“It’s important to understand that disability is contextual. One can be both enabled and disabled by their neurodivergence depending on the environment and the task at hand.”
-Nancy Doyle
“The way we diagnose and support neurodivergence needs to evolve. We’re still using outdated models that don’t consider the full spectrum of human cognitive diversity.”
-Nancy Doyle
Summary:
In this episode of “Psych Tech @ Work,” I welcome my new friend Nancy Doyle, founder and CEO of Genius Within and visiting professor Birkbeck, University of London.
In my opinion Nancy is one of the world’s most expert and on-point voices on the topic of neurodiversity and neurodivergence, especially as it relates to the world of work.
It was a real honor to spend an hour with her discussing the complexities and nuances of neurodiversity in the workplace.
Nancy brings her extensive experience in IO psychology and coaching to the conversation, offering insights that challenge traditional views and practices around neurodiversity.
Nancy shares her journey into the field, highlighting the transition from disability support to specializing in neurodiversity inclusion.
Nancy is doing hero’s work emphasizing the need for flexible and inclusive workplace practices that go beyond tokenistic inclusion programs and truly address the functional needs of employees. She also discusses the limitations of current diagnostic practices and the potential for AI and machine learning to aid, but not replace, the nuanced understanding required for effective support.
Topics Covered:
- Early Career Experiences:
- Transition from academic learning to practical applications in the workplace.
- Differences between academic theories and real-world scenarios.
- Practical Applications of Neurodiversity Inclusion:
- Importance of creating flexible and inclusive environments tailored to individual needs.
- Common workplace accommodations that can enhance productivity and well-being.
- Impact of Technology and AI:
- The potential and limitations of AI in diagnosing and supporting neurodivergent individuals.
- How machine learning and big data can help identify common needs and effective accommodations.
- Genius Within:
- The amazing work Nancy’s company, Genius Within is doing in providing assessments, coaching, and organizational design services to support neurodivergent individuals, creating inclusive workplaces that enhance productivity and well-being.
Takeaways:
- Understand the Context of Disability: Recognize that neurodivergence can be both enabling and disabling depending on the environment and task. Create flexible workplace policies that accommodate individual needs.
- Move Beyond Tokenism: Avoid tokenistic inclusion programs and instead focus on practical, everyday accommodations that support all employees.
- Utilize Free Accommodations: Many effective accommodations, such as allowing quiet workspaces or flexible seating, are cost-free and easy to implement.
- Leverage Technology Thoughtfully: Use machine learning and big data to identify trends and common needs among neurodivergent employees, but be cautious with AI diagnoses due to embedded biases.
- Promote Continuous Learning: Stay informed about the evolving field of neurodiversity and be open to adapting workplace practices to better support neurodivergent employees.
“Take it or Leave it” Articles:
In the most fun part of the show Nancy and I discuss two articles and give our opinions on the authors’ takes.
- “The Danger of Neurodiversity” From the Spectator UK
- Summary: This article critiques the neurodiversity movement, arguing that it may dilute the challenges faced by individuals with severe conditions. It highlights the need to balance the celebration of neurodiversity with the recognition of serious disabilities.
- Discussion: Nancy acknowledges the validity of the critique but criticizes the article’s tone. She emphasizes the need for a balanced approach that respects all experiences of neurodivergence.
- “The Rise of Neurodiversity at Work” From Psychology Today
- Summary: This article discusses how companies are increasingly recognizing the value of neurodiverse employees but warns against tokenistic inclusion programs. It advocates for tailored support that genuinely meets the needs of neurodivergent individuals.
- Discussion: Nancy agrees with the article’s critique of tokenistic programs and stresses the importance of functional performance and everyday accommodations.
Full transcript
PTWNancy
Charles: Welcome to the show, Nancy. How are you this afternoon?
Nancy: I’m good. Thank you, Charles. How are you?
Charles: I am doing quite well. It’s it’s great to speak with you. I can’t wait to share your perspective with our audience on all things neuro diversity, especially the workplace. And in speaking with you a couple of times, I feel like your perspective on this is is one that people need to hear because it’s more evolved maybe than a than a lot of the spooky here on the streets. And so I’m excited about that.
But before we really get going, yeah, I’d love to hear a little bit about your your background and kinda how you found your way to this topic and how you execute on that. On a daily basis.
Nancy: Yeah. I mean, I think I found my way to this topic quite intuitively. I didn’t mean to be an I O psychologist. None of us do. Right?
We all go into psychology for other reasons. And when I started learning psychology, I had already worked in supported disability. So working with in community group homes and thinking about disability inclusion. And I got really interested in I O’Seq in my undergrad degree, and ended up doing my masters in I o psych, and then my doctoral level kind of accreditation training, which isn’t the same as you have in the US. But it’s it’s like a doctoral level qualification.
And at some point in that, I was doing both unemployment support work and disability inclusion work, really assessing workplace needs and then helping employers work out what kind of accommodations would suit people. And more and more, I was drawn to non visible disability because it’s really hard to figure that stuff out. If someone has a is so using a wheelchair, you create step free access. If someone has a working memory deficit, What do we do about that? How do you accommodate that?
It was challenging. It was interesting. So I started specializing in neurodiversity inclusion in about two thousand two, two thousand three. And I got involved in diagnosis and also the provision of coaching, which has led to a lifelong love of coaching psychology. And I’m a dual registered coaching psychologist and I O’ Psychologist in the UK now.
