if you're going around a corner, people will will, you know, kind of cheat over toward the corner. So two people coming from opposite directions would meet face to face or two to sometimes. And so we actually did some productive work with safety in that office environment. But the main thing I was concerned about was the gas operation side. You know, because that was the side that can go boom. And because if there was a mistake, then you were looking at a fire for a fairly large explosion. And so I remember at one point, you know, talking to the plant manager and saying to the, to the accounting people understand that this place could blow up. And he said, I've always wondered whether we should tell them that. And I kind of favored telling them just to, to be on the alert that if you, if you see the drywall coming at you at 600 miles an hour, it means there's been an explosion. So there wouldn't be terribly shocked. But we tried to work on the gas upside to make sure that there weren't explosions and to try to reduce the possibility of that. So that's all, you know, the safety kind of things that we do out there and it's with all kinds of industries. You name the type of industry. We generally work with it. And I like to understand something about what the company does. When I'm there, just, you know, as side-knowledge, you know, how do you make this? What do you do here? What's this chemical you're working with here? What does it do? How do you manage it? Those kinds of things. And it's all fascinating stuff. It's, you know, kind of inside baseball stuff. And I just, I love it because you, you would be astonished. I'm sure Karl Weiner knows this because he's consulted to a lot of the different companies out there. And Karl's been doing it longer than I have out there. But you know that when you look at these companies, some of them are named companies. You're familiar with them. But a lot of them are companies no one has heard of on a population level. But they have tremendous industries where they make things that go into everything else. They're just amazing companies. And you just had to go, I had no idea that people processed seaweed and got these very useful chemicals out of them. And you would just go, that's amazing. You know, who thought of this idea? What a brilliant idea. And so it's kind of fascinating to look at this. You sort of get some industrial history in there just in the course of learning a little bit about the company's operations. So that's all fun, Kelly. Oh man, there's so much in there that I want to unpack. Seaweed is a extremely cool thing. You can make plastic bags out of it. It's a great reusable source. So yeah, yeah. And again, Cara Ginen, which is one of those thickeners. And that is a seaweed derivative. People see non-packages and think it's an artificial product. And I go, no, no, that's a Cara Ginen, it's a natural product from seaweed. So don't be afraid. You see it on your ice cream, ice cream for thickening or maybe some emulsification or something like that. That's a natural product. Don't be afraid of it. Yeah, it's tasty and delicious and extremely reusable and renewable. So like I said, lots of things that I kind of want to unpack. I know for most behavioral or most BCBAs at least, a lot of us are working in like school districts or with agencies where we're maybe seeing a team of RBTs or parents or teachers. And I think it's really interesting how valuable having that knowledge of human systems and really how humans behave in that level when you're working with these kind of individuals. Because I know you can fall into the trap of like, Oh, well, I did. I gave them the plan to follow for a little Jimmy. And I know I gave them some visuals too. But why are they getting it? And we can kind of get stuck in that loop of they're still an organism that I need to make sure is motivated has some kind of reinforcement system feedback is important. What does this relationship look like and building on that creativity? So yeah, and that's why I really valued my OBM courses just because I now it's a I don't say a better visual, but it's a different way to view how the humans interact. And not necessarily on just an ABC level, it's multi leveled. And you can see how if I turn this knob over here, how it affects this over here, the behavioral waterfall effect. And you really, you know, you really see the management side of things. Most of the solutions to the problems you're looking at in any organization are going to have to come from what managers and supervisors do out there. And in that whole hierarchy of all the management people involved in in doing things, there is surprisingly little preparation. Most of those people get on the people management side of things. Sure, they can take any kind of HR kinds of courses or things like that. But oftentimes they don't focus on the things that we focus on because we're kind of nuts and bolts. Okay, tell us about what behaviors are crucial to driving these kinds of outcomes. And how are what are we going to do to make sure that that end result happens out there. And that includes what are we going to do as leaders? How are we going to influence those behaviors? Not just temporarily, because the temporary solutions are the things that most people default to. They say, well, we'll have a town hall. We'll put up a meeting. We'll put up some signs. We'll put up some posters, you know, those kinds of things. Yeah, that's not going to produce long-term behavior change. So there's, you know, it's not just with us with the stuff that we do, but there's terrific ideas out there in business, which suffer from the same problem of behavior mismanagement underlying them. We do work with companies, for example, that have implemented lean sigma kinds of things to improve quality and efficiency, which is its own entire methodology that arose coming out of Toyota's production system and all the early days of six sigma and things like that. And now it's fairly standard. It's a very common organizational and manufacturing environments to have something like that. But of course, it requires you to change some things that you do and to do them in some different ways. Well, that's behavior change. So if people don't know how to maintain what it takes to maintain those behavior changes, then people will often revert to the old way of doing things. And the gains they got from all of the process improvements disappear. So whether it's implementing what we're doing in behavioral safety or it's implementing something like lean sigma, you still have to understand what a managers need to do. What does this, we as people and what does this system need to do that's going to sustain these behaviors. And