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Over the years I’ve heard a lot of people say something to the effect of ‘you’re a very private person’.  And they’re right.  So as well as being a bit out of character for the focus of the posts on this blog, the next few paragraphs are out of character for me full stop.  Slightly more normal service (i.e. thoughts on aspects of UK higher education) resumes thereafter.

individual

This month it’s a year since I was formally diagnosed as autistic.  For someone who receives a mid-life diagnosis, I’m not unusual in that I’d had a sense of this for a fair length of time before it became ‘official’.  It’s something where I’m still working through the implications, seeking to understand what it means for my sense of self and sense of being.

And of course it’s something that isn’t straightforward, as the nature and implications of autism vary so much between individuals.  When reading around about autism it doesn’t take very long to come across Stephen Shore’s quote: ‘if you’ve met one person with autism, you’ve met one person with autism’.

organisations

I’ve already found that this means that while there are some really useful resources out there on how organisations can make reasonable adjustments for autistic employees, it can still be difficult for even those organisations that want to make adjustments to do this.  There’s often an unspoken sense of wanting the checklist of adjustments to make, when the very different implications of autism for each individual means that this list doesn’t exist.

It’s absolutely about responding to the individual, and what their autism means for them – their individual strengths, their individual challenges. And recognising that each individual’s understanding and perspective about their autism can and often does change over time (see for instance an interview earlier this year with Chris Packham, where one of the things he talks about is how his perspective on his autism has changed over time), and adjustments may need to change with this.

I realise that I’m fortunate that universities are often among the better organisations in dealing with this area.  I remember a few years ago (pre-diagnosis) talking to a senior university colleague who everyone rightly regarded as ‘one of the good ’uns’.  Commenting on another senior manager who was generally regarded as direct, definitely tactless and perhaps bordering on being a bully, he described that colleague as ‘probably on the spectrum’.  My experience is that (thankfully) those type of comments are rarer, less likely now.  As universities have paid greater attention to inclusivity, there is more understanding of the neurodivergence across our student and staff bodies.

While there has been much progress, there is much further to g, and perhaps not just in the ways that people might immediately think. The rest of this post is about one aspect of this.

talk the talk

At the start of this year someone tried to persuade me to apply for a job at another university.  One of the claimed selling points was that this university wasn’t just a standard Russell Group university, with an institutional strategy focused on climbing league tables and increasing research income.  This university was different.  The VC had a distinctive vision of their university as a values-driven organisation, focused on making a real impact on major global issues.

I wasn’t persuaded, about the job or this claimed distinctiveness.  Look at pretty much any UK university, and for a number of years now their pitch has been about being values-driven.

That’s a(nother) positive development. A key element of what ‘values’ means is that it’s about how things are done.  That’s crucially important, but from observation and talking with colleagues in the sector there have been two challenges arising from the ‘values-turn’ in university strategies.

walk the walk

The first is that ‘how’ things are done needs to be linked to ‘why’ things are done – the purpose of an organisation.

The importance of purpose for organisations has been strongly emphasised over the last decade by people like Paul Collier, John Kay and Colin Mayer. Initially in higher education it could feel that values-based approaches could be untethered to that broader sense of purpose. In recent years (as can be seen for example in the recent AdvanceHE/WonkHE report of discussions with senior leaders) universities have become better at articulating their ‘why’, their purpose and linking this with their values.

The second issue is that the reality is that organisational values only matter if they are reflected in the behaviours within that organisation.  They have to be lived, and be seen to be lived, not just espoused.

There is evidence that senior leaders in university recognise and are increasingly emphasising the need for this, and the importance of making this a reality (again see for example some of the quotes in the AdvanceHE/WonkHE report).  This is welcome, and crucial.  But one of the ways this is happening does make me pause for thought.

but how?

A typical way of seeking to ensure that values and behaviours link is to establish organisational behaviour frameworks: ‘this is what we mean by value X, and these are the behaviours that demonstrate this value’.  And I worry about such approaches.

I’ve seen these in different organisations, and my impression is that they are written with the best of intentions.  Despite this I’ve always been a little wary of them. It can be easy for the descriptions of behaviours to step over the fuzzy boundary that separates articulating behaviours from defining someone’s personality.  Careful drafting can mitigate this to some extent, but it’s an inherent danger in these frameworks – either in their design, or their implementation.

I think that this becomes more of an issue where someone has one or more type of neurodivergence.  The way that these behaviour frameworks are written sometimes stray into descriptions of behaviour that feel as though they assume someone is neurotypical, or where the behaviours describe could easily be interpreted that way.

There’s a danger that as we try as organisations to ensure that our values and behaviours are consistent with each other, we reach for approaches that aren’t truly inclusive.  Of course it is important that values are lived through behaviours, but how this is done will vary according to each individual.  Behaviour frameworks, no matter how carefully written, risk being blunt tools that are too formulaic and/or get used by managers in prescriptive ways.

Instead we need approaches that are truly focused on the individual; understanding their specific situation and context, including their ways of thinking; and how our organisational values work through as behaviours for individuals within that context.  In other words approaches that have a sharp focus on what organisational values mean for how someone does their job, but which do this on the basis of an understanding of and empathy for each individual member of our universities.  Which is hard, and is challenging. It’s time-consuming.  But it’s necessary, if as organisations we mean what we say about inclusivity.