So, yeah, so it kind of emerged from disability, but it turns out later in life that I and pretty much everyone I know is some flavor of neurodivergent. So that kind of specialism has come back to bite me somewhat because now I am the expert on everybody and it’s quite a lot to deal with sometimes. I would like you.
Charles: Then you have a dual affliction, which is the one of the ones, I only get one of them, and that is anytime I tell somebody what I do, it’s typically oh, you’re gonna analyze me. Oh, I have problems. I would be your best client. You know, they think that I’m a clinical psychologist, essentially, which is not true. I avoid that really well.
It’s just an interesting little, you know, side note. Maybe people don’t really realize or know, and why would they, but, you know, I live here in New Orleans. Nobody. I mean, it is very very rare
for someone to ask you what you do when you meet them. You got to a party, it’s wonderful, actually.
And I typically don’t ask people either. I know, you know, sometimes I know you’re a musician because I’ve heard your name around town or whatever, but very very rare in the little, you know, focus community here as you get broader to the suburbs, maybe it changes. So that’s that’s an interesting thing because we define ourselves so much by our work Right? I mean, that’s how people recognize such. And where are you where are you in the UK anyway? I don’t even know.
Nancy: I’m in the County of Sussex. I’m south of London by about forty five minutes to an hour. I can be in Central London on a train. And I’m just north of the very lively city of Brighton, which is known for being slightly unconventional not dissimilarly to New Orleans and is famous for its annual LGBTQ Pride event, which is the biggest Pride event in the UK. Oh, wow. We we get we get kaiemonogue and, you know, really famous people coming to Brighton Pride, so it’s pretty exciting.
Charles: And that’s the there’s there’s a seashore there? Is there not?
Nancy: There is. Yes. It’s a there’s a a seashore with a with a fun fair and a, you know, big ferris wheel and a and a here with lots of rides on it.
Charles: Yeah. Sounds like a lot of fun.
Nancy: The fun time.
Charles: Yeah. Mhmm. We all get to visit there someday. I’ve been to the UK a bunch, but never there. But I think it’s really, really important for our audience and even for me, let’s get you know, we’re IOCAZE’s we like to objectively define things, so everybody’s on the same page before we start making assumptions and talking about it.
So what’s your definition of neurodiversity as people throw that word around, like, it’s a it’s like a free free thing to throw around everywhere. People need to know what is it that we’re really talking about here and are there kind of mis misconceptions about what it is, you know. Yeah.
Nancy: Yes. I think there are lots of misconceptions, but I also you know, there isn’t a a neurodiversity police that’s keeping the language in and out. You know, it’s an evolving field and an evolving discourse. So at its most basic level, the word neurodiversity means that our species of humans is diverse in our neurocognitive presentation. So just as our faces are diverse and our sensory perception is diverse.
You know, actually the whole of our brains are diverse. And that makes total sense. Right? Why would we have identical brains given that as as species were pretty diverse in other ways. Sometimes it’s used as a synonym for disability of the non visible kind, sometimes the word neurodiversity is used as a synonym for neurodevelopmental disorders.
But actually, neurodevelopmental disorders are part of neurodiversity. And so are so is a kind of neuro normative experience of of development and a person who is neurotypical who doesn’t have a neurodivergent subtype, that’s part of neurodiversity as well. So neurodiversity is a species level description in the same way that biodiversity refers to the globe, neurodiversity refers to the species. And within that, we would tend to say people are neurodivergent. Some
people use the word neurodiverse.
Other people find that very grammatically weird because you wouldn’t say a person is diverse. So there’s kind of some disagreement in the in the wider field around what is the correct language, and this can be quite catchy sometimes, and people feel very strongly about the words. Not everyone likes neurodivergent because it feels other ring. It’s like to say you are diverging from the norm, which some people think is is not is stigmatizing and not okay. So the language is in flux.
If it feels confusing and ambiguous to you and your listeners, that’s because it’s confusing and ambiguous. It’s not because you’ve missed a memo or a report somewhere, you know. There is it’s it’s a language influx. And in the same way as a woman can identify as lesbian queer or gay, So can an individual that I then choose to identify as neurodivergent, neurodiverse, autistic, dyslexic, dyslexic, dyslexic, an ADHD, a ticker person with bipolar condition. You know, I think I think we have to allow individuals their right to self identify as this becomes an identity movement rather than a purely pathological clinical description.
And I think we have to acknowledge that like all language in diversity. It’s it’s in flux and it changes and we don’t know where it’s gonna land yet.
Charles: Interesting. Yeah. I mean, we’ll talk about it a little bit later in the show too when we talk about our articles, but it does kind of seem like I don’t know, a a TikTok thing almost. Right? Like, it’s so popular to to tag yourself that that you it gives you some cachet and some cool, which I mean, in some sense, it’s good to celebrate that and people who really have it. But at what level? So I’ll be I’ll be give you an example, you know, I’m I’m mildly ADHD. And and and and I’ve seen people who are got a lot more of it. Right? And so is it okay for me to call myself neurodivergent?
You know? Sometimes I do. My wife does when I do really, you know, crazy things and forget things and run around, you know. But I don’t know. For sure, if I would call myself that, you know, I’ve at least I’ve I’ve will say that when I’m speaking to somebody, especially when I show symptoms of it or, you know, behavioral manifestations of it.
