Part 1

Hi, I am Cary Griffin with Griffin-Hammis Associates. Today, we are 
talking about discovering personal genius or the discovery process. It 
is the foundation for customizing employment. Before we start, I have to 
give a special thanks to Michael Callahan, at Employment for All and 
Marc Gold Associates, as well as Ellen Condon, at the Rural Institute at 
the University of Montana. They are really the pioneers of discovery. I 
want to make sure it is understood that these folks have really helped 
to guide what we know about discovery as an assessment process. 
Typically, we use discovery with folks that we don't know very well and 
that we need to know more about [who] are searching for a job or 
starting a small business. These folks generally have fairly complex 
lives or disabilities.

In the past, we have done person-centered planning, but we left out a 
substantial assessment piece. That's what discovery does. It goes back 
in time and looks at who the person is. That's the foundation for any 
good job development plan or small business plan.  The challenge that we 
are facing is creating lasting satisfying person-directed employment 
beyond the confines of traditional job development.

What I mean is that customized employment, which is driven by discovery, 
builds on some aspects of competitive employment.  We know that 
competitive employment has brutalized people with disabilities and other 
populations as well who face substantial barriers to employment. 
Customized employment really starts with the person more so than 
traditional approaches have.

Instead of looking at what an employer has to offer, we start with 
identifying what the person has to offer. Then, we blend those two. 
While obviously the market matters, we want to start with [the] person 
so that we are not sticking people into jobs just because the jobs are 
available.  That is the challenge of discovery - to figure out who the 
person is. 

One of the first activities is to ask questions without asking 
questions. In other words, how do we have a conversation with folks? The 
first thing that I would like you to do is to go find somebody. It could 
be somebody that you know or somebody that you don't know very well.  I 
want you to follow these steps.  First, align with somebody that you 
don't particularly know. It can be somebody that you know as well. It 
might not work as well though.  Find out three things about the person 
that aren't obvious, like I am a good mother, or I play the lottery 
every week. Those may or may not be important things. [In fact], those 
are pretty run of the mill kinds of things. What we are looking for is 
something a little bit deeper.  Now, the trick is that 
I want you to do this without asking any questions.

The hint is that I want you to have a conversation. After you have had a 
conversation, report back to each other about what it is you learned. We 
will take a short break here. You can go do your activity. Then we'll 
come back for the next part of this discussion.

Part 2

What you have found out probably, if you did this correctly and you 
didn't ask any questions, is that it’s very difficult to have a 
conversation with somebody that you don't know if you don't ask 
questions. The reason I had you do this is not that I don't want you 
asking people questions. I had you do it, because in the traditional way 
that we worked with folks with disabilities and their families is that 
we fired questions from a checklist at them. 

For example, "Do you like to work indoors? Do you like to work outdoors? 
Do you like to work with people? Do you like to work alone?" These are 
all great questions, but folks without communication capacity, verbal 
language, or limited life experiences, have a very hard time answering 
those questions. What we try to do is to have a conversation and not an 
interrogation. 
 
Also, if I asked the wrong question, I am done. For example, if I ask, 
“Did you watch the baseball game last night?” And you say, “No.” We're 
done.  But if I approach it by saying, “Hey, I watched that baseball 
game last night,” and give room for silence, I allow the person to 
contemplate what was asked. What I am after is simply something about a 
baseball game. But, it allows them to consider that and to think; well 
maybe this is an opportunity just to have a chat.  Maybe they would feel 
comfortable enough over time to say, “You know, I don't really like 
baseball and don't watch baseball.  Here is what I did last night.” 

Questions need to be open-ended. Yes or no questions tend to be the 
direction that we go or their first choice.  We may ask, "Do you want to 
work outside or inside?  You know, I'd like to work both places. It is 
hard to score that response.  

Also, the information changes over time and with the circumstance. "I 
like to work alone as opposed to working with people that I don't.  I 
love to work with people who I like." Again, stay away from questions 
and lead into the answers through experience and getting to know 
somebody is a better way to go about this.  Truly having a conversation 
and not having an interrogation is what discovery is about; it's the 
foundation.

It's also best to let the environment guide discovery.  People are 
different people in different environments. We have to access 
environments that make sense for the person and go to meet them where 
they are.  If they have family connections then we want to go to the 
family. If that's where they are living, that is especially important.  
Even if they are in a residential program, we want to go to that area of 
the community and look around the neighborhood.

Just from a functional standpoint, if transportation is going to be an 
issue, which it is so often in job development or owning a business and 
being able to get your products to market, then let’s look for resources 
that are close to home. Because that just makes it easier.   Are there 
businesses close to home?  One of the things that we talk about a lot in 
our work is the proliferation of small businesses that aren't 
necessarily identified or that we drive by everyday in our rush to work. 
We don't ever see them until we need them. 

By getting out and looking around the neighborhood more closely, we pick 
up cues from the kinds of homes that people are living in and the cars 
parked out in their driveway. By looking at people working in their 
garages and what they are doing in there, we get a sense for who lives 
in the neighborhood. We find out who might be able to help later, and 
who might be able to guide our directions.  

We want to know about that local environment.  We want to stop 
occasionally and ask a neighbor where they drive to work in case we are 
trying to create a carpool of some kind.  Be in a variety of 
environments. Try to figure out where this person does the best. Where 
are they during the day that makes sense for them? What other 
environments do we need to explore that are critical?

If we listen to John O'Brien when he talks about the fact that sometimes 
we have to live into the answers with people, that's what discovery 
does. We put people in enough situations so that we're starting to find 
out about who they are. Who they are often is much more complex than 
we've thought they are.  We find out that people have an insatiable 
desire to learn.  We find that they are very competent in diverse areas. 
We have been really limited by our own abilities to dream big and to 
teach people complex tasks. 

We don't want to put limits on this. But, we also need to know how long 
discovery takes. How much money and time is this going to take?  There's 
a couple different ways to look at that.  What Mike Callahan and his 
colleagues are reporting is that discovery generally occurs over a 1 to 
5 week period, and it takes 10 to 25 hours. Those are fairly broad 
ranges, but certainly understandable.  

