Autism Works - Neurodiversity in the Workplace

Added: 2026-06-04

[00:00:00]There's a phrase that can cost a company a fortune. And the worst part is that it usually sounds like good teamwork. Oh, I assumed you knew. And that's it. There's no siren, no flashing beacon. Nobody slams a big red button on a console.

[00:00:12]Just a little social shortcut passed quietly from one person to another until it eventually shows up in the real world wearing coveralls and carrying a wrench.

[00:00:20]Today I want to talk to you about neurodiversity in the workplace, but not as a slogan or as a bumper sticker and not as a poster in the lunchroom and not as one more mandatory training module that everybody clicks through while waiting for their coffee. I want to talk about in the context of industrial work where assumptions are not merely inconvenient but can become physical.

[00:00:37]They can become pressure, heat, stored energy, ignition sources, fatigue cracks, vapor clouds, and sometimes an incident investigation with diagrams and arrows showing how we got from what everybody thought to what nobody verified. And I want to do that for an audience that already understands the stakes. TC Energy operates one of the largest natural gas pipeline networks in North America with tens of thousands of kilometers of pipe, compressor stations, meter stations, control rooms, field crews, engineers, operators, land representatives, integrity specialists, project teams, and contractors all joined together into one living industrial system that moves energy across Canada and beyond. DC Energy describes its natural gas network as 93,600 km of pipeline supplying more than 30% of the natural gas consumed across North America daily. That scale is impressive, but scale has a personality all of its own. A small assumption inside a small system is a nuisance, but a small assumption inside a continental energy system is a seed.

[00:01:33]You may not see anything grow from it today. You may not see anything tomorrow. But if the conditions are right, if the shift handover is vague enough, if the alarm is familiar enough, if the required documents are thick enough or if the procedure has a sentence that everybody interprets slightly differently, then eventually that seed can find water and sprout. And that's where somebody like me can be useful. I'm autistic and it's not something I lean into as an identity.

[00:01:57]It's just who I am. And while I always knew I was pretty different, I had no real idea why. I was diagnosed late after decades of thinking that I was merely odd in some very specific ways. I knew that I was literal. I knew that I could be intense and that it could be like flipping a switch. I knew I had a low tolerance for ambiguity when a precise answer ought to exist. I needed to know what was inside of everything.

[00:02:18]And I knew that social situations sometimes felt like a game where everybody else had been given the rules and I was expect to infer them from facial expressions, pauses, and how quickly people reach for their jackets.

[00:02:28]But I didn't know it was autism. When I was first diagnosed, it caused me to replay much of my life from a new angle.

[00:02:34]Suddenly, old memories that had been filed under just Dave being Dave acquired a different label. Like the first time I met Bill Gates in his backyard while I was still an intern at Microsoft. My manager was introducing me and effectively bragging on me that I had completed an impressive set of projects in just 4 months. The problem was that it had actually taken 3 months.

[00:02:52]So I interrupted him with the correction. 3 months. To me, that was the accurate value. To everybody else, I had just soiled a social moment for no useful reason. But that same instinct that made me correct in a relevant detail in a backyard conversation is also the same instinct that in a different life might have made me interrupt a control room discussion to ask, wait, do we actually know what the valve's current position is, or are we inferring it from the command that we just sent to the valve? And there's the knife edge of neurodiversity at work.

[00:03:19]That same trait that could be socially awkward can be operationally priceless.

[00:03:23]Because in industrial systems, there is a dangerous difference between what was commanded, what was indicated, what was assumed, and what is actually physically true. If you work around pipelines, compression, measurement, pressure control, excavation, isolation, electrical systems, or hot work, you already live in that difference. You know that a valve showing closed on a screen is not identical to a valve being closed out in the field. You know that a lock on a hasp is not identical to isolation unless the energy state has actually been verified. You know that the line was slept is not identical to we have confirmed that the atmosphere is safe. You know that the contractor understands is not identical to the contractor can repeat back the hazard and the control. You know that well we always do it this way is not a control measure. That's a cultural fossil. And today I want to make the case that neurodeiverse employees including people with autism, ADHD, dyslexia and other forms of non-standard cognition can be a powerful defense against those fossils hardening into failure. But first we need an example. I wanted to find a good example of an industrial accident to use here, but finding one where nobody died was challenging. And yet, we need one serious enough that nobody can dismiss it as just office politics wearing a hard hat. So, back in July of 1983, when I was in 10th grade, and Air Canada was bringing the new Boeing 767 into service, and it came with it a quiet but important transition. Fuel calculations were now being done in metric. The aircraft did not have a fully working fuel level system. So the crew and ground staff relied on manual measurements and calculations to determine how much fuel was actually aboard. And somewhere in that chain, a value was treated as pounds per liter when the aircraft actually needed kilog per liter. That sounds like a routine math error, but it wasn't merely arithmetic. It was a system caught between two measurement cultures, imperial habit and metric requirement.

[00:05:07]and a new aircraft, degraded instrumentation, unclear ownership, and just enough routine confidence that nobody stopped the process and asked the brutally simple question, uh, what units are we actually using here? The result was that a state-of-the-art widebody airliner departed with far less fuel than required and at 41,000 ft somewhere over Manitoba, both engines flamed out.

[00:05:28]Imagine that cockpit for a moment. No thrust, no mechanical engine driven power, no comforting turbine sound, just a Boeing 767 that has suddenly become the world's largest sail plane. Captain Bob Pearson and first officer Maurice Quintel managed the glide, founded old air base at Gimley, Manitoba, and put the aircraft down on what had become a drag strip, avoiding people on the ground picnicking and saving everybody on board. It was a brilliant piece of airmanship, but the heroics at the end should not distract us from the lesson at the beginning. The aircraft did not run out of fuel because Canada went metric. It ran out of fuel because the organization became bilingual in measurement before it became fluent in verification. And that is precisely why this story matters in an industrial workplace. A number without units is not just a number. It's worse. It's a trap wearing a name tag. Pressure, flow, torque, wall thickness, distance, gas concentrations, temperature, and fuel load all become dangerous when the unit or assumption behind them is merely implied. And this is where neurodeiverse thinking can be a real operational asset. Some autistic minds are unusually bothered by ambiguity. Not because we're trying to be difficult, but because undefined values do not feel complete.

[00:06:37]We may be the person who asks the painfully obvious questions like, "Is that PSI or kilopascals?" or "Is that valve closed by command or verified closed in the field?" "Is that isolation assumed or proven?" It can sound really pedantic right up until the moment when the entire safety case depends on the answer. Now, I'm not trying to make the case that somebody with autism is automatically smarter or more detail- oriented, more diligent, or more safety conscious. That would be nonsense and more than a little insulting to everybody else. But our brains seem to naturally abhore ambiguity. It's a genetic predisposition that gets reinforced by a lifetime of being confused and burned by ambiguity in other aspects of our life, particularly in the social realm. So, for me, proceeding while relying on untested assumptions is like stepping across one of those glass floored skywalks. You can do it easily enough and intellectually you believe it's perfectly safe, but there's still a primitive part of the nervous system saying something is very very wrong. Sometimes I've been overcome by that feeling without even knowing why. It's like a feeling of panic you sometimes get on the way to the airport where you suddenly wonder if you really have your passport, your keys, and your wallet. Sometimes I'll get that feeling in the middle of a code check-in, for example, and makes me stop to analyze why. Usually, there's a reason that I feel that way. I just don't know it yet.

[00:07:49]Not every autistic person is a safety savant and not every neurotypical person is careless. But many autistic people do share this particular discomfort with ambiguity. We often want terms defined, states confirmed, assumptions named, sequences written, exceptions handled, and handoffs made explicit. We often struggle with the soft social bandwidth that tells everyone else when the room is done with a topic. We may keep asking after the comfortable answer has arrived because the comfortable answer is not the same as a complete one. And we've all been in meetings with that one person. The person who asked the question at the end of the meeting just as everybody else has mentally already stood up needlessly extending what was already a long session often merely to justify their own presence at the meeting. And I'm begging you, don't confuse this with that because sometimes it's a nerdiverse person trying to get clarification on something the rest of you assume that everybody knows but which may not actually be known by everybody in the same way. That can be annoying in a meeting. It can also be the only thing between an assumption and an incident. Imagine for a moment that the person holding the clipboard and the tarmac for that Air Canada 767 had been just a little bit autistic. Not a genius, not a savant, not Rayman in a reflective vest, but simply the kind of person who gets physically uncomfortable when a number arrives without a unit attached to it. So the fuel figure is written down, the density is written down, the required uplift is written down, everybody is busy, the process is familiar enough to feel safe, and the social momentum is all pushing towards sign it and get moving along. But this person pauses, taps the page, and asks the question that sounds almost too basic to be worth asking. Is this pounds per liter or kilograms per liter? And that's the whole point. In many organizations, that question would feel annoying because everybody is supposed to know what the number means. It might even qualify as a stupid question. But supposed to know is not a unit of measure. It's not a control. It's just an assumption wearing a hard hat. A neurodeiverse mind may be less willing to accept the implied context and more likely to insist the hidden parts be made visible. Show me the unit. Show me the conversion. Show me the independent check. That little pause, that moment of socially inconvenient precision might have stopped the entire chain before it ever left the ground. And that's the value I want leaders to understand. The employee who asked the obvious question is not always slowing the work down.