But I don’t know if I truly would say I would feel like I’m kinda cheating people who truly are. So you know what I’m saying? So to talk a little bit about the popularity of this thing, Is it a good thing, a bad thing, you know, a both? I don’t know.
Nancy: That’s such a complex question, but it’s, you know, what my it’s where where is the bound, where is the edge of where something that’s different and eccentric and kind of useful to the human species because if we all thought the same that would be difficult and the edge of disability and disablement. So firstly, I think you can be both simultaneously disabled and not disabled by neurodivergence. So I’m an ADHD year. And I am decidedly not disabled when I’m working in my business because I have grown a business to accommodate the way I work. My environment is very suited to me in my business.
I also occasionally and quite a lot have to work in the world of academia and I feel very disabled in that environment. Very disabled. So contextually, I can be both disabled and enabled by being an an ADHD year. When I was in primary school, I had no problems, elementary school, I had no problems. In high school, I had significant issues.
Being neurodivergent. In my bachelor’s degree and master’s degree, I had significant limitations in my PhD it was nothing but joy. So, you know, disability is contextual. It isn’t yeah. And legally, that’s true.
So it’s legal statutes across the world do not define dis disablement as the label or condition, with a few exceptions, like spill cirrhosis, cancer, and HIV. But, you know, broadly, being diabetic could be disabling. It could not be disabling. If you have peripheral neuropathy and you can’t feel your feet, that’s going to be disabling. But if your diabetes is pretty well managed with insulin, that’s not disabling.
So it’s the same with neurodivergence. You are allowed to experience it as both simultaneously disabling and not disabling depending on your context depending on other health conditions, depending on how much sleep you had, depending on the role you’re trying to deliver, and the task you’re trying to deliver, and the equipment that you have to use.
Charles: So doesn’t that just mirror everything about individual differences in people? It’s the it’s the context. It’s where you find yourself. It’s who you find yourself around. That that applies to just about everything.
If you don’t think that, then you’re crazy. And that’s you know, we work at hiring people in organizations. It’s different organizations, the same person, could be a star or could do really poorly. So It’s it’s just that extension of that. Right?
It’s maybe a little more complicated because people don’t always act in the exact way that you would script it or expect it. And one of the things I really like about you and find interesting is just how, you know, you have some really solid staunch opinions, which I think are based on experience for sure. And you talk a lot and we’ve just you know, been talking about how people get it wrong. So we’ll ask how people get it right, but how do how are people getting the neuro divergency thing wrong. And you there’s maybe a couple bullet points.
It’s probably more than one way. But when that when I say that, what comes to mind? Immediately that you would like to help correct our thinking on some things?
Nancy: Well, I mean, honestly, we could talk for, like, five hours about both what we can do wrong and what we could do right. But let me start with some things that are wrong. Firstly, we are still using the medical model for analysis. We’re identifying deficits and then creating scaffolding according to those deficits because that’s what the law tells us to do. But what we’re not doing is looking at the wider macro system and changes that are coming our way in the workplace.
So I’m going to take you back a few steps to before the industrial revolution. And before the industrial revolution, the way that we learned and the way that we worked, Some people like you and I Charles would never have had to sit still all day, writing two d descriptive sequences of code, I e literacy. In order to to communicate. We’d have been out there talking to people because you and I like to talk, and we’d have been moving, and we would have been building things, and that would have been normal for us. And no one would have needed to give us a diagnosis of ADHD because our normal would have been contextual to our environment. Similarly, literacy is the major method of demonstrating what you know. That’s relatively new. But as we go into the twenty first century, you know, we’re changing the way that we work. We don’t need to spend twelve years teaching children literacy anymore because we all have devices that will convert speech to text and that will convert text to speech, but we’re spending an inordinate amount of time teaching children complex grammar for literally no good reason at all. So is it possible that in twenty years time that we’re not gonna have any dyslexics anymore? Because the the skill of learning to read and write will be so embedded in our in in our human machine interaction that actually it will be people who can’t visualize. It will be people who can’t
think of many things all at the same time who will be disabled. What are we gonna call them? Restrictive attention, disorder. You know, sedentary processing dependency. People have to people have to sit still to think or have sedentary Yeah. Processing.
Charles: Boring life syndrome.
Nancy: Yeah. Peep people who people who need to to write and be literate in order to think will have sequential code processing disorder. You know, like Right. What so the or you’ve got to remember that. So at the moment, and for the last kind of hundred years or more. We have focused entirely on what we expect a normal human to be able to do, and that is sit still for ages. In a loud and busy environments, being literate, being numerous, and using equipment with fine motor control. And anyone that couldn’t do that got a neurodivergent diagnosis. But because our norms are in such big flux, we’ve got to start moving our systems. And I think that the kind of exponential rise in neurodivergent diagnosis of late is part of what’s gonna create that tipping point because there’s too many of us to do this one person at a time. If the only way to support a newer divergent thinker, is to change nothing in educational work, but to spend a a ridiculous amount of money assessing that person, defining their needs, working out what kind of accommodations and scaffolds that person individually needs, and then kind of putting those in place, one person at a time, we’re all gonna run out of money. It’s not gonna work. And the other thing that I find interesting about that is that what people need is remarkably consistent. It doesn’t change. I’ve been doing workplace leads assessment for disability for twenty two years.
