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The Autism Advantage
Joachim Ladefoged/VII, for The New York Times
Thorkil Sonne and his son Lars, who has autism, at home in Ringsted, Denmark.
By GARETH COOK
Published: November 29, 2012 259 Comments
When Thorkil Sonne and his wife, Annette, learned that their 3-year-old
son, Lars, had autism, they did what any parent who has faith in reason
and research would do: They started reading. At first they were relieved
that so much was written on the topic. “Then came sadness,” Annette
says. Lars would have difficulty navigating the social world, they
learned, and might never be completely independent. The bleak accounts
of autistic adults who had to rely on their parents made them fear the
future.
Joachim Ladefoged/VII, for The New York Times
Christian Andersen in his office at a pharmaceutical company in Copenhagen.
What they read, however, didn’t square with the Lars they came home to
every day. He was a happy, curious boy, and as he grew, he amazed them
with his quirky and astonishing abilities. If his parents threw out a
date — Dec. 20, 1997, say — he could name, almost instantly, the day of
the week (Saturday). And, far more usefully for his family, who live
near Copenhagen, Lars knew the train schedules of all of Denmark’s major
routes.
One day when Lars was 7, Thorkil Sonne was puttering around the house
doing weekend chores while Lars sat on a wooden chair, hunched for hours
over a sheet of paper, pencil in hand, sketching chubby rectangles and
filling them with numerals in what seemed to represent a rough outline
of Europe. The family had recently gone on a long car trip from Scotland
to Germany, and Lars passed the time in the back seat studying a road
atlas. Sonne walked over to a low shelf in the living room, pulled out
the atlas and opened it up. The table of contents was presented as a map
of the continent, with page numbers listed in boxes over the various
countries (the fjords of Norway, Pages 34-35; Ireland, Pages 76-77).
Thorkil returned to Lars’s side. He slid a finger along the atlas,
moving from box to box, comparing the source with his son’s copy. Every
number matched. Lars had reproduced the entire spread, from memory,
without an error. “I was stunned, absolutely,” Sonne told me.
To his father, Lars seemed less defined by deficits than by his unusual
skills. And those skills, like intense focus and careful execution, were
exactly the ones that Sonne, who was the technical director at a
spinoff of TDC, Denmark’s largest telecommunications company, often
looked for in his own employees. Sonne did not consider himself an
entrepreneurial type, but watching Lars — and hearing similar stories
from parents he met volunteering with an autism organization — he slowly
conceived a business plan: many companies struggle to find workers who
can perform specific, often tedious tasks, like data entry or software
testing; some autistic people would be exceptionally good at those
tasks. So in 2003, Sonne quit his job, mortgaged the family’s home, took
a two-day accounting course and started a company called Specialisterne,
Danish for “the specialists,” on the theory that, given the right
environment, an autistic adult could not just hold down a job but also
be the best person for it.
For nearly a decade, the company has been modest in size — it employs 35
high-functioning autistic workers who are hired out as consultants, as
they are called, to 19 companies in Denmark — but it has grand
ambitions. In Europe, Sonne is a minor celebrity who has met with Danish
and Belgian royalty, and at the World Economic Forum meeting in Tianjin
in September, he was named one of 26 winners of a global social
entrepreneurship award. Specialisterne has inspired start-ups and has
five of its own, around the world. In the next few months, Sonne plans
to move with his family to the United States, where the number of
autistic adults — roughly 50,000 turn 18 every year — as well as a large
technology sector suggests a good market for expansion.
“He has made me think about this differently, that these individuals can
be a part of our business and our plans,” says Ernie Dianastasis, a
managing director of CAI, an information-technology company that has
agreed to work with Specialisterne to find jobs for autistic software
testers in the United States.
For previously unemployable people — one recent study found that more
than half of Americans with an autism diagnosis do not attend college or
find jobs within two years of graduating from high school — Sonne’s
idea holds out the possibility of self-sufficiency. He has received
countless letters of thanks and encouragement from the families of
autistic people. One woman in Hawaii wrote Sonne asking if she could
move her family to Denmark so that her unemployed autistic son could
join the Specialisterne team.
I first met Sonne, who is 52, in Delaware at a small conference he
organized for parents and government officials who want to help him set
up American operations over the coming year. He stood before them,
sipping a cup of Dunkin’ Donuts coffee, speaking enthusiastically of his
“dandelion model”: when dandelions pop up in a lawn, we call them
weeds, he said, but the spring greens can also make a tasty salad. A
similar thing can be said of autistic people — that apparent weaknesses
(bluntness and obsessiveness, say) can also be marketable strengths
(directness, attention to detail). “Every one of us has the power to
decide,” he said to the audience, “do we see a weed, or do we see an
herb?”
