I've worn so many hats in my professional life that sometimes it's hard to see where one begins and another ends: ditch digger, dishwasher, carpenter, salesperson, business analyst, enterprise architect, change management, project executive, leadership - performance and development coach, therapist, trusted listener, not to mention the numerous more personal identities such as father, son, and partner.
At 52, I'm starting to develop a fuller appreciation for how my new identities as an autistic and visual artist better allow me to extend and include each of these other roles, transform my life into a higher purpose, and create value for others. It's a humbling process learning to meet other people at the intersections of their lives with my own in service of something bigger than each of us.
Last week, I met with a staffing group executive concerned with tapping the underutilized workforce of our next generation and growing neurodivergent populations. If you are interested in the topic, I'd love your help distilling what we see as the strengths and weaknesses of autistics into a list of the top strategies that are fulfilled with an autistic workforce strategy. Here are a few that come to mind for me:
But first, it's important to note that topics of defence and security roles dominate the list, as I see this as a driving force for at least the next 30 years. North American and Western defence and security landscapes could greatly benefit from an integrated strategy for deploying the gifts of neurodivergent perceptions as a part of our defence and security architecture.
Integrative Intelligence Roles
Neurodivergents report heightened auditory, olfactory, visual, kinesthetic, and proprioceptive sensitivities that allow us to perceive each other and our environment in novel and divergent ways.
When communicating with general populations, neurodivergents speak of the stress of self-managing around half-truths, the unconscious and unspoken assumptions of others, or outright lying due to the pressures for social conformance. With more extreme autistics, it's like having an organic walking-talking lie detector machine at your fingertips. While some of us may fit the Rainman profile and be adept at counting cards, paradoxically, others like myself make terrible poker players, as we find it difficult to hide what we're thinking.
When put in a room together, it seems almost universal that neurodivergents begin to breathe a sigh of relief at the increased recognition they have of one another. We have the ability to hear and see shared truth, which allows us to stop socially masking what we believe and think and sort out differences of opinion at a faster pace than our neurotypical counterparts.
These characteristics provide the ingredients for new and novel ways of gathering intelligence and developing Social and Environmental sensemaking tools.
Applications in Defence and Security Operations
With the immanent approval and broader distribution of psychedelic-assisted therapy for our War Veterans, the paradigm for thinking about neurodivergence is flipping our assumptions of who is neurodivergent, how neurodivergence emerges, and how to harness the full potential of this evolution in human capability. Old paradigm thinking was that veterans who underwent psychedelic-assisted therapy would no longer be valuable as warfighters due to a shift in values precipitated by the treatment. Instead, we're discovering that many of these veterans are resolving their trauma (including but not limited to operational, epigenetic, cultural, and institutional traumas) and reigniting their desire to contribute to the world with the unique skills they have developed as warfighters.
Our best warfighters already have many of the markers of neurodivergence, and psychedelic-assisted therapy is both invigorating and enhancing latent developmental capacity. The ability to heal and reintegrate these elite men and women back into service with their unique talents will enhance force posture readiness and strengthen capability. This applies equally to National Defence as well as State and Local operations.
Foresight Functions
I facilitate a support group for autistic professionals. Last week, I introduced the idea of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and adult autism spectrum disorder (AASD) as a trauma, autoimmune and adaptive response to social disconnection. The flip side to the disorder aspect of our conditions is the ability to suss out relational dead-ends and social pathways and our unending evaluation and search for novel pathways that allow us to connect and maintain healthy social conditions for ourselves. The upside is that there tends to be a higher representation of autistics succeeding in roles requiring systems-level thinking and relational mapping, including those in engineering and artistic roles.
The ability and capacity to think 'meta' is a hallmark of neurodivergents and one of the reasons they already dominate in the tech and entertainment industries. As we move through the coming most tumultuous and relentless three to five decades in human history, having individuals dedicated to tracking the metaconditions, variables and future scenarios and finding positive pathways to pursue will be mission-critical to maintaining and sustaining our collective psychological and social cohesion.
Mavens of Cultural Disruption and Rejuvenation
This third one may take more to unpack. It's only just been dawning on me how utterly transformative artificial intelligence will be and how it's about to hit global culture like a planet-killing asteroid if we don't prepare for the radical reinvention of our culture. I believe social cohesion, democracy, and the very security of the planet are at risk - not to AI - but to human nature. AI and novel human interfaces with technology answer each of these concerns if we lean into cultural and social development like never before, and neurodivergents may be in a unique position to help unlock global human flourishing.
What's unique about neurodivergents is put into greater perceptive relief when you pull together a group of us and the realization that both none of us is special, and we are all special in the shear depth and diversity of collective emergent capacity as we respond to the evolutionary pressures of our historical moment. Here is a short story to help explain this:
When doing my MBA circa 2003, I remember having a group discussion about work-life balance in my Human Resource Management class. Most everyone was kvetching about the lack of work-life balance facilitated by their employers. I had to point out that we were a class comprised of a relatively developmentally privileged group of people who seemed to all be A-type (accomplishment-oriented) personalities, and we were all dishing out large sums of money and working insane hours to achieve our desired success. I suggested that there was something more systemic at play. Was it possible that we were all experiencing a sort of evolutionary pressure, symptoms of survival of the fittest? Well, didn't that float like a lead balloon!
In our day-to-day existence, 175 years post-Darwin, we typically don't experience ourselves or each other as evolutionary beings. It's difficult for us to experience, let alone imagine, who we are becoming individually and collectively and what our environment's role is in our evolutionary unfolding.
Rapid Onset Neurodivergence
I'm witnessing an increase and acceleration in Rapid Onset Neurodivergence. People you wouldn't have thought were neurodivergent suddenly have radically different perceptions and behaviours. Ready or not, a tsunami of human potential is on the cusp of being unleashed. Our ability to see and prepare for this will determine if the next wave of human evolution is a baptism by water, fire, or both.
Mapping and integrating neurodivergents' emergent perspectives and capacities will be critical to harnessing the positive potential of this next wave of human evolution, realizing regenerative capitalism, renewing national and transnational democracy, and unleashing the boundless possibilities of the human spirit.
I am humbled and privileged to contribute as a coach and therapist to this next generation of extraordinary defence and security operators, culture seers and reinventors in my daily practice.
If you have questions or thoughts you'd like to contribute to this discussion, hit me up, and I'll share them with others working to solve similar issues.
OM Namaste
I bow to you.
Christopher Lee Chang
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