Presenter: Mike Callahan This session is focused on an aspect of Customized Employment that really provides the foundation for job developers and others assisting an individual in coming up with a customized plan that is reflective of the applicants strengths, needs and interests as described in the definition of Customized Employment used by ODEP. Discovery has an interesting history in our field. Discovery is a concept, I guess as old as people and interactions among people would be. But for the field of disabilities services, it’s a relatively new concept. For the most part, we've figured who people are by testing, diagnosing, and comparing them to others or against standards. Discovery is a process that basically gets at the answer to the question, “Who is this person?” If you are to customize any sort of service, it would seem that the answer of “Who is this person?” is a necessary starting point. We are looking at the touchstone of this concept of customization. We want to think about it in terms of its history. Just very briefly, in the late 70's and into the early 80s, folks like Lou Brown from the University of Wisconsin used a person- centered, ecologically relevant approach to learn about students in the body of research that was being done in those days. It really provided a basis and a framework for what we are calling discovery. In the mid 80s, it was refined to a concept called the profile which included discovery, but we'll talk about that later, which refers to a written document. Most recently we've got this concept of discovery or exploration that is going to allow us to get in-depth knowledge of the individual. We are going to do that rather than test, diagnose, evaluate, and assess. We are going to spend time taking a close look at the person's life. In doing that, we are going to get a pretty good answer to the question, “Who is this person?” That information will give us the basis we need for the kinds of customized planning that’s so necessary to drive job development efforts for a customized job. Discovery and customization go hand-in-hand. They’re certainly compatible concepts. They do need to be used sequentially. It would not do to try to customize a service for someone that you didn't know. Discovery or exploration precedes the kinds of customized planning strategies, job development, or other activity development strategies that would follow. Doing this concept provides the information that we need to truly customize a position with a local employer. More broadly than disability, discovery is likely necessary anytime any applicant has a complex life. Most often that is referred or associated with a significant disability. But certainly as we've discussed in other aspects of this training, life brings many complexities. Disability only being one of many. Whether you're in the disability field or the generic system, this in-depth look into the person's life gives us the information that we need to go forward. Let’s look at what this process is. Discovery is a process. It involves getting to know people and to some degree helping them get to know themselves before we plan. In that aspect or in that sense, discovery precedes planning but also needs to be distinct from planning. One of the common errors in discovery is that we tend to short circuit to planning. We'll find something that seems to make sense, and we'll immediately engage the person (by asking), “Wouldn't you like to do that or wouldn't you like to be ‘a fill in the blank’?” Rather done well, discovery would try to let the person's story unfold. Then we would have a planning event that's based on all of the information that we've found. Discovery involves spending time with people. There is no way around it. We can't hot box this. We can't substitute documents, feelings, concepts, or concerns of others. We have to really get to know the individual. It's something that too often we don't give ourselves the time to do. It turns out, discovery is probably about the best way to find out the best that a person has to offer. Again for folks with significant disabilities, it’s a valuable thing to learn the best they have to offer. It's important to recognize that we're talking about a common sense subject. Sometimes it's so common sense, that we almost yearn for something harder edged. I would like something more scientific, but basically it's about getting to know people. There are some issues of doing that well, which we'll talk about later. There are further issues of accounting for the time that we spend, which gets to look a bit more like some of the strategies that we've used in the past. Regardless, discovery is simply about getting to know people and who they are. Discovery provides us a way to churn-up and to identify through a process of relationship the unique contributions that people have, who might not compete as well as others. It is especially for folks for whom employers, supervisors, and coworkers might not clearly see their competence on the surface. We have to bring the perspective of a more in-depth discovery approach to help them understand what a person can really offer, especially in a work setting. We've found that discovery is significantly enhanced when we get to know people in places where they are most “who they are.” Think of all the ways that traditionally we've gotten to know people. We bring an individual into a testing situation or into an assessment situation. They build performance anxiety. They're uncertain about their surroundings and the people who are wanting to know the information from them. Even the best of us, even those of us that have a fairly easy time letting others know