Benny Zuffolini
Working in Design: A Neurodiverse Perspective
In this episode of Brave UX, Benny Zuffolini bravely breaks down how she's navigating enterprise as a neurodiverse design leader, and shares a formative realisation from facilitating her first design sprint.
Highlights include:
- Should people treat you differently when they find out that you’re autistic?
- Why don’t you wish you were diagnosed as being neurodiverse earlier?
- How important is it for people to tell each other the stories they’re telling themselves?
- Are you concerned that being open about neurodiversity may lead to discrimination?
- What have you learned about effectively facilitating workshops with senior stakeholders?
Who is Benny Zuffolini?
Benny is a Product Design Director at Pearson, a 176 year old world-leading education company that’s helping people to achieve their potential through physical and digital learning and assessment experiences.
Prior to Pearson, Benny was the Head of Design and Experience at Zego, a UK-based insurtech startup that simplifies the way businesses insure their vehicles.
Benny was also the UX Manager at Vonage, where she was credited as one of two design leaders that enabled the successful creation and rollout of a design system that unified the company’s digital product experience, and brought greater efficiency and scalability to design efforts.
Recently diagnosed with autism, Benny has been actively raising awareness of neurodiversity and its many unique aspects and advantages in the workplace.
Transcript
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Hello and welcome to another episode of Brave UX. I'm Brendan Jarvis, Managing Founder of The Space InBetween, the home of New Zealand's only specialist evaluative UX research practice and world-class UX lab, enabling brave teams across the globe to de-risk product design and equally brave leaders to shape and scale design culture. Here on Brave UX though, it's my job to help you to put the pieces off the product puzzle together, I do that by unpacking the stories, learnings, and expert advice of world class UX, design and product management professionals. My guest today is Benny Zuffolini. Benny is a Product Design Director at Pearson, a 176 year old world-leading education company that's helping people to achieve their potential through physical and digital learning and assessment experiences. If that sounds familiar, then you would be right. It's the same company that my previous guest Trip O'Dell works for.
- And yes, Trip is how I came to meet Benny. Anyway, back to Benny. Prior to joining Pearson, Benny was the Head of Design and Experience at Zego, a UK-based InsureTech startup that simplifies the way businesses insure their vehicles, whether they have hundreds of them or whether they're a single self-employed driver. Benny was also the UX Manager at Vonage, an American cloud communications company that was founded in 2001 to disrupt traditional telcos by bringing voiceover IP technology to families and small businesses. Fast forward 17 years and Benny would join Vonage, now a billion dollar company with dozens of digital products and a globally distributed team. While at Vonage, Benny is widely credited for being one of the two design leaders who enabled the successful creation and rollout of the design system, unifying the company's digital product experience and bringing greater efficiency and scalability to design and development efforts. No small feat! Recently identified as neurodiverse, Benny has been actively raising awareness of neurodiversity and its many unique aspects and advantages in the workplace. Passionate, purposeful, and professional. I've been looking forward to speaking with Benny today. Benny, welcome to the show.
- Benny Zuffolini:
- Well, thank you for having me and thank you for the intro.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- No, it's great to have you here, Benny. I really did enjoy preparing for today and one of the things that I thought was a highlight of this preparation was that you are a self-described mother of bunnies and one of your bunnies. Yes. So that's true. Good. One of your bunnies, Steve, which is a great name by the way, for a bunny. He even guest starred in a recent exercise video series. What is with the bunnies? Why not cats or dogs? Why bunnies?
- Benny Zuffolini:
- Well, that's actually quite funny. After university, I went back to live with my mom for a little bit as sometimes people have to do when you're in Italy and the salaries are not very high for [laugh] a starter. So I love my mom, however going back at 22 to live just with her was a little bit mental. So we decided that we needed a buffer and she agreed to a Guinea pig. I went to the pet shop and they had a beautiful Guinea pig, which I named Harvey, but also an incredibly beautiful bunny that I had to take home and I called Holly thinking it was a girl. Turns out it was a boy. We called him Princess for about six months, [laugh]. In any case, that just started it. Then I moved to London and I took him with me. I got him a companion here and from that moment on, it's kind of you signed up your life to bunnies cause they live in Pariss and you never want one to be alone. So yeah, I am at my third and fourth bunny at the moment. Steve is Steve is number three.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Okay. And so you have three at the moment or you you've, you've got four.
- Benny Zuffolini:
- It's two. It's two unfortunately. Yeah. They don't live as long as I would like, but I aim to give them a good life as I can. Steve is also a funny story because his third home, because he was considered to be a biter, he's the absolute sweetest little like bunny boy I've ever seen. He constantly wants cuddles. He just doesn't like children. All
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Right. [laugh]. Right, okay. Maybe it was the home environment that was actually the problem and not Steve.
- Benny Zuffolini:
- Yeah, that's the idea. But yeah, Steve likes featuring in my general endeavors, he's both in my exercise videos for Autism Awareness Week and also in a video that I did at Ze go to celebrate neurodiversity in the workplace. There was an actual camera crew that time and they were quite happy when they saw just bunny hopping around and took a bunch of shots. They let me have the outtakes afterwards. I really appreciated that.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Well that's awesome and I do want to come to your time at Zi o as well as the awareness that you've been raising for neurodiversity. But before we do that Sure. I did want to speak with you a little bit about your personal story around neurodiversity and I understand Benny that you were recently identified and I want to be careful with my language here because I think I used the word diagnosed when speaking with Tripp and that wasn't a word that he was comfortable with. So do just correct me if need be as I go through today. Sure. Yeah. So as identified, you're comfortable with that term? Well
- Benny Zuffolini:
- No, I'm comfortable with diagnosed because diagnosed, yeah, I'm comfortable with either, I guess. Yeah, it's part of my personal story. I knew it beforehand, but it was only since I got officially diagnosed that I felt that I could speak about it.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Right. And I was going to ask you about that because, and I'll just quote you now, you've said that and now I am quoting you, I've always had trouble understanding the rules of life to some people I seem rude. I was always anxious. And then you went on to say, it was only when I was diagnosed that I finally understood why I think differently and how to explain it to others. And that was actually from that video that you mentioned about Ze Ego West. Yeah. Where Steve featured and they gave you the outtakes. How do you explain your neurodiversity to others?
