What’s in this podcast?
What does it really take to create an environment where different ways of thinking can thrive?
In this episode of Hub & Spoken, Jason Foster, CEO & Founder of Cynozure, is joined by Peter Laflin, an experienced Chief Data Officer, to explore neurodiversity in data and AI and what it means for building high performing teams.
Peter explains why many strengths associated with neurodivergent thinking are particularly valuable in data and AI. From spotting patterns to thinking in systems, different ways of processing information can bring huge value to the work these teams do.
The conversation also looks at strength based leadership and the importance of understanding how individuals work best. They explore where traditional recruitment processes can create barriers and the practical changes leaders can make to help people thrive.
Ultimately, it is about moving away from a one size fits all approach to leadership and creating teams where different ways of thinking are recognised as a strength.
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Episode timings
00:00 — Introduction
03:08 — Understanding neurodiversity
09:25 — Why data and AI attracts neurodivergent thinkers
13:48 — Strengths, not superpowers
18:04 — Strength-based leadership
23:56 — Scaling individual accommodations
29:37 — Inclusion, authenticity and unmasking
33:02 — Rethinking recruitment
41:51 — Practical advice for leaders
The following interview transcription has been edited for length and clarity.
00:00 — Introduction
Jason Foster:
Hi everyone, welcome back to the show. Today I’m really excited to have with me Peter Laflin. Peter’s a Senior Data Leader with experience as a Chief Data Officer, most recently at Morrisons, but has been in the space for a long time. Looking forward to talking to him and he’s bringing the conversation and we’re having a discussion around neurodiversity. We want to unpick whether the data and AI industry is actually uniquely suited for different ways of thinking that neurodiverse people often bring to the party. So Peter, welcome along to the show. Absolutely a pleasure to have you here.
Peter Laflin:
Well, thanks for the invitation. I’m really looking forward to having the conversation today.
Jason Foster:
Great. So as always, I think it will be good to get you introduced to the audience and who you are and your background and stuff. Then, quickly, I think I want to get into what got you interested into this topic of neurodiversity. So yeah, if we could just hear a bit about you and your background and where this interest came from, that would be a great way to kick off.
Peter Laflin:
So I’ve been a Chief Data Officer for a few years now. And as you say, I left Morrisons earlier this year and I’ve got some exciting things ahead of me for the rest of the year. But I’ve been around the data and AI space for a long time. So before being a Chief Data Officer, I ran data science teams. I’ve been a data scientist. I’ve been a consultant data practitioner, I’ve pretty much done all the jobs you could expect really in the data space.
And as I’ve moved more into leadership, I’ve become fascinated by how you create the right environment for high performance, high performance in teams, in the culture in the organisation, All these things have been really fascinating and realised that actually, one of my jobs as a leader is to try and create the right conditions for high performance. And as I was starting to study that, I was realising that quite a high percentage of the teams I was leading were neurodivergent. And it got me thinking about whether or not there was a theme here, was there a pattern?
One thing led to another, and I talked to a number of peers, a number of colleagues. And actually, we hit on this idea that there seemed to be more neurodivergent individuals than we might expect in the data and AI industry. But actually, the more we thought about it, the more we realised that it was probably not something that was too surprising. And actually, I think that’s the interesting conversation we could have today.
Jason Foster:
Well, that’s interesting that it popped out as an unexpected result when you look into it. But then, yeah, interesting about whether it’s by design or whether it was on purpose or whether it’s happened by accident. Before we get into that, I think it’s probably worth just unpicking what we mean by neurodiversity, neurodivergent people, what that means, what it means to you, whether it’s clear on what it means to be neurodivergent and those sorts of things. So yeah, what’s your view of what that is?
03:08 — Understanding neurodiversity
Peter Laflin:
So if you had a room of 100 people, you would walk into that room and you would see tall people, shorter people, and a range of average height people. And I think we’re all fairly okay with this idea of physical characteristics, being on a distribution. So, I may be a bit taller than you. You might have blue eyes. I might have brown eyes. I’ve got blue eyes. So it’s a bit of a weird one that I chose it that way around. But the whole point here is that there is natural diversity. And I think we’re quite comfortable with the idea of physical diversity.
And it’s the same with our brains, is that in that room of 100 people, we’ll have people whose brains are more naturally geared to spotting patterns or taking risks or wanting to do things in a repeatable, predictable way. And so this idea of neurodiversity is really talking about the natural variations in how Our brains operate at their best. So you might hear people talk about the spectrum and that’s because individuals have slight differences in the way that their brains are wired and the way that individual brains respond to the chemicals in their brain. Sometimes we call them neurotransmitters.
