Transurban office Melbourne. Image by Tom Blachford.
I am a workplace designer. I spend most of my working life collaborating and communicating – both internally with my team and externally with clients and partners to create highly functional, beautiful workplaces. My work primarily involves communicating to a myriad of people mostly in corporate organizations who don’t understand ‘archi-babble’, translating our ideas into ‘corporate-speak’ and back again – kind of like a universal translator. But perhaps a hidden dimension is that I am, paradoxically, an introvert, albeit one who has learned how to be an extrovert. There are many times when I prefer to spend time on my own, in blissful silence. I enjoy socializing, but I recharge from being on my own. I know when I am all people’d out and have literally run out of words, and in many ways, I am who Susan Cain was writing about in her seminal book Quiet.
In parallel to that recently my 10-year-old daughter has been diagnosed as having Asperger’s Syndrome – a type of autism that primarily effects people in the realms of communication, social understanding and sensory sensitivity. I know some people feel that a diagnosis of a lifelong disability like this is something to be mourned. But for us as parents, it was like the sun had started shining for the first time, and we were given access to the knowledge, capacity and the tools to understand our daughter, and to properly support her.
After the diagnosis I started to read. I read and read and read. Every textbook, parenting manual and online resource for parents with a child with ASD (Autism Spectrum Disorder), and while I was reading, I saw clear examples and parallels not only with my daughter’s behaviour but also with people I work with – clients, collaborators, stakeholders, engineers, lawyers, designers like me… you name it. If it’s in the textbook – I can show you people all around me who share those characteristics to a greater or lesser degree.
Allianz office Melbourne. Image by Nicole England.
We all make light of the idea of ‘being on the spectrum’ when we observe idiosyncratic behaviour or social and emotional extremes, but in reality, a formal diagnosis of ASD is not uncommon and indeed is on the rise. In Australia about one in 100 of us are diagnosed and of those in adulthood, only 20 percent are employed and so are significantly underrepresented in the workforce. However, the range of neuro-diverse conditions goes well beyond ASD and Asperger’s, and includes people who suffer from ADHD, dyslexia, Tourette’s, epilepsy, to name a few, and it is thought that as many as one in 10 people are neuro-divergent.
The spectrum of human brain function and behaviour is both deep and wide, and each of us occupies our own a unique place on that spectrum. Even for normal (neuro-typical) people at some point in life, at least one in four (and up to one in three in the UK) will experience some kind of mental health condition such as anxiety, depression or stress. Due to widespread under-diagnosis, which when overlaid with the cultural stigma of speaking up and asking for help, more than half of those on what are considered neuro-diverse areas of the spectrum aren’t even aware they are.
What I was beginning to understand is that the clinical boundaries between being neuro-typical, experiencing mental health issues, being ‘on the spectrum’ and having a clinical diagnosis are far murkier, overlapping, and common than I had previously thought. In almost every team, every group, in most meetings you go to, there will be someone who fits that profile, who behaves, feels, thinks, speaks and learns differently to most other people.
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My research helped to crystallize something that had always sat in that weird intangible space between my conscious and the sub-conscious mind, a half formed, vaguely uncomfortable feeling. In designing even the best contemporary, most enabled and functional workplaces, even caring deeply about balancing the needs of introverts with extroverts, we have spent the better part of 20-years looking at ‘workstyles’ to figure out what facilities and types of experiences and spaces people need to be their best at work – and broadly speaking, workstyles are based on a title or a job description that a person happens to hold, rather than an individual’s personality and their neurological differences and preferences.
In 2012 when Susan Cain’s book, Quiet arrived, it was a trigger to our industry to purposefully think, act, and design around one of the most fundamental dimensions of a person’s personality – whether you are an introvert or an extrovert. We are constantly bombarded with messages that to be great is to be bold, assertive and confident, and that being sociable is the path to happiness and a fulfilling life. Through that singular behavioural lens, Cain highlighted how the 20th century has shepherded a ‘Culture of Personality’ into dominance over a ‘Culture of Character’, a significant impact of which is how often introverts are passed over and under-supported in workplace environments, cultures and society at large in lieu of their more eloquent, bolder and charismatic extrovert cousins.