- Benny Zuffolini:
- It's a bit easier than I thought it would be, probably because I waited long enough for it to be at least available on Google. But what I explain is being neurodivergent is having your brain wired in a way that is slightly different from the majority of people. Sometimes lightly, sometimes more. But in any case, it's a rewiring and we're all different from each other. We're all different from all humans are different from each other. However, the rewiring tends to mean that there are some things that come very easy for me that may be a struggle for the majority of people and vice versa. There are some things that are harder and especially when it comes to interactions, I ask a lot of questions because I need to form a mental picture of things. So I recognize that that can come across as challenging for some. And I have had my share of misunderstandings and conflict, especially work life, but not just, and also the fact that I am not very good at taking hints. I can sense energy, I can sense when someone is uncomfortable, but I don't understand second meanings and I don't easily read between the lines of someone speaking cuz I'm not reading. I guess it just human communications are made a little bit harder to be fair, especially since I came to the UK because Italians tend to be a little bit,
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Well that actually we were speaking off air, right about how you love to do acting and of course the pandemic has put a bit of a break on that for you personally. But you were telling me how the acting means that you almost have to set your own beliefs and a way of seeing the world to the side in order to embrace the character and you have to learn how to, I think you said sort of something to the effect of moderate your emotions so you're not over embellishing the emotion that you're trying to project. And that had helped you in work context to navigate some of those areas where differences in sort of neuro, I wouldn't say neuro ability, I'm not quite sure what the word word is here, but that mismatch when you are not quite getting a colleague and they're not quite getting you. So te tell us a little bit about that. How have you used your skills as an actor to navigate the workplace more effectively?
- Benny Zuffolini:
- Sure. I think something that became clear to me, especially in my latest acting studies, which were at Identity School of Drama, which is a part-time drama school, so very professional I learned from very, very good people. What I understood truly is that it doesn't, doesn't really matter what I mean, if my audience didn't get it in acting about the emoting, if I'm reading a script and I'm trying to convey an emotion, it doesn't matter that I think I expressed sorrow. If the entire audience gets anxiety, it just only matters what the audience sees through in the end and the majority of the audience. So that has helped me come to terms with the fact that it's not personal and it's the same in conversation with humans. Ultimately, if my objective is for what I'm saying to come across and be understood by the other person, I have to c convey it and you know can have two people shouting at each other. I'm right, no, I'm right. No, this is what I meant. But it comes down to did the other person understand what you mean? If they didn't, then you said it wrong.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- We've certainly had a lot of examples recently around the world of people shouting each at each other. Yes. Because they've got a fundamental basis sort of misunderstanding going on. It sounds like you are fairly pragmatic about the way you view how to navigate and achieve the outcomes that you're seeking to achieve.
- Benny Zuffolini:
- Yes and that's something I can't say that I was born that I definitely had my share of getting really angry at, feeling misunderstood, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. That is probably where I'm saying the diagnosis made a big difference for me. It gave me grounding and stability. It made me feel like I didn't have anything to prove, which means pride is not that important. Okay. If I'm expressing myself in a way that I think is fine, but someone else, it doesn't mean I'm a bad person, but it does mean that they're not going to listen to me.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I understand. Yeah. I understand that neurodiversity is a wide, encompasses a wide variety of people with different forms of neurodiversity and that often people that aren't diagnosed or identified or have a more, I think it's neurotypical way of the way in which their brain works. There can be that disconnect that you've spoken about that can occur. It seems that the onus to address that disconnect is unfairly placed on the person who is neurodiverse. It seems to me at least that people who are neurodiverse have to put in more effort in order to be understood than perhaps people who are on the neurotypical end of that spectrum to understand those people.
- Benny Zuffolini:
- Unfortunately, yes, I do feel the same and that's where my younger self was angry most of the time. And it's not like it's anymore fair now. It's still not great and I wouldn't presume to advise other neurodiverse people to just suck it up and conform. Absolutely. And I don't confirm. I try to find my own way to stay true to my personality, but send my message across. It's complicated. I do wish we lived in a world where this sort of stuff is taught in school and so things like the ladder of inference and coming down from the ladder of your own beliefs and filters and just talk about what you've observed and ask questions, make less assumptions, all of that would be ideal. I decided to just model it and hope that someone will pick it up and then use it themselves.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- So when you disclose or when somebody finds out that you are neurodiverse, and I believe that the way that you've explained your diagnosis in the past is a level one autism. Yeah,
- Benny Zuffolini:
- I'm autistic. The term is level one dash mild [laugh], whatever that means. It's not quite a scale, but yeah, definitely it should mean that it doesn't affect my day-to-day life too much or it doesn't impede me from working and having a normal life. Yes. So
- Brendan Jarvis:
- When people find out about that, however they find out about it, what do you, I don't know if this is the right way to frame this question, but ideally, how ideally would they be with that? Yeah, what is the gap at the moment between how people that aren't conscious of this behaving when they find out about this and what they would ideally be doing that we're not doing as a society or as a workforce right now?
