The Future of Work Starts with our Kids
By Claire Quigley
I recently sat down to discuss diversity and its role in the FoW with Jules and Ellie. I expected to discuss statistics but found the real power and insights in their stories.
Both interviewees have a home that embraces diversity as a ‘super power’ or even better, ‘invisible abilities’. Whilst there is immense pride in this, there is also the edge side; “the physical presentation might not be right there upfront, but as soon as you might put a label on something, there's a whole lot of baggage that comes with just that one term”.
While the conversation explored many paths, I’m sharing the key threads of the tapestry here. My one ask is that you look through two lenses: that of working with people in the workforce today, and that of standing in the playground observing our future workforce or even, our future ‘human-force’.
Let’s unpack diversity in all its forms
In essence, there are four overarching ‘categories’ of diversity to help us understand and clarify it better:
Inherent diversity: racial, ethnic background, gender, neuro generally.
Acquired diversity: acquired forms of diversity, like what you studied or different life experiences.
Intrinsic good diversity: this looks at moral equity, inclusive social goals. For example whether we're looking at, at our parliament or Congress or the media or judiciary or board's leadership. Ensuring important bodies like that reflect the demographic diversity of the wider population… gender parity can be an important goal in many cases but then perhaps in some areas such as deep-sea fishing where 97% are men, perhaps parity is not so important here!
Performance enhancing diversity: what kinds of diversity are most correlated with innovation or competitive advantage.
Now it can be that these overlap but Jules talked to the point which can sound a little controversial in some circles, that it's also possible that people can look very different in terms of their skin colour or their genders, et cetera but think quite similarly.
I would say the research leans more towards its diversity of something called cognitive diversity. That doesn't just mean neuro typicality, or neuro atypicality. It’s often the proxy's educational background. If you're a poet or you're a chemical engineer, whether or not you are the same gender or have the same ethnic background, you're probably going to think and approach problems a little differently, right?
What if these breakthrough innovators had been labelled?
Melissa Schilling, a really well-regarded professor of innovation at NYU wrote a book called Quirky in 2018. In it she examines the lives of eight highly regarded innovators who changed our world, she looked not just at what they achieved but their characters, personalities, and working styles. She looked at Albert Einstein, Benjamin Franklin, Elon Musk, although he's not everybody's favourite cup of tea at the moment, Dean Carmen, the guy that, amongst other things, invented the Segway. Nikola Tesla, Marie Curie, Thomas Edison, Steve Jobs. And yes, she acknowledged the gender reflection. Now most people would acknowledge these were really unusually creative and influential people.
The intriguing part of this book were the chapters of biographies on their childhood, what they were like as children to the extent we have records what school teachers said about them and how they fared as people. None of them that we know of were diagnosed with anything but Nikola Tesla for example, had a morbid fear of round things and couldn't eat peas.
Jules is fascinated by this;
“He (Nikola Tesla) was terrified of pearls you know, and, but this is also a guy that could basically visualize schematics for inventions to the extent where he said it was like, I would just see schematics, my inventions in front of me, and I could spatially rotate them and think about, how to design things.”
What makes this so fascinating is to ask the question, if Nikola Tesla was to be in today’s working world, or even in today’s playground, would he have thrived and achieved what he did?
There was a huge spatial intelligence there, but sometimes that's accompanied with things that would be perceived as very strange and make it quite difficult to thrive in a standard workplace.
Our potential blind spots – how to create a safer and more inclusive playground
So here is one more example. Benjamin Franklin had a polyphasic sleeping schedule. He didn't sleep. He basically would nap during the day, but wouldn't sleep in a block. He thought that allowed him to work more. But if you went to a standard corporate and said, look, this is how I want to work. I work 20 hours a day, but I take naps every three hours for 20 minutes or something like that. It doesn't fit into the sort of industrialized template that we have.
Steve Jobs apparently didn't like to wash; he believed he didn't give off body odour. Um, so he didn't shower often or use deodorant. But it's hard not to look at Steve Jobs for all his personal foibles, as an incredible innovator, right?
But the point here is that not everyone has the support, confidence and purpose of a Steve Jobs, Benjamin Franklin or Nikola Tesla. So how do we create an environment where diverse perspectives and brains can thrive?
The traditional workplace dynamic can filter out those, or make it difficult for people that don't fit the centre of a bell curve on their social norms. This is really counterproductive a lot of the time for really interesting ideas.
Both Jules and Ellie agreed that it starts with schools as well as the workplace. How can they be not only ticking a box from a goal perspective or to be seen to be inclusive, but actually make space for the way different brains work?
In my reading and research, sensory environments is a big thing with a lot of autistic people, certainly my daughter….and secondly the industrial template of timing. And you see this at school, right? It's like – do this at this time at nine o'clock, you've got to be sitting down in this environment with 20 plus other kids with all the sounds and smells of that….there is no way our kid can learn in that context….”
This then translates into the workplace “ We can force people traditionally in the workplace into temporal and spatial context that just don't enable them to work very effectively”.
What if we recognised that different sorts of environments are required and different ways of working are required for different brains to do their best work.
Johan Wiklund, a friend of Jules and a well known academic in the entrepreneurship space, has done some empirical research on the overrepresentation of Neurodiverse people in entrepreneurship, so particularly A D H D.
His findings show a similar thing that basically a neurodiversity is superpower in the entrepreneurial context where they have to shift focus a lot, and it's not about getting bogged down, too bogged down in the one thing, but it's about having that overview on with your eyes on the horizon a lot and a little bit of this, a little bit of that.
In many ways it would be perhaps more ideal for companies if neurodiverse people didn't feel they had to exit organizational employment in order to thrive. Or that had to start their own businesses where they could control the way they work and where, and when and how they work. If there was more flexibility around that, so we could harness those skills and those talents inside more traditional companies.
The future we are striving for
Hopefully it will be different for the generation of our children. Things will be different because we're more aware of these things, but part of that is also getting a shift in the sort of standard view in the workplace about the contribution that Neurodiverse people can make with the right levels of, I won't even call it support…. It's just enabling ways of working that will enable them to thrive and make the best contributions they can”.
What's very clear from the literature on psychological safety is that what you need in a team in terms of optimizing both novelty and in many ways standardized high performance, is people feeling unconstrained to say what they think. This doesn't mean people being rude and offensive. It just means if they've got a view about something, they are not sitting there, holding it back, because they're terrified that they may be judged negatively.
It's important to bring this conversation forward in a way that encourages people of different perspectives and different backgrounds to not hold back in their views.
We need a respect for diversity. We also need a robust way of interacting.
Can we find a way to respect while still holding robust, safe conversations because we're there for a bigger purpose? So we are not tip toeing around things, or being afraid of saying the wrong thing. Instead we are about helping people to do their best work?
If we look at the playground again, there is a noticeable shift in seeing hyper kids as misbehaving to now viewing kids as oh, this kid is really great. They're so energetic, they've got loads of fun to bring to the table. I'd love to see if we can harness that and lift it into the workplace? We've probably got more work to do in the workplace in some ways than we do in the playground.
I would love a goal aspiration, pie in the sky, call it what you will. If my boys could grow up and work in an environment where they could just show up as their authentic self just like everyone else around them. Neurodiverse or not, no matter where anyone is sitting on any kind of diverse spectrum or anything.
It's not even about belonging. It's about just being authentic and being accepted as who you are, no matter who you are or how your brain works.
And kids can teach us a hell of a lot about this.