if that part is not designed, engineered, and maintained, as the process, then it will fall apart and you will not have an effective system for maintaining those critical things that people do to make an organizational, successful, and every level. That's the part I think that most companies are really weak at. They just don't know how to get people to do stuff. And that includes their own, you know, it's not just frontline performers. It's also how do I take a supervisor. I'm still shocked. It's happening in 2021, 2022. You know, that the people are promoted from a frontline performer or an operator into supervision and are given no preparation for how to be a supervisor. Nothing. So they're put out there and told you know, this is how I envision most sports coaches, you know, were prepared in high school, was they said, well, you can't you teach some football? Well, I know a little bit about it. Okay. Then here's your whistle. Go out there and start coaching people. Well, what are you supposed to use as a coaching methodology? Well, whatever, whatever, the people who coached you used. So it's not terribly effective. So there's a lot of, you know, fundamental mistakes in managing behavior that goes on out there because there's very little preparation. And if they do some preparation, it's usually not the kind of stuff that we're talking about, which is really, you know, how to get people to do stuff without having to rely on a versus of control or, you know, over-reliance on rules and policies and, you know, things like that. Hello, friends. If you are listening for continuing education units, here is the first of your two key words. Your first word is environment. E-N-V-I-R-O-N-M-E-N-T. Sometimes you only have to make a change in the environment. And the adverse of control is really important because you get this coercion and this power struggle that happens. And this is where you can see a lot of the issues in the last couple of years, how those things have stemmed where it's just been harboring under the surface and allowed to build up because no one's gone in and really figured out why are the humans upset? Why is it not, and you know, instead of just going in and saying, what do we need to do to fix this? It's more of a blame game sometimes. And, well, you as the organism, as the human, the worker, it's your fault that things aren't going well, as opposed to, well, I don't have the resources. No one told me what to do. Or I was told to do it this way and no one told me to change it over. So being able to go in and pinpoint really does help alleviate some of that stress and that control battle, too, which is really yes. And sometimes it's dead obvious when you look at things, but sometimes it's very subtle. In safety in particular, there's there are plenty of circumstances where people are should be doing because it's actually more effective. It's behaviors like safety hazard scans, you know, like right before there's a number of things that people do before they go out to do some work in a hazardous environment. But the closest in one is something that we recommend that people do and many other people reckon we didn't invent this, but a thing called a safety hazard scan sometimes they're called take twos or something like this where you get to the work site and you should scan for local hazards, you know, now that you're out there, you may have been out there the day before, but something may have changed in that time. There's a new threat, there's a new difficulty, new obstacle they may interfere with what you're doing safely. And so people say, okay, so you know, here's what you do, you go look for see if there's any hazards and then you figure out if if those things are going to control the the risks out there and that and mitigate the hazards. And if you're good to go, then go ahead and if you're not, then you don't call for help or something like this. The problem is that that's a extra effort be there's not a lot of natural reinforcement for doing that. So every time you go out to the job, you're supposed to do that, which is a good practice, but the world doesn't really provide any natural reinforcement for that because whether you do it or don't in a modern industrial environment, whether you do things safely or not, in most cases, there's no difference because the probability of you getting hurt or a serious, you know, incident happening is very low altogether. So you can be unsafe, do unsafe actions, you can forget to do your hazard scans, you have the wrong tools and you can get away with that for thousands and thousands of reps. Okay, and not get hurt. So if you're doing something to say, well, if I do this, this makes me safer. Unfortunately, the world doesn't provide any identifiable consequence that looks different from when you were doing it unsafely and nothing bad happened that day. So there's not a lot of natural reinforcement for that. In that case, you really have to say, well, then you need a chronic, you know, a system in place. It's either going to be peer-based or it's going to be a supervisor manager based to provide some observation and reinforcement of those behaviors, at least on a periodic basis, to maintain them out there because if you don't, the natural consequences, well, it's like non-differential reinforcement. There is nothing different just happening, and that's a prime circumstance where those behaviors will extinguish fairly rapidly. And you'll have a hard time recovering them where people go through the motions of the pencil whip before, you know, that says, did you do your hazard scan? Yes. You know, let's just check a box like this and they won't have done anything like that. So people will look at the paper and they'll go, oh, see, they're still doing it. Some paper, we have forms that prove that they're doing it like this. And, you know, we'll say, okay, well, you have eyes on. Does anybody have eyes on, even periodically, to see this? Some companies do have audit systems, whether they do sample observed behavior, but a lot of them don't. And then we pick it up when something happens. You know, there's an incident or a near miss, like this, and suddenly somebody goes, well, wait, how how how did that happen? Because people should have been checking for this stuff. What do you mean they weren't checking for this stuff? And they're shocked. Well, if you understand behavior, you shouldn't be shocked by this. And you should have figured out a long time ago, what's going to take to actually sustain that behavior? And that's that requires a good knowledge of behavior and understanding of contingencies and multiple contingencies interacting. And that's the that's the fun complex part, you know, is