Carol Cone:
I'm Carol Cone and welcome to Purpose 360, the podcast that unlocks the power of purpose to ignite business and social impact.
Today joining me is Rajesh Anandan and he is the co-founder of Ultranauts. And Ultranauts is on a mission to showcase that neurodiversity is a competitive advantage for businesses. Ultranauts pioneered the world's first fully remote workplace for cognitively diverse teams spread across 30 states in the US, serving a who's who of Fortune 500 companies. With over 75% of its professionals being neurodivergent, Ultranauts is a leader in software and data quality engineering services. Consistently outperforming global consulting firms, improving software and data quality, reducing business risk, and enhancing internal engineering, analytics and data science teams.
The company has had terrific success. They have grown almost every year by 50%. They have an astounding 100 net promoter score, I don't know any company that has that. And they are proving that their model in creating a universal workplace can be applied to companies of all different types. Ultranauts has been recognized as a fast company world-changing idea, an interbrand breakthrough brand, and an MIT solve challenge winner.
They're certainly reshaping the landscape of talent acquisition, team management and career development. So join us as we explore the incredible journey and purpose behind Ultranauts with Rajesh, where insights from the show can be applied to your team leadership with diversity of all kinds leading to better outcomes. So let's get started. So welcome to the show, Rajesh.
Rajesh Anandan:
Thank you, Carol. It's good to be here.
Carol Cone:
It is wonderful that you're going to be here because we're going to have a fabulous conversation to talk about this very different company that you've created. To create an engine that unlocks opportunity for people who haven't had a fair shot before because they're neurodivergent. So what I'd love to do is just start with who you are and also just talk a little bit about how we met, because we met when you were working at UNICEF. So what's the background on Rajesh?
Rajesh Anandan:
Look, I've got a long, windy story. But the short version is that, I grew up in Sri Lanka and I'm the kid of a mixed family in a country that was in the middle of a civil war between two ethnicities. And so in the southern part of the island, I spoke the wrong language and I needed to hide my ID card because my name was of one ethnicity. And if the police stopped a young boy, 12, 13 who had a Tamil name in the south of the island in the early mid-80s, that was not a good thing and you might actually disappear. Whereas in the north of the island, I couldn't communicate because I grew up in the south and I spoke the southern language.
And at one point, my dad's family came from a small village in the extreme north, which is the same place that the leader of the Tamil Tigers, which was either a terrorist group or freedom fighters, depending on a point of view, came from. My mom's family came from the extreme south where the most conservative nationalist politicians came from. Let's just say when they got married, they met in university and they got married, there was no wedding. No one was thrilled about it. Anyway, I have carried this with me and I think still have a deep-seated fear of what intolerance can do. And so in different ways, after my early mid-career where I ended up at MIT, I studied computer science, I went to work in Microsoft. Two days and realized I didn't actually like programming, and it was fun being in academia and doing research.
I went back to grad school, did some systems dynamics and business-related stuff, ended up at Bain and I found business as a much more interesting space only because of the chance to just keep learning. And I ended up with Bain going to South Africa, and this was in the year 2000. At the time, there was a full-blown HIV and AIDS epidemic in South Africa and a quarter of the adult population were HIV positive. So after that gig, I quit my job and went to work for a pediatric AIDS foundation that was trying to prevent mother to child transmission of HIV in Sub-Saharan Africa.
And so as fun as it was solving business problems, I just wanted to solve different kinds of problems and ones that I could happily keep working 120 hours a week just for a different outcome than purely focused on increased shareholder returns. And so that led me down a very different path. And a bunch of years later I ended up at UNICEF, which is how we met.
And then while I was there, UNICEF every year releases a global advocacy report, and every year there's a particular theme they focus on, and this was in 2012, I think maybe 2011. But the theme that year was children with disabilities. And one of the really hard hitting points made was, even in a best case scenario where a child was born into a family with means and was able to access a inclusive education system, when they aged out, there was no work, there were no opportunities. Because of a physical difference or a cognitive difference, whatever. And that was just a market failure if you would, of everyone involved. The governments, the intergovernmental groups, the nonprofits, the businesses from small businesses to large enterprise. This was a gap. Nobody was actually able to meaningfully start to address that gap.
