Plan, script, foresee, guess, assume, predict...Plan, script, foresee, guess, assume, predict…Plan, script, foresee, guess, assume, predict…
Published on 10 March 2026 • Written by Joppe Quaedvlieg and Dr Lisa Colledge
A real story of neurodivergent workplace experience, and what it reveals about cognitive load, leadership design, and building high-performing teams.
This story is based on a real interview, conducted by Joppe, with a neurodivergent professional. It reflects Sandra’s lived experience of navigating a working day.
Sandra’s name has been changed for privacy reasons. The words and experiences are real.
Read it slowly.
…
Sandra opens the drawer of her nightstand. She takes out the pack of sleeping medication, opens the pack and breaks one pill in half. The doctor said it works better when it is broken in half.
Her hand pauses in front of her lips before putting this token of chemical rest in her mouth. Tomorrow she has to get up earlier because James rescheduled the meeting. She puts the pill in her mouth as she sits on the side of the bed, cold glass of water in her hand as the edges of the pill feel sharp against her tongue.
“Tomorrow there will be rush hour and when there is rush hour all the seats are taken and it gets to busy on Alterstraat and maybe Johnny will be late today and I can go straight to my office but if he is early will he tell me about his daughters swimming lesson like he did last time and the meeting with Anna is not prepared and what if the coffee if cold and the seats will be dirty again…”
“Sandra?, Saaaaaaandra?” Her boyfriend calls her name and her body shocks with the sound of surprise. Blood rushes through her veins, a gasp of air and her lips dried up. “You alright?" He asks. She nods the smallest of nods before getting into the bed and taking her laptop.
The bottom of the laptop feels warm against her weighted blanket. She opens her calendar as she slowly but steadily goes through the calendar of every colleague. One by one she scans who will be at the office.
“When what room in till when who are they meeting with what will they need will I be in the way should I come and say hi are the rooms even free what if I am late what if I am early am I dressed properly…”
As thought after thought rushes in like electricity through a glass fiber cable the sleeping medication starts to do its job. She slides the laptop off the blanket and as her head hits the pillow she thinks about tomorrow.
“The bus honks the people brush shoulders children crying dogs barking and smell of garbage”
Her body is drifting into a medicated dream.
“What will happen in the morning? What will happen during the day? What will happen in the week and during pilates? What about next year? What about in Spain? What about?
“Plan, script, foresee, guess, assume, predict...
…plan, script, foresee, guess, assume, predict…
plan, script, foresee, guess, assume, predict…”
She pictures, she could fly. Fly high above the people and the things, the bleeps and the bloobs. Fly over daily life and be, be her.
Joppe
…
That was a real story, drawn from lived experience.
Now step back. If Sandra works in your organization, what does this mean for outcomes, for leadership, and for the way work is designed?
Three leadership themes stand out from this experience. Each has direct implications for how we coordinate, how we lead, and how much performance we may be unintentionally leaving on the table.
This experience highlights important lessons for neuro-inclusive leadership and how we design team performance systems.
Theme 1: physiological load and workplace energy
Sandra has no mental off-switch. She needs medication to sleep. The sharp edge of the pill, the honking bus, the brushing shoulders, the shock at her boyfriend’s voice – these are not simply “stressful thoughts.” They are physiological reactions. Her nervous system is constantly preparing.
Work does not begin at the office door. By the time Sandra arrives, part of her cognitive and emotional energy has already been spent. Over time, this can show up as rapid fatigue, reduced focus, lower risk tolerance, or behavior that others misinterpret as disengagement.
If colleagues perceive her as quieter or less socially available, that perception itself can intensify the very strain she is trying to manage. The cycle can quietly escalate.
This is not about privileging Sandra over the team. It is about recognizing that when one person’s energy is consistently depleted before the day properly begins, the whole team loses access to their best contribution.
Sandra may feel the strain most acutely, but she is unlikely to be the only person carrying concern about tomorrow’s order of play. What helps her regulate and contribute more fully will often strengthen the team as a whole. There is no universal fix.
But teams can reduce unnecessary load through shared design rather than special treatment. Clearer meeting structures, predictable rhythms after high-intensity days, explicit norms around interruptions or social expectations – these are small adjustments that help regulate collective energy.
The most powerful intervention is often a team conversation:
When do you struggle?
When do you do your best work?
What would make it easier to contribute?
These questions strengthen team performance as a whole, not just Sandra’s experience.
Theme 2: cognitive load and anticipatory processing at work
Sandra is not simply preparing for tomorrow. She is simulating.