And people people who have a working memory deficit, it kinda doesn’t matter what their neurotype is. If you have a working memory deficit, there’s some things that are gonna work for you. And it’s things like, you know, having a dual monitor so that you don’t have to flick between screens. You can have all of the things that are up visible at once so that you don’t forget things as you move from screens. Things like that, putting on noise cancelling headphones so that you can screen up, distracting background noise.
That stuff works for anyone with a working memory deficit, not just the dyslexics and the ADHD years, but also the people with long haul COVID, also the people who are dealing with chronic pain. Also, you know, so there’s just some universality around what kind of accommodations go in. And I’m moving here to what we should do instead of what we shouldn’t do. And I think when we look at those adjustments and they’re they’re just really about person centered environments and person centered human machine interaction. I mean, they are iocyte gold. We already have a lot of what we need to create the optimum conditions for human functioning. But we’re we’re still wedded to a load of industrial norms in our offices, which doesn’t make sense. Doesn’t make sense to be wedded to those industrial norms anymore. I mean, in the eighteen hundred clock sitting in the same offices as all the files because they were all paper files and they were ledgers. But now the files are in a data center in Arizona, and I can be on a train or in my office or, you know, we so we we we we haven’t finished that shift yet. And I think the new diversity movement is is point is providing a roadmap for us as to how we’re gonna make that shift.
Charles: Okay. Now I’m gonna get you really mad. You might even spit on me. If it’s a problem of scale, can’t AI solve it? Right?
Like
Nancy: No. It’s a problem. AI. Yeah. AI can solve it because I mean, AI is is an answer to a question.
Nobody’s answering or asking. I don’t think we need AI. We can do you know, we can use machine learning. We can use big data to solve these problems. But I don’t think we need generative AI.
I don’t think it don’t I don’t I genuinely don’t if you get that complicated. Yeah. I think it is. Good. Big big data for machine learning is enough.
We do not need generative AI to do this. We just need to go, right, what are the trends in, you know, what people are struggling with? Where are the commonalities and how can we install those things as baseline flexibilities for workplaces and education and education environments, and then fewer people are gonna need diagnosis, accommodation, and help.
Charles: Yeah. I love it. So you might be the first person on ever on this show to say AI. We don’t need AI, which is great. And I think it’s a good lesson that we try to we try to throw that at everything.
And I’m sure there’s, you know, I thought maybe more just scaled like the diagnosis side of things or the from a hiring perspective, okay, you know, if we can if we now know this information about someone without having to go through when you talked about a lot of different steps. Right? So anytime you think about it, I couldn’t have even told you, I guess I just named a couple, but it’s more on the, hey, can we get a quick diagnosis on this without having a person have to do anything? Right? So that And then
Nancy: a
Charles: quick a quick remedy for, you know, I always think about the workplace and that’s what we’re really focused on here. So as an employer, you know, would I be able to know for sure about someone coming in, and then would that be able to have an automatically kinda recommended accommodation? And then send a thing to the people in the right department to make that happen. So that’s the kind of thing I’m thinking about more efficiency.
Nancy: What that’s doing is what we’re currently doing wrong, faster, and at scale. Yeah. It’s that’s not going to change the workplace. So so first of all, a r okay. This this is actually quite complicated.
Are you ready for some complex psychology of
Charles: it? Yeah.
Nancy: So the reason you can’t do AI based diagnosis is because diagnosis itself has a massive construct validity problem. I would draw your attention to the trans diagnostic mapping research at Cambridge, where these amazing educational neuroscientists have been working on the commonalities and the extent of overlap between neurotypes and why that might be. And it’s because our neurotypes like ADHD, dyslexia, dyspraxia, autism are diagnosed through behavioral interviewing, and they are absolutely socially, historically, culturally, and gender bound. They are they are lacking. They’ve got so much embedded bias.
They are almost nonsense. But so what these guys did, they said, right, forget the behavioral and to views. Let’s just do a cognitive ability profile of fifteen hundred kids who all have a diagnosis of some kind of special educational need. And let’s see where the strengths and weaknesses are
using cognitive testing rather than behavioral interviewing or, you know, opinions. So they took these fifteen hundred kids and they got that what we would call their spiky profile. So where they have, you know, big differences between their strengths and weaknesses, and then they did a lovely quite sophisticated cluster analysis, and they could not replicate the neurotype diagnostic boundaries as we know of them today. They found three clusters. Kids who had problems with language acquisition and language expression, kids who had problems with cold executive functions, So like working memory processing speed, time management, planning, prioritizing, and kids who had difficulty with hot executive functions like social filters, risk, management of strong emotions. So those three clusters, kids could be in one more than one of them, but they were the clusters. And there was no correlation between the clusters and the existing diagnoses.
So then they got more sophisticated. They said, alright, let’s do some neuroimaging. So they did FMRI research looking at the brains of these kids and and using FMRI, they replicated the clusters but not the diagnosis. Now they’ve got even more sophisticated and instead of looking at functional areas, they’re looking at connectivity between regions and using that analysis, they can tell the difference between a neurotypical brain and a neurodivergent brain. They can’t still tell the difference between neurodivergent brains and what So it might well be that what we currently think of as autism ADHD, dyslexia, dyspareunia doesn’t even exist. So if we tell AI, to where’s our training material coming from? You know, if we could you can’t trade AI to diagnose those four conditions. If those four conditions are in and of themselves a hallucinatiary construct that we’ve made up based on our socio cultural norms as opposed to something inherently, you know, innate that we’re that we’re determining. That that’s not what it is. So it’s not that people aren’t neurodivergent or neurotypical.
