Gifted But Flawed: Talent in Entrepreneurs

09/26/2019

Can neuroscience help in nurturing the most talented entrepreneurs?

Have you invested in a very promising startup which failed but for its founders' inability to see through, on the face of it, straightforward steps?

Conversely, have you stopped yourself from investing in a brilliant startup, because the founders seemed too difficult or chaotic to work with?

Gavin is a retired builder who has invented a simple clip housing system that allows plumbers to install all the pipework in place first time, meaning no second fix required: anyone can connect up the plumbing at the decorating stage, saving thousands of hours and dollars for the homebuilder. In his pitch, Gavin is impatient; he's terrible with writing things down, and he speaks his mind too bluntly. His invention is worth millions to the construction industry, but he comes across as too blunt; he is terrible with maths, but hides his shame behind arrogance and bluster.

He doesn't care for figures, he says. People think he will be too difficult and defensive to work with.

The most talented entrepreneurs are fundamentally different in the way they think, but this comes at a price. The same qualities that create their value - restlessness, lateral thinking, disregard for boundaries- could also be sabotaging their efforts. Having a deep understanding of how they think is the key to understanding how to best nurture them.

Entrepreneurs have been studied from an academic perspective in business and sociology, for example telling us that the more along the ADHD spectrum you are, the more likely you are to pursue an entrepreneurial path in your career [1]. Are the real talents actually getting to pitch at all?

We are looking for more than statistics: we need in-field, real-time tips and techniques that we can use as investors and mentors.

Neuroscience gives us some clues as to how to answer these two big questions.

1. How can I spot genius if it is hidden behind the mask of a difficult or chaotic person?

2. How can I nurture talent and success in founders and entrepreneurs whose brilliance lies in the fact that they seem fundamentally differently wired?

What was your total?

If it was more than 20, then you have scored someone who has a high likelihood of having a significant neurodiversity [2]. Neurodiversity is a term which describes the genetically based thinking and behaviour patterns found to a clinical, reliable, consistent extent in around 10% of adults [3]. When they lead to disorder, neurodiverse states include such entities as dyslexia, autism, and ADHD. Although lifelong, these conditions are only the negative outcomes of neurodiversity: they're not the whole story by any means.

Neurodiversity is a neutral, non-clinical term. Such a person may or may not have a disorder, and is equally likely to have adapted to, compensated for, or even harnessed some of their markedly different thinking in a productive way. [4]

Most people with neurodiversity fall short of actual disorder; these are conditions on a spectrum. In any case, many people who may have the full blown disorder have learned to compensate against it in a way that helps them survive. Their achievements and talent may be exceptional, but often come at considerable personal expense in terms of a turbulent life history and relationships.

We know this because the research bears it out. The list of behaviours above is actually drawn from research which looks at adaptive behaviours in functional people who happen to have made a success of themselves whilst living with things like ADHD, dyslexia and autism.

How does neurodiversity translate into talent?

Neurodiversity is not a gift on its own. However, it can translate into giftedness by a number of means. As a provocative primer, let's think about Gavin again. It

turns out Gavin has severe dyslexia. He never learned to read properly; the words kept jumping around the page, sometimes appearing backwards, other times the lines got jumbled up.

Gavin had a good home, but his issues led to his parents and school never thinking of him as academically bright. Dyslexia was never mentioned. One teacher called him stupid and lazy outright. . Being thought of as led him to grow up with a strong sense of independence; he was quick to anger when accused of being lazy, and as a result he worked very hard to prove himself. He became a handyman, self-taught, never gaining qualifications but he was the kind of guy who could sort out the wiring in your house in a quarter of the time compared to the professionals. Somehow he just understood things visually and spatially better than anyone else. He saw problems in an intuitive way, unconstrained by education and words. He was also impatient, though. This led him to being difficult tom work with; he preferred to work alone. His impatience also fuelled his desire to get things done quickly; coupled with his visual and spatial ability, this drove him to invent the clip system that could speed up the building process for everyone.

Neurodiversity leads to talentedness in a number of ways.

1. Energy

Being thought of as outcast, or just very different to others, causes a strong, primal reaction to prove oneself. This energises a greater sense of persistence and autonomy. Few things energise a person more than the little voice in their head telling them that they must prove themselves worthy. It might wear them out, but they can achieve huge things by sheer persistence alone.

2. Compensation

Take an example. The received mythology is that people with traits of ADHD are disorganised and chaotic. While this is true in the uncompensated disorder, in some people it leads to the direct opposite. Here's how. ADHD is highly genetically inherited: it is almost as genetic as your height [5]. Combined with ADHD, if obsessiveness is also inherited separately [6], it leads to a hyper-organised person, able to deal almost exclusively with complex and demanding challenges. Ordinary projects turn them off. As crazy as it sounds, it's a fact.

