Most organisations think they understand neurodiversity. They don’t

Written By:

Ross Chambers
Co-Founder, Neuro NEDs
Chief Commercial Officer, Finclusion

Neuro NEDs co-founder Ross Chambers on why neuro-inclusion is a performance issue, not a wellbeing one – and why most workplaces still get it wrong

We were about 90 minutes into a commercial meeting, the kind that looks fine on the calendar and then somehow becomes a two-and-a-half-hour talk fest.

No breaks, jam-packed agenda, everyone still talking like it’s minute ten.

Numbers, pipeline, risk, performance. The sort of conversation I’d normally be completely locked into. I knew the detail, I knew the business, and I should have been fully with it.

At some point, I’d completely gone. My brain had clearly decided it had somewhere better to be, leaving the rest of me to carry the can.

You may not have really noticed it from the outside. It was more a slow fade where the energy drops and concentrating starts taking far more effort than it should.

Then the CEO asked me something fairly detailed, the sort of question I’d normally answer without even thinking about it, and for a few seconds I was behind it, trying to catch up. In my head it felt much longer.

Not because I didn’t know the answer, but because I hadn’t really been in the conversation for the last 15 or 20 minutes.

I managed to buy myself a second or two and eventually got there, although probably not as smoothly as I’d like to think.

If you just looked at that moment, it would be easy to read it the wrong way, lack of focus, not on it, maybe even a quiet question mark over capability.

In truth, it was much simpler than that.

I’ve got ADHD, and I was 90 minutes into a meeting with no breaks. My concentration had fallen off a cliff by that stage.

The problem wasn’t the question, it was that the environment wasn’t set up for my brain to win in the first place.

I’d already shared my ADHD at that stage, but nothing about how we worked had really changed. It was a previous role, although if I’m honest, I’ve seen versions of the same thing play out in plenty of others since.

The awareness illusion

Most organisations think they’ve already dealt with this.

They haven’t, although plenty of them think they have.

There’s definitely more awareness than there was five years ago. More conversations, more company posts, more leaders willing to talk about it publicly, and in some organisations you even get a few policy changes or adjustments if someone pushes for them.

It all gets rolled out during Neurodiversity Celebration Week, everybody talks about it for a few days, ticks the awareness box, and then quietly goes back to working exactly the same way as before.

At the moment, that’s considered progress.

Honestly, the bar is still incredibly low.

It’s one of the reasons we started Neuro NEDs in the first place, because we realised very quickly that most organisations were still treating neurodiversity as an awareness exercise rather than a genuine performance conversation.

Most organisations still treat neurodiversity as a wellbeing conversation, which is why the focus stays on awareness, support and accommodations rather than performance, decision-making and environment design.

That’s the part most organisations still don’t really understand.

Because when you look at how work actually happens day to day, very little has really changed.

Meetings still run long, the loudest voice still carries the most weight, and performance is still judged by visibility, speed and confidence, even though none of those things are remotely neutral.

Most workplaces are still designed around people who naturally operate well in those environments, which means the people who don’t are left spending huge amounts of energy trying to work around the setup instead of actually performing at their best.

If you fit the model, you don’t even notice it, but if you don’t, the effect builds over time and eventually organisations start losing people, ideas and performance without ever really understanding why.

Losing people quietly

What gets labelled as lack of focus, inconsistency or disengagement is often just someone trying to operate in an environment that doesn’t really work for how they think, but instead of questioning the setup, organisations tend to question the individual.

I’ve watched that happen more times than I could count, and the outcome is always the same. People who are genuinely capable never quite seem to land properly, good thinking gets missed, and over time the quality of decision-making starts to narrow without anyone really noticing it happening.

It’s not necessarily malicious, but it is consistent.

Eventually people leave as well, not always loudly, taking all of that capability and perspective with them, and none of it gets traced back to the environment itself.

Instead it gets explained away as culture, leadership or “fit”, which is often just another way of saying the system works well for one type of person and not particularly well for anyone outside of that.

The mistake most organisations make is treating neuro-inclusion as a moral or wellbeing conversation first, because the moment that happens it gets pushed into the world of support, awareness and accommodations instead of being recognised for what it actually is, a performance and decision-making issue.

This has far more to do with the quality of thinking inside an organisation than most businesses are comfortable admitting, because so many workplace environments are still built around one fairly narrow idea of what “good” looks like.

If you’re responsible for performance, you’re already managing risk every day, but this sits outside of how organisations measure it, which means the impact usually only becomes obvious later on, when the consequences start showing up somewhere else in the business.

We spend a lot of time talking about this through Neuro NEDs, particularly with leadership teams who are starting to realise that the issue isn’t whether neurodivergent people can perform, it’s whether the environment is actually allowing them to.