- Benny Zuffolini:
- You know, that's a very interesting question cuz lately I find myself telling, speaking openly to more and more people and usually everyone has an amazing reaction when I say it. I think the most clumsy reaction that I received was someone saying, oh, that's brilliant. I think my nephew's autistic. I'm like, [laugh], okay, sure, it's fine. But I've also spoken to recruiters in the past who would say, yeah, sure, let me know if you have any special requirements or any preferences for the interview process, for example. Yeah, that was exactly it. Just treat it as a bit like I said, Hey, I'm in a different time zone, so I might have thought, oh hey, yeah,
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I'm a vegetarian so I don't wanna downplay the importance of neurodiversity. So this is definitely not what sure I am getting at when I say that. But I, I've heard you talk about it as, and as I said before, you're very pragmatic. You seem to be someone who is very focused on their outcomes and I get the sense, and I could be wrong here, but that you almost want to not be a big deal for it just to be understood and accepted but not be something that is a way in which you are treated or put out on your own. And I get the sense maybe that would make you feel more uncomfortable than if people just reacted the way they have.
- Benny Zuffolini:
- So, okay, that's another very interesting thing. It just made me think that reality is there's absolutely no issue when I tell people that I'm autistic. Everyone in this day and age, everyone reacts pretty well. There is, however, it's more afterwards you get to know someone, you tell them, Hey, by the way, I'm attic. They're like, yeah, great, cool, good to know. But then a month later, two months later, you're having a discussion or a debate or an argument and that's the part where they forget or they don't understand truly the implications of what you disclosed and they start interpreting your behaviors through the lenses of what's common in society. To give you a practical example, I had a manager once that it would upset him that I asked a lot of questions because he eventually told me that he felt like I didn't trust him.
- I thought he wasn't good at his job because he interpreted it as me feeling like I need to check on him. A few months later I got diagnosed and I told him about it and he was very open. Yet the next time I asked him more questions, he again got upset and thought that I wasn't trusting him. I had explained to him that I just need to ask questions and also just in general, I will check on things just to sign it, to check. It's not impersonal. However, in the moment of high emotions, I don't know if he forgot or if it wasn't or if he didn't even just generally cross his mind. But those are the moments where it gets complicated. It's not enough to disclose it. Those different mismatches, like you said, they're subtle and they come out over time. It's all about interpretation. People might not even think that there's something odd what I did. They might just think I was being passive aggressive or I was trying to downplay something or discredit because I said made a blunt comment for example. It's way trickier
- Brendan Jarvis:
- So it's hard to, so it seems like it's hard for people to attribute the behavior to autism versus just things that humans sometimes do if they're under pressure or having a bad day or whatever. But that mis attribution or that lack of remembering what it is that you've previously said to them about who you are and why you do certain things the way you do them, that seems like that's quite confronting and quite hurtful and doesn't really give you the confidence in the people that, and I'm very specifically talking about this manager in that manager in the sense that they truly understand you and they're able to meet them and they're able to meet you where you both are.
- Benny Zuffolini:
- Yeah. The hurtful part is that you get judged over an intention that you never had. You get judges having intentionally misbehaved or were intentionally disrespectful when actually that was the furthest thing from your mind. We get told how to be in society from a very early age, and it's part of education that we learn to interpret certain sets of behaviors and give them a connotation and no one ever bother to explain that. Actually, it's not a one size fits all. If someone like, I'll give you a scenario. Let's say I'm talking to my entire team about the next project. I ask if anyone has any concern, no one says anything after the call. One of them sends me a link maybe that explains how we should have handled that conversation better. That sounds very passive aggressive or they didn't know how to word what they were thinking and they thought they would give me an example instead. But in a absolutely Pacific and well-intentioned way, the second is not the conclusion that people tend to go [laugh] or even consider.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I have heard somebody describe this on another podcast that I was listening to, and it wasn't in the context of neurodiversity. It was in the context of relationships between two loving individuals and maybe this is giving people too much of an insight of the things that I listen to [laugh], I promise everybody that things are okay with my wife and I at the moment. We are all good. But I was listening to this, I think it was actually a Tim Ferris episode and he was interviewing a psychologist and the psychologist was saying that there's a space in between people when we communicate and each of us in our own hits telling ourselves a story of why the other person did or said or behaved a certain way. And the longer we leave ourselves to tell ourselves that story without actually verbalizing it to the other person, to just to check whether or not our story and our head is actually what was intended, the more harm can creep into that relationship and people can start to believe things that just aren't true.
- So when you were saying that about your colleague giving you that feedback another way you've got a choice almost as to what the story is you tell yourself, and I mean you as an every everybody so mean this seems from what you're saying or from what I'm hearing that you connect with that. How important are those stories that we are telling ourselves and how important is it to get, this is a loaded question, but how important is it to get that story out there laid bare for people to see so you can actually have an adult conversation about what's going on?
