Maureen Dunne: Unlocking the Power of Neurodivergent Talent

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0:48I'm Guy Kawasaki and this is Remarkable People. Today we have with us Maureen Dunn. She is a trailblazer in the field of neurodiversity and cognitive science. She was trained at Oxford and she has dedicated over two decades to helping organizations harness the power of neurodivergent talent. Maureen's journey is an inspiring one. She was the first community college graduate to be named a Rhodes Scholar. And she's carved out an exceptional careers and advisors to corporations, universities and government officials. This includes the Lego Foundation, Cornell University, and members of Congress. Her work has been featured in Forbes, Bloomberg, New York Times, and other prestigious publications.

1:38In her book, The Neurodiversity Edge, Maureen presents a groundbreaking framework embracing the strengths of neurodivergent individuals. These are people with autism, ADHD, and dyslexia. Maureen's mission is to challenge the status quo and break society's neurotypical script. She wants to empower organizations to tap into the vast potential of neurodivergent talent. Join us as we learn about the neurodiversity edge and unlock a world of untapped possibilities. I'm Guy Kawasaki. This is Remarkable People. And now, here is the remarkable Maureen Dunn.

2:23Let's start with something very basic. Can you give us the definition of neurodiversity? If you go back a little bit in history, it started as part of an autism rights movement back in the late 1990s. And the term originated by a sociologist, an Australian sociologist named Judy Singer. And since then, it's really evolved into a much broader global movement. And while it first started in acknowledging that there are different ways of thinking about autism and Asperger's syndrome and the value that neurodivergent people bring to our communities, to our societies, to our companies, it's now since evolved to encompass a pretty broad range of neurodivergent conditions, including ADHD, including dyslexia.

3:29synthesisia, hyperlexia, you know, there's a pretty broad range of individuals that fit under the neurodiversity umbrella. But I think the crux of the, how we are defining neurodiversity now is it's really a paradigm shift from how we've been seeing things like autism and dyslexia and ADHD for many years, which has been a purely deficit-based perspective and seeing the rich diversity of abilities and strengths and human cognitive abilities that come along with neurodiversity and seeing it through this sort of strength-based lens and trying to get the world to understand the limitations of a purely what we would call a purely deficit paced model.

4:28And of course, you've probably, I'm sure, really aware of there's a pretty high overlap between successful entrepreneurs even and neurodivergent people. So there's that sort of interesting link as well. If I were a venture capitalist, I would only invest in neurodiverse entrepreneurs, quite frankly but that's well that's amazing well then yeah we're definitely peeps here because i think a lot of people need to appreciate and understand that most of it's one thing i bring up in my book is like there's a disproportionate number of innovations throughout history that have been driven by neurodivergent innovators and yet there's such a large number of neurodivergent people that have been left out of our economy and trying to reconcile that discrepancy is something that I think we need to, on a moral and functional and economic level, be having more conversations about.

5:29Since we've already touched upon this kind of deficit orientation, let's go the other extreme and maybe just for ADHD, dyslexia, autism, and synesthesia, can you just briefly explain what they are and what are the possible positives of those kind of diagnosis? Sure, absolutely. I think that's really important. So I think you see some of these conditions from a purely deficit-based perspective. And one thing I get in my book is like just we're still at an infancy understanding some of these conditions where there's still a lot of cognitive biases, but there's all these amazing strengths that are critical to the success of organizations and especially where we're going with the future of work.

6:22I believe it really our collective future depends on having a lot of unique problem solvers and we don't want to have all members of a team be perceptually and cognitively correlated. We want people that are seeing things from different angles and pointing out new paths where we could be doing things differently. And that's, you know, in the best interest of corporations. And so to drill that down a little bit further, you know, if we focus on, say, ADHD, so I'll give some examples from ADHD, autism, and dyslexia. And again, I want to really reinforce the point that like there's actually a lot more overlap and nuance, then people realize there are so many people, including myself, that don't neatly fit into one box.