If you think about somebody who is in a community health center, 
somebody who is in a developmental disability day program or sheltered 
workshop, the likelihood that they are going to spend the next 20 or 30 
years there is astronomically high.  If we spent 3, 4, or 5 weeks trying 
to figure out who somebody is and how that would lead to a job for them, 
then I don't think that has taken very much time. When you compare that 
to the 20 or 30 years that they are going to wait and not get a job, I 
think we need to refocus our priorities on that. 

Where did discovery come from?  I think it came from a variety of 
places.  For us in our work, it came out of a technique that we've sort 
of jokingly called Hanging Out With Intent (HOWI). This came out of some 
work that we were privileged to do with Steve Hall and Patty Cassidy 
when they were still in Indiana. We were working to close their 
workshops at the time.  We were meeting people who we didn't know. They 
didn't have a lot of social history. They may or may not have had 
families.  The whole idea was hanging out with intent, going downtown to 
try and find what this person liked and what they didn't like.  It was a 
very loose process 15 years ago. But, what we found and what we applied 
in many other occasions when we were especially working with people 
coming right out of institutions into the community was that this was a 
process that really taught us a lot about how people learned. What they 
liked and what they didn't like. How to accommodate their needs, 
learning styles, and the clues around employment likes and dislikes. So 
this has evolved. It took Mike Callahan, Ellen Condon, and Norciva 
Schumbert to really put the bones together on this and to really make it 
a more formal process then what we used for many years. 
It is focused all of our work on the idea of assistance and not 
assessment.  we spend much too much money testing people and assuming 
that things like vocational evaluation and psychometrics lead to a 
predictive outcome. We are looking for ecological validity, which is a 
fit in a particular environment versus the predictive validity of most 
vocational evaluation.

Is formal evaluation important? Absolutely.  Once you know who this 
person is, where they are going, and if the person happens to have a 
traumatic brain injury, then some neuropsychological testing can really 
help with figuring out adaptations for learning, memory, and teaching 
strategies. Those sorts of things are very important.  It's not the 
first thing. For many people, we will probably never need a standardized 
test or vocational evaluation again. Unfortunately, that testing has 
been used over and over again to screen people out of programs.  We want 
to screen people in. We want to be inclusive. 

We want to do this inventory work in real environments. We want to 
certainly take some cautions from rehabilitation environments. But 
really, we don't want that to guide our thinking. Let's say we were in a 
transition age classroom, but we didn't have augmentative communication 
to help us talk. Certainly, there are a lot of children today who do not 
have a speaking voice because of a lack of augmentative communication.  
I can't imagine being a teenager and not being allowed to talk or not 
being able to talk.  I would be throwing chairs around the room.  I am 
always sort of amazed of the tolerance and the patience that these 
students show us. I don't want to take information about behavior that 
has been produced by the inability of the system to accommodate their 
disability.  I don't want to take data on somebody who’s been sitting in 
a day program with 30 other people coloring or putting together puzzles 
or even doing some contract work that's meaningful to them.  That 
environment is still not terribly real in this world, so I want to go 
outside.  
 
I want to have one person, not a group of people. I want to try to see 
how it is that they get by in a variety of environments leading to these 
clues about who is this person. What kinds of things are they interested 
in? I am not looking for the one thing.  I am looking for the many 
things.  It has been said that 80% of Americans with college degrees 
work in a field for which they didn't prepare.  

We are very adaptable as human beings. We have a multitude of interests 
and to think that somebody with a serious disability has fewer interests 
would be very difficult at this point for me to believe. I think it has 
to do with exposure and with the ability to entertain ourselves. For 
instance, to say, "I think I want to try disassembling a car for a 
change." 

Those of us who have some cash and some independence get to make those 
choices everyday.  We have the ability to have hobbies and to have 
friends of diverse thought and background. Many people with disabilities 
live a life of isolation and loneliness and don't have those 
opportunities.  I am going in thinking that there are unlimited job and 
business opportunities in the world.  There are unlimited kinds of ways 
to make a living and if we've only got one idea for a person then we 
haven't done our work.  

We really want to get into as many environments that make sense for the 
person. That is why we are going downtown. That's why we're going into 
the family home. That's why we're going into these environments to see 
what works and what doesn't work. What supports do people need? Are 
there particularly bad days or good days?  What seems to happen when 
particular kinds of people are around?  Again, we're not out there doing 
this for six months.  We're really doing this in a strategic 
understandable fashion. We don't want to take those old tests and 
behavior reports from the segregated environments unless there is a 
strong history of some kind of violence or predation.  Even then we want 
to be very cautious about how we proceed and certainly pay attention to 
warning signs. We don't want to endanger anybody in this process 
obviously. 

What we find though is that once we get downtown, in the community, into 
a variety of different environments, one place leads to another. Then we 
get a clue. If the person is really into birds, we notice because we 
have gone to the park with the person. 

Then, we could go to other places, maybe a mountain trail. We can walk 
that mountain trail and look at a variety of different kinds of wild 
life and find out that it is not just about birds. Maybe it’s about 
being outdoors.  It might be about music or a thousand other things. We 
don't know yet.  All we are doing is following those clues. 

We ought to know that we liked birds. Where are the ten other 
environments that we can access easily that involve birds? What we will 
probably find is that the things that show up on the surface are not 
actually the motivator. Just because somebody likes popcorn doesn't mean 
that they want to make popcorn.  Generally, what it means is that 
popcorn is something that has been restricted.  Or, "I like popcorn 
because it means going to a movie. I like the person who makes the 
popcorn." Again, digging deeper is what I am suggesting. If you are 
doing discovery properly, you're finding that there are a multitude of 
layers to every individual.

The other piece is to avoid the idea that just because somebody likes 
something it’s what he or she ought to do for a living. I like lots of 
things.  I have a lot of hobbies.  I have a lot of interests.  But, I 
don't do any of those things for a living. I am not particularly excited 
about doing those things for a living. If I looked at all the different 
skills and talents that I have, I know how to do a lot of things, but 
that's not my chosen career. We have to look at those issues as well. 

