by Alan Nelson
My eye is caught by an article in the Guardian about CBT. As a person who staked his career on leaving traditional publishing to establish an online learning company, you might expect me to have been an enthusiast for what used to be called CBT, but in fact nothing could be further from the truth.
One of the jobs of a publisher is to sift through the wealth of bad ideas for new projects and spot the one good one that might be worth backing. The trouble with the early days of CBT was that there never was a good one. Throughout the 90s, I sat through a succession of pitches from wild eyed CBT enthusiasts, feeling like a one of the dragons on Dragon’s Den on a day when only the man with the inflatable sheep had turned up.
The pitch was generally this:
“I have developed a prototype for something that probably no one would ever want anyway. (By prototype, what I mean is that it looks crap and doesn’t work.) Anyway, if you were to give me a very large amount of money (generally over £100k), we could develop a less clunky version with which to conquer the known world and get rich.”
I don’t of course know whether any of these people were right because my rejection rate stood at 100%. But I did learn a couple of things that I still keep in mind.
Firstly, at the planning stage don’t make the mistake of thinking that changing the format changes the rules. You are still bound the dynamics of the market: how many people might buy it and how much will they pay?
Secondly, once the development begins, any prototype you develop must work and look like the finished thing or it will be next to useless. Don’t assume that people can envisage what you mean.
So what did the Guardian have to say about the rather dated acronym CBT? To my delight, they weren’t talking about Computer Based Training at all, but instead referring to Cognitive Behavioural Therapy. This is apparently a new approach to therapy which rejects detailed analysis in favour of travelling around on the tube with a portion of fish and chips. This sounds like a laugh, although I can’t of course vouch for its validity.
However, if it signals the end of CBT as I knew it, then I for one will be cheering it on.
Comments