Neuro-inclusion as a shortcut to inclusion across difference

Published on 7 March 2024 • Written by Dr Lisa Colledge

Designing and establishing a culture inspired by neuro-inclusion creates a work environment that is fair and inclusive across all dimensions of diversity – including ability, age, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality.

By focusing on how people with different cognitive strengths combine their contributions to achieve shared outcomes, organizations can strengthen their performance infrastructure – creating conditions that enable both neurodivergent and neurotypical talent to contribute well.

Three key take-aways

1. Neuro-inclusion creates a true cognitive mix.
A neuro-inclusive culture is designed to value focused analysis, creative ideation, and reliable execution equally. Differences in how people process, use, and communicate information are not merely accepted – they are actively sought after and nourished because they strengthen outcomes.

2. Inclusion becomes a shared, everyday responsibility.
In neuro-inclusive cultures, accountability shifts from conformity to contribution. Everyone shares responsibility for creating the conditions in which they and others can do their best work, regardless of neurotype or working style.

3. Designing for neuro-inclusion accelerates inclusion across difference.
By focusing on skills and outcomes rather than labels or accommodations, organizations reduce the need for individuals to claim identity in order to be supported. This makes neuro-inclusion a practical shortcut to inclusion across multiple dimensions of diversity.

The foundation of a neuro-inclusive working culture is atrue cognitive mix, where differences in how information is taken in, used, and communicated are not only accepted, but actively sought after and nurtured. It is a culture that is just as fair to neurodivergent employees – such as autists, ADHDers dyslexics, and dyspraxics – as it is to neurotypical employees. Everyone has an equal chance to develop in an environment where they feel valued and can contribute meaningfully to the collective success of the organization.

How do you get started with creating this working environment? I will answer by sharing an experience about a leadership team that I was part of during a major transformation that we engineered, but before I do, I want to emphasize that the goal of that transformation was to work together more effectively as a team. It was not labelled as a neuro-inclusion initiative. What we created, however, turned out to contain many of the conditions associated with neuro-inclusion. That experience helped shape an idea that has become central to my work: we can use what neurodivergence teaches us about human difference to design better ways of working for everyone.

The following story illustrates why. It benefited the whole team without requiring anyone to disclose a diagnosis or identify with a particular label.

Ours was a team in name-only. It felt as though we were a group of individuals forced to try to fit together, operating against an unspoken standard that none of us had explicitly agreed on. We were all busy with our own projects, and we were good at pointing out perceived flaws in how each other worked, which created a vicious cycle of defensiveness and confrontation. My role was to design, plan and lead organization-wide people-change initiatives, and I felt as though I was constantly chasing and nagging other leadership team members without much hope of response. On the other hand, my colleagues seemed to me to burn time in endless discussion, and on the rare occasion that we agreed an action it was not adhered to. It was an energy drain, it was not fun, and I don’t think that anyone was really engaged or contributing their best work.

Then came the change. A brave leader stopped us from trying to mold ourselves into the elusive standard team member, and instead invested in us as a collective which could learn to retain our diversities, to value them and combine them so that we could achieve outcomes together. They brought in neutral external expertise to help us reset as a team: we spent moderated time building understanding of each other’s strengths, styles, and sources of frustration.

No one needed to say whether they were neurodivergent or neurotypical, or for that matter anything about their age, ethnic background or sexuality, because it didn’t matter: we focused on the consequences for our team of our cognitive styles, our strengths, and our preferred way of working, not the source of them. It was an eye-opener for me to learn that the endless discussions were energising for my teammates – and equally eye-opening for them to understand how draining that could be for me. I learnt and experienced that my colleagues’ skills made our projects more ambitious, resilient, and impactful, and we also saw that skills like mine were essential to bring the team’s ideas to fruition. Everything fell into place. We could only be a successful leadership team by accepting what made us who we were and discovering how to work together while staying true to ourselves.

We discovered how to function as a team over the coming months, constantly testing and iterating ways to give each other time to discuss or plan, while (mostly) avoiding entering frustrating territory. We made our team norms explicit by writing them down, revisiting them regularly, and adjusting them as we learned. We learned to value and call on each other’s skills, and to enjoy our quirks. Sometimes we asked a team member what they were doing, but from a place of curiosity rather than criticism; we assumed best intent. Every achievement was celebrated together because we’d each contributed something and were all invested in the outcomes. We had mixed the best of ourselves together instead of trying to fit ourselves to a standard.