is teasing apart those things out there to look at what's going on in that organizational environment. It's one of my favorite parts about setting systems is I like to consider like looking through the vectors and like, okay, if I put this layer down, what does it do? Okay, then if I take that away and I put this one down, oh, that's really cool. I think this question actually goes really well with what you've been talking about. It's asking, oh, there we go. In your experience, what process is in interventions? Have you found or of course my chat bar is going to be a pain? Have you found or implemented to achieve long term outcomes? And then do you guys take a functional approach to achieve those kind of changes? And so I feel like what you've talked about a little bit is it's kind of a combination of things because sometimes it's not a consequence-based thing. It needs to be more on the antecedent side of things, but other times if we are looking at consequences in what maintains behavior, then we do kind of maybe take a functional approach, but it's not going to be the same I think as what, you know, what we'd commonly think about in like, you know, the autism or disabilities world of a function-based change. So can you kind of talk a little bit about that? Yeah. Yeah. It's our version of, you know, in standard applied behavior analysis these days, I guess, you know, there's a common understanding of what a functional assessment is, which is doing something to analyze why this behavior is occurring. So it's trying to understand the contingencies. And our version of this that we use is we call picnic analysis. And it's looking at the antecedents and consequences, but it's really looking for strong and weak consequences for the thing you want them to do and the thing they're currently doing, which is not that. And so you're always looking at behavior in light of choice. In other words, what is it that people are doing now? What should they be doing? What are they doing now? Why are they doing this instead of the thing that they're doing? So you have to look at it as a choice, to understand, because it's in the end, it's all about relative strength of antecedents and consequences for doing this versus doing that. So consequences of contingencies don't have to be optimized, but the contingencies promoting, you know, inefficient, unproductive, unsafe behavior can't be more powerful than the things for doing it the right way. And if you don't design those things in there, you can be very, you can be kind of guard and not realize that there are reasons for this. And sometimes the reasons are not that hard to see, but people way underestimate them. We, in picnic language, we talk about effort mix and a nick is a negative immediate certain consequence. Okay, so an effort, Nick, is one where doing the right thing takes some time or effort, some additional time or effort, which is very often the case in safety work. Doing the right thing involves more steps and requires putting on, you know, personal protective equipment and those kinds of things. And people will say, yeah, we know we should get that and say, why aren't you wearing it? Well, you know, it's, if you look at a lot of PPE, look at, look at all the last couple years when people, the PPE we've all been talking about during the pandemic is wearing a face mask. And that's just a face mask. That's not even a dustural level PPE in a lot of heavy duty environments. That's a simple face mask. And people complain left, it's too much hassle to put it on. It's hot and it's not uncomfortable. Yeah, try wearing a self-contained, you know, breathing apparatus and respirator and safety goggles and a face shield and gloves, all of which inhibits your senses. So that the very thing that we're trying to protect with the PPE is actually interfered with. So you put on hearing protection. What's the first thing that happens? What's the most immediate consequence that happens when you put on hearing protection? You can't hear. Well, I thought we were trying to prevent that. Like this, now you can't hear, okay? You put on safety glasses and in the right environment, South Florida during the summer, you put those on, they're going to fog up. Immediately, then you can't see. So there's a lot of built-in natural consequences, which are directly operating against what you want out there. And you have to understand that and try to figure out what you can do, what's a go-around for that. Maybe it is different equipment. Maybe it's placement of equipment. I dealt with a company this summer and they had had a near miss where a fellow was climbing over a handrail over a big drop, like this to do some work. And the management was looking at that going, why was he climbing over the handrail when the rail was supposed to prevent you from climbing it over, climbing over it? And then secondly, if he was going to do that for any amount of time, why didn't he have fall protection on? And we get to ask some of the basic questions and we say, okay, where's the fall protection? And they say, well, it's in a warehouse. You have to walk over the warehouse and they said, okay, how far away is the warehouse from the point of work? And they said about a hundred yards. And I said, you know, that's a fair hike when I'm under time pressure. And he said, oh, it's not that bad. All of us can do it. And I said, no, it's not whether you can do it. It's whether you're likely to do it when you're under time pressure. And why is it a hundred yards from the point of work? If you want this guy to have the important option of wearing fall protection, where should you put the fall protection at the point of performance? Okay. So can you not stage it closer to where the the high work is likely to be? That's one way to address it. You know, you can also pull back from this and say, wait a minute, why do we have any work at height? Why is this guy in this position? Can we eliminate that somehow, which has more to do with the hierarchy of hazard controls kind of logic that is critical to safety out there? We'll we'll back up and say, is there a way to prevent this kind of work at height? Because all work at height is inherently dangerous. Even if you're wearing the fall protection is designed to prevent you from dying, not from getting beaten up. You'll get bruised and battered. And that's not good. If you take a fall, so, you know, can we eliminate that and and back up with that? So all kinds of things like that, but I would have to explain to people to managers who should know better in this, but they don't. They really haven't had any behavior training like this that humans are sensitive to tiny amounts of increased effort or time. Somebody will