It’s an appealing metaphor, though perhaps a tougher sell in the United
States, where you rarely see dandelion salad. It is also, of course, a
little too simple. Over eight years of evaluating autistic adults, Sonne
has discovered that only a small minority have the abilities
Specialisterne is looking for and are able to navigate the unpredictable
world of work well enough to keep a job. “We want to be a role model to
inspire,” Sonne told me later, “but we can only hire the ones that we
believe can fill a valuable role in a consultancy like ours.” In other
words, he’s not running a charity. It is Sonne’s ultimate goal to change
how “neurotypicals” see people with autism, and the best way to do
that, he has decided, is to prove their value in the marketplace.
TDC, Thorkil Sonne’s former employer, is
Specialisterne’s oldest customer. When I visited its headquarters in
Copenhagen in June, it was obvious why the company finds it useful to
engage autistic consultants. Whenever cellphone makers introduce a new
product, there are countless opportunities for glitches. The only way
TDC can be sure of catching them is to load the software onto a phone
and punch the phone keys over and over again, following a lengthy script
of at least 200 instructions. The work is tedious, the information age
equivalent of the assembly line, but also important and beyond the
capacity of most people to perform well. “You will get bored, and then
you will take shortcuts, and then it is worthless,” explained Johnni
Jensen, a system technician at TDC.
Steen Iversen, a Specialsterne consultant in bluejeans and a bright red
polo shirt, showed me how he tackles the task. Iversen, who is 52 and
has worked at TDC for four years, laid out several phones on a desk that
also held his computer, two bananas, an apple and lines of lime green
Post-it notes. He picked up a phone in one hand and demonstrated his
technique, his thumb landing on the buttons in quick succession. But his
real advantage is mental: he is exhaustive and relentless. When a
script called for sending a “long text message,” Iverson keyed in every
character the phone was capable of; it crashed. Another time, he found a
flaw that could have disabled a phone’s emergency dialing capability, a
problem all previous testers had missed. I asked Iversen how he feels
at moments like that, and he gently pumped both fists in the air with a
shy smile. “I feel victorious,” he said.
Over the years, Jensen has developed strategies for interacting with
Iversen and the two other consultants he oversees. Trying to rush them
inevitably backfires, he told me. “Sometimes I have to bite my tongue.”
Jensen feels protective of the consultants and tries to shield them from
the usual stresses of office work, but he is emphatic that the
arrangement has endured not because he pities them but because their
work is excellent. When Iversen finds a bug, he can recall similar ones
from years past, saving Jensen the time and frustration of researching
the problem’s history. And, Jensen says, the consultants are far more
devoted to accuracy than neurotypical workers. Iversen has punched
mobile-phone keys day after day, and not once has he cut a corner or
even made a careless mistake.
Christian Andersen, another Specialisterne consultant, works at
Lundbeck, a large pharmaceutical company. He compares records of
patients who have experienced reactions to Lundbeck’s drugs, making sure
the paper records match the digital ones. Errors can creep in when the
reports are entered into the company’s database, and tiny mistakes could
mean that potential health hazards would go undetected. So Andersen
searches for anomalies, computer entry against written report, over and
over, hour after hour, day after day.
Before Andersen arrived, his boss, Janne Kampmann, had a hard time
finding employees who could do the job well. Most people’s minds wander
as they go back and forth between documents, their eyes skimming the
typos lurking there. Andersen, however, worked without interruption the
morning I visited, attentive and silent until he lifted his head and,
pointing to a sheet of paper, said to Kampmann, “Why do we have a 57
instead of 30 milligrams?” Kampmann told me Andersen is one of the best
quality-control people she’s ever seen.
For years, scientists underestimated the intelligence of autistic
people, an error now being rectified. A team of Canadian scientists
published a paper in 2007 showing that measures of intelligence vary
wildly, depending on what test is used. When the researchers used the
Wechsler scale, the historical standard in autism research, a third of
children tested fell in the range of intellectual disability, and none
had high intelligence, consistent with conventional wisdom. Yet on the
Raven’s Progressive Matrices, another respected I.Q. test, which does
not rely on language ability, a majority of the same children scored at
or above the middle range — and a third exhibited high intelligence.