It’s that the breakdown between the conditions is very hard to replicate using hard data like cognitive assessments, genetics. They can’t replicate it that way either. They can explain maybe twenty five to thirty percent of the variant, same as schizophrenia, and they can’t replicate it using your imaging. So what are we gonna tell the AI to do? We’re gonna tell the AI to find people who are likely to be diagnosed with these conditions, and they’re just gonna replicate the same biases.
They’ll they’ll find white males who are autistic. They’ll find it. You know, it’s it’s not gonna so that’s why we can’t use AI to do diagnosis in a not shell, love and kisses, doctor Nanssel.
Charles: That was awesome. I I really like that. You know what I thought about I don’t even know okay. I might butcher the articulation here. What if we end up having artificial general intelligence someday?
And it these intelligences could be neurodiverse. Like, somehow they
Nancy: Well, I know they have you read the people that made the Internet? Charles: Yeah.
Nancy: It’s all it’s almost guaranteed that they’ll be neurodivergent because No. Who made and play and engage on the internet are very neurodivergent compared to the general population.
Charles: Yeah. And hopefully, that would be a positive than than a negative. But who knows? Because, yeah, that that’s a whole another type of a show or whatever talking about that stuff so I could do it all day long. Let’s go over our Take it or leave it segment for today
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Charles: Take it or leave it show. And by the way, Nancy will be getting one of these awesome take it or leave it t shirts as all of our guests do. I’ve sent one to Scotland already, so I know that we can get them over there to the UK. So let’s go to the first article we have today. So, name of the article is called the danger of neurodiversity.
And, yes, these articles are hand selected to fit into things that might provoke, disturb, or excite, or professor Nancy here. So let’s see. Here it is. The danger of neurodiversity, we’ll take just a quick look at the TLDR from this article. Right?
It challenges the neurodiversity movement, which views autism in similar conditions as natural variations rather than disorders. The author himself was basically saying that if you’re on the severe end of this, it’s diluting the challenges that you might have. So, you know, people who may be less on the on the continuum spectrum, diagnosis, whatever. You know, they’re detracting from the people who really do have more pronounced problems. And this this may lead to people kinda blowing off the the idea that these people need help.
And of of course in the workplace, which is what we focus on, it may really really again, obscure what what the the the most difficult side of this are. And so really people are risking not being able to help people who are most in need, especially in the workplace or whatever. So I am gonna let you give your take on this, Nancy. What do you think?
Nancy: I think it’s a valid critique. Yeah. I I genuinely think it’s a valid critique. I was a little bit of suspended at some of the language in the article. I didn’t think it needed to be so angry and vociferous.
It could have made the critic without saying that people who’s experience is different or or wrong. It also had a bit of a sexist point in there that most of the proponents of this are women, and that’s not actually true. There’s lots of male neurodiversity advocates. In fact, I would say some of the leading voices are either currently male or were assigned male at birth. So it kinda shows an unfamiliarity with the neurodiversity movement.
But I think it’s a valid critique, you know, we’ve installed the idea that neurodiversity is about having magical mystical work fairies that will come and do all the boring IT work very accurately and at speed, And and that kind of generalization and stereotype of the particularly gifted white male middle class North American cishet coder is it has permeated and it has detracted from other experiences. But I would say all other experiences of neurodivergence, not just the experience of the autistic people who are also learning disabled or who have ever severe epilepsy, but the experience of of black and brown autistic people, the experience of female
autistic people living in the global south, or or in East Asia. That stereotyping isn’t helping anybody except the people who are already likely to do the best started this movement as it was. Do you know what I mean? Mhmm.
So I that’s why I think it’s a really valid critique, but I I’m slightly perturbed by some of the language in the art ago, I think it’s unnecessary. The critique is strong without being derogatory about people.
Charles: Yeah. So my take is the is a frustrated individual with an agenda because he’s had to deal with this for a long time. And so he’s venting a little bit. So you gotta Yeah. I gotta take that into account.
You know, it’s interesting about the the female part of it. I remember when we were talking, you were saying something about a very high correlation or relationship of people who are trans and neurodive Yeah. Being neurodiverse. So I’m curious you know, just really quickly summarize that. This is a good spot to to talk about that even though we’re in the middle of our little show here.
Nancy: So Sure. Population studies looking at neurodivergence in trans communities indicates that around up to thirty percent of trans gender people are autistic, which is very much higher than the general population where it’s sort of anywhere between one and three percent. When you look at trans communities and the autistic people in trans communities, there’s no difference between assigned female at birth and assigned male at birth. The gender differences disappear. So there’s kind of plenty of reasons that we could suspect, that’s one of them, that the gender differences in autism are created rather than innate.
The experiences of female artists tend to be that our, you know, behavior is more overcorrected for women in terms of compliance and inspiring social communication. The the diagnostic criteria, one of the diagnostic criteria in the most famous autism assessment is. I love to collect details about things, for example, birds, planes, and trains. I mean, we as a psychometrician, we can also overlook the fact that we put examples in an item and what a terrible practice that is. But even if we even if we overlook that, you know, that all of those are male types items. So there’s lots of reasons why there’s gender differences and they’re they’re really flaky. There’s no there’s no good reasons that are that are inherently biological. So so yeah, that’s my take on that.
