A Scientific Approach to Performance Behaviors with Amanda Borosh

The CEO asks you to improve organizational performance. Where do you start? What's most important for your assessment? Can it be done? Yes. According to Stolovitch & Keeps (2004), positions us in an important role for organizations:

Our goal as performance consultants (whether in name or in fact), is to help our organizations or organizational clients achieve maximum desired results from people in ways all stakeholders value. Our mission is to generate worthy performance.

This week, I had the opportunity to listen to a speaker for the Human Performance Technology course at Purdue University. The speaker was Amanda Borosh, a doctoral student at Purdue University and Board Certified Behavioral Analyst with experience in K-12 Special Education and Behavioral Analysis.

This speaker session was quite interesting and insightful as there were new concepts introduced relevant to Human Performance Training and Behavioral Science.

Takeaway #1: Implementation Science

Why is there a performance problem? Often as practitioners or professionals, we do not fully understand the problem the organization is facing. After a couple of intake conversations and powerful questioning, we might get to the root cause of the problem and can then effectively assess the organizational performance need. Or maybe not? During Amanda's research, she shared evidence-based practices and what schools are implementing (or rather say, not implementing) which concluded that effective assessment may provide a solution, but if there is no active implementation, the socially significant outcomes fail.

Takeaway #2: Behavioral Change Measures

I can't remember how many times I've heard, "Behavioral change can't be measured." The way I've always reacted to this statement is an optimistic curious one. Why can't we measure behaviors? And why are there no numbers associated with behaviors? Then how do we measure performance? In Amanda's presentation, a video explains a logical formula for active implementation and its way of measuring implementation led me to think deeper about how we actually measure behavioral change.

• Are we measuring the effective practices? Most often, no.

• Are we measuring effective implementation? What implementation?!

• Are we enabling the context for implementation? Wait, this was only supposed to be a performance improvement. Do you mean we need context?

According to the Active Implementation Formula, without one of these, there is no socially significant outcomes.

Takeaway #3: Organizational Behavior Management vs Organizational Human Performance System

In Stolovitch & Keeps's Organizational Human Performance System (OHPS), behaviors are influenced by external and internal environments. In Behavioral Systems Analysis (BSA), the focus is on the science of human behavior. Interestingly, organizational behavior management involves a "systems-wide analysis and intervention" and "individual performance management. Like OHPS, it's a systemic process of changing behaviors. Amanda particularly shared the seven steps to the BSA and further expressed that most of her time with this research was spent building rapport with the school to really understand the processes, people, and systems that were in place. Similar to OHPS, "you examine all the elements as they interrelate" (Stolovitch & Keeps, 2004, pg. 30).

Takeaway #4: Performance Professionals as Key Partners

Firstly, given the years of experience in human resources, change management, organizational development, and learning and development, this provides a perfect opportunity to share the impact of these takeaways. I truly believe the responsibility of an organizational behavioral analyst can be a time-consuming role. This role requires individuals to have a variety of mindsets such as strategic, organizational, global, growth, and developmental. It also follows a very linear process in the analysis to ensure there are outcomes for the organization. This would not be a role I would be interested in holding someday, however, given the importance of this work, I find higher value in the partnership with performance professionals.

Learn more about Amanda and her work by visiting her website.

References:

Stolovitch, H., & Keeps, E. (2004). Training Ain’t Performance. American Society for Training and Development