Tom walking near his home with Rob and Georgia.

10

The Behavior Analyst 1996, 19, 11-18 No. 1 (Spring)

In MemoriamThomas E Gilbert

1927-1995Ogden R. Lindsley

University of Kansas andBehavior Research Company

Tom Gilbert passed away onWednesday, September 27, 1995, aftera 4-month bout with lung cancer thathad spread throughout his body. Hisfaithful partner and wife, MarilynBender Gilbert (formerly Marilyn Fers-ter), was with him throughout his finalillness. These are simple facts that can-not hope to cover the complex study incontrasts that was Tom. His death willundoubtedly provoke a unique re-sponse from all who knew him. Storiesabout Tom are legion-he is partly aman of fiction.

How I Met Tom

I met Tom in 1954. We both had astrong interest in standardizing behav-ior measurement. I was applying Skin-ner's rate of response in analyzing psy-chotic behavior, and Tom was interest-ed in what he called the dimensions ofbehavior. We spent hours at conven-tions and meetings discussing how tomeasure the free operant. I thought awell-designed operandum and rate ofresponse were sensitive enough, andnicely universal. Tom was convincedthat rate was only one of three, or pos-sibly four, dimensions, and to focus onrate alone was a major mistake. (Theseideas became chapter 11 in HumanCompetence.)Then one day in September 1957,

Tom drove into the parking lot of mylaboratory at Metropolitan State Hos-

Address correspondence to Ogden R. Linds-ley, 366 North 1600 Road, Lawrence, Kansas66049-9 199.

pital, in Waltham, Massachusetts. Hisstation wagon was bulging with theload: he, wife Betty, and several chil-dren inside; luggage strapped on theback and piled on top. When I asked,"Tom, what are you doing here?" Hespat out angrily, "We are on our wayback to Georgia!" I said, "But whatbrought you up here? I thought youwere teaching at the University ofGeorgia." Tom replied, "Skinner ac-cepted me to spend a sabbatical year ina fellowship with him here at Harvard.At Memorial hall they had no office forme! They didn't even know I was com-ing! And, Skinner is in England! Weare on our way back to Georgia!" Isaid, "Tom, don't take this personal-ly." Tom interrupted, stood ramrodstraight, and with measured voice saidslowly and emphatically, "I take thishighly personally!"

I went on to say that Skinner oftenforgot things and, as my doctoral ad-visor, even missed my final doctoralorals. I said I had room for Tom tohave a desk and could free one of ourseven experimental rooms for him touse for research on operanda for histhree free-operant dimensions. Tomcooled down, accepted my offer, andfound an apartment in Cambridge. Wewould both drive over to Cambridgefor the regular monthly pigeon labmeetings organized by Skinner andCharlie Ferster. In addition to workingin my laboratory, Tom spent some timeat a small desk in the Office for Pro-grammed Instruction while he was inCambridge. Here he met Jim Hollandand Sue Markle and got in on the

11

12 OGDEN R. LINDSLEY

ground floor of teaching machines andprogrammed instruction.

A Proud SouthernerTom was a Southerner, proud of the

Civil War South, proud to have beenborn a Southerner. He knew details ofthe Civil War that few others knew. Heloved to tell about the crafty, cunning,brilliant, elusive, and handsome Fran-cis Marion who, without supplies andwith only a few men, regularly badg-ered the Union soldiers. He was calledthe Swamp Fox. I told Tom that thename for Rhode Islanders from SouthCounty near the Great Swamp, whereI grew up, was "Swamp Yankee." So,during the year that Tom spent in mylab I might call to Tom "Hey SwampFox, come over here and look at thiscumulative record if you want to seereal behavioral control." And Tomwould say, "No thanks, Swamp Yan-kee, you come over here and look atthis operandum that will record allthree dimensions of the free operant forthe first time!"Tom even sneaked General Robert

