Why me?

Each of us goes through life with two intertwined resources: who we are and what we experience. Who we has a profound impact on how (whether) we reflect on our experiences. Who we are also impacts the kinds of contexts and experiences that may be open to us and the opportunities that appeal to us. 

As we experience life moment by moment, we accumulate information and knowledge. If we are lucky, we get the opportunity to bring all of these things - who we are, our learning from our experiences, and our unique store of knowledge - with us to work. More often, as we reach the workplace threshold we are required to box away most of what makes us a unique human and put on a predefined work-specific role. That's cool if what is needed is a standardised result flowing from people operating a standardised process in as close to a standardardised way as possible. 

I must admit, this is one of the reasons I prefer to be my own boss. I want to know that I can always bring the whole of myself to work and work optimally for me. 

Having got some kind of vision on paper for NeuDICE (NeuroDivergent International Centre for Entrepreneurs), the next question was: "Who is best placed to take this forward?"

It's a question I ask myself regularly. If I can think of someone better suited than me for a task I will always nudge or prompt them towards it rather than nab it for myself. On this occasion for this start-up I believe the buck stops with me. This belief is rooted in reflections on who I am, what I have learned from my experiences and the store of information and knowledge I have accumulated. 

I am currently going through a formal assessment for being autistic having self-defined as autistic for the last couple of years and as neurodivergent since I first heard the term. I see the world differently from most of those around me. I have an immense capacity for drawing different sets of knowledge and different people into conversation with each other to see what happens rather than to achieve a specific goal. I believe this is associated with my neurodivergence as much as my education or 'being brainy'. This business start-up will involve all these skills because currently there are pockets of expert knowledge and I am itching to see what happens when they are introduced to each other. 

Since 2012, I have had a dual life. In one life I am co-founder of a kind of workers cooperative that no-one believed could exist - people who others divide into 'having a learning disability' or 'not having a learning disability' working together as colleagues and directors without hierarchy and defiantly refusing to divide ourselves or define ourselves or limit ourselves as the culture said we should.  My role in the co-founding was to absorb information about different types of legal structure, governance and purpose of a business and find ways to present it to the rest of the co-founders-to-be in a way that meant we could all play an equal role in making decisions. This business start-up will need someone who can present business-related information in different formats and use a different way of helping people match structures and governance to how they work best and what is best of achieving their vision. 

In the other life, I have been growing into a transdisciplinary academic with an interest in organisational management, sociolinguistics and 'being disabled' with a focus on making sure people labelled with learning disabilities aren't left out. The interest that holds both of these together is the determination to leave the world a fairer more equal place than I found it. For me, that involves becoming familiar (to the point of it counting as an 'autistic special interest') in social and government policy work. This business start-up is going to need to build an evidence base where none currently exists. It is as if entrepreneurs and neurodivergent people are two incommensurate categories (ie it is impossible to be both). 

As part of that dual life, I headed up two years of action research about the entrepreneurship of people with learning disabilities and their self-advocacy organisations. It showed far too many barriers and also offered some creative ways around and through those barriers. It showed multiple pitfalls and suggested a few ladders for climing out if you fell in. At the same time I found myself (thanks to university reorganisation) being relocated from a sociology department to a business school. This opened a rich vein of literatures about organisational management. This business start-up is going to need to build on everything learned from that research and combine those findings with what is known about organisational management in order to develop NeuDICE into a business that fits comfortably with the vision and with neurodivergent ways of approaching doing business.

This business start-up is going to need other competencies too, ones I do not have. That's where governance arrangements come in. And that's the next blog.