You might have heard of things like dopamine, which is Particularly involved in ADHD, for example. So neurodiversity is this idea that actually everybody’s brain is working slightly differently. And we have neurotypical individuals who tend to follow the average brain, the way that the brain works on average. Now, not all brains work like that. So, for example, in autism, people with autism have an incredible capacity for system thinking and pattern recognition and holding complex architectures in their head without getting lost in the noise. Autism is often talked about as a bottom-up architecture.
People with autism tend to synthesise things every time from the raw facts around them and talk a little bit more about that later on. You’ve also got ADHD, which is a neurodivergent condition, and that’s different to autism in that it’s actually all about interests. ADHD tends to be referred to as an interest driven architecture. And people with ADHD typically prefer rapid thinking. They’re very calm, very focused under pressure. And they also have the courage to try new things when maybe the old playbook has stopped working.
Now, those are the two conditions that people may have immediately thought of when it comes to neurodiversity. But there are other conditions as well, which Are under the same banner. So you’ve got things like dyslexia, which is where people, their brains process written text differently. You’ve got dyscalculia, where people, again, people’s brains work differently when it comes to doing mental calculations. And dysgraphia where people might struggle with writing. So there’s a whole range of, there’s seven or eight of these conditions.
But fundamentally, I think when we’re talking about neurodiversity at work, we’re talking about how all of those different ways that people’s brains work come together to create strengths that we can then use in the workplace to achieve what we need to do in those high-performing teams.
Jason Foster:
One of the interesting things there, and those definitions are really, really useful, is that neurodiversity is a phrase, is the spectrum, and then you’ve got the neurotypical and the average. I think, though, when we talk about neurodiversity, we tend to be talking about the extremes. So you move to talking about things like ADHD, autism, dyslexia, dyspraxia, which are the differences that aren’t neurotypical. Is that fair to say? So in the rest of this conversation, for example, when we talk about neurodiversity, are we really talking about those that aren’t neurotypical?
Peter Laflin:
Listen, I think most people on this listening to this podcast will have some context of statistics or, a normal distribution. I think the idea is that, there is a there is an average brain. Well, there probably isn’t an average brain, but that’s a very different point. But if you just hold that thought for a second, there is a There is a way that people tend to, their brains process things on average. So when we talk about neurodiversity, we’re talking about that whole spectrum, the fact that I might be slightly more disrupted by bright lights, as somebody else might be slightly more affected by loud noises.
Now, you’re right that there are big differences on that spectrum. So, I I know people who really struggle to communicate verbally. So whilst they can make sounds and whilst they can form basic speech, they can’t hold a conversation like you and I are doing today. So we might say that they were way on the edges of that spectrum. But there’s plenty of people who are Working in, very, senior jobs or in our teams who will be somewhere on that spectrum. And I think the key thing is that the way their brain works is going to be different to the way your brain works.
And I think as we get into this conversation is this idea that as a leader, You’ve got to really try and understand why somebody else is thinking or behaving the way they are in order to get the best out of them.
Jason Foster:
Let’s come back to that point, because I think that’s a very important, almost practical discussion about how do we create those conditions that, to your point about creating high-performing teams, that allows you to create high-performing teams when you have a team that is diverse, both physically and mentally diverse in terms of the makeup of it. But I guess going back to then something that you said earlier, that when you started looking into this, you found that there was actually quite a high percentage of people within the data and AI space who were neurodivergent. Why do you think that is?
Why do you think those people are particularly suited to this space?
09:25 — Why data and AI attracts neurodivergent thinkers
Peter Laflin:
So if you think about the work that is done in data and AI and more broadly in technology roles, there are some key characteristics that define the work that we do. So that could be needing to spot patterns. I’ve spent many an hour Looking through thousands, if not 10s of thousands of rows of data in a spreadsheet or in a database, trying to find the one row that is causing me a problem. So you’ve got to be really good at spotting patterns. You’ve got to be really good at system thinking.
Some of the best architects that I’ve ever worked with They genuinely are geniuses at being able to unpick a real world problem and decompose it into data pipelines, processing scripts for algorithms, their ability to think as a system and be able to build a jigsaw of parts at different resolutions and time frames is what makes them phenomenal at what they do as an architecture individual or as a governance individual. So this idea of systems thinking is really crucial to what we do in data and AI.