I was driving through western Iowa a few months ago and came across this 
town. On the outskirts, it said the "Ice Cream Capital of the World." 
It's where the Blue Bunny Factories are. When I drove up to the 
factories, I discovered that probably all those people working in the 
ice cream factory aren't there because they like ice cream. In the 
computer department, all the information technology folks probably like 
computers a lot more than they like ice cream.  The guys that are 
driving the trucks probably like driving the trucks more than they like 
ice cream. The folks that are doing the nutritional analysis probably 
aren't there because they like ice cream. They are probably there, 
because they like chemistry. Again, look beneath the surface. There are 
a lot people who sell cars for a living not because they like cars, but 
because they like selling. Or, they like being around people. So dig 
deeper. 

And again, let all of these connections, this web grow. This is a 
network approach.  Once we find family members who share certain 
interests or give us particular clues about a person, we can follow 
those clues.  Some are going to be a dead end. Some of those clues are 
going to lead to other places. 

I know of a circumstance where a dad had worked for 20 years for the 
state highway department.  He had never thought that his son would work. 
Never thought that his son really even understood what he did for a 
living.  But as we got to know Jim, he ended up going to work for the 
highway department.  Jim was really excited about the bright orange 
trucks and the safety aspects that he heard his father talking about. 
But they never really communicated much about that.  As we followed 
these lines of communication that opened up through the process, we 
found that it was a natural fit.  Of course dad does the job 
development.  

Sometimes we get in the way of families helping their siblings or their 
children figure out their work.  We look at families. We look at 
friends. We look at acquaintances who can tell us how the person is 
doing in this environment. What kind of support do you think they need? 
What are they really good at?  This may or may not lead to anything.

Sometimes those acquaintances may be as simple as the person at 7-11 on 
the corner who helps this young lady with her coffee in the morning. 
That might be an opening for a job; we don't know yet.  We are not going 
there.  It's one of those markers along the way that we can reference if 
we need it. 

The point is not to jump to the conclusion about the job yet.  That's 
going to evolve.  You are going to figure that out and discovery is 
going to reveal jobs rather than you having to speculate about jobs. 
That's sort of the magic of discovery when it’s done correctly.  
Obviously, we don't work professionals out of this. When I list the 
strangers, I mean folks that we don't know right now but that we can get 
to know. For most folks just starting discovery, they don't know the 
employers out there, but getting to know employers is part of our 
strategy in discovery. 

Even though Discovery sounds like a loose process, it is actually a 
pretty structured process.  I describe it as a funnel. We start out 
really big at the top. We grab as many ideas and environments and 
situations as we have time to do and that makes sense to do, and we 
gradually bring them down into the neck and the outlet of the funnel. It 
narrows.  As we get to know the person, we start zeroing in on 
particular environments, people, and attributes of a work environment 
that makes sense for this person based on their skills, talents, and 
preferences.  

Let me reiterate, we are not here to ask what job or business would be 
best. That's one of the major faults we find with person-centered 
planning.  I do not mean that it's not a great strategy. 
We use it all of the time.  But for the most part, we missed the 
assessment piece when we come into somebody's living room and we say 
what's your dream job?  Let me emphasize that we can talk more deeply 
about dream jobs and how that's a set-up for a job developer and for the 
person wanting them, but it also limits our ability to be creative and 
look beyond [the dream].

Focusing on a dream job also reinforces the fact that many people with 
complex disabilities have been taught what we want to hear and what's 
available.  If somebody comes in and answers that question and says, 
“Well, I want to be the manager of Philadelphia Phillies.” They really 
know that they are not going to get that. I am certainly not talented 
enough to get them that job, and so we are all disappointed.  They also 
know the reality that what we're probably going to say in many 
situations is, “How about you start bagging groceries at Kroger’s?” So 
everybody is disappointed.

Let's not go there.  Let's let the path reveal the secrets.  Let's let 
the path unfold all the different kinds of jobs that are available.  One 
of the great things about customized employment is that we can throw 
away the idea of job descriptions for a while and create that through 
negotiation later. 

That's also an important aspect of why we would include self-employment 
in this mix as a vital option. Sometimes the job that we need to create, 
the ultimate environment for folks, is not available.  Again, millions 
of people who are self-employed in this world have done the same thing.  
They have said there is no job description that does what I needed to 
do. There is no environment that I can find other than my own 
environment, so I am going to go create my business.  What we are trying 
to do with discovery is to find that out. Does it make sense for the 
person to create his or her own environment either in another business, 
or with a business within a business, or with a freestanding business?

The more folks are involved generally, with limits, the more diversity 
of thought, activities, and locations you are going to find that your 
discovery becomes richer.   We don't want it to go on forever, we want 
it to be a process that is somewhat finite. It ought to be driven by a 
plan. (First, I am going to do this, then I am going to do that, and 
then I am going to do this). We want activities built into this process. 
We want a variety of locations that are driven by the person. We also 
have to do one of those really difficult things; we have to think about.  
If there are really good environments, then there are probably not so 
good environments.

We have to go experiment with a couple of those too, just to see if the 
person's going to work. Chances are, most of us in our jobs are in 
environments or in situations or assigned work tasks that we don't 
particularly like.  Sometimes we can negotiate those out.  The more 
power we have for instance and the more an employer wants us, the more 
likelihood that we can carve those out and not have to work with those.  
But, there's also the idea that I can tolerate things when I am getting 
paid for them and when I am getting respect and appreciation for doing 
those things.  I can tolerate some things I don't like to do, because I 
am for the most part getting to do the bulk of my job, which is 
something I do enjoy doing.

In my own job, I don't particularly like sitting in airports for 10 
hours some nights. But, I do it, because I love the rest of my work.  I 
think that if we can give people more in their plus column than in the 
minus column, people are pretty adaptable.  But we want to know if we 
can, and this is the hard thing, figure out what we don't know.  If we 
can set off some alarm bells to say these are not particularly great 
environments or work tasks for this person to have to engage in, then we 
can maybe minimize or mitigate those (negatives) through adding more in 
the plus column.  The more good things that I like to do or better pay 
or whatever it is, or better yet, carve those out. Get rid of those 
things, especially those things that might make me look incompetent. 
There's a reason why I don't do [certain jobs]. I don't file legal 
papers for our firm, because I am not a lawyer and that would make me 
look very incompetent. So, I don't do that. I hire somebody to do that 
for us. 

Think that way and you have to have an abundance mind set to do this.  
You can't think the world is made up of this really small labor market.  
The labor market is ever expanding, and it's based on your ideas.  If 
somebody will buy it, you have created a labor market. You have to think 
beyond the bounds of traditional job development and entrepreneurship to 
do this.

