Reflections on neurodiversity in the workplace

"Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less." - Marie Curie

These days, I consider myself a corporate refugee in the world of nonprofits, after being in the corporate world for 35 years at IBM, Hitachi, Nvidia, and Stanford Graduate School of Business. Most of my corporate roles were driving innovation and transformation through technology as the CIO in IBM Storage Division, Hitachi Global Storage Technologies, and Nvidia and as Chief Digital Officer in Stanford Graduate School of Business. Creating and gaining consensus around business cases for the changes was par for the course. Little did I realize how easy it is to be oblivious to the people-case (or the human-case) for changes to mindsets, policies, processes, and practices established within organizations.  

You may wonder what brought me to the mission to improve intentional inclusion of neurodistinct people in the workplace. I have a son who is on the Autism spectrum. He was diagnosed only when he was in college, doing his undergraduate and having a great deal of difficulty being in a dorm where the socializing never stopped. It was just a completely different environment that overwhelmed the coping mechanisms he had used when he was at home. We had no clue. None of the  teachers had any clue. We had always observed that he had very few friends he socialized with regularly and he seemed to keep to himself in high school, unlike most of his classmates. I never thought much of that since I was quite introverted when I was growing up in India. It's only when he was in college and things seemingly fell apart that we went on a long journey of trying to figure out what was going on. Eventually after years of struggling through that journey, he ended up getting diagnosed as being on the Autism spectrum. At that point, of course, as any parent would do, we wanted to get a prescription to take care of this problem! 

Needless to say, there is no prescription, and my decade long journey of learning began. I started educating myself on autism and along the way learned about neurodiversity. The more I learned about autism and the life prospects for most autistic people in society, the more dismayed I became. The pervasiveness of stigma around disability in general and autism and neurodivergence in particular in the South Asian community was even more disconcerting. It seems as a society we have some implicit and explicit expectations for normalcy and if you happen to fall outside of those mythical norms, especially on the “lower” side of the range, you are plain out of luck. Somewhere along the way, I became convinced that I've done enough working for a living and that it was time to start living for a mission, spending my time and energy in trying to make the world a little better place for people like my son. Hence, I am here on this particular mission of raising the herd awareness of the normalcy of neurodiversity. I don’t mean here the mythical norms mentioned above. I mean the normalcy of the entire range of distribution of abilities, behavioral traits and cognitive characteristics. 

I suspect that many of you may have heard the term neurodiversity while for others it may be a new term. Your understanding of the term may be quite varied. While I will discuss neurodiversity in general, my focus will be more specifically on neurodiversity in the workplace.

I have a few objectives for the readers of this article: 

• First, in some way you will be left with a sense that neurodiversity is normal in human beings - as normal as different heights, weights, skin color, eye color, hair color etc. 
• Second, you will adopt a mindset of compassionate curiosity in your interactions and seek to understand people around you that are neurodistinct (or neurodivergent or neurodiverse - various terms that I will use interchangeably).
• Third, you will recognize the opportunity and play a definitive role in helping foster psychological safety for neurodivergent people in social, educational, and workplace settings you are in. 

So let us start with the concept of neurodiversity. Imagine that you are sitting in an auditorium or a stadium and you look around. You would find there are all kinds of people around you. They are taller. They are shorter. They are thinner. They are a little bit heftier than you. Their skin colors are different. For those of us who still have a few strands of hair left in our head, the hair colors are different. The eye colors are different. None of us think, “Oh this is really weird! How come you have a different skin color? How come you are a little taller?” We just don't think along those lines. We have come to realize and accept that physiological characteristics vary and wide variation in them is perfectly normal in human beings. There is no reason to expect the couple of pounds of gray matter inside our skulls to be exactly the same from one person to the other. Thank God, it's not the same. Can you imagine if every one of us thought the same way, behaved the same way, and learned the same way! I think it would be a really dull and boring world, if that were the case. 