And so it sent me down a rabbit hole looking at why is that? Which then surfaced some interesting research that looked at the over-indexing of certain traits among groups of people who had, let's say a physical disability or some kind of cognitive difference. So for example, if you're blind from birth, there's a reasonable chance, there's a high likelihood that you can comprehend speech at 24 syllables a second. Whereas sighted people stop being able to understand at eight syllables a second, you could literally hear you're faster. Which then and at the time was a huge advantage if you were doing medical transcription, transcribing notes. And one of the talent pools that I came across where there was quite a bit of research around an over indexing was the autistic population where again, any of these populations, there's a big group of humans and it's just really hard to generalize across such a diverse group of anybody.
But there certainly was an over indexing of certain traits like visual pattern recognition ability or logical reasoning ability or systems thinking. And so as I was describing some of those attributes to my old MIT roommate who'd been a serial entrepreneur, he was like, "Oh my gosh, you're describing exactly what I would look like in an engineer, or I can never seem to find good quality engineers like quality engineering, quality assurance, that kind of work. If you think we can find a few folks who fit this profile, I've got work." And so me as the Bain consultant, I was like, "Oh, well, let's investigate" and Art my co-founder as the entrepreneur is like, "Yeah, no, let's do it tomorrow." And so that's how we got started. that's how we got started with Ultranauts.
Carol Cone:
So what is the mission of Ultranauts?
Rajesh Anandan:
We started Ultranauts with a fairly simple mission to demonstrate that neurodiversity different brain types can be an advantage in a business setting, particularly when it came to solving complex business problems. And our theory of change was very basic. It was like, step one, build a business that can be commercially viable, deliver better values for the clients we work with, and be in actual living experiment and proof point of the thesis, but do that with a truly neurodiverse organization because we knew that would force us to reimagine the workplace, redesign work systems so that a much wider range of humans could use their unique strengths, collaborate with colleagues or different, and get on with the work, drive value together.
Carol Cone:
So Rajesh, you use the word neurodivergent across your business. Can you explain to our listeners what that means?
Rajesh:
Sure. So neurodiversity is a term that emerged in the nineties, social psychologist Judy Singer coined it, as a way to push back against what she saw, and a lot of people saw, as the medicalization of autism. And so neurodiversity is not a medical term, it's a way to reframe our understanding of different brain types, simply that there are many different brain types, naturally occurring variations in the human brain, and it's not a disability, it's just a difference. And so that's the term neurodiversity, which includes the notion of neurotypical brain type, which is a more typical brain type, and a neurodivergent brain type, which is a typical different from the norm, which is often used as an umbrella term to refer to brain types of people who are autistic or ADHD or dyslexic, dyspraxic, and so on.
Three quarters of our team is neurodivergent. The majority of our teammates are autistic. We have a ton of teammates who are a ADHD or is dyslexic dyspraxic. We have quite a few teammates who are non-speaking, including in lead project and lead technical roles. Half the company probably has some type of auditory challenge. So we have all the different brain types. And the theory around cognitive diversity is simply that if you can bring together different, in our case neuro types, but more generally different ways of perceiving the world, in our case, perceiving information and systems, different approaches to solving problems, in our case, different approaches to building lean maintainable solutions in complex technology ecosystems or data ecosystems, and you can form collaborative teams, then you're going to do better.
Carol Cone:
I want to say that your results are extraordinary. You've grown 50% every single year and you have a 100 net promoter score of satisfaction. And I don't know if any company that you listed who you work with or who's listening has a 100 number on their NPS, that is extraordinary. What are the key benefits that companies receive when they're working with Ultranauts?
Rajesh:
Sure. So we are in two different businesses, if you would. One is the business we started in, which is in data and software quality engineering. It's very technical field. The other is, after a decade of learning and experimentation about building high performing neurodiverse teams in a way under extreme circumstances, we've learned a lot about building inclusive, productive organizations and teams under any kind of context. And so the second and newer part of what we do is to take what we've learned and share that with others. So in our core business and in data and software quality engineering, we are brought in when the cookie cutter approach is not sufficient.
