Misfit minds: why mental illnesses and learning difficulties can be useful

June 4, 2012

Image: Don’t stay too close to the pack…

The classic liberal text, On Liberty by John Stuart Mill made a big impression on me years ago. What stayed with me above all was Mill’s insistence that liberty and tolerance were essential for a healthy society, since they permitted diversity.

Diversity of thought, behaviour, beliefs, ideas keep societies alive because they mean that there is an edge (not that Mills used this term – that’s more John Hagel) where new ideas can be born and taken back into the mainstream. When you start trying to make everyone adhere to a norm, become a single homogenous mainstream, things stagnate – essentially because there are no new ideas.

Mills cited the highly ordered Imperial China as an example of a non-diverse society in stagnation. To simplify, China creates printing, gunpowder and all manner of new technologies and then just stops. Stands still at the command of its imperial bureaucratic system.

While there is a lot of talk of diversity in politics and corporate life, the benefit to all of us is too infrequently cited. It is a presented in moral and ethical terms, when there is an everyone’s a winner upside to not having homogenous groups in charge.

In short, boardrooms and cabinet meetings are better off when they aren’t overwhelmingly white, male and middle-aged because they will have more perspectives, more ideas, more options and make better decisions. Society is better off with a healthy fringe of freaks, geeks and misfits because while much of what they might say and do amounts to nothing, that is where new ideas, options, perspectives come from.

But enough of this A-level philosophy rambling, I was thinking about all of this after reading the Schumpeter column in The Economist “In praise of misfits”, which discusses how variously people diagnosed with Aspergers, autism, ADD and dyslexia are successful in different types of busienss:

Entrepreneurs also display a striking number of mental oddities. Julie Login of Cass Business School surveyed a group of entrepreneurs and found that 35% of them said that they suffered from dyslexia, compared with 10% of the population as a whole and 1% of professional managers. Prominent dyslexics include the founders of Ford, General Electric, IBM and IKEA, not to mention more recent successes such as Charles Schwab (the founder of a stockbroker), Richard Branson (the Virgin Group), John Chambers (Cisco) and Steve Jobs (Apple). There are many possible explanations for this. Dyslexics learn how to delegate tasks early (getting other people to do their homework, for example). They gravitate to activities that require few formal qualifications and demand little reading or writing.

Being someway in with my own entrepreneurial adventure, I think there’s a kind of madness required to start a business at all. Certainly, the decision and the act of striking out from the known (employment) is much an emotional leap as a reasoned and planned manoeuvre.

In John Ronson’s The Psychopath Test, the author explains how different classifications of mental illness are created, how behaviours are called out as oddities and abnormalities are herded into categories.

It’s often a very subjective process: different ways of thinking, defining when eccentricity becomes mental illness is often a matter of perspective, such are the complexities of our many kinds of minds.

Ronson also mentions the callous way in which TV producers for reality shows recruit people who are “the right kind of mad” (mad enough to make an entertaining spectacle of themselves, not so mad they will hurt someone on the set).

It seems that in business, a good strategy might be working out what type of wotk you are “the right kind of mad” to win at. Obviously that takes a certain amount of self-awareness…

: : Another link: This line of thought also reminds me of the thesis that schizophrenia, depression and all manner of mental illness played a part in human society’s evolution and – according to an article in New Scientist (subscription required) – gave “early humans an edge“.

Antony Mayfield

Public notebook

add, aspergers, dyslexia, evolution, mental illness, the economist

7 responses to “Misfit minds: why mental illnesses and learning difficulties can be useful”

Adam Tinworth

June 5, 2012 at 11:41 am

This is a bit of a pet subject of mine, both because I have people within my immediate circle of family and friends who have (or who are) dealing with mental health issues, and because my better half was working at the Institute of Psychiatry when we met.

