R067 - Neurodivergence, with Ingrid Astiz

On one occasion, in this very podcast, I explained that I was always a mediocre student. Despite there being nothing in the world that stimulates me more than learning new things, I never felt truly motivated in an educational system that understood schooling as the academic standardization of its students. Success was found in the normative. This frustration, fortunately, ended with the birth of Runroom, which for me was an infinite green field of exploration and learning. But sometimes I wonder, could I have been just as happy in another context? Can I do something to make this context make other people who are beyond the normative happy?

Ingrid Astiz, speaker, author of the book "The Creative Power," born in Buenos Aires, software developer since the age of ten, teacher, trainer in non-violent communication, or consultant in agility and innovation contexts, recently helped me understand that there is a neurodiverse reality, eager to fully develop its creativity, innovation capacity, and pursuit of prosperity.

What is neurodivergence?

It is a term created by an Australian sociologist in '98 to activate a social movement that understands neurodivergences in a broader way. Thinking that the normal is the typical brain and that if you deviate from the normal or the average of the majority, it is atypical or pathological. A conception of saying all brains are welcome, broader, more inclusive, and not polar, not polarized. From that perspective, which she started for her daughter, who was diagnosed with Asperger's and saw traits of it also in herself and her mother, she said how do I build or promote that society does not stigmatize? And she expanded it to other divergences, to all psychological variations that have been stigmatized. It is a social movement and also included it as a category within intersectionality. The idea is that in diversity we have different factors that combine in different situations and moments, which can be that you are a woman with a diagnosis or a challenge and that is not being observed because you are a woman and there is a gender bias. So, factors combine that can make a situation more challenging or more difficult.

Contemplate all diversities together and add this category when analyzing and mapping diversities.

Diversity management is broader, so it can also be religious beliefs, political thought, socioeconomic situation, divergences of our body and, I don't know, some mobility, vision, auditory difficulty. There are many diversities. So, many times it's about thinking about diversity with a gender perspective and there's that focus and that entry, but it's a prism full of facets and different combinations.

Where does your interest in this topic come from?

I had heard the word neurodiversity and was in Berlin and there was a meetup that said: neurodiverse people talking with neurodiverse people. I went and it blew my mind. At first, I was accompanying people who had ADHD, who had already told me what they had and I didn't feel identified with these people, they just told me and we saw a strategy to cope and organize better.

The good thing is that they knew themselves and had that diagnosis and knew what worked for them and what didn't and explored. But when we switched to the pandemic to the online format, of course, there were things that their methodology was not adapted to online and no one had it adapted. So accompanying them was very interesting. I accompanied two people and they told me that many people had problems with the pandemic because that also happened to them, that they had their known or controlled or managed neurodivergence in a certain context and it was very exhausting for some people. And so, at first, I started by talking about others and when I started to remember, there were a lot of neurodivergences that I was compensating for. For example, I am totally absent-minded, but I write everything down. So there are people who work with me and don't realize that I am so absent-minded, but because I have it compensated, masked at work.

I took an online test, one can identify with things that are not as well, there is always a risk. But I started reading, researching, thinking about my family, thinking about people I knew and having more distinctions. So, something as simple as being absent-minded, well, it's very easy to notice, but others of how brains work in different ways. So it was for that interest and then I see that when I share it, the neurodivergences of others start to sprout and multiply, either from themselves, the person who listens to me and tells me something or they tell me about their child, sibling, or another person. Everyone has someone who in something is a different functioning. So, that of being able to talk about it, not seeing it as something bad, to hide or compensate or disguise, but that it is a different characteristic and give it visibility.

And also that in the team it is much easier when you find the compensation that another person helps you.

R067 - Neurodivergence, with Ingrid Astiz

What would you recommend to someone watching this interview and feeling very identified with the things you are saying?

1. Non-violent communication. It is a communication model that serves all types of people, very plastic, very flexible, because it is not normative, it does not tell you to diagnose anyone, it is simply how to open perception and how to communicate in ways that are more enabling. And also how to know ourselves more. So, that is a good model to return to, that can be strengthened.
2. If you are curious about neurodivergence, there are many accounts, on Instagram or online content, that you filter by neurodiversity or different names, and listen to people who say things to pay attention to and you can say, "yes this happens to me or, I didn't know this could happen to any human being".
3. And if in some way they start with online tests and get anxious because doubt begins, go to a professional to talk about it.

You have done a job of becoming aware of diversity and that having diversity mapped can help you understand and abstract from the judgment of just a small part of that diversity.

Also, every person has some pain and some challenge. Even if they are projecting an image from privileges and have everything resolved and look down on everyone, surely something is difficult inside them. Many times we don't know it and sometimes it is a mask, a shell to compensate for some pain or some previous deficiency or a battle. We never know the battles that other people are having and staying only with that discourse, that facade, you can't move forward. There will always be something happening beyond what we can see.

A bit of the seed of non-violent communication itself. That judgment-free perspective and trying to understand instead of passing judgment.

