What Autism Has Taught Me About CX

How Raising a Kid on the Autism Spectrum Made Me a More Aware CX Consultant

I am a divorced father of two boys. My oldest son, Simon, was diagnosed with ASD (autism spectrum disorder) 20 years ago when he was four. At that time, I was early in my career as a Digital CX Transformation Consultant while my son, Simon, bobbed up and down in Montessori pre-schools between Chicago and Raleigh, North Carolina. It really sucked back then.  

This is an article about how raising Simon personified for me more about the crux of CX than most client engagements or any book in my CX library ever could. He showed me that real talk beats small talk any day and that feedback is currency if you're willing to see it that way and use it authentically.  Simon's ability to cut to the heart of the matter reminds us that at the end of the day, people appreciate being heard and seeing action.  Through Simon, I’ve learned that the value of customer experience hinges on not just asking the right questions but being prepared to embrace the true answers.  

In the beginning

In Elementary, Middle, and High School, Simon couldn’t pass a class to save his life. He had a string of Fs longer than I thought was possible. I got to know every one of his teachers by their first names over time, and every one of them said, “Man, this boy is brilliant, but he cannot follow instructions, rules, or any of his assignments. He is scheduled to fail...again.” Miraculously, he never actually failed a grade level, but surfed that thin line as close as humanly possible for 12 years.  

In High School, Simon wrote a several-page manifesto which he handed to his principal one afternoon as he was walking toward the carpool lane. He titled it, “Pedagogical Myopia: Everything Wrong in Our Curricula Design and Delivery.” It was his honest assessment of what was failing him as a student, but to others it was seen as a scathing indictment of all the things wrong with the school’s ability to see the difference between teaching and learning from a disruptive student’s perspective.  

The next day I got called into the principal’s office for that one. I’ll never forget the meeting with the principal. It started with just the principal, Simon’s mother, and me. Then they invited Simon into the room to hear his perspective. That afternoon, I had tears running down my face for about 20 minutes as he uttered in a scolded whisper, “By whose standards am I failing, and who agreed that those are the right standards?”  Boy, that got me. And it got the principal too. What 14-year-old thinks like that? But he was right. He was a neuro-divergent ping pong ball floating in a waterfall of common denominators.  

Fast forward a few years—my younger son, Simon’s little brother, had a few school friends over for dinner. We were all sitting around the table and one shy little guy spoke up and said, “Mr. Keith, did you know that your son, Simon, taught my high school physics and calculus classes the entire year?” I sat there in disbelief. I said, “What?!! What do you mean, he taught the classes for the entire year?”  Simon’s little brother chimed in, “yeah, papa, how did you not know that?”  The kid went on to explain, “Our physics and calculus teacher wasn’t very competent, and Simon kept correcting him until one day the teacher (who taught both physics and calculus) told Simon to either shut up or come up to the front and teach the class better if he knew how—thinking that would shut him up. Then Simon, having Autism, thus not at all picking up on the veiled threat or sarcasm, walked to the front of the room and started pointing out the errors in the homework assignments and talking about the “why” behind knowing physics and calculus—why it was important and why you should pay attention. He focused like a laser on the value of learning this material and just taught better. He was very dry and humorless, but he didn’t relent. He just kept going. The teacher let Simon interject whenever he wanted, and we all learned from Simon from that point on for the remainder of the year. In both classes. It was a trip.”

Never once did it occur to Simon that this wasn’t normal. He was just being his form of honest. I was astounded but not surprised. Simon had ideas about how to improve everything as a kid—parenting skills as well. At that point, I thought about how I approach my work in the light of what I had just been told about Simon. Could I be autistic as well?  

Over the years, Simon took a very keen interest in my work. He knew I was working on big, messy transformation blueprints and mapping different parts of client’s organizations along with customer experience maps, and lifecycle flows. He would sit down next to me for hours and ask questions about everything I was doing. “Why are you doing it like that, papa, what outcome are you trying to arrive at? Why don’t you do it like this?” He refused to leave a curiosity unexplored and he never passed up an opportunity to reframe something.  