7:05And that's sort of another conversation to have, which is, I think, super important. But for people say that about our ADHDers, you could look at ADHD from this perspective, like a very deficit-based lens where people are really impulsive and thinking about the aspects that are the challenges that go along with ADHD, but there's also been a body of research that shows that ADHDers, because of the way their brains work, that there's less boundaries around more conventional scripts or ways of doing things. And so there's a number of studies, which you probably don't have time to go into in detail today, but happy to elaborate later, where there's less what we would call design fixation, where there's a lot of creativity, there's a lot of thinking that are outside the kind of like standard boundaries that a lot of neurotypical people maybe end up intuitively sticking to.

8:10And one example is a study that Hallie White had led where they looked at ADHD college students and it was a task related to trying to imagine and create different types of alien fruits that might exist on another planet. And so neurotypical people came up with some innovative ideas, but they're much closer to your more conventional existing ways of thinking about different fruits. And the ADHDers came up with just a different level of novelty with fruits that really don't exist on our planet. So the idea there was that they weren't as constrained by some of the boundaries of social scripts or they have a sort of broader repertoire of material to draw upon.

9:08So that's just one example. And then for autism, there's a lot of extraordinary strengths that relate to detailed thinking, hyper-focus, which also sometimes overlaps with ADHD. But the type, again, I think a lot of the neurodivergent populations, there's a tendency to solve problems in unique ways because they're coming at these solution pathways from different perceptual, cognitive, and analytical tendencies. And that in itself, in my opinion, is extremely valuable, especially when you think about the future of work and where things are going with AI and a lot of automation is just having individuals are at least part of the conversation and included on teams that may notice a new path of exploration or innovation that other people may not notice because they're coming from that problem solving from new angles, that that's inherently valuable.

10:10And how about people with dyslexia? Absolutely, hugely important, I think. And I'm sure you're quite aware of Richard Branson's been a huge advocate, right, for dyslexia and has been very vocal about how his way of thinking has, in his opinion, been absolutely essential to his success, right, as an entrepreneur. And there's been a growing body of research with dyslexic thinking of how there's a lot of alignment with the kinds of skills that are predicted to be critical in the future, with being able to connect dots between different fields. I think a lot of neurodivergent conditions end up overlapping with what I would call nonlinear thinking and intuitive leaps of logic.

11:01I think that type of thinking is going to, personally, in my personal view, is that's going to become increasingly more important, especially as automation starts to become more prevalent in our society and in companies where a lot of the generative AI solutions still are chained to a lot of very impressive processing speed, but still extremely linear tasks that are being taken over. And I think there's this whole other domain of thinking where neurodivergent people and neurotypical people could really work well together to cover some of the more human aspects or what I would call the limitations of AI that overlap with these intuitive leaps of logic and insight and the nonlinear domain of thinking that is really difficult to replicate with the current AI paradigm.

11:58How about you burst the bubble that many people, seems to me, think that there is a relationship between neurodiversity and intelligence. And I'm focusing on the negative assumption that these neurodiverse people, they're not intelligent. Does one thing have anything to do with the other? I'm glad you brought that up because that's something that I think has been an inaccurate way of thinking about this. Whereas the degree of neurodivergence and intelligence, there really isn't overlap. A lot of people hear of someone who's autistic or an ADHD or dyslexic and they make false assumptions about that person's capabilities or intelligence.

12:48And it's really a separate thing. Neurodivergent people are just people like anyone else, right? They have strengths and weaknesses. They tend to have more spiky profiles when compared to neurotypical people, but there should be no judgment about abilities and intelligence. So, you know, an autistic person, for instance, there's just a huge, huge range in terms of a spectrum of abilities and challenges. And just like anyone else, right, we're just people. And there's some people that are extremely intellectually gifted and there's other people that have intellectual disabilities, but there should be no presumption about what someone can and can't do.

13:30And so, you know, and something I really feel passionate about that I've got into detail in my book is being a cognitive scientist, of course, too, is like trying to educate people about some of these unconscious biases that really, I think, get in the way of giving people fair opportunities. And I guess I'm trying to spread the message of if we can all just become more aware of these unconscious biases, we could go in the direction of having just a more productive and functional world. And I even call some species of unconscious biases, I call them invisible cockroaches, right? Because they're very difficult to become aware of and very difficult to get a grasp of what you do about them.

