The Unicorns of the future will be Neurodiverse

What if your standard recruiting policy is crippling your company? Is your typical interview process a dead duck? What if there were a pool of amazing but untapped talent you just cannot see?

I regularly hear my clients and friends tell me staff turnover in their business is unacceptably high, they can’t attract the right talent and they’re spending way too much in HR-related litigation. And yet they still rely on the same-old recruitment formula –

1.     Write a job description (this never accurately describes the actual demands of the role, nor the flexibility needed for the holder to keep up with change).

2.     Advertise for applicants either directly or through a third party. (Do the “right applicants see it?). (Does the advert accurately describe the role etc?)

3.     People submit cvs. Or what I call “white lies” about themselves in the hope they say the right things to get past the gatekeeper.

4.     A sub-set of candidates are selected, based on those “white lies”, for interview.

5.     An interview is held by the people who believe they know what kind of applicant they are looking for. (Mostly they have no idea as they either didn't grasp what was needed, we plain wrong or are politically motivated)

6.     A candidate is selected based on the personal preference of the interviewers. (Research shows we are biased in favour of people most like ourselves, and whom we feel will fit in.). 

7.     A person starts the job and will be a more or less good fit. (They seldom feel 100% at home in the job).

You could call this a “system” but for many modern jobs, completely unsuitable and inefficient. It’s structurally incapable of delivering equality or diversity. Moreover, arbitrary quotas and policies are often introduced just to be aligned with regulatory edicts or current moral standards. It might feel good to help the organisation put the award certificate on the wall but surely there has to be a better approach. Above all, diversity isn’t just a moral imperative it’s an essential business lever.

Diversity conquers all!

Before coming to business consultancy, I spent 35 years as an academic biomedical scientist, and I often look to nature for good answers. She’s had a very long time to come up with the best answers and one of her go-to tools is diversity.

Nature adores diversity for it’s the most effective and stable system for the survival of organisms in a changing environment and I’m certainly not going to argue with mother nature. Unfortunately, we humans have rigged the system, arrogantly thinking we’re selecting people for jobs based on their specific fitness with a job, only to race towards the average. Disappointingly we usually appoint people most like ourselves as it makes us feel unconsciously comfortable! As we know benign conflict is the fountain of all great innovation and problem-solving, so we just need to learn how to be comfortable with being uncomfortable. Luckily, some adventurous companies are thinking laterally and broadening their recruitment nets.

Talent-based recruiting for human superpowers

Many big tech organisations have come to realise a proportion of the population is highly suited to coding. Historically, finding the best as a dismally inefficient process. I'm afraid that most of us, and by that, I mean at least 95%, are just not up to the task nor recognising those who could be. We’re too chaotic, can’t focus on one thing for long periods, love to pick fights for the sake of it, and enjoy gossip and politics before the execution of projects. 

It seems that almost any reason to be ineffective and avoid getting the job finished is attractive. If only we could find people with an almost obsessive love of detail, mathematics, logic, beauty, the ability to focus, and love of completing complex puzzles and games.

These amazing people are vital to the wider world and are everywhere around us. The trouble is, they’re sometimes hard to find because they like working alone, find social interaction challenging and noisy bright chaotic environments oftentimes overwhelm them. Wonderful people with outstanding talents routinely characterised as weirdos, nerds and geeks are marginalised from mainstream society. They are the "Neuro-diverse” and frankly, the rest of us need them!

Neuro-diverse people underachieve in typical recruitment processes because they tend to interview “badly”. After all, they find social interaction makes them anxious and they lose their words. My blood boils when I see the overt or implicit interviewer bias along the lines of. “They simply won’t fit in with our culture”.

“We are freshwater fish in salt water. Put us in fresh water and we function just fine. Put us in salt water and we struggle to survive.” Anonymous autistic person

Looked at objectively the overall commercial performance of a business is determined by a drive to help neurotypicals somehow feel more “comfortable” with their environment, rather than finding ways to create a culture and environment where everyone exercises their strengths and prospers.

I’m not going to spend time here discussing how to create inclusive environments because to my knowledge, I’m not on the autistic-spectrum (but then again, I’ve not been tested) and so I’d only be reporting third or fourth-hand opinion. No, this article is more about how we can completely up-end recruitment and job creation and in doing so create revolutionary organisation predicated on diversity at its heart. The good news is this approach is already successful in other spheres of elite human endeavour – Sport.