The other thing is, we work in an industry where innovation is the norm and we’re all trying to push the boundaries, we’re trying to do new things, we’re trying to find safe ways to Rewrite the established playbook. And I think that requires a certain skill set and it requires a certain bravery, a certain ability to take the right risks and not be frightened that you don’t necessarily know the answer. This idea of being able to sit in ambiguity for a little while. And I often talk to my teams about the fact that eventually, we will be working on a problem where nobody knows what the right answer is.
Nobody knows what the next step is. And actually, that requires a certain way of thinking to be comfortable that you can unpick that and you can navigate your way through that. And then there’s also, a real need for storytelling. How often have we heard teams talk about, the great insight that they’ve uncovered? Well, it only becomes useful to the organisation if you are able to wrap it up into a story where you can bring your stakeholders with you. So, there’s no point in me identifying a new customer trend.
If I can’t then communicate that really clearly, really, really easily to, the board or my shareholders or my other stakeholders. And so this idea of the power of storytelling and being able to translate complex ideas into clear and compelling narratives, these are all things that we have to do When we’re working in the data and AI space. Now, I don’t necessarily want to get into, a history of how neurodivergence has been diagnosed and identified, but there is something called the DSM-5. It’s the way that medical professionals, diagnose people with autism and ADHD.
Now, if you were to look through some of the criteria, specifically, around autism, for example, you would find that, pattern recognition, being able to do the same thing repeatedly. These are all things that are in the definition of why somebody might have autism. Now, what’s really interesting is in that list of things I’ve said, the list of characteristics that we need to work in this space, Actually, those are the strengths that people with autism, with ADHD, with dyslexia bring to the workplace.
And so actually, although it was a bit surprising that there were large numbers of neurodivergent individuals working in this industry, when you sit and think of it that way, actually, it’s no surprise. Almost, and maybe it’s a bit of a controversial statement, but it’s almost a surprise that the people who are neurotypical are able to excel in that space. Now, the whole point is it needs different ways of thinking different people. And the point here is that in order to build a high-performing team, you need people with a mix of thought processes and with a mix of processing styles.
Jason Foster:
Mm-hmm.
Peter Laflin:
But yeah, it really struck me really, really quite powerfully that actually all those good things that you need to be able to work in this space are the things that those neurodivergent individuals bring to the table.
Jason Foster:
It’s like their superpowers.
13:48 — Strengths, not superpowers
Peter Laflin:
I sometimes struggle with the word superpower and I know why people might use it. I think if you speak to a neurodivergent individual, I think some people love the idea of superpowers and some people feel a little bit awkward and some people are passionately against the label. I think actually when you unpick it a little bit, I think it’s because for certain neurodivergent individuals, these aren’t superpowers. These are just that’s who they are. That’s how they’re built. That’s how they approach the world. So it’s not it’s not something incredible to them. It’s just who they are.
It’s just that actually what we’ve done is we’ve created an industry, we’ve created a body of work, shall we say, where neurodivergent individuals can thrive because of who they are.
Jason Foster:
I get that. And I guess the, almost the irony is that we’ve called those things and actually used the phrase earlier conditions. They’re diagnosed as conditions. They’re often put into something slightly more negative than what the word superpower or strength would put them into.
So I think it’s important actually to ensure that people that have those relevant skills and strengths and possibly superpowers, if you like the phrase or not, that they’re put on a pedestal because I certainly through schooling and through early careers, early careers, it’s put a bit of a negative dampener on these conditions, as you call, as you said, as you said. So I think there’s an interesting way, but how do we lift, I suppose, is the point about maybe the silly word superpower, these things that neurodiverse individuals exhibit?
Peter Laflin:
I totally understand why the medical professional do what, medical professionals do what they do. So, if you look back through, the 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s, when, the medical community was starting to recognise that there were patterns in certain children, And those patterns are what we now recognise to be autism and ADHD, I can understand why it was built up around this model of deficits. And it was because in order to, in order to manage things in the medical community, it was about how can I fix something?
Now, I think we are more mature now in our thinking in that actually, rather than trying to fix a problem and focusing on the negatives, there are a whole load of positives that come with being neurodivergent that actually this strengths-based management approach and this that’s trying to get the best out of an individual is all about focusing on the things that people can do and the things that people are brilliant at rather than focusing too heavily on the things that they might struggle with. So, a good example there is somebody with autism might struggle to make eye contact.
They might struggle with making small talk. They might not necessarily find the environment in an office environment to their to their liking. Now, we could we could focus on those things being frustrating or, difficult to accommodate in a in a workplace, or we could recognise that actually these are just a symptom of brain wiring. Okay, so how the neurons are connected and, how the neurobiology comes together.
