Some Notes on Autistic Burnout

Posted on by mistynodine

Autistic burnout is a mental state that happens when an autistic person becomes unable to keep up with the real (or perceived) demands that they feel are being placed on them in order to fit into the expectations of the world they live in. Burnout often happens during transitions, such as when a young adult graduates high school and is moving towards a more independent lifestyle. It also happens when an autistic person has been in a situation such as a job that is not accommodating their needs, and where they have needed to do a lot of masking or camouflaging. It happens when the autistic person is experiencing big changes or losses. It happens when daily life is too much. These types of situation drastically increase the mental load placed on an autistic person’s brain. When a person’s brain no longer can keep up with the demands placed on it, they reach the point of autistic burnout.

As a non-autistic person, I have no personal experience with autistic burnout. Yet, when living life with my autistic friends I can see that it is a very real experience. For me, the best approach for understanding it is to go to the source – the autistic people themselves – and listen to and try to understand their experiences. I have several go-to autistic-led resources that I use in order to gain input and understanding of the autistic experience. Here, I summarize some of the best inputs I have from those resources.

What is autistic burnout?

What autistic burnout looks and feels like can vary widely among different autistic people. The common underlying presentation is an inability to regulate themselves and to function, because they are overwhelmed by the expectations being placed on them – despite a real desire to meet those expectations. The mind and body just shut down, there is no ability to function. Autistic burnout is a state of utter exhaustion. Since autistic burnout results from trying to push through challenges, it cannot be solved by trying to push through the burnout – it must be handled by stepping back, resting, and recharging. 

In this video in the series Ask an Autistic, Amythest Schaber frames autistic burnout as something that happens when the autistic person has too much going on, and is not taking care of their sensory, social and other needs. She says, “It’s kind of like your brain is just exhausted and cannot go any further.” A person may feel like they are ‘becoming more autistic’ because they no longer have the mental energy to mask or camouflage to fit in and act in a way that can pass for being ‘normal’.

In this article, the Autistic Scholar (Patrick Dwyer) defines autistic burnout as, “… the consequence of accumulating stress and exhaustion from trying to constantly cope as an autistic person in an overwhelming, often hostile world.  As autistic people, we are expected to camouflage our autistic features and appear more neurotypical; to pretend constantly, all the time, that you are someone you are not is exhausting. We are frequently subjected to sensory overloads and expected to push through them and continue functioning; to have to continuously cope with overwhelming sensory input is exhausting.  Basically, autistic people have stressful lives, and coping with this stress is exhausting.”

This insightful article by The Autistic Advocate helps explain the inner experiences of a person going through autistic burnout. Kieran divides autistic burnout into two categories. Social burnout is when the sensory challenges and the need to mask during parts of your day – like school or work – take away all of your mental energy. In order to be ready for the next day, the result of social burnout is that you need to incorporate significant time to rest and recover into your daily rhythms.

Extreme autistic burnout is when the shutting down of your mind and body persists for weeks, months or years. This state looks similar to depression, but Kieran states that it is actually a different mental state than depression. He says of his own experience with extreme autistic burnout, “It was like a switch had gone off, my verbal ability to convey what was going on in my mind and body was gone. … I did not want to die, I’ve never wanted to die. … I needed to step out. … I needed to remove myself from the environment and take myself elsewhere;  I needed to escape. …But the only way I knew how to do that was to die. So I tried.” Extreme autistic burnout develops over a long period of time, and consequently recovery from it also takes a long period of time.

Another good resource on autistic burnout is this interview with Dora Haymaker, an autistic person who researches autism. She defines autistic burnout as, “A state of pervasive exhaustion, loss of function, increase in autistic traits, and withdrawal from life that results from continuously expending more resources than one has coping with activities and environments ill-suited to one’s abilities and needs.”

How do I help someone avoid / recover from autistic burnout?

Autistic burnout comes from the crushing overwhelming mental load of trying to live your life, do what is necessary to support yourself, and exert your mind on trying to understand how to fit into a world which is largely incomprehensible to you. From my perspective, this means that the most helpful approaches to supporting an autistic person revolve around decreasing the mental load they need to exert to ‘fit in’, and increasing their ability to access the things that are necessary to recharge their mental energy.

Listen to them

The most important starting place for a non-autistic person to understand the autistic experience and autistic burnout is to listen to the stories of the autistic people around you.  Autistic and non-autistic people experience the world very differently, but in the end we are all equal humans walking on the face of this earth. Be open-minded and ask open-ended questions. Additionally, please keep in mind that even within the family of autistic experienc”e, each autistic person has different experiences and needs, so you cannot extrapolate new understanding from a few examples. “Even autistic people with heavy burnout experience aren’t likely to assume other autistic people’s experiences of it are the same as their own“[1]. Whatever your understanding of burnout is, it is still helpful to ask a question like, ‘What does autistic burnout look like for you?’.

You can also read sources on the Internet. The ones I am citing here are ones I have found particularly helpful for this topic. 

Listening takes effort – I have a hard time understanding autistic people, just as they have a hard time understanding me. However, when I can listen to their experiences and understand their sensory needs, their social needs, their needs to take time to rest and recharge, then I have a better sense of how I can work to mitigate the challenges of living in a world that is not set up for their neurotype.

Adapt to their sensory needs

Where possible, you can change the sensory environment to accommodate the needs of the autistic person. This includes both changing the overall environment and providing the ability for the person to take sensory breaks according to their specific needs.

Amythest also talks a lot about stimming and about different ways that an autistic person can regulate themselves and recharge their energy. A good way to support an autistic person in avoiding autistic burnout is by understanding what helps regulate them, and when they may be in a situation where they need to step out to take a sensory break. With that understanding, you have the information you need to support them in maintaining healthy rhythms to mitigate burnout.

Be careful of the expectations you are placing on them

If you are in a position where you find yourself placing expectations on an autistic person in any way (for example, behavior, social, or performance), re-evaluate those expectations. Note that you may be placing expectations on them subconsciously, based on your own notion of how people ‘ought to’ behave, or interact socially, or get things done. Clarify your expectations in your mind and drop all that are unnecessary, unclear or overly strict. For the rest, work with the person to determine a path through those expectations that works for both of you. Be prepared also that they will have expectations on you which also will need to be discussed.

One huge expectation that we often place on an autistic person is asking them to look like a non-autistic, or neurotypical, person. We expect an autistic person to do things like a neurotypical person does them. Looking neurotypical is exhausting and invalidating for the autistic person. As Judy Endow puts it, “Ultimately, for me, passing as ‘normal’ means that I am now a fake person, never able to be myself without putting my ability to make a living in jeopardy.” 

Patrick Dwyer says, “Autistic people don’t deserve to be surrounded by people who blithely assume that we can do things exactly like a neurotypical person, and when we fail, then assume that we can’t succeed at all.  We deserve to be surrounded by people who understand our differences and allow us to follow our own paths, but who will still believe that we can succeed and thrive.” In other words, when we expect an autistic person to do things in the way a neurotypical person does them, we rob them of the energy required to be successful and do well in ways that are more natural to them.

Note also that, while non-autistic people often ask autistic people to do things like a neurotypical person does them, we non-autistic people also do not pause to ask ourselves how we can do things more like an autistic person. The pressure to adapt is one-sided.

Help them belong as opposed to making them ‘fit in’

Supporting an autistic person means fully accepting them for who they are. It means listening to the stories they tell, and believing that their experiences are valid, even when you are having a hard time understanding them. Their experiences are important, even if you do not understand them. They want to feel like they belong, not that they need to try to ’fit in’.

Dora Raymaker says, “being accepted for who you are as an autistic person and supported by others, being able to act autistic and do things that fuel you (like engage in special interests), taking time off, and having a reduction in expectations to do things in the same way as non-autistic people are some of the primary things that help.”

As Dora alludes to, one way to communicate to an autistic person that they belong is to listen to the things that they are passionate about – their special interests. Sharing special interests with each other is one way that autistic people bond emotionally with each other.

Keep an eye out for autistic burnout indicators

There are common features you can look for when trying to understand when an autistic person is struggling and possibly headed for autistic burnout. Kieran, in his article, has a list of warning signs to look for. This complete list is worth looking at, but I will not repeat it in its entirety here. The list does include things like,

  • increases in lethargy, irritability and anxiety, 
  • increased sensory sensitivity, 
  • increased difficulty hearing, producing language, and communicating,
  • brain fog, forgetfulness, decreased executive function, slower thought processes,
  • extreme overwhelm,
  • massive increase in guilt.

Often, when we see these things, we are inclined to ask the person push through their challenges. However, the better response is to support them in pulling back.

In Conclusion …

If you know someone who is autistic, please listen to their story. Ask them how you can support them. Give them the space and time they need to unmask and be themselves – whether supporting them in unmasking while you are with them or being considerate when they need time by themselves. Operate under the correct assumption that they are better experts on their needs than you are — do not fall into the common pitfall that you actually have better ways to support them.

If you are managing a person who is autistic, listen to their needs — especially with respect to workload, sensory needs and social requirements. Again, they are best at understanding how to manage their workday to be the most productive while minimizing mental overwhelm leading to autistic burnout.

I cannot emphasize this enough – listen to the autistic people around you. When you want to know more, find first-hand accounts from autistic people on the web, in books, in articles. Autistic people are the experts in living the autistic life well.

Sources

[1] Quote is from Chris Bonnello, aka Autistic Not Weird.

Ask an Autistic (Amethyst Schaber): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZwfujkNBGk

Autistic Advocate (Kieran): https://theautisticadvocate.com/2018/05/an-autistic-burnout/

Autistic Scholar (Patrick Dwyer): http://www.autisticscholar.com/burnout-and-expectations/

Dora Raymaker: https://thinkingautismguide.com/2019/08/autistic-burnout-interview-with.html

Judy Endow: https://ollibean.com/autistic-burnout/

Five insights that changed my view of autism

Posted on by mistynodine

As I have interacted with increasing numbers of autistic people, much of what I have learned has taken me a bit by surprise. Yet, the effects of my heeding these lessons and working counter to my erroneous instincts in my relationships with my autistic friends, family members and coworkers have been amazing. 

Five key issues that have radically changed how I think about and approach my relationships with autistic people are understanding that:

  1. Empathy struggles go both ways.
  2. Sensory differences can lead to trauma.
  3. Failure to comply to a request does not equate to being oppositional.
  4. Honoring their ‘no’ is critical.
  5. Inability to speak does not imply low intelligence.

This article is a reflection of my own journey, and my own learnings and perceptions, based on my understanding gleaned from input and reading from autistic and neurotypical people alike. As with all such things, I am a work in progress in this area. Throughout this article are links to useful clarifying articles from research, from the perspective of educators and therapists, and most importantly, from autistic people themselves. These links can be used to inform your own learning, direct from the source.

Empathy struggles go both ways.

In his original paper on the double empathy problem, Damian Milton proposes that the difficulties in understanding and communication between neurotypical people and autistic people go both ways. Basically, the greater the mismatch two people have in culture, communication style, way of thinking, etc – the more likely there will be miscommunication and misunderstanding between them. This difficulty is mutual and goes both ways. 