No Inhibitions

Simon’s high school was only a few blocks away from my office. One afternoon, school let out a few hours early and Simon walked to my office, dropped his backpack off at my desk, and then walked up to me while I was walking a group of IBM global marketers through a whiteboard session.  He stared at what we were doing and then walked up to the whiteboard while 15 IBM executives were sitting there, and he asked me, “what are you guys trying to figure out?” he then walked up to the whiteboard and erased an equation I had written, and began writing a long string of corrections with the dry-erase marker—took a step back, stared for a few seconds and then walked back to the diagram and corrected my spelling of ‘receipt.’ Then, without saying a word, he unceremoniously walked away, downstairs to the office kitchen to grab an apple juice. After a few very awkward seconds, one of the executives started laughing out loud and said, “uhm...what the fuck just happened? Who was that kid?”  

I apologized and said, “Hey everyone, I am sorry about that. That’s my son, Simon, who got out of school early today. He’s on the Autism spectrum which means he doesn’t really have any inhibitions or understand what social lines he should not cross. He crossed a line, and I am sorry about that.”  Immediately, the same vocal executive said, “But it looks like he knows more about our reseller lifecycle math than you do! Don’t apologize for Autism, dude, it’s a gift. I think it’s terrific. I have a son just like that, myself. Get him back over here. I’m serious.”    

Brutal Feedback

Raising a kid on the spectrum has had its challenges. Going to restaurants was always an occasion with Simon. When he was younger, he would never address a server directly who was asking what he wanted. He would whisper what he wanted to me, then have me tell them what he said. However, and this is strange to me, he would always address the server directly if they asked him how everything was, after the fact.  And it was NEVER okay. Simon would go into excruciating detail about everything that he felt was average or below. It would take two or three minutes while the server would stand there staring at me in shock. I would often interject only to have Simon say, "But she asked me how my meal was, and I was telling her the truth. Doesn’t she want the truth—if she didn’t want the truth why would she have asked me?”  He was always excruciatingly literal.  I would then say to Simon, “Sometimes people ask rhetorically to be polite.”  This made no sense to Simon—or to me if I’m being honest.  More times than you might imagine, we would get a visit from a restaurant manager who would come over to apologize to the table and offer to comp the meal. I would routinely refuse the offer and continue to work with Simon. But it never stuck. As a divorced father with an overly demanding job, I would commonly take my two boys out for meals rather than cook at home—which meant this happened all the time.  

“So, how was everything?” a server would ask.  

“First of all, that television over there mounted on the wall is emitting a very high-pitched tone even though it’s turned off. These 28 offensive fluorescent lights are also emitting a tone that makes it impossible to relax—you should investigate halogens. This fork’s tines are crooked for some reason. See, this third tine is bent out of alignment with its peer tines. The water tastes like bleach and artificial citrus, it’s undrinkable, really. The salad has pieces of wilted and nearly rotten arugula in it which who knows whether we’re looking at a wisteria issue, and the cucumbers have aged out and are beginning to get mushy in the middle. The salad dressing tastes like it may have aspartame in it.  Please tell me you don’t put artificial sweeteners in your salad dressing. The cheeseburger wasn’t medium rare, it was well done which, in my opinion, is a crime in and of itself. The cheese slice was way too thick and was sweating which tells me you had it under a heat lamp and didn’t melt in while you were way overcooking the burger. You put the mustard on too soon which made the lower bun soggy, which is disgusting. The raw onion still had its outer layer which you probably know is inedible, and the tomato was not ripe—it needed a few more days on the vine. The French fries were significantly overcooked which I can understand because of their thickness, and you don’t want to under-fry a potato wedge that thick. I would have expected a bit more from a restaurant of this caliber, wouldn’t you, papa?”  

And it would go on until someone stopped him. And when a manager would come over and ask for the story, it was like it had been recorded. Simon would say the entire spiel word-for-word all over again to the manager—who would stand there, jaw agape and shift his eyes in disbelief, back and forth to me and then to Simon.  

Over time, I would ask the boys where they’d like to go for dinner and Simon would say he wanted to go back to the place with “shitty burgers.” I would ask him why he wanted to go where he knew he didn’t like the food. He would then say, “Because they always listen to me. When I walk in, they unplug the television, lower the lights, and try to cook the cheeseburger the way I prefer. They offer to make a salad dressing from scratch, and they try to avoid putting rotten produce in it. They never get it right, but I enjoy their attempts. They’re good people because they recall who I am, and they try.”  

