30. Neurodiversity at work: why traditional workplaces fail ‘different thinkers’

Now if you're a leader you've achieved an amazing amount of success, you've worked hard to get where you are. But what you do because of cognitive bias, you naturally assume that this is what work for me, so it must work for everybody else. So if it's not working for you, you're not working hard enough, it's really hard to get out of your head and see it will differently. The workplace, it can be a source of stress, shame and often burn out for neurodivergent people. Think about the expectations that come with work. How you should act, communicate, socialise, prioritise, meet deadlines, work with and timeframes, a whole network of systems, often invisible, that are supposed to be second nature for any employee. But if you're neurodivergent, these rules can be hard to decode, let alone follow. Survival at work often means masking and disguising weaknesses and feigning competence. That so you can even get in the door. The rates of unemployment, particularly for autistic people, are staggeringly high. Now, we can talk endlessly about different ways to support and accommodate, and these are vitally important. But it can also perpetuate the idea that neurodivergent people need rescuing. That an organisation is being charitable in making room for different thinkers. But what if these different thinkers are precisely what businesses need in these tricky times? We're starting to see that dyslexic ADHD and autistic people, with their different ways of approaching problems, are an immensely valuable, untapped resource. Because often, the deficits we see are actually strengths in disguise, struggling to operate in an environment that just doesn't suit them. Neurodiversity. It's no longer a fringe conversation. For decades, neurodifferences have been framed as deficits. But now, we're questioning that narrative. What if variation is part of the design? In season three, I look at the science, the systems, and the stories, shaping what happens next. And the tools, they can really make a difference. Kia ora, I'm Sonja Gray, and this is no such thing as normal, season three. Won't you really begin seeing the world for how it is and how human brains are different, and how they work, and how we work together better? It's like magic. You might recognise Rich Raleigh's voice from previous episodes of this podcast. He's a deep thinker with a refreshing way of looking at different cognition. In this episode, I speak to Rich about his vision for true neuroinclusion in workplaces. And the beauty is, this vision isn't just about supporting neurodivergent people. It's all inclusive. According to Rich, for employers to get the best from their staff, they need to focus on how they can give the best to their staff. It's work he does for a living through his company BrainBedge. They help organisations to see the immense value in different ways of thinking. And it's a passion for Rich, because it's personal. I've been out as neurodivergent for ages, and there's really a lot to talk about. And for the longest time, I just felt like a bloody alien and weird and a lion. Now, I know there's a whole load of people who are really similar to me. We're all beautiful and different, but in a sort of general way, they think more like I think, experience the world more, and it's incredible. But then it also allows me to think kindly about the other kind of thinkers, like, wow, that's so hard for me, and you do effortlessly. But you do get those incredible magic moments where some of those think it's going, wow, how'd you do that? You've got these people who, for you, it's no effort. For you, this is no effort. And that's the secret to productivity and organisations. Rich is autistic and ADHD, and he embraces his neurospiciness. But he also thinks our ideas around neurodivergence. And the diagnoses themselves, add to the narrative that these are brains that need fixing. ADHD right is an attention deficit and a disorder. I'm like, it's not that at all. I hyperfocus, right? So I've not got an attention deficit. I've just got an inability to do boring stuff. Rich's idea of boring is similar to mine. Writing reports, meeting deadlines, doing things in a logical sequential order. All the things that are fundamental in most schools and workplaces. Personally, I have always felt a sense of shame at my inability to operate in the expected way. But Rich has a different take. So I look at people who thrive in our current system, and I think who's weirder? Me, who just has no interest in that stuff, or you, who can make yourself do something. That's mine, nominally boring, for us on end, just for some outcome at the end of God knows how many years that somebody else is telling you that's important. It's, I think that's a more unusual kind of cognition than mine. I just do the stuff that I'm interested in, and when I'm interested in it, it's amazing. Yeah. Yeah. It's brilliant. And I can go three days. If there's something that I want to learn, and it's super interested, I won't sleep, I forget to eat. It's awesome. Just