our competencies are uncomfortable. We tend to be nervous. We tend to be uncertain in those situations. I think it would only follow that individuals with more significant disabilities are not going to show us their best when they're in settings that are not about who they are. In discovery, we can really spend the time to let people indicate to us through their behavior, conversation, comments, observations, and reflections by folks close to these individuals (by asking them), “What are the contexts in which this individual is the best of who they are?” If we learn about them in those contexts, we have extremely valuable information; not only to know about the person, but obviously to extend that to the kind of matching and customization that's going to be necessary as a result of our job development planning and services that we're offering to people. It's important to understand that discovery is not a plan but the foundation of all employment planning, especially any employment planning that seeks to customize an outcome. In this sense, discovery is extremely compatible with the concepts of self-determination and customer choice; because basically, the plan is coming from and is of the individual. Let's go to the dictionary. It's an interesting thing to do sometimes to make sure that as we're pursuing a topic, we find out what the framers of functional definitions would have to say. We find that discovery is to gain insight or knowledge of something previously unseen or unknown, to notice or realize, to make known, reveal or disclose. These are some interesting ways to understand discovery and to understand our role in relation to people with disabilities. Some of us spend so much time with individuals through daily supports in which people are participating. Those might be school based supports. They might be disability program supports. There might be individuals on a case load of one sort or another. We feel that we know the person pretty well. If we can imagine that there's something additional to be known, to reveal, to disclose, then people have something to teach us. When we feel that we know all that we need to know about the individual, there's not much new we're going to find out. There's not much we're going to listen to about what a person has uniquely to say to us about who they are. One of the things that discovery asks us to do is to literally give in to it, to imagine that there's more important information about a person than we already know. Only in that sense, the individual really has an opportunity to let us know who they are as being unique, not only from other people, but unique from the perceptions that we might already have of them. Some of the complexities associated with discovery is that it might seem on the surface as simple as sitting down with a person across a table in an office, across a desk, or in some other setting, and simply asking the questions, “Tell me what you want? Tell me what's important to you? I'll see if I can get that for you.” All of these are concepts or strategies associated with asking. There is absolutely nothing wrong with asking. Asking is an important component of discovery, but it is definitely an insufficient component. For some folks asking works very well. They would ask almost anybody a set of questions. But for other people, this concept can actually be an obscuring concept, for instance, at times people give different answers to different people that are asking them questions. If I asked today “What are you really interested in for work?” I might get one answer and another person might ask that same question, say a parent or a friend, and get a totally different answer. That happens often, and it's understandable in life that people are uncertain. They often tell us what they think we want to hear. The same person can give different answers at different times regardless of who you are talking about or who you are talking to. Their focus or their verbal answers shift from day to day. This occasionally happens in various aspects of interaction in employment. People will sometimes find themselves in a group, and they'll tend to give a different answer within a group context, obviously worried about what people think and how other people feel about their answer, than they would on a one-to-one situation. The point that I would like to make about asking is that we certainly want to ask questions of people, but we want to go further. People’s lives really give us an additional clarity that people's words might not give us. Discovery utilizes but goes beyond the issue of asking. Before I get off of this issue, I would like to make one more comment and that is, the most often asked question in employment is, “What do you want to do?” That's one of the trickiest almost pitfall laden questions that a person can give an answer. Personally speaking for myself, I've really never quite known how to answer that question. Even as I matured, and people would ask me, “Well Mike what are your plans 5 years from now, 10 years from now?” I'd often make up an answer just because I felt like I was expected to know the answer to that question. I find that certainly I am not the only one that would feel this way. Other people feel that these are some of the toughest things to know. You are going to be much better off learning about me by finding out who I am and how I live my life, than how I might answer one of these lightening rod questions. The other aspect of that is when we ask about employment, it usually evokes a rather narrow answer. In other words, I think we condition people to answer those questions in relation to job title or job slot. People