Charles: Cool. So you tell me thumbs up, thumbs down on this one.
Nancy: Or I can’t pick. It has to be both. It depends. I think that I think in general, the critic is valid, but but I I think that the style of putting that critique across is in unnecessarily inflammatory and my concern about the reason I can’t sign it off with a thumbs up is because what it will do is it’s it’s job is to legitimize discrimination against neurodivergent people who are managing to be in workplaces. And actually, even though those people might you might think, well, they’re they’re standing on privilege because they’re being in on in workplaces, neurodivergent people who are functioning in in in society have higher rates of suicidality, higher rates of mental health distress, high much higher rates of insomnia, self medication, substance use than the general population.
It is stressful being a neurodivergent person. So the needs are different. They are then, you know, we we don’t wanna get into the oppression Olympics, you know, whose needs are the worst. You
know, everybody that is neurodivergent who is trying to fit into a neurotypical world has some kind of difficulty doing that. It’s you you you know, it’s not easy.
It’s just a different kind of hard. So I I don’t wanna judge.
Charles: Gotcha. Gotcha. So you’re one one up, one down. I’m just gonna take the viewpoint of a lesser educated person who reads this article and says, jeez, you know, this guy’s kinda right. I reckon didn’t really think of it that way.
You don’t think about people who are severely autistic even in the workplace a lot of times, which it’s good to be reminded of that, you know. And so I think as a layperson who doesn’t have your background. It’s a it’s a positive oops. It’s a positive thing or a positive article anyway. Right?
So So that’s summation. We had a a half, upsie, downsie, and one upie from me. So let’s go on to the next article, which is the rise of neurodiversity at work is the name of this and is in psychology today, so much bigger production an outlet than than the last article. And so let’s take a look at the summary of this one. Right?
Basically here it’s saying, hey, companies are appreciating the unique abilities and perspectives of neurodiverse folks and neurodivergence. And even businesses, they’re being inclusive about how they’re hiring and accommodating these people. So despite that, you know, there’s they still may not be getting the job done and things may be misguided. And here’s how they might, you know, misstep is that they’re really, like, maybe focus too much on getting people integrated into the regular workplace as opposed to accommodating their actual needs. And they give a little prescription here of, you know, to truly benefit from this.
You’ve really got to tailor strengths to better support the needs of neurodivergent individuals. So I’m very interested in your take on this one. I can’t necessarily guess what you’re gonna say.
Nancy: Well, again, I could go both ways on this one. I I think its negatives for me are the kind of promotion of some fairly tokenistic inclusion programs on behalf of some famous tech companies as the whole as the kind of ideal of neuro inclusion. So I think it has embedded within it the right critique, which is this isn’t where we start people. This this is this is a well, It is where we start to pilot project, but it shouldn’t be where we stop. This is not you know, it’s a And we’ve been doing this for years.
So I think SAP’s first program in two thousand and seven were in two thousand twenty four. SAP’s program still doesn’t have more than it’s got less than one percent of its staff on this on this program and the population prevalence of autism is one to three percent, so it’s not even mirroring. And this this actually goes back to your other guys’ article. And that’s because the population prevalence of autism includes the artists who don’t have the right skills to work in technology. So, you know, they’re not They’re not necessarily what we should look at. And and my other critic of those programs is a bit more intersectional. I just think we wouldn’t do other diversity and inclusion that way. So if you imagine, you know, you’re sitting in a business, you’re like, we need to improve gender inclusion. We’ve had women a really good multi taskers. So let’s get some project managers who are women.
Or you’re sitting there going, well, we need to improve race and ethnicity, diversity. We’ve heard that Chinese people are really good at math. So let’s get them into the finance team. Like, you wouldn’t do it that way and you know why it was because it would be illegal. Yeah. And you would be sued if you did that. And they would win. So but for some reason, we do think it’s okay to do disability inclusion with these token projects. In which the individuals coming into
them have automatically by virtue of getting a job disclosed something about themselves, which is protected and confidential medical grade data, which may affect their ability to get promoted to become a manager to get a reference for another job where they might not wanna be on the autism team. They might wanna be, you know, in the architecture design team, just doing regular stuff.
So I think they’re problematic and so I’m not a massive fan of them. So the the the the article does two things. Number one, it talks about them as a sales technique as if we should all be, like, falling down because clever tech companies have done this thing. So that means we should all do it too. But the article does have that little thing at the end that says, well, actually, Isn’t this about more than a label?
Isn’t this about functional performance of everyday scale? And that’s where I agree with it?
Charles: Gotcha. So my take again, not as not as in-depth or probably multi clever, I guess, is yours. But the way I look at it is, I feel like there’s probably a lot of overemphasis on the neurodivergence washing or whatever, where companies, as you mentioned, talk about doing it. Because it’s the right thing to talk about. And if we look at DE and I efforts, we know it It started with here’s a training video tape that you have to watch.
It’s gotten better than that, but it’s still a struggle and maybe not execute as well as you’d like. And I think that you look at the volume of people going through these programs. It’s pretty infinitesimal. Right? They’re not really scaling these programs very much, which to me again, and are they getting the right people to help create these programs?
