Accreditation of a B-BS Process
By Fabio Tosolin, AARBA president
Accreditation, certification and qualification of companies, productive sites or individuals involved in a B-BS process entail several misconceptions and ethical issues.
Can a B-BS process be certified?
As a scientific protocol, every B-BS implementation can eventually be formally “certified”. However, only a single B-BS process, currently in place within a single site, can be directly evaluated and granted.
This is the reason why only each single process can be accredited and such accreditation cannot be forever.
From a scientific point of view, such a certification would never be made about a company as a whole, nor about individuals. Indeed, nobody can guarantee that a company will be permanently able and enduringly committed with behavioral safety. Further, nothing assures that
a single safety consultant, even if correctly trained and effectively experienced, will effectively and truly perform B-BS processes for life, nor in the near future.
Scientific, academic and ethical issues.
B-BS is founded on the scientific laws and paradigms of the Science of Behavior, i.e. Behavior Analysis. Obviously, influencing human behavior related to work safety is not a joke: any mistake or inaccuracy in applying the protocol can lead to injuries, illnesses or even death of the worker. This is the reason why all over the world people who apply such laws and paradigms must be deeply trained and experienced in ABA (Applied Behavior Analysis).
Obviously, no rigorous accreditation/certification process can be performed by people without a strong knowledge in the specific fields.
This is the reason why entities or individuals who claim themselves “experts” in B-BS would never certify a B-BS process implemented in any company site, for both technical and ethical reasons, even in absence of a local explicit bylaw prohibition!
AARBA strongly disagrees with any private or public company which eventually does it regardless the below requisites.
Who can reasonably make the accreditation of a B-BS process?
An accreditation process regarding the Behavior-Based Safety must be built, superintended and finally performed by an Independent Scientific Institute employing Behavior Analysts, with an academic 2nd grade degree and a specific PhD in OBM, being OBM - Organizational Behavior Management - the scheme of reference of B-BS.
The CCBS (Cambridge Centre for Behavioral Studies - Massachusetts - USA), actually is the only Scientific Independent Institute which accredits the B-BS processes in any kind of organizations over the world. CCBS does it with the support of a small number of local scientific institutes or associations active in the field of Behavior Analysis (e.g. AARBA, Italian Chapter of ABA in Italy - EU).