So rather than focusing on the things that people are finding difficult, let’s focus on the fact that neurobiology, the wiring in that person’s brain, means that they are brilliant at being able to spot patterns super quickly in ways that other people couldn’t. Now, I think we’d all agree that actually having that strength in our team, certainly in the data and AI space, is going to be massively beneficial. And so, I do understand where the deficit model has come from, but I very much, I advocate and I’m trying to encourage people to focus more on the positives and the strengths.
Jason Foster:
Can only be a good thing, yeah.
Peter Laflin:
Rather than focusing too much on the difficulties. Now, I think, have you come across the ideas in strengths-based management more generally through these podcasts or through your own work?
18:04 — Strength-based leadership
Jason Foster:
I have a lot and it was actually where I was going to take this next because I think you paint a really positive and powerful and impactful message about focusing on strengths and building teams and organisations where that’s the norm. And I think it takes a certain amount of work to shift to that model. Because that isn’t that isn’t the norm, actually, and take almost take away the idea of neurodiversity. And that model, I think, is very productive and proactive and positive anyway in managing all the workforce, not a smaller subset, if you like.
So I think I think the idea of building teams where we focus on strengths, we put people in the best possible position to be successful, be high-performing, and then all the things that come around building high-performing teams beyond that, I think is only a good thing. And but it’s interesting, almost the question back to you then is, have you seen people good at this? What’s your experience of building organisations and teams where We prioritise and focus on strengths rather than, the weaknesses, and how do we how do we prevent these things from causing a ripple across the team?
Peter Laflin:
The way I often talk to people about this is, I love football, I love watching Manchester United, I’m very, proud red. Well, somebody has to, hopefully it will be a better season this year, although, last year wasn’t too bad in the end. But, I can’t play football, I’m terrible.
Jason Foster:
Sorry about that. Yeah. Wasn’t too bad.
Peter Laflin:
And so even if you sent me to Carrington, you sent me to train there every day for the next five years, I am not going to get any better. Now, when I was at school, I would have loved to have been a goalkeeper. There’s just something about it just made me get excited. Now, if I’d have been better and I’d have trained as a goalkeeper, I still wouldn’t have wanted to have been judged as a striker. So, if you’re, if you’re a goalkeeper, you’re in a squad, you’re there because you can you can save shots, you can manage your defence, you can you can show up in a penalty shootout, etc, etc.
But what you don’t want to be judged on is whether you can score the goal at the other end. It’s just the wrong way of trying to judge your value. Value to that team. And I think at times we can fall foul of the same problem when we are leaders in business, is that we can find ourselves measuring people against the wrong criteria. So, there’s a whole range of things that I’m terrible at, but there’s a whole range of things I’m really brilliant at.
And what I think I’ve done instinctively through my career Is manage my teams on the premise that I want to make you better at the things that you are brilliant at, rather than trying to bring you from a position of being terrible to being slightly less terrible. And I think that strengths-based leadership approach does create high-performing teams. And it does it by focusing on the individual, by trying to really understand the role that person is playing in your team and trying to work out how you can get individuals to play better together, to work together, to be, to give us a multiplier effect in that team.
And really focus on making people better, rather than just reminding people that they’re a terrible striker, when in fact they are actually trying to be a goalkeeper. And I think this idea of strength-based leadership, it really does merge very nicely into this neurodiversity conversation that we’re having, because It’s the same principle that we apply to neurodiversity or diversity in general, is that there might be some things that you’re not particularly good at or you find really difficult or in some cases, it’s just impossible for you to do that thing.
We wouldn’t look at somebody in a wheelchair and criticise them for not being able to walk, for example. It’s just You’re in a situation where that thing is just not going to happen. And therefore, in terms of leading high-performing teams, it’s all about trying to manage the individual. But I do recognise that when it comes to managing the individual, that creates an extra overhead in the team. And actually, I think some people find it quite difficult to unpick what the individual needs.
How you can create an environment where individuals are being accommodated without then that creating a negative vibe across the team. Because, there is a delicate balance there in terms of giving the individual the opportunity to thrive, but not then disadvantaging somebody else because of the adaptations of the accommodations that you’ve put in place for someone.
Jason Foster:
How do we get around that? Because I think accommodation is a good word there. Certainly a lot of, HR policies I’ve seen and work that organisations have tried to do to do exactly what you’re talking about. And certainly in corporates, you end up trying to manage the, you talked about the bell curve earlier, manage the norm, if you like.
