We asked some of our most innovative autistic employees to share their thoughts on innovation, autism, and more.
New research from Cambridge University Professor, author, and auticon UK advisor Professor Simon Baron-Cohen concludes in his new book, The Pattern Seekers that many autistic people have advanced innovative and creative intelligence. With this in mind, we asked some of our most innovative autistic employees to share their thoughts on innovation, autism, and more. Below we are sharing some highlights from their comments:
Contributors:
Marc Ristau, Senior Consultant from auticon Germany
Beat Steiner, Senior Consultant from auticon Switzerland
Q: In yourself, do you see habits of a hyper-systemizer (defined as one who frequently wants to put things in order.) If so, how does this enable your work at auticon? Do you see hyper-systemizing as a benefit?
Beat Steiner “Yes, especially for generating data retrieval keys or reference designation systems. I use data visualization as a support tool to see how well my systems perform in classifying data and how consistent systems and data are. This is not in contradiction to the fact that I am chaotic in nature.”
Marc Ristau “From early childhood on I was systemizing the world around me, how I perceive others, my toys, my daily routine, how I communicate, just look at the attached picture of me sleeping next to my arranged toys, sorted by how much I liked them. The teddy always had to lay in the same spot, otherwise I wouldn’t be able to sleep. I am frequently seeing beauty in order and seeing order where no one else saw it, even in simple things like traffic lights or language patterns.
This trait also led me to usually systemize given tasks and rather write a framework of building blocks to solve these or other problems than to implement business logic directly.”
Q: Research suggests autism contributes to Innovative and creative intelligence. What is your reaction to this claim? Do you recognize this in your own work and thinking?
Marc Ristau “Hyperconnectivity, hyperreactivity and hyperplasticity of autistic brains not only enable us to process more bandwidth on the input channels, but this also implies both increased frequency in forming and adaptivity in changing meaningful connections. Therefore, autistic neurology takes more factors into consideration than in neurotypical approaches and because of that the likelihood there’s something considered that no one else has paid attention to yet is also increasing the likelihood that this can be seen as innovative or at least creative. I do recognize this mainly in my perception, but I can also “watch my brain think” about the bigger picture and how many associations it takes into consideration when thinking about a seemingly simple circumstance, which gives every thought a further growing context, the longer I “watch”, and eventually there will be a solution that no one else saw before.”
Beat Steiner “To be innovative is not given to all autists. I am among the lucky ones. Innovation is one of my key strengths. If my need for innovation is missing at work, I introduce it by developing a tool automating routine work.”
Q: Innovators love to create and to create solutions to problems. What have you created or innovated in your lifetime? What was the problem and did your innovation solve anything?
Marc Ristau “While I was just finishing school, I started creating my own very lean content management system, because existing ones were bulky, used a lot of resources and were inconvenient to use. Within that I already implemented animation modules in JavaScript, when the rest of the world still animated websites with Flash as I could see this was a dead end from the moment I investigated its architecture.
I was always obsessed with effective and comfortable human/machine interfaces and began diving into UX for that reason, which led me to create a data model UI framework to work around the issue of rapidly evolving user requirements and let users connect data around several corners. Building on top of that I am working on a self-explaining crowd sourced collaboration process & big data environment, which is supposed to solve the need for rapidly evolving processes, like it was the case with the beginning of the pandemic.”
Q: In your opinion, what is the relationship between autism and innovation?
Beat Steiner “Perseverance, precision, concentration, but also out-of-the-box thinking, questioning existing systems and traditions. Sometimes seeing the needle in the haystack. Curiosity across system (and especially organizational) boundaries, crawling through product catalogs and puzzling pieces together in a different way than others do. This is not only true for physical objects but also for processes.”
Marc Ristau “I am convinced that many big innovators are at least somewhat on the autistic spectrum and were assumingly just lucky enough not having the need to be diagnosed because it worked out well for them, mainly because they grew up in supportive or wealthy environments. I can see by his humor, way of using words and particularly from his body language that renowned innovator Elon Musk must be quite likely one of us and it’s also widely known that many others in tech are open about their diagnosis. Being autistic invokes some kind of urge to not only find a solution that excels in a given context, but one that also contributes to bigger goals.”
Q: What is your secret to keep your motivation high against all the odds?
Beat Steiner “Inject innovation into boring work. Persistence wins against many odds. But I have to admit that I tend to lose patience easier than 4 years ago. The odds are created by disconnecting yourself from your own true nature. Stop masking consciously and subconsciously. Accept your diversity. Experience who and how you are. Then accept yourself the way you are and reconnect to yourself. Only then you are capable of progressing and not just do more sophisticated masking, leading to even more exhaustion.”
Marc Ristau “Allow yourself to give up for a given day and reset your motivation with every new day, every morning. Accept all that happened as status quo. This way, you can start every day like it was the first one.”