so intrinsically motivated, you don't even notice time. And it's a beautiful thing, but it's personal to me, my. Yes, it's personal to you, but it's valuable to everyone because the fact that you're going deep on something, and I know the amount of work that you've done in this space in the amount you've thought about it, and really honed on what is it, that's valuable to everybody. Yeah, but the mad thing is, I'm not special. I mean, I'm not every single spicy person that I meet, whatever it is about how my brain does that, their brains do it too. There's lots of us in where everywhere, and we're just undervalued, misunderstood, not appreciated. And it's just the secret source to everything. Hearing this is very validating to me. I'm one of the many neurodivergent people who struggled to find their place in traditional workplaces. I desperately wanted to do the right thing and get a real job out of university, but I just couldn't do it. There was a friction between how my brain works and how the workplace is structured. As a result, the modern work environment feels very alien to me. The concepts and buzzwords are a foreign language, but Rich Rowley has a neck for simplifying it. I'm interested in innovation, right? What it is, how it works, how you solve problems more effectively. And you've got all of these big organisations, full of amazing people, all trying to get better at solving the problems, and all they do is try and throw all of these different processes and systems and tools and routines at it. But this simple fact is almost all of the time you've got the wrong people working on the wrong kind of problems. When you align the right kind of thinkers with the right kind of problems, everything just falls into place. But it's hard to make visible. It's hard, but it's not impossible. And this is really the basis of what Rich's company BrainBedge does. Help organisations make the invisible, visible. Give them tools and metrics that allow them to get the best value out of their employees. But that's part of a bigger picture, which is creating a healthy environment. And according to Rich, the starting point is simple. It's all about building psychological safety within a group of people. You need psychological safety. That's really the key to everything. Psychological safety says the more people feel they belong, the more secure they are to be themselves, the easier it is for them to learn to share and to contribute meaningfully. But that relies on trust in the organisation's culture. And less than half of all employees believe the company always lives up to its stated values. There's what's called a values decision-skap. Quite often, it's like this is what we say we do, but what they actually do is different to what the values are. And a big values decision gap every indicator about people and well-being and performance goes down. So the individuals in the company are like, you said these were our company values, but we're not feeling it. We're not seeing it. So it's almost worse than if they didn't have the values at all. Yeah, that's it. And it can be so bad in organisations that people who work in them get what's called moral injuries. It can be like PTSD, working in a system where the actions of the organisation are so different from what they're supposed to be doing. That it can actually traumatise the employees who work there. It's academic, you can measure it really easily. My question is why organisations actively work in towards narrowing it? And why aren't they? Why isn't that 101? I believe it all comes back to what we're taught to believe in schools. That's all about the individual measuring testing individuals, but in actual fact as a species that's not how we evolve to solve problems. There's a whole load of research that shows that we evolve to work together and that's why we have these different kinds of cognition that enable us to work together to solve different kinds of problems. We've got it all wrong. Many companies are working hard to be more neuroinclusive, but diversity and inclusion policies can feel very surface level. Most diversity stuff that organisations Luca is a stuff that you can see, demographic stuff, gender, culture, and that's really important, but all of those outside differences, they all go towards informing how you think. It's not just major cognition differences like ADHD and autism. How I think is a product of my gender, where I was born, life experiences, plus, I have a brain that's just more naturally inclined to like certain kinds of problems. And so the diversity that really matters is really hard to see a const here. Right, and at the moment, if you don't fit this really narrow idea of what normal is that begins in school, you just get all of these labels. But there's another layer to this. Many autistic ADHD and dyslexic people have become masters at masking. So much so that it's become part of their identity. Many find it hard to separate their authentic needs from those they deem acceptable. And constantly working against the way your brain naturally operates, or being told