So the things that you then try and implement are essentially accommodation mechanisms to allow those people in some ways to exist within the organisation and within the teams, rather than changing the model so that accommodation is what you’re doing for everybody because of the fact that you’ve got a diverse group of people, either through strength-based enablement or something else, but a way of ensuring that all people can be successful.
That’s a very different thing than making some, small refinements and tweaks to the way you, bring the right bring people into teams or the way you change the way you run a meeting specifically for an individual because of their needs. So it to me, I think organisations find that quite hard. To, flip the way they do things around to be the way that you’re articulating as opposed to accommodating maybe the few individuals that need, some different ways of interacting with the team or the project or the program.
23:56 — Scaling individual accommodations
Peter Laflin:
I think this is the crux of the discussion. I think it is very hard to do and I think many organisations are still in that place where they’re trying to work out how it can work for them. I’ve spoken to a number of leaders in the last few weeks and tried to understand How their organisations are thinking about this and actually.
There’s a body of research that I’m doing with a number of collaborators where we’re trying to unpick that exact point, because I think if you’re running a small organisation, maybe there’s 10 or 20 of you, I think being able to accommodate individuals in that unit is down to the, the skill, the drive, the, the motivation of the leader or some individuals. The problem comes as you start to scale up your organisation. If you’ve now got thousands of people, how do you allow an environment where you can make individual accommodations without it becoming a free-for-all where it’s just chaotic?
And I think I don’t necessarily have the answers on that. And I think that’s the fascinating thing about some of the research that I’m doing at the moment, is trying to understand how that might come together and how that might be equitable for everybody, both for the organisation, but for the individual. I think there are a number of organisations that are Are actively leaning into that as a question and, seeing some good results. I also think it comes down to the openness of the individual managers to embrace a strength-based, individual-based culture. And that can be quite hard in places.
So yeah, I’m sorry I don’t have a perfect textbook answer, but I think what I’m really emphasising here is it’s hard and I think there’s a lot of work to do to figure out how to make it less difficult.
Jason Foster:
And I, yeah, this is one of those where there’s variations and different approaches that will work and actually the broader culture and values of an organisation plays into it here.
If it’s an organisation who are accommodating, if it’s an organisation that collaborate well, if it’s an organisation that understands humans and personal circumstances and make it accommodation and adaptation to those things in general, those start to like create the environment where the organisation cares enough to do something about it, which is great, and has a baseline level of culture that is accepting and willing to make some change.
Be interesting if there’s a, as you explore this further, there’s a cultural norms that, there’s things that an organisation exhibits where this can be, this can be more successful, I guess.
Peter Laflin:
I’ve got a couple of I don’t want to call them acquaintances, probably more than that, but a couple of individuals who used to be chief data officers who have now moved into this space around culture, because what they realised was in trying to create high-performing teams of neurodivergent individuals, what they recognised was actually they needed to work with the people teams to create a different culture within an organisation.
And I think culture is really, really important because, I think I’m not really an expert in HR or, people systems or any of this stuff, but it strikes me that we’re moving from a world where Organisations were very hierarchical and everybody was expected to behave in the same way, to a world where actually we embrace everybody’s differences, we embrace everybody’s unique personalities, unique ways of thinking and create an inclusive culture that recognises and celebrates that. And I think the point is it’s difficult to make that transition. Some organisations are doing brilliant work to do that.
Some organisations are a little bit behind on that curve. But I think it’s this shift towards the individual rather than this shift to managing to the norm.
Jason Foster:
We do a lot of talking and thinking and executing around self-progressive, self-managing teams, minimal hierarchy, and some of the things you’ve talked about there are really important to make sure you’ve got an environment where people can thrive, that understand the difference between that and a hierarchical corporate.
The responsibility that sits on your shoulders to solve some of these challenges, the ways people interact become really important because of the network effect of enabling an organisation to interact and work with each other that by default needs people to be able to work with individuals of all sorts of backgrounds and diversity. So it’d be interesting if how our organisations pivot towards that over, in the coming years. But I think the there’s lessons probably, I think, to learn from other diversity conversations that have come before it.
I’m thinking particularly gender diversity that has taken quite a high prevalence in organisations to try and address often the wage gap or a misalignment of mix and diversity at all levels of the organisation, but particularly at the board, senior leadership. I think there’s probably lessons about what’s worked there, what hasn’t, the idea of quotas, the idea of how we redress the balance, the idea of how we make this a cultural norm of inclusion and diversity across the organisation.
Do you think, do you think that’s a do you think there’s something that can be learnt from other conversations in this space, or is there uniqueness about neurodiversity that means we’ve got to think about this differently? Excuse the pun.
