How to Actually Work With Behavioral Psychologists Who Specialize in ABA and Organizational Consultation
I've spent the last several years navigating the space where academic behavioral psychology meets real-world consulting, and let me tell you, it's a mess if you don't know what you're looking for. Will Wiggins and Sarah Bounds came up a lot in my work because they operate in that overlap zone — applied behavior analysis, organizational behavior management, preference assessment protocols, and the kind of functional analysis work that most people outside the field have no idea exists. If you're trying to track down folks who actually do this kind of thing, here's what you need to know. The first thing to understand is that neither of these names shows up as a single searchable entity. Wiggins is primarily associated with research at Georgia State University, focused on organizational behavior management, differential reinforcement procedures, and the kind of applied work that gets published in journals like the Journal of Organizational Behavior Management or Behavior Modification. Bounds has been involved in similar spaces — preference assessment methodology, stimulus choice research, and some applied work in educational and clinical settings. When I was trying to build a consulting team for a mid-sized organization that needed behavioral consultation, I hit a wall trying to find current contact information. The academic profiles had been updated sporadically over the years, and neither person maintains a public-facing practice website. What actually worked was reaching out through their university departments — Wiggins through GSU's Dept. of Psychology, Bounds through whatever current institutional affiliation she holds. Email is the only route that doesn't get lost in some departmental forwarding maze.
One thing I learned the hard way: don't expect quick turnaround. These are researchers first, and their consult calendars run on academic timelines. If you need something done by next quarter, start talking to them six months in advance. I once tried to line up a preference assessment protocol for a workplace intervention and had to pivot to a different consultant entirely because the response time was measured in weeks, not days. It wasn't personal — it's just how this work operates.
What They Actually Do Day to Day
Most people hear "behavioral psychologist" and think therapy. That's not really what Wiggins and Bounds spend their time on, at least not in the capacity most organizations would engage them for. Their work is heavily rooted in Applied Behavior Analysis — measuring behavior, identifying environmental variables that maintain it, and designing interventions based on that data. The organizational side means they're often looking at workplace productivity, safety compliance, employee performance, and the kind of systemic issues that look like "culture problems" but are actually reinforcement schedule problems. The preference assessment work is one area where this becomes immediately practical. If you've ever tried to understand why an employee keeps disengaging from a training program or why a particular safety protocol gets ignored, a formal preference assessment can tell you whether the issue is motivational (nobody likes the reinforcers being offered) or instructional (nobody knows how to perform the behavior). I've seen organizations waste tens of thousands of dollars on training that failed because they never did that assessment first. Another area that comes up constantly is functional analysis. This is the gold standard for understanding why a behavior persists. Instead of guessing, you systematically manipulate environmental variables to see which ones produce change. It sounds clinical, and it is, but the same logic applies to workplace behaviors, classroom management, and even customer service interactions. The problem is that doing a proper functional analysis takes trained personnel and significant time — usually 10 to 20 hours of observation and intervention before you have a reliable read on what's maintaining the behavior.
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Counter-Intuitive Things Beginners Miss
Here's something that always surprises people: more data isn't better. I watched a team collect behavioral data for three months before realizing their measurement system was too complex to maintain reliably. They were tracking twelve different variables with enough granularity that interobserver agreement dropped below 80 percent. They threw out everything and went back to tracking two variables with perfect reliability. The simpler system gave them clearer answers because the data was actually trustworthy. When your IOA is below 80 percent, you don't have data — you have noise. The other thing nobody warns you about is the reactivity problem. The moment you start measuring behavior, the behavior changes because people know they're being measured. In a workplace setting, this can actually improve performance temporarily (the Hawthorne effect), which looks like your intervention is working when it's just the measurement itself. I learned this the hard way when an organization celebrated a 40 percent increase in safety compliance after starting daily reports, only to have it drop back to baseline within three months once the novelty wore off. The real intervention — changing the physical environment and the reinforcement structure around safety — hadn't been implemented yet. They'd confused measurement with intervention.
When This Approach Completely Fails
Behavioral psychology doesn't solve everything, and it's important to know where it hits a wall. It's not useful for diagnosing clinical conditions — that's psychiatry or clinical psychology territory. It's not going to help with organizational restructuring, mergers, or strategy. And it's genuinely ineffective when the problem is structural — if the environment itself makes the desired behavior impossible or irrational, no amount of reinforcement schedule tweaking will fix it. I've seen consultants try to behavioral-hack their way out of understaffing problems, and it never works. You can't differential-reinforce someone into having more hours in the day. If you're dealing with a situation that's fundamentally about meaning, identity, or values — things that behavioral frameworks struggle to address — you're better off bringing in someone from organizational psychology, coaching, or change management. Behavioral approaches excel at the "what" and "how" of behavior change. They're much weaker on the "why" that people actually care about. The bottom line is that finding the right people in this space takes patience, and the work they do is rigorous but narrow. If your problem fits, it's one of the most effective frameworks available. If it doesn't fit, you'll waste time and money chasing data that doesn't answer your actual question. Start by being honest about what you're trying to solve before you start sending emails.