explicitly or implicitly that the way you are is wrong, it comes at a cost as it did and still does for rich. A lot of it's trauma. So the trauma that I've experienced because I think differently, a lot of my interactions with people who think well in these linear things, I'm automatically in fight or flight mode all of the time because their natural assumption is they look at me and they think, oh, you're difficult, you're challenging. You're not very social, won't make eye contact, doesn't shake hands. All of that ritual weirst that people think is important. And it's only important to you in that context. I have no problem socialising, I love socialising, but most of my socialising tends to be with people who are spicy. Like me, it's no effort, I love it. We might not talk about what you did at the weekend or the rugby, but a battle run for hours with a spicy autistic post. New love's computer science or robotics. It thrills me and it tops me up, it doesn't drain me. I remember a few years ago an autistic friend of mine saying, who gets to decide what the right way of socialising is? The sad thing is, many of those people who don't socialise in the "normal way" are seen as not a good fit for our organisation. When in fact, they may be exactly what that organisation needs. [Music] So different people have vastly different approaches to problems. And examples of this can be found everywhere. My Sound Recorder's Deb took on the additional role of a camera operator for many of my podcast interviews. Now she's not a camera person, but she quickly became one, and she loved it. [Music] So look at Deb, this is all that expensive gear I bought and then went, I don't know what to do. And Deb was like, "Oh, I love this. Yeah, I'll read up on it all, so I'm not great at all." "You're so cool." Because this is the stuff that would lead me to possibly homicide. Okay, homicide is an overstatement, but I run a mile from anything technical. And she's like, "Oh, get me outside of my comfort zone." And yeah. Deb's dyslexia and her ADHD make reading really tricky. So following an instruction manual would be almost impossible. But she's very visual with a mind like a sponge. A few YouTube videos, and she's a multi-camera lighting expert. I cannot. Oh, no, A. Yeah. That's exactly what I love as well. Really? I am amazed by that, but I love it as well, because I'm like, "I don't have to be good at everything." No, you don't. That's the amazing thing about working with Bix. Bix is Rich's business partner at BrainBedge, and they're a great example of a team whose skills complement each other. Bix excels in many of the areas Rich struggles in, and vice-fuser. But the thing is, Bix will look at me, "Oh, wish I could do all of that stuff that you do. It's amazing. To me, it's no effort." Yeah. It's no effort. I just do it, and almost all the time I enjoy it. Bix does all of this other stuff. People, relationship, building, creativity, how to talk about things. I can't do any of that. I mean, all of it, once again, should be like, "Oh, it's nothing." You kind of. And this Richie tries it, but. Yeah, but you just don't appreciate your own talents, because you've just been told that you zero value, right? Yeah. Yeah. Those strengths have not been celebrated or even unlocked sometimes. No. My entire life, I'd worked for traditional organizations, and it was only when I went to work for a start-up and the way that my brain works was really value. Because I love new stuff, sex-iting. I had an environment where a lot of that kind of linear, like, do you need emails, writing records? Never had to do it. I don't need to connect all of the dots to get from A to Z. If you give me A and F, I can figure out where Z is. Yeah. I don't know how I do it. It's no effort. Effort for me is going ABCD. Like my brain, that's brutal. Right? I like cleaning around. And people say it's creative, and that's not right, because you can be creative across all of the problem spaces. It's just a different kind of creativity. It's just a different way of connecting the dots. And it's like, when you're in an environment where you connect in the dots and the way that works for you, it's magic. And according to Rich, if businesses can recognise this and start moving towards operating in this way, it's a win-win. If you get this right, everything will improve. But online, you're well-being, whatever. It will all get better. Say that with a shadow of a doubt. Every individual is unique in the way they like to connect the dots. But you can crudely break it down into two types of cognition, linear thinkers who like working systematically, and non-linear thinkers who jump across ideas and possibilities. Neurodivergent people tend to be more non-linear thinking style. This is not a hard and fast rule, but it gives a clue as to how and where a person might thrive. No one thinking style is better than another. The theory is they're designed to work together. Linear thinkers are brilliant at building the road. Complex thinkers are the ones asking whether the road should maybe go somewhere else. So if you've got