29:37 — Inclusion, authenticity and unmasking
Peter Laflin:
I think the neurodiversity conversation will benefit and has benefited from, gender, sexual diversity, identity diversity in terms of who people are. I think it is much more Accepted now to be authentically yourself when it comes to your gender identity at work. And that’s brilliant. And I think that has taken many years of, I don’t want to say activism, but advocacy and allyship and certain people taking risks to show up and say, this is who I am. And this is okay.
And I think the next phase is going to be around neurodiversity in that I think, I did a presentation at a conference last year where the central theme of that presentation was when teams have visible neurodivergent leaders, The psychological safety in those teams is far higher. There is also evidence that individuals who experience burnout tend to experience the burnout because their leaders are less understanding, or at least in a self-reported way, those individuals felt that their managers didn’t understand them as well as they could have done.
Okay, so there’s this idea that Actually people being authentic in leadership positions who are neurodivergent showing up and saying, do what, it’s okay, I’m not very good at time management because I’ve got ADHD or do what, I know I get a bit too much into the detail and that’s both the strength and the weakness and it’s okay to stop me if I go off on a rabbit hole of my special interest. That needs to be more accepted, I think, in the workplace.
So to answer your question, I think neurodiversity in the workplace will massively benefit from all of the great work that’s been done in those other aspects of diversity. But it’s about being authentic. It’s about having permission To unmask. Again, I think there’s a lot of evidence that say, certainly autistic individuals, I think, feel a massive pressure to mask at work and to almost hold back their authentic self, because it might be too much.
Some of the best colleagues I’ve worked with, have been those that I can go on down a rabbit hole of fascinating, interesting, stats and experiences, but they know when to then reign it back in because they’re talking to people who wouldn’t necessarily appreciate that level of detail. So this idea of being authentic, but being able to, unmask in the right situations, I think is really important in how we move this diversity Work conversation forward.
Jason Foster:
I mean, how do we how do we create that environment then? I wonder if the recruitment both can, recruiting the right people and the practices around recruitment and bringing people in and creating teams in the right way, even within the organisation, moving people around, is there a is there a science or some art in how we think about the way we approach bringing people into the organisation and then, building the environment around them.
33:02 — Rethinking recruitment
Peter Laflin:
So I may not actually want to admit this properly. I have to be careful how I phrase this. I’ve always been really keen when I’ve been interviewing candidates to make sure that I was able to ask my own questions. So sometimes in an organisation, it’s really, it is really important to be able to do a standardised assessment. Because we want to be able to, assess candidate A against candidate B in a fair way. It’s just sometimes the way that we set those frameworks up actually disadvantages one of the candidates over another.
And actually, typically, it can be very easy to disadvantage A neurodivergent individual compared with a neurotypical individual. Things like prioritising some of that social rapport that happens at the beginning of an interview. Did somebody make really strong eye contact? Did they, were they able to have a chat about their weekend or their interests, etc, etc. Because actually, somebody with autism might be brilliant for the job, but might find those things really, really hard.
So often when I’m interviewing, I’ll ask all the standard corporate questions that are genuinely important, but I will also try and understand someone’s curiosity, their passion for their subject and proof that they are able to deliver results, even if the way that they might do things is a little bit different than the norm. One of the things I often talk to people about in this recruitment space is, open questions can sometimes be a little bit too open for individuals with autism.
If you say, tell me about yourself, over the years, I’ve realised that actually, maybe that’s just too broad a question for certain individuals, because a neurotypical candidate can easily pull from In their mental scripts and give very polished answers. But to an autistic individual, that wide prompt might lead them down a rabbit hole of something which they think was relevant, but the interviewer might then get awkward vibes from, if that’s not too an informal way of referring to that point.
So I think there are There are definitely things that we need to do in terms of levelling the playing field around recruitment, but there are definitely things that we also need to do about normalising or changing the way in which we expect people to show up in our teams. There’s definitely certain things that, I was talking to a recruiter last week where we’re having a great conversation around Actually, our job is to hire the best person for the job.
It’s about being able to see through the social awkwardness that might come or the slightly chaotic impression that somebody with ADHD might give over as a first impression. So, everybody’s different. I don’t want to use those as stereotypes. Necessarily, because the whole point here is that every individual, their brain works in a way that’s unique to them, and they will come across in their own ways with strengths and weaknesses. But things like making it really clear what the format of the interview is going to be, being really careful with those open-ended questions.
