POV: You’re a behavior analyst who was promised vast opportunity because of your credential, but you’re stuck working as “the autism behavior person.” That sucks!
Kitty corner to the endless opportunity promise is the field’s vow to provide jobs outside of children and even healthcare: Organizational Behavior Management (OBM), health and nutrition, sports coaching, sleep and habit consulting. And yet, you’re still the autistic 2nd graders’ personal punching bag. You tout your adorable Clinical Director title without directing much other than those spare, flying fucks you’ve scrounged up over your clinical career.
‘honestly unorthodox’ is now Operation: Replace My Salary. Subscribe for free and become a poop-scooper (haha, kidding, except not really)
Be not afraid, grasshopper. There are glimmers of hope in this old curmudgeon you’re listening to. Fields like OBM, in particular, are not blocked be a credential gap. And there isn’t a lock on the discipline’s jobs only for those who “came up” as OBMers in the 90’s.
The block is your mindset and absence of business knowledge.
Here are five ways our “clinical hat” prunes our thinking in ways highly unattractive to nearly any career outside of “autism behavior people”--- and what you can do to shake loose our hyper-specialized reputation.
1) You Know Behavior But Not Revenue
Our field tricks its clinicians. Graduate programs and practicums remind us that everything is “behavior”, which means we can address any problem. Wrong! Your immaculate behavior plans and multi-tiered systems of color-coded data monitoring may get a head-nod in the clinic, but they will get you exiled in the business world. If you’re unaware of how a business makes money (i.e., where the profit margins live, bottlenecks in service delivery, revenue versus profit), your data-analytic lens and your gung-ho-behavior-plan language cannot meaningfully improve performance.
What Matters Instead: Learn how revenue flows. What outcomes move the business forward (i.e., boost revenue while preserving healthy margins)?
Experiment For You: Choose any company you know and write down its main revenue stream, biggest cost, and the one behavior that drives profit.
2) You’re Waiting for OBM to Be a Job Title
In your defense, you ipso-facto absorbed this falsity while studying for the exam. Behavior analysts can do anything, well-known people in the field say. We can change the world, keynote speakers coo.
There will never be a role on Indeed or Glassdoor which explicitly lists “OBM Consultant”, “Chief People Officer”, “Chief Motivating Professional”, or even “Behavioral Organizational Consultant”. Adam Grant did not break in to America’s highest-powered corporations by virtue of his PhD in Industrial Psychology. He got “in” by deeply understanding workplace problems and offering the company’s leader a series of solutions. Grant’s ideas are usable because he’s put them into practice over and over again- not just read about them.
OBM is not a credential or a title. I wouldn’t even call it a roaring subdiscipline of our field. It is instead a lens by which you operate under. You must solve operational problems by examining them from the perspective of employees at every level—-from peon to CEO. You’re no longer “BCBA” or “clinician”… you are operator.
What Matters Instead: Identifying workplace systems in place and how they improve upon versus hinder a business’ growth.
Experiment For You: Identify one operational problem in any organization you see this week and write down one change you’d test if you were responsible for fixing it.
3) You’re Still Thinking Like a Service Provider
We measure value mostly by billable hours, nickel-and-diming the time spent with each client on our caseload, and social metrics (e.g., Hanley’s method, ‘trauma-informed care’, etc.). These typically have nothing to do with improved outcomes. We also tend to admire problems for too long (i.e., analyze relentlessly instead of just trying an intervention), which slows decision-making. You cannot be slow in the world of business, the world where speed is more important than competence.
What Matters Instead: Creating leverage within systems versus changing individual behavior.
Experiment For You: Take one task you do regularly and write the outcome it actually improves instead of the time it takes.
4) You’re Fluent in Jargon and Storytelling, Not In Outcomes
Go on Facebook and type in “Organizational Behavior Management” or any ABA/BCBA-run group which claims to provide mentorship in this sector. You will find that every post is rich with not only jargon, but a CEU opportunity or podcast link. These will not “get you in” to OBM--- you’re more likely to hoard them in your collection of information without taking any sort of action. And that’s probably because CEUs and most CEU deliverers won’t tell you that OBM-type-jobs require you to immerse yourself in business by either 1) working in one yourself or 2) starting one yourself.
We like to generate fables in our field. He doesn’t like that because Mom emailed me saying that he had a rough night, which is more likely to increase seizure activity and affect his nervous system and attention… No. Stop it. Business focuses on outcomes.
What Matters Instead: All of the key people in big organizations like Microsoft or Google or Meta are wholly uninterested in your theories. They want proof or productivity (number figures), efficient operating systems (itemized and task-analyzed lists), employee and consumer retention (percentage of churn/turnover), and cost savings (expense reduction).
Experiment For You: Pick one project you’ve worked on and rewrite its impact in a single measurable result (time saved, errors reduced, revenue increased, etc.).
5) You Haven’t Run Any Systems Yet! Get Those Boots On the Ground!
First of all, if your OBM gig consists of training staff on behavioral principles that can help educators, social workers, parents, children, etc., I don’t think you’re “doing OBM”. Unless this is something you find appealing and/or want to break into, then sure, call it anything you’d like. But if you’re truly interested in the business operations pivotal to a legit-OBMer’s role, you must not take advice from people still doing traditional ABA work but calling it “OBM”.
I’ve written about this concept probably a thousand times by now: the unread library effect. Consuming OBM content without ever managing a workflow, generating organization incentives, or analyzing a business’ processes in real time will keep you in the ABA clinic getting spit on until you’re in your 50’s.
What Matters Instead: Much like we cannot master golf just by watching Tiger Woods on YouTube, positioning yourself as the go-to OBM consultant requires you to operate something on your own. This could be a small business or a side gig. I recommend service businesses that have nothing to do with children, ABA, or anything helping-profession-related. You’ll quickly find how disillusioned our field is into thinking we can master real-world problems just by reading about them.
Experiment For You: Create a simple checklist for any repeat task this week and notice how consistency changes immediately.
What All This Means for You
The awesome news which I hope my trusty readers have gleaned is that OBM isn’t hidden behind another certification or CEU. It’s a skillset built through baptism by fire: understanding how organizations function by following around the owner of a dryer vent cleaning business all day. Or analyzing profit and loss statements from an e-commerce boutique and monitoring how money moves. Or how current systems in place for dispatching poop-scoop technicians on 49 routes across 3 separate counties can make or break a company’s profit margins.
The beauty in what we do is that we can see opportunity anywhere. The only snag, then, is combining behavior science with business literacy from the beginning, if that’s the route we hope to go career-wise.
NEXT UP…: I’ll break down how I’m using my small service business(es) as a real-world OBM lab and what it has taught me already. I guarantee you it will be more than any OBM CEU course bundle ever could.
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