Why Neuro-Inspired Teams™ are redefining modern leadership
Published on 8 September 2025 • Written by Dr Lisa Colledge
I am honored to be named Leadership Consultant of the Year in the Corporate LiveWire Innovation & Excellence Awards 2025.
These awards recognize leaders across industries and geographies who are raising the bar in service excellence, innovation, and impact. To be recognized on this global stage is a privilege, and a wonderful opportunity to remind ourselves why we need a new leadership playbook.
This recognition is meaningful because it signals a shift already happening in the highest performing environments: the old leadership playbook isn’t built for the world we lead in today.
The systems I’ve developed — Neuro-Inspired Teams™ and the Future-Ready Team Pathway™ — substitute that old leadership playbook of “more pressure, more rules, more motivation” with neuro-inclusive performance infrastructure designed for the uncertainty we face in today’s working environment. It enables different talent that brings different neurostyles to contribute at their best and helps teams deliver excellence consistently, even when conditions are unpredictable.
Why we need new leadership playbook
For a long time, I thought performance was an absolute. Someone was either a “high performer” or a “low performer.” Our systems reinforce that belief: you’re a straight-A student, or you’re not; you are a high-potential employee, or you’re not.
But as I progressed in my career and built experience of working with people in different cultures, industries and functions, I began to realize how wrong that thinking was.
Now I believe that everyone has the potential to be a high performer, if they find themselves in the right circumstances for that potential to emerge.
That realization became sharper when I became a mum. I don’t know what paths my children will take, but I know that they will be different from mine. My daughter is naturally brilliant at things I need work hard to learn. And when we discovered that our son is autistic, with learning difficulties, it brought this gradual realization into focus. His contribution will necessarily be very different, and he is more dependent than most on having an environment that will enable him to succeed.
That’s when I started to see the waste in our workplaces. Too often, we dismiss or downgrade people simply because their contribution isn’t a natural fit to the system around them.
Some things we can’t change:
My son is autistic - that won’t change.
My daughter is a visual learner - that preference won’t change.
I am a scientist - I make decisions based mainly on evidence, not instinct.
We can all stretch beyond our preferences, and we often do. But we do our best work when the system doesn’t force us to fight against our own neurostyle just to contribute.
And life throws challenges at us too: illness, caregiving, upheaval. We may not always be at our best, but we are still doing the best we can in that moment.
Here’s the realisation that changed everything for me:
Performance is systemic, not personal.
If you redesign the system, more people can contribute the level of performance they’re capable of and aspire to — reliably and sustainably.
But most cultures “just happen.”
They form unintentionally, often mirroring the preferences of the leaders who built them — favouring one dominant cognitive style and marginalizing the rest.
Yet culture is not a personality. It is not a neurostyle.
It’s a system, created by people, and people can redesign it.
When you interpret behavior as everybody doing the best they can within the system they’re in, everything shifts.
And when you intentionally design working culture to lift people up, not make them fight to fit in, the performance opportunity improves for everyone — not just those at the extremes.
That belief — that culture, by design, can unlock high performance for all — is what drives my work.
How I turned this into an innovative system
Seeing the waste in teams — talent left on the table, ideas never fully pursued, contributions dismissed because they didn’t fit the system — pushed me to ask a different question: what if we designed culture to bring out high performance in everyone, reliably and sustainably?
I didn’t ask this as an academic exercise. I asked it while leading transformation in a toxic workplace, while co-chairing a disability-inclusion ERG, and while supporting my autistic son to be happy, functional, and able to grow.
The evidence I studied, the teams I redesigned, and the experiments I tried at home all reinforced each other. I think that’s why my work resonates. It’s not only theory. It’s grounded in science, proven in business, and lived every day.
And at the heart of it is this conviction:
when you design culture intentionally, every person’s best can emerge — and performance becomes more predictable, even in disruption.
This is what eventually became the system recognised by Corporate LiveWire: five innovations that together form a new leadership playbook, built for today’s complexity and tomorrow’s uncertainty.
Innovation 1: universal inclusion over quotas.
Innovation 2: anticipatory culture over compliance.
Innovation 3: Neuro-Inspired Teams™ over individuals.
Innovation 4: freedom within a framework - Future-Ready Team Pathway™.
Innovation 5: operationalize the system with Golden Rules - my FIT Framework.
Innovation 1: universal inclusion over quotas.
Traditional approaches to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) focus on quotas, programs of initiatives for selected groups. These may achieve visibility and representation, but they oversimplify human complexity, fail to set people up for success, and risk creating resentment by replacing one form of favouritism with another.
My approach is different.
I use cognitive inclusion as a universal design principle.
Every one of us has a neurostyle shaped by different combinations of five core cognitive traits. Some of us are at the extremes of these traits, and may receive a diagnosis of autism, ADHD, dyslexia or other neurodivergence. Our neurostyles influence how we focus, communicate, problem-solve, and collaborate.
When leaders design team systems for those neurodivergent cognitive extremes, they benefit everyone.
Cognitive inclusion is:
Universal: it benefits everyone, not just selected groups.
Scalable: it integrates neuro-inspired practices into culture.
Sustainable: it persists through leadership changes and adapts as organizations evolve.
What you need to know: designing for the cognitive extremes lifts performance for the whole.
👉 Read more: Rethinking Diversity at Work.
🎧 Want to listen instead? DEI and me: a journey from indifference to insight.