To help really do? People really understand that. Right? And so I think from that standpoint, it’s it’s like sometimes it’s hard to tease apart your feelings about the article and the subject matter that some of kind of struggle with on this. So I I do think the article is good at I think it glosses over some of those things even if it talks about, hey, here’s how we gotta do it better. They’re kind of a obliged to do that. Right? I mean, it’d be crazy to ignore the the positive side of it or the way that companies could deal with it. I just don’t know enough about are these really gonna be the correct ways to do it? I don’t know enough about the reality in this. So to me, I would say, you know what, this is celebrating the fact that companies are doing this more than it’s providing a cautionary tail. So that’s how I think about it. So what’s your vote?
Nancy: I think you’ve summed that up nicely, actually, Charles. And I’m gonna go with a down vote on that basis. I think the the motion. If it if it if it if it was better balanced, I would give it a balanced result, but because it I think it does overpromote what these companies are doing. Yeah. So I’m giving it a no on that basis.
Charles: Gotcha. Me too. That was my thing.
Nancy: There is
Charles: a no on this one. So whether we agree or not, You got a nice shirt coming at you. I put a lot of Mhmm. You know, this is a logo that I basically typed what I wanted into dolly and it cranked out this logo for me with very minimal changes. It’s pretty incredible that they can spell so much better now.
Talking a little bit now, we’ve gotten into the workplace. We’ve, you know, by design, those were to really make sure we got pushed into the workplace discussion, which is really important. And to me, I wonder so think about it from a job applicant perspective. You mentioned something
before about, you know, how job applicants may It’s very personal information. There may be a stigma about it.
I’m gonna guess some job applicants may not even know, right, or be aware. But how do would a company even like, there’s a pretty famous case here in the US about that from someone who you know, was bipolar, I think, extremely and, you know, was just didn’t get a job and then claim discrimination and company said, well, because of how they would act on the job, they we couldn’t give them this job and the job description doesn’t, they don’t fit that job description. So we were doing it. You know, correctly. And so there there’s a lot of it’s just a a real thorny issue about it.
Like, the only way a company would know to put someone in neurodivergent hiring track is if that person came in flying that flag, And of course, if you put someone in a neurodivergent hiring track without them claiming they are, then you risk all kinds of of problems. And if their profile on an assessment that’s not a clinical measure of neurodiversity, but may reflect something, you know, excludes them or includes them. That’s problematic too. It almost feels like you can’t win, which is how I think companies are making these poster programs. Right? So so how would it Yes. How does that happen in in the real world? What, you know, what are your reactions to what I said?
Nancy: Well, what happens in the real world is all of those things. So, you know, people come in, they know, but they don’t disclose, and then they don’t ask for any kind of flexibility or accommodation until they’re already in trouble in terms of performance. And therefore, that creates a lot of conflict and mistrust. And kind of defensiveness on both parts. People come in and and they don’t know and then they find out throughout, you know, at some point in there in their tenure.
People ask to go on programs and then regret it because they found it stigmatizing. People don’t ask to go on programs and then they see people who are on programs having much better working conditions than them and then they regret that. So, you know, all of those things are happening all the time. And I think the the best thing for businesses to do right now is to cut through all of this by really refocusing on everyday functional performance an everyday accommodations and flexibilities that are easy to implement. The most popular accommodations and flexibilities in every piece of research I’ve done have been the things that are free. That it’s it’s not complex. You know, we need to take a flexible attitude to our entire culture around maximizing productivity and performance. You ask people how can I support you to work at your best? And any blanket policy is going to fail. So if we say everybody works remotely now, everybody works in the office now you know, everybody works hybrid two days and five days.
None of that is ever gonna work because people have such different sit situations, and this goes back to the individual differences. Point that we made earlier, and the fact that individual differences have both, you know, microatyologies, but also mezzo and macro ethiologies of how those differences emerge and and manifest. So we need to find ways of capturing that, which is what I’ve been working on for the last four or five years, I’ve been going, how do we capture the individual difference that would lead you to know what kind of flexibilities are gonna enhance productivity and performance and well-being for this person, you know. So, yeah, that’s been my my research aim And my product development aim for the last few years is is to find a way to do that at a scalable efficient and reasonable approach.
Charles: Very cool. Very cool. So, you know, when I think about especially with hiring, like, what is the core idea? What is the what is the thing we are attempting to do? In my mind, it’s to to understand individual differences so that you can align people with the ideal work, the ideal product they’re supposed to produce to create value for the company and to create a good life experience, a good fulfilling thing for an individual, whether they’re neurodiverse, whether they’re a computer program, whether they’re a cartoon, whether they’re a dog, you know, it doesn’t matter.
That’s what you’re that’s what you’re really looking to do. And so, you know, neurodivergence is is an individual difference. It just happens to be one that’s more pronounced in its ability potentially to allow somebody to do just the normal thing that everybody’s supposed to be doing You mentioned a couple of you mentioned something interesting where you said, you know, some of the best accommodations are free. So name a couple of accommodations that are very common that you see?
Nancy: So if you have a hot desking situation that people are allowed to choose their own desk and stick to it. If you are trying to do work that requires concentration that you have the ability to change the noise levels in your environment either by taking a private office if you’re working in a more kind of manufacturing or health care environment that you would stand in a corner so that you reduce the degrees of extractions around you. So so the awareness that noise distraction and movement and busyness affects concentration and being allowed to take steps to minimize that. That is by far the most popular accommodation, and it doesn’t have to cost money. You don’t even have to use noise cancelling headphones.
