Key highlights: National Neurodiversity at Work Conference 2026

The event brought together researchers, practitioners, advocates and HR professionals for a day of talks ranging from employment tribunal case studies to the neuroscience of creativity. Neurodivergent Works reports.

Opening keynote: the next chapter of neurodiversity at work

Fiona Barrett, chief operating officer, Genius Within CIC

Fiona Barrett opened the day with a panoramic view of where neuroinclusion currently stands and where it is failing. Genius Within, whose leadership team comprises 67% neurominority members, works daily with both individuals and organisations, giving Barrett a dual vantage point: the landscape as lived experience, and the landscape as institutional reality.

The push towards needs-based support, rather than diagnosis-first support, is gathering pace, partly because diagnosis itself is so broken. NHS pathways are effectively closed to adults outside full-time education for most conditions except autism and ADHD. The cost of private assessment is prohibitive for many. Women are routinely missed, their presentations not fitting the diagnostic criteria built around male expression of conditions. Black young men are more likely to be misdiagnosed with conduct disorders than to receive a neurodivergent diagnosis. People from communities where English is not the first language are told that speech delays are about language acquisition rather than developmental difference.

'We've got double and triple masking going on for intersectional neurodivergent people,' Barrett said. 'It leads to a much higher risk of burnout.'

The most striking research Barrett cited came from a Cambridge University study using transdiagnostic mapping. Rather than grouping children by diagnosis, the researchers fed formal diagnostic data into a machine learning model and looked at what support needs actually clustered together. What emerged were not neurotypes but three areas of need: language support, executive function support and support with social communication and emotion. The diagnosis did not predict the support needed. Knowing someone is autistic, or dyslexic, or has ADHD says very little about what they actually need. Asking does.

Barrett turned to the question of retention and legal risk. Psychological safety is simultaneously the top driver of neurodivergent career satisfaction and the top predictor of neurodivergent turnover. When it is absent, people leave, and increasingly, they also litigate. According to the City & Guilds Neurodiversity Index, 13% of UK organisations have been involved in a neurodiversity-related employment tribunal. The average cost of defending a single claim stands at £8,500 in legal costs alone, before any settlement is reached.

Barrett walked through two recent cases to illustrate how easily organisations fail. In Vale v Chief Constable of Avon and Somerset Constabulary, an employee with ADHD requested noise-cancelling headphones. The request fell through the gap between line manager and HR. No occupational health referral was made. No follow-up occurred. The manager was later found to have questioned the legitimacy of the employee's ADHD diagnosis in a Teams chat. The tribunal found in the employee's favour. In Khorram v Capgemini UK Plc, a dyslexic employee disclosed difficulties at the start of their employment and was assessed, with coaching, time management support and clear task-setting recommended. None of the recommended manager training was delivered. When performance concerns arose, they were escalated without the agreed support ever being put in place. Again, the tribunal found in the employee's favour, noting that systemic-level adjustments had been overlooked in favour of scrutinising individual performance.

A third scenario Barrett shared involved an employee with dyslexia who, when their bus timetable changed, asked for support navigating it. Their employer interpreted the difficulty as avoidance behaviour. Nobody asked how dyslexia was affecting their ability to process the timetable information. Nobody offered to go through it with them.

'These are not complicated adjustments,' Barrett said. 'They are not expensive adjustments. Some of them just require time, curiosity and asking someone.'

Her closing message was about the direction of travel. The goal is not individual-level adjustment but systemic inclusion: designing organisations so that they ask everyone what they need, at every transition point, including recruitment, promotion, return from sickness, and change of manager. 'Assume everybody needs adjustments,' she said. 'Don't wait for someone to disclose. Ask them what support they need.'

Creating psychological safety for a neurodivergent workforce

Charlie Hart, founder, Ausome Minds UK

Charlie Hart's session was, in her own words, not a data presentation. It was a reckoning with what psychological safety actually means for people who have spent their lives being told they are wrong.

Hart, who is autistic and has ADHD, described the layered damage of growing up with undiagnosed neurodivergence: the accumulation of feedback that you are too much, too intense, too weird, that your eye contact is wrong, your walk is awkward, your voice monotone. By the time neurodivergent people enter the workforce, they are already hypervigilant. 'The question of whether a workplace is safe is not abstract for us,' she said. 'It is existential.'

She drew on Dr Ludmila Praslova's definition of psychological safety: an environment where team members feel comfortable sharing their unique ideas and suggestions, expressing their needs, and exploring their strengths without negative repercussions. 'When we've gone through our whole lives being picked on for being weird and different,' Hart said, 'we're going to be really sensitive to that.'

