A Hidden Force: Unlocking the Potential of Neurodiversity at Work

By Ed Thompson

How can your teams meet their true collective potential?

​Diversity is a hot topic in the business world, but it has been largely restricted to meaning a diversity of experiences based on a person’s heritage, upbringing, or gender. As A Hidden Force points out, however, there is another type of diversity that has been overlooked until recently: neurodiversity—the differences in how our brains process information.

Through his research, personal experiences, and extensive interviews with global neurodiversity experts and neurodivergent people in the workforce, Ed Thompson convincingly shows:

• Why neurodiversity has historically been overlooked by society and in business and why it’s so relevant
• Why embracing neurodiversity will help us be part of and build more innovative and effective teams
• How we can take our new understanding of the topic and neuroinclusive principles into our everyday work and interactions

A Hidden Force makes a timely, apt, and critical contribution to today’s business world. Written for business leaders, talent management professionals, and neurodivergent employees, this book shows why and how creating a work environment that welcomes the full spectrum of talent benefits everyone.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Greenleaf Book Group
• Release date: Apr 4, 2023
• ISBN: 9781639080465

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First Edition

To my mother, Elizabeth

CONTENTS

FOREWORD BY PAULETTE PENZVALTO

PREFACE

INTRODUCTION:Neurodiversity Is a Fact of Every Workplace

CHAPTER 1:Understanding Neurodiversity

CHAPTER 2:A Brief History of Neurodiversity

CHAPTER 3:The Rise of the Neurodiversity Movement

CHAPTER 4:Neurodiversity and Innovation

CHAPTER 5:A Common Theme

CHAPTER 6:Boulders in the Road

CHAPTER 7:Neurodiversity Becomes a Talent Strategy

CHAPTER 8:Appreciating Neurodiversity at Work

CHAPTER 9:Inclusive Workplaces for All

CHAPTER 10:Leveraging a Neurodiverse Team

CHAPTER 11:Hiring the Full Range of Talent

CHAPTER 12:Neuroinclusion and the Future of Work

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

NOTES

INDEX

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

FOREWORD

I am a program manager at Google, and I work in privacy, safety, and security.

As a child, I was homeschooled. I enjoyed organizing, assisting my father in his construction trade, and singing in choir. I was an ambitious child, so I set my sights on becoming an international opera star and the president of the United States. There was a minimum age requirement to be elected president, so I started with music, beginning college-level voice courses at age fourteen.

My mother was an opera singer, so I had long been exposed to classical music. I found that I had a talent for learning music by ear; on the other hand, I struggled to read sheet music. As a result, I developed a set of accommodations with my coaches: they read the music for me, allowing me to quickly memorize operatic roles. My parents instilled confidence in me and taught me to look beyond my limitations. Ultimately, I traveled to Italy to perform in my first international opera at the age of seventeen.

As I grew older, it became clear that my vocal talent was exceptional, but I found that opera professionals were not as accepting of my unique learning style. I needed a specific approach for audio-based learning that, contrary to traditional methods, used very few visual aids. I was told to hide my differences, so I started masking (a term often used to describe passing as nondisabled to maintain social standing) as a matter of professional survival and became very successful. I was invited to join the Indianapolis Opera Ensemble and won the regional Metropolitan Opera competition. Shortly thereafter, I was invited to join the Artist Diploma program at the University of Cincinnati (UC) College-Conservatory of Music.

I became the president of UC’s Graduate Student Governance Association and befriended one of the university vice presidents. They confided in me that they had a similar processing challenge but had found success through accommodations. This admission had a profound effect on me, as it was the first time I had seen someone in a leadership role with similar challenges. I realized that if representation could be that powerful, I should use my platform to inspire others.

I graduated from UC and went on to work at Juilliard and, at the same time, began the process of diagnosis. I worked with Andrea Bocelli’s vocal coach, Maestro Eugene Kohn, who believed in me and insisted that I should be judged not by how I learned but how I performed.

I was also introduced at that time to the early Autism at Work movement, as big companies began to actively seek autistic talent in the mid- to late 2010s. I was lucky enough to participate in and help develop programs to assist neurodivergent individuals in expanding their knowledge of different fields, upskill them, and make the workplace more equitable. Through these networks, my interests also evolved and led me to study computer science at Columbia University, become a Google Lime Scholar, and ultimately join Google.

I founded AutistX@Google, a group of people of marginalized genders who identify with the autistic spectrum that provides support and advocacy, and I am currently the COO of the Google Disability Alliance. Google provides me with an excellent platform to influence the focus of diversity, equity, and inclusion in the industry. I have also become a global public speaker so that I could scale moments of If you see it, you can be it and make a positive impact on the self-esteem and professional success of people who have invisible differences.