[00:10:00]Sometimes they're preventing the work from speeding confidently in the wrong direction. The cost of that question might be 30 seconds on the tarmac. The cost of not asking it was a powerless Boeing 767 gliding over Manitoba. And there's a subtle but critical distinction here. The first instinct after a near miss of some kind is often to go hunting for the person closest to the mistake. Who signed it? Who missed it? Who should have known? But that line of questioning can turn a technical failure into more of a courtroom drama.

[00:10:25]And once people feel cross-examined, the truth starts wearing body armor. The more useful question is colder, cleaner, and far more powerful. What do we actually know that does not depend on this assumption being true? That's the question that cuts through the fog. Not do we trust the gauge, but what second source agrees with it? Not did the procedure say it was isolated, but how did we physically prove that the energy was gone? Not was everybody told, but can the person actually doing the work explain the hazard back to us? In high consequence systems, confidence is not evidence. Independent verification is evidence. That distinction matters, especially in high hazard work. Blame makes people defensive. Precision makes system safer. A neurodeiverse employee who is trained and well supported can become very good at precision without automatically turning it into blame. At the end of the day, they tend to be more driven to understand the how and the why than the who. Anyway, now if you're in industry and you have your own procedures, your own standards, your own management systems, your own control room practices, your own integrity programs, your own emergency response structures, and your own safety culture.

[00:11:27]I'm not here to pretend I know anything about your internal systems. I don't.

[00:11:31]But physics does not care whose logo is on the truck. Gas pressure does not care how senior someone is. A flange does not care whether the meeting was respectful.

[00:11:39]Stored energy does not care whether the assumption felt obvious to everyone else. And a right of way does not care whether the person with the excavator probably understood the locating marks.

[00:11:49]Industrial reality is beautifully democratic that way because it ignores everybody's opinion equally. And that's why ambiguity is so expensive. It lets people preserve social comfort in the moment by moving uncertainty into the field. Accepting ambiguity is a social convention we follow to speed things along, but it always transfers the risk downstream. Think about a shift handover. On paper, it's simple. One crew transfers the state of the operation to another. In reality, it's one human brain trying to serialize a messy physical system into a language while another human brain reconstructs it under time pressure. Any missing context becomes a little trap door. But with time constraints, we use shorthand and assumptions. We had some trouble with the transmitter earlier, but it's fine now. Well, what does fine mean?

[00:12:31]Stable, calibrated, bypassed, in alarm, but acknowledged, replaced, verified against a local gauge, temporarily ignored because maintenance is coming on Monday anyway. Or how about we isolated that section? Well, what does isolated mean? Valve closed, locked, tagged, depressurized, verified, zero energy, or just merely removed from normal operation? Or the contractor knows about the crossing but knows what exactly?

[00:12:53]knows there is a pipeline, knows the depth, knows the tolerance zone, knows the hand dig requirement, knows who to call if conditions differ, knows that frozen ground, bad light, or snow cover can make yesterday's certainty into today's gas. Neurotypical teams often rely on context and convention to compress those details. You develop something of a shortorthhand. Most of the time, that compression works and saves valuable time. Language would be intolerable otherwise. But in hazardous work, compression must be done carefully. It's the difference between a good fitting and one that was almost tight. Autistic cognition often resists that compression. We may ask for the uncompressed version. And yes, sometimes we ask at the most inconvenient possible times. But if your system has no room for that question, the system is brutal.

