A Strength-Based Approach to Neuroplurality for Enterprise Competitive Advantage

Towards Neuroplural Enterprises: Introduction to Series of Essays

Part 1: The State of Neuroplurality in Enterprise Organizations in 2022

(If you haven't read the previous parts to this series, please check out the links above)

As we enter April Autism Acceptance Month, 2023, in this second essay in my series on Neuroplural Enterprises, I want to discuss the most frequently missed side of neuroplurality: The benefits to firms.?Too often we focus on neurodiversity with a lens of lack of capability, tolerability, limits, hand-holding, and the such.?The purpose of this piece is to highlight the advantages that some neurodivergent folk may have relative to their neurotypical peers, and, more crucially, how these advantages--properly captured and nurtured and directed--can benefit the organizations that employ these individuals at all levels of the internal hierarchy, not, merely, at the lowest tiers.

I am not the first person to suggest that Neuroplural Enterprises may enjoy a competitive advantage.?In fact, Austin & Pisano described the very thing in their aptly titled Harvard Business Review article Neurodiversity as a Competitive Advantage in 2017.?As they correctly observe:

"Many people with neurological conditions such as autism spectrum disorder and dyslexia have extraordinary skills, including in pattern recognition, memory, and mathematics. Yet they often struggle to fit the profiles sought by employers."

They conclude that organizations that take the time to thoughtfully consider how to fully take advantage of their employees' capabilities will "access to more of their employees’ talents, along with diverse perspectives that will help them compete".?Compete: This word is key.?They do not talk about charity or social welfare or publicity or good will.?They talk of competition. Compete:?Neuroplural Enterprises compete more successfully than their peers.?That is, they innovate faster and more creatively, they create and capture more value, and they withstand discontinuous change better than their rivals through more rapid adaptation.?The historical adaptations to organizations to enforce conformity and consistency and reproducibility, while useful in the industrial economics era, have diminishing returns in the era of knowledge-driven competition, where innovation is king.?Innovation thrives on difference and diverse perspectives, as SAP's Chairman, Anka Wittenberg, observed:

"SAP uses a metaphor to communicate this idea across the organization: People are like puzzle pieces, irregularly shaped. Historically, companies have asked employees to trim away their irregularities, because it’s easier to fit people together if they are all perfect rectangles. But that requires employees to leave their differences at home—differences firms need in order to innovate. 'The corporate world has mostly missed out on this [benefit].Innovation is most likely to come from parts of us that we don’t all share.'”

In order for organizations to realize these benefits, they need to shift their perspectives away from stereotypes and simplifications of the average neurodivergent employee and instead use a strengths-based approach, which puts neurodivergent individuals in control of their own careers within the organizations, rather than leaving them at the mercy of well-intended, but power-differentiated people, like neurotypical managers, executives, and rigid HR programs.?

Dr. Ludmila Praslova, Professor of Psychology and founding Director of Graduate Programs in Industrial-Organizational Psychology at Vanguard University of Southern California, and contributor at Specialisterne, an organization dedicated to "harnessing the talents of people on the autism spectrum, or with similar neurodiversities, by providing them with the opportunity to sustain meaningful employment," emphasizes that focus on the strengths of neurodiverse individuals is not a new appraoch, but rather an adaptation of the response by researchers and the broader Autistic Community to the shortcomings inherent in the medical models of neurodivergence, which overlook or even pathologize the strengths of such individuals.?This approach, she cautions, is not about "promoting ableist and dehumanizing stereotypes of [neurodivergent] employees as extremely talented, but extremely difficult 'misfit toys' to be hired for their talents but kept segregated from other employees, with the goal of 'protecting' the other employees".?Nor is it about treating all such individuals as sensationalized "tech genius" or "savant" stereotypes.?Rather, it is a "guiding philosophy of looking beyond the [neurodivergent] 'label' to focus on individual strengths as a foundation for development and achievement, accurately assessed within and between individuals."?And, I would add, this approach is not one that need be exclusively applied to neurodivergent employees.?Rather, it makes sense, at face value, to focus on the strengths of all employees--whatever they may be!--and seek ways to align those strengths to creating more value within the organization.??

It starts with business leaders.?Too many organizations relegate neurodiverse hiring (or promotion) to junior employees in HR, with a vague mandate to make the organization look good in the trade press or whatever.?Instead, smart organizations with top business leaders prioritize neurodiverse hiring to introduce powerful skillsets to organizations, and recognize that if they don't grab these talented individuals and give them a meaningful career path, their competitors will!?As Professor Nick Wailes, Director of the Australian Graduate School of Management at the University of New South Wales, observes:

"You need to consciously bring diverse people into the organization AND [emphasis added] give them leadership roles. Lots of organizations, in their progression and their promotion paths, reward a certain type of person or create certain types of outcomes. Diversifying that and ensuring that there are lots of opportunities for people from different backgrounds to get into leadership and important roles is important."?

Business leaders need to create opportunities for advancement for the neurodiverse employees that don't pigeon hole well into the traditional molds organizations create for what they think will lead to success.?When change is the only norm, no matter the shape of the pigeon hole, it is too rigid to adapt and remain relevant over time.?Instead, organizations need to promote not for profile match, but rather for aptitude, knowledge, and potential, traits whose strengths are often amorphous, difficult to quantify with the many mindless tools organizations use to routine-ify processes like promotion and advancement--process that, themselves, often suffer from failure to recognize Goodhart's Law and thereby inadvertently reward toxic workplace behaviours and further segregate those whose unconventional approaches, if measured properly, often create greater net value.

