The following is Chapter One from the book Modernising HR for Variant Minds: Autism - The Monotropic Mind.

Available on Apple Books and Kindle.

Chapter 1 – What Autism is

Autism isn’t rare, complicated, or tragic - it’s simply misunderstood, mostly by workplaces designed for everyone else.

Manager Confession: The Quiet Star in the Corner “I used to think Ethan was difficult. He never joined the small talk before meetings, didn’t come to Friday drinks, and I assumed he wasn’t a team player. Then one morning we had a system outage. While everyone else was scrambling, Ethan quietly opened a log file, found the fault, and fixed it before IT arrived. He’d been tracking tiny inconsistencies for weeks - just because they didn’t “look right.” That was the day I realised he wasn’t disengaged. He was hyper-engaged, just differently. I’d been managing through assumptions, not understanding.”

Autism in a cubicle

Most people think they know what autism is, yet few understand how it actually operates in day-to-day working life. For many managers, “autism” still conjures images of savants, social awkwardness, or someone who “doesn’t make eye contact.” In truth, autism is a distinctive cognitive and sensory profile - not a malfunction, but a different operating system. It values depth over breadth, truth over convention, and structure over spontaneity.

Autistic people are not detached from the world; they are often deeply tuned in - just not always to the same signals their neurotypical colleagues notice. What looks like avoidance is usually sensory overload. What seems like obsession is often passion. What appears blunt is usually clarity. The problem is not the person; it is that workplaces have been built for multitasking, socially driven minds, rewarding the behaviours those minds find effortless. Autism doesn’t break those systems - it exposes where they were never as fair or efficient as we assumed.

In clinical classification systems such as the DSM-5-TR ¹ and the ICD-11 ², Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is defined as a neurodevelopmental condition characterised by:

• Persistent differences in social communication and interaction across contexts; and
• Restricted or repetitive patterns of behaviour, interests, or activities.

It is worth noting, however, that while both systems describe the same condition, their purposes diverge. The DSM-5 serves a clinical function - assigning one of three “support levels” based on how much assistance a person may need. These levels (1: requiring support, 2: substantial support, and 3: very substantial support) can change over time as they depend heavily on the person’s environment. The ICD-11, by contrast, categorises autism through a matrix model, using two primary axes: impairment of functional language and presence or absence of intellectual disability.

But that is the clinical view - and it tells us almost nothing about the lived reality of autistic adults in the workplace. These classifications matter for diagnosis and support access, but they tell managers almost nothing about daily collaboration. At its core, autism reflects a brain that is wired differently from the statistical majority - what society calls “normal.” Pause for a moment and consider what that means. There are billions of potential neurological variations within that definition. And therein lies the complexity: autism cannot define a person as a fixed set of traits or behaviours. Each individual presents differently.

Decades of study have identified clusters of common - though not universal - features. Some autistic people prefer quiet spaces or minimal social interaction. Others thrive on structure and find comfort in sorting, categorising, or repeating patterns. Some display physical movements, such as hand-flapping when excited. Others talk a great deal, often about specific topics like trains or data systems, and may struggle to “read the room” or avoid interrupting. And then there are those who appear entirely “typical” but are expending enormous energy masking - consciously suppressing their natural behaviours to appear socially conventional. These employees often return home so exhausted from the effort of “acting normal” that they cannot fully engage with family or friends. Imagine performing social theatre every day, knowing the wrong gesture could be misread as disinterest or defiance.

All these are expressions of what we call the Autism Spectrum. It is not a scale from “low” to “high,” nor a ladder from Level 1 to 3. It is more like a lake of difference - wide, deep, and varied. One person may struggle with noise but excel at visual patterns; another may shut down in crowds yet find joy in precision and order. Autism isn’t about how autistic someone is - it’s about how autism shows up. Each person different. Each experience unique.

When “different” is different enough

It’s fair to ask: if everyone is different, what makes one person’s difference Autism and another’s simply personality? After all, most workplaces already celebrate individuality, creativity, and “thinking outside the box.”

The answer lies in how deep and consistent the differences run. Autism isn’t a collection of quirks or preferences; it’s a stable neurological architecture that shapes how someone perceives, filters, and responds to the world. These aren’t situational traits - they’re built into how the brain connects and communicates.