a team that's trying to solve a complex problem and they're all linear thinkers with a linear thinking leader, nothing that they're going to do is really going to help them solve that problem. That says just like, says if we're trying to push a rock or a pill, right? But at guarantee in your organisation you've got a whole bunch of people who can see all the answers to that problem. You don't need consultants, your organisations got the best answers. You just need to be able to figure out who are these people. How do we lead them? How do we support them? And when is it time for them to hand over as well? It should work like a kind of beautiful musical symphony. And at the moment everything's just, it's not going very well. A whole global society is focused on one very particular kind of problem. These sort of linear industrial problems that are binary in nature, right or wrong, pass or fail. And that's a massive problem because it almost brain washes people. It really trains people to solve problems in a certain kind of way. It's like that linear progression. And that's great because there's a lot of those problems. But as soon as you're trying to address more complex challenges, everything falls apart. Give me an example of my complicated problem. Oh, that's easy. If you're a business, you've got a whole load of things that you do to make money. Right? So you know how to do that. More complicated problems is how do we get everything that we do and make it better? That's it. That's a higher order of complexity. Taking what you already do and working out, how do we make this widget, this do-dangle, whatever it is that we do? To make money, how do we make that better? Right. Because I, having never had a real job, I don't really understand business very well. And even the word business kind of makes me go, "Oh my God." So I'm just trying to understand as an outsider. do business is not generally look at the things they're doing well and try and improve them. Are they like, oh that works? So I'm going to move. I'm just trying to understand them. Yeah but it's building a culture of continued improvement. But then you've got another order of magnitude problems which is how do we make new stuff? Yeah. How do we make totally new stuff potentially totally unrelated to what it is we do as an organisation? That's incredibly hard. Only about one third of the world's problems are linear. The majority are more complex and need a different slightly more chaotic approach. But to take it a step further without getting too academic there's a framework called Kinefin which rich is a big fan of. Kinefin means belonging in Welsh and it breaks situations down into four domains showing that not all challenges can be solved with an ordered methodical approach. But from early on we're taught that anything other than linear and predictable is the wrong way to do it. If you go to school and you've got the kind of cognition that's evolved for any of those other three kinds of problem spaces it looks like you're like you're broken. You know the medical profession looks at it like you're broken because it's only looking at that box too and that's where you get these labels. You've got a deficit, you've got a disorder. You're taking a perfectly evolved natural cognitive system and labeling it as a disorder that's just a logical fallacy. We've evolved over millions of years to say that somebody's cognition is a deficit or a disorder just because it doesn't fit in this one kind of problem box that school looks at. It's lunacy that are really fundamental levels. School has only about three things. Compliance, conformity and control and that rolls over to business and as leaders it's really hard because you do need compliance, conformity and control for industrial problems. Absolutely. That's how they work. But when you're in these sort of complex problems like how do we make sure that we're going to be in business in another 30 years with all of the crazy change that's come in, that's not compliance, conformity and control, that exploration, that's playing around figuring it out. You've got to allow people to be free to explore an experiment. We're amazing at it. But you have to change the whole culture of your organisation to allow that to happen. But there's still this belief in organisations that you can't have different things for different people. Which brings us back around to psychological safety. No one wants special treatment but we all have unique needs. The problem is most people don't feel safe to voice them. That was me. Until a couple of years ago when I had serious burnout and recovery meant I had to learn to speak up. I'm quite happy in the workplace to say, hey guys this is what I need and I'm sorry I need a break here and whatever. I mean most people are in that position. No, no. The mad thing is it's a legal obligation on organisations. If you've got ADHD or autism or dyslexia, you ask for an accommodation and as long as it's reasonable, you don't even need a diagnosis. Organisations got a legal duty to provide that and they don't. I mean I think organisations