There is a good summary of double empathy from a layman’s perspective in this article from Spectrum, and one from the autistic perspective in this article from Reframing Autism. The fact that communication issues are really related to neurotype differences (as opposed to being a deficit related to one neurotype or the other) is examined in this study on autistic peer-to-peer information transfer.

What this means for me is that I change my mindset about what to do when I am getting frustrated due to communication struggles with someone. If I think that a person is struggling to understand me and what I am communicating, it is very likely that I am not understanding them and what they are communicating also. I can proceed with the notion that they are likely getting just as frustrated as I am. Rather than feeding my frustration, I choose to start to do things like asking open ended question to try to figure out where the communication mismatch lies.

Sensory differences can lead to trauma.

Autistic people frequently have sensory differences. These sensory differences include not only the five senses we normally think of (vision, hearing, touch, taste, smell), but also vestibular (balance), proprioception (awareness of the position and movement of your body)  and interoception (sensing what is going on inside your body). These senses are described in more detail in this article. Judy Endow gives a good explanation of sensory differences from the perspective of an autistic person.

What this tells me is that autistic people sense the world differently from me. What is pleasing to me may be torment to them. Sensory differences are not something to brush off or ignore, especially given that one way these differences manifest is hypersensitivity to sensory input. Hypersensitivity makes sensory overload more likely. Many common experiences are very difficult for people who tend to experience sensory overload. A recent survey of autistic people noted that sensory challenge and overload are most problematic in such everyday places as supermarkets, restaurants, main streets, public transport and doctor’s offices.

Sensory overload itself can cause trauma, especially in situations where the person is exposed to the same kind of sensory overload repeatedly. Terra Vance describes sensory trauma in this NeuroClastic article. Therefore, expecting an autistic person who struggles in this area to learn to cope quietly with a sensory barrage does them significant harm in the long-term. Another thing to consider here is that many autistic people experience a lot of trauma and trauma also affects your sensory system, so there is a bad feedback loop that can develop.

What this means for me is that I pay close attention to the autistic people I am with and the environment that we are in. I do well when I try to understand a person’s sensory issues and adapt the environment and my expectations to minimize their sensory stressors. I may meet them on a quieter street, or in an outdoor cafe instead of on a main street in a busy restaurant. I try to understand the differences in body language and what are their signals for when they are indicating discomfort. When they indicate that they want to move to get away from a bad sensory situation I listen and do my best to work with their request.

Failure to comply to a request does not equate to being oppositional. 

When I ask someone to do something and they don’t do what I asked, it is tempting to jump to the conclusion that they are being oppositional. However, this is not always the case.

With some people, phrasing something as a demand can cause a spike in anxiety (or even a panic attack) that prevents the person from being able to fulfill the demand. This happens even when they make a demand on themselves, like make themselves a checklist of things they need to do. This is called Pathological Demand Avoidance, or PDA. PDA was described originally in this article. In the PDA information sheet, people with PDA describe their experience as “a neurological tug of war between brain, heart and body”.

When a person is showing signs of anxiety when I need them to do something, there are a few strategies that I lean on. One strategy that is useful when I have a bit of flexibility is to use declarative language. That is, I will state the thing that needs to be done and leave them the opportunity to volunteer to do it. A second, related strategy is to move towards a more collaborative approach to the planning process, where they are participating and have more control. This strategy requires starting the whole process a bit earlier to leave room for the collaboration, but also tends to produce plans that are more useful in the long run.

Another situation that looks like failure to comply to a request happens when a person struggles with executive function, as described in this article. The person does not comply with the request because they are lacking the skills and emotional energy to plan and execute the requested task. Executive function includes the ability to make a plan, start doing the plan, remember all the steps in the plan, and continue executing the plan until the task is complete. Executive functioning challenges are more of a lagging skill problem. When a person has weak executive function, they are challenged with one or more of the tasks of planning, organization, remembering key pieces of information, and shifting between tasks easily. When a person is anxious or under stress, their executive functioning capabilities may decline. Cynthia Kim does a deep dive into autism, executive function, and her strategies to manage it in this series of blog posts.

One important thing I keep in mind when I interact with someone who is both a very literal thinker and also a person who has weaker executive functioning skills is to keep any directions I give them very concrete and unambiguous. Also, slower and more durable methods of communication help, such as emailing requests and directions, writing things down, or managing tasks on a Kanban board tend to work better. It helps to provide more concrete deadlines as to when the request needs to be completed. Often, people with executive function issues also are not particularly good at asking for help or clarification, so taking the extra time to check in, see whether they need anything, and check that they are clear on the next steps can facilitate their completing the task satisfactorily.

Honoring their ‘no’ is critical.

When a person is constantly told that their instincts are bad and they need to look to other authorities for how to behave, they do not have the opportunity to learn when and how to say ‘no’. Even the most communication-challenged autistic people can clearly indicate ‘no’ and ‘enough’ in some way, and it is important for us to listen and respond appropriately.

Many of the autism therapies recommended today are centered around the notion of compliance. These therapies include ones that focus on behavioral change, such as Applied Behavior Analysis. Behavioral therapies operate on the principle that if you change a person’s behavior, you can effect deeper changes in how their mind works. While these therapies may improve surface behavior in some circumstances, they also teach the person that their mind does not work correctly and they need to look to others to understand what is ‘correct’ behavior in a situation.

In light of the previous three points in this article, what does it mean for someone to evaluate someone else’s behavior and then proceed under the assumption that their evaluation is correct? Is this approach effective?

First, when an autistic person says ‘no’, I may have very little empathy or understanding of what is bringing them to that point, due to the double empathy problem. I may be unaware of sensory issues or other traumatizing factors, both because I do not experience the sensory environment in the same way and because their lack of interoception may mean they are unable to describe the pain the sensory environment is causing them. The reason a child may not be following directions may be related to anxiety or lagging skills, neither of which is something they can control easily (even if they thought what I was asking was reasonable).

Behavioral therapies center around compliance to some behavior goals that are usually not set with the consent of the person who is the subject of the therapy. That is, behavioral goals are usually set by parents, school personnel, and/or therapists. The autistic person, often a child, is not given the opportunity to provide input. Yet, from double empathy, we see that the parents often do not understand the concerns of the child, the function the behavior has in their lives, and/or the underlying frustrations that the child may be experiencing because they can’t comply. At the same time, the autistic person may not understand the function of the behavior being taught or the concerns of the parents or therapists that are leading them to try to adjust their behavior. It is only when both sides understand each other that it is really possible to define a goal that addresses the root of the ‘challenging behavior’, and if so, whether a particular approach has any chance of working in any durable or generalizable sense. That is, the often-missing input from the person receiving the therapy actually is key to evaluating the likelihood of its success.

A second reason we need to honor their ‘no’ has to do with the dangers of reinforcing a fawning response in an unsafe situation. When an autistic person appears calm and compliant, there is a very likely possibility that their decision to comply and squash their natural emotions seems from a psychological perspective like the safest thing for them to do at the moment. Their fear of imposed consequences is stronger than their natural desire for self-protection. That is, compliance often comes from a natural fawning response to fear and anxiety. This Medium article looks at fawning from the perspective of the person who has internalized a fawning behavior. Neurodivergent Teacher has a good article on how to tell actual calm from fawning compliance in this Facebook post.

If we do not listen, the consequence is that they learn to disregard their inner voice that says that they are in a dangerous situation. This happens because parents, therapists, friends and coworkers do not recognize that things that appear safe and normal to them may actually be unsafe and traumatizing to an autistic person. Insisting that a person should invalidate their own perception of safety because it is flawed or incorrect sets them up for grooming and abuse in their adult life. OldLady with Autism gives a much deeper and more accurate description of this in her blog.

One key takeaway I have from this is for me to operate under the assumption that each person has their own areas of comfort and discomfort, of safety and danger. Trying to force a ‘solution’ on someone that makes sense to me but seems unsafe to them is both useless and counterproductive. When I am trying to navigate a challenging situation with them, the solution needs to take everyone’s concerns to heart. A solution works best when everyone agrees to it, everyone thinks the solution will be effective, and everyone thinks the approach is feasible.

A second takeaway comes from the fact that I am by nature a person who offers hugs and touch for comfort, but I have learned to ask first. When a person says no, I honor that no. When a person indicates that they want to leave a conversation, I exit the conversation, even if I think I have more to say. More generally, I give the other person in a conversation a lot more leeway to control the flow of the conversation and our interaction than I did previously. This is a work in progress, however. Old habits die hard.

Inability to speak does not imply low intelligence.

Last but not least, I have developed a great respect for the non-speakers in our midst. Our natural thinking leads us to the mistaken conclusion that a nonspeaking person is not intelligent. This misconception is reinforced if the person does things like shout randomly or say seemingly irrelevant words over and over. Yet, these kinds of behaviors are associated not with low intelligence, but with apraxia (not being able to execute purposeful motor movements) and motor disinhibition (uncontrolled movements). Intelligence tests that take being able to speak into account demonstrate that people with apraxia have roughly the same intelligence distribution of those who speak. The problem is not in their innate ability to think and reason but in the disconnect between their brain and their body, as described for instance in this Spectrum article. Recent studies have shown that methods such as Facilitated Communication and Rapid Prompting Method enable communication and unlock their ability to express what they think. 

Over the last several years, I have been fascinated with the writings of nonspeaking autistic people. Last year, I wrote a Medium article on the things I had learned from reading their writings. I encourage anyone, especially those who interact with nonspeaking adults or children, to read their writing – I have found it eye-opening.

One key lesson I have learned with respect to the non-speakers around me is to presume competence, my gut reactions notwithstanding. When I am interacting with a nonspeaking person, I assume that they fully understand what I am saying. I assume that they are working on responding intelligently, even when their efforts do not succeed. I also have been working on actual understanding. As I said earlier, most nonspeaking people I have met have been pretty good at conveying things like ‘no’ and ‘enough’ – sometimes very cleverly. Communication for them takes so much work and creativity that I see it as very important that I try to put forward my best efforts to try to understand what they are trying to communicate. 

This lesson specifically applies when I interact with people who use AAC (Augmentative and Alternative Communication). AAC communication is slower but it greatly expands the non speaker’s ability to communicate effectively. Taking time to listen at a slower pace is valuable and educational. To have a conversation, though, I also need to slow down to their communication speed. Sometimes it helps for me to communicate using a slower method as well, such as email or online chat. When I use a slower method to communicate, I am not as tempted to interrupt, talk over them, or try to finish their sentences.

A second takeaway I have is that I think of how frustrating it must be to be a non-speaker. Imagine being in a position where you have so much to say, where you can explain something that may make things so much easier, when you see solutions to problems clearly in your head – yet you are unable to communicate them. Imagine being treated as stupid and incompetent when your mind is functioning quite well, and understands clearly what it means to be treated in a demeaning way due to presumed incompetence. Imagine being abused and being unable to communicate that to anyone. I cannot really imagine this, but it seems like such a hard place to be. I do well when I work to help with communication, find those points of connection, and just be there with them in their journey.