say, well, but that only takes a few seconds and I'll go, you know what? A few seconds is enough to switch, you know, to change your behavior. A few seconds saved is what people do all the time in many environments and many tasks that gets us into trouble. So if people underestimate an effort or time Nick in there, they'll never really understand what they need to do to fix the problem, which is what can you do if you can't alter and eliminate the hazard entirely. What can you do to reduce that effort Nick and maybe it's staging the right kind of tools and equipment at the point of performance? And so it's a reachover to get this and it's not walk a hundred yards, deal with a, you know, strappy clerk who has a multi-page form for you to fill out while the rest of your team is waiting for you to come back and show up. That's not a good setup. So sometimes it's explained to people's stuff that sounds obvious to us in behavior analysis, but which is not obvious to most people who haven't, you know, dived into behavior like we have. I remember when I took OBM as an undergrad, there were other business majors that were in the class and the class was almost literally divided. They sat on the left side and then the behavior analyst student sat on the right side and it was frustrating because we got it, we got it, and they were really stuck on, you know, positive means good, right? So it was just praise statements, like, or we just put up, like, I don't understand why the sign doesn't work. And so it's really important that we do take that time to explain, you know, competing contingencies, response cost for things because yeah, I mean, how many of us will sit there and in order not to have to get up to go get the remote, like, oh man, maybe I can knock it onto the room, but we'll bring it to me. Or like, maybe if I reach out with my shoe, like, because we are, like, admittedly so. Exactly. That's why we're able to use most home examples in explaining this stuff to people. We can, one of my favorite things to say to people is, you know, if they're stumped about why people aren't following a procedure or using the right kind of equipment or something like that, I'll say women. So you've lived in your house and you've had to do stuff and you've probably got a tool chest, but how many times have you used not a hammer for a hammer? And almost everybody will go, oh yeah, I've banged in some, some hammers, you know, for curtain rods with, uh, you know, with the, the button of a screwdriver. And I said, it wasn't because you didn't have a hammer, right? It wasn't because you didn't have a hammer training, right? You knew how to operate the hammer. There was no problem there with this. The hammer was a walk around the corner, into your closet to get. And what'd you have in your hand? You got the screwdriver. So you flipped it over, did it. So you've done the very thing you're complaining about these people doing. Like this, you stood in a chair to replace a light bulb. You know, at home, instead of going out and getting your step ladder. So the good part of this is explaining the behavior other than a few technical terms, which we do in some training and not in others, we try and plan English and most circumstances. You can explain the behavioral processes in everyday language because people see them operating. And once you talked about what the mechanism is, it's easy to point out examples of that in real life. And so they go, oh, yes, I have seen instances of that. I never really understood that before. And at that point, you know, if they want to learn more about the terminology field, that's fine. We can talk about it. We do in our week long workshop, but we don't typically go into much detail on terminology in our shorter, you know, training type events. What's important to make sure that your audience actually understands you because otherwise, what, what good are we doing? You know, I used to tout. And this has been my humbling last few years of, like, no, everybody will use correct terminology. I want parents using positive and negative reinforcement correctly. Like, I was, I was very rigid. And it's not okay because my programs, I'm sure, could have been much more successful, much more quickly. Had I just been like, hey, it's kind of like this, you know, when you, and explaining it in layman's terms and the way that my listener is going to understand. And that way, they're able to then go, oh, so if it's like this here, I'm going to give an example. Is it correct or incorrect? Ah, now we have more teaching moments. And their knowledge starts to expand from there. Yes. And we have Carl Binderzon. And he's one of the masters of speaking in plain English to organizations, probably more than we do at ADI. I mean, one of the things we have a reputation at ADI as we are the behavior science people. So people come to us and say, what, what do you have from behavior science that can help us? And there are some people in those organizations who will say, tell me more about this. And so we're happy to go on and explain some of the technical things. But, you know, at some practical level, I mean, you don't want to waste time in getting people to master jargon. You're not giving them an advanced degree or anything like this. So if they, if they screw up some of the terminology, that's not fatal. As long as what they do actually is consistent with what you're trying to get across out there. So in the end, I'm not terribly, you know, I'm not going to be terribly concerned with that. We do use that terminology in our own writings on the technical things. But if you look at the books that we publish, we publish highly readable books with a very modest amount of technical information in them about behavioral analysis. There's not a lot of high-end stuff. There's some basic things out there, which are really probably intrigued most readers like this. They don't need to master the technical parts to see the points that we're trying to make. And I think Carl and his group has done an outstanding job of that for many years out there. If you want to get more dense, you can like, you mentioned at the beginning of our talk, Tom Gilbert, and human competence and human engineering, because that is very dense. And it's, it's not user-friendly in that respect. There is a lot of information, but it does take a while to kind of unpack and everything. So I like the way that you guys have been able to utilize the technology in a way that is more applicable for more people. So you've given us kind of like little bits and pieces. And as we titled today's talk as a day in the life of, which I may or may not try to use some Beatles music for it. We'll see for our intro. Yes. And we've got a