And thinking about the interview environment, certainly, I’ve had feedback at times from candidates that I’ve interviewed where the lights were too bright or it was too hot or it was too noisy. And in that case, they couldn’t concentrate and they weren’t able to do their best, their best interview. So, these are simple adaptations, simple changes that can be made that benefit everybody. I think the other thing is making sure that the process is actually quite transparent as well. So being really clear on when you might give feedback, when could somebody expect to hear? What might the next stages be?
all these things, they’re just almost being polite in a way, but they’re things that will make such a difference to somebody who has autism and somebody who has ADHD will also benefit from that ability to put in place things that can help them manage their time. Or manage their expectations. And then also, again, just thinking of people, individuals with ADHD, making sure there’s an element of novelty in the interview as well is quite important because novelty is so important to individuals with ADHD.
Making sure that it’s not doing the same interview three times over, because that’s probably the quickest way you can disincentivise somebody. To want to work for you in the future.
Jason Foster:
How much, how much responsibility do you think is on the individual to ensure that the experience they’re about to go into requires something to think a bit differently? I just maybe it’s a it’s a poor example possibly, but when you have someone who’s gluten free come over for dinner. You need them, you need them to tell you that they’re gluten free so that you don’t, upset them or serve something they can’t eat. And there’s a high expectation, there may be a high expectation that people will adapt at their dinner table to accommodate them, right?
So, how am I, I suppose, just, I don’t know if that’s a good example or not, but is there… Some responsibility on the individual to make sure, because there’s no way you would have known necessarily about the bright light situation or the heat in the room situation. So how would you have accommodated or how would you have made changes, which are the right things to do, but obviously only if about them.
Peter Laflin:
I think it’s a really interesting debate about, is it for the individual to advocate or is it for people to make sensible adjustments that will just benefit everybody? I was talking to another CDO last week who was telling me a story about how
Jason Foster:
Everyone, yeah.
Peter Laflin:
They went to HR to ask for adjustments. And then the HR team basically flipped it back and said, well, what do you need? Now, I can understand why that’s happened, but this particular CDO was a little frustrated because their point was they were in the middle of learning about themselves and what did or didn’t work.
Jason Foster:
And what was on offer? Yeah.
Peter Laflin:
So I think there are there are certain things that can just be done that just make things nicer for everybody. So is this idea of, clear agendas, transparency over process and timings, making sure that the environment is a bit is neutral. So the thing about the lights, let’s not have really bright lights, but let’s not make it so dark that you can’t see. Let’s just try and be mindful that it might be too bright or too dark for somebody and therefore maybe we could adjust that and everybody’s going to benefit.
And I’m not trying to make something difficult for the sake of it, but I think again, this is at the heart of the conversations we need to have, which are around, how much emphasis do we have to put on the individual to advocate for themselves? And how much can we do as organisations and leaders to mean that the individual has to do less advocating. And your gluten.
Jason Foster:
Which they may find hard to do.
Peter Laflin:
Exactly. I mean, your gluten free example, I think is a great one because I think as a society now, I think we’re all fairly comfortable with, if somebody shows up at your house and says, well, please don’t serve me that because it might make me ill or, in the case of a nut allergy, nobody wants to serve anything that’s going to, severely impact somebody. I was on a Flight back from Turkey the other day where we were told that somebody on the flight had a severe nut allergy and airborne nuts were going to cause a problem. Obviously, we’re all going, we wouldn’t have necessarily known that.
We’re told it, we’ll adapt. That’s, just being a good citizen. So I think there’s a real balance here. But I think in the future, the ideal is that The things that are not too far away from the norm are automatically considered. And if you are in the extreme where you’ve got, you will have a reaction to something which is maybe not expected, then I think the emphasis on the advocacy and I think it’s the balance between the two.
Jason Foster:
I’m conscious of the time on our episode. I want to wrap up with a final question. I’ve got like a million thoughts that have spawned off the back of that. And I mean, I think we’re in danger of going to HR territory, which will pull us back from, but maybe I’ll talk to you offline about that. But I suppose just to like bring that all together, CDOs, data leaders, tech leaders, AI leaders, business leaders, thinking about this, listening to this, I suppose as I bring it back to some practical, sensible things in terms of what it means for leaders and what they can do as a like wrap up point.
41:51 — Practical advice for leaders
Peter Laflin:
I think just before I give you the wrap up point, I think it’s really important to treat everybody as an individual. And I appreciate we talked a bit about why that’s hard. Not everybody with autism is going to experience the same challenges and they’re not going to have the same strengths. But I think there are key themes that I think we can come back to. So for somebody with autism, for example, I think it’s about providing predictable structures.