Wrapping Up …

Each one of the insights I have mentioned here have changed the way that I see and interact with the autistic people around me in one or more significant ways. None of these things I learned were intuitive or obvious to me at the time, though they are clear in hindsight. The net effect has been that the autistic people, for the most part, tell me that they see me as being more supportive, more connecting, and more empathetic. I see us more now as all being humans on this earth, each of us having our own strengths and challenges. And as Chris Bonnello taught me, things go much better when we all can play to our strengths.

Rethinking Agile in the Light of Diversity and Inclusion: A Retrospective Process

Posted on by mistynodine

The Agile Manifesto and the ensuing emergence of Agile development methodologies were a great step forward in helping the software industry move past the clunkiness and slowness of the existing waterfall-like methods. However, Agile is a methodology authored entirely by western males in an industry dominated by men. Because of this, Agile relies on values, thinking processes, communication practices and working styles that are comfortable for western males but not necessarily aligned with other types of people. For instance, Agile assumes that all team members have equal privileges with respect to communication and bringing their ideas to the table. Agile inherently values speed (velocity) and pace as an appropriate measure of productivity. Agile assumes that the best solutions emerge naturally from self-organizing teams working incrementally in close collaboration with the customers. 

While Agile has many good features as a methodology for software development, the Agile assumptions work against members of the non-dominant groups in a workplace. This is because:

  • Agile approaches do not take into account that employees of the non-majority group are often muted, and therefore do not incorporate into its routines mechanisms that enable their voices to be heard and factored into product and team planning.
  • Agile approaches do not take into account that different people process, reflect and work best at different paces at different times. It tends to penalize people that process more slowly and/or more deeply, for example.
  • Agile approaches do not tend to take into account that listening to and planning around minority group values and priorities takes time and effort, but may unearth more problems earlier, may spur products to be more creative, and may better support a wider variety of customers. 

In order to bring together teams that include and embrace input from these groups, and to reap the benefits of being truly diverse and equitable, Agile needs to be agile. We need to take steps to examine its assumptions and understand where to make changes. Doing so requires bringing members of other groups into the software methodology discussions, listening carefully to what they have to say while factoring out  our own natural biases, and enabling them to provide honest feedback and input on how these methodologies can evolve to support a more diverse and inclusive work environment.

Basic concepts in group psychology

Before launching into a discussion of Agile, there are some key psychological concepts that are useful to understand.

We start out with a notion of groups. Whenever you have a number of people working together, they will form into groups naturally. These groups may form based on things like common traits, experiences, cultures, and interests. We mentally have an affinity towards people in our own groups, and attribute different levels of respect to others based on the groups where we mentally place them. We are more inclined to listen to and accept some groups over others. Our in group consists of people we perceive as sharing many of our beliefs, attitudes, values, and language of communication. With the other groups, our out-groups, there is less overlap.

This natural clustering of coworkers into groups has several effects. The dominant group at work, the organizational in-group, defines the tone of the working conversations. It dominates the values, thinking processes, communication processes and working practices of the group. The coworkers who are in a minority group must make a greater effort to understand the dominant group’s values and thinking. They must take the effort to make their communication, and working practices “fit in”. This innately places a higher cognitive load on the people in the out-groups, which leaves them with fewer reserves for their actual work. This is explained in more detail in my article on masking.

In addition to the increased cognitive load there is the problem of in-group favoritism and out-group negativity. In-group favoritism is “favoring members of one’s in-group over out-group members … in evaluation of others, in allocation of resources, and in many other ways”. Out-group negativity is “punishing or placing burdens upon the out-group”. How out-group negativity often works out in the workplace is that behaviors that are acceptable from a member of the dominant are punished when done by a member of the minority. For example, in a setting dominated by males, if a male is assertive that may be considered as a leadership strength, but if a female does the same thing she is more likely to be considered to be pushy and her behavior something to correct (e.g., see Gender Bias is Real).

Finally there is the issue that minority groups are often muted. The muted group theory states that the dominant group is the group that creates the communication system, and that members of the minority need to learn the dominant group’s communication system in order to express themselves. Because the minority groups have different values, thought processes, etc., they may be unable to express their ideas clearly in the dominant group’s communication system. Because they have difficulty expressing themselves, the minority groups often are ignored by the dominant group. This leads to the members of the minority groups being “overlooked, muffled, and invisible” [1].

To summarize, because we as humans naturally form groups, with one group dominating, members of the minority groups inherently have problems with communication and fitting their working practices into those of the dominant group, with being productive in the face of additional expectations that are placed on them, and with speaking and speaking up in settings where their ideas are overlooked and suppressed. These consequences follow from basic psychological principles.

How Agile Assumptions Impact Inclusion

As I mentioned before, the Agile Manifesto was authored by a group of western men, and thus inherently leans towards that kind of value system. The Agile Manifesto works hard to address the real problems inherent in waterfall software development methodologies. It is important to preserve the real forward progress in development speed and flexibility that we gain from Agile methodologies as we evolve our best practices for software development. However, due to the nature of the committee that authored it, their underlying biases are incorporated into the proposed solution. These biases include values concerning communication and collaboration, measures of productivity and methods for making progress. These are not necessarily bad values. Rather, they are values that are biased towards a particular way of thinking and working. Hence, they do not always mesh with the values of a more diverse population.

In this section, we will discuss six basic assumptions made within the Agile manifesto and how they work against making our Agile teams more inclusive.

Assumption 1: Communication is a universal privilege

The values in the agile manifesto include “Individuals and interactions over processes and tools”, “Customer collaboration over contract negotiation” and “Responding to change over following a plan”. In other words, you figure out things like project objectives and requirements by interacting (usually verbally) with the customer, preferably on a regular basis. The development of the product becomes a (mostly oral) team effort between the customers/stakeholders and the developers. 

These values make the inherent assumption that the privilege of being able to speak and to be listened to is shared equally by all. However, when you enter a diverse corporate setting, where there is a dominant group and one or more minority groups, this assumption cannot be made. Likely, the privilege of being able to speak and to be heard and respected is owned almost entirely by the dominant group in the workplace. Muted group theory states that these design conversations are likely to take place using the language and communication processes of the dominant group. The resulting design reflects the understanding and concerns of the dominant group. The tendency will be to mute the members of the minority groups; their voice will become overlooked, muffled and ignored. The values, priorities, suggestions and ideas of the muted individuals do not get brought to the table, or get dismissed quickly. This effectively removes them from the collaboration. 

Assumption 2: We all communicate best the same way

One underlying tenet put forth in Agile is that oral communication is the most efficient communication method:

“The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation.”

– Agile Manifesto

Face-to-face communication can be efficient in the situation where all people feel equally comfortable and able to engage in it. This is often true among the members of the dominant group. However, muting, by definition, means that the members of the muted group are less comfortable engaging in the conversation and/or speaking up, even when they have the capability to articulate their input clearly and their input is important and/or significant. Additionally, some minority groups do not do well with speaking as a form of communication, but still do valuable work. For example, a person who speaks English as a second language may need extra time to process verbal input and to  understand English-based nuances in what people are saying. Some autistic people think best in writing or pictures, and at the same time often have different and useful perspectives on the challenges at hand. People who are wheelchair-bound often have their heads at a different level from others, which can be a barrier to breaking into a conversation. Deaf people may need to communicate through assistive technology. The ultimate result of relying heavily on face-to-face communication in Agile organizations is a tendency to discount and undervalue minority groups.

Contrast this approach to systems that use processes and tools, and contract negotiation. These systems usually include some form of writing down things like architectures and requirements. A communication approach that includes more writing and relies less on face-to-face conversation often helps in situations where oral communication is difficult. A combined oral/written approach enables members of more different groups to understand common design and implementation goals, which helps them work together more efficiently. Writing things down increases the number of different channels of communication and helps those who learn and communicate better through writing or visualization. 

Writing things down also gives everyone mental space. All of us do better when we have space to think and process. Face-to-face conversation requires a person to process in real-time, and is often strewn with challenging behaviors like people  interrupting or speaking over other people. Writing things down provides room for people to understand and reflect more deeply on the things that are being discussed. While it is important not to go too deeply down the reflection rabbit hole, some deeper thinking can streamline software development and help avoid problems in the future.

Assumption 3: Velocity is a good metric for overall productivity

The Agile approach of frequently delivering small increments has many advantages. The stakeholders have an early idea of what the product will look like, and can react appropriately. Early hands-on experience with a product provides the  opportunity for the perhaps not very clear requirements to be embodied into something concrete and accessible. It helps the end users to bridge the gap between description and hands-on visualization. Seeing a concrete prototype or visualization can help people resolve ambiguities and can be used to sharpen and modify requirements. This value is embodied in the Agile methodology:

“Deliver working software frequently, from a couple of weeks to a couple of months, with a preference to the shorter timescale.”

– Agile Manifesto

This idea of delivering in small increments has led to the use of velocity as a metric for the success of an agile team. If you assign points to increments, you can then measure productivity by measuring how many points a team completes in some period of time. This view of productivity, however, prioritizes quantity over quality. If your metric for productivity is velocity you will work to improve it, simply because you are measuring it. However, velocity just means you deliver stuff quickly. It does not mean you deliver features well. It does not mean that what you deliver will meet the wants and needs of your diverse set of customers who will use the products and services you are developing. It does not even mean that you will deliver things that are likely to meet your own needs at future stages of the development of the product.

This idea of velocity works against diversity in several ways. If we look at the psychological concepts related to groups and language, we can see that different groups have different languages (ways of thinking, ways of behaving), and that gap means that it is harder to communicate between groups than it is to communicate within groups. The natural shortsighted approach to speed up development progress in the short term is to mute some people whose inputs you do not understand or value. Muting has the effect of quashing the diversity of input into solutions but also makes it easier for the rest of the team to reach a consensus. However, trying to increase velocity naively in this way eventually will slow you down. This slowing down happens naturally due to 

  • increased technical debt in the product or service code base,
  • increased “cultural debt” – how your internal company culture affects your product development and how well your team works together, and 
  • decreased representation of the types of people in your customer base on your development team, which affects the likelihood that your product or service to the types of customers no longer represented.

The more different people from different groups interact, the harder it is to communicate deeply, and the harder it is to reach any form of agreement. This difficulty slows down communication speed and hence also slows down product development in the short term. It takes practice and trust to overcome this problem, but the long-term dividends are worth it. A diverse team that has learned to bridge the communication gaps and work together well can be extremely creative and productive.

Assumption 4: People can always work at a constant pace

In addition to using velocity as a metric, Agile also has this notion that a team can work at a constant pace, and each of the individuals can contribute at a constant pace. The best teams find their pace and stay at it.

“Agile processes promote sustainable development. The sponsors, developers, and users should be able to maintain a constant pace indefinitely.”