- Benny Zuffolini:
- You said a few things there that I absolutely love. One is adult conversation and the other is putting the story out there. There's actually a chapter in Brene Browns there to lead. I do love Brene Brown, half of the world. She just has an incredible way of explaining certain concepts. She talks about actually a fight or almost fight that she had with her husband because of a story that she made up in her own head and how he was actually very calm. And so he just asked her, okay, walk me through what you were thinking. And she tells him what she was thinking and he is like, okay, that's kind of dumb [laugh]. Like how does that sound realistic? Yeah, no, no, they're saying it out loud. It doesn't sound realistic. Okay, let's let's reconnect and start from scratch. And her advice from there is to just go for the rumble, go with your shitty first draft, which is actually a reference she makes of someone else. Just say what you are thinking, express what you're seeing. Now the problem there is it takes a lot of confidence and quiet confidence and the ability to be vulnerable with other people in order to do that. I know that if it were for me, I would approach every conversation with, okay, this is what I heard. Did you mean that? But not everyone is going to react well to that. Yeah,
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And this is what you were saying earlier about wouldn't it be nice to live in a world where we learn about these things from an early age and that part of the expectations that we put on our young adults and children is an expectation that they'll be able to have more mature conversations with each other, is they encounter situations where other people don't see the world the same way that they do. And I know that sounds very fanciful, but I also, on the other hand, I don't understand why we couldn't, knowing what we know now about people and how different people are, why we couldn't actually place more emphasis in this on our education.
- Benny Zuffolini:
- It would be fantastic. It would be be absolutely fantastic. And like you're saying, it's actually very achievable. It's just about starting to build a shared vocabulary and start dropping some of those expectations. I think this is actually very, very important in the hierarchy in a company. For example, the levels of seniority and how they're approached. Sometimes the fact that it's perfectly fine from for a senior person to have made a mistake and for a junior person to point that out. Those are things that are still not quite widely accepted. And I think it's mainly because we were taught that they were wrong to do. And so we don't have the tools or the vocabulary to even handle that situation gracefully. There's an immediate instinct to defend ourselves and to put other people in their place, but it's all a social construct doesn't have to go like that [laugh]
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Status. A lot of that seems to me at least to be attributed to status and some of the protections that status affords people in hierarchies where they've gained that status. I'm also remembering a study that I was reading about where they were looking at outcomes in operating theaters in various hospitals and the types of cultures that existed around the theater itself in particular. And some cultures had a fear-based status culture where the surgeon ruled the roost. And if anyone questioned her decision then it was potentially career limiting and therefore people stayed quiet when they were observing things that were potentially harmful to patients on the operating table. And other hospitals that had better outcomes for patients were found to have a better culture where it was actually encouraged for anybody, even the orderly that may be in the theater, to put their hand up and pull that alarm bell if they felt that they needed to. And that comes back to what you were saying before about in order to do that from a cultural perspective, an organizational perspective, you need to have the trust that you can be confident in doing that and you won't pay a price to yourself for doing that, that it's actually
- Benny Zuffolini:
- Encouraged. And I would also say this, it's important for people to feel like you said safe, that they can do that and they won't suffer repercussions. And I also have a lot of empathy for their superiors and I wish everyone felt comfortable enough to know that it doesn't take anything away from their experience or seniority or status to be wrong sometimes. I think actually what you said about the pulling the alarm bell was talking about it with my fiance recently. He was looking into the story of CanBan CanBan boards and what kaban generated from, which was I think an automotive factory, although I don't remember which one, but they did have a rule where, and anyone in the warehouse with the conveyor belt, anyone could pull the chain that would stop the whole thing if they saw something happen in the shouldn't have happened. And that was like you said, the orderly, the executives or the mailman and that that's how we avoid mistakes, big ones at least, and just destroying things.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And then, I mean that comes back to what we were talking about, about expectations that society places upon us. And I know from listening to you describe your diagnosis and how you felt after that. I get the sense that there was a bit of relief in that and that you were able to, now I think you said you found a foundation from which you could actually mm-hmm. Build on. But something else you said that I really struck me and being male, it's not something that I have really thought about at length, but I definitely connected with it when I heard you say it, and I'm paraphrasing now, but you've said that women are often judged by much harsher social standards than men, which is evident. You don't have to look too hard for those kind of expectations and standards, which has in part led to fewer girls being identified as having autism than boys. And often those diagnoses come when the girls are no longer girls, they're actually women much later in life. Now I was curious about what you said after this though, which was that you don't wish that you were identified or diagnosed sooner. Why not?
- Benny Zuffolini:
- I guess part of it is because I can't imagine my life going any differently from how it went. Part is also because, I mean in an ideal world, if I had been diagnosed early, also my family would've been given the tools to deal with that and raise me as good as they possibly could. But in reality, if I had been diagnosed early as in myself born in 1988, I think I would just have been treated differently and have probably have a lot of opportunities taken away. Whereas what actually happened is that I was considered to be socially weird but really smart it, but it was a foundation to at least always be confident that I was recognized as being intelligent. And I just apparently did stupid things in social environments, which has then given me the confidence to pursue studying English well enough to move to the UK and there to take some opportunities and some leaps. I am afraid that if I was diagnosed early it would've been all different.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And I suppose that's what I was trying to touch on earlier where it's this tension looking from the outside in, I suppose, which is from a privileged position, but there's this tension between wanting people to understand who you are and how that means that you show up in the world in certain situations, but also the social price, the fear around people knowing that. And so something that I wanted to ask you about was there's a growing movement at the moment for companies to do a better job when it comes to understanding neurodiversity and ensuring that neurodiverse people have the environment and the tools that they need to be successful. And this is something that I spoke with Tripp about and Tripp was very passionate about fighting the organization, procurement in other areas of the organization when he was at Amazon, to make sure that people that he was hiring who were neurodiverse had the tools that they needed to be successful.