For neurotypical people, social, sensory, and cognitive differences fluctuate depending on mood, environment, or experience. For autistic people, those differences are constant and structural. The wiring itself channels attention, perception, and communication along distinct pathways. It’s not about a degree of difference, but a kind of difference.

Autistic brains process information through networks that favour precision, pattern recognition, and depth of focus, sometimes at the expense of rapid social inference or effortless multitasking ^3,4. Social meaning, for example, is decoded through logic rather than intuition. The brain doesn’t “fill in the blanks” of implied communication - it needs the blanks filled in. Likewise, sensory systems register stimuli that others might not even notice, turning what seems like mild background noise into an avalanche of competing data.

The result is a predictable pattern across multiple life domains:

• Communication and interaction follow clear, literal logic.
• Sensory input is processed more intensely or unevenly.
• Attention flows in single, deep channels rather than dispersed multitasking.
• Transitions and unpredictability impose heavier executive-function loads.

This consistency is what distinguishes autism from ordinary variation. Everyone occasionally misses a cue, seeks quiet, or focuses deeply. Autistic people experience those differences as the baseline - not the exception. They move through the world interpreting information on a different frequency, and that frequency remains constant regardless of circumstance.

Dr Lorna Wing described it ⁵ simply: “It’s not that autistic people have special features; it’s that their whole perception of reality is organised differently.”

That’s why autism is not a set of “traits” that a person happens to have, but a distinct cognitive lens - one that influences how reality itself is experienced. When that difference intersects with environments designed for another lens, challenges appear. But the difference itself is neither wrong nor inferior. It is, quite literally, another way of being human.

A brief detour: how we learned to misunderstand Autism

For decades, autism was interpreted almost entirely through a medical or deficit lens. Early research in the mid-twentieth century viewed autistic traits as symptoms to be eliminated rather than patterns to be understood. Even as diagnostic frameworks improved, popular culture reinforced stereotypes of emotionless logic, child-like helplessness, or detached intellect. Those narratives quietly seeped into organisational life.

But the misunderstanding runs deeper than clinical history. Over the last century, social science itself codified social behaviour into moral behaviour. Traits that made people comfortable were labelled “good,” and those that didn’t were labelled “bad.” Eye contact became shorthand for honesty; a firm handshake signified confidence; smiling at the right moments suggested warmth and cooperation; interrupting seen as arrogance; quietness mistaken for disengagement.

These moralised interpretations of social behaviour - born from neurotypical majority norms - still dominate workplaces today. They appear in performance reviews (“lacks interpersonal warmth”), hiring rubrics (“strong eye contact”), and leadership training (“commanding presence”). None of these have anything to do with skill, integrity, or competence - but everything to do with conformity to a particular social rhythm.

Autistic communication simply runs on a different rhythm. Many autistic people process social signals literally, rely on direct language, and prefer depth over small talk. Their facial expressions, tone, or gestures may not align with expected conventions, but that has no bearing on their honesty, intent, or empathy. As psychologist Damian Milton ⁶ observed in his Double Empathy theory, communication breakdowns between autistic and non-autistic people are bi-directional misunderstandings, not deficits on one side.

HR systems inherited both these medical and moral assumptions: framing autism as a set of deficits to fix and deviations to manage. The language followed suit: “high-functioning”, “low-functioning”, “disorder”, and “abnormal”. Each term subtly locates the “problem” inside the person rather than within the environment. The modern neurodiversity paradigm reverses that logic. It recognises autism as one natural variation of human cognition and argues that social and workplace barriers - not autistic traits - create disadvantage ^7,8.

This shift matters. Workplaces are still catching up. Many diversity frameworks remain trapped in the “medical–moral” hybrid - expecting individuals to adapt, then rewarding those who best mimic the majority. True inclusion begins when organisations stop reading difference as defiance and start recognising that social fluency is not the same as moral character.

Policies built on pathology focus on accommodation after the fact, rather than designing systems that work for everyone from the start. Understanding autism through this updated lens reframes inclusion from charity to competence: a matter of design, not diagnosis.