The best way to get a great idea is to get lots of ideas.  I can't state 
that enough. When we are working on teams, job development teams, 
discovery teams, person-centered planning teams, the idea is that 
everybody has to be a contributor. Everybody has to come to the table 
with a variety of ideas. 

Now, I am going to have you do another exercise. You will go away and 
work on this and then come back. These questions were prompted by Mike 
Callahan, Norciva Schumbert, and Ellen Condon. These are great questions 
to get the conversation going.  These are not questions you fire at 
somebody. These are the questions that guide part of your discovery.  
You're trying to figure these things out with your activities.  

I'd like for you to go out and do this with somebody over the next 
couple days. Try to at least get some clues.  Obviously, I don't want 
you to do all of discovery yet.  We haven't been through the entire 
presentation yet.  But, I want you to go practice a little bit.  This is 
something good to practice on yourself. 

Get with a colleague, a friend, or your partner and sit down and answer 
these questions, or look at yourself in a variety of environments. See 
how you would answer these questions when you were in the work 
environment, when you were at church, when you were out on Friday night, 
when you were with your friends watching a football game.  Think about 
how it is you might answer these questions. 

First, focus on two things that people don't know about you, those are 
important.  Many of you know me, but you don't really know who I am.  
You see the professional me, but you don't see the at home me.  You 
don't see the slothful me.  You don't see the mechanic me.  You don't 
see the fisherman me. You don't see whatever it is.  I have lots of 
interests.  

You don't know that part of me. That's pretty darn critical, I think, to 
developing a new job for me. Where and when are you at your best? Are 
there a variety of places? When and where do you have your highest 
support needs?  For instance, I am lousy at taking verbal directions 
from people.  If somebody is going to tell me how to do something, they 
have already lost me. I have to read about it.  I have to sit down and 
draw it out.  I have to do it.  I think a lot of people are like that, 
but we all get into situations where we are on the computer tech line 
and some computer wiz is telling you how to do something.  They've lost 
me at press the escape button. I have to do it.  I have to read about 
it.  I have to see it. 

Other then your immediate family, who knows you best? Who do you share 
your deepest, darkest intimate secrets with?  Think about the kinds of 
things you share with other friends, with coworkers that you may or may 
not have shared with your immediate family, and think about why that it 
is. Think about if you had no close friends or nobody to share things 
with.  One of the reasons why we share information with others is to get 
their response, guidance, advice, and sometimes permission to move 
forward. Those are important social relationships that we are really 
getting at here.  What gets you out of bed in the morning?  What really 
gets you to move forward to engage in the day? 

I am always kind of amazed that folks will get out of bed everyday at 
the group home and go to a day program that they have been going to for 
15 years, where they know that every day is going to be pretty much the 
same as it was yesterday.  I think about the drive and the desire to 
achieve that person has and then a lot of times they get labeled as 
unmotivated to work. I can't imagine a person more motivated.  I'd have 
given up years ago if that was what I had to face everyday. Go work on 
that and come back, and we will do the next section. Thanks! 

Part 3

Hopefully you found out some pretty interesting things in your exercise. 
We're going to move on to the more formal assessment piece of this. Let 
me state that we've certainly been having these debates for many years, 
since supported employment was authorized in the Rehab Act in 1986. In 
the Developmental Disability (DD) Act in 1985, one of the things that we 
started understanding right away was that vocational evaluation was not 
particularly functional. It didn't tell us what we really needed to know 
about a person. IQ tests and reading levels didn't really matter for us.  
What we were looking for was this ecological fit. What environment, what 
tasks, and around what people makes sense for this person? 

Unfortunately for a lot of us, we focused on entry-level jobs. Even when 
we got a good job lead, it was interesting how we went to the easiest 
job that we could teach in that arena. Or, the job we thought was most 
deserving for that person. 

Just last night I got an email from a mother, who was telling the story 
of her daughter. Her daughter really likes reptiles and snakes. They go 
to this community museum that has a reptile center all through the 
summer. She gets to pet the snakes and takes the classes there.  The 
daughter doesn't have a lot of verbal language and carries a label of 
autism and all kinds of things that present an alleged barrier to 
employment. 

But, the mother was a real advocate for the last few years. She has been 
complaining that the school needs to get her daughter a job. Finally, 
she convinced the teacher to go to this museum.  The teacher went in and 
introduced herself and said, “You know I'd like at least a work study 
position here for this young lady.  She is really into snakes and 
reptiles.”  And, the teacher said, “You know she could be fine emptying 
the trash, cleaning the tables, sweeping the floor, and cleaning the 
bathrooms.” She immediately went to the janitorial job.

Luckily, the curator of the reptile exhibit said, “Gee, that's too bad.  
What I really need is somebody who will handle the snakes.  I need 
somebody who will pet the lizards, because they so need to be touched 
and worked with, physically handled, during the day because of the 
nature of this captive environment.” Luckily the teacher picked up on 
that and said, “Well, she'd be perfect for that. That's what she really 
likes to do.” But why didn't she start with that? Why did she assume 
that this young lady should be the janitor and not the snake handler? 

We've got to undo that in our thinking. Why are we looking towards the 
least instead of the most when we are out doing job development? Part of 
that I think comes from the tradition of testing which has been about 
what are you bad at not what are you good at. Also that takes a very 
limited look at work and all the multitudinous amounts of different 
tasks, and diversity of all the different tools and things that get done 
deep inside of business and industry. 

Again, data taken in segregated settings is by its very nature false. 
It’s a fake environment. So, it's going to produce fake data. Checklists 
don't offer enough diversity of choice. Most of us have been given 
interest inventories in our lives. I can tell you that you would have to 
have a checklist or an interest inventory that was a billion pages long 
to capture what's true about business and industry opportunities today. 

