OBM Experience Pitches a Fix for BCBA Burnout

Working on the Company, Not the Client

Adam Ventura spent more than a decade running an applied behavior analysis company before he hired someone to fix it. The problems that kept him up at night, he says, had little to do with treatment plans and everything to do with people, systems, and performance. So he hired an OBM consultant. The work was not with his clients; it was on the company. That hire changed his career. The science he had spent years using with children with autism, he realized, could be turned on the business that delivered it. “It showed me that the same science we use to improve outcomes for clients could also improve the way organizations function,” says Ventura. Ventura sold World Evolve, the multi-state provider he built, in 2018. He spent the next several years as an OBM consultant, was elected president of the OBM Network, the professional group for the specialty, and wrote books on leadership and performance feedback. Today he runs Intraverbal AI, which builds artificial-intelligence tools for behavior analysts. Now Ventura and Mellanie Page, a board-certified behavior analyst who founded the continuing-education company The ABA Collective, are making a bet: that the realization Ventura had about his own company can help a field struggling to hold on to the clinicians it has. They are making that case at the OBM Experience, a two-day virtual conference running this month.

A Field Losing Its Clinicians

The field they are pitching is under strain. In a 2022 study of 826 practitioners published in Behavior Analysis in Practice, researchers Slowiak and DeLongchamp found that 72% reported moderate-to-high burnout, measured as exhaustion and disengagement. An earlier survey led by Corina Jimenez-Gomez, published in the same journal in 2021, put the figure at 45% in the months after COVID-19 arrived. Demand has climbed at the same time. Job postings seeking a BCBA rose from roughly 800 in 2010 to nearly 50,000 in 2021, an increase of close to 600%, according to Behavior Analyst Certification Board figures cited by the Association for Behavior Analysis International. Rising demand and persistent burnout point to a retention problem, not only a shortage of new graduates. That is the gap Ventura and Page are aiming at. Their argument is not that behavior analysts should leave clinical work. It is that the science they already practice can make the organizations around them worth staying in.

Behavior Science, Turned Inward

OBM applies the same tools of measurement, reinforcement, and systems analysis that BCBAs use with clients to the performance of employees and whole organizations. Page argues that most behavior analysts are already doing a version of it without the label. “Most BCBAs are already ‘doing OBM’ in their current roles and don’t even realize it,” she wrote in the materials provided to BreakingNewsABA, describing her own approach as diagnosing the root cause of a problem and aligning the performer, the process, and the policies of an organization. Page came to the work the way many BCBAs do. She was promoted into a clinical director role about a year after certification, then went looking for training on how to run teams and build systems. She eventually packaged what she learned into the OBM Practitioner program, a 12-week cohort she runs twice a year through The ABA Collective. She built the company after selling her first continuing-education course with a Venmo link and a YouTube video.

“Our field needs BCBAs who can improve their workplaces instead of fleeing them. OBM is accessible, and our goal is to make it feel within reach.” – Mellanie Page, co-host, the OBM Experience (2026)

Ventura frames it as a matter of consistency. “If we believe behavior analysis works, we should be applying it to our workplaces as well,” he wrote.

Inside the OBM Experience

The conference is built around a complaint Ventura has about his own field’s events: too much theory, too little practice. After years of sitting through OBM talks heavy on research, he wrote, many practitioners were left wondering, “How do I actually do this?” The OBM Experience answers along two tracks. One teaches BCBAs to apply OBM inside the organizations where they already work, on problems like staff performance, feedback systems, and retention. The other teaches them to take OBM outside, through consulting and external projects. The published agenda covers behavioral systems analysis, performance management design, and consulting frameworks, with what the organizers call workshop-tested skills rather than lectures.

“OBM represents one of the greatest opportunities for behavior analysts to expand the impact of our science.” – Adam Ventura (2026)

The event is virtual, runs two days, and carries BACB-approved continuing-education credit with recordings. It is produced by Invivo CE and hosted on the CEU platform BehaviorLive. The OBM Experience is one of a group of niche 2026 conferences for behavior analysts looking past autism services, on subjects from entrepreneurship to staff retention.

What a Conference Can and Cannot Fix

The case for OBM as a retention tool has limits, and the same research that documents the burnout problem points to them. Practitioners in those studies tie their exhaustion to heavy caseloads, thin supervision, and professional isolation, not to a shortage of management frameworks. Two workshop days will not lighten a caseload or raise a salary.

What Ventura and Page are wagering is narrower: that clinicians who can diagnose and change the systems around them are likelier to stay, and likelier to find a second act inside the field rather than outside it. Whether that pays off is a question the conference itself will not settle. Registration for the OBM Experience is open on BehaviorLive, and the next OBM Practitioner cohort opens later in 2026.

AT A GLANCE

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