A business case (for those who don’t think they care)

Even leaders unmoved by moral or social arguments should pay attention to the economics. Across developed economies, between 60 and 80 per cent of autistic adults remain unemployed or under-employed - an extraordinary waste of skill and investment ⁹. This gap represents lost productivity, higher turnover, and billions in unused talent every year. Yet where organisations build the right conditions, autistic employees consistently show greater accuracy, reliability, and ethical integrity than their peers ¹⁰.

Inclusion is often framed through the language of law - the Americans with Disabilities Act (1990), the UK Equality Act (2010), the Canadian Human Rights Act (1985), and the Australian Disability Discrimination Act (1992). These frameworks are essential, but they are also reactive: they protect rights after someone has already been excluded or harmed. In practice, this means most corporate risk systems treat disability inclusion as a compliance safeguard, not as a strategic design principle.

That mindset creates a quiet paradox. When companies see disability as a potential legal exposure, they may unconsciously avoid hiring people they fear they’ll later have to “accommodate.” It’s not malicious - it’s risk aversion disguised as neutrality. But it’s also how opportunity is lost before talent ever reaches the interview.

The real advantage comes when inclusion is built upstream, before recruitment even begins. When hiring systems, job descriptions, and performance criteria are designed with neurodiversity in mind, compliance becomes almost irrelevant - because the environment itself no longer discriminates. This is the essence of universal design in HR: make systems functional for all minds, and the need for accommodation largely disappears.

Diverse cognitive teams outperform homogeneous ones because they approach problems differently. They notice the blind spots others miss, identify errors earlier, and challenge assumptions that would otherwise go untested. According to Deloitte’s Human Capital Trends analysis ¹¹, cognitive diversity can lift problem-solving performance by up to 20% and risk detection by nearly 30%.

For HR leaders focused on productivity, retention, and innovation, inclusion is not about avoiding lawsuits or managing liabilities. It’s about future-proofing the organisation itself - guarding against the risk of sameness, missed opportunity, and stagnant thinking. In that sense, inclusion is less a moral gesture and more a resilience strategy: it strengthens the business by expanding how it thinks, reacts, and adapts.

Autism as a different way of processing information

Autism isn’t defined by a single feature or deficit. It is a constellation of interconnected differences in how people perceive, filter, and act on information. These differences don’t reflect intelligence or motivation - they reflect a distinct way of organising experience.

For autistic people, those filters work differently. Research in sensory neuroscience shows that autistic brains assign unusually high precision to incoming data - sights, sounds, words, and even internal thoughts - meaning that information arrives with roughly equal importance instead of being automatically prioritised ^12,4. What others’ brains dampen as background noise remains present, demanding conscious effort to sort and interpret. That extra filtering step consumes mental energy, which is why seemingly simple tasks - like following a meeting conversation in a noisy room - can be exhausting. It’s not distraction; it’s data overload.

Different theoretical frameworks attempt to explain these cognitive patterns. Frith and Happé’s weak central coherence theory ¹³ suggests autistic people naturally focus on details rather than gestalt wholes. Others, like enhanced perceptual functioning theory ¹⁴, emphasise superior discrimination of sensory information. More recent predictive processing ^15,12 accounts explore differences in how autistic brains generate and update expectations about the world. Each framework illuminates particular aspects of autistic cognition without fully capturing its complexity. For workplace purposes, one especially practical lens is monotropism, which describes autistic cognition as tending toward narrow, deep streams of attention rather than spreading focus broadly across multiple inputs ³. This does not define autism, but it helps explain the familiar pattern of intense concentration, difficulty switching tasks, and strong preference for clarity that many autistic people report.

This attentional style can be an extraordinary advantage when work aligns with interest. It fuels the kind of sustained concentration behind breakthrough research, flawless code, and process excellence. When interest meets purpose, the autistic brain enters what Mihály Csíkszentmihályi called flow ¹⁶ - a state of deep focus that can last hours without fatigue.

However, in environments that demand constant context switching or social multitasking, that same strength becomes a liability. Every interruption, ambiguous instruction, or “quick chat” triggers an expensive mental reorientation. Think of it like shifting a microscope lens mid-focus: each time the field changes, the entire system must recalibrate before clarity returns. Over a full workday, those micro-switches accumulate into what psychologists call executive-function load - the hidden cognitive tax of unpredictability.

