Channeling autism
A Danish tech firm harnesses the power of the autistic brain
from a Canadian magazine called "Macleans":
http://www2.macleans.ca/2009/06/04/channelling-autism/

For the first two years of his life, Lars Sonne appeared to develop normally, a
happy boy, much like his older brothers. But at the age of two, roughly 10 years
ago, Lars started to retreat into himself. “At kindergarten, he wouldn’t
play with others,” says his father Thorkil Sonne, a Danish software executive,
speaking from his office in Copenhagen. “He would only be on his own, sit on a
swing for hours.” For several months, psychologists observed the boy closely,
and ultimately delivered a devastating diagnosis. “We were told that our son
has a lifelong disability called childhood autism,” says Sonne. “It was
scary to realize how many doors would be closed to him.”
As time progressed, Sonne noted something remarkable about Lars. He had few
friends—he was far too easy to bully—but he had intense, deeply cerebral
interests, like astronomy, railroad systems and mat h. “When he starts
focusing on something, he is so clever,” he says. “He can learn so much;
it’s quite extraordinary.” Once, when Lars was seven, Sonne found him
creating an elaborate doodle, made up of dozens of stacked boxes, numbers and
acronyms. Only later, when Sonne happened to crack open an atlas on his
bookshelf, did he realize that what his son had drawn was a replica, from
memory, of an intricate road map of western Europe, reproduced without a single
error.
By then, the extraordinary capabilities of the autistic brain had become
familiar ground to Sonne. As chairman of his local autism society chapter, he
spoke to dozens of parents of high-functioning kids with astonishing cognitive
abilities. “Their skills were particularly strong with computers,” he says,
“and they were very familiar with the Internet.” But they also faced many of
the same social obstacles as Lars—difficulty interacting, an inability to read
tone or body language, an intolerance of change, and an extreme sensitivity to
distractions—all things that, parents feared, would render their children
virtually unemployable in a conventional work setting. Everywhere, Sonne found,
discourse about autism was dominated by talk of weaknesses. But when he looked
at gifted young people like his son, he saw enormous wasted enthusiasm and
untapped potential.
In 2004, Sonne refinanced his home and founded Specialisterne—Danish for
“The Specialists”—the first20company in the world whose business model
caters to employees with autism spectrum disorders (ASDs). Its employees, 75 per
cent of whom have some form of autism, are specialists in software
testing—challenging, repetitive tasks that demand enormous accuracy and
intense focus. Because of his first-hand knowledge of the software business,
Sonne believed that if he could convince major companies to outsource the
testing of their products to his consultants, he could save them millions in
defect prevention, free up their creative employees from “the boring work,”
create a profitable business, and offer meaningful work to employees with
special challenges.
But first he had to find a way to make clients understand the extraordinary
resources his consultants had to offer. Torben Sorensen, 30, is a typical
Specialisterne employee. He has a mild form of autism called Asperger’s
syndrome. “I have an ability to see when something deviates,” he told the
Danish newspaper Urban DK in 2005. “It kind of leaps to the eye. It’s an
ability many people don’t seem to have, but to me it’s natural.” Sorensen
came to Specialisterne after his teaching career didn’t pan out. He excelled
at the theoretical aspects of education, he said, but he could not seem to
connect with the children. “I like working here,” he said. “I don’t have
to try to be anything other than myself. At times I can become obsessed with my
work and that’s20fine. In another company I might be expected to make small
talk and be flexible. Here I can just concentrate on my work without being
considered anti-social.”
Five years in, the company now employs 60 consultants who have proven so skilled
at their work they have more commissions than they can handle from multinational
clients including Microsoft, CSC, Oracle and LEGO. The company’s annual
revenue has increased by 50 per cent year over year; by 2007, it was pulling in
over $2.3 million, and last year, the company turned a modest profit. Sonne’s
long-term goal is to employ 1,000-plus employees with ASDs worldwide. “We are
in contact with people or organizations in 53 countries who want Specialisterne
to be established in their country,” he says. This year, the company will
expand into Norway, Switzerland and Britain and, before too long, he plans to
break into the U.S. and Canadian markets.
