Consulting While Autistic

Things That Don't Have Words

My 5yo daughter is really precocious at language. She reads and picks up words easily, and it always seems to me like she has a huge vocabulary for a small child.

Despite this, she HATES talking about things that upset her. Hates, hates it. I finally figured out this week that it wasn't because she doesn't like to cope with big feelings as I had assumed. It's because she feels like there aren't good words available for a lot of the things that bother her, and she can't handle not being able to express herself.

I guess that makes sense. This little kid who can give pretty sophisticated explanations of almost everything, feels deeply and uncontrollably stuck when she has an inner experience that doesn't match any common words for feelings or experiences. She usually hates the stuckness more than the problem, so then she ignores the problem.

I actually had the same thing at her age and all through my childhood, and suspect she likely gets it from me. As an autistic person, my primary experience of my inner world is in shapes, colors, textures, and movements, and for most of my childhood I could only try to explain things in those terms. It honestly wasn't until I was in my early 30s that I developed the skill of translating that native texture-space into externally sharable language.

The breakthrough that did it for me, was realizing that all my inner-moving-shape-world-things were actual external real-world concrete systems that were moving and shifting, but that most people perceived different parts of those systems than I did.

Thus, the journey of learning to use language authentically, for me, required first learning to see and understand systems and patterns of the outside world in the wholeness of their movements; and then learning to translate that moving wholeness between the parts that I sensorily perceived and the perspectives that others had words for. (This also takes a lot more brain development than a 5 yo has, so I guess my daughter is going to have an interesting time of it?)

Working in Innovation / Design Consulting

For me, this way of experiencing the world has the upside of making me really good at a particular piece of my job, namely solving risk.

When I tackle a product/service/etc design project, I can physically see risk and how it moves through the solution space, so I can jump in and de-risk / stabilize the solution design pretty automatically.

Actually, it's more accurate to say that I physically FEEL the risk in my body.

Fun fact-- the limit to the amount of consulting work I can do at once isn't actually time: it's the total amount of risk I can wiggle around through my arms and hands while keeping everything under control. Concretely, this is about 3 big projects' worth. (5 if you discount family and personal obligations, but raising 2 kids kind of always occupies a project slot!)

So, if you sit down with me for 30 minutes and tell me all about your problem, I can immediately wiggle your situation around in my forearms and tell you how to solve your risk, delight your customers, and also shift around the different interwoven systems you're working in to be able to achieve all goals at the same time without making tradeoffs. It's really fun to do so, actually, and I get a little tingle in my hands when I find a particularly effective shift that will untangle everything and it make it all 30x easier.

My favorite sensation is figuring out a way for you to solve your biggest problems using existing capabilities that you already find easiest-- it's a warm pushing tingle in palms that feels a little like shooting comfortable heat lasers.

The challenges in a situation also all show up in my body in different ways. Lack of clarity is a long blue chunk somewhere in my upper or lower arms (depending on the type of non-clarity), an unchallenged assumption is a spongey green wall that goes crosswise, a conflict of interest is sort of yellow-brown wedge in my shoulders.

As we talk, through arm-sensation-shifting, all of these challenges get translated into objective statements of risks, and then tasks to handle the risks, and a framework to structure the tasks...

Anyway, I've been often told that this part, which is fun and instantaneous and physically enjoyable, is usually the most valuable thing for others because it can ordinarily take a lot of difficult brute force work to accomplish.

The flip side of this, though, is that my natural scalability is shit ??. Because there really is only so much kinesthetic arm wiggling available.

Find Words for Work

The bigger flip side is that I am equivalently really bad at things that things that almost everyone else is good at. Such as, just like with my daughter, communicating what I am literally doing using words.

Nowhere does this show up more than with marketing.

Marketing is, honestly, the bane of my life. I have tousled with and lost to marketing campaigns, team members, advisors, consultants, etc, more times in the last 8 years than I can keep track of. I'm so bad at marketing that if a team member lets me vaguely near one of our marketing projects, I am likely to accidentally ruin it for no reason. ??

Our business has a highly rated product/service, delighted customers, high referral and repeat customer rate, 80% of people use it 2 years later, and almost a 90% sales close rate-- and like zero marketing.

We really want to get more public. It shouldn't be that hard!

But my fundamental limitation is that I'm a customizer, not a generalizer. I know how to CREATE the shift that unravels risks and knots, but I don't know how to verbally express it to a general audience--

-- other than the way it lived in my head when I was a child.

I wish I could say:

We are an agency that takes your 3 wide gray boulder-shaped things that are your design mandate, including the extra long brown one that reflects your market conditions, and knocks away 80% of the excess mass so that your workflow is actually 4 small bouncy pale glowing clumps and this purple ribbon-shaped thing that's meanders through it that represents your testing strategy.

This works because that giant brown thing is not actually solid stone, it's like many sedimentary layers of soil, and so if you loosen it up a bit most of it will crumble away and leave you just the living, jagged, asymmetric wood-like heart of your team's mission, which adds no weight because it is a part of you. Once you do that, you just have to keep your 4 bouncy clumps in the air in almost any order, brute force execute on the ribbon, and the project will be done in another month. You will never have to lift a boulder again, because your your mission-heart will have grown bigger and into the right shape on its own.

There are no words for the rest. It takes a 2-hour workshop and presentation to express what the ribbon is. It takes 2 months of working together to express what the clumps are.

The growing live wooden heart is not something I have ever heard anyone talk about in any form. Nobody has ever identified or discussed it before or after. It is only the happiness and groundedness and trueness and the celebration of "this is us and this is what we are doing and this is why it is good" that remains at the end of a project. It is only expressible once the project is complete and the team looks at the world with new eyes.

At the end of the project, I get to look at them and see that the wood heart has grown to 8 times the size that it was before the project, or bigger. It's no longer hidden in the muddy sediment of a giant brown block they thought was market assessment. It is the platter on which the future of the project rests, held sturdily up by each team member in their hands that I can see but they can't. It is way that each team member irreversibly became a bigger person through the intimacy they shared with their customer.

When that happens, the wiggling in my arms stops because the risk has been resolved, the design solution has been consummated with the user. Then I have room in my arms for a new problem.

Anyway, that's why I can't write marketing copy!

What I'm Really Selling

Instead, usually I will try to explain that I'm an innovation consultant, with a process to help people de-risk new projects using a fraction of time and resources, and a way to teach anyone to test productively and strategically with customers without needing design or development. Etc. This makes sense to people in their language.

But... just like my 5 yo trying to talk about her feelings, my heart isn't truly fully into it?

Because the truth that I've always hidden is, I'm really here because I want to share with people these 4 gorgeous glowing clumps that can dance so beautifully and fluidly through space, and help them scrub the dust off of their unique wooden hearts.