Safety is not simply about avoiding psychological damage, which is a health and safety matter, but about actually being safe to be who you are. The distinction matters, because organisations frequently create the appearance of psychological safety without the substance. Hart described disclosing her autism at the age of 42, after years of misdiagnosis and what she now understands were autistic burnouts presenting as depression. She felt safe enough to tell her employer. What she did not anticipate was that from that point on, she was no longer consulted on leadership decisions, no longer the go-to person on HR systems, no longer treated as the reliable expert. 'I had the psychological safety in that I disclosed,' she said, 'but I wasn't actually safe.'

The consequences extend well beyond the individual. When psychological safety is absent, neurodivergent employees do not just withhold personal information. They stop flagging risks, stop challenging poor leadership decisions, stop sharing innovative approaches. 'That is the best way to stifle innovation and growth,' Hart said, 'and lose the market share you already have.'

She referenced Dr Praslova's book The Canary Code, which frames neurodivergent employees as canaries in a coal mine: the first to be harmed by toxic environments, but also the most useful indicators that something in the environment needs to change. The question organisations face is what they do when the canary starts choking. 'Everyone thinks they would fix the environment,' she said. 'But what actually happens is the canary gets managed out of the business.'

Hart was particularly pointed about the weaponisation of vulnerability. When people share what they need in good faith, in a conversation framed as a safe space, and that information is then used against them or mishandled, the damage is profound and often permanent. 'Trust takes years to build,' she said. 'It can be destroyed in seconds, and it can take years to get back. If ever.'

Labels, language and identity

Lucy Hobbs, founder, The Future is ND

Lucy Hobbs took a different approach to the traditional conference format, leading an interactive session that invited delegates to reflect on labels: the ones they have been given, the ones they have chosen, and what either kind of language actually does in practice.

Hobbs, who received her ADHD diagnosis in 2007 and an autism diagnosis in 2021 after years working as an art director and copywriter in advertising, began from a personal place. What happens, she asked, when you realise that the way you have been understood, or misunderstood, does not tell the full story?

Labels are neither straightforwardly good nor bad. They are powerful, and power can cut in both directions. Labels often come from outside, from clinicians, from institutions, from other people's assumptions, and once attached, they shape how someone is seen, how they are treated, and over time, how they come to see themselves. A label applied without understanding can narrow a person, reducing them to a stereotype and generating assumptions that are frequently wrong, often judgemental, and sometimes damaging.

On the other hand, labels can be liberating. They can transform the question 'what is wrong with me?' into 'how is my brain wired?' They can connect people to communities, to shared language, to others who recognise their experience. They can unlock support in education, healthcare and the workplace that would otherwise remain inaccessible.

The more interesting question, Hobbs suggested, is who gets to define the label and who gets to reclaim it. She pointed to 'weird' as a word that has shifted in meaning for many neurodivergent people, from a term of exclusion to something closer to a badge. She discussed the word 'neurodivergent' itself, coined by Kassiane Asasumasu as a more inclusive alternative to 'neurotypical's opposite', recognising the many different ways a brain can diverge rather than defining difference by a single diagnostic category. 'That shift in language matters,' Hobbs said, 'because it moves away from defining people by a single narrow category towards recognising difference and variation.'

Audience responses to the session's interactive prompts surfaced a theme that ran through much of the day: the same label can mean entirely different things to different people, depending on context, identity, history and what assumptions already surround them. 'It's not the label itself,' Hobbs said. 'It's how it interacts with existing expectations and bias.'

The four horsemen of the neurodiversity apocalypse

Ryan Hoare, reasonable adjustments expert and founder, TryMosaic

Ryan Hoare delivered a framework to help explain why neuroinclusion initiatives so consistently fail to deliver what they promise. He outlined why that failure is not a matter of effort or intention but of system design.

Hoare, who has dyspraxia and founded TryMosaic to build the infrastructure organisations need to deliver reasonable adjustments systematically, opened with three scenarios he invited delegates to recognise. The neurodiversity training rollout with excellent completion rates, after which a manager still comes to HR asking what to do about a team member they think might be autistic. The reasonable adjustment passport launched in 2022 with no data on whether anyone has ever used it. The tribunal bundle in which the employee says no adjustments were made, the manager says it was all agreed somewhere on Teams, and there is no paper trail.

