A translational neuroscientist at the Queensland Brain Institute said something to me a few weeks ago I haven’t been able to shake. If everybody was neurotypical, we would still be in caves having parties, because it is the neuro-spicy ones that push the world forward.
That was Dr Susannah Tye, Ph.D., and she said it after we had finished recording The NeuroCollective podcast, when our conversation drifted to something I have been noticing for a while. About 60% of the leaders doing our program now identify as neurodivergent, whereas ten years ago that number was somewhere between 5 and 10%.
The obvious question is why. However, I think most organisations have been asking the wrong version of it. They ask why so many people seem to have something wrong with them, when the more interesting question is why we built systems that made so many people feel that way.
Dr Tye put it plainly. Neurodivergence found its place in psychiatry not because of the brains themselves, but because we never structured our systems in a way that supports that diversity. We put everyone in the same box and when some brains didn’t fit, we labelled them the problem and medicated them accordingly.
Some people are now calling the push for more inclusive environments woke. However, that argument has a problem, because it ignores evolutionary biology. The brain we have been medicating and managing for not fitting our systems is the same brain that drove human innovation across history, and the hyperfocus that looks like a disorder in a classroom is the same capacity that builds companies, sees patterns no one else can see and solves problems that defeat everyone else.
ADHD, as Dr Tye described it, is not a deficit of attention at all but a great capacity to direct attention very precisely, just not to the things the system expects.
I think I am probably a bit neuro-spicy myself, and I suspect a lot of you reading this are too. Think about the person in your team who gets labelled the difficult one, the one who challenges every process, who can’t sit still in meetings, who goes so deep into a problem that everything else disappears. What if the environment was the problem and not the person?
We have spent decades trying to make neurodivergent people fit the system, and the neuroscience suggests we have had it backwards all along.
What would it take for your organisation to start designing for brain diversity rather than managing it away?
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