– Agile Manifesto

This assumption often does not hold. Being able to do your job at a constant pace is a luxury. In general, it requires a stable living situation, a support group that allows you to go to work even when you have basic problems such as childcare or transportation, and the mental health to have the stamina to deliver results at a constant pace. Many people do not have these support systems. The canonical 1950s husband with the stay-at-home wife and the stable, lifetime job had significant support systems in place. People who have been raised with a comfortable income and have a financial buffer can gain some stability from that. Sad to say, in this modern world, many people do not have these support systems. Working mothers. Racial minorities. Autistic people. People with mental illness. Disabled people. Yet these are often the diverse people we want to attract to a diverse workplace.

If we are going to optimize our workforce to enable each person to contribute to the fullest, we need to deal with the fact that external circumstances impact the pace at which a person can work. The work bandwidth you see from them varies over time. There is no innate reason why someone who can give you 100% this month but nothing next month is any less productive than the person who can give you a steady 50%. Yet the former person becomes a problem, while the latter person is okay because they are predictable and help the team maintain a ‘constant pace’.

Reflecting back on metrics, then, there are better and more diversity-friendly metrics for productivity, ones which are tied more to the business objectives than to coding or tickets or burndown rates. For example, the features that the team is developing can be tied to business objectives, and team productivity tied to new features per quarter. This metric has the advantage of encouraging creativity and the development of new features, while disincentivizing developing them in a way that increases technical or cultural debt. Working collaboratively, using everyone’s strengths, helps the developers perform better against this metric as well. This metric, also, is calculated over quarters, not sprints – smoothing the way for some sprints to be less productive (for a variety of reasons), but enabling a focus on supporting faster execution on longer-term objectives.

Assumption 5: The best way to progress is incrementally

Agile assumes that the best way to get to a good solution and a good architecture is incrementally; that a good solution will emerge from incremental steps.

“Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software.”

– Agile Manifesto

Incremental progress leads to a focus on the short term, quicker conversations. “What are the next steps?” But often even when the end vision is clear and the requirements are not changing, different groups may see different paths to the end. One person may see a path that starts out being harder and with longer steps, but leads to a cleaner, more extensible and more intuitive implementation, while another person may see a path that starts out easier but the way the start happens leads to a less clean and extensible implementation. In any given situation, it is likely that the steps that are logical for one person are not logical from the point of view of some other person with different experiences and values.. For example, often the person who is a slower thinker, who deliberates many options, may see things that others don’t, but that affect the development of the product in intangible ways. However, the slower thinker may be unable to vocalize these concerns at the pace that the team is moving. This kind of situation is particularly true when something new is being developed and the path to a solution is not a well-trodden one.

When people come from different cultures and different perspectives, where their values of generalization vs specialization differ, where their notion of collaboration differs, and where there are different ideas on how the product or service should support a particular class of user  — these all impact what steps to start with as well as how to take the steps and in what order. Since these differences align with how people think, they also frequently align with the groups. That is, often there is a particular start path that is basically agreed on by the dominant group, and other paths that align more with the minority groups. One setting where this is evident is when you have an older, more experienced engineer working with younger, less experienced ones. The older person is likely to try to fold in concerns about maintainability and flexibility at an earlier stage of the development process. Another example occurs when you have a disabled engineer trying to include disability-friendliness into the project earlier. When one or the other group is muted, the initial steps taken in the process may preclude the very real long-term effects on product applicability, maintainability and durability that the muted person is trying to convey.

Assumption 6: The best solutions emerge organically

“The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams.”

– Agile Manifesto

Because of its incremental nature and the mindset of being able to change your software and requirements early and often, there is an assumption that a good architecture and good products will emerge. Yet self-organization works well only when all of the team members are listening to each other and valuing each other’s input equally. However, as stated earlier, we tend to listen to and value the input of our own group above others. When one group dominates, the minority groups are often muted and unable to contribute things that would improve the architectures, requirements, and designs. In the long run, though, the dominant group does not retain the key to the best architecture, or the best requirements, or the best designs.

This muting of the minority groups has an impact in the longer term on the group composition. Because they are not listened to, the members of the minority groups are seen as not contributing to the architecture, requirements, and designs. As a result of their muting, they become less valuable to the group, and eventually the group ‘self-organizes’ them out. When a person is not listened to and is organized out, often the architectures, requirements, and designs are not as strong, creative, and durable as they would have been had the person’s input been considered more deeply.

Call to Action

Despite what I have said above, I do believe that Agile is a really good step forward in software development processes. I do appreciate not being trapped in the days of ever-changing requirements documents with little or no development time. Those were very discouraging and unproductive times.

So what is there to do next? How do we move forward from here? I would say, the answer is mostly in the who, not the how. Ask the groups who were muted because they were not represented in the original process of developing the Agile manifesto. Let them map a path of change from within.

One of the Agile strengths is that it bakes in time and space for reflection into the software development process.

“At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly.”

– Agile Manifesto

Reflection allows time and space for thinking and improvement. Now is a good time to apply these reflection principles to the Agile manifesto itself. 

This retrospective process is an exercise that should include all sorts of diverse members across the software development and Agile community. We need to listen to their stories. Where is it working well? What could be improved? Specifically, what aspects of Agile could be improved to facilitate the software and tech industry in the process of becoming more diverse, inclusive, and equitable? How can we open up the discussion to enable people in minority groups (gender, race, neurodiversity, disability, etc.) to speak for themselves about where improvements can be made, and to express concrete changes? How can we change the agile ceremonies, assumptions and metrics to ensure that all working and communication styles are accommodated and no voice is muted?

Learning to listen, understand and accept what everyone has to say despite our own biases is a key competence to develop and use throughout this retrospective process. This means looking at different modes through which underrepresented people can communicate their ideas and concerns. A second key element is understanding and embracing the long-term value of inclusion and diversity within software development. A third key element is developing the underlying mindset that diversity is a win-win proposition for all – a mindset that brings everyone to the table naturally.

Agile naturally incorporates the willingness to evolve and improve our processes. We already do this with our technical processes and our day-to-day working together, but we can expand this approach to improving our recognition that each person on the team as someone who belongs, has strengths and has unique contributions to make. Teams work best when all members work to communicate, understand and trust each other better, and where people work through their differences respectfully.

Listen. Value. Include. The Agile process inherently supports teamwork and evolution. In the spirit of Agile, it is time to do a deep meta-retrospective on the Agile manifesto and the processes and rhythms that derive from it.


[1] Griffin, Emory A (2011). A First Look at Communication Theory. New York: McGraw-Hill. ISBN978-0-07-353430-5.

We All Need To Do the Work

Posted on by mistynodine
A colony of Adelie penguins on the Yalour Islands in Antarctica.

Summary

We begin with the premise that the ability to sustain diversity in your company and to reap its advantages requires good inclusion practices to be built into your company culture. For your company to be inclusive, everyone needs to do the work to bridge the cultural and communication gaps between people of different races, ethnicities, genders, neurotypes, abilities, backgrounds and experiences. Diversity practices run into difficulty when policies and structures are centered around dividing people into groups and treating employees in different groups differently. Inclusion practices give each employee a place of belonging and provide for both development and accommodation universally across all employees. An inclusion culture enables a diverse employee group to thrive, and naturally attracts a more diverse job applicant pool.

Examples of good inclusion practices include:

  • Embracing diversity as a benefit and a corporate value, from the top down.
  • Ensuring that the diverse population is represented at all levels and in all functions of your company.
  • Encouraging a culture of respect where employees listen to, make space for and work to understand all of their fellow employees.
  • Assuming all employees are competent, honest and desire to do well until proven otherwise.
  • Communicating clearly and regularly with each employee about expectations, tasks, and any difficulties they might be experiencing.
  • Collaboratively resolving problems and conflict, being sure all sides have been able to air their concerns before determining paths forward, and that the path forward is both realistic and addresses the concerns of all sides.

A couple of years ago, I quit my job in technology. I love technology and really enjoy thinking about data and efficiency. However, there was another concern that I wanted to spend some time thinking about, and that was that there were so many autistic people I knew that were having a hard time interviewing, finding a job, and (more importantly) sustaining that job. 

Over the years, beginning with my very first job, I have worked with many people who presented in the way an autistic person does. While I never asked for any diagnoses, I was to some extent able to appreciate the challenges that they face. Furthermore, I actually had very positive experiences with many of them – lots of creativity, thinking out of the box, innovative solutions to things, a strong focus and desire to get the job done. So why was the work environment often so unfriendly and inconsiderate towards them?

I thought, with my experiences both as a parent of an autistic child and as a person who worked with many autistic people, I understood where they were coming from. I thought that my experiences as a basically minority population (older women) in a field that was dominated by a different population (younger men) would have taught me what it was like to be in a situation where you were chronically misunderstood and discounted. I thought that my good intentions would prevent me from doing anything that would hurt or discount the population I wanted to support. I was so wrong.

With my considerable google skills at hand, I set out to figure out what the existing best practices were to support autism in the workplace. I started to grasp the concept of neurodiversity, and instantly sought its benefits. However, I was also picking up on a lot of material coming out of a deficit or disorder view of autism.

I tried laying out my ideas on how to support this new concept of neurodiversity into some sort of a training or teaching methodology that I could use to help non-autistic people understand their autistic coworkers better. This resulted in a set of training slides that I was trying to refine. Thankfully for all involved, at that time I also had the good fortune of meeting Tim Goldstein, an autistic person who does neurodiversity training. He volunteered to review the training slides for me from his autistic perspective. I jumped at the opportunity to get such useful feedback.

I do not remember much about what Tim said to me after he read the slides, but I do very vividly remember my main takeaway: “You should listen to some more autistic people before trying to do something like this.” Wow. Great feedback, directly to the point, in true autistic style.

So, what did this experience teach me? One of the things I took away from that experience is that no matter how many biases I have experienced against me, and no matter how much I have worked to go against my own unconscious biases, I still have things to learn. Even though I thought I had a handle on some aspects of diversity due to being a female engineer I did not actually have a handle on neurodiversity. Just because I have been disregarded, put down and muted does not mean I do not do the same to others, intentionally or unintentionally.

Having both desire for and experience in relating with people who are very different from me did not prevent me from big mistakes in the area of diversity. One huge mistake I made was not considering representation – basically, that if you are talking about or speaking for some group, your primary input on what you are saying comes from members of that group and vetted by members of that group. Better yet, you do well just to amplify what they are saying themselves. The people in a minority group are much better experts on that group than people who have studied that group but are not a part of it. 

When I listen to representative people in a group, I gain a better understanding of their experience. When I listen respectfully, with an open mind, and through the lens that we are all fellow humans here on earth – then I gain the wisdom that comes from their direct experiences and thinking. When I listen to many people in a group in order to get a feel for the group, I learn the span of diversity within the group and can respond to each member as an individual, but within their group’s common experiences and context. This holds both for when I am a member of an advantaged group listening to members of disadvantaged groups, and vice versa.

This whole process led me to think about inclusion a lot more than I had been. I had a diversity mindset, but it was abundantly clear to me that I did not have an inclusive mindset.

Diversity-First Thinking or Inclusion-First Thinking?

True inclusion is not about managing groups and getting groups of people to get along. It is not about categorizing people so that we can attach them to our favorite generalizations about that kind of person and what they need or desire. It is not focused on things like genders, races, religions, cultures or abilities – ideas which divide people. 

