Chapter 3: Autism or systems thinking?
Spring 2019
After a series of difficult & ethically challenging project roles where leaders declare success to what I -and usually the business case — view as failure, I leave the corporate world and start my own company. I usually know why the projects I am on are doomed to fail, and believe if the leaders would listen, they would be able to prevent the failures. In one of my first sales calls, a leader challenges me, “so am I to believe you are just so smart that you will solve all the problems we are facing even though we have tons of fancy consultants?” Not exactly, I explain, feeling stumped by his question, “the reason that I usually know why projects will fail is not due to my intellect; rather, to talking to everyone relevant to the project and placing value their perspectives.”
I go to basements and talk to the data guys & architects. Many of them are introverts and during certain parts of project lifecycles are sustained by coca cola and pizza. They know vital things, but do not deliver points in crisp power point slides, so their ideas are often overlooked. Like babies in an orphanage who have stopped crying because they have learned no one is coming, many of them do not even bother sharing their opinions. If one leaks to the surface, it is often dismissed as “noise” because it has no home on the traffic light report for the precious steerco.
I speak with “the business” as we call them from the IT department. These are the poor souls who my nerdy friends think are too dumb to understand technology. But I know they are not. They just have different priorities and are trapped in double binds chasing KPIs that conflict with their colleague’s KPIs.
Years ago, the whole charade seemed funny to me, like a Dilbert comic being played out daily, I would sometimes hear “Entrance of the Gladiators” in my head when meetings were about to start. But as I grow older the pattern is extending, and it feels more tragic. Here are all these wonderful people working toward the same goals but having such different perspectives that the success of the goals suffers.
But why does it feel like I see this, and others do not? I reflect on my childhood. When I was 10, I was sitting one afternoon at my older brother’s basketball practice. Dreadfully bored, I grabbed his Algebra book and started completing equations. His teacher asked him why he was working ahead, and they realized the work had been done by me. I was quickly recruited to the math club and began winning math competitions, competing against kids up to 3 years older than me.
My final year of high school, our guidance counsellor, who was ironically named Mr Wright, advised that although my test scores indicated I should study engineering, I would need to find a career path more suited for women, like elementary education. I settled on a humanities education instead. It was unfair, but it was a blessing in disguise. Getting a humanities education was incredibly more difficult for me than getting a degree in engineering would have been. I breezed through my business and economics courses, making straight A’s without studying. My mind works mathematically, loves logic, and craves understanding causality. I was perhaps meant to be a data nerd, but that would have been my comfort zone.
Studying literature, philosophy and religion forced me to grapple with paradox. This felt unnatural to me, but I learned that there are multiple ways of making sense of the world, and numbers are only involved in some of them. I learned to speak qualitative data as a second language.
This reflection causes me to realize that instead of pulling from an acquired, reflexive sense of “gut feeling”, I look at un-numeric data as an outsider, looking in, curiously tracing patterns. I am not “above” the biases that Kahneman famously describes, but there is something different going on in my head. I feel like an onion that is missing the top layer. The top layer stores skills for small talk, navigating corporate politics and reading people’s faces enough to know when to shut up. It is such an important layer. But the layers beneath it are stronger and more intense. They also make you cry more.
August 10, 2020
Since meeting Nora Bateson at a conference in January, I have been digging deeper into her (and her father’s) work. I sign up for her Warm Data course and settle into a series of Zoom classes. I hesitate to write about the experience, because it might sound cult-like, so without elaboration, I will just say it was a life changing learning experience. If that makes it a cult, then sign me up. I could take the course a hundred times and learn something different each time. She shows a picture of a tree that has adapted to its environment, growing in a way that straddles a ditch and asks the question, “how does a tree learn to live in the world?” This leads her to explain her concept of Symmathesy which is based on the idea of mutual learning. In her book, Small Arcs of Larger Circles she writes:
“Learning in symmathesy is an ongoing process of calibration (precise and continuous adjustment) within contexts of aggregate interrelational variables. This calibration does not require conscious involvement. The learning that any living thing must continue within (if it is not to become obsolete) is a wide-angle process of receiving and responding to information. This information is sensed as difference and is received from simultaneous multiple interactions. (Gregory Bateson referred to this definition of information as “the difference that makes a difference”). Complexity does not divide itself and therefore life requires calibration within multiple streams of information and interaction”.
It may not require it, but I give this process a lot of conscious involvement. Have you ever looked at a painting or a landscape that is so beautiful that it hurts? Heard a song that breaks your heart? I remember a 6-month period when I was haunted by Debussy’s Suite Bergamasque, unable to get it to stop playing in my head. It became the theme song for everything that I find simultaneously beautiful and painful in the world. In a world that favours mediocrity, reminders of the close relation of these sensations are rare. When they occur, their revelation of possibility causes a delta to emerge which I feel strongly inclined to influence. Van Gogh compares this to a bird in a cage feeling like it is time to be building a nest but not understanding why he is unable to, “A man himself doesn’t know what he can do, but he feels by instinct, I am good for something.”
I am filled with a sense of hopelessness and decide to revisit the autism topic. But I want to find a psychiatrist who is a systems thinker. I stumble upon the profile of an autism specialist in the UK whose profile lists all her accreditations before ending like this:
“I have always been keenly interested in hows and whys of the world. Medicine offers one viewpoint on the humanity and the human condition, but (no matter how fascinating) it is still rather limited. Philosophy, psychology, economics and sociology provide other views of other facets of mankind, and literature has the tools to describe those aptly.”
“Yes”, I shout to myself, and contact her immediately. In our introductory meeting, I explain that I highly doubt I “have” autism — since I am empathetic — but am not sure what to make of the way my mind works. She explains that it is a common misunderstanding that autistic people are not empathetic. She elaborates that there are various types of empathy and draws a distinction between cognitive and emotional empathy, which hits the nail on the head. My cognitive empathy — which pulls on skills like reading people well enough to know what they need in each moment — is weak. But my emotional empathy — which involves sharing the feelings of another person — is in overdrive. If I had a dollar for each time someone told me “When I first met you, I thought you were (insert bad adjective here), but now that I know you, that couldn’t be farther away from the truth”, I would be rich. My outer onion layer is missing. With me you get right to the smelly part of the onion. For people who like raw onions, this is great. But not everyone likes onions. Turns out my systems thinking psychiatrist is also autistic.