14:15But like two really big examples is there's one is called the overconfidence effect. And that's a really common one. And I've seen it in practice, even with large corporations where, you know, I was brought in to consult on a multi-billion dollar brand where that played out, where there was, you know, a marketing ad focused on autistic people and they didn't include anyone in the community that had lived experience. And there was this sort of, I guess, the overconfidence that, hey, this is a global award-winning marketing team. So they felt like they really knew what they were doing. But they ended up releasing an ad that was actually ended up being extremely offensive.

14:56And then I was brought in to kind of like do some damage control. And so I think what people, the companies need to understand, like this is a growing market segment for them. It's actually a really huge proportion of our global population. And we're talking about at minimum 15 to 20 % of the global population that identify as neurodivergent. And it's important to get this right. And then even the younger generations, like Generation Z, for instance, there's been some surveys, including one from Zen Business, where over 50 % of Gen Z identify as being part of the neurodiversity umbrella. I think it was like 31 % said that they identify as definitely being neurodivergent and like 20 % somewhat neurodivergent.

15:45Of course, there's some complexities there of identification versus diagnosis, but still says a lot that this is an important topic for all companies, I think, are going to need to really take this more seriously because it's just becoming increasingly important. And then there's also a cognitive bias called the availability bias, which I think really was an important one to become aware of because it's the bias where we all tend to default to the information that we most readily have available in our mental repertoire or experience. And sometimes that unfortunately ends up reinforcing stereotypes.

16:32And so I think like the goal is like to try to make front and center people that actually really don't fit into the traditional stereotypes. I think that's been a huge barrier where, especially with women, because I think a lot of the initial data and diagnostic tools were based on Caucasian boys. And then the way in which some of these conditions manifest in women are actually pretty different. And so there's been so many women that have not been getting the support they need or been flying under the radar. And so I think just becoming more aware and I think there's strategies to become better at this, at minimum, like questioning yourself.

17:14Hey, OK, the two or three people I met that were, you know, ADHD or autistic or dyslexic, that's not necessarily representative of the community as a whole. And becoming more like aware of that, there's this really rich tapestry of ways in which neurodiversity manifests itself. and part of my book, I really try hard to like bring up some interesting examples and drawings and my hope is to like get people to really appreciate and have a broader understanding of neurodiversity and have a genuine appreciation and empathy for the gifts that come along with neurodiversity and just get outside these sort of, I don't know, more very narrow understandings of these different typologies that maybe are causing barriers for people, many people that don't necessarily fit one box or another extremely well, but nevertheless identify as neurodivergent.

18:27You touched upon this briefly, but it seems that there's until this perfect world where neurodiversity is accepted, if not celebrated, it seems that diagnosis is very important. and I want you to explain to me how people become diagnosed with these neurodivergent kind of conditions. And I think in regular life, you go to somebody's house and that his or her bookshelf, all the red books are together, all the white books are together, all the green books are together. And you make this like instant diagnosis. Oh, this person must be OCD. So exactly how should diagnosis be done? Yeah, it's a great question.

19:20And one thing I think a lot about is I feel like even though we've made so much progress, like in the cognitive brain sciences, I still feel like we're at the infancy in some of that because so many of the diagnostic instruments are still somewhat subjective. There's observational options, But if you go way back, especially for autism, for instance, there's been a bias towards white Caucasian boys that a lot of the research has initially done. I think it's been improving over time. But what I would want to answer your question, I would want to really focus on is that I feel like there's so much more nuance and complexity and overlap between even typologies where there's a lot of people that are searching for their sort of tribe, so to speak, and they don't necessarily fit neatly into one category or another, even if they've been diagnosed with one or more typologies.

20:22And I feel we might be in a really different place, say 10 years from now, where there's an explanation. For people even like me that never fit into one diagnostic category really well. And maybe that's too long of a conversation for this episode, but there's a lot more overlap of different interesting, you know, talents and ways of thinking that go beyond one diagnostic category. And so there's a lot of overlap with like conceptual synthesis and hyperlexia. And there's a lot more, especially women, for instance, where they don't fit really neatly into an autism diagnosis or an ADHD diagnosis at the extremes, but that they're sometimes being diagnosed with both, but their true skill sets are best represented at the intersections of some of these different typologies.