Why do I say that grouping ideas divide people? Start with the fact that in any social situation, power is already distributed unevenly. Because of this, any grouping concept can and often will be used by the groups that are more powerful to maintain and increase their power over the groups that are less powerful. People in the groups that are less powerful fight back just to receive the same considerations and benefits as those in the more powerful groups. Being in one group or another defines your experiences. Your lack of shared experiences with the other group hinders dialogue, empathy and trust. In this way, dividing people in groups sets up unhealthy patterns of antagonism and opposition between the groups.

True inclusion means moving from the notions of “us” and “them” to the unified notion of “us”. It is about helping everyone understand one another and learn how to incorporate everyone’s strengths into the team. It is looking at each person and treating them as a valid, equal partner with their own individual abilities, desires, history, experiences, needs and concerns. Some people historically have been muted – their input has been ignored, spoken over, marginalized and/or mocked. For those people, treating them equitably means paying special attention to their voices and elevating those voices to the point where their input is considered on an equal footing with others’. When there is a conflict, treating people equitably is about each side listening to and working to understand the concerns of the other side, and looking for solutions to the conflict that meet everyones’ concerns. Inclusion means we are all in this together. We look for input from all involved. We solve problems with all involved. We all do the work together.

Doing inclusion well naturally leads to doing diversity well. That is, how well a company does inclusion has a direct impact on how well they do diversity. Diversity increasingly is becoming important in the workplace. The benefits of including diverse employees in a company are well-documented – for example, see  [Why Diverse Teams Are Smarter], [How Inclusion Matters], [Neurodiversity as a Competitive Advantage]. Diversity improves when a company in its core values, from the executive level down, believes that diversity is advantageous and desirable. The best people I have worked with are those who truly looked at diversity as an advantage, an enabler for more relevant and creative work.

Diversity metrics are useful in keeping an eye on things, but true diversity can be hard to measure. Diversity metrics can leave unmeasured populations out – for example, an autistic white male may be counted as being in an advantaged population (white men) when in actuality he is in a very disadvantaged population (autistic). Additionally, the things you may be interested in measuring may be things that an employee does not want to disclose. 

While diversity metrics may be useful, the metrics themselves inherently group and divide. Because of this, diversity metrics need to remain firmly as evaluation metrics, used for seeing where biases still exist within a company. Since doing inclusion well enables doing diversity well, the place of diversity metrics is to give the company an indirect window on the strength of their inclusion culture. When diversity metrics are used instead to drive the hiring and retention processes in the company it is like putting the cart before the horse.

Rather, the focus on hiring and retention does best when it is driven by inclusion considerations. When a company focuses on inclusion, they incorporate hiring and retention processes  such as Universal Design Inclusivity, an approach to diversity that is coming out of the neurodiversity movement. It is a different kind of thinking – one that comes from realizing that we all are different, we all have strengths and needs, and we all do best when the company universally strives to give us work that fits into our strengths, and accommodates us based on our individual needs. Everyone is supported, and no one is left out.

How do we become more inclusive?

In my article Breaking Out of In Group Thinking, I talk about the notion of in-groups and out-groups. Psychological group theory brings us directly to the point that we all have to work against our nature in order to be inclusive and welcoming to people who are different from us. We never completely get there. Yet, we also consider that America was predicated on a declaration that states that all are created equal, that we all have the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Being inclusive and treating all people equitably is a goal worth striving towards.

Work towards diversity at all levels

From differences come balance and completeness

Diverse representation at all levels means that the groups, departments, and seniority levels within your company all have a wide range of different kinds of people, and that within such a diverse group all employees operate on equal footing. Each person respects, listens to, and responds to each other person in the team – there is no favoritism. Diverse individuals occupy significant roles – in the executive suite, in human resources, in product development, in operations. If your company just engages a token diverse Human Resources person, or engages in diversity theater without real impact among the employees, this is not diverse representation. 

Diverse representation means that employees are connected with and teaming with people both very like themselves and people who are very different from themselves. More marginalized populations can benefit from connecting with people who have similar experiences, cultural backgrounds, strength/weakness profiles both in hiring and mentoring. However, they also benefit from things that currently often only can be provided by the less marginalized populations – sponsorship, mentoring, networking and career development. Similarly, more dominant groups benefit from communication skills and understanding of differing viewpoints that come from the more marginalized populations, leading to greater creativity and to the development of products that support a wider range of people. Thus, diversity benefits everyone.

A company also benefits when diverse representation is present during the hiring process. Much can be learned about the interviewee by looking at them through different lenses and different experiences. For example, an autistic interviewer is likely better able to understand the capabilities and competencies of a fellow autistic interviewee, while a non-autistic interviewer may better be able to judge how best to enable the team the interviewee is interviewing for to create a welcoming environment for them.

Model and encourage listening and collaboration

Problems happen when someone isn’t listening

When you are interacting with a person who is different from you, has different communication patterns from you, and responds to experiences differently from you, listening to them is the key to understanding how to work with them and to support them. An equitable organization supports and models good listening practices at all levels of management, and especially at the executive level. An inclusive organization is characterized as a place where everyone is listened to, where everyone’s voice is considered valid, and where everyone can speak in safety.

When you are interacting with a person, no matter what your initial impression is, it helps to set the relationship off with a good footing when you presume competence, honesty, and an intention to do well. Is Joe describing how a work situation is affecting him? Assume Joe is competent to evaluate that situation’s impact on himself, even if you would have reacted very differently. Is Mary stating that she would be able to focus better if she had a more secluded cubicle? Assume she is competent to figure that out, as opposed to thinking she is being manipulative to get a better cubicle. Is Alex struggling with a challenging relationship? Listen with empathy, and without offering unsolicited advice. Alex probably has already thought about whatever advice you are about to offer. This is not to say that people are always competent, honest, and desiring to do well – rather, it means that it helps to start out from this presumption until proven otherwise. The lens you listen with will affect the whole conversation.

A second key component to listening is to ask open ended questions. Open-ended questions are ones that invite complex answers, and do not predispose the person to answer in a specific way. During my coaching training, and as a practicing coach, I have learned the value of open ended questions and how they empower people to express themselves more deeply and reflectively. Questions that are not open make assumptions that the answerer may not share, or even that they find irrelevant or demeaning. Open-ended questions give the responder the freedom to reply in their own communication patterns, according to their own thought processes. Thus, they are an efficient strategy to enable understanding of commonalities and differences between the participants.

A third key component is to give people space to process the question, reflect, and formulate an answer. When two very different people are interacting, their thought patterns and communication patterns are different. When you ask such a person a question, they need to reflect on the question and what you are actually asking, and translate it into their own patterns of thought and communication. Then they need to reflect on the translated question, which may be something they have not previously considered or thought about. Once they come up with a response that they are willing to share, they then need to translate that response into a form that you, the questioner, will be more likely to understand. Processing, reflecting, and responding to the question takes time – the more differently you think, the more time it will take. However, taking time at this point to wait for a thought-out answer helps prevent misunderstandings. Misunderstandings can waste time later; the current wait is worth it.

Finally, it is important to remember that each person that we interact with is facing their own challenges – possibly a diagnosis, or a stressful circumstance, or other situations in the work environment that you are not aware of. Each individual has the right to decide how much of their personal challenges they are comfortable talking about, and to whom. Listening in this space, where you realize that there may be other things going on that you do not know about and have no need to know about, and not pushing or forcing the person to disclose what they do not want to disclose, has the effect of building trust and support. It is okay to accept a person’s input and requests as being valid even though you do not understand all the reasoning and circumstances behind it.

Communicate clearly across the organization

Communication is key to organizational health

Looking at the nature of in-groups, out-groups, and muting, we see that the issue that divides groups is that each group uses language in different ways – thus, the nature of the divisions among us are rooted in communication. Listening helps us understand our communication differences. The knowledge acquired through listening to each other gives us the understanding and facility to adapt our communication patterns to each other’s communication styles.

In order to do their job well, an employee needs to receive clear and understandable communication about the expectations related to their job, both in general and on a recurring basis. To ensure that a job expectation is understood, the employer does well to check back with the employee on their understanding of a job and its scope. The employee does well to ask questions to ensure that their understanding aligns with the company’s expectations. A good example of clear day-to-day communication is work items or tickets in the software development world. A good ticket specifies the requirements of a new software feature, defines who is generating the requirement – and thus, who needs to accept that the software implements the feature, and works according to a definition of “done” which clearly indicates when the work on a ticket is complete. This can be distilled to defining what needs to be completed, who are the stakeholders who will be using the finished product, and what the expectations are for a product to be completed.

Communication between an employee and their manager is key to a broader understanding and clarification of overall job requirements as well as expectations regarding team roles and responsibilities. Regular one-on-one meetings between an employee and their manager ensure that the employee has a discreet place to bring up uncertainties and struggles. Employees benefit when they have more continuous feedback on what the expectations are on them and how well they are meeting those expectations. When the employee is not meeting expectations, collaborating with them to identify where the challenges are and involving them in working through those challenges sets them up for success. It helps if these meetings have a rhythm of topics and questions that supports the manager in doing their work and ensures consistency of the meetings within an organization and management level. A consistent rhythm also systemetizes the management process, making it less likely for bias to be introduced within a given relationship. 

Lastly, and possibly the hardest communication to establish, are the processes around reporting and resolving conflict. This includes reporting difficult situations, reporting belittling and harassing behaviors and around resolving interpersonal conflicts. Especially in a company with increasing diversity, where the equity lessons are still in the early stages of being learned, communication differences will exacerbate interpersonal relationship challenges. When left unaddressed, conflict, harassment, and other undesirable situations increase. As with management meetings, it helps if there are regular, known, and possibly anonymous channels for raising concerns. One example is to put out regular surveys on how the employees feel, how connected they feel and how well they feel they are enabled to contribute to the company and to grow in their careers. Equally important to uncovering conflict is how it is resolved. In any conflict situation, it is crucial for all sides to be able to provide the input they feel is necessary for understanding their viewpoint. A good interpersonal resolution process is non-judgmental and collaborative, allowing each party to voice their side, listen to the other side, and respond to the other side before working together to come up with a mutually agreeable solution. It helps when this process is done under the mediation of fellow employees who are trained and skilled in listening and unbiased facilitation, especially when the conflicting individuals are at different levels in the management or social hierarchy.

In conclusion …

I believe that when a company strives for inclusion, at all levels and in all ways, then diversity and equity will follow. If you want your company to become more diverse and to remain more diverse, it requires a broad mindset change to one that embraces difference as an asset. An inclusive organization pays attention to things like representation, listening, communication and collaboration. These cultural values apply across the company, ensuring equity and a level playing field for all employees. The result is a win-win for all.

When You Listen to the Voices of the Non-Speaking

Posted on by mistynodine
A heard of giraffes roaming in Zimbabwe.

