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Practice, Autistic Pride Day Symposium 2024
Minds at Play, a contract critique and growth built from special interests
In short
At the Sydney symposium in 2024, Dwayne Fernandes of Minds at Play described an autistic employee whose critique of a contract fixed a problem for the business. A panellist explained using a game to start the conversation.
Read it instead, 5 minutesThe transcript
The story
Dwayne Fernandes told the closing session of the 2024 Autistic Pride Day Symposium in Sydney that an autistic member of staff had set out, in writing, exactly what his business’s employment contracts should look like. His organisation, Minds at Play, began as an ADHD organisation, with two people with confirmed ADHD and one neurotypical. When it moved its workers from contractor arrangements onto standard employment contracts, it issued the kind of boilerplate document that most neurotypical people simply sign because they are glad to have a job.
One autistic employee did not simply sign. Dwayne received a detailed email that said “I love Dwayne, but”, followed by what he called “an essay of everything wrong with the contract”. He took it to the business’s accountant and legal team. His message to them was that this employee had just fixed a problem the business had, by setting out exactly what the contract should look like, and had done it because they wanted to work for the organisation.
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Sources the story draws on
- The three D's: Dungeons, dragons and Dwayne Fernandes (opens in a new tab), National Disability Insurance Agency (ndis.gov.au)
- Can Dungeons and Dragons help players build social skills? (opens in a new tab), University of South Australia (via Newswise)
- Special interests and subjective wellbeing in autistic adults (opens in a new tab), Autism Research, 11(5), 766 to 775 (record in UTS OPUS)
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