shoot the moon on this. I mean they don't hold back. We ask the question like, “What would you like to do?” Then we get an answer, “Well, I would like to be a police detective; or I would like to be an astronaut; or I would like to fly a jet plane; or I would like to be a doctor.” All reasonable things for anyone to want to do. But what happens is that the universe of possibilities actually becomes narrowed as the specifics of the answer is laid in front of us. To further complicate the issue, when we feel that a person’s response to our question isn't feasible, then we spend the next month or two months trying to talk them out of the answer that we've just asked. That doesn't seem to be at the basis of good self-determination and person centered planning. (There are) a couple of things about asking that we want to take from this discussion. One is that we do ask. Try to ask broad rather than specific. Ask questions in a way that evoke general rather than specific answers. Have a person reflect on the broader aspects and not, “I want to be a ‘ fill in the blank’”. If we do that, and then use observation and time with people beyond the asking strategy, I think we'll really get a very much greater sense of who this person actually is. Let’s also spend a little time on testing. Testing has been one of our traditional alternatives or strategies to figuring out who people are. Since Mark Gold's days in the 70’s of “train don't test,” I think we've admonished to be careful of this concept. We need to continue to remind ourselves; because today, both in the disability system and in the generic system, tests and evaluations are routine ways that we find out about people. Folks with significant life issues, particularly significant disabilities, are going to struggle against those tests. Most tests are standardized in the way they measure a norm. If you have a difficulty, you can be a long way from the norm. Too often the answers that we ask on tests are checklists or short answers; and richness, depth, understanding, and comprehensiveness are usually lost. Tests usually try to get to a yes or no answer. Shades of gray are not what tests try to get at. Yet, it’s within shades of gray that we really understand the hues and the colors of the person's life. In doing this, we need to embrace all of the paradox of the complex life instead of just boiling things down to give me an answer of yes or no. When we force that issue, the answer for a lot of the folks that we deal with is usually “no” unfortunately. I think that we all know tests are reflection of one specific time. For those of us that were partying late for our ACT test, we can kick ourselves thinking, “Gosh, if I had gotten a good night sleep and really focused, I would have done a lot better. That's not really who I am.” But, it is who I was that morning when I took the test, the SAT, the GRE, or all the standardized tests that so many of us have taken. And lastly, and this is kind of a harsh comment, but I think too often for folks with significant disabilities, tests predict failure rather than possibility. Tests rarely look at the best that people have to offer and the most optimistic perspectives of an individual. We're socialized to be professionally pessimistic, and tests keep us in that venue. Discovery offers an alternative. We have a need for discovery in a sense that interestingly, we tend to presume we know what we know about people and that information is sufficient. Therefore, we actually need to embrace the idea that we have more to learn. As we look at people in a way not associated with discovery, the information on them is often very disjointed. It's like pieces in a jigsaw puzzle that certain people have one or two pieces and other people might have 50 or 80 pieces. But they’re all in everybody’s pocket or perspective about the individual. Discovery allows for us to pull together all that disjointed and diverse information, most of which is very useful; and at times it's contradictory, because life is contradictory at times. We need to pull all of that together where we can make the best sense of the individual's life as possible. In thinking about this, discovery allows us to deal with the naturally obscuring affects of disability. Disability is like a fog. It obscures often the best that people have to offer. By engaging in and embracing discovery, we can learn some very specific things that are hard to get. We can learn what's the likely impact of this person's disability in relation to work that they might do. We can begin to think of the person descriptively rather than “evalutively”. The person's story can emerge rather than having the person compared against others or some standard. Discovery is very compatible with possibility. It begins to allow us to see not only things from our own perspective, but perspectives that other people have felt, “You know, here's what I've always thought.” Another person would say, “Well you know, here's what I've thought.” We start combining all those possibilities. It gets well beyond just what we might think would be best for the person. We get this complete picture that discovery allows us to bring together. The next slide is going to give us a perspective of the iceberg model of discovery. We really only get to know just the surface level of who people are. Either because we don't know them beyond our professional relationship, or they are guarded and would really not prefer to dig any deeper. What we see too often is only the tip of the individual's iceberg of who they are. We really need to know as much as we possibly can know, so we can effectively negotiate and customize employment