We have a strong but erroneous tendency to equate not being able to speak with lack of intelligence. When a child is growing up and their speech does not develop, we tend to make the assumption that the child is stupid. This is reinforced by the fact that our normal intelligence tests (IQ) tend to be biased towards verbal intelligence, and if you can’t speak, you get a low score just by the nature of the test.

While on the surface someone proficient in speech may believe this is a reasonable assumption, the more deeply I think about it, the less the idea that being able to speak is a requirement for intelligence and communication passes muster. Consider Steven Hawking, who lost his speech in 1985 and communicated entirely through devices until he died in 2018. No one doubted his intelligence or thought that he somehow became stupid for the last 33 years of his life. Similarly, while the accounts differ, there is general agreement that Albert Einstein developed speech much later than most people, yet there are no doubts about Einstein’s intelligence. On a more analytical level, if I consider the process of ‘learning’ in three parts – listening, understanding, and communicating that understanding back – then not being able to speak only really impacts the third part. In actuality, the learning process itself only requires listening and understanding.

Speaking requires many different capabilities to work together, many of which have nothing to do with innate intelligence. For instance, you need to be able to think in words or translate your thoughts into words. Yet, not all people think in words. Some think in patterns, or visually in movies or images. When you do not think in words, you need to be able to translate your thoughts into words. Secondly, you need to be able to pace your thoughts and your mouth together. If your mind is moving too quickly, you may forget the point in your thoughts where your mouth is speaking. Another point has to do with motor coordination — you need to be able to move your mouth and engage your vocal cords in the way you want in order to produce sounds, you need to get the tone and pronunciation right and the syllables all in the correct order, all while still remembering to breathe. People with apraxia have trouble with this kind of coordination. Also, anxiety or sensory challenges may mean that a person needs to be comfortable with the people they are talking to and/or the setting they are talking in as a precursor to being able to speak. This is called selective or situational mutism. While this is by no means a comprehensive list of challenges, it gives a flavor for the different barriers to speech that may occur.

Thankfully, with the advent of communication devices and a better understanding of how to support people through some of these barriers, non-speaking people are now able to communicate in ways that speaking people can understand. In the past year, I have read several autobiographies and other writings authored by or in collaboration with non-speaking people. In this article, I would like to cover four things that the non-speaking population consistently states that they long for — connection, safety, education and participation in society.

Connection

As I have read many of the writings of the non-speaking population, one of the huge things I see them talking about is directly related to the need for communication capabilities to support their ability to connect with other people, to express their needs and to empathize with others’ needs,  and to contribute to society in general. In his autobiography, Ido Kedar expresses it this way:

The hardest part of autism is the communication challenge. I feel depressed often by my inability to speak. I talk in my mind, but my mind doesn’t talk to my mouth. It’s frustrating even though I can communicate by pointing now. Before I could, it was like a solitary confinement. It was terrible having experts talk to each other about me, and to hear them be wrong in their observations and interpretations, but to not be capable of telling them.

Ido in Autismland. Ido Kedar, October 2008

Ido points out that not only do we need communication to feel connected, but also that communication is necessary to be understood and to express our needs so they can be met. Often, nonspeaking children are left alone with caregivers and teachers who do not understand the real impact their interactions are having with the non-speaking child. Even the most well-intentioned carers and teachers may have vast misinterpretations of the attempts a nonspeaker is making to communicate. For example, we often look at a person who is moving and wriggling and think this is from boredom or from a desire to escape a situation, or as evidence that they are not paying attention. A parent may respond to a wiggly child by trying to calm them down, or by trying to distract them. However, Naoki Higashida answers the question, “Why can you never stay still?” with a completely different explanation. He says, 

My body’s always moving about. I just can’t stay still. When I’m not moving, it feels as if my soul is detaching itself from my body, and this makes me so jumpy and scared that I can’t stay where I am. … I’m always struggling inside my own body, and staying still really hammers it home that I’m trapped here. But as long as I’m in a state of motion, I’m able to relax a little bit.

The Reason I Jump, Naoki Higashida, 2012

Safety

Non-speakers are frequent targets for bullying and abuse. When family members, carers or teachers are abusive, the nonspeaker has no means to communicate their experience and their side of a story. Children with developmental disabilities are more than twice as likely to be abused as people in the general population, and more likely to be abused more frequently, for longer periods of time, and by a carer or someone they know [Abuse and Exploitation of People with Developmental Disabilities]. Non-speakers are especially vulnerable. When they have been bullied or abused, their only choice is to communicate through behaviors that are often misunderstood or interpreted as ‘bad behavior’ that needs to be addressed. Attempts to ‘correct’ the behavior can lead to further trauma. For example, the person could have a meltdown when being sent into a place where they were being abused – having no other real option to communicate about the abuse. Yet, that meltdown may be interpreted as some form of deliberate, rebellious behavior that should be ignored. Ignoring that behavior, however, devalues the person and leaves them open for future abuse.

Peyton Goddard puts it this way (Note: FC is Facilitated Communication):

First, without a voice, never are people safe; second, … a voiceless person is easily and unbearably frustrated by behaviors they must resort to and the often incorrect interpretation of these behaviors. With FC, I finally gained a mode of dependable communication, which allowed me to tell the truth of my life and begin to relieve the fear which plagued me.

I Am Intelligent: From Heartbreak to Healing. Peyton Goddard, June 2012

Education

Without the ability to communicate what they know and perceive, we often assume that the non-speaker does not understand and is therefore intellectually disabled. Ido Kedar describes years where he was sitting in a classroom being asked to point at the blue card, knowing full well what the color blue was, but being unable to get his finger to point in the correct direction due to his apraxia. Several non-speakers whose autobiographical writings I have read talk about that ‘aha’ moment for their parents and educators when a non-speaking person was finally able to use a device to communicate what they were thinking, and then could communicate how much they really had learned. An example that is fairly typical from my readings is this one, from Hari Srinivasan, who is now a student at UC Berkeley:

By middle school I had been placed in a segregated non public school which was to be my life till I was 22 and then be sent to an adult day program for the rest of my life. 

Education and the chance to be a contributing member of society was like a candy store with me on the outside looking longingly in. Finding a way to communicate and a charter school was what gave me that alternative access to mainstream education as a teenager.  The psych-ed assessment conducted by my charter school when I first joined, placed me at college level english and at 12th grade math. … I made valedictorian in High School. How about that!!

Access to higher education for individuals like me is hard-won and I am now absolutely thoroughly enjoying and just savoring my undergraduate years at UC Berkeley and all the opportunities it has opened up.

https://uniquelyhari.blogspot.com/p/about-me.html

Representation

One of the key lessons I have learned from the non-speaking population is that their experiences and understanding are so different and complementary to the experiences of the speaking population that when speakers try to understand them or represent their experience they often get it vastly wrong. Yet the speaking population tends to ignore or talk over the non-speaking people. This devalues them and demeans them. Rather, we need to figure out a way to bring their experiences and understanding into our own day to day society, and to learn from them how best to leverage their unique strengths, skills and perspectives.

CommunicationFirst’s short film, Listen, was produced recently in response to the releasing of a movie about a non-speaking autistic person that was produced entirely without consulting any actual non-speaking autistic people (or any autistic people for that matter). They say:

If you always leave us out, people think we are not able to participate. That’s why most people don’t realize that we have a contribution to make. … Ask us. Listen to us. Nothing about us without us.

Narrator, Listen

Connection, Safety, Education, Representation. These are basic and inalienable rights that have long been denied to the non-speakers among us. So today, on Autism Awareness Day, I want to encourage you to listen to the voices of the non-speaking people. They have a lot to say.

Notes on the People Quoted in this Article:

Ido Kedar graduated high school with a GPA of 3.9 and is in college. He communicates using a letter board or by typing on an iPad. He learned to type independently on an iPad to refute skeptics who thought his facilitator was the one actually typing when he was using the letter board.

Naoki Higashida was 13 years old in 2007 when he wrote The Reason I Jump. He learned to communicate using an alphabet board. He continues to write books, fairy tales and poems. 

Peyton Goddard is an advocate for inclusion in education and society. She graduated from Cuyamaca College as class valedictorian in 2002. Peyton learned to communicate on a keyboard using Facilitated Communication.

Hari Srinivasan is a student at UC Berkeley, class of 2022, majoring in psychology. He is a member of Phi Beta Kappa, a student instructor in a class on autism, and a board member of the Autism Self Advocacy Network. Hari learned to communicate using a keyboard.

The High Cost of the Mask

Posted on by mistynodine

Last year I spent a lot of time thinking about camouflaging / masking / code switching. These terms are all related to a response that a minority or muted group has to try to ‘fit in’ in situations where the dominant group is making an implicit cultural requirement on a minority group to behave in a way that is not natural to them. Masking is one of the consequences of in-group thinking, in that the person in the minority group who is masking feels obligated to act in a way that is acceptable to the dominant group. The requirement to mask imposes added cognitive load on minority groups.

Masking is exhausting and demeaning. When a person feels the need to mask, the effort put towards masking detracts from their energy to do their job. It also takes away from group productivity in that the group is not taking advantage of the full benefits of the diversity in the group and of the different perspetives of the minority members. Finally, when a person feels compelled to mask, this forces them to suppress their identity, takes away from their sense of self-worth, and detracts from the value others place on their work and their contributions to the team.

The original LinkedIn article can be found here.

When I left my last full-time tech job over a year ago, I left partly because I could look back over the years and see that over time, my neurodivergent co-workers were having an increasingly difficult time in the technical workplace, and I wanted to work towards amending that problem in some way. I had been aware of this issue for a while; twice in my past few jobs, I asked management to put someone on my team who I thought might be neurodivergent; in both cases I was told no, and in both cases the employee eventually left the company.

There is a growing recognition that diversity in general and neurodiversity specifically are important drivers in innovation, creativity and process. For instance, see The Business Case for Diversity in the Workplace is now Overwhelming and Neurodiversity as a Competitive Advantage. Neurodivergent people process information differently from neurotypical people, which means that they are predisposed to thinking outside the box and seeing problems from different angles. They often see details that many other people miss; some can understand code visually as opposed to just a bunch of lines on a screen. 

What drives neurodivergent employees away from a workplace? I would say that one reason is that underlying all of this is the sheer exhaustion of their being required to ‘fit in’ to a society that was not designed for them, using a process they call ‘masking’ or ‘camouflage’.

Masking / Camouflage and Diversity

So what is masking? I remember back in my early days in tech, back in the 1980s, when I was one of the few women who were interested in and capable of programming a computer. On the one hand, I really enjoyed those days. They were fun and inventive. On the other hand, I did have to think consciously about some things — for instance I developed a concept of defensive dressing, which meant that I did not wear anything to work that would be even vaguely interpreted as sexy. I did my best to assimilate into the male culture and not look too odd. I learned to laugh at and tell dad jokes. I learned not to react to offensive and sexist language. You see similar sentiments expressed in the first half of the Pixar short Purl. In retrospect, this was my first introduction to masking-like behavior.

There is also plenty of evidence that this sort of thing happens with other minority groups as well For example, see The Exhausting Burden of Code-Switching for White People. Here, Carl Anka talks about, “… the need or belief that I have to show a mask to the world to protect myself and any future Black people who walk through the door …”. He speaks of the need to mask, not only as a survival tactic for himself, but also as a requirement to protect his race, other people like him.