- But there seems to be this risk here, and I don't really know what I'm getting at here, but there seems to be a risk of it's, yes, it's a positive thing that we understand neurodiversity and that people can be open about it. But we've seen with other movements in history such as the pride movement and where people have been different from the norm, there is also this darker side of humanity where there is a risk to people who are being brave enough to disclose that they're different, that there is a fear that they may end up in the future at some point being discriminated against or paying a price for that bravery because there is another side of humanity that isn't accepting of difference. And I don't have a question here more so just to say that this is a tension that I observe and I suppose the question is, I wonder as someone who is neurodiverse and is raising awareness about this, do you ever worry that being so vocal about this and being so open about it may come to bite you in the future or may lead to you not being able to experience things that you otherwise would've if you continued to mask your neurodiversity?
- What
- Benny Zuffolini:
- Is the funniest about this question is that I actually suffered way more repercussions for speaking up before I was diagnosed and before I disclosed my condition, I used to be the classic person that enters a company and within a very short time, there are labeled as a troublemaker because I was pointing out things that weren't working or I suggestions better way of dealing with them. At the time I thought I was discriminated because I was a foreigner or a woman in a male dominated environment cuz I was mainly around of engineers all the time. And they need to keep it longer than designed to accept more women. However, ultimately I just understood that there's a journey that people need to take. And whenever I try to fight for something, I try now to disclose the journey and take people with me rather than just pointing out what's wrong.
- It's an extra effort. So like we were saying earlier in this conversation, it does, it's not super fair that, and these end up being the ones that put the extra effort, but then again, it's also, as long as it happens, it's fine, I reckon. Okay. One thing that I will say is I don't know how comfortable I would've been disclosing my autism before I got head of in my title for a career perspective. I actually, I was diagnosed in August, but I got my title changed only in January and I wasn't super public between August and January. It wasn't a long time to wait to be fair. And I was still wrapping my head around it. But yeah, I don't think I would've felt comfortable in terms of future career. However, it does feel like there is a genuine interest in most work companies, [laugh] say in most companies right now, there is a genuine interest in truly understanding and appreciating the value of diversity.
- So I would say that we're doing some steps in the right direction. However, it seems to have hit more the recruitment side of the industry than the actual work side of the industry. Especially there's something far funny here because the work of designers of UXers actually in this day and age and in the context of product is very often to argue for things. It's arguing for the customers, arguing for getting data and not making assumptions. And unfortunately a lot of that ends up your success in that ends up being about your ability to leverage the best in people and avoid triggering the worst. I do think that when I'm successful at it, it's because I had to spend so much time learning about it, [laugh] learning how to do it. But it's something that in that sense that doesn't discriminate neurodiverse and neurotypical, everyone has to do it in. When you have the K classic triad of the lead engineer, the lead PM and the lead designer in a room and they're all trying to understand each other. They're all coming from a different place and almost speaking a different language. And at that moment they might as well be someone with auto autism, someone near typical and someone with dyslexia.
- It's about communication. So when I think of the ideal world, I don't think necessarily of a place where the conditions for the work environment for neurodiverse or any type of diversity is improved because that would be a given if we were just able to consider individual people as that, as individuals with a different upbringing, with a different background, with different belief system. And we all learned tools like the ladder of inference and just generally overcoming your own biases. And I think that we as UXers are in an incredibly good place for that because we have to do it every day for our customers. When you do a piece of UX research, you can't bring your own biases in otherwise you're not doing a job. What surprises me is how few people make the natural step of understanding that we should just do that with each other as well. It's not just something that we reserve for our customers.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And this to me seems to be one of the keys to highly, highly performing teams and organizations. And I'm recording now a highlight from my conversation with Theresa Torres that I posted recently on LinkedIn, which went mental actually so many people were identifying with this post. And basically in the video, Theresa is explaining exactly what you've talked about there, that triad and people talking at cross purposes and that what's actually happening there is there's a failure to integrate perspectives. There's a failure to step back and actually look at what it is that they're trying to achieve before they start pushing their own agendas. And that to our earlier conversation around telling, getting the story out there laid bare so that everyone can talk about the story that each of them are telling themselves. Doing that by actually visualizing and creating artifacts from our internal stories, we can actually sit down in our teams and actually look at those together.
- And that's actually how we start to integrate perspectives and can actually start making better decisions. So this seems to me to your point, but this isn't even necessarily specific to neurodiversity, but it would be very helpful just for everybody just to embrace a way of working that's like this. Then I, you've actually said something that you reminded me of that I laughed actually out loud at about 10 o'clock when I was at night when I was preparing for this. I think my wife thought I was watching comedy, but you said it, I'll just find it here. So you said something that I thought was hilarious as I mentioned, which was, and I'll quote you now, find me a person neurodiverse or neurotypical who doesn't wish that they could disappear if suddenly 10 people around them start singing happy birthday. Everyone has those preferences, whether they're saying it or not.
- Now that to me is, it was so funny, but you seem to be suggesting that you don't believe that neurodiverse people should be given special treatment as far as how they're communicated with by their managers. But now that I think back about what you said earlier about how hurtful it can be when managers don't understand things that you've previously disclosed, I'm not so sure about how I interpreted that statement. So the question therefore is what is the subtle I'm trying to understand is I'm trying to grasp the subtleties that exist around what is just the way in which people irrespective of neurodiversity navigate the world and how that intersects with neurodiversity and therefore what is the most appropriate way to navigate that if you are neurotypical?