lot of bed. I'm going to have to. It's Friday. Wait, that's probably not appropriate on Friday. But kind of give us a walk through. Like when you take on a project, you know, what does it look like from start to finish or, you know, what does your day look like as you're working through things? Because they know it's, I mean, you go into an office, but it's not like, you know, a lot of us are familiar with either. I'm on a Zoom call with people, but I'm doing like, hey, let's do some discrimination training. What is this? What is this kind of deal? And that's definitely not what it looks like on your end. So could you just kind of give us a rundown of what it means to be a senior OPM consultant? Yeah. If we work, usually we'll get an inquiry from a client about something and we'll have some preliminary conversations about what their performance problems are, what their interests are. Like this will often go then into kind of an assessment phase and we'll be doing things like doing interviews with people at multiple levels, kind of a sample cross section of people involved in whatever this performance issue that is that they're having. We'll also do our company. We have a variety of surveys that we can offer out there to get people's perceptions. You never don't, we know, we know not to confuse the survey with reality. It's what people are currently thinking about and feeling about something like this, but it does give you some useful information that then you can go and follow up with. So a typical or kind of soup the nuts, you know, thing would work like this. We're going to client inquiry. They say, we're going to problem like this. We've got it's fairly big. We've done x, y, and z. It hasn't really done anything. We'll take a look at how they're currently managing this issue. And that will involve this thing I'm talking about as an assessment. So survey, follow up interviews on before the pandemic. This was all on site. It was going there, walking the plant, going and interviewing people for sometimes several days, you know, like 45 minute interviews for days out there, but also looking at data that they have that where they've tracked this thing and looking at trends out there to try to understand some of how their systems work and those kinds of things. We do our own kind of analysis and report back to them. And with some options of here's some things we can do to help with this and they'll decide, okay, green light or not green light, you know, for these things. And if they want to pursue that, then typically we'll do something which often involves us doing training for their management cadre. And that's sometimes front line supervisors, sometimes it's the entire management hierarchy from executives to front line supervisors in different different workshops for them of different lengths. And then coaching and follow up because we're not drive by trainers as most of us in OBM who do consulting. We're not just training shops. We will follow up with people after training and check in with them and as we used to do, go visit, sit in on some of the meetings that we've taught them to hold where they discuss what they're doing to influence these behaviors out there and try to help them overcome some of the usual problems that we see on any implementation like that. So that's all kind of year one stuff. There's year two and year three kind of stuff. Depending on what the intervention is, we have a variety of things to continue to follow. We may train some of their own people to be trainers, we may train some of their own people to be internal coaches, like essentially do what we do. And that could take us into the year two, year three. I just did back earlier this year, I had like 90 people on a zoom from North America and the UK with one of our UK based clients who has operations in North America and throughout the United Kingdom. And where those were all people that we had put through one kind of training and they wanted to bring them back and get some more advanced training and a little bit of refresher on things. And we did that and that's probably, I think we're looking at guys that's probably four years after we started working with them. We'll continue to do that stuff. So a lot of the work has a fairly long tail on it and we can continue to do offer services and even do kind of follow up surveys, check in with things. They say we've got a particular problem here. Can you help us with this? We can do that kind of stuff. So we will follow up with people, the ideal kind of thing is to work with people over a number of years. Get something implemented, but figure out how to maintain it and then figure out if there's other things that we can help them with with this and try to stay in touch with them. Because just because you do one intervention doesn't mean that everything's going to continue to play out. New people are going to come in. New policies are going to be created. Like COVID happens and suddenly we're all on zoom and you can't be innocent. So you know, things and you know, it's a good humbling reminder. I think for us as we analyze contingencies, do you remember that there's a lot of variables out there and there's a lot of things that can, you know, derail whatever plan we had in place. So I really dig the idea of keeping in touch with those organizations over a lengthy period of time and the idea of training trainers, we see that a lot within like the teacher world or the clinical world of, you know, or training staff. Like I go and I train one member of staff and then they go to the day hab in the group home and would train from there. And so that's lovely and to do that on the organizational side because you're teaching that way you don't have to teach everybody how to identify the wide variety of critical features that you're going to need to analyze and pull apart and figure out which contingency which one to turn and which one to slide the lever and things like that. You know, if you just have one or two people that are knowledgeable on that, that's awesome. So they have their own like OBM crew. Yeah, and because some of them become in one way or another become an internal champion because either because they're training folks or we explicitly train them as coaches to assist the ongoing implementation and maintenance of something that we put in place. So we'll have I'm preparing to at the end of the month go back and train some more internal coaches in one of our clients overseas. And so that's as long as they want to continue with with the kind of thing that we're doing, they'll need internal support. And there's some companies, you know, we work with some international companies that have so many, you know, they're all over