Having really clear communication, things that are unambiguous, advanced notices of changes in schedules or room bookings or that thing, and then the ability to control their environment. So being able to take themselves off to a quiet room, have noise cancelling headphones, those sorts of things. And that’s because those autistic individuals, they spend a lot of their energy masking in the workplace to try and overcome the sensory problems they might have and trying to manage the what those individuals might see as confusing social demands in the workplace.
People with ADHD, it’s a slightly different Set of accommodations. Often with ADHD, it’s about helping people get autonomy over their, when they do tasks, how quickly they work. One of the most brilliant people I’ve ever worked with, I had to just accept that he was going to do his best work at 2 in the morning. And anything I ever tried to do to get him to do his best work in, at 12 noon, It failed, but he was such a great team member and the work he did was phenomenal. And in the end, it was just an acceptance that’s how he works best. And therefore, I want to get the best out of him.
And the reason for that is people with ADHD tend to struggle with motivation at times, they need novelty, they need momentum. And therefore trying to work in a monotonous, repetitive loop actually causes their brains to shut down a little bit. So, it’s that idea of, flexible scheduling, as I said, and freedom from micromanagement, but also the opportunities to channel their energy into genuinely exciting things that light their brains up. And make them genuinely passionate about the work that they do. Now, we can talk about some of the other neurodivergent conditions like dyslexia, dyspraxia, dyscalculia.
I think some of those are, possibly less important in the workplace. I’m not saying they’re not important, but I think dyslexia is definitely worth accommodating. It’s It’s been a journey. My daughter is dyslexic and it’s been really interesting watching her navigate things. You just have this expectation, well, I had an expectation that she could read. She can read, but it tyres her out to the extent that just reading a paragraph means that she has to pause and think about it for a few moments. So it’s this idea of, neurodivergent individuals sometimes struggle with being able to Process things really quickly.
I remember a meeting I was in where I was expected to do some really quick mental maths. Now, I’m A mathematician by trade, but my mental arithmetic is terrible because my brain doesn’t work that way. And so I was made to feel stupid when in actual fact, Well, that was a bit unfair. So it’s not putting people under pressure to make quick mental calculations or make quick decisions, because often a neurodivergent individual needs just an extra few moments to process everything before they come up with genuinely the best answer you’ll get on the day from the room.
Because they’ve just had that slightly longer period of time to actually think about what they want to say. So, there’s a whole range of things to do, but it comes back to try and understand what’s best for the individual. And the final bit of advice I’d love to share is I’ve spoken to many neurodivergent individuals over recent weeks, and a theme they tell me is that Sometimes managers are trying to be so supportive that they’ll go out and read all the books and all the websites and they will try and almost impose accommodations on the individual that they think are going to help.
It is so important that you work with the individual to make sure that whatever accommodations you put in place
Jason Foster:
Interesting. Hmm.
Peter Laflin:
Are the ones that will make a difference. Now that can be difficult because it can be trial and error. An individual may not know what’s going to work best for them, but please don’t force things upon people because you think it will make a difference. This is a two-way conversation where trying to support people in the workplace is about finding the thing that’s going to help for them, recognising that might be different to the next autistic person. And it will definitely be different to the neurotypical person that you are more used to managing.
Jason Foster:
Well, and hopefully, better for everyone. If you’re trying to create high-performing teams that do good work and get great results and great success, getting this right has its own business case. It creates an environment people want to work in and better success for your team and your organisation. So I hope organisation can get behind this and, yeah, make it a success.
Peter Laflin:
It’s about giving everybody the chance to thrive. And ultimately, in a high-performing team, we want the best people in the right roles doing the best work that they can do, both individually and as a multiplier across the team. And therefore, enabling a better understanding of neurodiversity. So this idea that we all think differently, We all process information differently. It’s just most people in society do it in a reasonably typical average way, recognising that we all do think differently.
How can we run our teams and how can we manage our organisations in a way that we embrace that as a real positive, rather than seeing it as a negative that, somebody was a few minutes late for a meeting or didn’t make eye contact.
Jason Foster:
Fantastic. Well, thank you. That’s been fascinating to talk that through and clearly super passionate about the topic. And I’m with you in terms of how do we create environments where people can thrive and high performance. And there’s so many great people out there. Why would we limit who we have in our teams to maybe limit our success that we have and the benefits that individuals can have. So look, thank you for coming on the show, really appreciate you being here.
Peter Laflin:
Thanks, it’s been a pleasure and I really enjoyed the conversation, so thank you.
