Why neuroinclusion matters

Over the years, I have worked in very different jobs and environments, and in most of these places, I see good people struggle in ways that dont quite add up, and it's not because they were lazy, or incapable, it's just that they seemed out of sync with how work was set up, and to be completely honest, I've felt it myself too.

There’s a quiet expectation in most workplaces that everyone thinks and works in roughly the same way. Meetings. Deadlines. Focus. Communication, and if your brain fits that shape, you get on fine.

However, if it doesn’t, you spend a lot of time compensating, trying to find workarounds, and dealing with additional pressures, and that costs energy. Neuroinclusion, to me, isn’t a programme or a policy, it’s just an acknowledgement that people process information differently and don't need to feel as though they have to pretend otherwise.

The interesting thing is that when work becomes clearer and calmer, people tend to do better work, and that’s not someone's opinion. Many large organisations like Deloitte, CIPD, and Harvard Business Review have all pointed to the same outcomes. They've recognised the benefits that mixed thinking styles improve problem-solving, clearer environments reduce friction, and even better, when it comes to retention, people stay longer when they don’t feel constantly on edge.

What often gets missed is that the things that help neurodivergent people usually help everyone else too, helping to make fewer assumptions, better communication, and therefore, more realistic expectations around focus and energy.

For a long time, I thought the tension I felt at work was something I needed to fix in myself, but in truth, it wasn’t. It was the confirmation that my brain had always worked differently, and as someone who was advised that they were AuDHD, it was often down to the way my brain worked, the inability to recognise the same social cues that others adhered to, and often the lighting, and environment, and it was this realisation that changed how I work and why I set up NeuThinking.

Not as a solution or a system, but as a way of slowing things down and thinking more clearly about how work actually feels from the inside.

This is why I don’t necessarily think that neuroinclusion needs noise, but attention, as when people don’t have to fight the way that their work is designed, they usually show up better, and when that happens, everything else tends to follow.