I'll give you an example. I was on a plane a couple years ago. We were 
landing in Cincinnati. I was making small talk with the guy sitting next 
to me. I said that I have to change planes and go on to New York or 
wherever I was going that day. He said, “Well, I am staying on this 
plane.” I thought well that's great and this plane is going on to Paris.  
I said, “Are you on vacation?”  He said, “Well no. Several times during 
the winter, I have to go to Paris to work.” And I said, “That's 
interesting.” And he says, “Well, actually, what I do is I meet with 
several of my other colleagues. We get on a train, go up into the Swiss 
Alps, and we ski for a week.”  I said, “And that's work?” and he says, 
“Yes, I am a ski tester.” Well, ski tester doesn't show up on any test!  
When I was in high school, I was supposed to be a barber and join the 
Navy, that's what my test showed.  So, I am not a big fan and maybe 
that's my bias, but I don't know a test that comes up with being a ski 
tester. I haven't seen that test yet. 

I've got no big problem with unpaid work experiences other than the fact 
that they don't tend to be very natural in the world. I understand that 
many school personnel think that they can't have kids in paid jobs, but 
that's not true.  You just have to watch the kind of job and the number 
of hours that person would be in that job. When we were growing up, if 
we were doing an unpaid work experience it meant that dad was mad at 
you, that you weren't getting your allowance, that something had gone 
wrong, and that you were given some unseemly task to complete as 
punishment. I am wondering how many people think that unpaid work is 
punishment.  That's what we are teaching them about work by having them 
do unpaid work experience.

Growing up, many of us owned small businesses, and we didn't know it. 
Now some of them only lasted a couple of weeks. One of my best friends, 
Randy, and I would detail cars over the Christmas break from junior high 
school. I used to buy cars, strip them down, and sell the parts. I did 
that as a small business throughout high school. I had a job helping a 
guy restore Modal A Fords when I was in seventh grade. I always milked 
cows, worked on the farm, and did a variety of things.  I never once 
considered not getting paid for those things-that was a natural part of 
growing up. Now maybe I'm too old, maybe that doesn't happen anymore, 
but I am a big fan of folks having paper routes and doing babysitting.  
There is no reason why you couldn't, especially in the schools, be 
linking up [with] a non-disabled peer with a similar interest so that 
they complement each other and complete those tasks together. 

Let me ask further; are you at your best when you're being tested or 
when you are exploring familiar and new places, people and things? 
Again, what better way to figure that out than to have some part-time 
jobs while you're growing up? I think that that's as much a family 
responsibility as it is a school responsibility.  
Those are really natural pieces of a person’s life and coming out of 
high school without paid experience doesn't prepare you much. It 
certainly doesn't build a career ladder. It doesn't build a work ethic. 
It doesn't connect the dots between effort and pay. I think we have 
created a monster by not having done this. 

Again, those expectations and support strategies need to be investigated 
as far as making sure that people have real work for real pay. It could 
be that having time limited unpaid work experience makes a lot of sense, 
but people ought to have the opportunity to earn some money as children 
or as adolescents anyway. 

How do you pay for assessment? Certainly, the base funding that all of 
us get to support that adolescent or that adult, whether we are running 
a developmental disability program, a mental health program, or a 
school, is exactly meant for assessment.  It’s not meant to run the 
program.  It’s meant to get that person a career, a job, or an education 
that leads to those same things. 

This is part of the process.  It's what that money is for. Now, 
vocational rehabilitation, work force investment, summer youth 
employment programs, school, general fund funding, development 
disability, and day program money can pay for career exploration in one 
way or another. Medicaid waivers can be tapped to do those sorts of 
things.  Sometimes you have to call discovery ugly things like work 
therapy or evaluation, but all the same, you can manipulate these 
funding sources to pay for the development of these opportunities. 

A PASS plan, a Plan for Achieving Self-Support, can be used to purchase 
career exploration for adolescents and certainly for adults. Personal 
budgets that we're trying to drive through the system can help with 
career development.  The new Medicaid [programs], such as the Community 
Plus Medicaid template, is allowing our personal budgets.  Personal 
budgets should contain hours and dollars for discovering the vocational 
themes in somebody's life. 

What are we looking for in discovery?  We're looking for the ideal 
conditions of employment and a lot of times that takes, by definition 
with customized employment, some form of negotiation.  This may come in 
the form of different tasks of negotiating, different ways of 
supervising, or doing the work itself.  Discovery amounts to looking at 
strengths, interests, supports needed, supports that are available, and 
the various contributions that the person can make in a particular work 
environment or across work environments. We are looking for 
relationships that matter and that help us get more ideas or a lot of 
ideas. 

We need other people in our circle. That’s the other problem a lot of 
times with person-centered planning. Because we're not out in the 
community necessarily doing those things, I know some folks are, we're 
only talking to ourselves.  It's the same people at the same table all 
of the time or in the same living room all of the time.  Most of tend to 
be professionals even though that's what person-centered planning hopes 
to undo.

This is not a criticism.  Person-centered planning is a very dynamic and 
feasible process. But, what tends to happen is that we only talk to 
ourselves, and we already know everything that we already know. We have 
to get other people involved. That's why work experience is so 
important, because now we're out there talking to coworkers. We're out 
there talking to customers. We're out there talking to employers who 
sometimes live within different social and professional networks that we 
can tap and get ideas from. 

The fact that we're out in those environments teaches us a whole lot.  
When we go grocery shopping every week, we only see the surface of a 
grocery store. We don't see the back room. We don't see what it's like 
to work as a union meat cutter. We don't see what it's like to work in 
the inventory control department. We don't know what's it's like to work 
in shipping and receiving. We don't know about health standards, 
packaging, and repackaging and all of those things that go into the 
complexity of running a grocery store.  All we see is facing cans and 
stocking shelves. It’s so much more that goes on there. By being in 
those environments, even if we start just saying Jimmie likes being in 
grocery stores. Let's start there and the only jobs that are available 
for work experience are bagging groceries and facing cans.  Great!  That 
may be a great place to start, but it's not where we stop in discovery. 

Discovery is ongoing through this. We want to get deeper inside that 
store to look at what else is going on and what other kinds of things 
make sense. Also, being open to the idea that I liked grocery stores, 
because I got to go there with my dad and shop for groceries. Actually, 
I really liked being with my dad much more than I liked going grocery 
shopping.  In fact, I don’t really like grocery stores it turns out. 
Those are all things we're going to learn by doing discovery 
appropriately. 

Part of this process is also the idea of relationship mapping, which is 
that we identify people known to the job seeker.  This can be 
acquaintances, folks in the family, friends, and neighbors. Then we want 
to broaden the relationship map and identify people known to the team 
who also know the community. 