E. Lee into the text of Human Com-petence. See if you can find it.

A Complex ManTom was charismatic, flamboyant,

brilliant, articulate, high response rate,tall, handsome, red-haired, driven, andhighly creative. In his early years hedrank a little too heavily and woman-ized a bit, as did many of the WorldWar II generation. He was determinedto make it on his own in business with-out the security blanket of a universitytenure and retirement system. Tom wasnot willing to pay the social and polit-ical prices for that security.Tom was strong, tough, and had a

disregard for mortality. He was stillsmoking at the 1995 NSPI meeting inAtlanta. When I cautioned him aboutit he pooh-poohed me saying, "NowOggie, you sound like Marilyn, ciga-rettes won't get me." At the age of 68he still acted as immortal as a youth of18 years.

Tom was often contrary. A letter tome dated July 5, 1977, on Praxis Cor-poration stationery arrived with hisbook Human Competence. In it Tomwrote, "I am sending an MS of HumanCompetence. I know you can't read,but at least you can heft it."My wife, Nancy, knew Tom, and she

described him as "complex." Shedrew the following diagram.

tenacious loving unyieling

proud TO7 gentle

humorous Gilbert competitive

Southeemer literary

arcane brilliantCarl Binder recently put this de-

scription of Tom on Compuserve:Tom was my friend, a curmudgeonly caring manwho taught me ideas and ... was willing to goWAY beyond the usual concepts and frame-works, a "creative genius" in many ways. Tomcould be cranky or gracious, delightful or an-noying, very very funny, and then come outwith some beautiful example of performanceanalysis and intervention he'd seen or thoughtabout!

Yes, you loved him or hated him, andmost often both at once.

A Loving Father

Tom loved children, fathering sevenin all: Kathleen, Micah, Sarah, andAdam with his first wife, Betty Battle;Jessie with S. K. Dunn; and Roby andEve with his second wife, MarilynBender Ferster. Tom also stepfatheredBill, Andrea, Sam, and Warren, whowere children of Marilyn and CharlieFerster. In his last years he was a sur-rogate father to little Georgia, hisgrandchild, who lived with Tom andMarilyn in Hampton, New Jersey. Atthe NSPI meeting in Atlanta, Tom wentout of his way to find a canvas totewith "Georgia" emblazoned over apicture of a beautiful peach to bringhome as a school bag for his littleGeorgia.

It was fitting that, after listing 34

IN MEMORIAM: T. F. GILBERT 13

names in his acknowledgments to Hu-man Competence, Tom listed last hisseven biological children. Tom oncetold me, "Oggie, the greatest accom-plishment of all is children. The more,the better!"

Humor

Tom relished responding to Jeho-vah's Witnesses when they approachedhis doorway or outside airports. Whenthey spoke to Tom about the Bible, hewould look them sternly in the eye,raise his voice and exclaim, "Don'tyou talk to me about the Bible. You goread Matthew Six. It clearly states thatyou must pray in secret, and you shallnot proselytize. Do you hear me, THEBIBLE SAYS THOU SHALT NOTPROSELYTIZE!9"

John McKee relates that when ex-tremely weak and hardly audible in hislast stages, Tom heard his visitors say-ing that Medicare will probably be cutback, and that the new age has gonesour. Tom smiled and said, "That'slemon age. "When I last spoke to him on the

phone, Tom said, "Oggie, I have thebig C." I told him that Sherrington re-turned to religion in his old age, andasked Tom if he had started prayingyet. Tom replied, "Oh, God! No!"'Then paused a moment and laughedheartily for several minutes untilstopped by a bout of coughing.

The Truth

Tom never compromised the truth ashe saw it. Many of his relations withhis business partners were strained be-cause of this. On a sales call to a keyclient, Tom might disagree with the po-sition taken by the client's top instruc-tional designer. Tom would let the cli-ent and his or her staff know in no un-certain terms that they were wrong,and that Tom and his company couldfix their problems. Needless to say, thisis the opposite of the successful"SPIN-selling." Tom's business asso-ciates thought that many lucrative con-tracts were lost in this fashion.

