IN THIS SECTION, Dr. Judith Hale interviews ISPI members so that readers can learn about colleagues. She is featuring a new member (an emerging or a reemerging professional), along with a notable long-term member of the Society.When Robert Damelio attended the 2022 ISPI Conference in Nashville, Tennessee, he was inspired to become a sponsor and “make a difference.” During his career, he became known for “synthesizing and applying” learning and experience from various fields, wrote books on process mapping and benchmarking, and led high-level projects in organizations. Robert is reemerging in the performance improvement (PI) field with his company Paladin Continuous Improvement!Dr. Carl Binder is a celebrated thought leader and developer of the Six Boxes® Model, a conceptual update of Thomas Gilbert's Behavior Engineering Model (BEM). He is also a frequent presenter at our ISPI Conferences. As a doctoral student of B.F. Skinner, he applied science and received a friendly welcome at ISPI!We hope you enjoy reading these interviews!If you are interested in learning more and/or contributing to this project, please send an email to pij@ispi.org and include Know Your Colleagues on the subject line.Carlos Antonio Viera, PhD, Editor-in-ChiefNancy Crain Burns, PhD, Editorial AdvisorI was a doctoral student with B.F. Skinner in the 1970s and spent most of the decade under the influence of Skinner, Ogden Lindsley, Eric Haughton, and other thought leaders in the application of behavior science; they were making early contributions to the field created by Lindsley called Precision Teaching. Precision Teaching is the use of Skinner's measure—rate of response or behavior frequency—to measure and make decisions about instructional interventions, mostly with school children. At the end of the 1970s, when we had been demonstrating huge impacts on student learning using this approach, the educational establishment was not receptive to our science-based methods. So many of us turned to the private sector to find ways to continue our research and development by finding what kinds of problems people would pay us to address and how we should talk about it. At that point, in about 1978, Lindsley encouraged me to take what we had learned into the corporate sector.I did not really know anything about that but began to network and look for opportunities. The first one was with a company that offered weight management programs for severely overweight people, and I created training for their staff. But, more interesting than that, I used Lindsley's standard graphic display tool—the standard celeration chart—to analyze and project business and clinical data from about 20 clinics around the country, to better understand their organizational performance. I was able to project the company's annual revenue using my charting techniques more accurately than the guys in Information Technology with their algorithmized models and mainframes.Around that time one of my behaviorist friends told me about NSPI (National Society for Programmed Instruction), which I had not known about before, despite having learned quite a bit about programmed instruction. I had read Gilbert's Human Competence, and when I discovered that NSPI was his home organization, I became very interested. I volunteered to help with the Boston chapter of NSPI, which later became ISPI, eventually became president, and began attending the international conferences. ISPI became my main professional community, other than my behavior science community at the Association for Behavior Analysis International, and I was an active participant and contributor for over 30 years. It was the application of Skinner's science; my acceptance by colleagues at ISPI because of my scientific background; the friendly welcome I received from Margo Murray, who was the president when I attended my first conference; and the many mentors I found at ISPI that attracted me and then kept me there.There are two bodies of work of which I am proud, and for which I think they gave me the Gilbert Award. The first was our translation of Precision Teaching into what we called fluency-based instruction in the corporate world. We found that if we used Skinner's variable, rate of response, to measure learning and performance, and if we brought forward the behavior component analysis methods and practice strategies we learned using Precision Teaching, we could make huge improvements in adult training. For example, we trained salespeople and were told that they knew more than people who'd been selling for over five years. We shortened the time to ramp new customer service reps at AT&T from two months to two weeks, and then surpassed the previous productivity benchmarks by 60%. And we improved productivity at Amazon.com call centers by over 35%. I published and spoke all over the world about that work, and we had an influence both on some adult training and on kids' education. The paper published in 1996 called “Behavioral Fluency: Evolution of a New Paradigm” became the 12th most cited publication in the 40-year history of The Behavior Analyst, then the flagship journal of the Association for Behavior Analysis. We have also been building www.Fluency.org.The second contribution that I think is important, and we are still working on it, is what we now call our Performance Thinking® approach to PI. Many people know about me because of the Six Boxes Model, the plain English derivative of Gilbert's Behavior Engineering Model that I and my colleagues created in the late 1980s. It received its name, “The Six Boxes,” at the suggestion of Vice President of Sales Training, Tom Hogan, at Dun and Bradstreet in the early 90s. I and the people working on our teams loved Gilbert's