The Lessons

There are many lessons for me in how I noticed Simon managing himself in public.  After each event, I would spend time talking to Simon about unspoken protocols or etiquette. To which, I would learn, he had it more right than wrong. Maybe the rest of us neurotypicals are wasting time and fooling ourselves. Out of those long conversations, I learned:  

• He was brutally honest and felt others should be as well no matter the circumstances.  
• He valued those who were curious about his experience and lobbied the family hard to go where servers demonstrated a willingness to listen.  
• He felt that small talk was a cruel waste of time and too personal.  
• He felt that you should not ask someone questions unless you’re prepared for truthful answers.  
• Those who do something with constructive criticism are better than those who do nothing with it.  
• He felt that curiosity was a virtue and those who are curious are also interesting and worth re-patronizing.  
• He felt he was doing others a service when he was being open, direct, and honest.
• He felt he was liked by the restaurants because they learned how to be better through listening to him.  
• He genuinely felt he was their most important customer and demonstrating his loyalty was important to show them.  
• He liked it when he felt his opinion mattered.

And it wasn’t just restaurants. It was clothing stores, Jiffy Lube, electronics stores, his school, the pizza delivery guy, the mail woman, the bank, the grocery store, shoe stores, and airlines. He watched what I did as a CX transformation consultant, learned the basics, and used it to navigate his way through uncomfortable circumstances. I was proud of him. In turn, I learned that we cannot get better at service unless we’re all just a little bit autistic.

Where ASD Shines

Over the years, I have taken some of what I have learned from my son and have applied parts of it to my practice. I find myself asking the hard, even uninhibited questions that can, at first, make people uncomfortable on their path to self-realization and improvement, but in the long run can reveal root causes. I’m channeling my son.

Sometimes, I’ll use Simon as a proxy.  

“Hey Simon, I am working with a very large group of international lawyers who believe they are already providing terrific service, but some of their clients’ feedback indicates otherwise. How would you break the news to them that they’ve received negative feedback from their clients?”  

“Papa, people love the truth only when it either makes them look good or others bad, assuming clients hold the truth—then again from what I know about CX, it’s mostly predicated on perceptions—wholly free from any real empirical truth. In any case, I would assume many are incapable of seeing the healing quality in truth when it gets personal. We all have a level of Schadenfreude (German: enjoyment obtained from the misfortune of others) in us which is too bad but it’s true. Which, I imagine, makes your job harder. People want you to intervene with CX unless it means they must change themselves. Time and truth together are the prescription. You just have to level with them quickly and trust the universe’s filter will allow the good ones to get better and the bad ones to languish, I guess—which may be the right sign that you need to invent other interventions for them.”  

“Hey Simon, we have a client whose CEO doesn’t really see the value in investing in managing their client experience program. What should I tell him?”      

“Can you blame him? Most of what I have read in your embarrassingly gargantuan library of worthless CX books sounds like complete bullshit to me. I mean there is so very little real science in it. I have no idea how most of those authors got published. It should be a crime, in my opinion—I mean most of those books are misclassified as non-fiction. I mean there are like three books out of a few hundred that I’ve looked at that I’d keep—throw the rest of them away. After reading all those books, I would be suspect too if I were leading a company and someone came to me and asked me to invest in CX. But you must assume the CEO hasn’t read all those books—they’re way too smart. You know this, papa. You talk about it all the time. I’d show him all the CX economics you work on that demonstrate pure, scientifically, straight up, no bullshit results of your specific way of doing it. Be honest with him. Tell him the truth, that there is a healthy sum of Microsoft Excel in CX. That most CX is the opposite of sexy. Tell him that real CX is really just math and manners. Show them what you’ve shown me about the empirical side of it. Embrace the CEO’s reticence. It’s exactly what you need to de-bullshit CX. Also, don’t you have to be a psychopath to be a CEO? Pretend you’re also a psychopath to find the right logical path into their way of thinking. Don’t waste your time trying to prove things you know are right or true. Instead, focus on the ones who want to know how you think.”  

Let’s all be a bit more like Simon: be more direct, pay closer attention, make bold changes, ask better questions, and respect the honesty coming our way.  

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