It has only been a month since the first Unicus consultants joined Telia Sweden’s Analytics and Artificial Intelligence team. We spoke with CIO Ida la Spisa about what sparked her vision for the collaboration.
Let’s rewind 14 months. It’s winter in Stockholm, and every Sunday Ida meets up with a few friends to play tennis. One day, a friend tells her about his employer, Unicus – an IT consultancy that exclusively hires people with autism.
“It made me reflect on my own ability to recognize people on the spectrum,” Ida recalls. “To me, this friend is just one of many nerdy people I’ve always been around—and that nerdy trait applies to me, too.”
She admits she had never considered autism or neurodiversity in that way before. As a leader in a large organisation, she immediately saw the potential impact a collaboration with Unicus could have. It sparked a strong interest to learn more.
”I think it’s a good eye-opener in terms of how we are different in general, all of us as individuals, and what level of information we need to receive to perform at our best,” she says.
Real diversity is rarely part of the discussion on inclusion and diversity, especially how our brains work. According to Ida, we need to learn how different we are from each other.
“That’s what I like about this; it’s about making sure that we understand that all of us are different,” she explains. “We cannot give the same input to hundreds of people and expect the same output. It doesn’t work that way.”
That’s why Ida met with consultant manager Therese Holm Hagberg who gave a brief seminar on neurodiversity to the management team. Reactions to the idea were mixed. How would it affect their performance? Would it be difficult? From Ida’s perspective, it was an opportunity too good to pass.
“I have 800 consultants in my organisation. It can’t be that we can’t find meaningful work for a few more people.”
If one percent of those consultants came from Unicus, that would be an important marker serving as a role model to other large corporations. Still, bringing in neurodiverse consultants required careful planning. The right mix of skills, department, and manager had to be in place. To prepare, Ida met with another large Unicus client and asked how they got started. Their advice? Begin with the analytics team.
“You need to match the unique type of skills that Unicus consultants bring to the table with a department that can really leverage those skills,” Ida says. “Then, you need to match that with a manager who is keen on spending a little bit more time at the beginning.”
As it happened, a new organisation had just been added to Ida’s unit: the Analytics and Artificial Intelligence team. During their onboarding, she introduced the idea of bringing in consultants from Unicus. Within days, one of the managers stepped forward and said they wanted to give it a try.
Today, neurodiversity is a KPI for Ida’s unit, and the two consultants from Unicus are just the beginning:
“If we can share this example with the rest of Telia, I believe it can benefit everyone.”