Neurodivergent observations on poor experiences with organisations
I am neurodivergent and my experiences with organisations have on the whole been pretty crap. In fact so much so, I really don’t want to have anything to do with them, which unfortunately is not always possible. To give you an idea of what the experience is like, imagine…
Wandering into a Victorian asylum like Bedlam, and watching the people there smear literal shit on the walls. When you point out what they are doing, they tell you it’s all completely normal, and it’s you who is the mad one.
I find it very hard to function inside organisations, I get extremely stressed. I can find myself being disliked, and in extreme cases I have experienced sustained bullying. My experience is similar to other neurodivergent people, who can also experience difficulty navigating the complex social systems which exist inside organisations.
Poor experiences past and present
I had been in a support worker job for a couple of months, when my manager approached me, and asked me how I thought it was going. I said okay, and she said, “Well… the team have complained that you don’t ask them about their holidays when they return.” I was floored. People disliked me, because I hadn’t asked about their holidays!? Seriously!?
To me the team felt pretty toxic, but was described by others as high performing. Apparently asking about holidays was good for team morale, but what I noticed was that some people got asked about their holidays and some people didn’t, with me being one of the people who weren’t asked, so whatever the rules were behind this piece of social etiquette it wasn’t applied universally. Lots of supposedly universal social rules are like that - there are always exceptions.
Fast forward to last year, I had yet another poor experience. I was asked to write an article for a therapy organisation. My article contained a quote from a neurodivergent client talking about ableism. My editor’s position was that the language in the quote didn’t meet their publishing standards, and wanted to change the words my client had used to express themselves. I knew that this was a no-no academically, and after talking to other people in the publishing industry I discovered it was considered a no-no more generally. I also contacted my ethical body who said that it would be unethical for me to accept the changes my editor wanted to make.
It seemed really obvious to me that people wouldn’t like their words being changed. I know I didn’t, the 30 odd people I had talked to didn’t, and my client definitely didn’t, but what really confused me was that my editor reacted as though it was inconsequential. So when I raised the issue of consent, my editor’s concern was with how that might impact deadlines. When I said that I didn’t think the editing was ethical, my editor responded that they would try to compromise, but the priority was the publishing guidelines. I said that the edits in my client’s quote were a red line for me, only for my editor to suggest changes I had said I wouldn’t accept. When I refused them, my editor told me that those suggested edits were in fact non-negotiable house style edits.
When we reached what seemed to me to be an obvious impasse, I withdrew and submitted a lengthy complaint. The organisation’s response was that they disagreed that the editing process was in any way unethical or discriminatory, and that my editor “was supportive, clear and helpful throughout this process.”
I noticed that there was a general lack of reasoning in their response, so I asked why they had disagreed that the editing was discriminatory. Their reply was, “suggesting edits is a requirement and it’s the responsibility of the editor to ensure what is published is of a specific standard.” Are they really arguing that ‘doing your job’ means you can not be discriminatory? The answer was also hard to understand considering, my complaint was about institutional discrimination, being caused by an uncritical adherence to institutional rules, practices and norms.
Can you see the madness I am seeing yet? What struck me was how similar this experience was to my previous experiences in organisations. Asymmetric relationships with unclear rules, which shifted depending on circumstance, being given reasons which read like excuses, trying to use clear communication only to be misunderstood, assumptions about what you are thinking and feeling (my favourite), talking at cross purposes, and presenting clear reasoning only to be ignored.
Neurotypes and social vulnerabilities
The question however is why does this happen. Well the official answer is because I have a deficit in social reciprocation. What that means is that I find it hard to read complex social systems, and so find it hard to produce socially accurate behaviour. I also struggle to read social hierarchies. To me, much of what I see going on looks like madness, and when I talk about it to people outside the organisation, they see it as madness too, but here is the strange thing. To the people inside the organisation they react as though it’s all completely normal. Now that to me seems very weird. What makes that happen?
Neurodivergent people, and in particular autistic individuals, are often thought to be naive and socially vulnerable, simply because they are neurodivergent. Interestingly though, non-neurodivergent or neurotypical people would not regard themselves as socially vulnerable simply because they have a typical neurotype. However, I am going to suggest that a key driver in my experience with organisations is because neurotypical people do in fact have a social vulnerability. One which they are almost completely unaware of.
Top-down processing and social hierarchies
Neurotypical people are primarily top-down processors. A neurotypical brain has a series of intuitive systems which can process information very quickly and accurately to provide global understandings. Reading a room, understanding motives, generating socially accurate responses is relatively effortless. Neurodivergent and autistic people in particular have fewer of these intuitive systems, instead we are relying on conscious cognitive systems, and so are largely processing from the bottom-up, hence the difficulty we have in social situations.
Top-down processes are built over time through trial and error learning, often with little conscious input. But because the processing is unconscious, it can be hard to verbalise, and there are number of experiments, such as the bystander effect, where it is clear people do not necessarily have insight into the decisions they make. So what we have is a system which is socially tuned, capable of learning and adapting to social situations, while offering little feedback on what it is learning, but is extremely good at enabling individuals to fit into social situations, particularly ones involving hierarchies.
