Benefit from autism in your RD team

With regard to efficiently leading your technology professionals, what can we learn from autism? In this course you will learn the basics of the most autism friendly and therefore also technology professional friendly communication there is, especially clear communication. Through examples and short exercises you will learn what clear communication is and how you can shape this to your own use. To lead and direct is to communicate: to formulate instructions and tasks, give and request feedback and make decisions. The brain of technology professionals varies slightly from the average brain, which can result in communication differences. This is particularly obvious when a lack of communication or inefficient communication leads to all sorts of misunderstandings and frustrations. These consequences are similar to what we see in the extreme systemizing brain that we also known as the autistic brain.

This is why leaders and directors of highly educated technological brains can be inspired by the knowledge of autism experts regarding the communication with autistic brains. During this one-day course we will address several specific communication topics as an inspiration to discover possible pitfalls in the communication with technology professionals.

Examples of common pitfalls, frustrations and misunderstandings:

• My instructions are clear and still the person is not doing what I asked him/her to do. Or (s)he simply does what (s)he wants to do, which is completely different from what I asked him/her to do;
• When I ask a question I do not get an answer. Or an answer that is in no way an answer to my question;
• The person does not react to my communication;
• The person says he/she understands what I am saying but simply doesn’t do anything with what I am saying;
• The person does not spontaneously communicate things that are important to say, such as reporting a problem;
• The person finds it hard to communicate the core issue and gets lost in irrelevant details.

Depending on the COVID-19 situation and measures, the training will either be converted into a classroom training in Eindhoven or into a live, online interactive training.