Neurodiversity-related employment tribunal claims have risen 95% in recent years. The average cost of defending a single claim is £8,500 in legal costs alone. 'Either we're all really bad at our jobs,' Hoare said, 'or we're solving the wrong problem.'

His framework identifies four assumptions embedded in most HR processes that are rarely true for neurodivergent employees, and whose failure creates a vicious cycle. He calls them the four horsemen.

The first is broken metacognition: the ability to accurately identify and articulate what help you need. People with ADHD underestimate how long tasks take. Autistic people frequently cannot tell they are approaching burnout until they are already in it. Dyspraxic people may not realise they have done something incorrectly until after the fact. Asking 'what support do you need?' of someone in this position is not just difficult. 'It is a functionally unanswerable question,' Hoare said. 'They just know they're finding things hard, and they don't know if that's normal or not, and they probably think they're just bad at things.'

The second horseman is imposter syndrome, but not as it is usually understood. For neurodivergent people, imposter syndrome is rarely a vague fear of being found out. It is the rational conclusion of a lifetime of criticism. Research suggests neurodivergent people are criticised, on average, significantly more often than their neurotypical peers. The evidence accumulates, and the conclusion, 'I cannot do this', is not irrational given that evidence. It is simply wrong.

These two reinforce each other directly, producing the third horseman: weak self-advocacy. Hoare described the employee who goes home, writes the email asking for support three times, deletes it each time worrying about seeming too demanding or ungrateful, and eventually closes the laptop and tells themselves they will deal with it next week. 'Weak self-advocacy sounds like a personal failing,' he said. 'It isn't. It's a predictable, well-documented consequence of imposter syndrome and broken metacognition, plus a power imbalance that is baked into the process.'

The fourth horseman is ableist systems, and Hoare was careful to distinguish this from personal ableism. The organisations in the room, he acknowledged, are not trying to build exclusionary systems. But they exist in a society with a particular idea of what work should look like, and almost every HR process reflects that default: performance management that assumes linear, consistent output; meeting cultures that reward the loudest voice; reasonable adjustment processes that only activate once the employee can clearly articulate their diagnosis, their needs and their request. All of these are preconditions that the other three horsemen have already undermined.

'The reasonable adjustment process assumes the person who needs the help has functioning metacognition and can ask clearly for it, doesn't have imposter syndrome and feels confident advocating for themselves,' Hoare said. 'So in reality, what happens is: I don't disclose, no adjustments are made, and I burn out or leave.'

The cycle is self-reinforcing in both directions. Systems that ignore disclosure teach people not to advocate. People who are not heard develop stronger imposter syndrome. Stronger imposter syndrome further damages metacognition. And around it goes.

The practical test Hoare offered delegates for any neuroinclusion intervention is a four-question checklist: Does this require the person to know what is wrong with them? Does it require psychological safety to ask for help? Does it require the person to clearly articulate their needs to someone with power over them? And if they cannot do any of those things, does the intervention still work?

'Most of what we do in this space fails at least one of those questions,' he said. 'That is not a reason to stop. It is a reason to redesign.'

Embracing the creativity of neurodiverse minds

Sammi Ford, poet, artist, photographer and veteran RAF officer

Sammi Ford provided a wide-ranging account of her own experience, from a childhood with undiagnosed autism and ADHD through a career as a RAF officer, import-export business owner, artist, photographer and poet, all before receiving her diagnosis at 50 during the turbulence of COVID, Brexit and a serious mental health crisis.

Ford's argument was less a structured presentation than a sustained demonstration of its own thesis: that neurodivergent minds perceive and engage with the world differently, and that this difference, given the right conditions, produces original work. Her photography, including architectural studies of Lincoln Cathedral's ceiling and a staircase that looked, from the right angle, like a lightbulb, emerged from the kind of observational intensity she now understands as part of how her brain works. Her Elvis Presley obsession, which began in 1977, led her to fill book after book with handwritten transcriptions of everything she could find, because the internet did not yet exist and the library was where you went to know things. 'That is what an obsession looks like,' she said. 'And it is also what deep expertise looks like.'

She drew on the cases of Phineas Gage, the nineteenth-century railroad worker whose personality transformed after a tamping iron passed through his frontal lobe, and neuroscientist Antonio Damasio's patient Elliot, who lost the ability to make decisions after a brain tumour was removed, to argue that neurodivergence is a physical condition rooted in brain structure, not a behavioural choice or a deficit of willpower. She also cited Eadweard Muybridge, whose 1878 sequence The Horse in Motion, widely considered the first motion picture, came after a stagecoach accident that, like Gage's, affected the prefrontal cortex and appeared to accelerate his creative thinking.