Understanding this cost helps HR stop pathologising behaviour and start adjusting structure. The employee who resists “ad hoc meetings” may not be inflexible; they may be protecting their processing bandwidth. The person who prefers written instructions isn’t avoiding collaboration; they’re minimising ambiguity to stay accurate. Once these patterns are recognised as neurological, not attitudinal, productivity strategies shift from fixing people to fixing friction.

The idea of the spectrum is also widely misunderstood. Autism is not a straight line from “mild” to “severe.” It is more accurately a multidimensional profile - a pattern of traits that vary in intensity across domains such as communication, sensory experience, and attention amongst others. The specific mix, not the “level,” defines the individual.

To borrow an image: imagine a lake with countless depths and currents. Each autistic person moves through that water differently. Some need calm surfaces and predictable routines to stay afloat. Others dive deep into their interests and surface with insights no one else imagined. Some are driven by rules, others by creativity; many by both. The water isn’t shallow or deep - it’s simply varied. Autism isn’t about how autistic someone is; it’s about how autism shows up in their particular current.

For HR, understanding that variability is crucial. It reminds us that no policy, job description, or accommodation will fit everyone. The goal is not uniformity, but design elasticity - systems flexible enough to meet employees where their cognition naturally flows.

Communication and the double empathy problem

Modern communication theory, from Carl Rogers’ humanistic psychology ¹⁷ to symbolic interactionism ^18,19, has long posited that empathy is the foundation of mutual understanding. Empathy enables people to infer others’ intentions, predict reactions, and maintain social harmony - what Rogers described as a “necessary and sufficient condition” for genuine connection. But these theories were developed through neurotypical lenses. They assume that empathy operates in predictable ways.

Social communication differences - one of the two diagnostic domains of autism ¹ - are among the most frequent fault lines in workplace misunderstanding. Autistic people often prioritise accuracy over tone. A manager’s “constructive feedback” may sound vague or contradictory; an autistic employee’s directness may be mistaken for rudeness.

Psychologist Damian Milton ⁶ proposed that these breakdowns aren’t caused by a lack of empathy, but by a mismatch in how empathy works between autistic and non-autistic people - a theory he called the Double Empathy Problem.

In traditional psychology, empathy may be described with two different meanings. Cognitive empathy is the ability to infer what someone else is thinking or intending. While emotional empathy, is the ability to feel and respond to another’s emotions. In simpler terms, cognitive empathy is when I understand how you feel, and emotional empathy is when I literally feel what you feel.

Research suggests that autistic people generally show typical or even heightened emotional empathy - they feel deeply, often to the point of overwhelm - but may struggle with cognitive empathy when social cues are subtle or inconsistent ²⁰. Non-autistic people, conversely, tend to rely heavily on shared social conventions and can misread autistic communication because it follows a different logic and rhythm.

In other words, both sides experience empathy - just differently. The autistic person may miss a hint, while the neurotypical person misses sincerity. Each interprets the other through their own social code, and both can leave the exchange feeling unseen or disrespected.

Milton’s research, later expanded by Crompton and colleagues ²¹, shows that autistic-to-autistic communication is often fluent, intuitive, and mutually satisfying, while mixed-neurotype exchanges are more likely to falter. The lesson for HR is profound: communication breakdowns arise not because one party lacks empathy, but because both are operating from different empathic frameworks.

Once managers grasp this, they stop confusing clarity with conflict and begin recognising that “poor communication” may simply mean mismatched translation. Building systems that favour explicit, written, and predictable interaction closes that gap - not by asking one side to adapt more, but by levelling the interpretive field for both.

Bridging forward: from understanding to design

So when we talk about autism at work, we are not describing deficits in people but mismatches between minds and systems. The differences we’ve explored - in perception, attention, and communication - only become problems when the workplace demands conformity to a single cognitive style.

The next chapter turns from definition to impact. It examines what happens when organisations fail to recognise these mismatches - the hidden costs of exclusion, burnout, and lost innovation - and why inclusion is not simply a moral gesture but a business imperative. By understanding the price of inaccessibility, we can begin designing workplaces that value difference as an asset rather than treating it as an exception.

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