21:19And I feel like our science is not quite there to best understand some of these nuances and complexities. And, you know, I'm hoping we get there over time. But there's increasingly a lot of people that are being diagnosed with one or more typologies and they don't necessarily perfectly fit into one or the other. And they're best explained by like the ways in which there's synergies or interactions between these different typologies. So let's pretend that parents, actually, we don't have to pretend this is true. So parents are listening to this and they say, oh, my kid is always sitting in the corner of the kindergarten classroom.

22:04He's not socializing. He's not relating. Do you think he's autistic? Or my kid is a very slow reader. Maybe he has ADHD. But how do you know when it's a real thing versus maybe it's just a teenage boy who's bored with your curriculum and that's why he can't focus. It's not him. It's you. It's your curriculum. Like, how do you decide what's going on? It's a great question. And it's one of the reasons why I'm a really strong advocate for what I would call universal design, where we move in this direction, where we design neuro-inclusive environments, where even regardless of diagnosis, like we're moving this direction where everybody can just be more productive.

22:54And it's not necessarily by diagnosis as much as whatever support needs people have that there's no shame if you need to use noise-canceling headphones or there's more sensory-friendly environments. I think that's where I think even companies will get the most out of all their employees. But yeah, but from a parent perspective, I think there's still a lot of progress that needs to be made in the schools. There's still usually a structure, depending on what school we're talking about, some are more rigid than others in terms of where there needs to be that sort of, okay, which box are, what are the exact needs this child needs and what box does someone fit into?

23:40And generally what I've seen is that there's not an issue with maybe a child that is diagnosed as, say, ADHD, but that doesn't explain the full story. And part of what I do then is try to be an advocate too and use my expertise to create a more nuanced plan and attend some of the IEPs. And every child's different. So just advocating for what's really going to work for that particular child. And sometimes the diagnostic process is imperfect, I would say, too. We're still in infancy, I think, in this field where so much of what's happening is still somewhat subjective and it's helpful as a starting point to get the resources and support that's needed.

24:29But I suspect that if I had to imagine like where things might be even 10 years from now, I think we might have just much more explanations for people that don't as neatly fit into one box or another or there's overlap. And the complexity is there is I think that there's like these stereotypes. And to me, that's something I get in my book a lot is just I think one of the difficulties is to combat these cognitive biases and stereotypes where people tend to, it's just how our brains work. we tend to desire these mental shortcuts. And the one or two people we each might have met that are autistic or ADHD or, you know, have seen in the movies, then when we're going through a hiring process, like that ends up unfortunately factoring into some of these decisions.

25:20And so a lot of what I do is trying to get people to be aware of the dangers of that and just how incredibly rich the neurodiversity community on it really is. And the amazing skill sets that come along with neurodiversity and the importance of thinking through, in my opinion, all companies should be planning for the future and future-proofing their organizations, not just from the perspective of integrating technology and AI, but taking it really seriously and thinking about the human resources perspective too? And how do you recruit unique talent? And how do you recruit talent that are thinking along lines that are going to be operating outside of these sort of conceptual maps that AI are going to be by far more proficient, right?

26:11Than human beings. And yeah, and how we can all work together, right? A couple minutes ago, you used the term IEP. What is an IEP? Yeah, it's an individual education plan. So, so all, you know, by law, by law, all students are required to what we would call a free and appropriate education. The idea there is, is, is that being a more inclusive environment. As far as I could tell, I did not notice one word in your book about treatment or drugs or concerta or Adderall or anything like this. Are you basically saying we should accept neurodiversity and not try to fix people, but rather accommodate people's special needs?

26:59Is there a place for, quote unquote, treatment and drugs? It's great. It's a great question. Yeah, just to clarify, I think this is an important point, is that I'm not saying in any way that accommodations, again, there's this huge spectrum of strengths and challenges within the neurodiversity community. And I think it's important to, you know, it's always a case by case basis and there's each individual is going to be different. And I'm not in any way saying that those supports aren't important. I do think that they absolutely are. And then there's also just laws, right, that protect people that have disabilities and, you know, making sure that appropriate education and supports are being met.

27:51But I think that what I tried to focus on in my book, and then there's more tools on the online version that get into some more specifics and how to go about that. But what I try to focus on is what I believe just from my 20 plus years of working in this space is that that's the support needs and there's varying support needs, but that's absolutely important. So I'm not in any way dismissing that. But I think that even within that, it's really important that there's this like cultural shift and paradigm shift where we don't by default see neurodivergent profiles as being not as valuable as neurotypical profiles.

