Undercover in Diversity Training

Author's note: This was originally posted on my wordpress site in 2023. I like it better here.

As someone with a handful of intersections often talked about in diversity trainings (being a cis woman, queer, a stroke survivor/neurodiverse, etc etc etc), I sometimes feel a bit like I'm undercover when I attend a training related to an axis of my identity that isn't visible or otherwise obvious about myself. Sometimes I go to these trainings to see what the presenter has to say, to see if I can learn something about myself and others and maybe learn new tools to better interact with my fellow humans. Sometimes I go to them because they're mandatory. Sometimes I go to them because the description indicates that it's going to be a hot mess and I'm curious to see just how bad it's going to be.

I recently attended a work-hosted diversity training presented by an external trainer on the topic of neurodiversity which was unfortunately one of the latter. However, instead of bringing popcorn and a bad attitude, I decided I was going to use this as an opportunity to identify what, exactly, about the training made me feel like it was going to be a failure. I hoped that approaching it from this perspective would give me some food for thought on what makes a training successful and help me better understand my response to the trainings that aren't.

Training on the topic of neurodiversity in particular can be a bit fraught. Not only is there a stigma around talking about mental health in our culture, there are a shocking number of stereotypes, both positive and negative, about people who are classified as neurodiverse. These stereotypes are everywhere and insidious, and are often rarely considered in the context of these trainings. Consider how many belittling words we use for people that are related to DSM categories: "OCD", "bipolar", "schizo", "crazy". DSM aside, I also see the effect of the stories our culture tells about our brains every time I tell someone I've had a stroke. There's always a bit of a pause while I see them trying to equate their expectation of "stroke survivor" with the person in front of them.

So when someone does a training on neurodiversity, there's always some veneer of this mental-health-related cultural shorthand, either from the presenters themselves or the specific topic of the training. Rarely do the presenters self-identify as neurodiverse. Rather, they tend to be some sort of therapist or other psychiatric professional. On one hand this is nice because it means neurodiverse folks don't have to do the emotional labor of yet another 101 course. But if done wrong, it can lead to anyone who is neurodiverse in the audience feeling like being a beetle pinned under glass. Not to mention a long history of medical professionals advocating at rather than for neurodiverse people. A lot of horrific things have been done to folks with mental illness or other brain-related disabilities "for their own good."

So did I think this training was going to advocate for frontal lobotomies and Victorian-era psychiatric care? No. However, I did suspect there was going to be a bit of an ... anthropological distance in the presentation. 

As an exercise in understanding why this whole thing made me feel icky, I took some time to write out all of my emotional responses to the agenda. The general gist of my notes was that this felt like it would be an attempt to provide a universal guide or complete how-to for interacting with "neurodivergent colleagues". One of those 60-minute "complete guide to working with the other in our midst" sort of things. Imagine more ranting and all-caps on my part, but you get the idea.

The problem with trainings that advocate for and teach these plug and play frameworks for human interaction is that they inevitably feel dehumanizing to the folks they are about. There is rarely a nice logic tree with a one size fits all solution to how to work with "those people" and any attempt to create one often comes across as incomplete at best.

Humans are messy, irrational, and full of gooey emotional gunk. Because of this, I feel that any sort of logic-based framework proposed as a be-all-end-all way of communication is bound to break down at the first contact with a real interpersonal issue. It often results in disappointment on all sides, with the folks trying to use the framework not understanding why it isn't working and the folks on the receiving end not feeling like their needs have been met or understood.

Identifying this as my central concern made me realize the core problem: I felt that this training would only further "other" neurodiverse folks like me.

"Othering" never feels good to folks experiencing it, and it also tends to disenfranchise them as well by making them feel unseen and unheard. It's the difference between being talked about vs being talked with.

Now that I'd identified this as the problem I was having with the training in question, I set myself a challenge: could I set aside those expectations and pre-conceptions to attend this training as someone genuinely intending to learn something from it? 