Similarly, a person with dyslexia might learn to become socially facile at an early age: instead of becoming defiant, they get things done by relying on and persuading others to help them out. As a child they learnt to get friends and teachers to help them complete assignments, allowing for their failures for a repertoire of charm, wit or creativity. In later life they become the CEOs who are exceptionally emotionally intelligent, brimming with ideas and visions, terrible with facts and figures to a forgivable and disarming fault. They use their immense verbal communication and interpersonal skill to recruit and retain the most technically skilled people.

3. Extension

Ramesh has Asperger's syndrome. While he struggles to understand body language and communication outside very concrete things, he is also able to communicate very effectively where precision and detail are required. His childhood, whilst frustrating for a lack of friends, saw him on his computer, which seemed to offer a soothing balm away from the unpredictable nightmare of human interaction. Here is a thing which can be told to do anything you like it to do, and will keep doing it the same time every time, as long as you know how to talk to it. It responds to precision and clarity. So it feels good to learn how to code. Alongside this, Aspergers also affords Ramesh the quality of perseverance- a neurological term which describes the inability to defocus from a task; this translates in reality to an exceptional ability to focus, for superhuman periods, on a task in front of him. Given an intriguing and difficult IT task, Romesh does not relent. Where other people clock off, he stays there until the job is done, calm and determined, totally oblivious to distractions. Parties, meetings, and family life are all difficult and unrewarding compared to being in front of that terminal.

4. Synergy

Creativity is a skill that is both inherited and learnt. It results from a synergistic process: genes and learning which promote creativity work to multiply creative ability [7]. The learnt element of creativity is borne out in practice: even for people who claim to not have a creative bone in their body, a small amount of training and priming can transform their self-belief. ADHD has many routes to enhance creativity. A person with ADHD traits, with separate creative traits, is far more creative than the non-ADHD person [8]. Founders and entrepreneurs are naturally creative people, but if their exceptional creativity has come from a tendency to ADHD traits, they may well suffer from the difficulties in organisation, fractious interpersonal skills, or inability to complete tasks that also come along. Properly adapted, they could become serial green-shoots entrepreneurs, setting up projects and then leaving once that phase is over. Far too commonly, they are serially disappointed because convention deems it worthy to see things through, to persist. They above all are bewildered by how they seem to lose interest or energy in their projects; bright promise turns to confused failure, time and time again.

In the case of Ramesh above, if he has a good IQ or mathematical ability, his potential to crack problems with computers is that much more adept. These skills are separate to having Asperger's syndrome, but given the combination of Asperger's syndrome, access to computers, and a quiet studious disposition, Ramesh could turn out to be a world-beater as a teenager. Most Rameshes are never discovered or recognised, let alone go on to work as star coders in top companies. They end up being clerks or office workers; their reluctance to live in a world outside the bounds of the things they know means that they rarely dare to think about grander things, and neither are they identified nor sought out.

How to identify talent behind the flaws.

Experience alone is not enough. Many angel investors and venture capitalists are only too aware of the fact that a good proportion of their bets will fail, despite their best appraisal beforehand and top quality incubation. Having an appetite for risk is part and parcel of the game. Is there a parallel mechanism to allow a deeper insight, to reduce the risk of failure?

The answer is yes, but it is not straightforward. You need expertise: either your own, or from people who know how.

Your own expertise.

Angels in particular have an innate knowledge of success against personal failure. Many angels themselves come from a background of triumph against adversity. They seek to invest, consciously or otherwise, in people who they identify with; diamonds in the rough who believe in something enough to make their belief felt as successful enterprise. It would not be surprising to learn that people with divergent mindsets are over-represented in the angel community. They will be well placed to mentor people with a similar approach, giving them tips and direct assistance on how to get around their problems.

This alone is not enough though; one person's experience of how they dealt with their issues is not sufficient for them to identify talent in others who made headway through their own problems with entirely different solutions. There isn't just one blueprint of how exceptional talent resides behind flaws, nor one single way to help a given individual with the same profile.

Is it worth it?

Before we go on, we should ask if it is worth it?

Well, the world needs diversity more than ever. People who thrive in chaos, who solve problems that plague our daily lives, are more needed than ever. Evolutionary psychology would posit that neurodiversity is nature's way of ensuring that a given percentage of people will become the misfits, the sleepless grafters, the defiant dominos who don't fall in line, the restless explorers: as a hypersocial species, we must come to accept and embrace the fact that we thrive when we specialise, celebrating and encouraging difference, because difference predicts innovation.

We need differentiation, and dramatic diversity at that, to properly meet the global challenges that we face. People who are literally wired differently are better placed to do that than the rest of us: we must seek them out and nurture them in a way that is far more sophisticated than what we currently do. After all, doing what we currently do is the finest way of ensuring we continue not to solve the problems we currently face.

The Expertise Gap

There are precious few experts (namely coaches, occupational psychologists etc), that firmly grasp the nettle of translating neurodiversity into high level business success.

Most experts in neurodiversity currently ply a living dealing with the negative outcomes, working in clinical, research or teaching institutions: as psychologists, psychiatrists, lecturers, carers, sociologists and educators. Awareness takes many years to become reality in practice. There are myths and legends about famous or successful people having disorders like ADHD dyslexia and Asperger's syndrome (think Steve Jobs, Richard Branson and Mark Zuckerberg respectively), but rarely do these people themselves readily say, or know, how their divergences actually help or hinder them.

