“My little professor”. That’s what my great-grandma used to call me, because when I was young I was smart but struggled with social interactions.
“My little professors” is what Hans Asperger called the boys in his school who were highly intelligent but didn’t fit in socially. His research on these boys led to a diagnosis called “Asperger Syndrome”, a condition that generally described intellectually gifted people with poor social skills. These were the kids most likely to end up in a technology career.
Today “Asperger Syndrome” has been rolled into the larger diagnosis of Autism Spectrum Disorder, and those who are on the spectrum are considered to be “neurodiverse”.
I would consider myself on that spectrum somewhere, and the more I’ve learned about neurodiversity the more I see how it applies to so many folks in IT.
In this talk I share my voyage of discovery and lessons for leading people who sometimes have too much attention to detail, prefer predictable patterns, get confused by ambiguity, and occasionally struggle to talk to others.
This interactive mixing board is one way to think about neurodiversity. It is not used in research and the numbers don’t mean anything, but it is a handy way to think about how each person can have very different cognitive strengths and weaknesses.
Each slider has a range of white numbers representing “normal” variation. For example, someone may
have a higher or lower attention to detail yet still fall within the “normal” or “neuro-typical” range.
However, when their attention to detail interferes with their daily life, that trait becomes a-typical
and would possibly place them on the spectrum.