Dear readers, I tried. I really did. I showed up, bright eyed and bushy tailed, with a cup of tea and a fresh notepad file. The course started: I listened to the presenter's intro, nodded in acknowledgement when the presenter said this was a "safe space", and prepared to learn.

About five minutes in, my determination to be open-minded about the quality and content of the training was being sorely tested. The presenter started off with talking about a study of college students that compared the performance of students with ADHD against those who had not been diagnosed. I was pretty confused as to why he had started off the training with this example, and further distracted by his use of "outperformed". He said these students with ADHD in the study "outperformed in 'originality', 'novelty', and 'flexibility'" but didn't really make it clear why this was significant to the discussion. This was a training on Neurodiversity 101, which I presumed was intended to be a general discussion, so why were we talking about a specific study of college students with ADHD?

As the training went on, I realized the point of this intro had been to start the discussion by priming the audience to think about individuals with neurodiverse brains as a model minority. Yet as we moved on into more expected territory of definitions and clinical terms, I wondered why he had bothered. After going through the definitions of the difference between being "neurodiverse," "neurodivergent," and "neurotypical", it seemed like we had landed directly in let's talk about "people with divergent brains territory". This was made worse by his definition of "neurotypical" individuals as those with more "common thought patterns", which sounded very close to "normal" versus "abnormal". This wasn't helped by the fact that for the rest of the presentation, the majority of his reference to people who are neurodiverse was to call them "neurodivergent populations", which although accurate, felt pretty othering (in a weird young-adult science-fiction novel kind of way). 

So for those playing along at home, we had started in a "safe space," journeyed into "model minority" territory, and had now landed a "look at these uncommon thought pattern people" swamp. Nothing up to this point had made me feel very safe, and as a result I'd pretty much given up on the whole "let's approach this with an open mind" approach.

I didn't go so far as to make popcorn for the rest of the training, but my notes have an increasing tone of somewhat disbelieving outrage, starting with his presentation of the COIN model as a way of giving feedback to neurodiverse populations in the workforce. Remember at the beginning of this I mentioned the whole "applying general frameworks to human behavior usually ends in sorrow" thing? I didn't expect how prophetic that would be. 

For those who haven't had the experience, the COIN model breaks down into a four-part discussion format involving providing Context, Observations, Impact, and Next steps. Basically "In this context, I saw you do this thing and it had this impact so I want you do this other thing to fix that." In general, not a bad framework, but in the context of how he posed it as a good framework for communicating with neurodiverse coworkers, it sounded like a recipe for disaster. In particular, I suspect there's a reason folks have proposed a modification to this framework: COILED, which focuses on creating more of a discussion than a series of ultimatums. For someone who has pretty crippling anxiety some days, if I was on the receiving end of the COIN model on a bad day, I would likely smile, nod, and then go have a panic attack somewhere away from my desk. 

It was around this point that I started to wonder if the presenter had actually ever genuinely talked to someone who was neurodiverse in a work environment. The first clue probably should have been the muzac he had playing in the background throughout the entire training (which I fortunately was able to turn off due to Zoom's "mute speaker's computer sound" option). However, my suspicion only deepened when as an example of "explaining implicit cultural norms", he used telling a coworker: "In this office we don't wear flip flops." 

That's it. No follow on explanation of why flip flops were not appropriate work attire, nor any indication that an explanation of the rule should occur. Just that statement, as if that would be sufficient. I don't know about other neurodiverse folks, but if I am given a rule with no explanation of the function of that rule I am very unlikely to remember to follow it. There was no reference to "we don't wear flip flops because we require close-toed shoes for safety", which means there is an implied cultural context that the speaker assumes is available to the hearer.

I know I work best when the rules make sense and have a purpose. Rules for the sake of having rules tend to be forgotten or ignored in light of all the other things I need to keep track of.

