Neru Obhrai

Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, everybody.

My name is Neru, and I am here to share an experience with you very recently in an enterprise where I was coaching and consulting them.

You may be familiar with the Scaled Agile Framework for enterprises that helps organizations to deliver IT solutions. With this particular organization, we were launching one of the main events of the SAFe framework, which is a PI planning event.

The PI planning event enables teams to come together to plan and align on their commitments for the next planning window.

So in the window we were doing this, I had done this hundreds of times before. Well, maybe not quite hundreds of times, but enough times to be able to say, I am comfortable. I know that we need to train our people. We need to align on our backlogs.

Overall, yes, the ART was a success as a delivery and an implementation. However, two days later, I received this email from the HR manager of the people who were part of this Agile Release Train. She forwarded an email from Mike.

Mike was a member of the Agile Release Train and said, Neru, moving to an agile environment could unintentionally create an environment that is less suitable for neurodivergent people.

Mike is a 45-year-old gentleman who had recently been diagnosed with ADHD.

I realized that in my naivety and in my ignorance, I really had not put my arms around the folks who had neurodivergent symptoms in an agile environment. But I quickly started to recognize that they essentially display fundamental differences in their social understanding, their sensory perception, and their information processing.

When it comes to our children, we give them the support they need. We are almost focused on looking out for those symptoms and behaviors such as loneliness, minimum eye contact, being late speakers, because we want to make the adjustments for them in their schooling environments, in their education environments, because we want them to be successful.

But do we give enough focus, and equally, to the adults in the workspace?

I have here a few simple statistics from the United Kingdom. I guess what this told me was most importantly that a lot of people within our workspace are still going undiagnosed.

Perhaps two of the main reasons for that are the stigma associated with the behaviors and also the overall cost of getting a professional diagnosis done. One could argue that if we extrapolated these numbers, then maybe 15 to 20 percent of us here in this summit today demonstrate some of those symptoms.

Here is some generic profiling. There are barriers and there are strengths. I absolutely believe that as managers, as coaches, as consultants in the workspace, we misinterpret some of these barriers, and we do not necessarily capitalize enough on the strengths here as well.

So what we need to do, perhaps, is start to reflect on our coaching styles for the behaviors that we want to encourage.

A simple example here was when I was training in a classroom, and a lady, a student, said to Neru, this is not working for me. I asked her, what can I do differently for you?

She said, it is really simple. I have ADHD. When you ask me a question, just give me a few seconds to be able to process and give you an answer.

I would like to leave you with the SCARF model from David Rock. David Rock was able to combine neuroscience research with the world of work. He created that concept of NeuroLeadership, and essentially he says that these five domains are physical parts of our brain that are activated as a result of a perceived response, or a reward.

So to summarize, we have an opportunity here. We have an opportunity to nourish every interaction in the workplace, to create that workplace where every single person, regardless of their differences, feels valued, empowered, and comfortable.

So take the responsibility to enable individuals to bring their whole self to the workspace.