Specialisterne stands as a beacon of hope in the autism community. In recent
years, ASD diagnoses have exploded in North America for reasons that remain
mysterious but are thought to be the result of some combination of improved
diagnostics, environmental factors and genetics. In Canada, one in 165 children
is now born with autism—with symptoms that range from mild to requiring 24-7
care. “And now what’s happening,” says Sandra McKay, chair of the Autism
Society Canada, “is that we’ve got a lot of adolescents and young adults who
were d iagnosed 10, 15 years ago who are going to be entering the workforce, and
it’s like, what do we do now?”
Currently, only six per cent of adults with autism find full-time work—even
though half of all individuals with ASDs are high-functioning, meaning they
don’t have an intellectual disability. For this group, their greatest
obstacles pertain to social expectations. The world is simply not configured to
accommodate their version of “normal” behaviour.
To shed light on why so many bright people are languishing—and whether the
barriers they face are real or socially constructed—David Hagner of the
University of New Hampshire Institute on Disability conducted a study of
successfully employed autistic adults to determine what they had in common.
Overall, he said, “the comments I got from employers were almost as
superlative as you can hear about a worker.”
The challenges employers reported to him were pretty consistent: for one,
autistic employees generally don’t fare well in job interviews (eye contact
and small talk are a challenge). They can be hypersensitive to noise, light or
scent, and are often uncomfortable working in open-concept spaces. Most
commonly, they work best with very specific instructions, a great deal of
consistency, and advance notice of any changes to their routine. “Once
employers saw these things, they realized it was a cost of doing business,”
says Hagner. “But supervisors told me it8 0s not a greater cost than someone
else. It’s just different.”
In fact, ironically, Hagner’s research found that the quirks that make social
situations challenging for people with autism are often the very things that
make them great employees. For instance, a person with autism, he says, is not
going to get caught up in office gossip or politics. They’re not going to cut
corners, or lie, or steal. Universally, these employees were said to be loyal,
punctual and thorough. “I think the thing the supervisors really liked most
was their work ethic,” says Hagner. “If they’re told, ‘Your break is 10
minutes,’ they would take 10 minutes. Not nine or 11. Just 10.”
The genius of Specialisterne is that it was set up to take so-called “odd”
behaviour and make it the norm. “They are the ‘normals,’ ” says Sonne.
“Many have never had a job before. They might not have an education, but we
don’t care.” Instead of a traditional interview, Specialisterne engages
prospective consultants in a five-month training process to determine where they
excel. “We see their personality, their vocational, personal and social
experience, and their learning profile,” says Sonne, “and we try out
different set-ups and work hours and find out what kind of stress level would go
well with them.” Once they’re hired, consultants typically work 25 to 30
hours per week.
0A
Seventy per cent of their work is performed on-site at clients’ facilities. To
ease the relationship, clients are given a short introduction to autism and to
the firm’s culture. Specialisterne also offers a full-time, on-call response
staff who are trained to deal with any situation that may arise. Disruptions,
although infrequent, do happen. In one instance, a Specialisterne consultant,
disturbed by an inexplicable irregularity in his work, would get up and pace the
hallway between his desk and the men’s room every time it happened. The client
called the support staff who stepped in to counsel the consultant. In another
case, a consultant described as a brilliant mathematician would occasionally be
hit with bouts of depression. On those days, he would simply get up and leave. A
support person would be called upon to find a substitute.
Overwhelmingly, however, clients have expressed great satisfaction with the work
Specialisterne does. Microsoft Denmark, for example, hired its consultants to
test its Windows XP Media Center. “The assignment could have been solved by
one of our own employees,” said Nis Bank Lorentzen, business group lead of
Microsoft Denmark, “but there was a great risk that he or she would lose the
ability to concentrate after repeating the assignment a couple of times. With
Specialisterne, the risk is non-existent. Their ability to concentrate remains
intact, even after solving the same task many times over. Furthermore, they have
a fantastic ability to=2 0locate errors and aberrations.”
In December, confident that the company was on solid footing and ready to take
it to the next level, Sonne sold the company to the Specialisterne People
Foundation, which he created, for one Danish krone. “The role of
Specialisterne is still to earn money,” he says, “but the money will not go
to external sources, but to the foundation, and the foundation will use the
money for creating jobs and developing new knowledge, new services.” His hope
is that, by the time Lars turns 18, the world will be a little more hospitable
to people like him. “My goal is to showcase or demonstrate what happens if we
embrace people with autism instead of keep on thinking they are problems to our
society,” he says. “Otherwise, they have no chances.”