No, autism isn’t a fucking superpower – that’s a cop-out for employers
For 27 years, strategist Kevin Chesters worked in advertising with undiagnosed autism. He tells The Drum it’s time for the industry to embrace the realities of the disorder and accommodate staff properly.
A woman suffering a headache in the office
Kevin Chesters, once a leading strategist at Wieden+Kennedy, Dentsu, Ogilvy and more, behind famous campaigns such as Carlsberg ‘Old Lions’, Three ‘Pony’ and Honda ‘Hands,’ is angry about autism in adland.
“I try not to be, but I almost feel quite insulted when people refer to it as a superpower… it’s an incredibly distracting and debilitating condition for a lot of people.”
It’s a condition he’s become intimately aware of in the last decade. Two of his children have autism, one with an additional ADD, and he has a niece with “very severe OCD... it’s a lot worse than having to color code albums [as some people say].”
He worries about their place in the future workplace if employers don’t up their ideas.
Chesters didn’t know he had autism until his oldest child went through the diagnosis. Treating the process like a brief (he does that with “everything” in life], he was very involved and walked through the steps himself, like any good planner.
“I was getting increasingly frustrated through the process and going, ‘This is bullshit; these 12 traits of autism are just the traits of all people.’ I then did all these online tests from America. ‘Absolute horseshit,’ I was thinking. ‘I’m scoring 95% [autism probability] and I’m not autistic.’”
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A gentle intervention from his wife went roughly as follows: “Have you ever considered the possibility? People think you’re a bit odd. I mean, nice odd, but not necessarily, like, you know, normal people.”
It was staring him in the face the whole time. “It’s bloody obvious that my mother had it and it’s fairly obvious my father had it.”
There’s a lot of it in the family, they now know.
Chesters’s son has just gone through the interview process for getting placements for his third year at university, with interviews being typically higher hurdles for some people with autism. While most companies claim they now welcome neurodiverse candidates, a lot of them are “lip service” and autistic people “are being filtered out and prevented from even joining the workforce,” Chesters (pictured below) says.
The most recent data from the UK government backs this view. Autistica estimates that around one in 70 people is autistic, adding up to about 1 million people in the UK. But only three in 10 working-age autistic disabled people are in employment (that’s diagnosed). Autistic graduates are twice as likely to be unemployed after 15 months as non-disabled graduates. Only 36% find full time work in this period.
Agency in the ad agencies
Agencies and their clients have been guilty of perpetuating the well-meaning myth that autism is a superpower. It’s understandable, given the lack of understanding of the disorder and the tropes that exist around it.
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Much like how discourse has moved on around the Paralympics in the last decade (Channel 4’s evolution from the iconic ‘Superhumans’ campaign is a fine example), the same is needed for autism and the wider range of neurodiversity. It's time for a 2024 discussion.
To that end, the superhero line is giving employers a “cop-out,” putting emphasis on the individual to be super rather than driving a collective solution. The 2023 All In census from the Advertising Association, IPA and Isba found many disparities in the ad industry, but we’ll focus on disabled staff for now. 11% of all 19,000 respondents and 8% of C-suite respondents (UK) had a disability registered by the Equality Act 2010. Chesters says that a wheelchair user would expect accessibility to the office and other accommodations. [Now, whether they get it is a whole other debate we’ll address at a later date.]
Those with less visible disabilities, including autism, ADD, ADHD and OCD, should also be accommodated. It’s a legal obligation. The Equality Act says there’s a duty to “make reasonable adjustments” if a member of staff is placed at a “substantial disadvantage” when compared with peers.
In the case of autism, offices can cause sensory overload. Noise-canceling headphones, a screen filter for a laptop or desktop PC monitor and quiet, secluded corners to work from are the bare minimum accommodations. Flexible hours and exemption from stressful social gatherings also accommodate some needs.
Chesters’s son works with a single airpod in at all times to dilute the background, for example.
Chesters says: “Schools are getting much better at accommodating and creating conditions within which neurodiverse and neurotypical individuals can thrive, but the workplace is shit at it.”
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Emphasizing the strain of sensory overload on Chesters and some of his family, the lockdown had a silver lining. “It was a dream; I could focus on what I wanted to do. I could edit out the extraneous. I could focus on the task and be much more efficient. You could have 15-minute meetings with pre-notes ahead of time.”
Now, as a publisher, author, speaker, visibility animator and self-described “loud person,” Chesters explains that’s only part of the story.
“It can be frequently exhausting. People often say, ‘Oh, you’re an extrovert,’ but I’m not. I’m an incredibly shy introvert. But I realized the workplace didn’t really want that. After a day presenting, I want to skip dinner and lie in my hotel room in the evening, skipping the meet and greet.”