The crucial thing here is that most ‘disorders’ come on a spectrum – it’s arguable that a good proportion of research scientists are at least somewhat on the autistic spectrum. Some excellent developers, too. Much of our approach to mental health is rooted in the industrialisation of society – so those who would have been tolerated in smaller societal structures, found no place in the rigid hierarchies of the industrial society. As recently as the middle decades of the 20th century, severe epileptics were being institutionalised. It’s a vaguely more civilised approach to the “drive out or execute as demon-possessed” approach that earlier societies took to people on the extreme end of the bell curve.

It seems possible that, as we shift to a knowledge-work based economy, that those with different brain chemistry, as long as they remain within the bell curve of tolerable – if not always acceptable – behaviour, may have a crucial role to play in driving innovation. But it will require both a societal shift in attitudes to differing mental states, and organisational structures that can accomodate them.

(While I hate to use the example everyone’s using: Steve Jobs was clearly someone whose mental make-up wouldn’t fit in traditional company hierarchies, and who had to shape a company around his distinctive quirks.)
dan barker

June 5, 2012 at 12:14 pm

“Society is better off with a healthy fringe of freaks, geeks and misfits because while much of what they might say and do amounts to nothing, that is where new ideas, options, perspectives come from.”

I can’t figure out whether you’re saying that, or making fun of the ridiculousness of the idea.
amayfield

June 5, 2012 at 2:26 pm

Yes, I’m saying that. But now I can’t work out if you’re saying the idea’s ridiculous or that that sentence isn’t clear enough. or both…

The irony!
amayfield

June 5, 2012 at 2:32 pm

Great comment, Adam – thanks, and I agree with you.

My sense is that we are more diverse, more quirky and divergent in the ways we think than we let on. Perhaps this is down to conformist cultures, which are more common in organisations in some industries and professions than others.

“On the spectrum”? Mostly people are probably on one spectrum or another at one time or another. A different attitude to difference and to mental health issues would benefit us all, ultimately.
dan barker

June 5, 2012 at 4:47 pm

Sorry, Antony. I thought the idea ridiculous. That could of course be my misreading.

“In short, boardrooms and cabinet meetings are better off when they aren’t overwhelmingly white, male and middle-aged because they will have more perspectives, more ideas, more options and make better decisions. Society is better off with a healthy fringe of freaks, geeks and misfits because while much of what they might say and do amounts to nothing, that is where new ideas, options, perspectives come from.”

Here were the bits I thought odd there:

1. Lumping people with mental illness, or those with learning difficulties (the topic of this blog post) into a category called ‘freaks, geeks and misfits’ feels a bit 1950s.
2. The idea that – other than their ideas and perspectives – “much of what they might say and do amounts to nothing” also feels pretty harsh. (not sure whether the category here is people with ‘Aspergers, autism, ADD and dyslexia’, or the entirety of the non-white, non-male, non-middle-aged population :)

I thought there was a nice point somewhere in the original Schumpeter article, but that it largely fell for this old trap: http://www.disabilityplanet.co.uk/super-heroes-and-the-tragic.html
amayfield

June 5, 2012 at 5:37 pm

Thanks for unpacking that, Dan – really useful.

In that post I am playing fast and loose with language and thinking aloud, and in the process mixing up a lot of issues – that leaves some holes in my argument and some places where I am wide open to misinterpretation.

Couple of points to add clarity, hopefully, on what I was thinking about…

* I’m thinking about diversity and edge culture – I appreciate those aren’t always the same thing (more clearly for your points). I’m switching between talking about the two, but – I appreciate – need to be careful about conflating them.
* “Freaks, geeks and misfits” could well be taken the wrong way – but those are now labels that a lot of people feel comfortable owning, and don’t see as negative at all. I’ve described by people as a couple of them and haven’t been too troubled.

Thanks again for calling me out on these points – this is an issue – or cluster of issues – I need to think through and articulate more clearly. That said, I expect in exploring them one will always cause offence to someone – such are the sensitivities around them.
dan barker

June 5, 2012 at 8:45 pm

Thanks, Antony, that’s a brilliant reply.

dan