I have found that openness and candor are key ingredients to creating safe spaces for people to be curious, take risks, and thrive—whether they are a student, a professional, or an executive. Selfishly, I love that diversity initiatives make work more fun and have unlocked my potential, both in my core role and as a leader. It also heartens me to see these efforts making the same positive impact on others that the UC vice president’s admission had on me.

It is urgent for both individuals and organizations to upskill themselves to reflect a wider spectrum of human needs and behavior. Like Ed, I am a major proponent of Universal Design as the fastest path to helping people become better colleagues and managers by helping them unlock their potential for empathy and ability to leverage diverse strengths. This need has been further punctuated by the need to accommodate neurodiversity at scale. There are more reports of burnout and higher rates of disability leave related to mental health than ever before, both in the wide population and among the neurodivergent.

As we move through the various stages of our lives, empathy and compassion become more and more critical to success. We spend the majority of our time at work, and it is only when we encounter a period when work is inaccessible that we realize the importance of an accessible environment and the need for upskilling and flexibility. Often, I think of when my colleague Aubrie Lee, Disability Alliance’s president, shared with our CEO, Sundar Pichai, about the time that she could not enter our main cafeteria because the door was not accessible; she was perfectly capable of entering with the right accommodations but was shut out by her own company because of a lack of accessibility.

Since my earliest conversations with Ed, we shared a mutual vision of what neurodiversity and neuroinclusion at work would ultimately have to mean. In practice, we felt it would have to mean everybody recognizing that they work in neurodiverse organizations and therefore bringing sensitivity, empathy, and curiosity to all their daily interactions. My hope for the future is that neuroinclusion will advance to the point where all employees recognize how critical it is to build their cultural competence, and companies hold themselves accountable for creating an accessible environment through a rigorous data-driven process of measuring employee sentiment, as well as a process for implementing critical research on improvement of the corporate environment for all employees.

We are each human, and as such, we function best as a collective, filling in gaps with our individual strengths and lifting others up; it is against out nature to be all things at all times. For example, I owe my success as an opera singer not just to my own merit but to the many coaches who served as my eyes throughout the years, allowing me to shine when I otherwise could not.

It is our responsibility to put neuroinclusion at the forefront of team building, management training, and individual expression. It is important, belated, and exciting, from a business perspective, given the potential to help optimize team and organizational collaboration. None of us can do this alone, so make an effort to make room for those who are most vulnerable, and you might be surprised by the brilliant music you are able to create together.

Paulette Penzvalto

COO of the Google Disability Alliance

PREFACE

"How can we become a truly twenty-first-century company?"

That was the question, the challenge, even the job description, given to me by my boss at the time, the CEO of a successful venture-backed company at the heart of London’s Tech City.

My role, reporting to the CEO, was technically chief of staff. But such is the nebulousness of that job title that it really meant something closer to strategic projects director. Though I was expecting this to principally involve areas of commercial strategy, the true answer to the CEO’s question seemed to lie principally with our people—specifically, continuing to build an innovative team that could continue the company’s success and meet the challenges ahead.

As we looked around the room, we saw a highly accomplished team of professionals, but one that, to some extent, was homogenous—a good gender balance, yes, but a lot of similar backgrounds, ages, and experience. My boss was convinced—like a sports manager—that the team needed to evolve to maximize its potential. This meant striving to achieve, somehow, greater diversity of thought.

How had I come to be discussing corporate strategy in this boardroom, and to be zeroing in on people as the key element in the goal of building a truly twenty-first-century firm?

Having studied at Oxford, I found a graduate role in finance in London, only to suffer a major car accident just three days in. This involved a head injury with a fractured skull and serious contusions. The latter—as it became clear over the coming months and years—affected my processing speed and working memory. Regarding the memory aspect, one doctor, when giving me a test as part of my compensation case, thought I was playing it up when he showed me the text of a short story, asked me to recall it, and saw that I could barely get started. I also noticed a sensitivity to bright lights I had never experienced before, one that led to a lot of moving chairs to find a spot where I could be less distracted.

The accident meant time off work, then back part-time, and finally several years working as an on/off consultant as I recovered my strength. All of this meant that when I finally felt ready and able to hold down a proper job again, I presented as an unusual package: strong academics, yes, but a patchy and strange career to that point. That led to an uncomfortably drawn-out period of unsuccessful job hunting.

As I’d envisioned, my new role began in the commercial strategy zone with which I was then familiar. But it didn’t stay that way for long, because the only answer to How do we become a truly twenty-first-century company? seemed to lie deeply in the makeup of the company’s employees, not in what we were selling or how. It seemed to lie in the pursuit of this frustratingly intangible concept of diversity of thought, the idea of having people with different experiences and viewpoints attacking problems together and finding solutions. Compounding the urgency of adding varied talent to the mix was the ongoing tech talent crisis. Thousands of job adverts for tech workers in London were going unfilled, month after month, as in global tech clusters elsewhere. Our company was no different in facing these challenges.

