Why Mental Difference in the Workplace Matters

Dan Holloway
7 min readOct 10, 2017

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This is the transcript of a talk given at Oxford’s Pitt Rivers Museum on World Mental Health Day 2017. Full event details are here. As a result of it being a transcript of a 10 minute talk, its arguments may be somewhat truncated in places.

l-r Dan Holloway, Marie Tidball, Miranda Reilly, Sonia Boué, Philip Bullock

Aaron Swartz committed suicide at the age of 26 while facing 30 years in jail for downloading too many scientific articles because he believed that every brilliant mind in the world should have access to the sum of human knowledge irrespective of accidents of birth. By that time he had been shaping the world’s future for the better for a decade and a half. By the age of 14, through W3C, the consortium that curates the World Wide Web, he was offering advice to Tim Berners-Lee on particular difficulties with the semantic web, part of the underlying code of the Web.

It strikes us as a remarkable story. But, as the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Danny O’Brien commented at Swartz’s memorial, it shouldn’t. “Aaron himself wasn’t the exceptional part of this,” he said. “The exceptional part of this was an institution that allowed someone like Aaron to walk in through its door and before anyone had noticed where he came from or what age he was or what his background was they allowed him to start contributing good work and learning from his peers. An institution is not truly open until somebody you could never even imagine exists walks through the door.”

So how do we make our institutions truly open, or even just more open? An institution that does not ask itself this not just on World Mental Health Day but on every day will never truly achieve the excellence it seeks.

Last month I took part in the Mind Sports Olympiad, where I won the Creative Thinking World Championship for the second year running. In the intervening year I have had the wonderful good fortune to win the Oxford University Humanities Innovation Challenge with a new game designed to prime people’s brains to be more creative.

Yet just two days after securing my gold medal, our washing machine broke. For most people, ordering a new washing machine would take about 5 minutes, and an hour of someone’s time when it was delivered.

It took me 10 hours just to place the order. The company I went to had an option to let me communicate with them in the way I need (an online chat — being telephoned to arrange delivery is not possible) despite the store telling me they did not, but over the course of the day, in order to use that method I had to recount intimate details of my and my spouse’s autism and mental ill health to more than 10 different individuals before they would allow me to communicate sufficient to discover their system simply would not work for me. It was distressing, humiliating, and left me wrung out and temporarily broken.

And this is the essence of why workplaces struggle when faced with the very many of us who are neurodivergent or have mental ill health who have wildly uneven skills, excelling beyond our peers in some others, falling short of what many would consider “normal” in others. And unless institutions and businesses stop making basic errors of perspective and start looking at how they can simultaneously empower and support a diverse workforce, then not only will individuals find themselves facing a lifetime of needlessly closed doors, but the organizations themselves will miss out on the vast untapped potential those individuals offer.

The first step is to acknowledge that human beings are not simple, one-dimensional creatures, and to adapt accordingly, avoiding the simplistic approaches we see so often.

On the one side is the approach that says “we see only what you can do”. You see what we can do? That’s great. Maybe you will give us jobs doing something that uses our abilities, allows us to feel fulfilled, stretch us in the way that a really good job should stretch us.

But wait, you see “only” what we can do? So you place us in a shared office, require us to wear clothes that actually hurt my skin in the name of smartness, require us to attend teambuilding lunches and communal coffee breaks, give us a list of exact processes we must follow to produce the results you want, and need us to sit at our desks for 8 hours a day however long it actually takes to do the work, and wherever we might do it best? By failing to acknowledge what we are unable to do, you will not permit us to show what we can.

On the other side is a really well-meaning group who will see what we can’t do, and will dedicate themselves to removing barriers. But, sadly, for them getting us into work is too often about “giving us something we can manage” so they will make life “as easy as possible” for us, not *actually* listening to what we say but giving us what they perceive to be simple, trouble free tasks that “anyone” could do. And, of course, because they haven’t addressed the real problems, we still won’t be able to cope. And we will do a really bad job, and they will resent having to pay us for a job we are doing poorly, and maybe they’ll try and find a job we *can* do — by making it “even easier” — and of course we will do that one even worse.

And they may be even more helpful, and have a really inclusive recruitment policy that is laser-focused on measurable essential criteria so as to weed out anyone’s bias — and, of course, to weed out anyone whose difficulties mean their CV is somewhat atypical (Oxford can struggle with this).

In both cases, people end up unable to do what they are capable of doing, and the organisations that employ them end up losing out on their potential. Both sides end up sitting on a narrow spectrum that runs from resentful and frustrated at one end to really not understanding why they bother at the other.

There is a very simple business case for trying to get it right when it comes to employing a mentally different workforce in roles in which they can excel. First there is the value of diversity. This isn’t simply about branding oneself inclusive or about compliance. It’s about performance. Teams that are more diverse make better decisions. It’s that simple.

And second, when institutions look at their productivity they so often fail to look at underemployment, to ask if their staff are truly flourishing, doing what they are best able and most willing to do. How many people are working in roles where they are unable to use the skills that could transform what their organizations do? And how often is that the result of factors that go back to mental ill health? Well, to give just one figure, men with anxiety and depression will earn 58 pence in the pound compared to their peers without those conditions.

There are many steps an organization can take to nurture a diverse workforce. I have mentioned scrapping evidence-based recruitment in favour of allowing people to demonstrate their skills by means appropriate to them.

But as a novelist it is my duty to point out that everything boils down to that very simple, trite adage — “show, don’t tell”. Policies go only so far. Talks and events, however inspiring, can only achieve something of value if they are supported in practice, indeed an inspirational message that goes unsupported in action is the most damaging mix of all. And action must come from the very top, because when someone in any organisation feels cut adrift, finds themselves facing prejudice or ignorance or simply a workplace that doesn’t work, they need to know that as they exhaust every level of possible support, at some point they *will* float up to the door of someone who will nod their head and say “yes, I will make this happen.”

Change doesn’t come from hoping that with enough education people will do it right. Change is the junior member of a selection panel hearing colleagues say of an applicant “they have depression, they won’t handle the pressure” and knowing they can raise their hand and speak out. Change is seeing a senior manager who insists impaired executive function is laziness or that a meltdown is an aggressive outburst and knowing that if you speak up, the highest management of all will say “no, this will not stand.”

On days like this, at events like this across the world we endeavour to build a culture where people feel able to talk about their mental health, and able to ask for help. But in doing this we create for ourselves an iron-clad responsibility — to listen, and to give. Because if we do not, all we are doing is asking our most vulnerable to put their heads above the parapet before we walk away with our fingers crossed they will not be shot.

When asked about his early years, Aaron Swartz said, “At first I was worried about revealing my age, but now I let my words speak for themselves.” That is all so many of us are asking for.

I want to end by asking this: could “somebody you could never even imagine exists” walk through your door and set to work? Because if we at Oxford take seriously our mission statement of being the home to the very best, that is what must be able to happen.

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Dan Holloway
Dan Holloway

Written by Dan Holloway

CEO & founder of Rogue Interrobang, University of Oxford spinout using creativity to solve wicked problems. 2016, 17 & 19 Creative Thinking World Champion.

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