work, but the language of his model often confused stakeholders. So, we kept changing the labels of the cells, using very plain English words, until our user testing showed that people could learn the model, and make very few category errors from the beginning. This was a big win for both learning and adoption or communication.That experience and people's reaction to it started me on a mission to simplify and improve comprehension of the relatively complicated and hard-to-comprehend models and frameworks that so many of our great ISPI thought leaders created. We eventually combined a very simple model of the elements of performance (behavior, work outputs or accomplishments, and organizational or business results) called The Performance Chain, with the Six Boxes Model, and built a “logic” around them that we have been able to teach frontline employees, senior executives, and everyone else in between. We have developed certification programs for both performance professionals and leaders or managers, based on the same models, enabling them to do their own jobs more effectively, with a focus on continuous performance improvement. The Six Boxes Model was recently voted by a group in attendance at last spring's ISPI conference, in a session facilitated by Scott Weersing, as “the best performance model in the world.” While I don't take that too seriously, knowing the work of Tom Gilbert, Dale Brethower, Geary Rummler, Don Tosti, et al., I do believe that it highlights that our models communicate rapidly and allow people to partner around performance across many typical organizational silos.I hope they think I am generous with my time and attention to people who are curious and eager to learn. When I opted out of being a professor to live where I wanted and to avoid the politics of academe, I wanted to nonetheless endow myself with a professorship in the private sector by finding a market and developing protégés. I wanted to pass on what we have learned, starting with Skinner's natural science of behavior. Skinner himself was the paragon of generosity for me. I wrote him a frenzied fan letter while I was still in college, majoring in philosophy, after reading his novel, Walden Two. Skinner responded in two weeks with a friendly letter, which ended by telling me to stay in touch. This was at a time when he was being hounded by the press, and was a very busy man. A year or so later, when I had decided to transfer from the Philosophy PhD program at Notre Dame to Experimental Psychology, I hitched a ride to Boston, found Skinner's office, knocked on the door, and he sat me down to talk for an hour. He introduced me around the faculty and suggested I apply to Harvard grad school for that fall. I did, and I was accepted. From then on, Skinner introduced me to people and taught me how to think as a natural scientist. I engaged with him during two semesters of one-on-one independent study, and for years afterward until his death. His generosity, and that of so many of my mentors and teachers, including those in behavior science and at ISPI, has been breathtaking. I will never be able to thank Tom and Marylin Gilbert, Joe Harless, Don Tosti, Roger Addison, Geary Rummler, Roger Kaufman, and many others enough for their generosity in time and ideas and mentorship. I hope I can be remembered for that myself. I am very busy at 73, planning for continued evolution of our models and approach over the coming for decades. But I still make as much time as I can for people who are inquisitive and truly interested, and I hope I will be remembered for that—passing it on.I'm Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of The Performance Thinking Network, LLC, based on Bainbridge Island, Washington, near Seattle. We offer programs that certify Performance Thinking Practitioners to be systemic human performance consultants, using tools and methods that we teach. And we help leaders and managers apply our accomplishment-based coaching methodology, and to leverage Performance Thinking models and logic to improve both the productivity and the engagement of their people.See our website at www.PerformanceThinking.com, our YouTube Channel at www.PerformanceThinking.tv, and my not-for-profit behavior science website at www.Fluency.org.Dr. Carl Binder is CEO of The Performance Thinking Network, a firm that certifies performance professionals and develops leaders and managers worldwide. He studied behavior science at Harvard with B.F. Skinner in the 1970s, and conducted both laboratory and applied research before joining ISPI and embracing accomplishment-based performance improvement in the early 1980s. Carl has published several dozen chapters and articles, and received career achievement awards from the American Psychological Association, the International Society for Performance Improvement, the Organizational Behavior Management Network, and the Standard Celeration Society. He lives on Bainbridge Island, near Seattle, and can be reached by email at CarlBinder@sixboxes.com.A professional colleague, Rich Boucher, recommended ISPI and Joe Harless in particular, to me. At the time, we were both working in the course development function of a Northern Telecom (NT) Technical training center (for customers of NT SL-1 digital telephony products and services).I am especially proud of the very first project I performed when I was a senior course developer at NT. Oddly enough, the project made use of my nontraining skill set at the time.My very first annual conference presentation to a professional association was to ISPI in Toronto, 1990. See photo below. I presented an in-depth overview of the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award (MBNQA). By the way, if I knew then what stage