the world. And there's logistically, it's not possible for our group at ADI to go everywhere their their locations are. I mean, these these companies are amazing because they have operations on every continent. And and Pacific Islands and things like that. So at some point when you get to that scale, we've got to say, okay, now we're talking about preparing some of your people to be training people. We can help train them and calibrate them. And you know, look out for things like drift over the years. And some organizations do that really well. I think one of the more fun ones I remember is was we had a client who held sort of like, you know, one of those singing competition shows. But it wasn't so about singing. It was get up. And here's here's a short bit audition by essentially teaching this bit. And they had teaching auditions like this. And it was like American Idol had a judges panel and things like that. I mean, it was it was the most fun and outrageous thing I had seen a company do to select people for that was that they just held a competition. And it made people really enthusiastic to be, you know, I want to be in, you know, I want to be on this team and things like that. And some companies do that far better than others. Some people and, you know, they may they may say, okay, who wants to do this and who we think could be a great trainer. And other people it's it's sort of like, well, who's available? And they may not turn out to be the best trainers. And we have to work with that those guys and just see what we can do to make them good trainers or good internal coaches and good champions. I would love to have auditioned for things. That would have been so much more fun. As opposed to like, here's my CV and my resume. Woo, it's exciting. I know. I know. It was it was it was a completely novel thing. And, and you know, working with companies like that where they're enthusiastic, innovative and, you know, take the ball and run with it without us having to tell them every step, you know, that's the kind of client that is really fun to work with because they're really engaged. They're pushing us for things. They say they come back with ideas. That's that's real exciting. So another side benefit of doing all this is you get to meet a lot of great people, you know, in all kinds of industries and in all parts of the world. And it's just amazing, you know, what what what people are doing out there. And they're all working hard. Man, they are trying to do their best and solve the problems and troubleshoot stuff. And the whole thing is pretty, you know, it's it's I guess it's energizing in one way because you think, you know, we deal with customers as regular citizens. I mean, we're often on the customer service and the things where we're calling up some customer service line or something like that and we get we get a lousy customer service and it doesn't sound like somebody's engaged. Well, that may be but there's lots of places where you look at and there's people at every level in that company just working their butts off to try to think of what how can we do this better. And and that's, you know, that's just lights up your day. Man, that's that's like, okay, we can help you do that better. And they go, well, tell us how what can we do? Alrighty, here is the second of your two key words. Your second word is expert E X P E R T. You don't have to be an expert. You just need to be curious expert. I feel like it's my goal is like, you know, how can I make this, you know, very conscious like goal diamond in the instructional approach of like, you know, what is your ideal environment look like? Cool. What do we need to do to get there? You know, what are the barriers and being able to unpack that? So it's, oh, that's yeah, I dig, I dig. So that is the cool stuff. So with, you said that you were doing a lot of things on site and then 2020 happened and we've shifted a lot to zoom. And there's been a little bit of openings now where you've been able to go back on site, but really, what has that changed or has anything really changed in the way that you guys work with this, you know, barrier with having to do a lot more telehealth, telehealth side of things. Yeah, telehealth. Zoom. There we go. For everybody else in the world, it's Zoom. For us, it's telehealth. Yeah. Yeah, we've been able to do a lot of the things, but some things is very hard to do. The thing that is crucial in an assessment is, I mean, we can do surveys like this, but it's really helpful to be able to see the lay of the land. You know, I had a steel mill client a number of years ago, and to be able to go up and walk the mill, then, and, you know, okay, what do y'all do here on this hot side? What do you do over on the finishing side? You know, how does that work so that you end up having a decent understanding of the kind of things that are going on, and to be able to visit people, you know, in their work environment, right? So you would go see, hey, I got three supervisors over on the finishing side of the mill to go see. Out there, we can go out on the floor, look at the machinery equipment like that. And right now, that's hard to do in every place. We can't, we can't get out to some places. But hopefully if, you know, Omicron, surge crests and things like that, that, you know, we may be able to get back to doing that. But training follow up, we've been able to do that online fairly well. It's still not quite the same as you would have with an in-person class. And things like that, just because the dynamics between people in a classroom are part of the equation. You know, they're talking to each other, they're asking us questions, and they don't tend to do that as much on on on Zoom. So having a class there of people in a safe environment like that is still the, you know, definitely the gold standard. Well, like with the audition, it makes a big difference. Like a person can look, you know, look one way on their paper. And then when they come in, they're like, oh my gosh, you're boring. No one's going to listen to you. You're just not engaging. But they look great on paper. And so being able to have that dynamic, that human element, because yeah, maybe somebody's going to make an example that sparks this question over here and then leads to this great discussion. As we were talking beforehand, like most everybody has their videos turned off, and that's totally fine. But it's, it's really tough. Like if it's just me staring at myself, and there's no audience to give me feedback. Am I doing a good job? I don't know. And so yeah, there's that huge barrier there. And I think we kind of ask questions. You know, it feel comfortable asking questions, you know, just in a classroom