Actionable communication: inspiration from autism best practices

We want our business communications to have outcomes. I don’t believe anyone tries to communicate poorly, but it is easy to leave information open to interpretation, unintentionally wasting employees’ ideas and efforts by allowing misunderstandings to flourish. Unchecked, the resulting frustration can lead to declining people- and business-performance that is characteristic of an unengaged culture.

Adopting autism-inspired best practice is an effective, sustainable approach to making your communication more actionable, impactful, and inclusive. It is not only autists who benefit, but also non-native speakers whose challenges are similar and, arguably, your entire organization. This piece shares some tips and illustrates the transformative potential of neurodivergence-inspired actions to improve engagement throughout your organization.

Three key takeaways

1. Autistic brains are specialized for focused, detailed activity and new information that you communicate needs to travel through relatively many connections to be processed, understood, and acted on. All extra information asks for extra effort to filter to your core message. We can help by slowing down and pausing, reducing meaningless noise, and being aware of and explaining idioms, metaphors, and social context. A useful guideline is always to ask recipients of your communication to paraphrase back what they have heard and understood, to ensure you can together work to common understanding.
2. These same challenges are faced by people who are not speaking their native language: about ten years ago, this described 80% English speakers, a ratio that was growing. While the cause of the challenges may differ, the ways in which we can facilitate understanding are the same as those inspired by autists’ needs. This is just one example of how embedding neurodivergence-inspired actions in your organizational culture can improve the environment and ability to contribute value, making neuro-inclusion the smart choice to improve engagement throughout your organization.
3. This awareness and efforts to improve our communication habits should be made by everyone, including autists and non-native speakers who will regularly be the communicator. Effective communication needs both parties to engage, with the broadcaster having responsibility to improve their intelligibility, and the recipient having responsibility to assume best intent and to ask for clarity as needed, regardless of their background and cognitive preferences. Let’s not lose the nuance and diversity of our communications in all situations, but this is not fair or inclusive in a business environment where we should invest in making our communications clearer.

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Business communication is successful if people understand you in the way that you intend to be understood, and then take appropriate action. This can be a minefield for autistic employees, whose challenges include the tendency to need extra processing time, to be literal, and to struggle with social context. Let’s take a look at some tips to improve your communication in these areas, and consider how significantly they overlap with those helpful to non-native speakers.

The British Council estimated in 2013 that 4 out of every 5 of the quarter of people in the world who spoke English were not native speakers (see reference at the end), and that this ratio was growing. I’ll leave it to you to calculate the implications for your organization.

Tip 1: build in time for processing

Most people speak quickly, especially when they are enthusiastic. When you’re listening, it can be hard work to follow, especially when sounds that are not meaningful are mixed in: background noise, or fillers such as “Hmm,” (to pass time while thinking about what to say next), “Like,” “Actually,” or, “You know…”.

Autists’ brain cells are more densely packed than neurotypical brain cells, and most strongly connected to their nearest neighbors; that tends to make it easier for them to perform focused, detailed work than to process new concepts which need to travel across relatively more cells and connections. Fillers and noise add unnecessary work to filter to our core message, reducing the capacity available for comprehension and contribution.

If you have tried to follow a communication in a language that you can speak reasonably, but not to native level, you’ll understand. Using myself as an example: English is my native language, and I have been speaking Dutch since I moved to The Netherlands in 2001. My Dutch is good, but when native speakers get enthusiastic, it becomes more difficult for me to hear where one word ends and the next one begins. In a noisy environment, I get tired very quickly, and I am almost always behind where the discussion is in real time so I struggle to contribute.

We can help autists and non-native speakers by slowing down and adding pauses. We should leave space for responses, and not immediately repeat ourselves if a response takes a few seconds to emerge; if we do need to repeat something, we should use similar words to reduce the need for additional processing. We should select quiet locations and use fewer fillers.

Tip 2: anticipate misunderstandings

Autists tend to understand communications literally which is often not how they are intended. I sometimes experience a similar problem in Dutch conversations, when I can understand the words but not extract the meaning, so this challenge reaches far beyond autists to the many others who are not on your wavelength.

“Not on your wavelength” is a good example of difficult communication. It’s an everyday idiom whose component words mean something different from what I want to convey, which is someone whose ideas, opinions, or behaviors are out of alignment. I could easily clarify the phrase by sharing this explanation either instead of or after using the expression. Jokes, sarcasm, and metaphor also fall into this category. They are all linguistically complex, relying on assumed shared understanding.

Imprecision represents another invitation to misunderstanding. Expressions of time are often vague in English, such as, “We’ll do that in a while,” or, “Let’s circle back to that at a later date” (double difficulty: idiom and imprecision in one short sentence), but they are easy to correct when we are conscious about it.

