Changing Behavior One Step At A Time - a podcast by Ty Brown

Today I’d like to talk about something I call “bite-sized chunks.” This is a concept I use tot show clients how to bring about complex behavior changes in their dogs.

Now, a complex task for a dog is very different from a complex task for us. If someone were to tell me to go upstairs, grab something out of my bedroom, and bring it back downstairs, I wouldn't think that was a complex task at all. When we’re asked to do something like that, our brain immediately links all the steps together: I need to walk up the staircase, turn at the landing, turn left to enter the bedroom, open the door, pick up an object—and so on. It’s only a few steps. Human brains are good at synthesizing multiple steps of a process, so walking upstairs to grab an object isn’t a complex problem.

For dogs, however, that would be a very complex set of actions. If it’s something that they decide to do, and it’s in their minds already, then it isn’t quite as complex. But if we are attempting to prompt that behavior and associate it with a cue or a command, then we often see that putting all of those steps together is enormously complicated for our dogs. Some will pick it up quickly, but even smart dogs will take a long time to learn how to perform all of those actions reliably and progressively.

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