- Benny Zuffolini:
- I think it's because I like to think far in the future to our world in which we don't even need to think about the differentiation and the titles of neurotypical neurodiverse and which type of neurodiversity because it doesn't really mean much. The point is the situation at hand. So for example, sometimes you were saying before when people are talking and they don't understand each other and they start pushing for their own agenda, usually, I mean I would say in most cases it's one or two things, especially when people get upset, they think that the other person is either being lazy or being prideful, having a lot of ego, and so they start just going against it. I actually have met very few people that were genuinely a little bit in love with their own ideas or people that really didn't feel like making an effort. Normally the truth is somewhere is it's just somewhere that you can't comprehend. So you make up the story in your own head cuz it's easier to make the, when you phone your internet company and you're having a problem because you're having a problem with your broadband and the person on the phone is not being very helpful, you start thinking the absolute worst things and this person on the other line, maybe it's their first day or maybe they didn't sleep well, maybe they're trying their best.
- So in that sense, I think what is hurtful to me, even before, way before I even knew what autism was, just to be judged by someone else's standards and that is something that would be hurtful for anyone for any reason. So I guess it doesn't make much of a difference, it's just about the core concept, like the judgment, the assumptions that we make. And that's the part that I wish, I wish we didn't, I wish we'd never learned that. I wish no one has ever taught us to jump to conclusions.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- One of the moments that I am not looking forward to. So I have a three and a half year old son and as that moment in his life where he realizes that other people will judge him for what he says or how he behaves, and I'm not saying that he doesn't have free reign to do whatever he wants, alright, I'm the disciplinarian in our household, but just when our young minds become aware that the views of other people and the judgment of other people can have quite a profound effect on how we choose to show up the following day. And that's the thing, that's one of the things, at least as a parent that I am trying to prepare myself for and try to help him to understand what decisions or what choices are available to him when he becomes conscious of that. And I know I'm over intellectualizing this and I'll have to meet him on his level. He's a small human, but this conditioning that we spoke about, the expectation society places upon us, how we choose to not express ourselves because of fear of judgment and I punitive action being taken against us. It all seems to stem from a lack of ability to truly seek to understand each other.
- I just think
- Benny Zuffolini:
- It's comfort there. There's just comfort in, there's comfort in thinking that we're right. There's comfort in thinking that the way we are doing things is actually the right one.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Everyone else is the idiot.
- Benny Zuffolini:
- Yeah, yeah, exactly. In reality, what if ours is right, but also someone that be great, there're done, there are two ways of doing things or 10 or 20 or maybe it doesn't matter. I do wish that we could take things at face value. If someone said something that's hurtful to me, it doesn't mean they wanted to hurt me, it just mean that they said something that to me is hurtful. I could let them know and chances are they'll apologize and not do it again. And it could be as simple as that.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And just affording ourselves the ability to make a choice in those moments where we feel the hairs on the back of our neck start to stand up when someone's getting under your skin. And you mentioned before, sometimes you have difficulty sensing when other people are feeling uncomfortable. And I imagine that that would be challenging when other people are starting to feel that. But people do have the ability in those moments to choose how they respond. And we've observed, and I think we touched on this earlier, there's a lot of behavior on at the moment probably always has been in the world where people don't give themselves the benefit of thinking a little bit more or ensuring a little bit more before they choose what to do next.
- Benny Zuffolini:
- Yeah, I think that the general consensus is if they said something that hurt me, there are bad people who wanted to hurt me when it's actually, there's a massive gray scale in between those two tens. I do feel for anyone who enters our industry, not just our industry, I guess in general, I feel for all those people that come out of college where there was one set of rules and there were fairly declared and enter the world of offices and work and hierarchies. And first off they learn that set of rules changes in every company, every manager, every team, every person. And you have to relearn it from scratch. And also that they learn that the set of behaviors that you are supposed to have or that you were taught to have, they're not going to be effective. They were never based on real life. It's really tricky.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Half the job is learning how to navigate the other people and the organization, which is we are social beings and one of our benefits, I was speaking to my physio about this today, and I, humans are so useless for so long. We are not much use until we're, I don't know, 20 years old. It takes so long for us to learn how to do life. Yet our major benefit is our ability to cooperate with each other. So as much as we've been talking today about people not doing a great job of seeking to understand what's going on for others and missing out on the ability to create something new or better than that they've had before by doing that, we are a fairly remarkable species in the sense that cooperation is actually what has enabled us to have this conversation today and all the technology that has been created off the back of that, it is a wonderful thing, but we are not all the same.
- And I think that's absolutely the theme of today. We're not the same. And even you've mentioned you've been very careful about describing your new neurodiversity and not suggesting that what's best for other people that are neurodiverse. Absolutely. And I completely get that. Something that I've been wondering about though is the, in design specifically the way in which we run particular popular team-based workshops, design workshops, and whether or not these actually appropriately accommodate people's different communication preferences, irrespective of whether they're neurodiverse, but also on the other hand, people that are neurodiverse and have a very definite preference because of the way their brain works as to how they learn and how they participate with others. Now I understand you had an experience a few years ago running a design sprint and I think you Yes. Yeah. Running, ringing a bell. So I think you've got a really great story around that to tell and I just wanna leave that open to you now just to tell me about that experience and the realization that you had during or after that experience was over.
- Benny Zuffolini:
- Yes, that experience was really something I kept thinking about it during the years, well first off, it was the first design sprint that I ran at least full on Google Ventures design sprint by the book with the set of tools that they give you, the initial presentation and everything. So I was already quite nervous, especially because I was at the time just a senior designer in a room with VPs, heads of department and so on and so forth. But yes, what really surprised me was how I would never have thought that I could see people struggle so much with sketching, drawing, writing, I, I'm used to up to that point, I was used to seeing people that don't feel confident drawing because they think they don't draw well. Same as people not being comfortable with speaking in a room full of people because they think that they don't speak very well necessarily.