We're not claiming to have teammates with superpowers, it's something you'll hear advocates use, or maybe parents might use, of, again, as a way to push back against a lot of the negative messaging around autism or ADHD and so on. But as one of my peers on our leadership team who happens to be autistic shared with me once, she said all her life she had to be exceptional just to be accepted, and it's just not fair.
What we do think is true, and also compelling, is the advantage of having a cognitively diverse team, meaning you have different neurotypes, different ways of perceiving information and systems, in our line of work, different approaches to solving problems, and you can form a collaborative team that brings together those differences. It's fairly intuitively obvious that that team is going to innovate their way into a very different approach. It's going to spot patterns or insights, tools might miss, it's going to find their way to solutions that are just more effective, leaner, more maintainable, more scalable, than a typical team might. And so that's really the advantage.
Carol Cone:
Can you mention some of your customers in this conversation?
Rajesh:
Yeah, absolutely. So in financial services, Goldman Sachs is a client, Bloomberg, BNY Mellon, TD Securities. Insurance, we've done work with AIG, Berkshire Hathaway. Healthcare, we've done work and are doing work, CVS Health, Point32Health, Cigna.
We also do work in more fast-moving industries, media, consumer goods, where, for a different set of reasons, there's real money on the table if you have poor data quality or making bad decisions or your customer experience digitally is impeded by software quality. So we've worked with Comcast, Warner, Disney, Pepsi, Colgate, P&G, and so we've been able to come into fairly mature high-performing organizations and solve hard problems for their chief data officers, their chief information officers, heads of data governance, heads of engineering, where, either for lack of bandwidth or just specialized skills or approach, they've been stuck and they just haven't been able to solve the problem.
Carol Cone:
That's an amazing business because I won't name who, but there are some of the largest technology consulting firms in the world that you have beaten out for contracts. And I would say to anybody who has an interest in this, go to your website.
Carol Cone:
We'll put it in the show notes. But there are cases that are very straightforward, different situations, and then they show the outcomes saving 100s of people hours a month, delivering models two times faster and many other outcomes. So I'd love for you to say, let's go back to why is the type of individual that you hire a neurodivergent person?
Rajesh Anandan:
What we've strongly believe in and have proven is that by having different brain types and of course having team members who are committed serious professionals who care about their work and have the technical aptitude to do that work, if you layer on the cognitive diversity where you then are able to bring together productively different perspectives, different approaches, you do actually end up with stellar results.
And it is still surprising to me that we're clinging to tactics that have shown to not work. So for example, company has some kind of incident around discrimination. They force everyone to go through anti-bias workshops. I mean, how much evidence do we really need that you cannot de-bias humans? Not possible. Literally not possible. And there's just research paper that point to this. And yet this is the default reaction. Why? Because you feel like you need to do something and this is a thing you can do. And isn't it better than not doing it? Well, actually, no, it's not. And there are things you can do. And so you got to de-bias the system, not the person, because you can't de-bias the person.
Carol Cone:
Right. So thank you. And then also you have this incredible workplace that you call the universal workplace where you're very, do I say considerate? About how you communicate with each other, how you plan with each other. And can you share that? Because I think that this has benefits not just for a neurodivergent very innovative firm such as Ultranauts, but for other companies who are trying to create inclusive organizations.
Rajesh Anandan:
When we say a universal workplace, it's simply just shorthand for applying universal design principles to the actual systems and processes and practices that together represent a working environment. And so we think of it at a couple levels. One is at the enterprise level, is your performance review and promotion process, transparent, fair, and consistently deliver high quality decisions? I would challenge, and I've been at Bain, I've been at Microsoft, there is no company where you can ask your average employee on like, "Hey, so how do you feel about your promotion process?" Where the answer is going to be, "Wow, it's so transparent, I know exactly what I need to do to get promoted." No, we actually solved it. It took us 10 years.
