When we recognize the diversity in our nervous systems, the problems with most organizational planning models become more evident, and we can start designing them for humans, not ideas.
If you work with more than one other person — and how many of us don’t? — you encounter diversity. When we design systems to improve our work, we design them to fit a singular model with certain traits in mind that are intended to transcend diversity. We do this in the hope of finding a system that works enough for everyone involved.
It rarely turns out as we’d hoped.
One of the great myths is that there is a set of ‘best practices’ that we can apply to a living system like an organization and produce consistent results for the people within it. Best practices are a distortion of an idea drawn from manufacturing where highly ordered, stable systems are used to create standardized, consistent, and predictable products and outcomes. This is mistakenly applied to human systems which are most often complex in nature.
This isn’t to suggest we can’t plan and organize, but there are reasons why human resources and management consume such a large amount of organizational budgets (for time, money and more). If we could design a system to work that was simple, easy to implement, and consistent things would be much easier. But as the famously attributed quote from H.L. Mencken says:
“For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.” – H. L. Mencken, “Prejudices: Second Series” (1920)
The Neurodiversity ‘Problem’
We are different in many ways, but the one that might be least understood is how our nervous systems differ from one another. Neurodiversity is a broad-based concept that reflects differences in how people’s brains and nervous systems react to things. It encompasses many qualities like cognition, sensory activation, attention, intelligence, and emotional disposition. This can manifest in attributes that are labelled or diagnosed as such things as Attention Deficit Disorder, autism spectrum disorders, Downs Syndrome, dyslexia, those who are considered intellectually “gifted” and many more. These characteristics can be advantageous or limiting depending on the perspective, situation, and context, and situate themselves within a realm of bio-psycho-social traits and capacities.
Most of what falls under the broad category of being neurodivergent is relatively new to us. We don’t have a long history of understanding how people develop, evolve or manage the various qualities tied to being neurodivergent, especially because the breadth of conditions that can apply to this category. The idea that our brains and nervous systems — not just our minds and thoughts — might differ from person to person is a very new idea. How these differences manifest within a human system in encounters with others (some of whom are neurodivergent, too), is even less known.
Clinical estimates of neurodivergence in the population suggest it directly affects between 15 and 20 percent of people. However, because the concept is still not evolving along with the knowledge about what constitutes neurodiversity and the attendant problems associated with diagnosis and screening with many neurodiverse conditions, this number is likely incorrect. Nevertheless, even if true, that means one in five people have nervous systems that enable them to think, feel, and experience the world in ways that are substantively different than others around them. Seeing that our thoughts and feelings serve as the core of our very being (who we are), that’s a profound insight and has considerable implications for how we design human systems like schools, organizations, governments etc.
This insight also has enormous implications for how we use evidence to make decisions and guide what we do. Aside from the issues of mis-specification tied to ideas of ‘best practice’ and predictive evidence (the ability to draw conclusions from one thing to predict another), neurodiversity might mean we need to rethink how learn from each other altogether.
Minds, Bodies, and Preferences
At this point it’s important to frame the context of neurodiversity within the fabric of our cultures. While the concept of neurodiversity is new, the characteristics that it represents are not. Human differences have always existed, they’ve just not always been understood or fully recognized. There’s nothing new here besides a label and the scientific understanding behind those labels. What these labels (or diagnoses or categories) can do is help frame the stories of lived experience from the millions of people who could identify or relate to one or more of the conditions. It opens up places for conversation where they didn’t exist before. These labels — which can be helpful and harmful — can help people feel seen, heard, and frame discussions about what people need and their preferences. This is enormously helpful for designers.
This attention to differences and preferences are part of what good design research does. What an awareness and understanding of neurodiversity does is provide us with context, yet it doesn’t fundamentally change what design research does. The aim when designing any system (or product, service, policy etc..) is to ensure our creations achieve what it sets out to do for whom it intends to serve in ways that limit or eliminate harms and amplifies benefits. Accounting for people’s needs, skills, capacities, and preferences is a critical part of this aspect of designing for living systems.
What attending to neurodiversity means is extending our inquiry beyond looking at certain preferences as something “nice to have“ toward more ”need to have” / “critical to have” for proper function. For example, those who wrestle with dsylexia require additional supports to ensure that they can learn and integrate their knowledge into activities in ways that more neurotypical individuals do not.
Lest people think this kind of design is some form of unnecessary ‘accommodation’, consider the myriad ways we already design our systems to reflect diversity of situations and needs of people within them. We have mentorship programs for people who are young in their career, flexible hours for parents who have chlidcare responsibilities, flexible job benefits to encourage, retain, and support our staff in performing their best, or offer occupational health and safety consultations to create work environments that reflect different physical . We do this all the time. We do it not just because it promotes equity and inclusion; we do it because it contributes to the value of our organizations.
We all want to be a part of systems where we can contribute and gain value, whether it’s our workplace, neighbourhood, faith group, sports club, or cultural community. Designing with neurodiversity in mind helps us do this.
Planning for (Neuro)Diversity
Design at its most basic is: planning + making.
The perils of planning in living systems is finding harmony or equanimity between common and uncommon qualities. How can we create policies that can govern these systems without overly constraining people’s behaviour and, in the case of neurodiversity, reducing everyone’s experience to an inaccurate base level? From the planning perspective, this comes down partly to the quality of the design research that goes into the work.
Lessons from complexity science are useful here. This involves creating system designs that are focused around using dynamic, flexible guides around attractors, rather than inflexible rules that don’t recognize differences. This requires systems that listen and learn, so the role of evidence is key here. Having quality information that is gathered and made sense of in ways that respect complexity is key.
Design research means gathering information that doesn’t feed into a hard set of structures and rules, rather a set of guides and learning questions that can be implemented in a way that will create a coherent set of policies and practices that can be tested against people’s preferences, needs, and circumstances. If we integrate a space for learning — with good evaluation information — into the design itself (not just at the initial research phase) we absolve ourselves of having to ‘figure it all out’ at the beginning and instead can learn how best to serve those of us with different ways of seeing, thinking, feeling, and reacting to the world. In doing this, we also have the benefit of creating systems that are tuned to the many other types of diversity we encounter in human groups.
What this approach does is simply widen our view toward foundational components of human experience that affect the environments we create for ourselves.
This might result in decisions around technology procurement and policies that reflect people’s attentional capacity, learning needs, and ways of retaining and using information. These designs might inform the physical environments we create. Neurodiverse-informed designs might also create performance management approaches that best reflect the skills and practices that align better with individuals to help them give and get the most for their work and workplace. These might not always differ from what we currently use, yet they hold the promise of reflecting much more of what makes us human and keeps us well.
Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash