early on in my career I realized that the way to get things done was to be “project loyal.” More important than any ego was the goal to do the best work and get the job done. Most projects crash and burn, as far as I can tell, from an abundance of ego. I think I speak for most techies when I say we will go the distance to get a project done. That is our chief objective: our loyalty is to the project, not to management. We’ll sit around in the job trailer and complain about what an idiot the manager is, but we’ll get the machine working. I will grovel in the dirt if needed to get a job done right. I am completely driven by project loyalty over ego.
Most of our traits are polygenic, which means they are affected by many genes. Another mechanism for understanding individual difference is single-nucleotide polymorphisms, or SNPs. Each one of these refers to possible substitutions at a single rung on the ladder of DNA. Sometimes a rung on the ladder changes and nobody knows why. This is called a de novo mutation and occurs in a small percentage of people diagnosed with autism.
I’m a total picture-thinker, and Betsy lives in a world of words. It was a huge challenge for her to help me arrange my thoughts in a linear fashion. Not only do I think in pictures, but my mind is associative. It creates chunks of visualized information and makes associations. To a verbal thinker, these associations may appear random, but in my mind I’m continuously sorting the images. Betsy, on the other hand, is a strictly linear verbal thinker. She needs a sentence to be grammatically correct before she can understand it and move on to the next. We learned that we think completely differently, but that difference became the cornerstone of our future collaborations. To the uninitiated verbal thinker, my initial draft would have looked like a disjointed series of chunks. Betsy takes my pictures and puts them in order.
Some dyslexics are object thinkers, and some are more mathematical visual-spatial. Once again, the studies don’t sufficiently distinguish between the two types. Some spatial visualizers and people with dyslexia are great at big-picture thinking; they can both visualize and rotate 3D objects in their mind’s eye. I have worked with creative metalworkers who had dyslexia. They designed and built huge, elaborate feed mills. Object visualization skills are used to design complex systems consisting of conveyors, pumps, and feed-mixing equipment. The spatial visualizers make them work.
One of the most startling challenges I will put to a client comes from my bastardization of a Zen aphorism: This being so, so what? Things being as they are, what will you do about it?
The failure to identify and get ready for endings and losses is the largest difficulty for people in transition. And the failure to provide help with endings and losses leads to more problems for organizations in transition than anything else.
People seem to “overreact” to a change when they are reacting more than we are. But when we think that way, we overlook two things: first, that changes cause transitions, which cause losses, and it is the losses, not the changes, that they’re reacting to; and second, that it’s a piece of their world that is being lost, not a piece of ours, and we often react that way ourselves when it’s part of our own world that is being lost. Being reasonable is much easier if you have little or nothing at stake.