in New Zealand are very lucky that we're not a very litigious society in the UK, the US, well US is interested at the moment but in the UK people are much more likely to sue an employer if they ask for something and they're not given it and that culture might come here in New Zealand eventually but should you be waiting for that as an organisation for the stick like that's the wrong way to do it. There are a lot of organisations are willing to try. I think that's the other thing, the great thing is there's a huge number of people and organisations that want to try but again it's new and it's difficult and they're not sure. According to Rich Rally, as a society we have a very limited view of our ability to solve problems and that starts early. When you're in school if you don't know an answer what you do. Freak out? Well most people go put the handle. Yeah I wouldn't have because I need I was too scared to ask questions at school that's a whole other exercise. Yeah because it's not psychologically safe because if you're wrong you get punished for it right? Yeah so that idea that you're right or wrong that's where that begins. Rich's point is that most people learn early on to put their hand up at school to get the answer to a question and that gets baked into the way we think as a society. That the solution to a problem is always out there. So every single big business, public sector, private sector, when they don't know an answer they do exactly the same thing that you talk to do in school. They put the handle. It's not a teacher who comes, it's consultants who come and think about that for a minute. What that says about an organisation's confidence in its own people says you haven't got the answers we need to go outside somebody else who knows better. I just think that's just wrong. Your people have got the answers. Hell we've ever read. You're a consultant. No. No, no. No. No. No. We don't come in and give organisations the answer. We give organisations the tools together. So in terms of neuroinclusion. Yeah. We don't serve you a pre-made inclusive pie. We teach you how to bake your own pie. Well maybe not a pie because an organisation needs a unique. I want you to explain in a nutshell what brain veg is and why it's different and what you do. Is it possible to do that in a? It's hard to talk about. So all it is. What's it's hard of it? A design sprint. A what? A design sprint. A design sprint. What's your innovation stuff? What you're talking about. What we do is just basically pose the question to a team, how might you increase the feeling of belonging? I'm a nerd and an academic and I can talk about academically but like most people just get rich. That's boring as far. I don't. But that's why I love the workshops that we do. You actually experience it. Yeah. And then it's like wow, it's like seeing the world in a different way and I love that. You get leaders gain, wow I didn't realise I was actually part of the problem. I thought I was being supportive and wanting the best. Yeah. And good intent. Yeah. Setting things up in a way that would be the best for their brain and the way they work. Yeah. And that's, do you know what I'm thinking of now? Theory of mind. Yeah. Which has talked about a lot in terms of autistic people. Not having theory of mind. Not understanding how other people interpret experience the world. But really, no one does. No, you're just stuck inside your own head. Yeah. If it provokes you to think differently, I've done my job and that's awesome because that's the start of you learning journey then. Right? It's just the beginning and it's never going to end. Like as a species, we've got this phenomenal capability to solve problems. It's wonderful, aspirational. We've had millions of years to evolve these things. Same computational devices in our heads that don't just work in isolation. They work in communities and that's how our cognitive systems evolved. We leverage in a tiny percentage of it. Everybody's concerned about oh, we're not very productive and the row sum tech at it. And it's like, that's not really the answer. The answer is how do you unlock this amazing human potential that you've got in your organisation? That's dead easy as well. Psychological safety. That's it. Done. No secret source. But once again, that's incredibly hard because, you know, you said it earlier, you know, when I was at school, I didn't want to put my hand up because you've been told that your idea is wrong. There's no such thing. Ideas do not have a value. There's no idea that's better than another idea. The magic is in how ideas link and combine and spot conversations. It's the magic. It's all about how we learn together. Right? Our whole life, all of our learnings been individual. And that's just not how we solve these kinds of problems that we're facing. Is there still room? I'm just, you know, hearing the nice air going, yeah, but what about individual brilliance? And do you know what I mean? Like, are we going to lose them? No, genuinely, everybody's got this brilliance. Right? It's just at the moment we've just got just