Reflecting on what his mother may think about this interview, he says it would be along the lines of, “Don’t be telling people about your autism; they might not give you a job if they knew.”
It’s a belief many likely still have. Of those who make it into the workplace, government data finds that only around 35% of autistic employees are fully open about being autistic. One in 10 keep it to themselves.
So, back to the office culture.
It’d be a huge mistake to force everyone back to the office five-days a week, Chesters believes. Especially planners who do most of their best work out and about or in peaceful quiet. But if offices are intent on pulling staff back in, they need a rethink.
“You ask a kid what a farmer does; they’ll say, ‘Farmers grow crops.’ Bullshit. They’re not fucking magicians. What a farmer does is create the conditions within which things can thrive and that is the job of a fucking management team or an office. Sorry, I’m turning into Mark Ritson.”
A great deal of younger staff, in particular, have the choice between working at the end of a bed in a shared apartment or in an open-plan office that’s made no or little concessions to them. That has to change. “I think for managers, it’s basic fucking humanity. Get to know the people who work for you and get to know what works for them.”
What could have been?
The Drum asks Chesters if an early diagnosis and a better understanding of self may have changed how he approached work in the early days? 25 years of masking can’t have been easy. But during that time, he says, he learned how to deal with it. “I learned how to minimize what didn’t make me a good Kevin and maximize what does make me a good Kevin.”
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He believes his autism helped make him a good strategist and agrees that he can’t be the only person in the trade with it. “People probably say strategists are quite quiet, a bit introverted, get very detailed, quite smart, a bit weird. It is the way autistic people are often described too.”
He’s found one particular trait very useful: ‘monotropism.’
“You’ll see this in autistic children. They get very focused on something [his example was four-legged dinosaurs of the gigantic variety], go very deep for 48 hours and then move on.” His obsession as a kid was Star Wars, although that lasted closer to 48 years than 48 hours.
“Monotropism is very useful for planners. If you have a week to prepare a pitch to Mazda, older drivers who tend to buy hatchbacks [for example] become the single most interesting thing you’ve ever come up against.”
That times a thousand is the life of a strategist. Many of these topics are ones neurotypical people would get lost in.
This is also why Chesters doesn’t charge a day rate as a consultant. During his fixation, he reckons he could bash out in a day or two a solution that might take someone else a fortnight. “Why should I be penalized for my own efficiency?”
There’s a slight lull in the conversation when we discuss what he could have done differently in life. It’s a hard question to answer for anyone.
He says: “I am riddled with two things: self-doubt and a responsibility complex. I’ve looked back on a few incidents that went on in my career when I was a boss, dealing with other bosses when I was just an employee, and it has made me sort of reappraise a lot of things.”
Autism, he knows, isn’t a get-out-of-jail-free card. As his wife told him: “Autism explains a lot of your behavior, but it does not excuse it.”
“I’ve always considered myself to be a good person; I think if I’ve ever upset anyone, or I’ve ever been sort of overly harsh or overly truthful, or maybe too blunt, I’m mortified. Now I do approach things differently. I can more understand when I feel anxiety rising within me, when I’m about to react badly, and do the adult equivalent of counting to 10 and taking myself off to my own naughty step.”
After some guidance?
Chesters agreed to this interview to reach people who have autism or other neurodiversities. He urges them to own it and master it.
“You are not alone,” he says and suggests finding your people, be it in your workplace or across the industry. And he pushes staff to pursue the accommodations they are legally entitled to. “Even if you work in a company with 30 people, I guarantee there’ll be three people there with autism.”
He’s happy that more people are seeking diagnoses and exploring that part of themselves, but he wishes those people luck getting an appointment with specialists. It requires patience with healthcare in its current state, particularly in mental health.
“We need a lot more diverse brains and voices in our industry. That colleague who people dismiss as weird. That girl who you think is rude. That young lad who the ECD thinks is a bit of a knob because he was blunt about your idea. They may be on the spectrum and undiagnosed. Just stop and ask yourself if maybe they are one of the tens of thousands of people who are undiagnosed adults.”
He concludes: “When I was diagnosed, I asked my psychiatrist what we did next and what she could do for me. She basically said there was nothing she could do for me, but there was an awful lot that I could do for others. She said that I was a useful example of somebody who was neurodiverse who had had a career, written a book, spoken to lots of people, done lots of things and said that I was quite an interesting example of the fact that neurodiversity while not being a superpower certainly didn’t need to be a hindrance in your career.”
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Kev’s more than happy to take DMs on LinkedIn. He has written for The Drum here. And his most recent book is The Creative Nudge available here.