[00:13:36]In that case, don't hate the player. Fix the game. I learned this the hard way in my own career, though mostly with software and people rather than pipes and pressure. When I was a precocious pre-teen of about 12, I used to ride my bike down to Radio Shack and spend as much time as they would allow me on their computer. One day the store manager needed it back for store business and I said, "Well, I'm going to save my work." He asked if I was telling him or asking him, and I replied honestly and without a hint of teenage rebellion. I'm telling you. I did not understand that the social convention required deference in that situation. I was merely reporting an operational requirement. The work had to be saved before the machine could be used. Now, translate that trait into fieldwork. A socially smooth employee might hear, "We need to move this along." And infer that further questions are unwelcome. A literal employee might hear the same thing and say, "I understand the scheduled pressure, but we still have not verified isolation." Depending on the culture, that person is either a pain to work with or a lifesaver. The reality is that they might be both at the same time. And the best organizations learn to distinguish friction from resistance. Friction slows motion. Resistance prevents movement in the wrong direction. They feel similar in the moment, but they are not the same thing. This is where the costs and benefits of neurodiversity become tangled. An autistic employee may be unusually reliable with routines, details, pattern recognition, and rule-based work. They may remember the abnormal reading from 6 weeks ago that everybody else has already forgot. They may notice that the procedure says verify in one section and confirm in another and then seek out to find out what the actual difference is. They may be the one person in the room who cannot let go of the mismatch between the plan and the site conditions. That's the benefit. The cost is that they also may get stuck on a detail that is truly not important. They may have trouble prioritizing if everything else feels like a rule. They may struggle with noisy environments, last minute changes, vague feedback, political conversations, or the emotional temperature of a room.

[00:15:24]They may sound angry when they're actually just anxious or concerned. They may look bored when they're overloaded.

[00:15:30]They may fail to perform the expected facial expressions when someone gives them good news. I've done all of that. I once had a classic car restored, a 1969 Pontiac Laurentian that my father bought new and later gave to me in ' 84. The restoration shop did beautiful work.

[00:15:44]When I finally inspected it, I was deeply moved, but I did not perform the expected emotional reaction. No tears, no dramatic television reveal, no collapsing into the arms of the crafts people. I inspected it carefully, thanked them, paid the bill, and went home. Years later, I realized they may have expected a much bigger response.

[00:16:00]So, I wrote to the owner to explain that I had been genuinely impressed, but I'd probably failed to show it properly. He replied that he had thought about my reaction many times over the years, and that was a hard lesson. Internal appreciation does not automatically become external communication at work.

[00:16:15]That can look like disengagement. It can look like disrespect. It can look like the person does not care and sometimes they care so much that they've gone quiet because their system is overloaded. That is why managers matter.

[00:16:25]A neurodeiverse employee in a bad environment can become isolated, defensive, underused or treated as a problem to be managed. The same employee in a good environment can become a kind of humanindependent check not because they are better but because they are different in a useful direction. If the unspoken rule is don't make the meeting awkward, then the autistic employee has two choices. They can make the meeting awkward and pay for it, or they can learn to mask until the very difference that you hire them for becomes hidden.

[00:16:50]Masking is the process of acting more neurotypical than you naturally are. And I've done it for decades, and I'm doing it right now. It can help you fit in, but it also burns energy that could have gone into the work. That is the bargain many of us make. We spend our best thinking trying to look normal. Then everybody wonders why they're not getting our best thinking. The workplace fix is not complicated, but it does require discipline. Send the agenda before the meeting. Write down decisions. Define terms. Attach units to numbers. Make ownership explicit. Give people a way to raise a concern before the job starts, not after the incident review. Don't rely on hallway context for safety critical information. Don't make charisma in a crowded room the only path to influence. And when somebody asks the uncomfortable question, train leaders to respond with curiosity before status defense. Good question. Let's verify those four words can change a culture because the issue is not whether everybody is smart enough. They probably are. The issue is that smart people still operate inside social systems.

[00:17:45]They notice rank. They notice irritation. They intuitively know when a manager wants the answer to be yes. They know when the project is behind schedule. They know when the room has emotionally moved on. And once enough people sense that the room wants the answer to be yes, the safest technical answer can start to feel like the riskiest social one. And that's what I mean by social convention as a hazard.