really looking through blinkers at this one different kind. To tap into each individual's brilliance, you need to take a step back, start by differentiating the problems and differentiating the approaches to them. Then you can start having conversations about who the people who are cognitivri betta, naturali, do it. dealing with those problems. And then the final bit of that is, how do we support everybody just to be the best at work? And. - And be happy. And enjoy it. - I don't like happy. - Okay. - Scrap, Peppy. - Full filled? - Full filled. Yeah. There's a Japanese concept called "Ikyai", which I really like, which is trying to have this sweet spot of what you go at, what the world needs, like it loosely translates to "Fulfillment", which I think is a much better thing to pursue. And that's why I love my work as well, 'cause it gives me a sense of fulfillment. I actually feel lucky to have an experience that allows me to think about this sort of stuff and how it could add value, particularly for people like me and for my daughter and for kids who were different and disenfranchised by this system, how it could begin having an impact. - There's a lot of suffering, isn't it, Ian? - Yeah. It's horrible. And there's this idea that you turn up to work and somebody says, "How are you?" And everybody just goes, "I'm okay." But actually, it's part of the human condition. It's okay not to be okay, but we sort of gloss over it. And it's somebody asked me, "Cos I'm autistic, how are you?" Well, I'll tell you, you might not want to hear it though, 'cause it's like, "Why often I'll get up and I'm not okay?" I don't believe we should have that. I'll call to it, "It's okay to be happy, it's okay to be sad." They're just normal human emotions. So, fulfillment is what I chase. - It's hard to even imagine true fulfillment when the world is facing so many challenges. But rich says it's a far from hopeless. He is cautiously optimistic. - Every problem that we're facing as a global society is fixable. We don't need anything new. We've got the most amazingly powerful tools, but I'm a computer scientist, right? The stuff that we can do with tech is phenomenal and nothing's unsolvable. We've got the answers. - Rich loves tech, but he believes it's only as good as the people using it. And people, he says, have a real gold. - One of the magic things for me about coming to Levin, New Zealand was indigenous values, right? Copapa Maori. They're the values that enable Pacifica communities to do the greatest feat of scientific exploration ever, right? Copa's voyage, the great Trans-Pacific migration. If you look at the globe, turn it around. It's just blue and empty. And these people, they just got in walkers and just went out on this voyage of exploration and discovering we did it. They did it and the values that enabled them to carry out that feat. They're still here, the whole to the Harry Kekke, individuals you've found out and then the global community and the planet. It's there. It's been here for millennia, right? And it works. - At the heart of the Harry Kekke, the retour is young people, future generations, and for rich, the well-being of young people is a driving force. His company BrainBedge currently works to support businesses, but the long-term goal is to use that revenue to make a real difference long before people get to the workplace. He wants to make change early in education. - I struggle with saying this because I love educators. I love people working schools. They are my heroes. It's the hardest job, but the most valuable job that there is. But they're working in a system that's designed to treat the people who go in it as a unit of production, to be measured and ranked. All school dead to me was knocked me down. And I'm still struggled to deal with a lot of the damage done to me. In that system, you know, even now I've refrained everything, it's still really easy for me to get knocked off my feet again. And it's not the fault of the people in it. It's just a systems thing. It's badly designed systems. The 30% of people it works for, amazing. I love that to continue, but it's about time that we did something not just in schools, but in businesses for all of those other people who've got huge amounts of value to art. Next time on No Such Thing As Normal, I look at the overlap of gender and neurodiversity. She is beautiful. And she is immensely brave. Yeah. Immensely brave. It's a lot easier now to be able to look back and make sense of it. But, you know, for anybody going through it right now, hands down it's tough. If you like this podcast, please rate and review it. It helps others find it. No Such Thing As Normal is produced and presented by me, Sonja Gray. The editor is Jamie Lee Smith. Sarah's art, Bex War and Deep Frame, helped with production. The series is brought to you by the New Zealand Herald and Team Uniform, and it's made with the support of New Zealand on air. You can find us on Instagram. The handle is No Such Thing As Normal Podcast. New episodes of No Such Thing As Normal are available every Saturday, wherever you get your podcast.