How to solve this?

As I worked with my colleagues and with other leaders in London’s tech zone at the time, we realized there was potential for greater diversity of thought right on our doorstep. East London, where many such tech companies are clustered, was and remains an area of high youth unemployment. Meanwhile, an absence of young talent in our firm and other friendly firms had been particularly striking, despite the younger generation’s familiarity with social media and technology in general. Surely there was talent here that had been active on Twitter for years by the time they were eighteen? Or that knew how to route up their gaming room with some sophistication?

Surely yes, but much of this particular potential talent was not going to college and building traditional qualifications. Thus, there was no connection path with talent-hungry tech companies often merely a few yards from local high schools.

Helping build a tech apprenticeship program in London was incredibly rewarding. We called it Tech City Stars. Today, it’s part of the LDN Apprenticeships suite run by inspirational apprenticeships leader Simon Bozzoli. Connecting businesses with hidden talent within their own community (and seeing the immediate impact this talent made in their host companies), we demonstrated that diversity of thought can be built and nurtured. We also showed how talent challenges can be addressed by making the effort to really include previously marginalized demographics—in our case, disadvantaged young people without the path to achieving the conventional qualifications sought by the tech industry.

Having helped build the initiative, I didn’t want to go back to a day job without what I’d discovered to be the wonderfully intoxicating ingredient of obvious social impact. As well as helping businesses find valuable talent, we’d seen young lives meaningfully affected by being given this chance to find and build a real career in an area of interest. Our team had been in tears several times while interviewing program candidates, such as a young refugee from Afghanistan, who would go on to get his degree in software engineering and continue to build a successful career in the field.

It was around this time that I first became aware of neurodiversity—especially at work. My aunt by marriage, Valerie Paradiz, is an eminent author, educator, and neurodiversity advocate and thought leader, eventually becoming one of the first autistic board members at the American nonprofit Autism Speaks. She encouraged me to bring my successful experiences in education-to-employment to the neurodiversity arena—specifically, to help tackle the question of autism underemployment, which was then and is now estimated as significantly higher even when compared to people within other official disability categories.

Exploring this field, I began to meet with charities, with employers then beginning their first ever autism hiring programs, and with individual neurodivergent talent directly. It became clear very quickly that here was perhaps an even larger challenge and opportunity. Organizations (and me included, to that point) evidently knew very little about neurodiversity and the opportunity to build and nurture diversity of thought in this very literal sense.

The topic also particularly intrigued me, given my own experiences of a brain injury. The results of this injury have never been a core part of my identity in the way that an inherited neurodivergence often is for someone who considers themselves to be dyslexic or an ADHDer, for example.¹ Nevertheless, I felt able to come at least to a partially closer understanding and empathy with some of the workplace challenges—the need to find a low-sensory-input workspace and to have flexibility in terms of working times—facing the community daily.

The more I met with neurodivergent professionals and job seekers, the more I realized this topic was also a little different from my previous focus on disadvantaged youth, and perhaps different from any other corporate diversity topic. There is inevitably an empathy and experience gap between a person from a wealthy background and a colleague who is not, between a male and a female coworker, or between colleagues from different ethnicities and cultures. But there is also, to an extent, a functional understanding of some of these differences, informed by some degree—albeit a patchy one—of cultural education.

Neurodiversity to me seemed a topic like no other: perhaps a fifth of people may be neurodivergent (!), it is estimated.² Yet functional understanding in workplaces was clearly almost nonexistent. In fact, such understanding was (and often still is) perhaps below zero, in that what people think they know about neurodiversity and neurodivergence is often false and warped by stereotypes.

I founded the neuroinclusion training company Uptimize to change this through organizational learning. We help organizations hire and include talent that thinks in different ways, with benefits to productivity, innovative capacity, and an organization’s ability to be a fair and humane place to work. Through doing this, such organizations—often seeking ways to connect with and support their communities—would facilitate effective career destinations and pathways for neurodivergent talent that had too often missed out on such opportunities.

Building the company and working with our stakeholders (employers, researchers, leading neurodiversity experts, and the wider neurodivergent community), I have been blessed to have a unique perspective on what is now an exploding field of business interest: the rise of neuroinclusion in workplaces. This perspective has given me and our team a close-up view of the power of neuroinclusion, and of the efforts of neuroinclusion program builders who have brought this topic to their organizations around the world and seen remarkable results.

It turns out that teaching people about neurodiversity is not like any other corporate training topic. We realized over time that we are really providing something deeply profound and human, allowing people to think differently about one another, and sometimes about themselves.

I wanted to write a book that captures these experiences and puts the rise of what we can call neurodiversity at work—and its importance—into a cultural and business context. Given the workload of building the company, I had discounted this as a possibility until the COVID-19 crisis began in 2020. With a little more time, I began to gather my materials and put pen to paper. This book is the result.