Other scientists have demonstrated that the autistic mind is superior at
noticing details, distinguishing among sounds and mentally rotating
complex three-dimensional structures. In 2009, scientists at King’s
College London concluded that about a third of autistic males have “some
form of outstanding ability.”
This emerging understanding of autism may change attitudes toward
autistic workers. But intelligence, even superior intelligence, isn’t
enough to get or keep a job. Modern office culture — with its unwritten
rules of behavior, its fluid and socially demanding work spaces — can be
hostile territory for autistic people, who do better in predictable
environments and who tend to be clumsy at shaping their priorities
around other people’s requirements.
Most Specialisterne consultants work in the offices of the companies
that use their services, but some need to operate out of
Specialisterne’s more forgiving work space. Even those capable of
working on site sometimes get into trouble. In one case, the company was
contacted by a medical-technology company, which needed help testing
new prescription-tracking software. This seemed a marvelous bit of luck,
says Rune Oblom, Specialisterne’s business manager, because there was a
consultant on staff interested in illnesses. Everything was going fine
until a medical team arrived to try out the software, and the consultant
spent the entire morning recounting to them, in detail, the medical
treatments that he, his mother and the rest of his family received over
the years. Another consultant was assigned to finish the
software-testing job. “I told him that the doctors were not very happy
and felt he was a disturbing factor,” Oblom says. “But he couldn’t see
it.”
The consultant has since been moved to another company, where he has
done well at his professional tasks but still misses social cues. In
Denmark, there is a tradition of bringing cake to the office on Fridays,
and Oblom recently learned from the on-site supervisor that the
consultant happily eats cake but has never volunteered to bring one
himself. Then there was the time he tasted a co-worker’s cake and
pronounced it terrible. Oblom told me that he plans to tell the
consultant that he has to bring in cake now and then — and he will do
it, Oblom predicts, without understanding the reason — but he’s not
going to encourage the consultant to be more polite. The concept of
socially mandated dishonesty would mystify him, Oblom said, so the other
employees will just have to deal with it.
Specialisterne tries to anticipate, or at least mitigate, conflicts by
assigning every consultant to a neurotypical coach. The coach checks in
with the consultants regularly, monitoring their emotional well-being
and helping them navigate the social landscape of the office. Henrik
Thomsen, a jolly man who runs Specialisterne in Denmark while Sonne
works on international expansion, told me about one consultant who is
fascinated by train schedules. Severe storms can disrupt the trains
around Copenhagen, and if the consultant’s train was delayed, he would
start the day with a tour of his colleagues at the Specialisterne
office, telling each how the commute played out, station by station.
Sometimes another consultant would get annoyed and tell him to “cut the
crap,” Thomsen says, “and then the real fun would begin.” So now Thomsen
listens to the radio as he drives in, taking mental note of potential
delays. When Thomsen arrives at work, he invites the consultant into his
office first thing, listens to the day’s commuting story and then asks
him to please get to work.
Specialisterne’s headquarters occupy part of a three-story complex in a
Copenhagen suburb. Sonne showed me around the building: in addition to
the consulting business, there is a nonprofit focused on spreading the
Specialisterne business model, and a small school for people on the
autism spectrum in their late teens and early 20s. In the largest room,
boxes of Legos are stacked against one wall, and a pair of long,
waist-high tables for Lego activities occupy the center, under a string
of halogen lights.
When Sonne started the company, one of his biggest challenges was
determining who would be able to thrive as a tech consultant in an
office environment. A traditional interview was clearly not going to do
the trick, and he had to think of other ways to identify marketable
strengths in people who have difficulty communicating.
Lars had always enjoyed Legos, and talking to other parents, Sonne heard
stories about how the toy bricks brought out remarkable, hidden
abilities. “For many parents,” Sonne told me, “this was one of the few
moments when they could be proud of their children.” So he decided to
ask potential employees to follow the assembly directions included in
the Lego Mindstorms kits and watch them build the robots.
This turned out to be so revealing that assessing job skills in the
autistic population has itself become part of Specialisterne’s
business, with local government sending about 50 people a year to the
company for five-month evaluations. (Specialisterne considers some for
consulting jobs; others might end up doing clerical work, mowing lawns
or other tasks for municipalities.) The Specialisterne evaluators place
the candidates in groups for part of the time to see how well they work
in teams, in addition to assessing the skills (reasoning, following
directions, attending to details) that are naturally on display in a
Mindstorms session. The assignments also reveal how a person handles
trouble. More than once a candidate has become derailed because a Lego
piece does not match the shade of gray depicted in the manual. Yet it is
also not uncommon for a candidate to notice a struggling partner, stop
and patiently explain how to get back on track.