Ahimsa is non-violence in the tradition of the ancient Indian ayurvedas. And for me, that as a philosophy is about seeking. For me, it is tremendously profound because it is simple the model of reading Marshall Rosenberg's book, explaining things in a very simple way, but at the same time, it is so profound ahimsa as a philosophy of life, and that of identifying when there is violence, when there is tension, when there is separation, when there is division, where there is something that is about to break or is too tense, there, put love, put compassion, put understanding, whatever you can. You can't always understand, but having a compassionate view you can.

The stigma of diversity

From the feeling that it is more common than it seems and it doesn't seem so because everyone strives to hide it, in some way.

Yes, we come from a society that stigmatized it, hid it. But now in schools, there are more resources and more people observing this. More kids are being diagnosed, so parents start asking themselves what about me? And there they also discover, it becomes more visible. In women, many times it was more invisible because it is different how it is expressed. And that, now it is wanting to expand, that perception and that accompaniment, because in itself it is not bad. The bad thing is when you don't know it and you don't have the necessary support to manage it.

Sometimes it is useful to take a test to clear up doubts. Not because you have a symptom or a sign, it means you have the diagnosis that the other person has. It is better to go to a specialized professional who can tell you. If someone is distressed or confused, with some sensations that they are not knowing how to manage, I think it is good to go to one of these neuropsychology centers and talk to a professional, tell them, and the first meeting is to evaluate if there are traits or not of neurodivergence and if it is justified to do all the tests.

Many people discover neurodiversity or non-violent communication in the context of agility.

I was accompanying as an Agile coach in a company and the pandemic started and a lot of things started happening to us that I didn't have the information to manage them. The mapping of diversity, for me diversity management is like a precondition of agility or non-violent communication as a precondition. If we are not managing for parity and for both or all parties involved, for example, a retro, to be in a position to express their points of view, the retro is useless. So, none of the agility is useful if we are not doing that previous work. Many times things that don't work with agility techniques, we have to dig a little deeper and see what is there before, what previous work needs to be done so that in the retro all parties can express themselves and reach an agreement, for example.

We are also curious, I think that affects quite a bit. And well, then we share enthusiasm when we discover something and bring it.

With non-violent communication, it also happened to me. I met it in 2006 and I joined the agile community in 2009. So, I brought it thinking they would treat me as a heretic, that I had gone off-topic. And when I brought it in Argentina and I thought they would say: off the topic. And no, immediately, total curiosity, openness, a desire to see what it was about, how it could complement. That of putting it into practice and developing it together in the community is super valuable to me. It is more of an exchange and thoughts that are in continuous movement and experiments that we are doing of what works for us, what doesn't work for us.

Individuals and their interactions

The principle of the Agile manifesto comes to mind all the time: individuals and their interactions. We can't do anything we do without having a good relational base between people.

Yes, when I read Conway's law I said this! I was a software developer and at one point it was just logic and technology and any human interaction seemed like a waste of time. I was more focused on processes. But then I started meditating and doing therapy, listening a little more to people and I started to see that analogy that when two managers didn't talk and fought, designing a process was tremendously difficult and it didn't hold up and didn't have good quality that interaction between those two departments. I was in the systems management and we always had a lot of budget for software projects and there was no budget for human issues. At that time it wasn't seen and I didn't know how to explain it either, and agility came to show you that with numbers and to do that. Now they don't doubt that it is justified and that it reflects in development, in processes, in results, in lots of impact, but at first, it was difficult.

In the technology industry, for me neurodiversity has a high percentage. We don't have metrics because as most people are not diagnosed, we don't know, but my suspicion is that it is very high. And also to bring talent and integrate them into teams and be able to reach agreements and work and flow well in these companies, because there is a whole challenge of understanding each other in our complexity.

Intersectionality and privileges

It is very difficult to be aware of privileges. Sometimes we are aware when we lose them.

You talked about intersectionality as that relationship between different diversities, gender diversity, economic stratum, race diversity, religion diversity, a lot of diversities. The same problem, the same challenge, can be faced and perceived from the intersection of several of these diversities. And that leads me to talk about privilege. What has been your relationship with privileges?

I had some awareness, luckily, from my parents, who somehow, for example, they chose an excellent school for my brother and me and they had that option and it was wonderful, but there were also activities that we went to the neighborhood with kids who lived in slums, in underprivileged neighborhoods. So that of having a lot of social visibility and a lot of social interaction with all social groups. So there it was evident the privilege of having a roof, having space, having food every day. I don't know, there were many things that we lived consciously from a young age, but there were many that I had unconsciously, that I started to see to become conscious when I changed countries, six years ago. And it was like a shock. That there were other privileges, like having contacts.

I arrived here and there were some people who received me very well and recognized my career, but other people didn't. Somehow, I felt that I had to revalidate my experience, that I had an experience, but it was another socioeconomic context here and there were some things that I had to update and my profile had to be interesting in this context. Like when I realized that, I felt I didn't have a network.

