BRICKS AND STONES

This is a metaphor I find really helpful.

Building a wall out of bricks is fairly easy. Bricks are regular, predictable, consistent shapes. That’s because they have been made that way – they’re essentially a kind of artificial stone.

Building a wall out of stones is much harder. They are irregular and come in all different shapes and sizes. That’s because they occur naturally, and are the product of all kinds of factors in their environment. You have to pay attention to what the individual stones are like when building with stones.

Real people are like stones, not like bricks. In the pre-industrial era, when most people stayed in the same area where they were born, organisations and social structures were made of stones. A family business would use the different gifts and skills of each member of the family, or of other local folk. Everyone had their place, and there was space for everyone.

With industrialisation came a mass movement of people to the cities, and large companies. People started to be seen as part of a machine – as instrumental rather than relational. When building a large company, managers wanted bricks who would behave consistently and be a consistent shape. They had specific job descriptions and wanted people who fit the shape they had already decided the people should be.

So the people who were roughly brick-shaped found roles which kind of fit them. But the people who were slightly more unusually-shaped didn’t. They either got left out, or they needed to squeeze into roles that didn’t fit them, or they needed to go and be part of something else altogether.

Now neurodiverse people are differently-shaped to normal people. All people are different shapes, of course, but neurodiverse people are more different than usual. So most organisations that were built with standard-sized bricks didn’t plan for neurodiverse people to be part of them. They excluded us, and they did so partly by design.

Treating people like bricks is objectifying them. Treating people like stones gives them the space to be who they are.

If we want our organisations, churches, companies to be neurodiverse, we need to build with stones, not with bricks. It might be harder work, but the result will be much better for it.

Of course, this gets even clearer and much more powerful once we realise that this isn’t just a metaphor I made up – it’s in the Bible…