Message from Dr. Dwight Harshbarger:
Our Partnership

Dr. Ramona Houmanfar has agreed to be the Action Editor for the OBM websection, and I am confident that many of you will serve as contributors and Associate Editors. I know that our work together will generate fresh and exciting ways to present behavior-based approaches to bringing about positive behavior and improved performance in organizations.

Our Mission And Our Challenge

The mission of the Cambridge Center is to develop humane solutions to societal problems through behavioral research. We want to impact the behavior of people facing difficult problems. The OBM section of the website will help people discover behavior-based research as a guide to more effective and more cost-effective solutions for their organizational behavior problems, and help them meet the difficult challenges of our times. The importance of these challenges and the relevance of our behavioral technology, are underscored by the tragic events of September 11.

In the early 1990’s, the Cambridge Center sponsored Forums on Behavioral Safety. As more and more people visited these forums, they committed to change how workplace safety is managed, and the group developed into a critical mass. Today behavior-based safety practices enjoy widespread success, including adoption in the risk consulting divisions of major insurance companies.

OBM has traveled a wider, more difficult and rockier road than behavioral safety. I believe that the difficulties in our travel on the road to successful adoption of behavioral practices in the marketplace have occurred for five principal reasons.

• The road is much wider. The outcomes pursued in OBM-type approaches to behavior change are more wide-ranging than the relatively narrow outcomes of behavioral safety. Success is diffused, often pigeon holed, particularly by those advocating other approaches.
• The road map is often hard to read. Behavior-based approaches are more difficult for potential consumers and users to understand than they initially believe. The initial positive responses of people (potential adopters) change dramatically when they learn what must be done to successfully apply OBM methods.
• The road doesn’t seem to go in the right direction. Even more importantly, these initial positive responses shift markedly when people realize just how counter-intuitive behavioral methods are. OBM is not about the application of common sense solutions to behavior problems in the workplace. Sometimes our applications run counter to common sense, and that makes it a difficult sell.
• Driving on the road is difficult, sometimes expensive. Behavior-based approaches to changing behavior often conflict with years of doing things differently. This is most evident in how managers in workplaces continue to use and threaten the use of punishment to bring about behavior change. "Grab’em by their throats and their hearts and minds will follow" is still a more widely believed and practiced axiom than anything having to do with arranging contingencies to reinforce the behaviors you want to increase.
• We keep getting new drivers. Promotions, resignations and other forces lead to employee turnover and changes in leadership responsibilities. The learning curves and skill development of incumbent leaders are interrupted, and new people must be brought into the leadership of a sometimes-counter intuitive approach to managing people. There is a cost to this.

And yet, as you know so well, we have achieved wonderful and noteworthy successes! These are cited in professional publications, including the JOBM, as well as in the case histories known to behavioral practitioners and clients. Many individuals and consulting firms have achieved success in the application of behavior-based methods to important organizational problem solving. We have a lot to be proud of.

However, we must be realistic about the limits of our success. If we were to total the dollar volume of business done by all the behavioral consulting firms in the private and public sectors, including those in behavioral safety, this amount would be but a sliver of the total organizational consulting market. For example, the 2001 revenue of Accenture, the new name for the recent spin off of Anderson Consulting from the parent firm, Arthur Anderson, is likely to top $11 billion for the fiscal year ending August 31. There are many other large organizational consulting firms.

Our Commitment To Building Through Teaching And Learning

We are committed to observable procedures and specifiable outcomes in our work. We welcome hard-nosed evaluation of its effectiveness. We know that outcome data, however painful, teaches us and creates opportunities for improvement. We can and should raise tough questions about our work and the work of people applying non-behavioral methods to organizational behavior problems. An educated consumer is a more effective and more powerful consumer.

• What distinguishes behavior-based approaches from other performance building approaches?
• Why should anybody, particularly managers and executives, care about these differences?
• How would a manager who is not behaviorally trained know the difference between behavioral and non-behavioral methods of behavior change?
• Why use a behavior-based approach? What will it do for us?
• What is the value added for managers who adopt behavior-based methods?
• If a manager wants to use a behavior-based program, how does he/she go about it without hiring an expensive consultant?
• In hiring an outside consulting firm to help with organizational behavior problems, what might managers and executives do to become wise consumers of services?
• How should organizations evaluate the effectiveness, cost-effectiveness, and value of organizational consulting services?

With the CCBS OBM section, we can do lots of things that will be rewarding to us and helpful to professionals and the public. For example we can:

• Describe best practices,
• Present interesting current research with implications for solving organizational behavior problems,
• Present essays by our members on issues and concerns in organizational behavior and improved management practices,
• Present case presentations on successful organizational interventions; with permission, published as well as unpublished work,
• Personally network with other members,
• Invite people to join us, particularly managers and executives who struggle with the daily challenges of organizational behavior management, and
• Present criteria for evaluating the appropriateness and later effectiveness of behavior-based organizational initiatives and consulting firms.

Our national crisis stemming from the events of September 11 drives home the importance of the careful and effective management of organizational behavior, particularly when the outcomes involve the safety and security of organizations and communities. We have a technology that can be of inordinate help in addressing the issues of organizational, community, and national security.

I am confident that we will achieve our mission and help others and in the process have a lot of fun. We will be successful. I look forward to our partnership.

Message reprinted with permission from the
OBM Network Newsletter (Volume 15, 3), Fall 2001.
Dr. Dwight Harshbarger is the Executive Director of the
Cambridge Center for Behavioral Studies.

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