12 minutes
Designing around strengths Run a demand review on one process and redesign one step around what the person does well.
What you’ll be able to do Complete a demand review on one process, identify the person's relevant strengths, and redesign one step so that it draws on a strength rather than an affected function. Compare the responses to this question and explain your choice: What is the strongest redesign? Draft Demand review and strength redesign for your work, including process and failing step, what the person does reliably, redesigned step. Route through what works A person whose initiation is affected may keep a calendar without fail. A person whose working memory is affected may have a partner who remembers everything. A person who cannot track a deadline may read every piece of mail the day it arrives. Strength-based design starts from those facts. It asks what the person already does reliably and builds the step out of that material, so that the step runs through functions that work and around the ones that do not.
The alternative, routing the step through staff effort, works for exactly as long as the effort lasts. A support that depends on a worker remembering to call is a support that ends when the worker changes, gets busy, or leaves. A support that depends on the person's own Sunday phone call to their sister does not.
The five questions Which step in this process fails most often for this person, and which function does it require?
What does the person do reliably, without prompting, every day or every week?
Who in the person's life do they already talk to on a rhythm?
What tools do they already use: a calendar, a phone, a notebook, a place where things go?
Redesign the step so it runs through one of those. Test it once. Look at the result.
Demand review and strength redesign One page that names the failing step, the function it requires, the person's reliable strengths, and the redesigned step.
Process and failing step Which step; which function it requires
What the person does reliably Routines, people, tools
Redesigned step The same outcome, routed through a strength
Test Try it once; what happened
One change, one owner, one date Named person; a date to look again
Run it on one process for one person and test the redesigned step.
Browse and download only. Staff notes are not typed or saved on this page.
Download this published draft Prefer supports that outlast staff What you can change You control whether a support depends on a worker's memory or on something in the person's own life. The second survives turnover; the first does not.
What to watch for Do not build a plan that lists every conceivable support. Build one step that works and add the next.
Your next step Redesign one step this month so that it runs through something the person already does.
Carry this forward Every person has functions that work well; design that routes around the affected ones and through the strong ones produces support that holds without constant staff effort.
A strength-based redesign asks what the person already does reliably and builds the step out of that: a routine they keep, a person they trust, a tool they already use.
One step redesigned and tested is worth more than a plan that lists every support the person could conceivably need.
A list of the review's questions, an artifact, a scenario decision and a knowledge check.
Run the demand review on one process for one person this month and test the redesigned step.
Browse and download only. Course notes are not typed or saved on this page.
Reset this lesson
Previous lesson Back to course Carry this into practice What executive function is, why a process that assumes it fails specific people predictably, how to read behavior as information about the demand rather than the person, and how to design support around what someone does well.
Return to the experience: What did you notice or try, whose perspective informed it, and what would you keep or adjust?
Participation and course completion in this program do not count toward DHS-required training credits unless management, a director, or DHS leadership expressly approves an exception.