The difference was not the talent in the room. It was the conditions that allowed that talent to combine. The team became a source of energy and being a part of creating it remains one of my proudest achievements.

Perhaps the most rewarding outcome originated from sharing the journey and revitalized team dynamics with the rest of the organization, which had been modelling a lot of our earlier negative behavior. We were able to cascade our learnings to the teams reporting to us and everyone became more open to mixing differences rather than seeking conformity. The profound impact of these changes was clear when we then asked our organization to take a leap of faith to achieve something very frightening and challenging (a story for another day): they trusted, they contributed, and we succeeded together beyond all expectations. In short, we had transformed the culture of our leadership team and organization from “No, but” to “Yes, and.”

The second key component of a neuro-inclusive culture is a collective shift in accountability. The focus needs to move from process to skills and outcomes. It’s not a task reserved for leadership alone; it’s a collective responsibility that pervades every level of the organization.

Neuro-inclusivity can only truly exist when every individual strives to create and sustain an open, trusting and accepting working environment, that places equal value on logical structural input, free-flowing ideation, and the ability to focus and execute agreed actions. These are the diverse skills we will find in every neuro-inclusive team, but that team needs to move beyond merely acknowledging this diversity to being actively neuro-inclusive. Being consciously inclusive means taking responsibility for creating the conditions that enable other team members to contribute their best.

As well as being a critical enabler of neuro-inclusivity, shared accountability ensures that the changes are implemented in ways that are relevant to the various teams within the organization. One size does not fit all. The way in which one team achieves the state of belonging, connection and delivering outstanding value is different to the way in which another team accomplishes it, because of the diversity of team members, as well as to the team’s priorities and goals. Scaling this requires shared accountability for the outcomes and conditions that matter, while giving individual teams freedom to determine how they achieve them.

A major bonus of focusing on skills and outcomes, rather than the way in which those skills are employed to reach outcomes, is that it drives inclusion across all dimensions. Consider gender-equality as an example: focusing on how a skillset can best be enabled to shine within the context of the team gives people of all gender identities an equal chance to contribute.

The final element of a neuro-inclusive culture is sustainability. Neuro-inclusion isn’t static; it’s a dynamic ecosystem that needs to evolve in response to change.

Organizations inevitably and constantly experience the forces of change. They may be internal from changes in team composition, or a result of new strategic priorities. They may be externally driven by new customer needs, or changes in the competitive environment. A global disruptor may come along like generative AI. A neuro-inclusive culture contains and empowers such diversity of skills, that reinforce each other, that it is highly resilient. Neuro-inclusion is a bet on long-term success if it is set up in a way that ensures it evolves when necessary.

This resilience is sustained by formal frameworks, processes, and policies. Sustainability comes when neuro-inclusion stops being a standalone initiative and becomes part of how the organization operates. Hiring, reward, leadership expectations, team norms, and policies all reinforce which kinds of contribution are valued and how people are expected to work together. Refocusing the hiring process on revealing relevant skills; ensuring that the rewards process recognizes the same skills and experience with consistent pay; and explicitly including cognitive differences in policies such as anti-discrimination, means that neuro-inclusion is not inadvertently forgotten when processes and policies are adjusted to keep pace with the organization’s shifting environment. Every employee is jointly accountable for building and sustaining neuro-inclusivity in their teams, and coding this expectation into process and policy means that space must always be created for employees to have the freedom to evolve and innovate how the neuro-inclusive culture manifests, so that it remains relevant.

Neuro-inclusion offers something broader than a set of accommodations or a standalone inclusion initiative. It gives us a source of insight into how different people think, contribute, and work together – and therefore how we can design systems that enable more of that difference to translate into collective performance.

That is why I have come to think of neuro-inspiration not only as an inclusion approach, but as a way to strengthen the performance infrastructure of organizations operating in complexity and change.

➡️ If these ideas resonate, you can explore how I approach neuro-inspired team and leadership design on the Services page. 

Most organizations already have the cognitive diversity they need. 

The opportunity is designing systems that allow those different ways of thinking to work together effectively.