We call the community driven promotions, and it runs in the background and it flips the power dynamic on its head with complete transparency of requirements of competencies and benchmarks you need to hit, and tools that everyone has that we've provided where you can document the evidence of meeting those benchmarks and a completely decoupled process where experts in particular skills validate the evidence you've documented about meeting a benchmark. And so it's a system now that generates the decision of, are you ready for promotion into X role or Y. The management team means once a quarter and just decides, can we afford it or do we need another fill in the blank senior, whatever?
The second thing I would say is, what gets very little attention is, how do you actually change the day-to-day experience of work? How do you actually make that experience more inclusive? And inclusion gets a bad rap because people have hijacked the phrase, and it's all this rhetoric, but there's a couple of decades of research into what actually inclusion means in a workplace setting, which is simply removing the barriers to full participation. And when you think of inclusion that way, of course you want to do it. Because if your team members are blocked from fully contributing and engaging and driving value, of course your performance is going to suffer.
But in order to do that, you can't just sit in somehow to be an inclusive manager training nonsense. This generic stuff is useless. Because it tells me nothing about the specific humans I'm working with and their actual needs in terms of what they need to do their best work and the actual barriers in the current team context that's preventing them from doing that. And so over the years, we've developed a bunch of tools and methods to solve this exact kind of problem. One of them is a tool we call the Biodex. A bunch of years ago, someone on the team said, "I can never figure out how to work with all these people on my project, everybody's so different. I just wish humans came with a user manual." And we're like, yes.
Carol Cone:
I love it. The user manual.
Rajesh Anandan:
And initially it was 50 different variables you needed to know, but obviously that was too much. We always start with too much and then we whittle it down to something very practical. And now it's just 15 things you absolutely need to know if you're going to be working with someone. And it's very simple things. It's very concrete. It's not like a Meyer�s Briggs theoretical assessment. It's things like, how do you actually prefer to receive critical feedback? Because managers are taught to give critical feedback in the moment, in a live conversation, sandwiched between positive comments. There is no evidence this works. And on most teams, not just at Ultranauts, it actually doesn't work at all. It's either confusing or offensive or just not effective. And so the answer is just ask. And so we structure it so it's easy to ask. It's like, okay, how would you prefer to receive critical feedback in terms of timing? Do you want it in the moment or would you prefer to have it at the end of the day delivery?
Do you want it in a live conversation or would you prefer to have it in writing first so you can digest it on your own terms, reflect on it, and then have a conversation if you don't agree or you have questions? And framing, is there some phrase that could be used or some way to couch this simply to make it easier for you to hear? Because delivering it is hopefully doing it with the best of intention. So the Biodex just extracts a bunch of very concrete preferences about what you need to effectively communicate and collaborate. We then have another tool we built over the years we call the inclusion recommender, which essentially is a catalog of about 100 discrete practices that are tagged based on different talent profiles. Are you sensory seeking or sensory avoiding, or do you prefer this or that? Do you ingest information this way or that way?
And so when you combine those things, and then this is where you sprinkle a little bit of data science and you could extract out some very concrete, practical actions a team can take that's tuned to the specific needs of the unique humans on that team, that is the future. That's how we need to work.
And it's going really well. The results have been extremely positive, and maybe it's a low bar around management training, but it's been exciting to see how Team X has added immediate value, very tangible, concrete insights and just change at the team level from everything from small startups to a Fortune 10 highly regulated organization and everything in between. And so we're really excited about taking what we've learned and starting to share that with others. And so a little while ago in this conversation, I said, we're starting to see two different businesses where one is-
Carol Cone:
Exactly. Yeah, I was going to ask that.
Rajesh Anandan:
The data and software quality engineering, which is really the core business, and arguably we'd like to think we do this better than anyone else. Whether it's big consulting firms or the tools, and we use everybody's tools. The other is our workplace solutions where we have Team X at the team level to immediately start shifting the dynamics to be more productive, help accelerate the formation of new teams, improve the team dynamics in collaboration on existing teams, et cetera, et cetera. And then we have a couple other tools that we've developed as well that round this out from individual level support to helping teams to redesigning enterprise processes and systems.