The gap that neurodivergent / autistic people have to cross to fit into our neurotypically driven society is relatively large. Therefore, their use of masking or camouflaging is quite pervasive. “Camouflaging is often about a desperate and sometimes subconscious survival battle,” says Kajsa Igelström, assistant professor of neuroscience at Linköping University in Sweden [The costs of camouflaging autism]. In the autistic person’s experience, masking becomes a lifestyle for survival, and this lifestyle causes them to ignore their own needs and their natural way of going through life for the comfort of the people around them. The result of this is exhaustion, social anxiety, and (unfortunately) an increased risk of suicide [Is Camouflaging Autistic Traits Associated with Suicidal Thoughts and Behaviours?]. 

When is Masking Toxic? 

We all adjust subtly to the people around us in order to fit in better; in fact, any relationship involves a certain amount of give and take towards each other. However, at some point this behavior becomes exhausting, toxic and identity-sapping. 

There are many reasons why masking has these awful effects on the person doing the masking. One big one has to do with the majority/minority subgroups within a group. When one type of person forms the majority in the group, they typically create a group culture that revolves around their own ways of thinking and doing things. This creates an adjustment imbalance in the group, where a few people are required to do all of the adjusting while the majority does relatively little adjusting. This imbalance basically communicates that the people in the majority have more intrinsic worth than the rest of the people, which is incredibly demeaning; hence, this leads to a harmful work environment for the minority.

There is also the issue of who is placing the burden to mask on the individual. Many of the articles on masking state that the person masking sees it as a requirement to survive, or to gain respect, or to fit in. In these situations, the masking becomes an imposition. Even in the case where someone chooses to mask in order to ‘look normal’ or make a good impression in a job interview, it feels like an imposition, especially when the behavior they are masking does not impact their ability to do the job. I think we would all agree that when a person imposes their desires or behaviors on someone else, explicitly or implicitly, it is destructive and counterproductive.

Another issue is that masking requires studying and imitating other peoples’ behavior, not behaving in a way that comes naturally to you. Thus, a person masks by developing a conscious set of scripts, behaviors, or ways of speaking that do not make intuitive sense to the person making the adjustment. For example, the article 21 Job Interview Tips: How to Make a Great Impression provides advice like, ‘The interviewer should extend their hand first to initiate a handshake. Stand, look the person in the eye and smile.’ However, if you are autistic, the sensory experience of looking someone in the eye can be overwhelming. If a person is trying to learn to make eye contact ‘normally’ for American society, they may have a running dialog going, ‘now I need to make some eye contact … oops 10 seconds is too long … maybe they thought I was creepy? … look away for a sec … wow this feels awful … is that long enough? … ‘. The issue here is that they are expected to be as fully functional in the situation while taking up part of their cognitive load to figure out how to manage their scripts around their sensory discomfort. Anyone who has tried to have a conversation with someone when there is an annoying noise in the background like a loud, piercing tone will be able to relate somewhat to this challenge. For someone to feel they need to mask in a situation places an unfair cognitive load on a person. A person interacting with them judges them both based on their reduced cognitive capacity and any ways in which their scripts differ from what would normally be expected in the situation.

How Do We Adjust?

How can you tell if a person is masking to the point of toxicity? One good guideline is to look at the general well-being of the individual. Are they showing symptoms of exhaustion or disorientation? Social anxiety? Depression? Is the person’s (normally adequate) productivity decreasing? Is their ability to be resilient and emotionally regulated decreasing? Are they sick often?

In these situations our first response is often judgmental or condemning. If someone has a fit of temper in the office, for instance, this often leads to office gossip and disapproval. Yet, the person may truly regret having lost their temper. A good question to ask here is not so much, ‘Why did they lose their temper?’ as ‘Why did they need to lose their temper?’. Similarly, if someone starts crying, a good thing to try to understand is, ‘What (emotion) are they trying to communicate by crying?’. Our behaviors are ways we communicate, and if a person is not communicating in a ‘socially-acceptable’ way, they still are trying to communicate something, so it is important for others to listen. In these situations, it is possible that their efforts at the ‘socially-acceptable’ way of communicating have failed, they do not have a script for the situation, and things have snowballed  from there. I recall one situation where someone was yelling, ‘If I tell you I do not know how long it will take me, it means that I actually do not know how long it will take me!’ The initial failure to communicate provoked the outburst; thus some of the fault for the ‘bad behavior’ rests on the person who did not listen to their colleague in the first place.

If you see signs of toxic masking in a teammate, colleague, or in someone you manage, how can you adjust to ease their situation? The key here is respect. We respect our coworkers by listening to them, and by accepting what they say even if we do not fully understand it. We respect our coworkers by asking them how we can adjust our behaviors and situations to ease their burdens — by effectively taking some of the adjustment requirements off of their shoulders and taking them on our own shoulders. We respect our coworkers by valuing them as peers, rather than trying to use power or privilege to make things more comfortable for ourselves.

The Cost of Masking

In order for us to have a truly diverse workplace, everyone needs to be able to bring their full selves to the workplace. Requiring people to mask in order to ‘fit in’ not only exhausts them, it also prevents us from taking advantage of the full strengths that their diversities provide. Requiring people to use ‘acceptable’ language and social cues places a cognitive load on them which saps their ability to apply that brain power to other things. The mental effort required by a person to make others more comfortable takes away from the time and effort they have available for actually doing their jobs. Masking then is all about the privilege of the majority culture, and it is a diversity squasher.

The cost of the mask is not only to the person doing the masking, although that cost is significant and not to be ignored. The cost of the mask is also to your workplace and its wellbeing. The cost of the mask is an inability to use all employees to their fullest capacity, and to have everyone be successful and engaged. The cost of the mask is a loss of innovation, creativity, and productivity. 

Giving people the freedom to take down their masks in the workplace requires adjustment by all for the purposes of building trust. When people can come to the office and know that their colleagues want to listen to them and understand their worldview and viewpoints, when people can accept that something might be true that they don’t really understand, then we can start building the trust required to enable people to start unmasking. It is only once people can be comfortable unmasking that we will be able to take advantage of the full benefits of diversity.

Breaking Out of In Group Thinking

Posted on by mistynodine
Lone Gentoo Penguin thinks about approaching a group of Chinstrap Penguins on the Antarctic Peninsula.

This article was originally published on LinkedIn: Breaking Out of In Group Thinking.

This article discusses some of my thoughts around group psychology and its impact on developing a diverse and inclusive workspace. I believe that some of the psychological concepts discussed in that article – in and out groups, muting – have a direct impact on how we treat others at work, and especially those who are very different from ourselves.

It is important to note that by this time I had had a rather long career in tech. I had graduated from MIT, worked in many different tech jobs, gotten an advanced degree, been the technical lead on several research teams, been a Principal Investigator on a DARPA (US government) research project, led a data science team, and had many other accomplishments under my belt.

The interviewer showed up late, and started talking. He told me how it was so nice that I wanted to learn data analytics. He mentioned that they had some really easy problems to start on so I could learn gradually. He said that they would help me all I needed so I could have some early successes.

Clearly he had not read my resume. Clearly he was going off the fact that he was looking at a fifty-something woman who had the audacity to think she was qualified to apply for a senior position in data science. Though his words seemed like he meant to be encouraging or supportive, they were totally off the mark.

I tried to bring the interviewer up to date by bringing in anecdotes from my experience and by asking intelligent questions, but he did not appear to be particularly engaged in the interview nonetheless. Naturally I declined to continue with the interview process.

That day, the company I was interviewing with lost something. They lost the chance at hiring a person who had already proven herself to be competent and innovative, and who checked off every check box in their posted job requirements. They also lost the chance at having a different kind of voice – an older woman’s voice – to have input into the design and implementation of their products.

When you look at a potential or current coworker, do you think about how their differences could enhance your business or your team? Alternatively, do you look at coworkers who are different from you as less competent or harder to work with? Do you view diversity as enhancing or dividing?

In-Group Thinking

A long time ago, when the world was much more primitive, we as humans organized into tribes. A tribe was a group of people who lived together, supported each other, and protected each other. In this setting, it was natural for my tribe to distrust your tribe – each tribe was competing for stuff from the same pool, and you wanted your tribe to survive. 

We still maintain this mentality today, but I would argue that our notion of “tribe” has changed. Its original sense was, “a social group comprising numerous families, clans, or generations together with slaves, dependents, or adopted strangers.” [Merriam Webster] The more modern sense is, “a group of persons having a common character, occupation, or interest.” For example, when Steve Silberman wrote the book Neurotribes, he was discussing groups of people and their neurological similarities and differences. 

This same notion of tribes aligns well with the psychological notion of groups. Groups in the workplace identify with each other for a variety of considerations, including things like race, age, neurology, religion, ability or gender. Closely related to this is the idea of culture or cultural lenses, in that a group of people often identify together as a group because they share similar cultural lenses. In many cases, the people in the same group have similar backgrounds, similar experiences, and similar ways of reacting to others. Their language, both verbal and body language, revolves around common teachings and expectations. These all feed into the way they view, interpret, and interact with people outside of their group. The tribal mentality still holds.

I believe that much of our struggle with implementing truly inclusive workplaces is rooted in group psychology and how our minds work.  That is, underpinning the challenges of diversity and equity is the fact that our basic psychology is wired to be discriminatory. For example, in my interview experience described above, the interviewer clearly had me mentally grouped according to his notion of the technical abilities of the fifty-something year old women he knew. He had not taken an unbiased look at my experience. I was grouped and classified.

Group psychology says that whenever you have a number of people working together, they naturally form into groups. This natural clustering of coworkers has several effects. We mentally have an affinity towards people in our own group (our in-group), and attribute different levels of respect to others based on their groups. The predominant group at work defines the tone of the working conversations. It dominates the values, thinking processes, communication processes and working practices of the group. The coworkers who are in other groups then must make a greater effort to understand the predominant groups’s values and thinking, and take the effort to make their communication, and working practices to “fit in.” This innately places a higher cognitive load on the people in the other groups, which leaves them with fewer reserves for their actual work. This is explained in more detail in my article on masking [The High Cost of the Mask].

In addition to the increased cognitive load we have the issues of in-group favoritism and out-group negativity. In-group favoritism is “favoring members of one’s in-group over out-group members … in evaluation of others, in allocation of resources, and in many other ways.” Out-group negativity is “punishing or placing burdens upon the out-group.” Behaviors that are acceptable from a member of the predominant group are punished when done by members of other groups. For example, in a setting where males are predominant, if a male is assertive that may be considered as a leadership strength, but if a female does the same thing it is more likely to be considered to be pushy and a behavior to correct. Another place favoritism often occurs is in decisions about advancement and promotion. In-group favoritism leads managers to excuse deficits in a person in their in-group, assuming they will learn to do better. At the same time, these same deficits may be a barrier to advancement to a person in an out-group.

