Volume 1 issue 1

Nobody is lacking good intentions: The part after the training.

Mon, June 15, 2026, 20:42

They always say you should not overthink your writing, just write. That, of course, is the conclusion everyone arrives at after going through the exact process we all go through: overthink, research, overthink some more. And yet, here we are. Here I am. Actually writing. And yes, at some point I will absolutely be the person telling someone else, "don't overthink it, just write."

What does this have to do with behaviour analysis? Everything. There is a lot that has been written and rewritten in our field. A lot currently being written. But sometimes we need to simply put something down, unfinished edges and all. So here is exactly that.

Over the past few years I've become increasingly aware of the scope of what I'm actually looking at in the settings I work in. Not just opportunities to develop clinical skills, though those are there, but opportunities to sit with a question that I find, our field has not yet fully answered:

What actually happens to the integrity of the science and the fidelity of implementation when the intervention moves from the behaviour analyst to the service team, the organisation, and the person's environment, and how do you engineer systems that preserve it?

That's a big question. Several questions, really. I'm going to start with one.

We already know the barriers. High staff turnover. Limited resources. Poor communication. Lack of buy-in. Depending on where you sit in a service, these feel either entirely within your control or completely out of your hands. Either way, they persist. People at every level of an organisation have ideas about how to fix them. Those ideas get shared. And then, largely, nothing changes.

That's my bottleneck, and I think it's the field's bottleneck too.

If everyone has good ideas about how to fix these problems, why aren't they getting fixed?

I think the answer is that we're looking at implementation too narrowly. We've reduced it to a question of can this plan be implemented, and to what degree, a fidelity checklist, a training session, a competency sign-off. But implementation doesn't start there. It starts from the foundation of the service itself. It starts with one question:

Why does this service exist?

Or more personally: Why does my team exist? Why am I working with this person or this family?

If you don't have a clear answer to that, and I mean a real answer, not a mission statement on a wall, then everything becomes negotiable. Priorities shift depending on who's loudest that week. Responses become reactive. And this "you" I keep using? It scales. You = the individual professional. You = the team. You = the organisation.

Here's where this becomes concrete.

When someone says "your plan doesn't work" or "we tried what you said and it's not working", and you know the plan works because you've run it yourself, the instinct is often to say: they need more training. They don't know how to implement it.

Sometimes that's true. But if that's your first and only response, we've missed something important.

What that person is often communicating, through what looks like a performance problem, is something closer to: I don't know why I'm supposed to do this.

I'll own that I'm making an inference there. But I'm willing to take that risk because I think it reframes everything.

When direct support staff, teachers, or frontline workers get to the point of saying "this doesn't work," that's not just an individual failing. It's a signal that something has gone wrong further up, in how the work has been set up, communicated, and supported around them. The solution, therefore, doesn't only lie with the person on the ground.

From a behaviour analytic perspective, an organisation is a system. And a system is a set of interrelated components with specified, measurable contingencies between them. That is: what goes into the system (inputs), what the system does with those inputs (processes), what it produces (outputs), and the feedback loop that allows the system to adjust itself. When those components aren't connected, when the contingencies between them are vague, unmeasured, or missing entirely, you don't actually have a system. You have a collection of people doing things in the same building.

Most disability services have PBS components. What is far less common, across the sector, is a PBS system.

So what is actually driving implementation failure isn't primarily the practical skills of the person implementing the plan. It's the systems, or lack of them, operating around that person and around the individual receiving support.

Our field has spent considerable energy confirming that training alone is insufficient. That finding has been replicated enough times that it no longer feels like a finding. It feels like something most of us already knew from experience and were relieved to see in print.

What I have not found, and what the people I speak to have not found either, is a clear answer to what comes next. If the problem is not the training, then where do you actually look? The science gives us the tools. Behaviour analysis gives us a way of understanding systems, contingencies, and what makes behaviour change stick across environments and over time. That foundation exists. What I am working through, in practice and in parallel with the literature, is actionable ways of taking that foundation and building something that tells me; that tells us, how to action this inside complex, real services, with real constraints, by real people. Not just what, but how.