When we recognize, acknowledge, view, and respect that wide variation in the brain function of human beings as normal, we are beginning to align with the concept of neurodiversity. We can readily see other people’s height, weight, and skin color. But we cannot see the brain, our own or others’. The way we experience someone else's brain or our own brain is through the behavioral and cognitive characteristics - the way we interact with the rest of the world, the way we relate to our own selves, the way we relate to others, the way we communicate, and the way we make sense of all the stimuli coming our way through all of our senses. Those characteristics vary widely from one person to another within the human population. It's all part of the same wide variation and distribution of numerous characteristics we see in nature. We all know about the symmetric bell curve, the so-called normal distribution. Well, which part of the normal distribution is abnormal? That's kind of a meaningless question because what makes the normal distribution normal is that there are widely varying points on it from one end and extreme to another end and extreme.

I feel strongly enough about this that I have started to discuss the concept of raising the herd awareness of the normalcy of neurodiversity. Thanks to Covid, we all had to learn about herd immunity and the need to raise the level of herd immunity to reduce the propagation factor of the virus. In the case of raising the herd awareness of the normalcy of neurodiversity, we actually want the propagation factor to be as large as possible. More and more people need to learn about neurodiversity and spread their learning to other people, so that the world will be more open to including people whose brain works differently for their abilities, whatever they may be, and offering them a mindset of acceptance for their differences. Acceptance can only come from a place of awareness and understanding and can lead to accommodations, appreciation, inclusion, and fostering a true sense of belonging. Once we understand and accept that neurodiversity is normal, we will need a mindset of compassionate curiosity to seek to understand and to make a difference in the lives of those that are different from us. 

You may have heard about a variety of terminology from the healthcare side that falls under the umbrella of neurodiversity - Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, Autism Spectrum Disorder, Tourette's Syndrome, Bipolar Disorder, Dyscalculia, Dyspraxia, Dyslexia and so on. Every one of these terms suggests that something is broken, something is a mess, something is defective, or something is deficient! I am not for a moment suggesting that the medical way of looking at differences in brain function is completely useless or not valid. It turns out that just like in the neurotypical population, people whose brain works differently also have a wide range of health challenges, whether they be physical health or mental health challenges. Because they live in a world that isn't really designed for them, neurodistinct people can and do experience a lot of stress that can translate into both physical and mental health challenges. We want our brothers and sisters in the healthcare field to deeply research, understand, and find ways to help people with such comorbid challenges. 

I am asserting that when it comes to dealing with people in social settings, educational settings, and employment settings, the deficit focused medical perspective is not very valuable. Generally when we go through life, we tend to wear a set of lenses through which we look at the world. One of those lenses is expectation. The other lens is judgment. So when I interact with a person, almost routinely and unconsciously, I quickly develop some expectation and then I'm judging them with respect to it. And that's kind of endemic throughout our day-to-day life. A lot of things are structured around this way of life. I'm not suggesting that this way of going through life is not useful. But when it comes to truly including people and helping them belong in any setting, it is not very useful. 

Neurodiversity movement calls for taking off and setting aside those expectation and judgment lenses and putting on a different set of lenses, namely inclusion for abilities and acceptance for differences. When you see someone does something or doesn't do something and that doesn't make sense to you, you can try to make sense of the situation through the lens of compassionate curiosity and seek to understand why. You may be tempted to attribute the behavior to some internal factors such as attitude, lack of empathy, etc. and that may well be the case. But there could be factors beyond the individual’s control that are the causes for the behavior. When you start from that place of compassion and curiosity you become open to a set of insights that you may otherwise completely miss. Those insights could translate into actions that you can take to enable and empower that individual to put out their best in that situation. 

A mindset of compassionate curiosity enables us to seek to understand other people around us as unique creations of the universe with a unique set of abilities and differences. From that place of understanding, we can seek to accept their differences, as we accept our own differences from others around us. With acceptance, we can progress further to offer them encouragement, accommodations, and whatever levels of support they may need, so that their strengths and abilities, regardless of levels, can contribute meaningfully in that setting. I have come to believe that those of us who are enjoying the privilege of having meaningful, rewarding, and sustained employment that enables and supports our life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness, have a sacred obligation to enable the same for those that face internal challenges and external barriers in attaining such outcomes. 

In the United States, only 14% of autistic adults have any form of paid employment in a community integrated setting, while 44% of them have average or above average level of intelligence on the conventional IQ scale. This is a consequence of both internal challenges autistic adults experience and external barriers they face in a world that is not designed for the way their brains work differently from the neuromajority (those whose behaviors and ways of being are deemed socially acceptable). 