The Specialisterne school uses Legos, too. Frank Paulsen, a red-haired
man with a thin beard who is the school’s principal, told me about a
session he once led in which he handed out small Lego boxes to a group
of young men and asked them to build something that showed their lives.
When the bricks had been snapped together, Paulsen asked each boy to say
a few words. One boy didn’t want to talk, saying his construction was
“nothing.” When Paulsen gathered his belongings to leave, however, the
boy, his teacher by his side, seemed to want to stay. Paulsen tried to
draw him out but failed. So Paulsen excused himself and stood up.
The boy grabbed Paulsen’s arm. “Actually,” he said, “I think I built my own life.”
Paulsen eased back into his seat.
“This is me,” the boy said, pointing to a skeleton penned in by a square
structure with high walls. A gray chain hung from the back wall, and a
drooping black net formed the roof. To the side, outside the wall, two
figures — a man with a red baseball cap and a woman raising a clear
goblet to her lips — stood by a translucent blue sphere filled with
little gold coins. That, the boy continued, represented “normal life.”
In front of the skeleton were low walls between a pair of tan pillars,
and a woman with a brown pony tail looked in, brandishing a yellow
hairbrush. “That is my mom, and she is the only one who is allowed in
the walls.”
The boy’s teacher was listening, astonished: In the years she’d known
him, she told Paulsen later, she had never heard him discuss his inner
life. Paulsen talked to the boy, now animated, for a quarter of an hour
about the walls, and Paulsen suggested that perhaps the barriers could
be removed. “I can’t take down the walls,” the boy concluded, “because
there is so much danger outside of them.”
In June, Sonne announced the opening of a United States
headquarters in Wilmington, Del. The state’s governor, Jack Markell,
was there, as was a representative from CAI, the company that is
Specialisterne’s first real partner in the United States. The company
says it plans to begin recruiting and training autistic software testers
in Delaware next month, and if all goes well, it will expand the
program to other states. Specialisterne is also talking with Microsoft
about setting up a pilot program in Fargo, N.D., where it has a large
software-development operation.
Tyler Cowen, an economist at George Mason University (and a regular
contributor to The Times), published a much-discussed paper last year
that addressed the ways that autistic workers are being drawn into the
modern economy. The autistic worker, Cowen wrote, has an unusually wide
variation in his or her skills, with higher highs and lower lows. Yet
today, he argued, it is increasingly a worker’s greatest skill,
not his average skill level, that matters. As capitalism has grown more
adept at disaggregating tasks, workers can focus on what they do best,
and managers are challenged to make room for brilliant, if difficult,
outliers. This march toward greater specialization, combined with the
pressing need for expertise in science, technology, engineering and
mathematics, so-called STEM workers, suggests that the prospects for
autistic workers will be on the rise in the coming decades. If the
market can forgive people’s weaknesses, then they will rise to the level
of their natural gifts.
“Specialization is partly about making good use of the skills of people
who have one type of skill in abundance but not necessarily others,”
says Daron Acemoglu, an economist at M.I.T. and co-author of “Why
Nations Fail.” In other words, there is good money to be made doing the
work that others do not have the skills for or are simply not interested
in.
As Sonne tries to build up his business in the United States, though, he
faces practical challenges. For one thing, in Denmark, the government
helps cover some of the additional expense of managing autistic workers,
and it pays Specialisterne so it can give its employees full-time
salaries even though they only work part time. Specialisterne pays its
consultants in Denmark between $22 and $39 an hour, a rate negotiated
with unions, and in Delaware it plans to start with salaries between $20
and $30 an hour. And while two Delaware charitable foundations have
pledged $800,000 to Specialisterne, Sonne estimates that it will take
$1.36 million, and three years, for the business to become
self-sustaining.
Another challenge involves expectations. A new stereotype of autistic
people as brainiacs, endowed with quirky superminds, is just as
misguided as the old assumption that autistic people are mentally
disabled, Sonne says. Autistic people, like everyone else, have diverse
abilities and interests, and Specialisterne can’t employ all of them.
Most people Specialisterne evaluates in Denmark don’t have the right
qualities to be a consultant — they are too troubled, too reluctant to
work in an office or simply lack the particular skills Specialisterne
requires. The company hires only about one in six of the men and women
it assesses.