Discovering outstanding sporting talent

As early as the 1960’s Russia and the then German Democratic Republic introduced highly organised objective searches for identifying outstanding sporting talent. The objective was to identify general athletic capability first and then fit people to a particular sport at which they were more likely to excel on the international stage.

There are many things to abhor about their overall process including what we’re now seeing as the institutional application of performance-enhancing drugs but that’s another matter entirely. My point is millions of children were poured into the sporting selection “funnel” to determine their aptitude for particular types of sport, what body type they possessed, did they have good hand/eye co-ordination, were they sprinters or distance athletes etc. Everything they required was then provided for them to perform at the highest level.

UK Sports have been incredibly successful over the last two decades and this isn’t a happy accident. Increasingly, its due to careful application of a strategic plan identifying innate talent and developing athletes (www.uksport.gov.uk/our-work/talent-id/how-we-find-the-talent .

Here, verbatim is the essence of UK Sports’ talent discovery process.

Phase 1

The selection process begins with a range of generic physical and skill-based tests at various testing centres around the UK. Tests may include sprints, jumps, aerobic fitness, and upper and lower body strength tests. These tests will vary from campaign to campaign depending on the sport. The selection process also includes an in-depth analysis of each athlete’s training and competition history.

Phase 2 - 3

Phases 2 and 3 are designed to further assess an athlete’s suitability for a sport and better equip them for the journey ahead. The athlete’s pathway from identification to world-class performance is also outlined. Sessions may include functional movement screening, medical screening, performance lifestyle workshops and psychology and behavioural assessments. 

Confirmation Phase

Selected athletes will embark on a 6 to 12-month confirmation phase during which they are immersed in the sport’s training environment. Athletes are exposed to a carefully constructed developmental experience and their rates of progression are tracked to further assess their suitability for the sport. Unsuccessful athletes are provided with opportunities to continue the sport through the club system.

Creating a Talent Funnel

You might recognise this approach in a typical Marketing/Sales Funnel where prospects enter, high-value leads are identified, and sales generated. Pretty much every business understands this fundamental process. It's a clever numbers game depending on dropping large enough numbers of qualified leads into the mouth of the funnel, carefully designing filters to convert leads into sales and then providing customers with brilliant products and services and support. Why not apply the same approach to selecting and developing talent? It just needs clever diverse and inclusive organisations to create the right selection and progression tools in their "Talent-spotting Funnel". Encouraging news comes from a select number of organisations who are making a pretty decent go of it.

What could excellence look like?

Tech giants like Google, Microsoft and SAP are revolutionising their recruiting processes. For example, SAP gives applicants for certain types of jobs Lego Mindstorm robots and asks them to come up with novel uses. They even sponsor a Lego Mindstorm League (https://news.sap.com/2016/06/first-lego-league-sparking-enthusiasm-for-stem/). Gaming, fun and creativity are exactly what neurodiverse people do in their everyday lives. Oh, and they’re proving to be far and away the best talent pool for next-generation coding! 

Various elite orchestras around the world remove personal interviewer bias by auditioning anonymous musicians behind curtains with musical prowess becoming the only determining factor. A high proportion of neurodiverse people are musically talented but we have no way of knowing how that talent could be used in other areas.

Games like Packtypes (www.packtypes.com) use gaming underpinned by solid psychological principles to help people and organisations identify personal cultural characteristics and preferences. Without hard labelling individuals, games like these are fun, open up conversations and identify personality type gaps in teams. As long as the assessment teams are wholly reflective of the types of people being sort, gaming at the beginning of selection funnels ensures a diverse psychological team structure.

Where does recruiting go from here?

The age-old joke when asking for directions to somewhere is it’s always best not to start from here! So, trying to modify an existing organisation’s unfit recruitment process, as well as the deepest aspects of its neurotypical culture may be a steep hill to climb. It seems to me there’s a need for a completely new paradigm which is fit for the 21st Century. One where people and their talents come first and the organisation is designed around them. Clearly this new model needs a catchy name, as well as some well-healed evangelists who aren’t scared of risk and want to leave a huge historical echo. The new strategy needs someone brave, with deep pockets, an obsessive need to innovate and a drive to leave a global legacy.

We also need a completely new way to assess people’s outstanding talents. For example, if you want brilliant neuro-diverse coders don’t put them through a standard selection process led by charismatic neuro-typicals. Why not ask people with Aspergers to select? After all, they can recognise people like themselves, understand their cultural needs and can recognise the skills required to get the job done.