You can use whatever’s in your environment to flex around that. And and, yeah, without you know, there is no doubt in my mind. Every piece of research I’ve ever done says that is the most popular thing you can do for people is give them the ability for quiet concentration space when they have to do quiet concentrated things. And, yeah, that’s that’s a deal breaker for a lot. It’s hard for every it’s like it’s this it’s this thing.
It is hard for everybody, but it is a deal breaker for a neurodiversion person.
Charles: Right? So who in the hell and a company is supposed to be able to figure that out. Right? That mean, if you’re just a hiring manager or somebody running a department or just a regular HR person. How the hell are you even gonna know that?
So what what would a company do to even be able to recognize that somebody somebody had something going on where that would be such an ideal solution. Because to me, the practicality of it is you you might have that, but if somebody doesn’t know to do it or how to do it, you’re not gonna get it. Mhmm. Right?
Nancy: So Yeah. Exactly. Because we all think that everybody thinks the same as us inside their heads. Don’t we? You know, in non psychologists don’t have really awareness of individual differences in in capacity.
And sensory processing. So not everybody knows that the reason they struggle so much is because of a working memory deficit or a sensory sensitivity. So yeah. So I I this well, this is what I’ve been working on is how do you profile that? How do you profile where your strengths and struggles are in a day to day work do you find easy of work?
What do you find hard at work? You find these kinds of things hard? Okay. Try try doing this. Here’s some options for you.
What can you do in your environment? Can you move? Can you make it quieter? Can you go somewhere else? Be that you know, could can you do any of those things? Try those things. So so that that is exactly what I’ve been working on is how do we do that at scale so that we can do that during onboarding as part of a kind of wider question of, you know, if this is your new job, how can we support you to be at your best in this job? Let’s try some things. You know, this is where I’ve tried to put all of my professional expertise into a psychometric profiler which is linked to over four hundred recommended accommodation recommendations that I know work, that I’ve researched work, and how can I target them? But the other thing I’m doing with that is if I’m working with a business on it, they’re not having the standard set of recommendations.
Like, I’m I’m sitting and working through them with the company. So I’ll find someone in if they have an accommodations team or occupational health, HR, and Cisco. Right? Here’s the list of things that you would do for concentration difficulties. Already of these impossible in your workplace.
Because if they are, let’s not recommend them. Let’s recommend the things that are possible in your workplace. And the idea is that all recommendations are free at the point of use and easy to implement without disclosure, without talking to your manager, without getting a purchase order or commissioning something, but they they can just be done. And I think that’s how we level the playing field and make it so that we don’t have twenty percent of people asking for diagnosis and accommodations, you know, and getting into conflict about it.
Charles: So the answer is hire someone like you who’s an expert. I think that’s a great answer. I know you’ve put a lot of effort into that. And as we close out, I’d love for you to be able to let people know about your company, what you guys guys and girls do. And, you know, that’s a good way to we always leave the show that way.
So So tell us how Cool. People can get a hold of you and what you do.
Nancy: So my company is called genius within, and we’re just at genius within dot org. And we have a kind of triage of services. So you’d start people would start with that kind of profiling, which we call the genius finder. And then if that’s not enough for people, we can escalate that to one to one one to one kind of case review. We can sign post people to coaching, to assessment, we do diagnosis for adults, and we do kind of organizational design and culture training, particularly supporting line managers and supervisors who are always the first responders for well-being.
And so, yeah, we have a bunch of bio psychs and a bunch of professional workplace coaches. And we have some we even we even have some other psychs. We have the odd clinical counseling and forensic psych, but, you know, On the quiet.
Charles: It’s okay.
Nancy: Yeah. On the quiet, we have multidisciplinary sites. And, yeah, there’s there’s about two hundred and fifty of mainly based in the UK, but also some some North Americans, and and I’m actually half North American. My father is from New Jersey. Which explains my personality better than ADHD does.
If you met my father, you’d know. Yeah. So so we are doing all those things. But the interesting thing about Genius Within is that we are a b corp. We give sixty five percent of our distributable
profits to services for children each year as a donation.
And as a company, seventy five percent of us are neurodivergent and or disabled ourselves. Including our leadership team. And I founded the company in two thousand eleven, but I do not run the company because when the company got to be too to a certain size. It was too big for me and I didn’t enjoy it. It wasn’t my genius within to run that company anymore. So I found somebody who’s genius within it was. To run companies, and she runs the company now. Her name is Jackie Wallace. She is a dyslexic and a dysparexic, not an AVH dear, and she is a marvelous leader, and we all love her very much.
Charles: Awesome. Well, that is a that’s an important thing for anyone to recognize, I think, when it when it’s time to let someone with different individual differences take over. So It
Nancy: is it is the thing most founders struggle with. But, you know, I think being an IO psychologist gave me my advantage there compared to most founders.
Charles: Yeah. For sure. Well, thanks so much for sharing amazing perspectives. I think Anyone who listens to this is gonna learn a lot. I know I know I have and that’s from talking to you, that’s why I really wanted to have you on because this is important stuff and it’s it’s gonna keep getting in the news, it’s gonna keep getting conversation, and we need to make sure we’re having the
right conversation about it instead of a perfunctory conversation because we think we should. So thanks so much, Nancy.
Nancy: Thanks for having me.