To Tom there was more at stake thanjust business. There was the clear, ob-jective Truth at stake. And Truthshould never be compromised!

A Wordsmith in the SouthernTradition

Extremely well-read and erudite,Tom often wrote poetry. Ten of the 11chapters in his classic Human Compe-tence are introduced with one of Tom'spoems.' My favorite is the introductionto chapter 6, "Information and Com-petence."HAYSTACKSData, like the hay, is2 usually dryAnd piled in stacks and measured by the bit.But how like the needle information is: ItAlways has a point and needs an eye.

KosciuszkoTom had a way with words. He es-

pecially loved those that rolled on thetongue and thrilled the ear. Arcane in-formation about the North and theSouth was an enduring aspect of ourlife-long friendship. I can still see andhear Tom teaching me (his peer and 5years older) the beauty of Englishphrasing. With a slight tilt of his headand a twinkle in his eye he exclaimed."Freedom shrieked when Kosciuszkofell! Freedom SHRIEKED, Oggie,Freedom SHRIEKED! Now that is us-ing English the way it should be used."Meanwhile, I was left to puzzle overthe subject. Who the hell was Kos-ciuszko, and where did he fall?

At the time, I assumed Kosciuszko,like Pulaski, was a Polish noblemanwho volunteered to help the Colonialsbattle the British in the RevolutionaryWar. I concluded that he probablyfought the British in the South, because

' Chapter 4, "The Performance Matrix," is in-troduced with an anonymous humorous Latinpoetic pun that Tom must have recalled from hisextensive study of Latin in high school.

2 The "is" in the first line is Tom's. To ascholar "data" are plural, and "datum" is thesingular. Therefore Tom should have written"are." Tom knew Latin, so this was his poeticlicense.

14 OGDEN R. LINDSLEY

Kosciuszko was less well known toNortherner me than was Pulaski. Yearslater I remembered Tom's raised voicesaying "Freedom SHRIEKED whenKosciuszko fell," and I fell to wonder-ing again about this freedom fighter.Was he better known in the South?

I counted towns named for Pulaskiand towns named for Kosciuszko in aRand McNally road atlas. Eight states(Arkansas, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky,Mississippi, Tennessee, Virginia, andWisconsin) had a Pulaski, five in theSouth and only three in the North,making Pulaski more southern thannorthern. Only two states (Indiana andMississippi) had a town named Kos-ciuszko (both spelled without the "z").One was a northern and one was asouthern state. I was wrong, and Icould almost hear Tom Gilbert snick-ering that he had sent me to the library!But Kosciuszko certainly wasn't adamned southern Swamp Fox!

Recently, my musing over Tom'sdeath got me wondering about the restof the story-where and how Kos-ciuszko fell. So I looked him up in acomputer search system. Watson Li-brary at the University of Kansas hadfive biographies of Kosciuszko-threein Polish and two in English. In one ofthe English volumes I found that Kos-ciuszko died in Switzerland in 1817,41 years after the revolution, and inbed. And in the other I found that hehad been shot in the buttocks duringthe battle of Ticonderoga in New York.Maybe that's where the phrase began-not shot dead, but merely felled froman ignoble wound.3 Nowhere could Ifind the words, "Freedom shriekedwhen Kosciuszko fell." Once again Iwas wrong. Once again Tom had sentme to the library. And, once againthings there were very interesting, butnot exactly as Tom had implied! DidFreedom shriek from pain or laughter?

3Pulaski, on the other hand, was killed in bat-tle in an unsuccessful attack on Savannah. AgainPulaski in the South and Kosciuszko in theNorth.