Much as some forward-thinking organizations have given themselves targets for better executive presence of under-represented groups such as women, people of colour, indigenous folk, differing sexual orientations, various gender presentations, national origins, creed, culture, language, and more, it is imperative that organizations give themselves a target for neuroplurality across all levels of the organization--especially executive leadership.?It's time we view an executive leadership made up entirely of neurotypical folk the same way we view an executive leadership made up entirely of cis straight white men.?And the same should be true across layers of the organization.?While targets are a good tool, paying close attention to Goodhart's Law, we must be careful to not simply play to numbers and declare fait accompli by hitting a given number.?Instead, we must look closely at the promotion processes themselves and determine if they have a tendency to exclude certain groups.?The resulting numbers are a measure only, not the goal. The goal is to eliminate such systemic, often unnoticed and institutionalized, biases.

Let me give you a clear, illustrative example: When speaking about promotion and career advancement experiences with highly educated, highly experienced, highly credentialled, hard working, talented neurodivergent employees, they tell me a phrase they often hear during interviews is along the lines of "You're clearly very smart and hard working and very good at what you do and our organization definitely needs that--just not my team."?The #NotMyTeam issue is akin to #NIMBYism we see in social communities: Even if we get to a point where we agree that neurodiverse employees have huge strengths to offer, and that the organizations that employ them will reap significant competitive advantage by putting them in senior positions to capitalize on those strengths, there will always be the #NotMyTeam institutional issue that nobody wants to be the one to take that perceived "risk".?Change is scary.?Taking "a chance" on an employee who doesn't fit a tried and true pattern (and, I should note, the question is never asked if that 'tried and true pattern' actually stands up to scrutiny when evaluated for any measure of value or success; hint: it never does.) never happens unless there is clear, executive leadership directives to do that very thing, with clear goals.?It also requires a "permission to fail" mentality.?If a given promotion doesn't work out and the executive champion of that promotion is raked over the coals, no other executive will ever "put their neck out" for a talented individual who simply doesn't understand the Machiavelian world of organisational internal promotion politics.?The double-standard here is obvious and scarce needs mentioning: When neurotypical folk fail, they often fail "upwards" into promotion to a "new area that's a better fit for them".?By contrast, if a neurodivergent individual fails, it's ALWAYS their fault and no thought is given to any systemic elements that might have played a role.?Instead, a "we should have known better" attitude is taken, one that is never directed towards those displaying more socially acceptable stereotypes such as "Type A" "Sports Bro" attitudes.?How could mistakes be made promoting THEM??THEY'RE a safe bet!

I'd be remiss if I didn't tie all of the many threads I've introduced in this essay together and wrapped them with a neat bow: Power.?It all comes down to power.?The only way Neuroplurality can be effected in an organization is if those with power use that power to put those without power who have much to offer in places of power.?This statement is obviously true for all employees and all forms of diversity: Privilege gives one inherent power over those with less.?Executives will always have more power than the employees many layers below them.?Only they can choose to use that power to put new executives who do not look, think, or act like them at their level--and that's a scary prospect to many executives who got to where they are in their careers by brokering power and manipulating agency with empire building aspirations.?Why should they give power to an "other"??Why, indeed, do they even care about the success of the organizations that they lead if it means sharing some of the power they have so carefully accumulated over their careers??These are the really difficult questions that truly revolutionary, thought leader executives will face head on.?They will think deeply about these issues and carefully craft solutions that create new institutional forms that thrive on flexibility and difference rather than rigid adherence to the past.?Power, after all, is a tool like any other, and is not inherently good or evil; it's a question of its wielder's application.

In wrapping up this essay, I want to put back into the melting pot a new take of an old saying: "A's hire A's; B's hire C's."?The intended moral is that managers/directors/executives--collectively, those with power--who are themselves talented, knowledgeable, hardworking, and capable, will use their power to hire others with such traits to add the maximum value to the organization; whereas, in contrast, mediocre folk with power will use that power to hire folks less capable than them so that their fragile egos are protected and they never need fear their power being taken away by an "underling" whom they can always keep under their thumb.?I propose an extension, or corollary, if you will:?"A's hire A's and 10's and Ω's and ?'s and ?'s (and so on); B's hire C's and D's and E's." The key extension here is that performance or value is multidimensional, and it is automatically a mistake to assess it along a single dimension--That's what mediocre managers do (to their neurotypical employees too!).?Visionary leaders recognize that they don't fully know (often due to irreducible uncertainty, but I'll save that topic for another essay) what will be valuable in the future.?The only smart play is to ensure that there is diversity, variation, so that when the uncertainty reduces and the mapping of traits to value becomes clearer, the people with the matching traits have the necessary power to execute on the organization's mission and innovate successfully to maintain its competitive advantage.

“Neurodiversity may be every bit as crucial for the human race as biodiversity is for life in general. Who can say what form of wiring will prove best at any given moment?”

— Harvey Blume, The Atlantic, 1998.