Matching appraisal and reward to personal neurotype

If our skills, and our likes and dislikes, are influenced by our neural make-up then the ways we wish to be rewarded will also differ. Moreover, the ways that specific roles are appraised will need to be tailor-made. We cannot replace recruitment bias by appraisal bias, otherwise, we are just setting up potentially vulnerable people to fail against unfair measures.

Similarly, reward systems must also be focussed on what individuals value most. We already know that money, even for neurotypicals, comes low down on almost every survey of job satisfaction. Maybe employers should consider a “Smorgasbord” approach where people choose what kind of reward they get.

One fear I have for the future is that just because many neurodiverse people seek quiet solitude we may unwittingly create a “battery chicken” approach to their employment. Just as with the neurotypical majority how we treat people in a modern enlightened business should be paramount. Again, asking the people are affected directly is the best and most sustainable solution.

By no means do I have all the answers, but the global “Crowd” absolutely does. We’re going to need a lot of people bringing their diverse individual superpowers to work collectively. I’m convinced the rewards will be worth the effort.

The Nature and Genius paradox

Geniuses are revered throughout history, but many today would be placed on the autistic spectrum. It’s hard to imagine a world without them; we might even not be here.

Nature’s a consummate experimenter, constantly creating variation through genetic recombination, with organisms whose physiology and behaviours survive natural selection pressures thrive, whilst others disappear. But variation always persists; there’s no respite from variation.

Human neurodiversity is an expression of nature’s variability and it appears autism may be the creative engine upon which the rest of us neurotypicals survive. True we’re all creative and analytical but neurodiverse people take it to quite another level. You might say they’re vital to all human survival.

The true genius shudders at incompleteness — imperfection — and usually prefers silence to saying the something which is not everything that should be said.

Edgar Allen-Poe

If only we are prepared to listen to the neurodiverse may be the solution to our biggest global problems such as climate change, overpopulation and hunger. The human tragedy is that these geniuses are a tiny tip of an autism iceberg. For a moment just comprehend the tens of millions of children who even up to the 1980s (and in some countries still are) locked away in institutions because they’re deemed incapable of learning or were just inconveniently weird. Autism is still seen by some as a disability requiring diagnosis and curing, it isn’t. It’s undeniable many people with extreme forms of autism may never navigate our world successfully because of other associated disability. However, a significant proportion has incredible strengths we don’t let them contribute to society. It’s such a terrible waste of human talent. Just so we the neurotypical can feel comfortable being with one another. If this atrocity were imposed on any other cultural or ethnic minority it would be called genocide.

Gazing into my business crystal ball

 It’s hard to stay objective in the face of such cruelty and misunderstanding but here goes. It’s the duty of any business leader to seek and leverage any pool of untapped talent out there, no matter if they spend time alone in a quiet room occasionally rocking back and forth. It really should not matter if they wear headphones all the time to reduce the chaos of noise around them. What if they flap their hands or speak in the third person? IT DOES NOT MATTER!

Crucially what matters is whether they produce the most elegant computer code that solves our biggest problems? Can they manage incredibly complex mathematics? Can they understand and design complex systems with a single look at the data? Can they create a symphony that tears at the emotional heartstrings of a neurotypical even if they themselves cannot read the emotional expressions on our faces?

If, as all research shows, diverse and inclusive organisations outperform monocultures measured by any criteria, it’s foolhardy for leaders of any organisation to ignore its power. CEO’s who believe that having a single collective view of the world will bring long-lasting commercial success are missing THE biggest business lever of the 21st Century, COGNITIVEDIVERSITY and COLLECTIVE INTELLIGENCE.

In a frenetically changing world where business models, products and services are disrupted every hour of every day, diversity is the only defence we have to solve our hairiest problems and ward off unforeseen competition. For done properly, diversity is the creative engine perpetually disrupting ourselves. We just have to be humble enough to accept we‘re not smart enough on our own.

Diversity is about all of us, and about us having to figure out how to walk through this world together.

Jacqueline Woodson

In this article, I’ve focussed on just one group of missing people in our organisations, the neurodiverse. Nevertheless, AI and robotics advance in sophistication all global society must re-evaluate what it is to work, how we will work and who will work doing what. We can either get the ball rolling now or we can go blindly and ill-equipped into an ever-uncertain future, whistling quietly as we go. We need courageous unconventional leaders who can harness our collective wisdom. I lay down the gauntlet. Is this you?

Dr Gary R Coulton is CEO of Adaptive Intelligence Consulting www.adaptiveintelligence.co.uk

Dr Coulton is not a clinician and not expert in the diagnosis or direct support of neurodiverse people. This article represents his personal views.