I hope it will help you, regardless of your own thinking style, feel energized to be part of neuroinclusive teams and interactions every day. And I hope it will help you and your organization answer the same question that every organization continues to face today: How can we become a truly twenty-first-century employer that is diverse, representative, innovative, and able to thrive in the years ahead?

INTRODUCTION

NEURODIVERSITY IS A FACT OF EVERY WORKPLACE

Lucie Geslot is a successful professional at video games giant Ubisoft, a pioneer and leader in the field of neurodiversity at work and at the company behind such global hits as Assassin’s Creed.

As a child growing up in France, Geslot loved video games, and particularly the sounds and music of those games—so much so that they dreamed of becoming a video game sound engineer. Meanwhile, they always had this feeling of being different.¹

This feeling wasn’t something Geslot could put into words. It would only be as an adult that they would receive diagnoses of autism and ADHD. We are very late when it comes to neurodiversity [awareness] in France, Geslot reflects. Their family just told Geslot that they were a bit smarter than average, but beyond that, their potential neurodivergence was never discussed.

Geslot’s intelligence and abilities helped them land a series of sound designer contracts in the games industry, thereby realizing their childhood dream. But while Geslot enjoyed and performed well in their work, they found themselves facing challenges because of a lack of familiarity with neurodiversity and different thinking styles.

They found it highly distracting, for example, to be frequently interrupted at their desk by colleagues, as this would break their flow state of attention. A common ADHD preference for multitasking during a video call was often not accommodated for or understood, as colleagues insisted on Geslot turning their video function on for virtual calls.

I can understand that people want to see who they’re talking to, they reflect, but I really hate not being able to have a background task while I’m talking. Geslot tried to communicate their preferences to colleagues and managers, but often this fell on deaf ears. At times, Geslot was labeled as difficult, and they remembered, much to their discomfort, one manager querying, "Okay, well how do you want us to communicate with you?"

Some of Geslot’s autistic characteristics were also met with a lack of understanding. They pride themselves on being direct: For me, I’m just stating facts, and that’s the only way I know to communicate. Yet, like many other autistic people at work, Geslot found themselves cautioned to be more careful when you speak.

Colleagues, in general, would try to draw Geslot into small talk, while Geslot preferred to keep communication to specific work topics. Sometimes people were forcing me to have conversations, and I would just find a way to leave. . . . People were not really respecting my wishes to just stay alone at times.

All this (not surprisingly) had an impact both on Geslot’s enjoyment of work and on their productivity. They felt uncomfortable and misunderstood, even like an outsider at times, something they note was an unhappy continuation of earlier childhood experiences: I don’t want to have that in the workplace as well.

They even contemplated leaving one contract early, though their passion for the work and the support from other, more inclusive colleagues served to win out against that possibility. Nevertheless, facing a lack of understanding elsewhere continued to affect both their motivation and their ability to do their best work.

One person who recognized the need for greater appreciation of different thinking styles in the games industry was Ubisoft executive Pierre Escaich. He was already senior enough to be preoccupied, like so many CEOs and talent leaders, with the critical talent issues facing organizations around the world: How do we hire great talent that can help us innovate and succeed? And how do we keep them around?

Escaich became interested in neurodiversity initially through his children being diagnosed as neurodivergent. The more he learned, the more he pondered about some of his own traits, too, eventually getting his own diagnosis of ADHD. He found himself increasingly conscious that his company clearly already had a strongly neurodiverse team; yet no one ever mentioned this, and few provisions were in place to support employees who might have preferences outside of company norms. Escaich was all too aware that the company’s endeavors were always a work of creation that would continue to need the inventiveness that comes from diverse minds.²

Escaich decided to try to spark a conversation around neurodiversity at Ubisoft, with a vision of bringing neuroinclusive practices to all aspects of the company’s talent management. He began by announcing the creation of a new group—a neurodiversity ERG (employee [or enterprise] resource group)—and launched it by sharing his own personal story with the company.

The group quickly resonated with colleagues such as Aris Bricker, a nonbinary game designer already passionate about workplace diversity and inclusion issues. Escaich, Bricker, and the earliest members of the group began to provide safe space channels for neurodivergent employees to share their personal and professional experiences. These quickly attracted colleagues from around the world.

Some activities were simple, like listening to relaxing playlists for sensory management. The group also engaged with others in the business proactively, through events promoting the topic, and reactively, helping neurodivergent employees navigate specific tasks or create more effective dialogue with their managers.

One such employee was Geslot, who had recently gained a contract with one of Ubisoft’s many design studios. As they mentioned their sensory sensitivity to bright office lights, a colleague began to tell them about the neurodiversity group. Immediately joining, they felt a powerful validation to be surrounded (virtually or in-person) by others like them, a sense that "I’m not alone in this. I