environment or something. So I mean, people can, you know, this platform enables you to ask questions. It's not, you know, it's not quite as easy or as dynamic as people just going, hey, I've got to, you know, raise your hand in the classroom. But it's definitely if we didn't have this and the pandemic hit, we wouldn't be able to Google hot. So I am very happy that we were already working on these platforms. And, you know, we were, we're coming up the speed on before everything hit on zoom, Microsoft Teams, Amazon Chime, some of the other services out there. So that's all been, that's all been fun away. We've gotten a lot more expertise with these systems. Like you said, you don't have to be a total expert in all of them. You just have to know enough to be like, okay, cool. These are, this is how the gears turn and what makes it tick and outstanding. So I know Slack is another one that we tried once. And it's really nifty. But our little company is not quite big enough for it. But it's, yeah, sometimes it can just be not as simple as utilizing technology. But there's a lot of technology out there. And sometimes it can just be as, you know, quick as, hey, we need to move the equipment closer. Or I need to be able to get immediate contact with my team member and just my team member in this one particular thing without having to go through calling this person a radioing or all these other things. So it's nifty that we can utilize, you know, technology across the board and do really cool things. Yes. And we're looking for more of that. I mean, even about the years ago, before the, before the pandemic and everything, I was in one of our clients that had two way video at the time. I don't, it was all closed circuit. It was their operation. It wasn't zoomed like this. But where, they were in a room that was set up as a, as a, as a video room. And the people that they were talking to were showing up on this glass wall over here at scale. So in other words, do you saw somebody that was at a normal one-to-one human scale showing up at this, it looked like the person was in the room which is behind this piece of glass. So the audio was top notch, the video was top notch. And that was, you know, it was like eight years ago. So zoom may be a step backwards compared to some of those closed circuit operations. But those were, you know, those were kind of state of the art AV systems that large companies could afford. Definitely. I've seen several articles discussing the uses, because even Facebook, Meta, has their virtual reality stuff. And people are trying to have more office meetings in like this virtual space. So it's interesting. It's interesting. So yeah, so if you're curious, behavior analyst, go forth and check out technology and see what wonders you can do with it. Absolutely. Another question that I wanted to get into and I'm kind of watching our time here too, because it is Friday afternoon guys. Thanks for hanging out with us. But we mentioned at the beginning, why people believe weird things, which I absolutely love this class. And I have referenced it. I think throughout my entire behavior, I let a career and told people like you have to get this book, you have to read it, because it does teach you why people do silly things and kind of the the convoluted histories that can build from these things like weird things that can shape up. So with your knowledge in that, do you apply it when you're looking at these human system organizations of like, are we just doing this because this is the way we've always done it? Like is there some overlap here? Yeah, I think I have to give credit to Michael Schermer, who wrote the book, why people believe weird things and several follow-ons for that. That was that together with the magician James Randi at the time. If you combine Trenner Stan's superstition and magic, you realize a lot about why people believe things and how people are deceived by things. But I use that whole course really just as a as a cute vehicle to teach the scientific method and critical thinking. Because you have to take apart these things and Schermer did a fairly good job, I think of understanding, you know, trying to explain why people would end up, you know, believing things. His book came out that we're talking mid-90s and it's more relevant today than ever with all the conspiracy thinking which is taken over the country. He was talking about this 30 years ago looking at these factors and how could anybody believe that that person claiming to be a psychic or cross from you is actually talking to your dead grandmother? Why would you believe that? And how can you not be fooled by somebody who is obviously a con artist in doing these things? And that's where, you know, understanding how magic works and because magicians are actors. And that was, you know, I took those things and put them together with what I wanted to teach about the scientific method. So it was really sort of a research methods course without research. It was about scientific method for people who just, you know, it was not coming in with a heck of a lot of scientific background in there because you wouldn't have to really to come into that course. But that it does help me understand, you know, things and try to make sense out of very complicated things. One of the great things that Schermer said was, hey, it's even very bright people can be fooled. He talked about this with magic tricks like this that sometimes it's something that in some ways you can fool smart people even easier than you can with people who are as highly educated, like this, if you know what you're doing. So I thought that was a great course to put together. And I think they're still doing it at UNT, but, you know, somebody took it over. I'm not sure if it's still going on like that, but it was it was a fascinating thing, but my underlying motivation was really, was I was already teaching graduate research methods. And I think the scientific method is the one of the best things that humans have ever come up with other than understanding fermentation. But, you know, that is relevant for everything that we do. And I thought, well, I wanted to teach something about that, but if I just set it up as a scientific method course, nobody would have taken it. So, you know, if you learn how magic tricks work and why people believe in superstitions and and wild things which have no basis for that, then suddenly becomes interesting to understand scientific and critical thinking. And I guess we didn't do that enough otherwise we wouldn't have all of this wacky thinking out there. I mean, you told us, I do remember, and maybe a couple of the other UNT alums can chime in and give me some experience here. We had to pledge