On the question of famous neurodivergent figures, Ford named several who have spoken openly about their diagnoses, including Chris Packham, Andy Warhol and Elon Musk, while being clear that the value of neurodivergent employees does not rest on exceptional cases. The more practical point is about recruitment and retention. 'If you assess a software engineer through a face-to-face interview that tests social competence rather than technical skill, you will lose people who could do the job brilliantly but cannot perform in that format,' she said. 'Give them a trial period. Test what you actually want to hire for.'

She also pointed to the importance of rest and transition time for neurodivergent employees. Creative thinking rarely happens under bombardment. 'If your brain is being bombarded, it is not going to be able to think for itself,' Ford said. 'Give your employees rest periods. Let them go away, have a break and digest what they have just been asked to do.'

Ford closed with two poems: Kindness, which traced the logic of interdependence from a grain of sand to a galaxy, and Unnatural Selection, which drew a sharp line between the selective breeding of pedigree dogs and the ways human beings are judged, for their colour, their ways, their gender, their jobs, in the guise of meritocracy.

Neurodivergent leadership: leading with a neuroatypical brain

Helena Territt, founder, Hatched Coaching

Helena Territt came to her session with the credentials of someone who has lived the full spectrum of neurodivergent professional experience: Oxford graduate; undiagnosed until 41; self-medicating for decades with recreational drugs while building a career as an HR director and senior civil servant; now properly medicated and running a coaching practice for neurodivergent leaders.

Her central argument was that neurodivergent ways of thinking are not incidental to organisational success. They are frequently its source. She cited research by Gail Saltz in The Power of Different, which found a direct link between the conditions that cause people difficulty in social or professional settings and the strengths, creative, analytical, artistic and athletic, that those same conditions produce. Simon Baron-Cohen's The Pattern Seekers argues that autistic cognition may have been central to the development of modern human tool use and systematic thinking. George Land's creativity study, tracking the same cohort from childhood to adulthood, found that 98% of five-year-olds tested at genius level for divergent thinking; by adulthood, that figure was 2%. 'The educational and organisational systems we build,' Territt argued, 'socialise creativity out of people, unless their neurodivergent wiring makes them resistant to that process.'

She pointed to Satya Nadella's transformation of Microsoft as a practical case study. When Nadella took over as CEO, he implemented a neurodiversity hiring programme and, crucially, shifted the entire organisational culture around Carol Dweck's growth mindset framework and psychological safety. 'He didn't just hire a load of neurodivergent people,' Territt said. 'He changed the environment so that neurodivergent brains could actually thrive. And that is what happened to the share price.'

The social model of disability framed the structural argument: it is not the disability that disables, but the barriers built into physical environments, institutions, communication systems and cultures. Territt noted that the impact of negative experiences is particularly acute for neurodivergent people, who are more likely to have their psychological safety shattered than neurotypical counterparts and more likely to carry the cognitive consequences of that damage long-term.

She turned to neuroplasticity as the source of practical hope. The brain, she argued, is not fixed at adulthood. The famous study of London taxi drivers, whose posterior hippocampus grows measurably larger after learning The Knowledge of London, demonstrates that sustained cognitive practice changes brain structure. What this means for neurodivergent people in coaching is that the patterns, the imposter syndrome, the negative self-talk, the rumination, the 'should' thinking, can be rewired. 'Not cured,' she said. 'Not eliminated. But shifted.'

The second half of Territt's session was a rapid and often funny tour of the things her coaching clients consistently do wrong when trying to understand how their brains work. She covered the tyranny of 'should'; the myth of consistency for people who are natural sprinters rather than marathon runners; the trap of rumination, which she called 'hanging around the toilet'; finding the flaw in every success before allowing yourself to register it; the paralysis of future-tripping and over-engineering; and the habit of using negative emotional stimulation as a substitute for motivation.

Her final point was about self-compassion, which she illustrated with the image of kicking the puppy. 'When we try a new strategy and it doesn't work, we are really hard on ourselves,' she said. 'What happens then is our brain recognises that if I try a new thing, I get shamed. And so it stops trying.'

'Your brains are puppies,' she said. 'You don't kick a puppy when it doesn't sit on the first try. You give it a biscuit and try again tomorrow.'

The role of senior leadership in building neuroinclusive workplaces

Hayley Brackley, neuroinclusion consultant, Great Minds Don't

Hayley Brackley's session was centred around a question: what is a neuroinclusive workplace, actually? Not as a concept, but as a working definition that an organisation can move towards and measure itself against.

Her answer: a workplace where environment, system and culture are designed so that everyone can do their best work without needing to mask, struggle in silence, or ask for things that should already be in place.

That last clause carries the weight of the definition. The systems that currently exist in most organisations, such as adjustment passports, training rollouts, disclosure processes, are designed for people who already know what they need, already feel safe enough to ask, and already have the language to articulate it. Brackley's point, consistent with Hoare's earlier framework, is that these are precisely the preconditions that neuroinclusion is supposed to create. If you need them in place before the support system kicks in, the support system is not working.

She laid out a journey of neuroinclusion in stages: building awareness first, not encyclopaedic knowledge, but enough to create psychological safety; then establishing a baseline through surveys and listening exercises to understand who is actually in your workforce and what they need; then targeted interventions, which include training for managers but must also extend to colleagues.

'I once worked with someone whose manager understood their dyslexia,' she said. 'The person who sat next to them didn't, and used to mumble under their breath, "will you just shut up?". We need compassion-based awareness across the board, not just at management level.'

Then an audit of policies for direct discrimination; then a cultural assessment, not the poster on the wall, but the email that comes through on a Sunday evening and makes someone's stomach drop; then attention to resources, adjustment processes, and universal design principles; and finally, ongoing iteration, because neuroinclusion is not a project with a completion date.

To help organisations move beyond diagnosis-led thinking, Brackley introduced her seven lenses framework: seven perspectives through which to view the workplace experience of neurodivergent employees. The red lens covers emotional regulation and energy, the cost of simply showing up, including rejection sensitivity, social battery depletion and the cyclical risk of burnout. The orange lens covers executive function and focus, which she was careful to note are not the exclusive territory of ADHD but cut across all neurotypes. The yellow lens covers sensory experience, including noise, light and temperature, and how these affect the ability to be present and productive. The green lens covers processing and memory, the way information is taken in and retained, and the unreasonable expectation that verbal instructions given once in a meeting will be accurately recalled. The blue lens covers social connection, unwritten rules, group dynamics and the expectations around eye contact, small talk and 'being a team player'. The indigo lens covers communication and language, not just spoken but written and unspoken, and the everyday micro-interactions that are frequently inaccessible without anyone intending them to be. The violet lens covers the body and movement, encompassing dyspraxia, sensory regulation, and the simple reality that different people need to move differently to think well.

'When we look at the world through seven perspectives,' Brackley said, 'we ask upfront: what could I do differently? What are the things that would mean that when I bring these people together, things just go well?'

Brackley was clear that knowledge alone does not drive change. She had, she said, spent the early part of her career delivering the facts, diagnostic criteria, historical context, the Equality Act, and had since concluded that this approach, however thorough, does not move people. What moves people is insight, and insight comes from curiosity.

Her closing framework was three words: curiosity, compassion, and conversation. 'If you can sit with somebody and say, what's your story, what's going on with you, what do you need, how does that show up for you,' she said, 'what a wonderful place that would be.'

The disclosure dilemma: rethinking neurodiversity at work

Jade Fuller, employability product partner, Ambitious About Autism

Jade Fuller's session brought the perspective of a national autism charity working at the intersection of education and employment, preparing autistic young people to enter the workforce while simultaneously working with employers to make that entry possible.

Fuller opened with the employment gap. More than one in 100 people in the UK are autistic, though that figure is almost certainly an undercount given long waiting lists and historical underdiagnosis. Girls are significantly less likely to receive an autism diagnosis than boys, a gap that is only slowly narrowing. A substantial majority of autistic young people experience a mental health condition alongside their autism. Fewer than a third of autistic people are currently in employment, against more than half of all disabled people and over 80% of non-disabled people.

The economic case for change is stark. Research by Pro Bono Economics for Autistica found that doubling the employment rate for autistic people could benefit the UK economy by up to £1.5bn per year. At the same time, employers consistently cite labour and talent shortages as a top-three business risk. The majority of autistic people who are not in work want to be. 'We need to be better aligning that,' Fuller said.

The session focused on disclosure, a word Fuller noted is itself contested. To disclose is, etymologically, to reveal something private or secret, and many people are uncomfortable with that framing. She suggested alternatives: requesting adjustments, sharing information, having a conversation. For young people entering work for the first time, the question of whether and how to disclose is rarely simple. They do not know the unwritten rules of the organisation they are entering. They may have spent years hearing negative things about their condition. Many fear that disclosure will lead to stereotyping, to being passed over, to having doors closed before they have had a chance to show what they can do. Ambitious About Autism's research found that a large majority of autistic young people fear discrimination if they disclose to an employer.

