Supporting workforce neurodiversity: unlocking the benefits for all


Nancy Doyle, Professor of Organisational Psychology, specialises in neurodiversity at work and is the founder of social enterprise Genius Within. She explains to Marianne Curphey how supporting neurodiversity in the workforce should be more than a box-ticking exercise. Innovative approaches to staff relationships can yield dividends.


E


xcluding people with different or unusual thinking skills participation


from in society


and the workforce means that we are missing out on a wealth of talent and different perspectives, says Prof Doyle. She cites the example of how the


Tudor Royal Court used to invite “autistic people and people with learning disabilities into the court because they were known to not pander to power”. These people were valued for their unique contribution and different perspectives, and yet that value became lost once Britain experienced the Industrial Revolution. “Neurodiversity is a feature of


human neuro-cognition, and it means that we are diverse as a species in the way that we think, feel and interpret our senses,” she explains. “This is quite a revolutionary idea for the 21st century because, since the Industrial Revolution, humans have been expected to be standard. Prior to the Industrial Revolution, it


was okay for humans to be diverse because people would naturally become silversmiths or town criers or farmers. Since the Industrial Revolution, we’ve needed humans to perform as automatons and we have standardised humanity.” A consequence of this, she says,


is to create institutional systems like education to standardise the way we think and institutional workplaces to govern the way we work and perform. However, these do not work for everyone. “This has led to the idea that


people who don’t fall within the normal distribution of IQ and the normal distribution of emotional expression, experience and sensory perception must in some way be odd or need a label,” she says. “The neurodiversity movement is trying to say that maybe there’s a reason that we have people at the extremes as well as people in the middle. Maybe that’s purposeful and helpful to our species. What are we missing when we exclude people who have unusual thinking styles from our society?”


RIGID SYSTEMS EXCLUDE MANY PEOPLE Prof Doyle argues that we are excluding too many people from participation because we have limited the range of what we regard as acceptable in education, the workplace and society. “In education, the only


way to succeed is to be literate, numerate and able to sit down and concentrate for seven hours at a time – and able to do so in a noisy environment where there are lots of things happening around you,” she says. “We have limited the way that you can show success or show contribution as a species to these very limited four or five skills and in doing so we have excluded around 15% to 20% of the population.” She


argues


that


neurodevelopmental conditions that are genetic have been around forever, but as a society we started naming them around the end of the 1800s and into the early 1900s. Due to the rigid system that we created at that time, the extent to which


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THINK GLOBAL PEOPLE DIVERSITY, EQUALITY & INCLUSION


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