One of the common ways that I'll do this is get out peoples’ checkbook 
registers and look at where they are buying things in the town. That 
gives us an edge to go out and do discovery. If I see that Edna is 
really interested in dry cleaning or in laundry and somebody on the team 
every week is picking up their shirts at the local dry cleaners. Then I 
would have the person make a connection and say, could we come in here 
and do a short term work experience? Could we come in here and do an 
informational interview with you and just ask you what it's like 
to have a career in the laundry business?  How did you get into the 
business? What are the cool things about running a dry cleaning outfit? 
What’s coming in the future? I would ask all those kinds of questions 
that go into an informational interview. And doing that with the 
individual there, taking the tour, getting to know from an expert what 
it’s like to be in there is key to starting to create that relationship. 

We get so many job offers at this point, because the person who runs the 
business realizes that there is somebody in their midst who might be 
very well be intrigued by what they do. People love to talk about what 
they do for a living.  They love to give advice. So don't lock employers 
out. Now that's a very different strategy.  Even though we're not really 
looking for a job yet, we haven't finished discovery yet. Part of the 
process is getting to know what's out there in the community and often 
people will stop the process here. Sometimes that's good, and sometimes 
that's not so good. You probably don't want to bite on the first job you 
turn over, but there is nothing wrong with taking that job if it seems 
like it's a match at this point. 

We like discovery to be firm and solid, but we also don't want to stand 
in the way of opportunity when it happens.  It happens quite often that 
we'll get into a circumstance when we're talking to an employer, and 
we're going through the tour and finding out about it. This process is 
very different than when you're calling or knocking on the door saying, 
“Do you want to hire Edna here? Edna's really impressed with dry 
cleaning.” 

Typically, an employer will say, "No, we are not hiring right now."  
But, if you have just done the tour with somebody who is as excited 
about your business as anybody else is or as you are, chances are you 
are going to take kindly to them. It doesn't happen necessarily that 
way.  Maybe what you do is that you come back later and say, "You know 
we've been looking for a career in the laundry business with Edna.  
We’re still kind of stuck.  What kind of advice would you give us?"  
Sometimes that's where the job happens. Employers want to do what's 
right.

One of the things that get employers out of the bed in the morning, 
we've found, is their ability to create employment for others, that's 
the way they give back to the community. Ask almost any employer what 
they enjoy, and they'll tell you we enjoy the fact that we create 
economic opportunity for other people. There is your common ground in 
the negotiation. Edna needs a job. Employers like to create jobs. Can we 
talk, and put that together. Being in those environments builds 
relationships. Discovery is not looking at the wants ads, not caring 
about what the labor market is, not caring about whose hiring and who's 
not that doesn't make any difference. It’s that personal relationship. 
It's being in that environment that matters. 

One of the other things that is very critical we find, especially for 
folks that we don't know very well, is to create a community inventory 
or what some people call a community calendar of both the formal and 
informal associational life of a community. Now the formal associational 
life involves the church, the Kiwanis, the Lions Club, and civic groups 
that you have to join, such as the Chamber of Commerce, places where you 
can network.  Those are all very important. 

But, where a lot of the really cool things happen and where the 
excitement is, I find as we move closer to one individual, finding that 
informal associational life.  This is figuring out, if I am working with 
Bobbie, and Bobbie really loves Corvettes, how to connect his interests 
with an informal social network.  

We work with a guy named Bobbie who loves corvettes [who] has never been 
in a corvette.  Up until the time that we met him, we are not sure [if] 
he'd ever talked to anybody about corvettes. He'd come into work every 
day with a corvette hat on and that was kind of a clue. When we found 
out that there was a corvette club in town, we were able to link him up 
with that to get to the car shows to start this working within this 
network of other people who like similar things. As it turns out, Bobbie 
doesn't have any interest in working in cars. He just likes corvettes 
and being around corvettes.  That's great. Just because people who own 
corvettes like corvettes, doesn't mean that that's what they do for a 
living.

They don't necessarily work on corvettes or have anything to do with the 
automobile industry.  They have a diverse background in all kinds of 
jobs from being attorneys to doctors, to working behind a counter in a 
7-11. There are all kinds of people who have multiple interests. Getting 
him into that network where people like him have a shared interest right 
from the start, we hope will propel Bobbie into his career choice. We 
want to find out about the formal and more importantly the informal 
associational life, which is generally driven by discovery. 

I worked with a young lady who had been in an institution for many years 
and didn't have very much verbal language. She recently moved into a new 
community.  I was spending some time with her trying to figure out who 
she was and where we were going with her.  She had been referred to an 
employment program, a very good program in a rural area. One of the 
things that kept coming up in the limited discussion that we were able 
to have with her, and in watching her, and in finding out about things 
that she liked to do was that she was very interested in clothing.  

As we started to explore that, we realized that she was very interested 
in cloth. As we investigated that, what we discovered, and this took a 
couple days to figure out, was that she wanted to learn how to sew.  We 
didn't exactly know how to ask that right away and that came from the 
program manager who had been hanging out with her for a little bit.  One 
of the things that we did was we went downtown. This little town had 
about 3000 people, I guess.  

We went downtown to the fabric store. We just sort of walked around and 
this young lady kind of stood out in the store.  She is a little bit 
overwhelming to some people maybe in public. I hope I am not saying 
anything bad about her - that's not my intention. She caught the 
attention of the storeowner as she was running her hands over some of 
the cloth, some of the finer fabric she found really impressive.

The storeowner came over in a huff and talked to me. The owner asked if 
there was anything that she could help us with.  I said, “Well this is 
so and so and she just moved to this community. She is very interested 
in learning how to sew. That's why we came down here.  Do you know of 
anybody who teaches sewing? Do you sponsor any classes? Is there a 
community college nearby or an adult basic education class that might be 
a good one to take?”  The woman said, “Well, we teach classes in sewing, 
embroidery, and in quilting, but right now all of our classes are full 
until after Christmas.” 