opportunities for people with very significant challenges. Discovery asks us to dig deep into people's lives and to know what we define and what we need to know. Over the years, we have learned that this is a concept that can be handled in a number of ways. Most typically, discovery is facilitated by someone else. Someone else can be an employment professional or a generic employment worker in the One Stop system. Someone else can be a teacher, a family member, or a friend. Anyone could facilitate discovery, but it really makes a lot of sense to have one person responsible for organizing the information. It's a kin in some ways to doing a biography on someone of importance, and you want a primary author or authors for the biography. As the researchers go out and the various information comes in, that person is responsible for pulling it all together. The discovery would need to be an authorized biography, so that the individual would actually have final say and clarity about, “Is this actually true, what you're finding out about me?” It's important to say that discovery does not require the kind of professional certification that some of our other approaches like evaluation and other strategies of getting to know people might require. That's not to say that it's strictly a seat of your pants strategy. Done well, there's some things that work, and there's some things that don't work so well. Some people can do it better than others, and some folks might not do it very well. In fact, I think discovery facilitated well is a powerful and unique skill that needs to be honed through practice, reflection, and discussion with others. Anyone should feel welcomed to facilitate discovery; anyone that most makes sense. The facilitation of the discovery can be done by a team of people on an individual's behalf. That's different than the group experience. It's facilitated by a team. We strongly recommend that there be a team leader primarily reasonable for pulling the information together. In that way, you don't have team members pointing to others saying, “I did my part, but you didn't do yours. So we don't really know this person very well.” Having one person associated with the responsibility is very important. The second strategy relates to a unique circumstance in our field. The one that comes most clearly to mind would be individuals who might be part of a naturally formed group such as a job club. That's a pretty common group within the field of mental health services in our country. That's a group of people who find themselves together in this naturally formed group. Though we're not suggesting such a group should be formed for the express purpose of discovery, it could offer each member assistance in coming to terms with who he or she is, from the services of your peers within the group. For people who might not have a great deal of trust of the mental health or the employment professional, they might be willing to disclose and allow who they are to be made know to peers within that group setting. The concern is to not artificially bring a group together solely for the purposes of discovery. It would be done better through facilitated discovery. If that group does exist, we should consider utilizing that dynamic to help people come to terms with who they are within the group. Finally, there's a concept of self-discovery. At one end of the dimension, it could be pure self discovery, a person really reflecting about, “Who am I? What's important to me?” As the dimension moves in another direction, the person comes to terms with having somebody, maybe a facilitator or a group, help him/her organize his/her thoughts around, “Who I am?” This is one of the hard things about self- discovery, organizing one's thoughts, that those who are professionally responsible for outcomes actually can do quite well. There are actually some tools of discovery that are the time-honored tools of qualitative researchers. Discovery borrows heavily from qualitative research procedures rather than quantitative research procedures. Discovery borrows those tools of interview, conversation, observation, time together, and review of information. In the organization of information, discovery uses the strategies that qualitative researchers have used for years to find meaning and importance within subjects to be studied. Discovery takes these concepts and applies them to an individual so that the individual's story qualitatively explored begins to emerge. Taken in turn, there are relations among these strategies. For instance, conversation and interview are like opposite sides of the same coin, similarly with time together and observation. The distinctions, the different sides of the coin, relate to the amount of structure or the absence of structure. Conversation an open-ended verbal exchange with very little focus as to which direction it's going. Interview is a very structured intentional verbal exchange to gain very specific information. The finesse of the discovery often is having a conversational tone with an individual, with a subtle structure behind the scenes that's like the census taker in your living room. “Just the facts ma’am, just the facts, no additional information please.” So, that we have the free flow of conversation subtly guided by the structure of interview. Similarly time together and observation operate as opposite sides of the same coin. In these opportunities, we are at times intentionally observing people, always with their permission of course, and spending time together, both structured and unstructured, for purposes of gaining information. These opportunities are again operating similarly in the time that we