Griffin – Discovery Personal Genius
Griffin Part #3

Note: This transcript has been edited for readability.  These edits do 
not alter the content of the original presentation.

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.