to only you as our powers for good at the end of class. And I have done well, but there have been many times. I've come close to being like, oh, I could totally just do a hot read on this person right now. Oh, yeah, which yes, I did I did do once, but there was no money involved. It was just because again, military families, you intersect each other in different places. And I realized you can predict a lot. Yeah. So, and the more you hang around people and the more experiences you get, and the dye just diverse cultures and everything like, you know, it's, you know, Dr. Highton, you were an army brat. I was an Air Force brat. And being able to experience different cultures in different humans and different lifestyles and behaviors and everything starts putting those extra layers into, oh, okay. So if I'm, if I'm looking at a situation, okay, well, that doesn't really fit. Oh, but that, that experience kind of fits here. Let's unpack that a little bit more and you start playing around. And yeah, the why people believe where things was phenomenal at teaching those critical thinking skills. And again, without making it be overbearing, it was very much like. No, it was entertaining. And it was fantastically entertaining. Yes. If, if we had Skinner, we have Skinner had taken that tack and coming up with, how do we teach behavior principles without confusing people? Maybe the terminology in our field would have been different. So positive and negative reinforcement will always be a nasty pedagogical problem. It's, it doesn't make any sense. It's inherently going against one of the normal language ways that we've learned. So, you know, it might have helped. Well, even in verbal behavior, the discussion of tax and man's and dealing with other professions like speech pathologists. You know, it's, we can come across a little pretentious there and be like, well, this is our language. So, but yeah, it's all, but it's all the same, it's all the same delicious frosting. So, thank you so much. This has been extremely enlightening. If anybody has any additional questions or comments, please feel free to throw them in the chat right now. And you can take a minute. And as we're doing that, Dr. Highton, if you could kind of plug, you know, I know that you have a new book that came out recently, any other websites or where we can find you on the web if people want to get in contact. Oh, yeah. I'm on LinkedIn. So, anyone can connect with me on LinkedIn. You can always, if you go, if you want to look up any of the things that we've written a lot, we have articles, we have blogs, we have all kinds of things on our website. So, if anybody wants to look at any of our free content that we have on our website, it's obidangels.com. And you can find a lot of links to things. It's not my book. Actually, it's our two senior VPs, Judy Agnew and Dave Ewell had just our newest book is called "Sake by Design." And that is more of a system's, you know, understanding how organizational systems influence behavior and what you can do about them, to design them so that they actually influence behavior the right way, because a lot of systems get designed without really a lot of forethought into exactly what kind of behavioral effects it will produce. So, we're kind of taking apart that, having worked with a lot of systems problems out there in organizations where you're trying to do this and this is, you know, something which should be helping you is actually interfering with what you're trying to do. So, easy read short book, not technical like this, like all of our popular books from ADI. They're all designed to be something that you can get something useful from without a whole lot of time, without a whole lot of effort technically wise. So, that's the only thing I really have to plug, but you can always, like I said, reach me on LinkedIn and, you know, you can see stuff that we post or catch us at a conference if we ever get back to the point where we're having real conferences. I don't know. I'm happy to have virtual conferences these days with all the raging variants out there. I'm happy to be doing this from home. I mean, I'm a big fan of sitting here and going no one knows if I'm actually wearing real pants or not, because I don't have to put real pants on if I don't have to or shoes or anything like that. And if you keep your video guys off, you can just have whatever party you want going on. So, well, thank you so much, sir. This was been really fantastic. I've got my, you know, page and a half of notes. And so I'm excited to go back over this a little bit later. I'm going to go ahead and post how you can get your CEUs in the chat. Well, it could actually went to everybody. That's impressive. I had a few moments in earlier episodes where I would send it to like the waiting room. So that was helpful. Yeah, again, technology and I are not friends. But yeah, thank you guys so much for joining us on a Friday. I hope that this kicks your weekend off to a great start. And it's a good start to the new year. You get some knowledge bombs, get some good learning in. And if you're curious, hopefully this has given people some ideas on on how to reach out and how to maybe start to pursue that kind of career path. So thank you all so very much. I love you all. Be good humans. Thank you, Kelly. Thank you. And we'll see you later. All right, listeners, thanks for sticking around. As promised, here is a preview from episode 25, our consent and ascent follow up with our group of neurodivergent BCBAs. Noncompliance is a social skill. And it really is because not complying blindly with people is a social skill that we all should use in our daily lives. I mean, this is a thing, you know, we're going through a lot of political stuff, a lot of government things. Noncompliance is one of the social skills we want to teach our children to do. And we want to teach them to do this in a way that helps benefit them and helps them contact reinforcement more often more frequently. And so I think I think the two different topics that I'm on is, hey, don't just change the language and think it's all better. And be look at it as possibly self advocacy rather than just noncompliance. Thank you for listening to this adventure of the atypical behavior analyst. Check out the website atypicalba.com for more episodes, references and to purchase CEUs. To stay up to date, like and follow us on social media, just search atypicalbehavioranalyst. If you like the show, please rate and leave us a review. And if you want to support the show but don't need CEUs, you can help by clicking the Buy us a coffee link in the show notes. So until next time listeners, grab your towel, keep exploring, and we'll see you in the fringes.