spend together with an individual. We want to have the subtle aspect of keen observation even though we might be playing out that interaction when driving in an automobile, attending a sports event, or having a cup of coffee with the individual at a local cafe in the afternoon and chatting. Let me go back to the first two, because I've referred to these mostly in terms of our interactions with the individual. Discovery goes beyond just the individual and asks us to focus on people who are important in the person's life. A lot of interviews and conversations we will have will be beyond our direct interaction with the individual, but with the people that the person has given approval and direction as to, “Who knows me best? Who would I turn to write my story?” We want to know those people. The next set of strategies involves some very intentional participation with an individual in various contexts both familiar and novel. In those strategies, we are actually intentionally spending time with a person, first in places that they're most familiar, so we get a sense of comfort, skills, and the various ways that a person deals effectively in environments in which they're most comfortable. Then we're going to, with the person's permission, ask the person, “What kind of new situation may be a place that you've always wanted go and never have been?” In those situations, we're going to see how the person deals with uncertainty, which is very reflective of the first days of work. Sufficient time (spent) in discovery is based on our national data range which is from a low of approximately 10 hours of direct discovery time to about 20-25 hours. It depends upon the individual, on the funding, and on time availability. All of those things are going to affect how much time, but broadly speaking between 10 and 25 hours, with around 16- 18 hours as a good average time of doing discovery. Only after we've really gotten a sense of the person, do we recommend a review of records. The relationship inoculates you against the inevitable negative information that's a part of a person’s permanent file. If anybody can ever find a positively written permanent file, I wish they would send it to me. I've never seen one personally. I am not sure that those things exists. We still need to know what's in those files even so, even if it is the negative information. Discovery isn't a “pollyannish” rose colored glasses approach. We do want to know all the stuff. But, we are looking as optimistically as we can. Then only when the previous situations are not sufficient, do we suggest either standardized or structured situational assessments or targeted evaluations to answer any unanswered questions that discovery could not provide us. In that sense, we have a functional positive relationship between this newly emerging concept of discovery and our more traditional testing-based concepts of assessment and evaluation, and that would allow us to use both of these strategies. But, always begin with discovery as the starting point. Let me take you through a brief kind of task analysis of discovery. I am socialized to think that way from Marc Gold and his perspectives. And just real quickly, discovery starts at home. In fact, multiple visits to a person’s home is probably going to be necessary. We also want to just literally spend time, and most places in America that's going to mean in a car, going around the person's neighborhood. [Always keep an open mind to the possibilities.] In some places like downtown Manhattan or downtown Chicago, you are going to be on foot walking around the neighborhood, of course if the neighborhood is safe to walk in. You don't want to do anything foolish in discovery that would put you in danger. For the most part, we are going to find ourselves driving and really seeing a person's neighborhood through fresh eyes as we visit their home and spend the time there. We're going to get to meet with the person multiple times. In the first meeting, I think we need to be careful of not spending too much time, about an hour and a half is about the maximum time I like to spend and then have 2-3 follow-up meetings. I think our national data would indicate about 2.5 visits on average to a person's home is made during typical discovery, just to give you an idea between 2 and 3 times of visiting a person’s home. There is a host of interviews that describe discovery. The interviews can take place in uncertain sequence. It doesn't really matter, I would ask the person, “Who would you like me to start with?” The people you'll be interviewing would be direct service staff, teachers, professionals, VR counselors, group home managers, all the folks who might be in the individual's life. Again, take a lead from the person or family as to who knows the person best and who's got the most positive stuff to say. Indeed if you cannot find optimistic positive information during discovery, you are not going to have much to talk to the employer about during job development. Then you want to focus on close friends, neighbors, advocates, people who are not professionally related to the person, but who are important to the individual, again directed by the individual and/or family. These folks are a significant resource of information. Also you are going to want to spend both structured and informal time in conversation with the individual over a multitude of opportunities. You might see a person during discovery as many as 6 or 8 times including at their home, at your office, at various context within the community. All during that time, try to have the information flow. For some people for whom conversation is not an avenue that they handle