Episode 33: Autism and Silicon Valley: a case study in neuro-inclusive design
Published on 20 May 2025 • Hosted by Dr Lisa Colledge
This article explores what Silicon Valley’s history can teach us about neuro-inclusive design, AI capability, and performance infrastructure today.
There’s no shortage of ambition around the world when it comes to AI adoption.
An expert recently told me there are around 250 million companies aiming to implement AI — and just 34,000 certified AI consultants.
That gap should make every leader pause, because it raises a deeper question than skills shortages alone:
Where do we find minds that are naturally suited to this work — and how do we design environments where they can thrive?
Minds that instinctively work well with structure, logic, systems thinking, and abstraction. Minds that don’t just use AI tools, but reliably extract value from them.
One answer comes from Silicon Valley.
A hidden clue in the data: The Geek Syndrome
The Geek Syndrome: a case study in autism, technology culture, and performance-driven inclusion.
In 2001, journalist Steve Silberman published a now-classic article in Wired titled The Geek Syndrome.
He set out to investigate why autism diagnoses were unusually concentrated in and around Silicon Valley — particularly Santa Clara County. While some of the language in the article reflects its time, Silberman’s central insight has aged remarkably well:
Silicon Valley didn’t just attract autistic people.
It created conditions where autistic minds could thrive — and lead.
This wasn’t a story about tolerance or accommodation. Silicon Valley didn’t succeed despite autistic minds. It succeeded because of them.
The conditions that made it work
Silberman’s reporting revealed a cultural pattern — one that quietly aligned with autistic strengths long before “neuro-inclusion” entered the leadership lexicon.
Some of the defining characteristics:
Asynchronous, screen-based communication
Reduced sensory and social overload, allowing precision, clarity, and depth over performative interaction.Flattened hierarchies and merit-driven norms
Less emphasis on politics and status navigation; more emphasis on whether ideas and code actually worked.Highly structured systems and workflows
Clear rules, logic, and predictable processes.Outcome-based evaluation
Work judged by accuracy, usefulness, and robustness — not charisma.
In this context, autistic strengths—such as deep focus, pattern recognition, and systems thinking — weren’t liabilities.
They were accelerants.
Performance-driven, not accommodation-driven
Silicon Valley didn’t become inclusive by adding accommodations after the fact.
It became inclusive because the performance model itself fit a wider range of brains.
Autistic people didn’t flourish by being helped to cope with a neurotypical system.
They flourished because the system was designed around the work, not around social norms.
Or, as Silberman’s reporting makes clear:
It wasn’t a charity model.
It was a performance model.
Why this matters now — especially for AI and knowledge-intensive work
Fast-forward to today.
We’re seeing:
More screen-based collaboration.
More remote and asynchronous work.
More reliance on complex systems and abstraction.
More urgency to extract real value from AI investments.
Without necessarily naming it, many organizations are recreating a subset of the very conditions Silicon Valley experts helped pioneer.
The opportunity now is to stop doing this accidentally — and start doing it intentionally.
What if we designed for this on purpose?
What if we:
Stopped waiting for someone to disclose a diagnosis before adapting how work works?
Designed environments that support precision, depth, and systems thinking by default?
Recognized that the people best suited to executing your AI strategy may already be on your teams — just under-enabled?
This is not about labelling people.
It’s about designing performance infrastructure that works for a greater diversity of minds.
As neurogeneticist Dan Geschwind put it in Silberman’s article:
“Certain kinds of excellence might require not just various modes of thinking, but different kinds of brains.”
➡️ Want practical examples of what autism-inclusive performance infrastructure looks like day-to-day?
Download Autism-inspired micro-inclusions — small behaviors that unlock contribution across neurostyles.
(Link coming soon)
This isn’t about “talent”—it’s about people
Some of the most valuable contributors to your organization:
Won’t win popularity contests.
Won’t be the loudest voices in the room.
Will quietly build the systems, spot the flaws, and hold complexity together.
Your job as a leader is to create conditions where their contribution compounds — alongside that of people with different, complementary strengths.
That’s how you build performance that:
Endures over time.
Outpaces competitors.
And doesn’t burn people out in the process.
➡️ Want to explore what this could look like in your organization?
If this resonates, you don’t need a full programme to start.
A good first step is simply to examine where your current working culture enables — or constrains — different neurostyles.
The Performance Leaks Audit is a structured conversation to explore where energy, focus, and capability are being constrained – often unintentionally – and what would help instead.
We don’t start with a full audit. We start with a conversation and decide together whether it’s worth going deeper.
Start a short exploratory call.
Related resources
The classic referenced article: The Geek Syndrome by Steve Silberman (2001, Wired).
Culture by Neurodesign, Episode 15: Autism, allism, and innovation: a case study with Prof. Laurent Mottron.
If you’d like to read an article version of this material: Autism traits and high-performing teams: lessons from Silicon Valley.
