Implicit biases on who belongs.

I didn't know whether to be happy or a bit sad about this LinkedIn comment on my SNS keynote. Sad as it points to be a stark reality. When you have more visible disability, do you need to be exceptional, for people to even being realize that maybe, just maybe you needed to be part of that space in the first place. 

Recording of talk here. https://youtu.be/sZm4SWYYrgE

LinkedIn Comment.

The keynote that moved me most at the Stanford Neurodiversity Summit last weekend was given by someone who cannot speak.

Hari Srinivasan is autistic and ADHD, and minimally speaking. He delivered an entire keynote on the neuroscience of autism, through a communication device. I went in intrigued. I did not expect to be held for every second of it.

Not once did I drift. He was funny. Genuinely funny, the kind that makes a whole room laugh with him. And though he was talking about autism, about his own brain, everyone seemed to recognise something of themselves in what he said. He wasn't a case study at the back of the room. He was the most present person in it.

My honest first thought, watching him up there, was: it's amazing he can do this. Then I caught what was underneath it. If I found it amazing, some part of me had expected less, had quietly assumed a nonspeaking man belonged in the audience, not at the front of it.

He hadn't overcome anything. He was simply the right person to be up there. What needed explaining wasn't him. It was my surprise.

Because most of the limits we put on people aren't theirs. They belong to everyone unwilling to build the conditions that let them show what they can do. The barrier was never the disability. It's a room that was never built for them, and then reads their absence as proof they didn't belong.

Hari broke through anyway. But no one should have to be extraordinary just to get through the door.

I work with organisations on people and inclusion. We're good at getting people through the door and calling it done. We rarely ask the harder question: once they're here, did we build a place they can belong, or just one they're allowed into?

The most credentialed voice in that room needed a device to speak. He had more to say than any of us.

The limit was never him.

RESPONSES:

1. That’s such a powerful observation! It’s about creating an environment that empowers everyone to speak, rather than focusing on the stage. People are often quick to criticize from their own limited perspectives, but miss the opportunity to ask themselves: Did we create a safe environment for the other person to speak?

2.The line about a room that reads absence as proof is amazing. In software we'd call that a bad default. We build for one kind of user, then treat low adoption as lack of interest. Makes me wonder how many 'defaults' in our own teams are quietly doing the same thing.

3. Great Analogy! That’s where “design thinking” comes in. Unfortunately, it only becomes a priority when there’s a business case attached to it.

4. This is such an important distinction. Inclusion isn’t just giving someone access to the room, it’s designing the conditions that let them participate fully once they’re there. Too often we judge capability through the narrow ways someone communicates or performs rather than adapting the environment enough to actually see what they can do.

5. Exactly,. That's the part that gets missed: we read the person as the limitation when it's usually the setup. With Hari, the moment the environment shifted, what he could do answered itself.