well, then your observational opportunities have to be significantly heightened as your conversation strategies are inhibited. During observation, we recommend a number of strategies. We do recommend rather formal observation, fully with the person's awareness and permission, wherever they are in the type of activities that describe what they do during their day right now. It's insight into those activities. I particularly like anything that might be work-focused or repetitive in a way, just to give me some insight into what work might look like. We want to try to accompany people in at least several activities and aspects of the community both planned, but familiar, and novel as we were talking about before. Just try to be with the person in as many opportunities as you reasonably can to gain insight and perspective. [Be sure to explore all the details of the person's interests.] All this discovery is going to lead to the need to capture the information that's written. In the past, we've called this a profile. We'll still refer to it today, but we referred to the entire activity in the past as the profile activity. We would like to distinguish that a profile is really a descriptive picture of what you learned during discover. It's necessary for a lot of reasons. We are going to develop positive and useful information. We are probably going to use some sort of format. You can choose that which works best for you. Over that time, your developing and accounting for the relationship that came to be during discovery. In this sense, the profile report can actually be an alternative to the sort of testing and evaluation reports so often required by our field in terms of having someone seen as appropriate for employment. The profile document can be a substitute for these reports. There are some good reasons to do a profile. One, we have a lot of information that we have to capture. We have to get it into some form so that people can know it. Two, somewhere we have to find the passion that's going to drive our job development efforts. Often by writing positively and descriptively about a challenging person, you can find just that passion. Writing a profile helps us come to terms with the contributions a person has to make or can make in a company. We can prepare for the kinds of conditions that they must have in order for employment for to be successful. We actually get those on paper as a basis and a foundation for our employment plan. We account for and identify their range of preferences and interests areas related to employment. The profile or any kind of capturing or writing about the profile, allows us a descriptive way of actually preparing for job development. If we can get beyond the banal sort of, “This is a nice person,” to something like, “How would you like to hire somebody who comes in to their workplace each morning, rolls up to each person and smiles and says, ‘hello’?” We can label that as friendly; but if you described it , you've got a powerful sound bite that most employers would find very intriguing. Ultimately, the written document pulls the puzzle pieces together into a format that others can look at and say, “Gosh, I am seeing aspects of this person that I didn't know.” Some of you will say, “The writing just doesn't fit for me.” You might want to have an alternative to the written profile. Think about using a format like a profile form just as a guide for your note taking. Those notes can be just as valuable as the writing that you might have done more formally. Take pictures. I can't say it enough, take lots of imaging. Imaginary is going to be the basis of so much good customization. You might want to develop a short narrative vignette that would substitute for a more comprehensive and structured document or organized document like a profile. You might it find a lot easier to write in social history paragraph form rather than in the format of some organized form, like the profile. Some of you have graphics strategies or mapping skills and use those skills to tell the person's story graphically as opposed to the writing. Also, for people who have very significant challenges in only certain areas, only write about the aspects of their life which are the most critical to understand, that way you can save yourself writing time. We're beginning to look at the use of what we're calling a discovery meeting. It's kind of an oral history coming together, but it has to be prior to planning. You don't want to again confuse who is this person from what do they want to do. If you hold a discovery meeting, we recommend that it be held separately from the planning meeting. This kind of oral history can really save us a lot of time. It only makes sense if somebody is paying for this, that somebody keep notes. You should have a scribe, maybe graphically or a secretary keeping meeting minutes, so at least you capture all of the information. You could record it. You could tape in a way that you have that information held and be able to be used by planners. Finally we might recommend an informational portfolio similar to a presentation portfolio, kind of an image, almost using a Power Point approach like this presentation to capture the best of who a person is. Some of you would find it much more friendly to go through a set of Power Point slides, mixing a narrative description and images than you would to deal with an in-depth form. I hope that this discussion has allowed you some insight into the importance of discovery and exploration; and some strategies for capturing that information; and the importance for us to come to terms with this information before we help people plan. Thank you very much.