- And those are all little hurdles that eventually people figure out and just do it. That was the first time I saw a few adults, senior people that I really respect and they're really great at their jobs and really great people have basically an emotional breakdown over the idea of having to sketch and having to write, tapped into all sorts of, I don't know exactly what, but it was very emotional for them. It's not just that they didn't wanna try to do the sketching part or they tried and then they got upset with it. There were tears, there was so much and they felt so vulnerable. It was like we had asked them to undress or something. They felt really, really vulnerable. And it just hit me that you can never know, there really isn't a one size fit all. Something that looks good on paper maybe works for 98% of the people, but not with all of them.
- And I know this is very cliche, but I truly thought because they cover everything in the book, they cover all of the instances where they ran this workshop and someone wasn't super comfortable with drawings, so they did another thing or they paired up when in reality, yes, on the day I had to just suddenly improvise. How am I going to deal with a situation where the person who's supposed to draw is now on a couch in another room and doesn't want to come back in? It did teach me a lot about just tuning with people what they're comfortable with and make it a truly safe space to say what they're not comfortable with and find an alternative because there is an alternative, there's always an alternative. I don't know if that answers. Yeah, yeah.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Do you remember when you observed that person having that breakdown effectively and their ability to contribute to the team? Take me back then, how were you feeling as the facilitator [laugh]? Like just what was going on for you when you realized that this was starting to fall apart?
- Benny Zuffolini:
- So I was very conflicted because on the one hand, this was a person that I was really looking forward to having the room because I really liked them and I thought they would've a lot to contribute and that they cared a lot about the project. When I saw their breakdown, I had a lot of empathy and I felt really, really bad for them because I think that actually the reason why it was such an emotional reaction is that they didn't think they were going to do a good job, but they did care a lot about the projects. So they were feeling like everything was going out of control. They couldn't understand, they had never been in a process like that. They didn't know how to trust the process and that was my job as the facilitator to get them to trust the process. However, yes, as the facilitator, I was freaking out because I was not imagining a situation like that unfolding.
- And I've been told in the past that I have mixed reactions in emergencies I, I'm usually very pragmatic, but when the emerge the emergency is emotional, pr pragmatic is not necessarily the good response. So me saying, don't worry about it, and just take a piece of paper and scribble something was not helping. Also me saying, don't worry, we could just use the other people's contributions and not, yours was also not helping. Ultimately, I remember I sat down with them and I just said, I thought, this is really hard. Please trust the process. The worst that can happen is that we don't get to a great solution and then we try something else afterwards. It was just about in the end, the only thing I could think of doing was deescalating. We are not in an operating room, we we're just a bunch of people trying to do our best. It's all okay, we will solve this problem one way or another. But
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah. Is this person more senior than you?
- Benny Zuffolini:
- Oh yeah. Oh yeah. But quite
- Brendan Jarvis:
- A bit. Yeah. So this is, again, I'm not a therapist here and I have no qualifications to talk about psychology, but it just strikes me as scary in some ways, and r rather emotional and others to see, you've described highly competent, really good at their job, individuals who care about the project that you were trying to facilitate to actually carry so much baggage, which I can only assume comes from their past. And again, I'm making a huge leap here how they may have grown up in their childhood, the type of stories we start to tell ourselves as I was speaking about my son, that I'm conscious of him going to run up into that as well, that we bring this forward into our work and that really a pressure cooker environment, like a design sprint, [laugh], the veneer that a lot of us, the armor that a lot of us carry around and the way we interact with others is actually very, very thin.
- And even if you are a vp, I mean this is going to sound cliched, they're humans too. Yes. And it doesn't necessarily take a lot of prodding at that armor for you to find a chink in it. And I suppose this story's a beautiful one in the sense that as the facilitator and also someone who's in a arguably lower status position overall in the organization, but in that moment you were the higher status leader and you had to respond to what you were seeing unfolding. And I'm curious, after that experience, how has it changed the way you design the workshops and facilitate the experiences that you bring people together to create better solutions or to better understand problems? How have they changed?
- Benny Zuffolini:
- Definitely what has changed is the confidence with which I entered the room. Something that situation really helped me understand is that when you are facilitating a workshop or a discussion, you have to position yourself as the highest leader in that room in that moment because you are the referee and there are rules to the game. And it's part of creating the safe space to declare those rules and show that you will get them respected. Otherwise, the place is not safe if you say something and if you put down a rule, if you say no phones, and then someone picks up the phone and you don't tell them off [laugh] because they're a VP or whatnot, you just made it unsafe for everyone else. You just invalidated the rules of the whole game and it's in no one's interest. So it's quite a high level of responsibility, or the most common scenario is letting people ramble too long and not interrupt them. When you're facilitating, if you are something that has to be respected and people will hate you for it for a moment, but it is in animal in everyone's best interest and just have to bring out your GaN persona, I guess, and just be like, no, you need to stop talking now.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- That's why those timers, timers are so useful because you can go, well, it's not me, it's just the timer. I know now we've gotta move
- Benny Zuffolini:
- On. It's funny because that first time, what first time, what I used to do is I had a time timer and if it rang and people were still talking, I would just dial it back a little bit and then dial it back onto zero ring again. And that is [laugh]. I would start doing it a bunch of times until they got the hint and I really wanted them to shut off. But
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yes, those people aren't very good at paying attention to social cues and it doesn't actually necessarily have to be a result of neurodiversity. Some people just, some people don't have anything other than the fact that they don't like to be told what to do. To put that back to, yeah. I'm curious to know in design, in your experience of working in the industry and the way in which we do things, what isn't working well for people that are neurodiverse? And I realize that that is a almost impossible question to answer given the wide variety of neurodiversity. But what are some of the experiences maybe that you've had in the way in which we work in design that just don't work very well or we need to be paying better attention to, and maybe approaching the design of differently so that it's more inclusive of the different ways in which people feel like they can bring their best self to the work?