It starts showing up in all the places organisations rarely stop to question properly, meetings that run long without really improving the quality of the conversation, meetings that never needed to happen in the first place because an email would have done the job perfectly well, the same voices dominating discussions simply because they’re more comfortable speaking, and decisions that feel broadly right but never quite as sharp as they should be.

Most of it has far more to do with habit and ego than results, although most businesses would never admit that openly.

You see it in people as well, particularly the ones who are clearly capable but never quite get recognised that way because they don’t communicate, process or operate in the expected format.

None of it feels significant in the moment, which is why so many businesses miss it, but over time the effect starts stacking up in ways that absolutely impact performance.

Most organisations are still built around a fairly fixed idea of what good looks like, quick responses, visible contribution, sustained attention, confidence in the room, and because those things are visible, they get rewarded.

None of those things are neutral, because they favour one type of thinking while quietly filtering out another, and once that starts happening you don’t just limit individuals, you narrow the overall quality of thinking inside the organisation itself.

Teams can look aligned, communication looks efficient and things can appear to move quickly, but that doesn’t necessarily mean the thinking is good.

The irony is that organisations already know cognitively diverse teams make better decisions. There’s plenty of evidence for that. The problem is that most workplaces are still set up in ways that quietly narrow thinking rather than expand it.

Quite often it just means the same types of people are agreeing with each other more quickly.

That’s where the problems really start.

Because once you narrow how an organisation thinks, you narrow the quality of the decisions it makes, and that rarely becomes obvious until the stakes are much higher and the margin for error is far smaller.

By that stage, the damage has normally already been done.

Beyond awareness

At some point organisations have to move past awareness, even though most believe they already have.

The reality is that nothing changes once people go back to work. The structure stays the same, meetings run the same way, performance is judged the same way, and managers are left trying to navigate all of this without ever really being shown what good looks like.

That’s where most organisations fall down.

The issue isn’t intent, it’s design.

Most businesses are still unwilling to properly question how work is actually set up, partly because it’s easier to add another awareness session than it is to rethink the environment itself.

But that’s exactly what needs to happen.

This is the pattern I see repeatedly in the work we do through Neuro NEDs. The intent behind it is genuine, the awareness is usually there, but the actual working environment rarely changes in any meaningful way.

Time is a simple example. Long meetings with no breaks are still treated as normal, even when they stop improving the quality of thinking in the room long before they finally end.

Communication follows the same pattern. Speed and confidence are rewarded, while people who think carefully or process differently are often misread entirely.

And again, none of that is neutral.

Management is where it becomes most obvious, because most managers have never really been taught how to recognise the difference between inability and somebody simply being misaligned with the environment they’re operating in.

It’s one of the biggest conversations we end up having through Neuro NEDs, because most managers have never actually been shown how to separate performance from presentation style.

So people fall back on what they know. Push harder, ask for consistency, encourage visibility, mistake energy for capability.

Sometimes that works, but a lot of the time it really doesn’t.

The organisations that genuinely get this right still expect high performance, they just stop assuming that high performance has to look identical in every person sitting around the table.

They create environments where different types of thinkers can actually contribute properly instead of constantly trying to adapt themselves to one narrow operating model.

None of this is complicated, but it does require organisations to be honest about how much of modern working culture is based on habit, optics and tradition rather than actual performance.

There’s a version of this conversation where awareness continues to increase, organisations keep posting about neurodiversity a few times a year, everybody says the right things publicly, and very little genuinely changes underneath it all.

That’s the easy route.

The harder route is accepting that this isn’t really about adding something new, it’s about being willing to rethink what already exists, how work is structured, how performance is recognised and what leaders genuinely value once the corporate messaging is stripped away.

That takes honesty, because once you start looking at it properly, it becomes uncomfortable how much of the system is still built around one narrow definition of what “good” looks like, and how many people are spending huge amounts of energy trying to work around environments that were never really designed for them to perform in properly.

This isn’t about lowering standards or making excuses for people.

It’s about recognising that organisations perform better when different types of thinkers are actually able to contribute fully instead of spending half their energy trying to survive the environment around them.

Most businesses won’t feel the cost of getting this wrong immediately, which is probably why so many still underestimate it.

But eventually it shows up somewhere, in decision quality, retention, culture, execution or performance, and by then the organisation has usually spent years treating the symptoms while completely missing the cause underneath them.

The organisations that start getting this right over the next few years won’t be the ones shouting the loudest about awareness.

They’ll be the ones willing to properly question how performance actually works inside their business, how much talent they’ve accidentally designed out of the room, and whether the environment itself is helping people perform or quietly getting in the way.

That’s where the real work is.

And most organisations haven’t started it yet.

That’s what we change through Neuro NEDs.