[00:18:04]Nobody writes a procedure manual that says, "If the senior person appears impatient, skip the awkward question, but organizations sometimes operate as if they had." Nobody writes, "Treat silence as confirmation, but meetings do it every day." Nobody writes, "Assuming the person doing the work understood the hazard because everybody nodded, but handovers do it all the time." And nobody writes, "The person who keeps asking about edge cases is not a team player." But some cultures teach exactly that without ever saying those words. A high reliability organization must do the opposite. It must make the awkward question normal and okay. It has to make verification more socially acceptable than assumption. It has to make I don't understand safe to say because the person who does not understand may be the only person in the room who is not silently sharing the wrong assumption.

[00:18:48]That is where neurodiverse people can help. We may not always pick up on the invisible paragraph everybody else is reading. We may not know that the meeting is supposed to be over. We may not understand why a vague answer satisfied the room. We may be less impressed by hierarchy when the facts are unresolved. That can be dangerous if it becomes disrespect, but it can also be essential. In a high consequence organization, truth has to outrank status. The junior person has to be able to stop the job. The contractor has to be able to say the conditions differ.

[00:19:16]The operator has to be able to challenge the engineer. And the engineer has to be able to challenge the schedule. The schedule does not get a vote if the hazard is real. And for those of us that are neurodiverse, there is responsibility on our side, too. We do not get a free pass to be dicks simply because we're accurate. We do not get to treat every uncertainty as a five alarm emergency. We do not get to assume that because we see one detail, everybody else is negligent for not seeing it first. Sometimes the emotionally intelligent person in the room is tracking a bigger issue that we missed.

[00:19:44]Sometimes the supervisor is balancing constraints that we don't understand.

[00:19:48]Sometimes the detail is real, but the way we deliver it determines whether anybody else can use it. So if you are nerverse and you can see the assumption, name it clearly. Don't point out just the flaw, help define the fix. If you're worried, explain the mechanism. If you need time to process, say so. If you're asking because you don't understand, make that clear. And if you believe something is unsafe, be direct, but anchor your concern in evidence. This is how difference becomes useful. The best teams need both forms of intelligence.

[00:20:15]They need the person who spots the assumption and the person who can get the room to hear it. They need the field expert who knows what actually happens at minus30 in Alberta and then the engineer who knows what the calculation assumed at room temperature. They need the control room operator who sees the trend and the technician who knows the transmitter has been flaky since the last storm. They need a safety professional who understands the procedure and the crew lead who knows where the procedure meets. Mud, fatigue, noise, and time pressure. Neurodiversity is not a replacement for experience.

[00:20:42]It's a multiplier when combined with experience. And that is the real business case for neurodiversity at TC Energy or any other high consequence organization. Not charity, not optics, not compliance. It's another way to see the system, another way to challenge drift. Another way to detect the gap between what the organization believes and what the field is actually doing.

[00:21:01]And that takes us back to the Gimly glider. Somewhere in that chain, a number lost its unit. And because the number looked familiar, the assumption survived long enough to become physical.

[00:21:09]It became altitude. It became silence in the engines. It became a powerless Boeing 67 gliding over Manitoba. That is the lesson. Assumptions do not remain abstract. In industrial work, they eventually become something you can touch, smell, hear, or measure.

[00:21:24]Pressure, flow, heat, gas, motion, stored energy, a missing unit. A valve believed closed. A drawing believed current. A contractor believed informed.

[00:21:32]A condition believed unchanged. So the next time somebody asks the awkward question, maybe don't rush past it.

[00:21:37]Maybe they are being difficult. Maybe they missed a social cue. Maybe they are overfocused on a detail. Or maybe they just notice that the number has no unit.

[00:21:45]And in a business where reality always gets the final word, that might be exactly the person you need in the room.

[00:21:51]Thank you. If you found this discussion to be informative or entertaining, remember I'm mostly in this for the subs and likes, but I have written two books on autism, Secrets of the Autistic Millionaire and the non-visible part of the autism spectrum, both of which are available on Amazon, and I'll put links in the video description. The first book covers more of the employment aspect, and the second book is more about how to manage it for yourself. Vex.