April Schnell, who is organizing a Specialisterne effort in the Midwest
and has an autistic son, told me that she traveled to Copenhagen for a
conference organized by the company for their volunteers from around the
world. One day, she and the others were given the Mindstorms challenges
used to assess candidates. As she struggled to solve one of the more
difficult ones, she realized that her son, Tim, who is 15, would find
the work uninteresting and probably too difficult: Specialisterne is not
likely to be the answer for him. “I was just very aware, there is a gap
here,” she said. “My heart was a little sad.”
One Friday evening, Sonne drove me to his house
southwest of Copenhagen, navigating through whipping rain and the last
clots of rush-hour traffic. Lars was waiting at the door to welcome us.
Now 16, Lars evokes a Tolkien elf — thin and blond with exceptionally
pale skin. He was outgoing from the start, eager to give me a tour of
the house, yet he only glanced at my face.
Lars has the sweet demeanor of a much younger boy. Several times he
affectionately rubbed his father’s head, the hair a short thin fur,
calling the bald spot “Mr. Moon.” He gushed about trains, and at dinner
Annette gently told him that we might not want to hear too much more
about international conventions on track signals. I played Lars in a
round of speed chess in the living room. There was never much doubt
about the outcome, but at one point he issued an earnest warning: “Take
care to not weaken your king’s position unnecessarily.” It was too late.
After we put the pieces away, I complimented him on his final moves —
an elegant and lethal attack with rooks, a bishop and a knight — and he
did a balletic twirl, arms out. I joked with his family about how
crushed I felt in defeat, and Lars walked over and put a consoling hand
on my shoulder. Perhaps, I suggested to Lars, I would be allowed a
rematch? “No,” he said simply.
When I asked Lars what he thought about his father’s company, he said he
has played with the Mindstorms robots but does not see himself working
there. “I want to be a train driver,” Lars announced. “It is the
country’s most beautiful job. You get to control a lot of horsepower.
Who wouldn’t want to do that?”
At the outset, it was Thorkil’s aim to persuade Danish tech companies to
hire his autistic employees. Now he wants all kinds of companies, all
over the world, to learn from what Speecialisterne is doing. He figures
that if he is successful, then maybe a national railway will consider
hiring a candidate as seemingly unlikely as his son, as long as he has
the right skills.
Certainly he has seen how transformative getting the right job can be
for the autistic workers themselves. Before coming to Specialisterne,
Iversen, who works at TDC, had not had a job for 12 years and spent the
days sleeping and nights surfing the Internet. Niels Kjaer once worked
as a physicist, receiving his diagnosis only after becoming clinically
depressed when he didn’t get an academic job. When he came to
Specialisterne, where he works on improving technology that grades eggs
as they pass by on a conveyor belt, he was on sick leave from a job
driving a cab.
Christian Andersen, who works at Lundbeck, the pharmaceutical company,
was bullied and beaten for years as a schoolboy. He received his
diagnosis at age 15 only because, fearing he might be suicidal, he
checked himself into a hospital. After high school — inspired by a
Hemingwayesque teacher who regaled his students with tales of outdoor
exploits — Andersen tried a vocational school for landscaping. But he
was overwhelmed by the requirement that he learn to drive. He tried
another tech school but flailed, became depressed and had a breakdown in
2005. Andersen was living at home without prospects, playing video
games. He couldn’t even land a job at a grocery store. Later that year,
his parents encouraged him to apply to Specialisterne.
I joined Andersen one morning on his commute to Lundbeck’s headquarters
across town. Riding on a yellow city bus, we talked about video games.
He still loves Halo; Diablo 3 he finds frustrating. “You turn a corner
and then — splat! — you are dead.” As we drew closer to the office, our
conversation drifted to his job. He spoke with surprising insight about
the psychological importance of work. “I have grown very much as a
person,” Andersen told me. “I have become more confident and
self-assured.” The job allowed him to move out of his parents’ house and
into an apartment. After a while, Andersen informed me, he “started
using body language.” It’s not something anyone taught him. He just
watched people, he said, and “monkey see, monkey do.”
When he started at Lundbeck, he was constantly anxious because he
dreaded making an error. Now the stress grips him far less often and is
readily dispelled with a phone call to a coach at Specialisterne. He
admits to being proud, having come so far. He was touched to be invited
recently to join his department for some after-work bowling. But he
doesn’t spend a lot of time thinking about these aspects of his
employment anymore. “Of course it feels good,” Andersen said, “but there
is such a thing as ‘here we go again.’ ” It’s only a job, after all.