Things are changing though; with awareness increasing, people become more tolerant of, and more expert in how to spot divergent talent. I, for one, take on the work for my firm when there is a question of neurodiversity being raised by a client.

This one guy's experience of helping neurodiversity to extraordinary success

Here's how I've done it so far.

1. Spotting the signs.

A trained eye, used to dealing with signs of neurodiverse people over many years. There are too many signs to list here, and it is rarely just one thing that clinches the 'diagnosis', as it were. Pattern recognition is experientially learned; a combination of soft signals and signs that a person exhibits in their behaviour.

2. Interview and testing.

One a candidate is in a coaching programme, we sometimes use more advanced tools such as psychometrics, extended interview tools, iand advanced methods such as AI-based speech analysis and EEG. These are not always used; indeed, their use is sometimes a bit of a cultural shock to non-clinical settings. We don't need them that often, but they can be handy when we are trying to tease out something very specific: they help in the overall effort to identify which particular elements in a person are contributing to their talent, and which parts are hindrances.

3. Specific, bespoke coaching techniques.

Coaching a given individual with neurodiversity need not be a specialist thing per se, but they are very specific to any given person. There is huge complexity in how someone's exceptional talent is manifest. There is precision required in engineering how to best to enhance it while overcoming their often troublesome flaws. A sophisticated, knowledgeable, flexible, but most importantly a warm, collaborative approach must be taken. People who think differently are especially receptive to someone who 'gets' them.

The person emerges with a growth plan and goals like they would with any coaching program; the difference is that this one is developed by, and with, an expert who understands their particular proclivities. Sometimes these plans and strategies can be completely counterintuitive.

An example of coaching technique

Take for example criterion number 18 from the 'Spotting the Signs' Test above:

'Seems to thrive when resources are absent or deficient'.

Given a history like this, one might be tempted to recreate those conditions to help the person be at their best: to further limit their resources, give them short time limits, for example. But examining it closer, the talent appears to be a compensation.

This particular trait is observed in people with ADHD who have compensated and improvised against a particularly disabling trait from the disorder in DSM-5:

Inattention criterion 7: Often loses things necessary for tasks and activities.

Losing and misplacing things means not turning up to school with the right kit, without pens even. At work you forget tools, lose your password, you lose that special expensive widget that got the job done, you can't concentrate for long enough to learn how to use this or that special device. But if you have the talent for creativity and improvisation, you learn to be inventive and get things done anyway. In the process, you imagine, create and discover how to get things done without the things that others seem to need. You emerge talented but flawed; you give the impression of thriving in harsh conditions, but in reality you don't quite know how to grow your skill.

It is said that resources are the enemy of the imagination. This person has learned to rely on their imagination a lot more. To foster such a talent, we would work out what the person's attitude was to their ability: do they pride themselves on it, or would they rather have help in organising their work and equipment? If they don't know, we would help them to discover this iteratively, measuring outcomes objectively and subjectively in a number of situations. It could well be that they just need to recreate that pressured environment to bring out their best, but the opposite might be true: they do even better given the right assistance with organisation.

Neurodiversity is not the hurdle: it is the KEY to picking out that exceptional innovator

Coaching people with neurodiversity may be a bit more intensive, but it is absolutely worth it: remember, these people do have the key to thinking in ways that benefit the rest of society in as yet untapped ways, so it is time that we gave them all the assistance that they need. Not only does it lead to ensuring success where previously there was failure, generating wealth and innovation at a far better rate than conventional models, but it spells a better, more sophisticated world. Dr A F Merchant, Coaching Programme Director, IngramFaraday.com

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References

[1] Dimic, Nebojsa and Orlov, Vitaly, Entrepreneurial Tendencies Among People with ADHD International Review of Entrepreneurship 13 (3), 187-204. 2014

[2] Merchant A F. Compensatory and adaptive behaviours in adults with traits of executive disorder. Data on file, Ingram Faraday Ltd, 2014

[3] World Health Organisation data. www.who.int

[4] Austin R and Pisano G. Neurodiversity as a Competitive Advantage. Harvard Business Review, May /June 2017.

[5] Larsson H et al. The heritability of clinically diagnosed attention deficit hyperactivity disorder across the lifespan. Psychological Medicine, Cambridge UP, October 2013.

[6] van Groothest D et al. Heritability of obsessive‐compulsive symptom dimensions. Am J Med Genet Part B 147B:473-478. 2007.

[7] Bouchard T et al. Creativity, Heritability, Familiarity: Which Word Does Not Belong? Psychological Inquiry, pp 235-237, Nov 2009.

[8] Healey M and Rucklidge J. The Relationship Between ADHD and Creativity. The ADHD Report: Vol. 16, No. 3, pp. 1-5. 2008.

[9] Taken from American Psychiatric Association: DSM-V. Criteria for diagnosis of ADHD. 2013.