Early Life and Education

Thomas Franklyn Roby Gilbert wasborn on January 3, 1927, in Durham,North Carolina, but he grew up in Co-lumbia, South Carolina. His parentswere Lillian Barton and Franklyn Gil-bert. Franklyn was a radio announcerand newspaper reporter; Lillian amother and successful business wom-an. Tom's younger brother was namedJames. Tom suffered from osteomyeli-tis as a youth and spent 2 years in bed.Through frustration with his physicalconfinement he became an avid readerand wordsmith. This condition madehim 4-F in the World War II draft,which further frustrated him. He hadrecurrent bouts of bone problemsthroughout his life; he was unsteady onhis feet and walked with a cane the last10 years of his life.Tom graduated from Columbia High

School, and completed his BA and MAdegrees at the University of South Car-olina. He earned his doctorate in psy-chology from the University of Ten-nessee in 1953 with Ted Cureton as hisadvisor. At that time his specialtieswere statistics, testing, and measure-ment.

University Teaching

Tom taught psychology and statisticsfirst at Emory University and later atthe University of Georgia. He went toHarvard for his sabbatical year fellow-ship in 1957. Tom then went to theUniversity of Alabama, where he re-fused to teach, but instead wrote hismega-grant to performance engineerthe city of Tuscaloosa.

Conceptual Accomplishments

Tom first deviated from classic Skin-nerian linear programmed instructionconcepts when he started teaching withmediators. He considered memory aidsa special class of mediators. He wasparticularly proud of his mediators forthe resistor color code: a FIVE dollarbill is GREEN, ONE BROWN penny,a WHITE cat has NINE lives, SEVEN

IN MEMORIAM: T. F. GILBERT 15

PURPLE seas, a BLUE tail fly has SIXlegs, ZERO BLACK nothingness, aRED heart has TWO parts, THREE or-anges, a FOUR-legged YELLOW dog,an EIGHTY-year-old man has GRAYhair.

In workshops he was proud of say-ing, "I can teach you to cook a suc-cessful omelet in three seconds. Bringthe eggs to room temperature beforeyou break them." This is an exampleof another of Tom's principles,"Teaching a performance theory first."He did not endear himself to the

budding group of programmed instruc-tion advocates when he wrote, "Throwaway your teaching machines."Tom has been most often called the

founder of human performance tech-nology. He was one of the great crea-tors of behavior analysis. Starting withCureton as a psychological statistician,he wound up a Skinnerian. Almost inpassing, Skinner wrote that you couldmeasure behavior or its results, andsaid little more. Gilbert said youshould focus first on the valuable re-sults, calling them accomplishments,and only later on behavior. He definedperformance as the transactions be-tween behavior and accomplishments.One of his favorite phrases was, "Be-havior you take with you, accomplish-ments you leave behind." This focuslinked behavior analysis to results,making it truly valuable in business.Tom called the economic value of theaccomplishments stakes. He developedthe first clear way to measure the costeffectiveness of performance interven-tions using the formula: worth = value- cost.Tom's Potential for Improving Per-

formance (PIP), the exemplary perfor-mance divided by the average, was amarked departure from traditional sta-tistics, which ignores the outliers. Sig-nificantly, Tom expressed the PIP as amultiple, rather than a confusing per-centage. Tom's PIP focuses on the ex-emplary performer-not the middleone, but the one whose performancecould be an example to others. Exem-plary performers were located and ex-

amined for performance variables thatcould be used to improve the perfor-mance of other workers, including theaverage.The conceptual impact of Tom's

teaching, writing, and speaking wasworldwide. It produced the field andform of performance technology.

Writing Accomplishments

Tom did not regularly write a certainnumber of pages or number of hourseach day, as do most disciplined pro-fessional writers, and as did Skinner.Tom wrote in fits and starts when theideas hit him. He wrote occasionally infeverish desperation all night to meet acontract or publisher deadline. This hedespised, and didn't meet deadlines of-ten or well.What Tom did regularly each and

every day was have ideas. He wouldstop everything to note these ideas.Stacks of his idea notes exist in his of-fice and home in chronological ratherthan topical order.Tom never learned to touch type, but

typed rapidly using his two-finger sys-tem. Although it took him some timeto make the switch from typewriter toword processor, he was writing on hiscomputer in his final years.Tom is best known for his 1978 clas-