- Benny Zuffolini:
- Well, I do have an answer to that because it doesn't really depend on neurodiversity. I just think it doesn't work quite well in general, and it's in our industry of designers, UXers, but also tech companies in general. I guess the concept of leadership and seniority and the mismatch between those two concepts, which are very different concepts, we have not nailed that. And I think what this ends up doing is situations that are not fit or even dangers for everyone involved. I reckon what I mean specifically is calling senior management leadership. It's a title that I've seen in a bunch of places, and ultimately I also started using because it's just easier that way because if that's how everyone is calling it, sure. But it's misleading because it doesn't mean that all the decisions and ideas should come from that group. Technically, everyone can be leader, everyone should be leader, especially as UXers.
- If we don't bring our point of view and expertise, then why are we even there? So there is something about how we define what leadership is, what it means, and how we should decouple it from seniority and also how we define seniority. Even that is something that I've been thinking about a lot in the past few years initially on the topic of neurodiversity, because I started thinking that a bunch of the qualities that spontaneously I would think make someone more senior than someone else are actually based on soft skills. And it's not very inclusive, like the ability to create consensus among a number of stakeholders, the ability to jump into a room and own it and lead it, that's something that to a certain flavor of neurodiverse, people will never be accessible. However, it doesn't mean that they're not bringing an incredible value to the company.
- So how could we possibly account for that? And in a smaller scale engineering is like yours ahead with a very, very forked track between the managerial path and the individual contributor path. And in design we're catching up with that as well. However, it's also not quite the same because then you start looking at the individual contributors path and at the level of principle or higher seniority, you start seeing things like public speaking mentoring of large groups. And so we're back from scratch. How is it possible to get to a place where we recognize the value that someone generates in a company, associate that with seniority and decouple that from the pre-concept that we have of what seniority used to be very complex. I don't think we'll necessarily find the answer to this in the next 10 years, but it is something that I've been thinking about because one of the most difficult things I see in designers is to understand what's their purpose, how are they contributing, how are they going to advance? And many people have put together career framework that are a great start, but we're not quite there. And especially when it comes to the concept of leadership, there are many leaders out there by leaders. In this case, I'm using the term to define senior managers and hence why it's so confusing. But there
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Are many managers, the title and leadership has actually earned.
- Benny Zuffolini:
- There are leaders that have three years experience, but they're just brilliant in the specific thing that they do. As well as there are people that have been 20 years in the industry who are not interested in leading, they're, they prefer executing, and that's also fine. There is a big discrepancy between what historically a role is supposed to cover and what it actually covers. And it impacts culture very much, which impacts productivity. And yeah, I haven't seen anywhere where this is done particularly well. There is always some kinks and it's a very complicated answer and it's something that I hope in the rest of my career to help figure out. But I think it's going to have to be a team effort with a lot of other heads in the game.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Well, Benny, I feel like that is an amazing place and a very impactful place to wind up our conversation today, neurodiversity and the way in which we approach the design of our career pathways in our organizations seems like a really worthy challenge for people to think about. And also f from very, very much just making the most of a misunderstood and underappreciated source of human potential. Whether or not those people are neurodiverse or whether or not they just don't want to be on stage being the public speaker, I think it is definitely time for a rethink. So very much appreciate you sharing that thought to close. This has been such a great conversation, Benny. It's certainly given me many, many things to think about. I really wanna say thank you for so being so generous with sharing your stories and insights with me today.
- Benny Zuffolini:
- Absolutely. This was a pleasure, honestly. It was a great conversation and to anyone who happens to listen to it and take something away from it just hope it was helpful in some way.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I have no doubt, and it's been a pleasure for me as well. Benny, if people want to find out more about you and the work that you're doing and the things that you are passionate about, what is the best way for them to do that?
- Benny Zuffolini:
- It's a good question. I'm reworking my website just as designers do every couple of years or so. So LinkedIn. LinkedIn would be it. [laugh] LinkedIn is the record. Perfect. Thank you.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- All right. Thank you, Benny. I will make sure that I put a link to your LinkedIn profile on the show notes, and also if you're listening out there people, we'll find all of the other things that we've talked about today in their very detailed chapters. In fact, Benny, there's one of the things that you mentioned twice there, which had recently come up for me in a conversation with another guest, which is the latter of inference, and I feel like that's a really important framework for thinking about thinking that I'll be putting in the show notes as well. Yeah. Oh, such a great framework. Really appreciate you mentioning it. If you enjoyed the show people and you want to hear more great conversations like this with world class leaders in UX, design and product management, don't forget to leave a review on the podcast. Subscribe both to the podcast. There's also a YouTube channel that you can find the videos of these episodes on as well, and also pass the show along to someone else that you feel would get value from these conversations. If you wanna reach out to me, you can also find my LinkedIn profile at the very, very, very bottom of the show notes hidden amongst them. And there's also a link through to my website, which is thespaceinbetween.co.nz. That's thespaceinbetween.co.nz. And until next time, keep being brave.