Even with all this, the part of the presentation that really took the cake was what I am presuming was a well-meaning attempt to "sell" the benefit of hiring neurodiverse employees. If you recall, this training started off focusing on the "outperformance" of students with ADHD. When the culmination of the model-minority talk came toward the end, when he claimed that hiring neurodiverse employees "added productivity on specific types of tasks and faster processing speed (30%)" (this is a literal quote from one of the slides). 

If you are screaming internally right now, you get it. For everyone else, here's the deal: I've intentionally used the term "model minority" a couple times so far as an adjective for this sort of talk. Although the term has been primarily used to discuss the perception and portrayal of Asian Americans in the US, I feel like it is an appropriate term here to describe this strange forced "look at how productive and useful this population is" theme of the training. 

This sort of portrayal tends to be shockingly harmful to the people portrayed in this manner. Not only does it set the bar unreasonably high for performance or behavior, it also leads to unreasonable conscious or unconscious expectations and bias. What if a hiring manager attended that training, then hired a neurodivergent employee with an expectation of "added productivity on specific types of tasks and faster processing speed (30%)"? How do you think that manager would naturally respond if that employee didn't live up to those expectations?

To make matters worse, there was no discussion of exactly what sorts of accommodations neurodiverse employees might need or ask for, leading to this weird portrayal of neurodiverse employees being super speed workers with no needs or accommodations beyond the norm. This makes it harder for folks who need accommodations (neurodiverse or otherwise) to ask for them. No one wants to be the person who needs an office without fluorescent lighting due to the migraine-inducing flickering, or who needs headphones to concentrate and filter out unwanted stimuli, or who needs to knit or have a fidget toy in meetings to stay focused. These examples are based on folks I have worked with and it wasn't unusual for me to hear others describe them as "needy," "weird," "disrespectful," and "antisocial" for needing sunglasses, headphones, or knitting to improve their working experience. 

When neurodiverse individuals are portrayed as superhuman, when we have to ask for help, it comes at a pretty high cost to our dignity and how others perceive us. It also means we feel like we have to do a lot more explaining to get our needs met, which can be awkward if not sometimes impossible. 

And that was the training. After I left the Zoom call, I tried to sum up my impression of the entire thing in one sentence:  

Disappointing because I was hoping people would use this training as an opportunity to understand me, but it was clear that even the presenter didn't understand, which made it worse.

Like I said at the beginning, when this sort of training goes wrong, it goes really wrong. "Disappointment" as my main reaction is pretty par for the course when this happens because I hope, despite everything, that these trainings and trainers will grow and do better by the populations they represent with them.

So what do we do? It would be super easy for me to leave it here, having said my piece. But does that really help contribute to fixing this problem? I mean, maybe, if the guy who did the training reads this and takes to heart my critique. But that would solve only one instance of trainings like this throughout the DE&I universe. 

The larger problem, however, is one I alluded to at the beginning of this article. There are so many DE&I trainings that are solely prohibitive ("Don't do this") or prescriptive ("Do this one neat trick..."). Both of these can be useful (especially if educating attendees on appropriate language/terminology), however, stopping at that is where I've found the gap between converting attendees to allies occurs.

No matter how much we wish there was one, there is no framework for "how to human". Many of these trainings, although well intentioned, appear to be considered "good enough" for helping people interact better with their colleagues, reports, and managers. But they don't typically give people the skills or the practice with the squishy side of human interaction. There aren't enough Powerpoint slides in the world to teach us how to be better humans.

But there is one set of things that will: self awareness, empathy, and compassion. When we practice being self-aware, we learn more about our reactions and responses to other people around us. When we practice empathy and compassion, we take ourselves out of the equation and try to view the situation as the other person. Adding in a level of curiosity also helps as it enables us to react to someone else from a place of "I wonder why they are doing that" instead of "ugh I can't believe they are doing that."

I just wish we had more trainings that supported us practicing those skills, rather than yet another one giving us a new crop of acronyms and dubious advice. But until that day when I might feel safe enough to attend without a metaphorical trench-coat and sunglasses, I can keep attending undercover and share my impressions of how we can do better.