'I didn't want to risk having doors shut in my face because of any misguided views on autism,' one young person told the charity, 'before I even had a chance to show people what I could do.'

Fuller's practical argument, however, was that employers should not wait for disclosure to act. If a manager can see that someone is struggling with noise, needs downtime from a busy social environment, or responds better to visual and detailed written information, they can act on that observation without waiting for formal disclosure. 'At worst, you're going to be seen as a caring employer who wants to get the best out of their team,' she said. One employer Ambitious About Autism worked with described exactly this approach: 'It was obvious to me that my employee was autistic. I just put adjustments in place as if I knew.'

She was careful to add that formal disclosure does carry legal weight, providing additional protection under the Equality Act, and that the goal is not to remove the option but to create the conditions in which people feel they can exercise it freely. Visibility, acceptance and cultural signalling all matter. When Ambitious About Autism becomes a named charity partner with an employer and that employer's name goes up publicly, people come forward. When organisations offer to support employees through private diagnosis, people feel valued enough to engage.

Fuller closed with practical suggestions spanning the full employee lifecycle: proactively inviting adjustment requests at recruitment rather than with a token line at the bottom of the job advertisement; sending interview questions to all candidates in advance; building clear structure into induction; maintaining regular check-ins rather than waiting for monthly supervisions; and always considering sensory environment, including where performance conversations happen. 'A coffee shop,' she noted, 'is not a neutral venue.'

Better communication for better work: a neuroinclusive approach

Sarah Castor-Perry, ADHD/AuDHD coach and neuroinclusion consultant

Sarah Castor-Perry opened her session by addressing the room in French, briefly and deliberately, to create the visceral experience of the moment her talk was about: the flash of anxiety, the scramble to work out whether you had missed something, the questioning of your own competence. 'That,' she said, 'is what a lot of neurodivergent people go through every day when there is a mismatch between what they need and what they get from communication in their organisation.'

Castor-Perry, who received her AuDHD diagnosis three years ago after a career in management consulting, focused on why communication misunderstandings happen and what organisations can practically do about them.

The starting point is that we communicate through a web of assumptions: that people share the same scripts, read between the same lines and have the same needs. Neurodivergence disrupts all three. For autistic employees, the double empathy problem describes the mutual miscommunication that occurs not because one person is communicating wrongly, but because two people are communicating differently, and the difficulty is most acute when one is autistic and one is not.

For people with ADHD, rejection sensitive dysphoria means that 'can I grab you for a minute?' can land as an imminent dismissal rather than a routine check-in; working memory difficulties mean that verbal instructions, delivered once in a meeting, are structurally inaccessible regardless of effort or attention. For dyslexic employees, the issue is not reading ability per se but a sensory processing difference that affects how quickly and accurately visual and auditory information is absorbed.

To illustrate how these differences interact with poorly designed work environments, Castor-Perry described a meeting: last-minute, no agenda, running over by an hour, everyone expected to contribute verbally and spontaneously, actions distributed verbally at the end. Three people in that meeting, she said, might look to an outside observer like they are not engaged, not capable, not team players. In reality, the first person is autistic and needed context, structure and reflection time before contributing; the second has ADHD and was not interrupting but racing to get their thought out before working memory dropped it; the third is dyslexic and found the unstructured verbal format, with no sequential written follow-up, impossible to process in real time.

'If that is happening every day,' she said, 'people stop contributing. They stop thinking it is worth trying. They start to believe they cannot do the job.'

Her four principles for neuroinclusive communication were clear and immediately applicable. First, clarity is kindness: be explicit rather than implicit, say what you mean, and do not expect people to read between lines that were never written for them. Second, make inclusion the default: design communication processes with the awareness that different people need different things, and build in flexibility from the start rather than retrofitting it. Third, go multi-channel: offer options for contribution, including asynchronous input for people who cannot process and respond in real time. Fourth, separate style from substance: different presentation does not mean different capability. Fidgeting is not disengagement. Not making small talk is not unfriendliness. Interrupting is not rudeness.

Castor-Perry closed on the same note that ran through the whole day: these changes are not accommodations for a minority. They are better management for everyone. 'Inclusive communication,' she said, 'is really just good communication.'

The National Neurodiversity at Work Conference is organised by the Institute of Government & Public Policy.

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