She said some other things then just walked off and left us alone. 
We continued exploring in the store. I was thinking about where do we go 
next? What kind of questions do we need to ask? Can we wait to Christmas 
and does that make sense?  As we walked around, another customer came in 
and the store owner chatted with them awhile. We were in the store for 
another 10 minutes or so. When the other customer left, the storeowner 
came back, and she said to me. “You know I was thinking that my 
girlfriends and I, after church on Sunday, get together and have a light 
meal and we quilt in my living room.  Do you think she would be 
interested in coming out and doing that?” So that led to that engagement 
in the community. Now we've got somebody who can speak up for her, 
somebody who is a respected other who can get us into some other 
environments. 

Does that happen every day? No, but it happens more often than you 
think, because it's not the traditional way that we've gone about 
gaining access to the community. People out there really do want to help 
and asking is sort of the key. There is some old data that comes out of 
the fund raising industry that shows that something like 90% of 
Americans donates money to charitable causes and about 60% donate their 
time to charitable causes. The 40% who don't donate time, of that about 
95% say they would donate time if somebody would just ask them. You've 
got this entire community.  I know that there are bad things that happen 
in communities sometimes, but I've got to believe for the most part that 
communities are pretty welcoming. Communities don't like it when folks 
aren't succeeding. It makes them feel bad, and it makes them not look 
very good. As you start to work on community inventory with a person, 
you want to start visiting various places and people of relevance [that 
are] driven by the discovery process. 

The next assignment that you have is to think about somebody that you 
have been working with, somebody that you are going to work through 
discovery with. Go out and identify both the formal and informal 
associational life that might interest this person.  This information 
comes out of the clues that you've found for this person already.
The formal stuff is usually pretty easy to find.  If you've got somebody 
who is interested in safety, police, and fire, and you know fire 
fighters then that would be a good place to start.  

If you live in a rural area, chances are that there is a rural fire 
department. I might start there. That's kind of an association of sorts. 
If they are interested in opening a business, you might go to the Home 
Alone Group, which are all over the US. They tend to be folks who are 
organized by the local Chamber of Commerce or the Downtown Merchants 
Association. They get together to talk about strategies for running 
their home-based businesses. There are a variety of those kinds of 
things, [such as] church, intramural baseball, volleyball, basketball, 
and those kinds of sports things. 

You know, it doesn't have to be business related.  Relationships are 
really important. Think about the informal associational life. How do 
you find it? What are the clues? If you've got somebody who likes 
working on cars or is interested in cars, walk around the neighborhood 
until you see somebody with their garage open on Friday night or 
Saturday morning tinkering with an old car.  That’s a great place to 
walk up and start a conversation. It may or may not lead anywhere, but 
if you can investigate somebody's hobbies. People love to talk about 
their hobbies.  Find out where they got their information. Find out who 
around town they hang out with and go there. Find out what kinds of car 
shows are around. Find out if there is a car club.  

If somebody is into long distance running, go to the park and find 
somebody who is resting. Talk to them about how you get into that.  It's 
creating relationships and most of us do that so naturally that we don't 
think about it. Go do that and then come and take the rest of this 
class. Thanks. 

Part 4

We've been talking about discovery. We've been in the top part of this 
funnel that we have been talking about. We want to develop a plan that 
moves the information through that funnel and guides us as we go. 
Remember that discovery should lead to a solid profile that captures the 
essence of the individual.

What we want to capture is what works and what doesn't work for this 
individual. You can collect this in a variety of ways.  There are a 
variety of vocational profiles that you can find on the web or in a 
variety of good books written by Michael Callahan or Virginia 
Commonwealth University.  We [Griffin-Hammis] have a new book coming out 
on job development that has a profile type form.  There are a variety of 
resources that you can use.  When you are trying to figure what works 
and what doesn't work, you have to try some things that may or may not 
make sense right now. You never know if you are good at something if you 
don't try it.

If there seems to be an interest in an area, let's at least go visit a 
place that does that. Let's go talk to some people who do that kind of 
thing.  Find out what are the best settings for this person. What are 
their support needs? What are their different talents, skills, and 
interests?  Don't just let skills drive the process.  A lot of us learn 
our skills by doing our job.  Long before I was a public speaker, I was 
dreadful in front of a group. But, I have done it so much now that I 
don't get anxious about it all. But, when I was young I would be tied in 
knots about going out and having to speak in public.  We get used to it; 
obviously it is something that attracted us, but it didn't necessarily 
feel good at first.  

Find out what home is like such as chores and hobby tasks.  If you are 
not finding those, talk to the people at home about adding those.  They 
are very critical. We find a lot of times that folks with disabilities 
have been excluded, because it is inconvenient to have them doing the 
chores that the other kids do. It’s very important to get tasks. 
Interests that are revealed by being at home can also give a lot of 
information about the person. I know that I have been at people's homes, 
and I've seen them in the professional light.  I've seen them in the day 
program or in the classroom. When I go to their homes, there is this 
whole other world to them that I didn't know. Just as if I'd come to 
your home, I would probably find that you are into scrap booking, or you 
have an eBay business on the side. Those interests are not instantly 
revealed in the other environments. I need to find out who you are; what 
you're like in those other environments; and see if we can't build on 
that.  

We want to see what the impact of disability is in a variety of 
settings. I used to run a program, an adult rehabilitation program in 
southern Colorado. I was astounded that when I went into homes, people 
that had very few language skills in the day program could speak fluent 
Spanish in their families, because that's what they've grown with. Their 
English sometimes wasn't so good.  Sometimes people were quite fluent 
and bilingual, something that I wasn't quite as good at.  Look at the 
impact of disability in those environments. I always found it humorous 
that people would test out with very low IQ's, but they were bilingual.  
They knew two languages, something that most Americans don't know.  We 
want to take that into account.

What other things do we need to observe and investigate both formally 
and informally?  I think that intuition plays a big part in being good 
at discovery.  I don't think that it is absolutely something that you 
have to be good at, but I think that intuition grows.  It’s kind of like 
common sense. The more you use those muscles, the better they get.  We 
use a phrase called "going to where the career makes sense", something 
that I've already touched on.

It’s that idea of using the informational interview, of going out and 
asking other people how they make their living.  It is simply making an 
appointment and saying, “Can I come talk to you about your business?”  
What I typically say is that I am a career counselor and I am working 
with somebody who is into painting.  I am not an artist, and I don't 
know much about that so I would call an artist and say, “I don't know 
much about this. I am a career counselor, but I am helping this person 
who really seems to have some talent and some drive in that area.  I am 
talking to a number of artists about how they make a living. How they 
got into it. "What are the pitfalls and the things to do to grow your 
career? Could we have 15 minutes of your time to come over to your 
studio or store to sit down with you and talk to us?”  