A key feature of a hierarchy is asymmetry, thus ‘You can say things to me, which I can’t say to you’. Being able to navigate a hierarchy is something neurotypical people are extremely good at. I can very easily cause offence, such as when I failed to offer the correct amount of deference by asking the higher status staff about their holiday. In a similar vein, I believe that telling my editor their editing crossed a red line, and questioning the ethics, would have caused similar feelings of offence, especially as they specifically mentioned both these things in the ending letter they sent. And, because my response in that kind of situation would be quite different, it didn’t occur to me it could cause offence. In fact it didn’t occur to me until right now as I was writing that sentence!
Manufacturing socially accurate behaviour
If you ask me, a neurodivergent person, a question like, “Is your service discriminatory?” then the first thing that would happen is a burst of anxiety, that I might have got something wrong. This would be followed by a pause, accompanied by facial and vocal ruminations, and then some sort of approximate answer followed by a series of reasons why I thought what I did. My response looks this way because I am bottom-up processing the answer, which means thinking through examples of working with minority groups, how I responded, what unconscious biases I may have had, how I managed them, and was there anything I could do better, before coming to a conclusion.
If however you ask a neurotypical person the same question, you will often get a rapid intuitively derived top-down response, so they might say something like “No, definitely not, we treat every one the same.” There are two issues with this answer; The first is that the person won’t be fully aware of the processes which generated it, and this matters because top-down systems are typically concerned with producing socially accurate behaviour, not analysing complex propositions. The second issue is that the feeling of ‘rightness’ which happens with a top-down response anchors all other responses which follow it. It thus limits the information which can be accommodated, and anything which is beyond this limit will get discarded, which is typically experienced by others as not being listened to.
When someone is asked to reason a top-down response, what follows is not reasoning as I would understand it, but is rather a process of justification. They are typically limited in number, one or maybe two, as opposed to bottom-up processing which will frequently contain detailed reasoning chains. It’s not uncommon for the justifications to have logical errors in them. The justification above, ‘we treat every one the same’ is one example of fallacious thinking. Another is when the complaints manager, who was asked to reason why they thought that the editor wasn’t discriminatory, said that it was because they were doing their job, when clearly it does not follow that the application of publishing standards is inherently non-discriminatory. There is nothing unusual about this person’s response, I have had multiple conversations with managers and senior staff in other organisations, which also follow this pattern.
Perhaps, you can also see that when my editor turns consent into an issue with deadlines, and transforms an issue of ethics into a matter of compromise how this could potentially fit within a pattern of discarding information which is incompatible with a person’s top-down derived global understanding. One interesting pattern was that in the final letter my editor sent, they do not at any point acknowledge that the focus of our disagreement was the editing in the client’s quote. A similar thing happens in the complaint response. They acknowledge my concern with authenticity, but they do not acknowledge my main concern was ethics, and so they avoid addressing a central contradiction. How can you claim to be acting ethically, when your actions if carried through would lead to an unethical outcome? This experience was not unique, I have encountered very similar issues in other organisations.
So in summary, what we have is a system which is designed to help human beings form co-operative groups. It’s effects happen in the background, and has the power to create stable cultures. When new people arrive, this same brain system, enables them to rapidly absorb the culture, to produce the required socially accurate behaviour. And now perhaps that observation I made about people outside of an organisation being able to see the ‘madness’ is making sense. They haven’t been encultured into the beliefs and values of the organisation, so their top-down intuitive system is able to produce a quite different response.
Neurodivergent immunity
The same difficulty I have reading complex social structures also means that the usual absorption of culture by an intuitive top-down system, just doesn’t happen for me. I can only understand this stuff in an abstract cognitive way; I can’t understand it in a lived experience way, so I am basically immune.
My bottom-up system is a complex web of principles – much of the thinking in this piece is bottom-up processing – so when I encounter an organisational culture, it has to pass through this web of processing. So if I find something which conflicts with it, such as someone contravening rules I have on how quotes should be treated, it causes confusion and large amounts of dissonance.
It can only be resolved with a sufficient reason for why my understanding does not apply. Being told things like, ‘this is what we do’, ‘we’ve been told to do this’, and the classic, ‘we’ve always done it this way’ simply do not work. Along with many other neurodivergent people, I have had many ‘lively discussions’ with senior staff in my time working inside organisations. This top-down intuitive system which is primarily concerned with producing socially accurate behaviour, will often create a gap between the organisation’s stated policies and their actual practice, which makes very fertile ground for such discussions.
As I finish writing this, I am very much reminded of Daniel Kahneman’s “Thinking Fast, and Slow” I find it wild to think that social vulnerability isn’t just something that me as a neurodivergent person can experience; neurotypical people can have their vulnerabilities too. The world revealed to me by my slow bottom-up processing is rich and fascinating, and I think we would all be in a better place if more people used their own bottom-up processing to take a more critical look at the organisations and the social structures they are surrounded by.
While the article uses anonymised real examples from real people and real organisations, this should not be read as a criticism of a particular person or organisation, rather they should be understood as examples of the kinds of processes which can occur in any organisation.