Finding Employment for Clients with a Mental Illness: A Positive Deviance Inquiry at the Oklahoma Department of Rehabilitation Services

by Arvind Singhal, Lauren Perez, Kristin Kosyluk

How might the positive deviance (PD) approach help a State agency be more effective in offering social services to its clients? How might a university-based team of compassionate PD coaches work with officials of the State of Oklahoma to implement a PD inquiry, building their capacity in a step-by-step fashion. How is the PD approach operationalized on the ground working with government officials who wish to improve their rehabilitation outcomes of clients who suffer from a mental illness? The Positive Deviance (PD) approach is premised on the belief that in every community there exist certain individuals or groups whose uncommon behaviors and strategies enable them to find better solutions to problems than their peers, while having access to the same resources and often facing worse challenges. Were there case counselors at the Oklahoma Department of Rehabilitation Services who were positive deviants? This is the fascinating story of how a team of positive deviance doers and researchers at The University of Texas at El Paso worked between 2015-2018 with colleagues at the Oklahoma Department of Rehabilitation Services (OKDRS) to unearth the hidden wisdom of nine of its PD case counselors who excelled in finding meaningful employment for their clients with a mental illness. Through a step-by-step process, some ten highly uncommon behaviors that were accessible to all case counselors were identified for amplification and scaling. These included behaviors such as shaking a client’s hand, offering them water or coffee or snacks when they came in, and sending an unexpected card or flowers to congratulate them on their progress toward finding a job. This Positively DeviANT Series is an initiative of the Positively AbundANT Collaborative that embodies the positive spirit and collective intelligence of ants who self-organize themselves in distributed and localized networks to accomplish highly complex tasks through connections and interactions.

32 pages, Kindle Edition

Published June 3, 2020