28:34And throughout history, too, I mean, there's been so many of our innovators, so many entrepreneurs, as I am sure you know as well, whether they're disclosing or not, certainly fit a neurodivergent profile. and there has been a disproportionate number of innovations that have come from the neurodiversity community. And yet there's been also a disproportionate number of neurodivergent people that have been completely left out of the economy with this just ridiculously high unemployment rate. And so I try to bring up just that discrepancy in how can we as a society go about trying to welcome and integrate and authentically include people that have some pretty really amazing skill sets that haven't been tapped into.

29:24And so there's varying support needs. And so I'm not in any way, shape or form dismissing that. I think that's certainly part of this. It's part of this equation, but I think it's one of the challenges is that we need to acknowledge that there is a really broad range. Like I'd say that the consistency is that most neurodivergent people have what we call spikely profiles, where there's in some cases more extreme talents and abilities and then more challenges as well. But I believe personally that if we take a strength-based perspective, regardless of where people fit in the neurodivergent umbrella, that I think that still goes a long way to helping people actualize their full potential and self-potential.

30:12And some people will need more support than others. Listen, I realize what I'm going to talk about next is on the fringe of paranoia, but I'm just so curious about what you'd say, because much of your book is about accepting people for who they are and what they are and looking at people's, you know, what they'd be missing according to your personal specifications. Now, it seems to me that right now in America, there's a large number of politicians who they just cannot accept LGBTQ plus black and brown people, et cetera, et cetera, basically diverse people. Aren't you afraid that they're coming for the neurodiverse people too it's not going to be just your race your color your creed your religion your sexual orientation pretty soon they're going to try to do away with neurodiversity sure that's i mean and i don't know i know if you've noticed i'm um on the side i'm i'm an elected official myself i don't know if you you saw that i mean i'm i'm a trustee at a community college.

31:29The community college I got my start at, I graduated high school early, and then I've been involved on the state and national levels in elected positions. And so I've been forced into this arena and know more about it than I intended to, I suppose. And yeah, the country is pretty polarized when we get into a lot of issues around, especially around DEI. And I guess from my perspective is I'm so passionate about the space that I'm just going to keep trying to influence as many people as I can. And I know it's a really difficult environment politically for that because of all the DEI stuff. But then neurodiversity is an interesting thing because it affects everyone.

32:12It's not just along political lines. It's not just like every race, every ethnicity. It's something that has touched, I think, everyone as well. So there's that common ground. But I do think that it's something that I certainly think about a lot. And it becomes, I think, that much more important that there's people in the community, you know, neurodivergent people that are in leadership positions that are very visible. They're at least at the table having a voice, right, in some of these conversations, I think that's absolutely critical. And also, I would take it as far as to say that it's not just about the DEI paradigm, but it's also there's a lot of unique ways of thinking or seeing things from different angles, you know, within the neurodiversity community where maybe even in our political institutions where there's been a lot of inertia or innovation stagnation due to groupthink and some of the social dynamics that come into play, of course, in that arena.

33:20And just even including one or two neurodivergent people into the equation, in my opinion, just could change the structure of some of the conversations we're having and start thinking along the lines of, okay, maybe there's other avenues we haven't thought about before. Because I just find a lot of neurodivergent people, they're not quite as bound to the same social scripts or boundaries that a lot of people intuitively feel they have to stick within. And I just think that's a healthy part of, a healthy and necessary part of our democracy, especially considering where we're at, right, at this, like, current point in our history, I think it's so important that we have problem solvers involved in these conversations that are maybe less concerned about social status and able to talk about some of the problems that we're experiencing from, like, a more pure, rational, how do we solve these problems?

34:20And it's not easy to do because of all the cognitive biases, but I do think that our world would be a more functional place and just a better place for everyone if we can welcome neurodiversity into all of these important conversations. I'll tell you a little personal story. My son was diagnosed professionally, not just us amateurs with both ADHD and dyslexia. And this dyslexia association came to his school for parents night. And they set up these exercises where you use mirrors on text and stuff. And they were trying to make you understand that you read this paragraph of text, You can just linearly read and using these mirrors and other optical things, it shows you what a dyslexic sees.