“At the end of the day, anyone who is regarded as ‘different’ is living in a world that is not really accommodating of them or built for them. So it’s a constant state of trying to fit in which is very stressful and can lead to burnout. Therapy can result in ‘masking’ or ‘camouflage’ but does not mean these issues are not there,” says Hari Srinivasan, a non-verbal Autistic young man. Hari was one of the first two non-verbal Autistics admitted into the undergraduate program in University of California, Berkeley. His writings provide a unique view into the inner world of non-speaking neurodistinct minds and serve to highlight the internal challenges and external barriers faced by neurodivergent individuals. Yet, a decade earlier, most educational professionals wrote him off as not college capable.

Existing mindsets, policies, processes, and practices in organizations have evolved over generations based on the behavioral and cognitive characteristics of the neuromajority that have constituted the organizations for the most part. They are not designed to include and accept the differences in behavioral and cognitive characteristics of neurominorities. This translates into a myriad of barriers that neurominorities find virtually impossible to overcome and get employed. 

What can organizational leaders do to be intentionally inclusive of neurodiversity? Organizational leaders need to have a clear understanding of how neurological differences may manifest as differences in areas such as social interactions, communications, cognition and special interests, executive function, sensory sensitivities and stimming, and strengths. They need to raise the herd awareness in their organizations of the normalcy of neurodiversity and the benefits of intentional inclusion of neurodivergent employees. They need to foster a culture of compassionate curiosity for employees to seek to understand the strengths and differences of themselves and their colleagues. They need to nurture a psychologically safe environment for the neurodistinct to be their genuine selves without the need to mask or camouflage their differences and to confidently advocate for their needs. In research by Google, a psychologically safe work environment has been found to be highly conducive to fostering innovation, creativity, and high team performance. All employees, regardless of their neurotypes, benefit from psychological safety by becoming empowered to advocate for their unique needs in the workplace to enable them to perform at their best.

We have made significant progress over the last decade and yet have a very long way to go to make the world a welcoming and supportive place for all people, regardless of their abilities and traits, determined by their unique neurological makeup. I have come to appreciate over the last five years that this mission is by no means an easy one, but rather a very, very hard one, since we are up against deeply entrenched societal perceptions, assumptions, and norms. Much of my career has been focused on helping make things happen and scale them fast significantly. In this mission, I had to learn not to be disheartened by the enormous level of effort expended to possibly achieve a small progress. Few people have any real appreciation of the odds against which a mission like this is working to make a real difference in the lives of those it serves. I have often derived inspiration from the quote below to adopt a perspective from which to view the mission.

“Do not depend on the hope of results. When you are doing the sort of work you have taken on, essentially an apostolic work, you may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no result at all, if not perhaps results opposite to what you expect. As you get used to this idea you start more and more to concentrate not on the results but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself. And there too a great deal has to be gone through, as gradually you struggle less and less for an idea and more and more for specific people.” -- Thomas Merton

A broader perspective I have come to believe over the years is there are no accidents or mistakes in the universe’s plan. Each human being on earth is here for a purpose and fully equipped for that purpose. The individual may or may not know what their life purpose is. Others around the individual may or may not know it either. Nevertheless, we can have unflinching faith that there is a life purpose for each and everyone of us and learn to dedicate our thoughts, words, and actions to love all, serve all, help ever, hurt never and empower ourselves and others to blossom to our potential and purpose. Therein perhaps lies our salvation. 

Each of us can do our part and make a small or large difference, depending on our place in society and life. I sincerely hope that many of us can and will take up this call to serve. Most of us are quite set in our way of thinking and doing things in life and at work and playing our part may not come so easily. As we embark on the journey bravely, let us be warned that we will become aware of explicit and implicit biases in us that we will need to wrestle with and overcome. From my own struggles and progress to date, I believe that the journey is well worth the effort. I wish you all the best for a safe and rewarding journey!

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Ranga Jayaraman is director of Neurodiversity Pathways, a social impact program of Goodwill of Silicon Valley.

#Disability #disabilityinclusion #DisabilityInTheWorkplace #Neurodiversity #NeurodiversityAtWork #DisabilityAtWork #CompassionateCuriosity #PsychologicalSafety #NeurodiversityIsNormal