Making it “too simple”

It can be difficult for newly diagnosed autistics to realise the ways in which the world doesn’t suit them because they (we) have never known anything else. It can also be very difficult for managers to know what they can do to be helpful. One tendency is to respond to someone revealing that they’re autistic by stopping treating them as an equal, which is a really bad thing. There’s a tendency to infantilise disabled people – to assume we’re stupid or can’t make our own judgements or choices, or work things out for ourselves. That can result in managers wanting to make tasks simple for disabled staff – which can be rather patronising. In the case of autism, a manager may know it’s a communication disorder and so try to make their instructions particularly simple, which can turn out really badly.

Unfortunately when a manager attempts to make a task simpler, it can actually make it much harder for an autistic person. That’s because our brains work differently. The way I process a task is to think about the desired outcome and work back. Unfortunately, managers are not always clear about the outcome we want(!) – possibly we only know an intermediate step that we want to get to. And in explaining the task to an autistic colleague we can’t actually say what we’re trying to achieve. The autistic colleague asks for more information – to know what the desired outcome is – and the manager, not understanding this different way of thinking, thinks they haven’t understood the task and makes it “simpler”. That still doesn’t give the autistic staff member what they need, so they ask for more, so the manager gives them something even simpler, and so out of misunderstanding the situation gets worse and worse.

This might be easier to visualise (for me if not for you!) if I offer an example dialogue. Which is obviously totally made up…

Manager: I’d like you to set up a meeting with Made Up Company Ltd please.

Autistic staff member: OK. I know Made Up Company Ltd is a major stakeholder of ours. Could you tell me a bit more about the meeting? [Thinks: I need to know what this meeting is for, and how important it is, so that I can explain when I contact Make Up Company, and so I can understand if it’s urgent or not.]

Manager: I’d like the meeting to be in a month’s time and to last about an hour – you should probably get a venue in Birmingham.

Autistic staff member: OK. Just so I get this clear – the meeting is for what, exactly?

Manager: It’s to get us and our major stakeholder together. We need to make a good job of it. Look – I’ll help you find the phone numbers of some venues in Birmingham.

Autistic staff member: But I don’t understand!! Also, I find using the phone rather difficult.

Manager: Hmmm. That’s unfortunate. I’ve made this as simple as I can for you – I think I’ll get someone else to do it. [Thinks: gosh this autistic staff member is a right idiot.]

That only has to happen a few times for the autistic staff member to lose all interesting work and get judged to be a poor performer. In fact, the problem isn’t that the autistic staff member is useless, but that they need to know what the manager wants the meeting to achieve in order to be able to process the request – the ultimate desired outcome. The manager hears the requests for more information as the opposite – wanting to be told exactly what to do first and how to do it. I’ll now replay the dialogue imagining that the manager has a better understanding of how their autistic colleague thinks.

Manager: I’d like you to set up a meeting with Made Up Company Ltd please.

Autistic staff member: OK. Could you tell me a bit more about the meeting?

Manager: I’m still mulling over exactly what I want to get out of the meeting, but part of the purpose is to build our relations with Made Up Company – it’s important that they feel involved in our work so they feel co-ownership of it.

Autistic staff member: OK. So this meeting is partly about managing relationships, and partly about ensuring we are working together as partners with Made Up Company, and there may be concrete outputs nearer the time. So we want to arrange this meeting in a way that makes them feel that we value them – not so soon as to rush them or so far in advance for them to feel we’re not that engaged? And we could make a point of going to Birmingham where their head office is rather than making them come to us?

Manager: Exactly that. Great ideas. Let’s say we try and fix it up for about a month’s time in Birmingham. I’ll dig out the email addresses of a couple of Birmingham venues for you, or you could ask Made Up Company if there’s a particular venue they like. I’ll confirm this in an email for you.

Autistic staff member: Great!

It’s not much different, but the manager comes away from the second dialogue impressed with the autistic staff member’s working out the best way to achieve the outcome of the meeting, and with a better understanding of that desired outcome themselves. Everybody wins!

Every autistic is different but knowing what it is that you’re trying to achieve can make a world of difference, specially if the way in which you’re going to achieve it isn’t what your neurotypical manager expects.