We almost never get told no.  People love to talk about what they do for 
a living. But, if I called that same person and say, “I have somebody 
who wants to be an artist do you have any jobs open?” They will probably 
say, “No.” That will be the end of the conversation.  
What you learned in the first part of discovery about having a 
conversation is so important.  I don't ever want to ask a yes or no 
question in job development or in discovery. I want to move on.  I want 
to keep it open ended to see what it is I am going to discover.

Again, going to where the career makes sense, as a course of action, 
evolves.  We visit others that have the same interest. We glean career 
information to find out where are the negotiables. What are the 
modifiers we need to use? How are we going to access this? What could we 
learn from this and start a different business or create a new job - 
something that's not getting done in the worksite? One of the 
interesting things about getting into the bowels of business and 
industry is that we find that a lot of work doesn't get done, because 
folks haven't figured out how to get money to pay for it to get done.  
Lots of small businesses are undercapitalized.

Those of you who know about resource ownership, also know about putting 
the means of production in the hands of people through skills, 
acquisition, and more importantly, through tools and equipment that 
allows them to be competent at doing something.  These are things that 
we have identified that there are opportunities inside of so many 
businesses doing so any different things. 

Most of us, when we go home on Friday night from our jobs, our work is 
still undone. There is more work waiting on Monday. It is the same in 
business and industry.  Why is it that we don't get that work done? 
Because we probably can't afford right now to hire somebody, or we don't 
have somebody who can do that. Maybe that's where our opportunity is.  
Maybe we can create another market, another customer to pay to get that 
work done.  

You'll never have enough information. Discovery could on forever. That's 
what we are trying to tell you not to do. Again, this is that intuitive 
piece.  When we've laid out a plan of significant questions that we need 
to be answered so that we've got a good picture of who this person is, 
and not before that, then we start to ask about possible businesses or 
wage job ideas.  

When we are out doing the investigation as the career counselor doing 
the informational interviews, we really truly are seeking information 
about what it's like to own that business or to be employed in that kind 
of business. We're not asking for a job. 

Now we're moving into formal job development. We want to create a job 
development plan. That is where we’re going to investigate.  We might 
still use some of those techniques of informational interviewing. But, 
now we've narrowed the focus. We generally have a pretty good idea of 
who this person is, where those proper environments are, and how we're 
going to negotiate this.  We certainly want to design a personal 
portfolio or resume. 

We want to create a job seekers map if we haven't done this already.  A 
lot of this stuff may have happened earlier in this process, but 
figuring out who it is we need to talk to whether we know them or not is 
important. These are known relationships or relationships that we need 
to have.  If somebody is interested in dry cleaning, then we need to 
have that local dry cleaners name on that list, and we need to be 
contacting them. That becomes part of this plan.  

We develop a list of potential employers, products, and services for a 
small business the person might own.  We use what we call the rule of 
three, which comes out of the Marine Corps, which says that if you come 
to a meeting to solve a problem you better have three good ideas.

In the way that we do it is that we throw your first idea out. That's 
because the first idea almost always follows the path of least 
resistance.  Generally when we come into a team, the majority of the 
people of the team already have that same idea that was the most easy 
and obvious idea. It’s not that it’s a bad idea. It’s dig deeper. Let's 
not stop there. Let's move deeper into the conversation with each team 
member coming with a couple different unique ideas.  We will probably be 
able to synthesis something that's pretty vital and creative, and it's 
very doable at the same time.  

We want to avoid those stereotypical jobs or businesses for people with 
disabilities.  We want to get deeper. We want to get more creative. We 
want to challenge ourselves a little bit.  Those entry-level jobs are 
not bad jobs. But so often, they have very meager natural support 
capabilities, because the other people around you are also in high 
turnover jobs. In those jobs, peers are turning over really fast. 
Employers expect you to leave. And, the jobs don't have a career path 
hooked to them.  
They are expendable kinds of jobs. So, we want to try and stay away from 
those if possible or take them on a time-limited basis, knowing that it 
is not the end, that it's the beginning of the rehabilitation process. 
Develop a prospecting list and a schedule for getting this done. There 
ought to be a done time put on this, so we don't go on forever.

And remember, this PowerPoint slide is "Forget, Saskatchewan one mile, 
or forget one". I was driving across Saskatchewan, having been working 
there. There isn't much in Saskatchewan. I was thinking about this 
presentation. How I would put this together? How I would make the point 
about forgetting one? What we find over and over again, and this is the 
importance of the plan and the importance of discovery.  Once we know 
what we are looking for, it makes it so much easier to find it.  I knew 
that I was looking for graphic representation of "forget one thing, drop 
one thing out," and I drive right by this sign. 

It happens over and over again. It’s similar to what women tell me when 
they get pregnant, that they've never noticed so many pregnant women 
before that.  Now they're looking for that, and when you are looking for 
something you kind of find it. 

We still understand that best practice has some pretty significant 
pieces to it that quality job or business development happens with the 
person.  It is still a crucial element in customized employment or 
supported employment that we still need job analyses and discrete task 
analysis.  If you don't know how to do that, and if you don't know how 
to systematically train somebody and to help the natural trainer and to 
recognize the natural trainers in a work site and provide them with more 
powerful training strategies for people who learn differently, then we 
are not going to get into the kind of complexity that guarantees higher 
wages and more job stability.  We need training plans for people. We 
need to know how to do this stuff, or we're constantly going to be stuck 
in minimum wage jobs.  

We need to be able to identify natural supports, not just talk about 
them, but identify them and facilitate them in a work site and know how 
to negotiate those kinds of things.  We also need to be studied in a 
consultative approach, how to do negotiation. These are the kinds of 
skills that are going to take us into better jobs.

I want to stop there and wish you good luck in doing discovery.  It is 
not an open-ended process.  It is a process that is guided by the 
person. It is a formal process that involves intuition, a lot of shoe 
leather, and doing things differently and avoiding that trap of testing 
and evaluating people in standardized ways.

Good luck, thanks.