Diversity is well understood in most businesses, as is the negative effect of leadership teams made up of people who are homogeneous in their backgrounds, beliefs and cultures.
Research has shown, for example, that greater diversity in start-ups is equated with greater likelihood of success.
However, there is one form of diversity that is little known, understood or researched, and that is neurodiversity: brains that work differently from the average or “neurotypical” person. Differences ranging from being on the autism spectrum to having attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) are regarded as disabilities in the workplace.
But that is changing, and it is starting at one of the biggest companies in the world: Amazon.com. The organisation’s chief security officer, Steve Schmidt, startled the audience at last year’s Amazon Web Services’ annual Re:Inforce conference when he gave a keynote address in a T-shirt emblazoned with the message: “ADHD: it’s not a disability, it’s a different ability”.
This year, he returned to Re:Inforce for a comparatively low-key session, a “fireside chat” on “neuroinclusive leadership”.
He described his journey and discovery that his brain functioned differently to most of those around him. Most significantly, he focused on the tremendous advantage it had given him in one of the world’s biggest cybersecurity jobs.
“The most important thing for me was the self-realisation that the differences I had in the way my brain functions are not something to be ashamed of, but, quite the contrary, something I was really proud of,” he told a small audience. “That really came to light during situations where I'm able to do multiple things at the same time and other people are not. For a lot of people, that's a nice to have. In my particular job, it's a got to have.
“When you look at our business and the security associated with it, that's everything from aircraft to spacecraft to boxes that it ships, to tonnes of customer data around the world. It all takes different attention, different decisions, different analysis. The security world is something we would love to think we control and that we drive, but in reality, we're often driven by outside input.
“So it's necessary to be able to say, I'm having a conversation here, but at the same time, I need to keep an eye on what's going on over there because the bad guys are always up to something.
“And that allowed me to say that (ADHD) is something that can be really helpful in a discussion about how we identify people with the right training and the right kinds of skills to fill the gaps we have, and enables us to use that as a selection criteria for when we want to find somebody and hire differently.”
A former firefighter and FBI agent, Schmidt pointed to research conducted by the CIA in the 1960s, repeated in the early 2000s, on intelligence analysis. It was found that having an overly homogeneous analytics team was detrimental to the US intelligence system because it meant it failed to understand its adversaries were diverse.
As a result, when the same set of decision-making criteria, experiences and common behaviours were used as lenses to understand the adversary, the service got it wrong.
“So it's that process of understanding that there are lots of different kinds of inputs, lots of different kinds of thought processes, lots of different kinds of people. We have to use that same set of differences to our advantage in figuring out what our (cybersecurity) adversaries are going to do.
“One of the components we look for is people who can do things nobody else can. And that takes a lot of different ways of thinking.”
* Goldstuck is founder of World Wide Worx and editor-in-chief of Gadget.co.za
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