fright was, I would have most certainly experienced it prior to that presentation. It seemed to me that every ISPI luminary I ever met was in the audience for this session. Fortunately, I did not realize this until shortly after I finished the presentation. I am proud that I predicted that the MBNQA would be good for the training function and ISPI. Nailed it! The minimum benchmark of 40 hours per person per year of training was largely established due to the MBNQA, due to the amount of quality-related training provided by early winners, Motorola and Xerox.I just realized that the first book I wrote (coauthored with Bill Englehaupt, a client, and ISPI-er as well) was titled, An Action Guide to Making Quality Happen (MQH). I am quite proud of that book. In a lot of ways, and under a lot of conditions, MQH is more actionable than my mapping books, which is saying a lot.MQH focuses on establishing a quality management system. Every organization should have an effective version of one of those.After the NT project, my workload as a course developer dramatically accelerated so I had to accelerate my own professional development as well. That's where ISPI-ers such as Tom Gilbert, Geary Rummler, Joe Harless, Ray Svenson, Bob Mager, Allison Rossett, Mark Graham Brown, Guy Wallace, Judy Hale, Ruth Clark, and of course Thiagarajan helped me learn and apply evidence-based ISD (Instructional Systems Design), needs assessments, job and performance models, performance analysis, job analysis, front-end analysis, and lots of process mapping.The work I did that I used when applying for the CPT credential was substantial in scope and had a major impact on client results. The client organization was the Software Engineering Process Group, within Lockheed Martin Tactical Aircraft Systems (LMTAS). Today you would know this organization as not only a location of a key scene shot for the first Iron Man movie, but also as the prime contractor who provides the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter (JSF).The projects, activities, learning materials, workshops, performance models, and coaching I provided made use of a very wide and fairly deep skill set, applied over several months. My skill set allowed me to identify the “affected groups, processes, jobs, and work products.” I was able to operationally define the “desired” (new) behaviors and related requirements for the resultant work products throughout the “affected organizations.” There was a lot of work to do. The performance gaps and targets were large. It was very gratifying though. The immediate result of my work (plus additional work of many others in other affected areas) was that LMTAS was awarded the JSF contract, the largest defense contract in US history, worth approximately $200 billion initially.The extant (current state) capability level of the software development process in use by software development project organizations (who would be potentially working on JSF software) was a major factor in evaluating potential suppliers as part of selecting a prime contractor.Fortunately for LMTAS, a few LMTAS software development projects were assessed at Level 4 of the software Capability Maturity Model (CMM) (that's a good thing). Prior to the work I did on their behalf, those projects were operating at CMM Level 2, at most. Most had never heard of the CMM.Today, the scope and capabilities of Fortune 500 organization operations is much broader than software engineering, and so too is the applicability of the relevant maturity model. It is now referred to as the CMM, Integrated (CMM-I). See the following link: https://www.bmc.com/blogs/cmmi-capability-maturity-model-integration/.The value he provides and the accomplishments he leaves behind at client organizations far exceed his fees. He sees the world in systems thinking terms. He can't help it.He reads a lot of books. I think he's written a few as well—two on process mapping for sure. He's enthusiastic, passionate, helpful, and a big fan of worthy performance. Plus, he's lost a bunch (60 lbs) of weight since the photo in the maroon shirt was taken. He's a quick study and is absolutely committed to the success of his clients in ways they may easily measure. Oh, and he is in fact coachable, on occasion.Organizations, leadership, and individuals face challenging problems and significant opportunities. Either or both sets of conditions require broad and deep skill sets to address. In my experience, worthwhile accomplishments are never easy to achieve. Fortunately, I enjoy helping individuals and organizations learn, grow, and realize more of their potential.I am the founder (in fact, the paladin) of Paladin Continuous Improvement, LLC, which was established in 2021.I am working with increasing regularity to transform the content from my best-selling books on process mapping, as well as a lot of the thought processes, mental models, actual models, and expertise I learned from Geary Rummler, into a variety of online learning offerings.Usually, at my cell 214.995.1960. I tend to carry it with me at all times. As Joe Harless might say, “brought to you at considerable time and expense.” I live in Jacksonville, Florida.Robert Damelio leads Paladin Continuous Improvement and is someone who reads a lot of books and has written four of them himself, with the two on process mapping being best sellers!He regularly synthesizes and applies what he's learned and experienced from various fields such as systems thinking, process thinking, evidence-based learning, applied behavior analysis, performance modeling, leading change, and continuous improvement.
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Jun 1, 2023
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