Carol Cone:
So that's amazing. The two different approaches, the two different businesses, how are people or how are you selling the management training? Is it to your current clients?
Rajesh Anandan:
There've been so many groups that have been following us that we just posted about, "Hey we're trying this Team X thing," and we are flooded with interest. And so we're not selling it right now, we're sort of constraining, we're anti-scaling in a way where there's a ton of demand. We've got really positive results. So we're trying to take our time here because, while the early results have been quite stellar, we really want to be self-critical and skeptical because what we're trying to do is actually change outcomes. We're not trying to generate revenue from workshops. That's a thing, and that's a business. It's just not the business we're in. Because if we're not able to help teams create a more productive, inclusive environment that unlocks their performance, then we're wasting our time, we should just stay focused on our quality engineering business.
Carol Cone:
Super. Thank you so much. So I always like to give the last word to my guest, and is there something else that you'd like to share with us before we say goodbye?
Rajesh:
Yes. So when we started Ultranauts 10 years ago, we had a very clear mission to build an organization that could demonstrate that neurodiversity, frankly human diversity, could be an advantage in a business context. And our theory of change was, step one, build a commercially viable business that could deliver better value for the clients with a truly neurodiverse team, which we knew would force us to reimagine the workplace, redesign work systems, so that a much wider range of humans could use their unique strengths, collaborate with teammates who are different, and just do good work together. And so that's what we've been doing for 10 years, and we've learned a lot along the way.
And then part two of that theory of change has always been to take what we've learned and figure out how we can share that with other teams, other organizations, to create a more universal workplace where all humans can thrive. And so we're finally, after a decade, getting to part two. And as we've taken some of our tools and services, we have a data-driven service called Team X that any team can use to figure out how they can optimally collaborate with each other to drive performance. Or we're about to launch an AI service called Coach X that supports individual team members and checks in with you and surfaces early signs of burnout and risk that we call Coach X, and a bunch of other things.
But all of this is based on a very simple premise, which is that we're all different, and we've spent so much time and attention and energy focused on groups, one group versus another group. And societally, maybe that makes sense, but in a workplace context, that makes no sense whatsoever because it doesn't actually help you change the outcomes. And so the thing I would say to anyone who's thinking about and doing work around creating a more productive work environment for a wider range of humans is just let go of the check the box activities and all this point solution focus, this group or that group, training workshops.
This stuff is nonsense. And I think we have to look at systems. We've got to redesign the systems so they work for a wider range of humans, so they produce higher quality decisions that are less likely to be biased. Because humans, guess what? Can't be de-biased. That's part of being human. You need systems that are de-biased. And then humans are different. When you focus on one dimension of a person, like race, gender, neurotype, flattening them, it doesn't actually tell you anything about them. It might tell you about their lived experience, frankly, but doesn't tell you about how they need to work, what they need to do their best work, how you can collaborate with them. And until you get to that point where you're focused on the individual, and have the tools and methods to bring some unique individuals together without dwelling on one dimension of who they are, whether that's a demographic dimension around identity or a neurotype, you're not actually getting to the place you're trying to go, which is creating a level playing field, creating a context where a lot of different, uniquely talented people can collaborate and thrive.
Carol Cone:
Perfect. We will definitely have you back on the show. We want to keep following all of your incredible insights and applications. So thank you Rajesh Anandan, we are not done with this conversation, but thank you for inspiring us and to showing us how to unlock the full potential of individuals and teams.
Rajesh Anandan:
Carol, thanks so much for having me, and I'm excited to be back to tell you what we've been able to accomplish over the next bunch of time.
Carol Cone:
This podcast was brought to you by some amazing people, and I'd love to thank them, Anne Hundertmark and Kristin Kenney at Carol Cone ON PURPOSE, Pete Wright and Andy Nelson, our crack production team at TruStory FM. And you, our listener, please rate and rank us because we really want to be as high as possible as one of the top business podcasts available so that we can continue exploring together the importance and the activation of authentic purpose. Thanks so much for listening.
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