sic Human Competence: EngineeringWorthy Performance. Several of Tom'sgems are not as well known but areequally innovative and brilliant. Thefirst two 1962 issues of the journal,Mathetics, are still excellent instruc-tional design resources. I know severalinstructional designers, lucky enoughto have copies, who regularly refer tothem to this day. The 1967 PraxisReading Series, in which children learnthe shapes and sounds of letters by firstseeing them as objects, is both uniqueand highly effective. For example, a isshaped as an apple, d as a duck, e asan elephant's head, F as a flag, T as atable, and S as a snake. The series pro-vides an excellent example of his in-structional design principle of media-tors.

16 OGDEN R. LINDSLEY

The out-of-print Praxis Reading Se-ries, the Mathetics volumes, and Hu-man Competence should be reprintedand used today. Although Tom wrotemany journal articles, he did not dis-cover new relations and ideas so hecould write about them. He did not dis-cover them to make money. He discov-ered them to know them. So, as withmany highly creative persons, he leftbehind giant stacks of brilliant notes,often written in a cursive hand thatonly he could easily decipher. Thesedocuments are a treasury of ideas.Marilyn plans to take the time and ef-fort to catalogue these and make themavailable to the rest of us.Tom was working on a second edi-

tion of Human Competence when hedied, probably to be called HumanCompetence Revisited. His coauthor,Marilyn B. Gilbert, promises a com-plete draft to the publisher (HRDPress) in May for publication late in1996.

CompaniesTom founded and cofounded several

companies. The first was EducationalDesign of Alabama (EDA), involvingMathetics, Incorporated, Tuscaloosa,Alabama. I'll never forget my surprisewhen I read "Mathetics, Inc." onTom's and Charlie Ferster's badges atan American Psychological Associa-tion convention. I said, "What in theworld is Mathetics?" Tom replied,"The study of learning. Look it up inthe dictionary!"4 These companies fol-lowed the collapse of Tom's compre-hensive scheme to completely perfor-mance engineer the city of Tuscaloosa.Along with John McKee, Charlie Fers-ter, Charlie Slack, Jack Findley, andPaul Siegel, the plan was to put a be-havioral program in every major publicservice program and institution intown. At that time Tom invited me tocome join the team and move my Be-

4According to Al Reis and Jack Trout in their1981 book Positioning, you want a companyname that everybody knows and no one has tolook up.

havior Research Laboratory with itsgovernment grants from Harvard Med-ical School and Metropolitan StateHospital in Waltham, Massachusetts toTuscaloosa, Alabama. The plan was tohave integrated programs in contactwith each other in the hospital, themental health clinics, the jails, the po-lice and fire departments, and theschools. All were to be in contact withthe Department of Psychology at theUniversity of Alabama, chaired byPaul Siegel. Mathetics had its ownJournal of Mathetics, which publishedtwo issues. These are now collector'sitems.The huge $3 million grant for the

Tuscaloosa program5 was rejected bythe National Institute of Mental Health.A year later, parts of the grant proposalwere paraphrased and submitted byothers who had received copies of theproposal that Tom had distributedwidely throughout the country. Thismore modest proposal was funded andbecame the enduring Institute for Be-havior Research (IBR), in SilverSpring, Maryland.

Educational Design of Alabama(EDA) was purchased by TOR Incor-porated, for which Tom worked for awhile after the buyout. (At the time,most of those involved said TOR stoodfor "Theory Of Reinforcement," butrecently John McKee said he thoughtthat was a joke, and not the correctmeaning.)A second company founded in New

York City by Tom and Marilyn Gilbertand Charlie Jacobs was Praxionomy,Incorporated, further demonstratingTom's delight in locating existing, pre-cise, and little used words. Praxiologyis in the unabridged dictionary as "thestudy of human action and conduct."Although praxionomy is not in thedictionary, following the word roots,

5Paul Siegel called the grant "The Thing,"and said the worst thing he had to do in hisentire life was to administer Tom Gilbert andCharlie Slack. Both Tom and Charlie refused toteach because they were too busy writing pro-posals and meeting with community leaders toset up the grant.