It was a shock. We are not aware of our privileges. Many times it is very difficult to be aware of privileges. Sometimes we are aware when we lose them.

And on the subject of neurodiversity, when they were already coming out and everyone was somehow out of danger, then I started to relax and realized that I was totally exhausted. I hadn't realized the compensation I was doing and that my online work methodology wasn't so suitable. Also in neurodiversity and sometimes we have privileges and challenges and we are not aware that we have them.

Your education has also been privileged in that sense.

Privileged for my brain. Because I criticized them a lot. In fact, I went to talk and give the book of Non-Violent Communication to my school, because I saw a lot of people suffering a lot in school. And many who somehow ended up being expelled or left out of the system. But when I started to see my neurodivergence I said: "how lucky I was that I went to that school". For example, I don't like memorizing. If I had gone to a school that was by memory, it would have been a disaster. I think I would have dropped out. Each system can be a blessing for one person and a nightmare for another. So, for my brain, it was a good system.

Neurodivergence in the workplace

What consequences does it have in the workplace?

Self-esteem as a person and intellectual self-esteem. So, if you were in a system that was not suitable for your brain and somehow that system put you as not very intelligent, your intellectual self-esteem may be destroyed and maybe it was a type of intelligence that was not well managed, not well understood; it wasn't that intelligence was lacking, it wasn't deployed. That lack of self-esteem is one point.

And the other of not being able to deploy talents. Because if you are in a school where your neurodiversity fits, your talents can shine and in another, they can't.

Of course, I don't think there should be only one educational system. People who flow more in one system and not in another, and for me, it's better that they are different, because fostering critical thinking, for example, there are some people who love it, it suits them great and they can have a career that has to do with critical thinking. But if we all have that, it's unbearable. And I say it because I am unbearable sometimes. I have a critical sense that I have learned with non-violent communication to nuance and empathize and not bring it out in every context, but it can be very annoying. We don't want everyone to have an exaggerated critical sense and it's better that they have different skills and different competencies. The issue would be that there are options.

And within companies, what can we do to improve it?

For me, talk about the topic. There are topics that we don't talk about and simply by talking about them a little, it starts to loosen up. And normalize and not seek the diagnosis. And not even if a person comes and tells us they have a diagnosis from an autism center, neurodivergences in each human being are expressed in totally different ways. So, it may be that we know three autistic people and a fourth appears and has nothing to do with the previous three. Let's not assume that we already know about autism or we already know about this condition. Pay more attention and ask questions. And what is right for each person. And also the exercise of self-knowledge, because when we know ourselves more, we make it easier for others to be able to explain a little more what strategies work and what don't, and find things, solutions together.

Inclusive language

What should we consider in our language?

When I write I can speak like all people, use indirect inclusive language, which would be all people instead of saying men and women, because it also excludes other genders and fluid genders, for example. So, I use indirect when writing and when I have time to rewrite and review the text. But speaking I had proposed it at one point, but in my brain, it is an enormous, immense effort and it exhausts me. The focus is also a political position, when one uses inclusive language, for example, to manifest something that in a certain context can be the priority and you put that expression as a priority but it can be in another moment that it is not. And also respect ourselves that each one can be more comfortable. Sometimes we don't register the effort it implies for another person. And also it was hard for me to empathize and understand that these women who don't feel identified and other genders in the masculine, I feel identified in the masculine and using the masculine is super natural for me. Other people feel excluded with that word. So, contemplate and empathize with those people and take them into consideration, I would love to be able to do it when I speak, but it is too difficult for me. I do it when writing.

Changing this type of thing I understand is difficult and I understand it can pose a challenge and an effort for some people. I talk about not wanting to do it.

It makes me very sad, actually, because they are missing out on a lot of diversities and conversations, perhaps, and creating gaps. But they can also create gaps on the other side, getting angry and saying "because you speak like that, I don't listen to you". It makes me sad not angry. It doesn't make me want to get closer to know and listen. There are many people in this about privileges who were educated and raised to be +50 already enjoying all those privileges. And society changed, and the map of privileges changed and those people are not perceived as they expected to be perceived at this age.

So, in general, many are left out of the labor market directly. Or there are certain positions that don't understand why their leadership style, which was super successful and they are perhaps executives in a company, there are people who don't buy them at all and don't understand what is happening. There are people who criticize them and they don't even realize it. It makes me more sad than anything else.

An interesting message I hear and take with me is abandoning yourself to your privileges can lead you to a path of total loss of all your privileges.

Of course, I had them and I didn't realize that there were things that were very easy for me because I had them and for the other who didn't have them, they were impossible. So there is a point that is very cruel and you are exercising a cruelty that you don't register, and even want to motivate the other and tell them, but you can, if I can, you can. No, the other can't because they are not having your privileges or your starting point. It is also sad to be in the place where you are not seeing your privilege. And you miss a lot, you are in a bubble, in a way, or a very biased vision.