“I just want to understand your thought process”

Everyone’s had a manager (or interviewer) say “I just want to understand what you were thinking” or similar. But do they really? As an autistic person when you hear that question you might wonder where it’s coming from. An autistic brain works in quite a different way to the neurotypical majority, so is the questioner really interested or do they just want me to pretend to be like them more effectively?

It’s common in jobs, as it is in school exams and similar, to have to “show your working”. It’s not enough just to get to the right answer – you have to show how you got there and, in the workplace, get people to agree with you. Unfortunately for an autistic employee like me, how they got to the right answer might not be how a neurotypical person would have done.

I’m going to need to use an analogy to explain this because I find it literally impossible to envisage how my brain thinks, never mind anyone else’s. Imagine that sorting out a situation at work is the mental equivalent of getting to the top of the tree. So if a manager asks “did you sort that out?” then you (from the top of your tree) can say “yes – here I am at the top of the tree”.

The problem in this analogy comes when the manager wants to know how you got there. Possibly the neurotypical brain’s way to get to the top of that mental tree was to climb up standing on one branch after another. So a neurotypical employee can say the equivalent of “well, I stood on that branch, then I reached up and grabbed that other branch, then I pulled myself up etc etc.”

Unfortunately the autistic brain works differently. So in this tree climbing analogy I as an autistic person certainly found a way to get to the top of that tree but I might have done it by jumping out of a helicopter, or taming a giant eagle that carried me up there, or learning to fly, or warping the space-time continuum such that I transported myself up there. Those things all sound completely mad to you I presume – and therein lies the problem. Because my brain is different, what sounds completely reasonable to me in terms of thinking processes (and, what has demonstrably worked as I’m at the top of the problem tree somehow or other) sounds impossible, bizarre and totally mad to other people.

“So – really – how did you get to the top of the tree?” the manager asks. I’ve said I flew up there, and the manager is absolutely 100% certain that that’s both mad and impossible so it can’t have been that way. They want to know how I really worked it out. So, given I’ve told the truth about how my brain worked but been ignored because it just seemed too far away from my neurotypical colleague’s experience, I now have to think what to say. And what I would normally do at this point – and what a lot of other autistic people would end up doing – is try to retrofit how a neurotypical person would like to hear that I climbed the tree and describe a thought process that is completely alien to me merely in order to be believed. So there I am in the office (or, conceivably, in an interview), having to remember a figurative tree that I flew to the top of and then imagine how a neurotypical person would have climbed that tree. I have to imagine and describe the sequence of branches a neurotypical person would have stood on to get to the top, in spite of the fact that I have never done any such thing and such a way of thinking is just not how my brain operates. Difficult huh?

So – a big part of being truly inclusive is accepting that some people really do think completely differently to how you do. I have to accept that every day because I have an unusual brain. A nice reasonable adjustment for autistic colleagues in the workplace would be for colleagues to get more used to believing that brains can be different, and, when they ask “so – tell me how you thought that ought”, actually accept the truthful but bizarre-sounding explanation they’re given.