IN MEMORIAM: T. F. GILBERT 17

it would mean the "laws of human ac-tion and conduct." This is what Tomwanted his customers to know hiscompany by. But most American busi-ness persons reacted to praxionomy asif it was cold, metallic, sterile, and hadsomething to do with proctology.A third company founded by Tom

and Marilyn, with Irving Goldberg andGeary Rummler, was Praxis Corpora-tion, New York, and later, Morristown,New Jersey. This company was boughtby Kepner-Trisoe after operating suc-cessfully for 10 years.

Tom's fourth company was the Per-formance Engineering Group, Hamp-ton, New Jersey, which he and Marilynoperated until he died.

Professionals Trained

Tom not only founded the field ofperformance technology, but several ofits acknowledged leaders were trainedby or worked under him. They at firstworked with Tom and then later set uptheir own companies to focus on andmarket a part of Tom's system.

Marilyn Gilbert was the first Math-eticist. Tom called her "Ml." Marilynhas mostly specialized in applyingprinciples of Mathetics to the teachingof writing. Joe Harless, a student ofTom's at the University of Alabama,formed the Harless Performance Guild,and went on to develop "Job Aids"and the "ABCD" performance analy-sis system. Geary Rummler, of Rum-mler Bache, focused on the organiza-tional hierarchy and successfully mar-keted analyzing and overcoming the"white space" in the organizationalchart. John McKee, of Pace Learning,credits Tom with his educational andtraining systems design. Recently, CarlBinder, of Product Knowledge Sys-tems, credits Tom with many of hismost powerful business tools and con-cepts. Each took a part of the systemthat Tom outlined in Human Compe-tence and simplified the terms, found aniche, and successfully marketed it.Tom realized that each had developedand marketed a part of his system, but

was convinced that none had appliedall of it.

Associations

Tom was not a member of the As-sociation for Behavior Analysis (ABA)and did not regularly attend ABA con-ventions until the last 5 years. Tom at-tended every yearly convention of theNational Society for Programmed In-struction (NSPI) since its founding in1962. It became the National Societyfor Performance and Instruction(NSPI) and then recently the Interna-tional Society for Performance Im-provement (ISPI). In 33 years this so-ciety grew from 7 to 10,000 memberswith over 50 chapters in 36 countriesworldwide. It grew from a handful ofproducers of programmed instructionmaterials to performance technologyspecialists in academics, consulting, fi-nancial services, manufacturing, gov-ernment, military, utilities, health ser-vices, transportation, retail sales, andnonprofit organizations. ISPI's currentadvocates (major supporters) areAT&T, Aetna Life, Apple Computer,Arthur Anderson, Bay Networks, Hew-lett-Packard, IBM, Siemens, Sun Mi-crosystems, Unisys Corporation, andWells Fargo Bank. Tom listed his affil-iation in the program of the 1994 and1995 ABA conventions as "The Na-tional Society for Performance and In-struction."

Awards

Tom did not work for awards. Hisreinforcer was discovery, pure andsimple. Although he did not work forawards, Tom received many. Becausethe list is long, I can mention only themost notable. The Organizational Be-havior Management Network of theAssociation for Behavior Analysisawarded Tom its Lifetime Achieve-ment Award in 1989. Tom was induct-ed into Training Magazine's Hall ofFame on the first round. He was madeone of the first Honorary Members for

18 OGDEN R. LINDSLEY

Life of the National Society for Per-formance and Instruction in 1963. Tomwas the first to receive its Distin-guished Professional AchievementAward in 1990. Recently the ISPIBoard of Directors renamed this awardthe "Tom Gilbert Award for Distin-

guished Professional Achievement inPerformance Improvement."Tom has taken his behavior with

him, but to us he has left his accom-plishments. You can almost hear aRebel yell, as performance technologySHRIEKED when Gilbert fell.