Can Businesses and Organizations be "Autistic?"

I've long believed (and I'm sure it's not original) now that neuroscience offers many lessons for businesses. Further, I believe that autism research in particular offers us a valuable metaphor to examine the functioning of an organization.

Using autism as a metaphor for understanding things rather than individuals is not minimizing the significance of autism, whether you believe it to be a blessing or a curse, or a mix of both. We routinely use things that we don't understand completely to understand other things we don't completely understand, and respectfully done, we shed light on both.

Salience Landscape Theory is one of the more important developments in autism research; in brief it attempts to explain why certain sensory input elicits a seemingly inappropriate or out-of-scale emotional response.

"In an attempt to determine how these secondary symptoms might arise, our lab group (in collaboration with William Hirstein of Elmhurst College and Portia Iversen of Cure Autism Now, a nonprofitt foundation based in Los Angeles) has developed what we call the salience landscape theory.

"When a person looks at the world, he or she is confronted with an overwhelming amount of sensory information— sights, sounds, smells, and so on. ... Using input from the individual’s stored knowledge, the amygdala determines how the person should respond emotionally ... If the person is confronting a burglar, for example, his heart rate will rise and his body will sweat to dissipate the heat from muscular exertion. ... Over time, the amygdala creates a salience landscape, a map that details the emotional significance of everything in the individual’s environment.

"Our group decided to explore the possibility that children with autism have a distorted salience landscape, perhaps because of altered connections ... that regulate the resulting behavior. As a result of these abnormal connections, any trivial event or object could set off an extreme emotional response—-an autonomic storm—-in the child’s mind. ... The distorted perceptions of emotional significance might also explain why many children with autism become intensely preoccupied with trifles such as train schedules while expressing no interest at all in things that most children find fascinating."

from "Broken Mirrors - A Theory of Autism"

Can an organization be "autistic?" In the sense that it may have poor or non-existent communication between disciplines, or that it perceives the world not as it is but in a distorted or idiosyncratic way, or that it obsesses on details that are not meaningful to its clients/customers, then yes.

These "distortions" or idiosyncrasies are very often also the source of an organization's strengths: they allow a unique view or focus which has been successfully translated into income or growth.

What I find myself doing in effect with many organizations is identifying an appropriate salience landscape, and helping cultivate, connect, or re-connect the functional areas that will create an appropriate response to changing market input.

For me, it emphasizes the artificial difference between perceptions and details and structures: which details are significant; which perceptions are correct; which structures are necessary or appropriately formed? I think it is an idea worth developing, and I hope to post more along these lines soon.