At bedtime, her mind runs through rush hour, colleagues’ arrival times, potential conversations, room bookings, clothing, coffee temperature. Work blends into pilates, Spain, next year. There is no boundary.
This is not occasional anxiety. It is continuous anticipatory processing.
In many workplaces, neurodivergent professionals run high-intensity background simulations simply to function by reducing the unexpected. Energy that could be invested in strategy, creativity, or problem-solving is diverted into predicting unstructured interactions, compensating for ambiguity, mitigating sensory exposure, and avoiding social missteps.
If 30–40% of someone’s cognitive bandwidth is spent on anticipatory survival, are you actually accessing their best thinking?
The story contains an important systems clue: Sandra searches for predictability. She scans calendars. She looks for structure. She is not resisting work – she is trying to stabilize it.
Not all uncertainty can, or should, be removed. Work requires adaptability. Nor is the responsibility entirely systemic. In a psychologically safe environment, Sandra can ask clarifying questions, signal when expectations are unclear, and request structure where needed.
But when ambiguity is chronic and preventable, it becomes a coordination issue rather than a personality trait.
Small reductions in unnecessary uncertainty create disproportionate gains in contribution. Less cognitive noise means more capacity for insight.
Teams can help by sharing agendas in advance, clarifying purpose and expected contributions, minimizing last-minute changes where possible, and making implicit norms explicit. These practices reduce anticipatory load for everyone, while disproportionately benefiting those carrying invisible cognitive labor.
Theme 3: masking, authenticity, and contribution in teams
The closing image is striking: she pictures she could fly. Fly high above the people and the things… and be, be her.
Sandra has learnt how to function. But she is not free.
Many neurodivergent professionals are high performers precisely because they over-prepare and over-regulate. They anticipate. They adapt. They compensate.
But sustained masking carries a cost: burnout, reduced innovation, emotional detachment, and gradual erosion of creative edge. If Sandra is spending a significant portion of her energy trying to decode expectations and fit into the room, she is shaping outcomes less than she could.
The deeper leadership question becomes: are we rewarding conformity to unspoken norms more than genuine contribution?
The shift is subtle but powerful. It moves from asking, “Can Sandra cope?” to asking, “Are we enabling Sandra to fly?”
Leadership here is not limited to formal titles. It is a behavior available to anyone who influences how work gets done in a team. Teams can explicitly value thinking time, reward depth rather than speed alone, invite written input alongside verbal contribution, and normalise different processing styles.
When we create conditions where authenticity is not penalized, the whole team gains access to more original thinking, not less.
Conclusion
Sandra is not fragile. She is resilient and adaptive. She is committed, and she has capabilities the team needs in order to succeed.
The real question is whether our systems are equally adaptive.
When we reduce unnecessary cognitive and physiological load, we do not lower standards. We increase the likelihood that everyone can bring their best thinking to the work that matters.
Joppe Quaedvlieg
Descriptive Communication specialist. CEO of Artiqula.com.
If we need anything from one another or wish for something for ourselves or them, it always has to be communicated. Without communication, without the ability to listen and express, there is no movement between a fellow human and us.
By expressing ourselves in such a way that the other can understand us, and to be able to listen while making the other feel heard, we create, maintain, and evolve connection. We, eventually, build something bigger than we could have done by ourselves.
This is what I have practiced my whole life, every second, of every hour, of every day. In the end, people became a language of their own to me. A language I learned to speak, physically perform, and understand in body, mind, and soul.
This put me on a path, a mission to take language and help myself and you.
Dr Lisa Colledge
Neuro-inspired systems consultant and CEO of Lisa Colledge Consulting.
Lisa’s work focuses on how working systems and leadership design shapes who gets to contribute and how well teams perform. Her interest in neuro-inspired leadership began at home, as the parent of two children with very different neurostyles, one autistic. What she learned there reshaped how she understood performance at work.
Small changes inspired by autism – greater clarity, flexibility, and fairness in how work is coordinated – transformed how her teams collaborated and delivered. The benefits extended far beyond the autistic individuals she originally expected to support: engagement improved, misunderstandings decreased, and decision-making and adaptability strengthened across the whole team.
Since then, Lisa has explored the science behind cognitive diversity and developed a practical approach for applying neuro-inclusive design across organizations and sectors. From designing responsible research-performance frameworks in academia to leading large-scale cultural transformation inside a global corporation, she has repeatedly seen the same pattern: when systems are designed to work with cognitive difference, teams perform more healthily and more effectively.