Innovation 2: anticipatory culture over compliance
The legally compliant disability inclusion model – which also covers neurodivergence - is reactive. When someone discloses a diagnosis, the business has a duty to respond with a reasonable adjustment.
But in practice, this model is not scalable, sustainable, or attractive to leaders. It depends on disclosure by the most vulnerable, creates a patchwork of exceptions, and fails to deliver team-level performance.
My model flips this approach.
Design culture to anticipate cognitive differences instead of waiting for disclosure, so more people thrive by default. Reactive accommodations then becomes an occasional supplement, rather than the primary mechanism.
An employment-law expert contact emphasized that the legal duty to make reasonable adjustments can be triggered by impact, not only by a formal diagnosis. He told me that a proactive cultural approach is therefore not only more effective, but also a more faithful interpretation of the spirit of the law.
What you need to know: sustainable inclusion is proactive, embedded in culture, and reduces reliance on reactive compliance.
👉 Read more: Stop waiting for a diagnosis.
Innovation 3: Neuro-Inspired Teams™, not just individuals
In the old-school leadership playbook, performance is treated as an individual trait. Someone is labelled a “high performer” or a “low performer.”
That mindset might have worked in a less connected, more hierarchical world, but in today’s world, facing complex global problems, it’s outdated.
The research is clear: performance emerges at the team level.
McKinsey research demonstrates that teams are the true unit of success. Individual superstars don’t guarantee results – and can even damage them.
Studies confirm that it isn’t demographic diversity (such as gender, ethnicity, or age) that drives the best problem-solving teams. It’s cognitive diversity - when combined with the culture that enables it.
When leaders design the team as a system - valuing cognitive diversity, ensuring psychological safety, and embedding curiosity and respect - they create the circumstances where high performance emerges collectively.
Engagement, performance, innovation, and resilience are properties of the collective. And when you get the team right, individuals flourish too.
What you need to know: the team is the performance engine, and culture is the operating system that activates the potential of cognitive diversity.
👉 Read more: Need to adapt? Secrets of the best team problem solving.
🎧 Want to listen instead? The hidden cost of rock stars.
Innovation 4: Future-Ready Team Pathway™
Too many organizations leave neurodivergence inclusion to employee resource groups (ERGs). These groups bring passion, expertise, and community, but they are unsustainable, fragmented and unfair as the engine of cultural change. They rarely shift the system.
An innovation I have applied is to move beyond piecemeal programs to a leadership-led pathway that is rigorous and practical.
That’s why I developed the Future-Ready Team Pathway™ - a seven-step roadmap that embeds neuro-inclusive best practices in evidence-based change management.
And crucially, it de-risks cultural change by focusing on role modelling, co-design, upskilling, and small visible steps.
In short, it offers leaders a framework to shape culture intentionally, so that the right circumstances for high performance can emerge, and persist.
What you need to know: culture change sticks when it’s leadership-led, systemic, and reinforced daily by team norms.
👉 Read more: How to build a neurodiversity-inclusive organization.
🎧 Want to listen instead? De-risking cultural change.
Innovation 5: The FIT Framework – my Golden Rules
Every leader asks: “How do I turn inclusion from an aspiration into something that benefits my team members and results every day?”
That’s why I created the FIT Framework: Fair, Intentional, Team-Minded. It isn’t just another checklist. It’s a set of Golden Rules: simple, portable anchors that leaders and teams can apply in the flow of daily work, to operationalize the four innovations we’ve just discussed.
My FIT Framework distils the principles of neuro-inspired working culture into three simple, memorable anchors:
Fair: your team culture doesn’t favour or penalize any one cognitive style but allows all participants to focus their energy on impact rather than managing distractions.
Intentional: assume cognitive diversity, including neurodivergence, is always present, and design proactively for neuro-inclusion rather than waiting for disclosure.
Team-Minded: every member of the team, with whichever function, seniority and experience, shares responsibility for reinforcing inclusion through clear guidance.
When teams make fairness explicit, design intentionally, and keep the team at the centre, they stop wasting energy on misunderstandings and politics. Instead, they create the conditions where every person’s best work can emerge.
What you need to know: the FIT Golden Rules are your operational compass. They’re how leaders and teams live inclusion every day, and how neuro-inspired culture sustainably generates high performance.
👉 See FIT in action: Maximizing creativity in brainstorming.
🎧 Listen: My ADHD team lead is unbearable during deadlines.
Why this recognition matters to me
This award is especially meaningful to me because it is international and cross-sector. Corporate LiveWire honors organizations from small and medium-sized enterprise (SMEs) to multinationals, across technology, finance, research, healthcare, and beyond.
That breadth reflects my mission to partner with far-sighted tech leaders navigating AI disruption; with regulated industries balancing compliance with innovation; and with research organizations tackling humanity’s most complex and challenging problems.
And in each case, the lesson is the same: when leaders intentionally shape culture, they create the circumstances where high performance emerges.
Closing reflection
Awards are milestones, not finish lines. They’re sparks of energy - wonderful moments to celebrate, and then keep building, iterating, and sharing smarter ways to lead.
Thanks to Corporate LiveWire, for recognizing that leadership consulting is evolving.
Thanks to my colleagues, clients, and community, for the nomination, and for the trust and conversations that shape my work.
And most of all, thanks to the bold leaders who dare to step away from the old leadership playbook, and co-create the new one cultures where everyone can find the circumstances they need to thrive.
Ready to take action?
If you’re interested in exploring how neuro-inspired team design could work for your team organization, let’s connect.
