The Rice Game, Again
There are so many things that people don’t understand about living with ADHD, autism, or any other neurodivergent condition. When you hear that we have problems with working memory, you can probably relate. Who doesn’t forget they walked into a room every once in a while? Or perhaps when we get very impatient waiting in a line or nervous about delivering a big project or task, you can probably relate that experience to something that’s happened to you, too. So clearly those of us with ADHD must all be weaklings or complainers that just can’t handle the mundane things that everybody hates, right? I’m sure nobody cheers at the red light that takes too long, or the yard work waiting out in the heat.
I promise you, though, I’m not being a diva that refuses to perform unless all of the conditions are exactly right- 58.6% humidity, water only from melted glacial ice flown in no less than 6 hours ago, or a basket of a certain chocolate candy with all the green coatings rubbed off by Franciscan monks- none of that is an actual blocker when there is a task at hand, especially when there is the risk of judgement, failure, or letting people down. Extending the metaphor, I can assure you that I want to get up onto that proverbial stage and sing my heart out for the crowd. But what ADHD does is make it so that the stage fright, perhaps the crowd size or the notables in the crowd, something makes it too big or grave of a task for our brains to contemplate completing and so we become paralyzed. The overwhelm becomes overwhelming and the safest thing for our brain is to stop us in our tracks and keep us in a safe and comfortable space. “Oh look, here’s a social media feed that will get you likes, show you cute dogs, and engage your passions. That’s fun and safe. Stay there,” our brains say. So we never make it to the stage.
The diva metaphor is not accidental. When someone has ADHD, they sometimes need to optimize their working environment or ask for exceptions to the norms of how a team operates to be able to contribute their best efforts to the team’s objectives. But they aren’t being divas, they are simply trying to get to the stage. A diva’s demands are about status. An accommodation is about access. Asking for a written agenda before a meeting, a quiet place to work, or a heads-up before priorities change isn’t a test of how far the team will bend, or a bid for special treatment to elevate ourselves. (We usually do not want the spotlight on us!) It’s a way to shrink the task down to a size our brain will agree to start, to stifle that part of our brain that is mentally blocking us from executing a task it deems too dangerous or overwhelming.
Most of the time, the accommodations needed to provide the structure and support an ADHD colleague needs are small things that don’t cost much time or effort. For example, sending the meeting agenda a day early takes the same effort as sending it five minutes before the call. Writing down what was decided in the room takes two minutes… and saves the message three days later asking what we agreed to. A lot of the time, what the ADHD person needs is a habit the whole team would benefit from anyway- we just feel its absence more.
There are also unspoken rules or norms that teams naturally form. If you examined your workplace, I’m sure you could easily spot unofficial rules or team customs that you engage in daily. This is a completely normal part of group dynamics. Every team runs on a set of unwritten rules: Answer messages quickly. Make decisions out loud in meetings. Keep your camera on. Handle interruptions as they come. Just to name a few. Nobody sat down and chose those rules, they just accumulated from how people naturally worked, and they happen to work well for some brains and badly for others. When a neurodivergent teammate asks for something different, they aren’t asking the team to lower the bar or bend to their will. They’re asking to clear the same bar by a different route so that they can bring all of their potential to the table and deliver their best for the team.
The Rice Game
Feeling left out by the group, intentionally or not, still to this day reminds me of a particular day in kindergarten. Picture it: Largo, FL, 1986, on a rare cool Autumn day with that crisp air that only comes that time of year. I was sporting my best Velcro sneakers and a hand-me-down pair of Oshkosh overalls, looking every part the kindergartener. And it was finally my turn to get to play the rice game. For those of you too unsophisticated to know about the rice game, let me explain. It is this glorious table filled with dried white rice and measuring cups. The goal of the game is to use the measuring cups to count. The end; everyone wins! Fun, right? (Thinking about it now, I’m surprised we don’t all have rice tables in our home game rooms now as adults.) Unfortunately, but perhaps understandably, I was alone in my excitement over counting rice. All the other kids wanted to do the more grown-up stuff, like ride bikes and dodgeball. (Technically I think it was actually tricycles and bouncing a child-sized ball back and forth, but I wouldn’t really know because I was measuring rice inside by myself.) Nobody wanted to play with me and I was devastated. I remember crying about it… a lot. Not a few tears. The full kindergarten meltdown, like you would expect from a scorned toddler.
At the time, it just looked like a kid who couldn’t handle not getting his way and made every adult in the room wish they’d picked a different career. What nobody knew then was that I was developmentally younger than the kids around me. Russell Barkley, one of the leading ADHD researchers, estimates that executive function in people with ADHD runs about 30% behind their actual age. And for a lot of us, that gap never fully closes. (We can close that gap as we get older, but might never necessarily make up that lost time. That’s the foundation that we build on, piling on the same experience over the years as our peers but at a slower rate.) I was a five-year-old in a room full of five-year-olds, working with the self-regulation of someone closer to three and a half.
Adults with ADHD don’t cry at the rice table anymore. Not only because rice table rooms never caught on, but we also learned a long time ago that outward displays of emotions and crying out “why does everyone hate me” in the conference room don’t quite resolve anything. I share that story, though, because the feeling of being left out is still pretty awful. When we ask for something small and get told no or the group behaviors that leave us feeling excluded keep going, that has a real, negative impact on us. What is different between the stylish kindergartener and the polished professional is what we do with that exclusion. We say “no worries.” Or “That’s cool.” We eventually stop asking. We try to power through with willpower, which is the one tool we’re shortest on, and when it doesn’t work, we blame ourselves.
That’s the real cost of a team where people don’t feel safe asking. Not a meltdown. A person who quietly stops bringing their best, and a team that never finds out why.
Sure, good teams can figure out how to make room for different routes on their own. They care about what gets delivered more than how it got done. They let people say what helps without making them re-justify it every week. And they notice that the teammate who asked for the agenda early is often the one who shows up with the best questions. The challenge, though, is creating the environment where people feel psychologically safe enough at work to ask for the agenda or the written notes, the extra coffee break, the late working hours, or the cafeteria rice table, without feeling like a diva that nobody will play with.