Finally, there is the issue that minority groups are often muted. The muted group theory implies that the predominant group is the group that creates the communication system, and that members of the minority need to learn that communication system in order to express themselves. Because the minority groups have different values, thought processes, etc., they may be unable to express their ideas clearly in the predominant group’s communication system. In fact, ways that they would express themselves naturally may be interpreted incorrectly by members of the predominant group. Consequently, the predominant group often fails to understand what the minority group is saying, takes the easy way out, and ignores or dismisses the minority group. This effectively mutes the minority group’s input. “Mutedness results from the lack of power and might lead to being overlooked, muffled, and invisible. [Griffin, Emory A (2011). A First Look at Communication Theory. New York: McGraw-Hill].

Because we as humans naturally form groups, with one group dominating, people who are not members of the predominant group inherently have problems with communication and fitting their working practices into those of the predominant group, with progressing in their careers due to additional burdens and punishments beyond those placed on members of the predominant group, and with speaking and speaking up in settings where their ideas are overlooked and suppressed. 

Becoming More Inclusive

So many of the inclusion problems in the workplace are effects related to groups, group privilege, and the reduced ability of muted groups to participate in the workplace at their full capacity. Because the notion of groups and group favoritism is so deeply rooted in our psychology, working against this mentality is challenging. As I have worked through my own journey to break free of my own biases and favoritism, I have specifically taken up certain cultural values. Embedding these values into a workplace is an important step in making it more inclusive.

Learn to be comfortable with people who think differently from you and have different worldviews and values.

Get to know people from different groups, cultures and mindsets. When we do not know multiple individuals in some other group, we tend to stereotype them, and this stereotyping leads to biases. Getting to know a wide variety of people helps us to remove that tendency to stereotype, which helps get rid of some of the bias.

As a data engineer, data scientist and data architect I have been responsible for creating and maintaining data and model pipelines to support many different aspects of the businesses I have worked in. It was easy in my setting to get to know the people in the predominant group – in this case younger, male software developers. However, many times I was one of the few data people who regularly talked to the people who used the different data related products – the customers of the products as well as the salespeople, the business analysts, the finance people, etc. Often, these people were very different in terms of their priorities. The sales people wanted the sales data to stay consistent and predictable so that they had an easier time explaining it to the customers. The female customers wanted to make sure there was no gender bias out of the data. The older engineers were looking to make the pipelines maintainable and lower technical debt. Without getting to know these other kinds of developers and consumers of the data, and effectively un-muting them in our conversations, I would not have been aware of some of these priorities, and would have delivered data products that were less useful.

Part of learning to be comfortable with people who are different from you is learning to be comfortable in the space of not knowing or not understanding. Just because you do not understand another person does not mean that their thoughts are invalid. For example, when I first started talking to the sales side of the organization in a company, I could not really understand why their thinking could lead them to prefer less accurate but consistent data to more accurate but less explainable data. Initially, I had a strong value towards data accuracy that really went against the grain of what some of the sales people were saying. I had to accept that they had a different value long before I really understood what the differences were and why those differences were there. I think this also happens a lot with disability and accessibility. When I look at articles like I’m deaf and this is what happens when I get on a Zoom call, it is clear that the deaf worker’s team related much more to his issues when they had experienced some of what he was going through. However, for many, the experiences that shape their needs are long-term and harder to grasp. When we listen, accept and react to people’s stated needs without understanding, this goes a long way to giving them a sense of belonging in the group.

However you go about learning to be comfortable with people across groups, it is hard work. In Confronting Bias: Thriving Across Our Differences – How can you prevent yourself from saying the wrong thing?, Vernā Myers says, “. … If I would say there was any daily practice, it would be curiosity, but then also the willingness to do the work of understanding others.” We may start with accepting what we do not understand, but in the long run interactions smooth out when we can see the world from the other person’s perspective and understand their concerns. It is hard to reach out to, listen, and accept people we do not understand. It is hard to push into that, be curious, learn, and start to understand. It is hard work to develop bridges across the different cultures in the group. In the end, however, the ability of team members to build these bridges results in better team relationships, the ability to be inclusive with more diverse team members, and the benefits of being able to leverage the wider variety of experiences that a more diverse team brings to the table.

Look for where muting and exclusion is occurring in your team

Teams and workplaces have in-groups and out-groups. Out groups tend to be muted at least to some degree. We know this because we have terms related to muting appearing increasingly in our language – mansplaining and manterruption, othering, code switching, and many others.

You can start to understand where muting and exclusion are occurring by paying attention to lines of communication in the people you work with. 

  • In meetings, who is talking and who is not talking? Who is interrupting whom? Who is generating the ideas and who is taking credit for those ideas? 
  • In the company cafeteria, who is sitting together? Who is excluded? Who is talking to whom? 
  • When there are informal meetings, who is there? If the discussion involves a number of stakeholders in the topic of the meeting, who is not there? Why were they not invited? Are the same people consistently not being invited?
  • When there is a time of personnel evaluation and deciding on promotions, who is pushing for the promotions of whom? Are there characteristics that people are saying are desirable in one person and undesirable in another? What signs of favoritism do others see in you? What signs do you see in others?
  • In one-on-one meetings, what is the other person trying to tell you? If you ask them where they perceive that they fit in the group, would they say they are a critical member, on the edge, or somewhere in between? If they say they are nearer to the edge, can they articulate why they think that? How much do they trust you and the situation, so that they can speak frankly?

Once you have identified where people and groups are being muted, and by whom, you have a lens on who is actually in the in group and who is in some out group. You also, as a consequence, have a lens on where some of the unconscious biases are occurring in the different groups. This exercise, if done well, is bound to lead to some discomfort, as well as some realization of what needs to be done to bring the muted people into the work group. As you and your team become more comfortable working across cultures and groups within the workplace, you all will develop skills that will enable you to embrace inclusion more fully.

Listen and respond to every person’s voice

An inclusive group is one in which the ‘in-group’ contains all of its members. Every voice is listened to and no voice is muted. People whose voices tend to be muted have their voices elevated, and people who tend to dominate are encouraged to sit back and listen. The group that works towards being unified and inclusive develops a new set of customs, new methods of discourse and new ways of communication that are welcoming to all of the members.

When one of my companies updated their software development processes, one of the ways that they broadened their capacity to listen was with the increased use of anonymous brainstorming techniques. In Why Brainstorming Works Better Online, one of the things Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic points out is that virtual anonymous brainstorming enables feelings of anonymity, which means that ideas are judged more objectively. If we think about this in terms of muted groups, what virtual brainstorming does is to give the minority groups a chance to speak objectively and to have their ideas listened to and evaluated on the same footing as the ideas of the dominant group. Anonymous input is effective in many other areas as well – I have seen it work well for things like for asking questions after a presentation, and for soliciting input in retrospective-style meetings.

Having an open and thoughtful process for proposing new ideas, both large and small, is also a good way to create this kind of work culture. In Radical Candor, Kim Scott describes an “ideas team,” which was committed to listening to and responding to any idea that anyone brought to them. If the ideas team rejected the idea, they needed to give a clear explanation of why they rejected it. If they accepted the idea, they were empowered to give the person who proposed the idea some resources to actually work on it. No idea was allowed to be left to languish. This process empowered everyone to be able to suggest an idea and have it be considered seriously. Since the ideas team were independent evaluators, they could consider the idea with respect to its benefits to the company and not be swayed by team politics.

Approaches to idea generation like anonymous input and ideas teams enable groups to perform well partly because they naturally cause people to listen to a wider variety of inputs. The norm is to be dismissive of ideas proposed by people outside of your in-group, regardless of the merit of the idea. When you remove the option to respond according to group politics, you are forced to listen to a broader set of ideas springing from people with a wider variety of world views and experience. This alone may account for the increase in creativity and product relevance that comes when your groups become more diverse and inclusive.

Key Takeaways

Embracing diversity and inclusion requires reaching across groups and cultures, and learning to understand people with different values and world views. This process goes directly against our innate psychological tendencies to favor our in-groups and mute our out-groups. To reiterate, in a workplace setting, people who are not members of the predominant group have challenges related to fitting their communication and working practices into those of the predominant group, progressing in their careers due to additional requirements beyond those placed on the predominant group, and  having their ideas overlooked and suppressed.

Being welcoming and inclusive to a wide variety of people requires both a mindset shift and hard work. The mindset shift is to one that embraces and values diversity, and results in the building of a culture of diversity and inclusion into the day to day working values of the company. The hard work involves learning, looking and listening:

  • Learn to be comfortable with people who think differently from you and have different world views and values.
  • Look for where muting and exclusion is occurring in your team
  • Listen and respond to every person’s voice.

Having a more diverse and inclusive workplace both improves company morale internally and also correlates with concrete financial and brand benefits. It is hard work, but worth the effort.

On Coaching for Teamwork and Diversity

Posted on by mistynodine

My years of working in the tech industry taught me many things about teams, and the many characteristics you want to see in a team. You want the team to be productive. You want the team to be creative. You want the team to get along well. You want everyone to be willing and able to bring their full selves into the work of the team.

When teams do ‘team’ well, you see all of these characteristics, and the result is magical. Good interpersonal dynamics in the team lead to mutual trust and support, which boost creativity and productivity. The team works through conflict in ways that ensure that every voice is listened to and accepted.

Our mission is to support the creation and maintenance of work environments where all individuals are welcomed, respected and supported, all voices are listened to, and all are free to contribute their best. Achieving this goal requires building good teams, and not just teams with good ‘velocity’ or teams whose ‘task burn-down rate’ is steady.

This is where diversity enters the picture. There is mounting evidence that diverse teams also increase creativity and productivity. Certainly if your company has a more diverse team, it is better at understanding the needs of a broader set of consumers of your product — for example the article How Diversity Can Drive Innovation notes that “inherently diverse contributors understand the unmet needs in under-leveraged markets … a team with a member who shares a client’s ethnicity is 152% likelier than another team to understand that client”. A well-functioning diverse team brings a broader set of experiences, needs and values into product discussions, so the resulting product can serve a wider audience in a more intuitive way.

Building a team which is both diverse and good (by the characteristics above) is challenging. However, having good teams and having diverse teams both require the same soft skills – things like welcoming people who are different from you, listening to them, supporting them, understanding their situations. Diversity training teaches a lot of theory, but does not do much to help teams apply what they have learned to their team situations. In fact, some even find diversity training to be threatening, especially when not coupled with efforts to make all groups feel accepted and valued. Other trainings, such as training in communication, empathy and listening, also are beneficial for building good teams, but again, hard to apply. Coaching is an approach that can help solidify these lessons into concrete improvement — for example, a study on executive coaching shows that training with coaching dramatically increases productivity over just doing the training without the coaching.

Because of this, we advocate that you supplement your diversity training with coaching for teams and managers to help them apply the lessons they have learned into the daily operation of their own teams. Our approach is to work with you, starting from your own trainings, and to provide coaching to selected teams within your organization as related to those trainings. Coaching sessions include group sessions with the team, individual sessions with the team manager, and laser sessions (short sessions which focus on a specific situation) with individual members. Please come and check us out!