Consistency

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On the finding that consistency and repeated contact develops trust and is important to success when training. Quote from Dr. Peter Wyman, in interview with Tim McGowan.

Consistency does not simply mean repeating a programme. It means deliberately maintaining contact after the initial delivery ends, so that trust and effect do not fade the moment participants walk out of the room.

Wyman et al. (2020) built this into Wingman-Connect's design rather than treating it as an afterthought. Both training arms "had a 1-hour booster session, plus text messages," and "participants in both conditions were invited to receive training-specific informational and interactive text messages for 6 months" (Interventions). The trial's own results suggest why this matters. The benefit on depression symptoms "was maintained at 6 months," including "lower likelihood of elevated depression... over the full study period," while "the benefit of the training on occupational problems did not extend past 1 month" (Results, Discussion). The pattern is suggestive rather than proven, but it points the same direction: the outcome supported by six months of reinforcement held; the one without it faded.

The same research programme has since built sustained contact even further into its next study. A currently active trial, "Career Enhancement Training Study Delivered Across Career Phases" (University of Rochester, Wyman, PI), asks participants to "complete a survey today... and another survey at 6 and 12 months," with "informational text messages (approximately 1 per week) that reinforce training concepts" across the full year. This is worth noting plainly: it is a live study with no outcome data yet, so it cannot be cited as evidence of effect. What it shows is a deliberate design choice — the same team choosing to extend touchpoints across a full year rather than treating one training block as sufficient.

There is a useful, if less rigorous, way to describe what consistency is protecting against. List (2022), writing for a general audience rather than presenting original research, calls it a "voltage drop": "when a seemingly promising idea loses efficacy or profitability as it expands." That is not evidence specific to network health, but it names the failure mode consistency exists to prevent: an intervention that works once and then quietly stops working as time, distance, or scale erodes it.

Two things should be said plainly. First, both the finished trial and the design logic behind it come from one research group; there is no independent replication of "booster plus months of reinforcement" as a mechanism. Second, the 2020 trial's own data show that sustained contact did not rescue every outcome — occupational problems faded regardless. Consistency appears to help, but the evidence here does not show it as a guarantee.

Context: Consistency in Schools

Schools cannot rely on a single well-run assembly or workshop; the evidence points to sustained delivery across years. Wyman's (2014) developmental model is explicitly staged over a child's school career: "(1) childhood programs to strengthen a broad set of self-regulation processes... through family and school-based programs, followed by (2) adolescent programs that leverage system-level influences (e.g., peer norms)" (p. S253). This is consistency built into the sequence itself, not a single intervention repeated unchanged. Implementation research reinforces the same point at the level of delivery quality: Santiago-Rosario et al. (2023) find that "Tier 1 PBIS implemented with fidelity improves valued outcomes like student social, emotional, behavioral, and mental health, academic achievement, and attendance" (p. 8) the qualifier "with fidelity" is doing real work, since a framework applied inconsistently is not the same programme as one sustained properly, even if the materials are identical.

Context: Consistency among Remote Workers in IT and Technology

For distributed software teams, consistency cannot mean merely staying on the same team for a long time, because duration alone does not appear to build trust. Herbsleb and Mockus (2003) followed two distributed departments for years and found no improvement: "high levels of interdependence were maintained for the entire 2.5 - 3.5 years, showing no consistent reduction" in the coordination problems distance caused (Discussion). Distant colleagues still reported markedly less "teamness" than local ones, a gap the authors trace to how "distance interfered with the usual stages by which individuals become coherent groups or teams" (Discussion) despite years of continuous working contact. This suggests consistency requires the right kind of repeated contact, not simply a long-running team roster; no study in this population has tested whether a Wingman-Connect-style deliberate touchpoint schedule, rather than passive tenure, would close that gap.

References

Herbsleb, J. D., & Mockus, A. (2003). An empirical study of speed and communication in globally distributed software development. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, 29(6), 481–494. https://doi.org/10.1109/TSE.2003.1205177

List, J. A. (2022, April 19). The five vital signs of a scalable idea and how to avoid a voltage drop. Behavioral Scientist. https://behavioralscientist.org/

Santiago-Rosario, M. R., McIntosh, K., Izzard, S., Cohen Lissman, D., & Calhoun, E. (2023). Is positive behavioral interventions and supports (PBIS) an evidence-based practice? Center on PBIS, University of Oregon.

University of Rochester, Department of Psychiatry. (2025). Consent form: Career enhancement training study delivered across career phases (STUDY00008549) [Clinical trial consent document]. ClinicalTrials.gov identifier NCT05967364.

Wyman, P. A. (2014). Developmental approach to prevent adolescent suicides: Research pathways to effective upstream preventive interventions. American Journal of Preventive Medicine, 47(3, Suppl. 2), S251–S256. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.amepre.2014.05.039

Wyman, P. A., Pisani, A. R., Brown, C. H., Yates, B., Morgan-DeVelder, L., Schmeelk-Cone, K., Gibbons, R. D., Caine, E. D., Petrova, M., Neal-Walden, T., Linkh, D. J., Matteson, A., Simonson, J., & Pflanz, S. E. (2020). Effect of the Wingman-Connect upstream suicide prevention program for Air Force personnel in training: A cluster randomized clinical trial. JAMA Network Open, 3(11), e2022532. https://doi.org/10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2020.22532