Sometimes, though, imprecision sneaks in unnoticed , as in these Dutch-English examples.

• I thought for a long time that “a couple” was unambiguous, meaning “two”, but the Dutch “een paar” means “a couple” and “a few”. Sometimes the meaning is clear from the context, sometimes not.
• The Dutch “als” means both “if” and “when”. It can be a shock to hear a Dutch friend say, “Let’s discuss it on Saturday if I see you,” when you have just made plans.

Some conversations seemed strange, before I understood why, because subsequent comments didn’t make sense based on my (incorrect) understanding. Eventually I asked about the disconnects and we all learned something. If you sense something like this, it’s best to check whether everyone shares the same understanding.

The last example I’ll share is that English is complex, with the same words having various meanings depending on context, and on the prepositions they are combined with. The book “Is that clear? Effective communication in a neurodiverse world” by Zanne Gaynor, Kathryn Alevizos and Joe Butler, shares multiple meanings of the word “letting”.

I’m letting…

• … my house. (renting)
• … my friend know that I’ll be late. (informing)
• … down my family because I can’t join this weekend. (disappointing)
• … my team have an extra day off. (allowing)
• … up on running so often. (stopping)
• … you off cutting the grass. (excusing you from)
• … on that I’m having a party this weekend. (revealing)
• … you out of the car here. (dropping you off)

Obviously, it will take time for someone “not on your wavelength” to select the one you mean, during which they have less attention available for your message. It’s no accident that Gaynor and Alevizos’ book is derived from their earlier “Is that clear? Effective communication in a multilingual world” because these challenges are shared between autists and non-native speakers, such that much of the earlier text is reused in their later book.

What can you do? Build your awareness of where misunderstanding may creep in and be vigilant about the need to clarify. I don’t believe it is possible for people to eliminate every nuance, and I don’t think it is desirable either; authenticity is part of effective communication and creating an engaging culture. I also know many people who enjoy exchanging idioms to learn about other cultures which is wonderfully inclusive. But be conscious about your use of this kind of language and explain it if you do use it. Five minutes of extra effort now can save hours of wasted work in the future.

This vigilance should not be a one-way-street. Autistic employees and non-native speakers also have a responsibility to do their best to understand communications, to ask for clarification if needed, and to validate that their understanding is correct. Plus, when they are doing the communicating, all of these tips apply to them just as much as they do to others.

Tip 3: social context is unreliable

Social context comes in two varieties.

• Non-verbal communication is our body language, which includes our facial expressions, posture, and gestures.
• Paraverbal language includes our pace and tone of voice, and the emphasis we place on words.

The use and meaning of social context differ between cultures. I nod my head up and down to indicate agreement, but Bulgarian culture agrees with a side-to-side head shake that I would use to mean “no”. Indians indicate “no” in this way, but their similar pendulum-variant means “harmony” or “yes”.

Social signals are a confusing distraction for autists, and they are also open to cross-cultural misunderstanding. At best, they disguise the meaning of what you’re trying to convey because they represent more information to process, and, at worst, they can leave major gaps in understanding if you’re relying on them to convey part of your meaning.

How can you improve this situation? Again, be aware of it. Autists and non-native speakers often prefer communication to be written as well as verbally delivered so they have the time and space they need to fully digest it. And double check for common understanding by asking the communication recipients to paraphrase their understanding back to you.

What’s stopping you?

I am not suggesting that we communicate in this way in every part of our lives. I enjoy the richness of the English language, the nuances and the word plays. I love reading and appreciate the ability of authors to conjure images in my head that I can fine-tune in my way. But there are situations when this is not productive, and not inclusive. I think it is reasonable to expect that we all build our skills in using clearer and more direct language in our business environments, regardless of how we choose to communicate outside them.

I have focused on the needs of autists and non-native speakers in this article, and I hope that is enough to have convinced you that it is worth paying attention to your communications to improve their ability to elicit the action that you mean them to cause. But in reality these steps can improve the effectiveness of your communication for your whole organization. Consider someone who is busy, who is concerned about a family member, who is about to go to an important call with a customer, and so on: these employees are not necessarily autistic or non-native speakers but they are almost certainly not fully focused, and would appreciate your efforts at improving clarity.

None of the tips I have suggested are inherently difficult, but we need to make a consistent effort to be conscious of patterns of our communication, and to change habits built up over a lifetime. Your effort is worth it to improve your employees’ satisfaction, connection to your mission, and opportunities to contribute value to your business success.

Reference for 4 out of every 5 of the quarter of the world that speaks English are non-native English speakers: from The British Council’s 2013 publication“The English Effect: The impact of English, what it’s worth to the UK and why it matters to the world”.