Well, that escalated. So buckle in for another adventure, this ones a long one.
My last rabbit hole into neuro-complexity clearly pulled on a heartstring I wasn’t quite expecting. More than 70,000 impressions later, with over 90 percent of that travelling outside my existing network, dozens and dozens of comments, messages, reposts and conversations, what interested me most wasn’t actually the numbers. It was how many people seemed to look at the idea through the lens of the Industrial Age and say some version of, “Bloody hell, that explains so much.”
People could see themselves in it.
They could see their families in it.
They could see their workplaces, schools and careers in it.
Which creates the next fairly obvious question.
If there really are far more neuro-complex people than we’ve traditionally recognised, where the hell have they all been?
They haven’t suddenly arrived.
Human beings haven’t undergone some extraordinary neurological transformation in the last twenty years. Autism didn’t appear when TikTok arrived. ADHD wasn’t invented by smartphones. Dyslexia didn’t suddenly emerge because somebody created an assessment for it.
So if my hypothesis is even somewhere in the ballpark, and there really is a much larger neuro-complex population hiding underneath the numbers we’ve traditionally used, then those people have been here all along.
The interesting question is where they were.
And the more I explore it, the more I reckon the answer is surprisingly simple.
Everywhere.
They’ve been hiding in plain sight.
The Industrial Revolution gives us a really useful place to start because, as much as I’ve been challenging some of the thinking we inherited from that era, I don’t see the Industrial Revolution as the villain in this story. Far from it. It created some extraordinary improvements in human life and opportunity.
Industrialisation gave many people something enormously valuable, greater predictability.
Factories created concentrated employment. People moved closer to them and towns and cities grew. Commerce developed around those centres. Apprenticeships and skilled trades became increasingly important. Over time, organised labour and unions fought for safer workplaces, better wages, reasonable working hours and conditions that eventually contributed to things such as weekends and leave.
That mattered.
For a family that had previously lived much more closely to the uncertainty of agriculture, weather, seasonal work, livestock and whatever happened to be required that day, the opportunity to know that somebody could go somewhere at a certain time, work a reasonably predictable number of hours and bring home a reasonably predictable wage was an enormous change.
E.P. Thompson’s classic work on industrialisation and time describes this transition beautifully. Pre-industrial work was much more task-oriented, particularly in agricultural communities. Work, social life and daily living could intermingle because the task rather than the clock often determined the rhythm. Industrialisation brought a much stronger regulation of time and eventually the discipline of the factory clock.
That’s not automatically a bad thing.
The clock brought predictability.
Predictability brought scale.
Scale created wealth and opportunity.
But it also began separating parts of our lives in ways that hadn’t necessarily existed before.
You went to work -> Then you came home.
Work increasingly became somewhere you performed a role for a defined period of time. You were paid for that time and, during it, you broadly did what the organisation required you to do.
That meant you could be something else outside work.
And that’s one of the places where this starts getting really interesting for neuro-complex people.
As working conditions improved and people gained more reliable leisure time, hobbies, clubs, sporting organisations, societies and all manner of strange little communities flourished.
You could spend the week doing the job that paid you and then spend Saturday doing the thing that made absolutely no sense to anybody other than the other sixteen people who were equally obsessed with it.
You could
- Build cars.
- Race motorcycles.
- Restore old machinery.
- Photograph birds.
- Paint.
- Write songs.
- Play music.
- Build model trains.
- Study military history.
- Breed pigeons.
- Collect stamps.
- Make furniture.
- Play sport.
- Build radios.
- Learn everything there was to know about astronomy.
- Run a local club.
Spend nine years restoring something that could have been purchased in working order for half the money, and we love every second of it. It’s awesome.
Human beings are wonderfully weird when we give ourselves permission to be.
And that’s important because one of the ideas we continue to carry around neurodivergence is that neurodivergent people are somehow inherently poor at socialising or communicating.
That’s far too simple.
Research around the Double Empathy Problem has been particularly interesting here. The idea isn’t that autistic people suddenly have no communication difficulties. It’s that some of the difficulty emerges through the mismatch between different ways of communicating and understanding one another. Research has found that neurotype matching can influence interpersonal rapport, supporting the idea that communication difficulties can be relational rather than sitting entirely inside the autistic person.
Have you watched two people meet who share a deep interest? They have probably seen a less academic version of this happen.
A person who has been described as quiet, withdrawn or socially awkward can suddenly find their people and talk for five hours. Remember LAN parties in the 2000s where all the nerds congregated to play video games connected between their computers. Yelling, jeering, food, quiet or loud, it did not matter. The space worked no matter. Yes, I am one of those.
There isn’t a lot of social difficulty when everybody in the room desperately wants to discuss the differential ratios of a particular racing gearbox.
The interest is the social structure.
Everyone knows why they’re there.
The rules are easier to understand.
Nobody has to pretend they’re interested in small talk before getting to the interesting bit.
That doesn’t mean every person in a car club is neurodivergent. It doesn’t mean every musician is neurodivergent, every mechanic is autistic, every programmer has ADHD or every artist has some underlying neurological difference.
That’s not the argument.
There are neurotypical people in every one of these places.
What I’m saying is that certain environments naturally provide more opportunity for curiosity, novelty, precision, deep interest, creative expression, systems thinking, experimentation and the ability to become spectacularly interested in something.
For some neuro-complex brains, that’s a very comfortable place to be.
The vocation doesn’t cause the neurodivergence.
The environment simply gives that particular brain somewhere to breathe and enjoy itself.
And sometimes that place wasn’t a club, hobby or occupation at all.
Sometimes it was home.
This is another hiding place that becomes really obvious once you start thinking about neurodivergence across generations.
Imagine growing up in a family where grandpa has always disappeared into the workshop for six hours, and nobody thinks that’s particularly unusual. Mum needs some quiet when she gets home. Dad has three subjects he can talk about in extraordinary detail. Grandma doesn’t like crowds. Somebody has always eaten the same breakfast. Somebody else is incredibly direct. The whole family knows not to move grandpa’s tools, and nobody needs a written policy explaining why.
That’s just your family. Families develop cultures. They develop routines. They accommodate one another.
They work out who likes what, who doesn’t, who needs space, who talks too much, who doesn’t talk enough, who notices every tiny detail and who is going to become very upset if somebody changes the plan at the last minute.
Nobody necessarily calls any of that neurodivergence. Nobody necessarily knows. And that’s OK.
And because conditions such as autism and ADHD have strong genetic components and aggregate within families, it isn’t remotely surprising that particular traits, behaviours and ways of experiencing the world can appear across generations.
That doesn’t mean every eccentric grandfather was autistic or every distracted mother had ADHD.
Again, that’s not what I’m saying.
It means that a family may have spent generations naturally building an environment around ways of being that nobody realised were unusual. Inside that house, a child can be completely normal because the family’s definition of normal already includes them.
Then the child goes to school.
And suddenly everybody else’s normal arrives.
That’s where things can change very quickly.
School is another really important part of this Industrial Age story.
There is a popular claim that modern schools were literally designed to create factory workers. Historically, that is too neat and doesn’t stand up particularly well when you poke at it. Modern mass education developed from a much more complicated mix of religious, civic, political, economic and social forces.
But we don’t need that myth to see the industrial assumptions sitting inside a lot of Western education.
Thirty children of roughly the same age enter a room.
They start at the same time. They stop at the same time.
They move when the timetable tells them to move.
There is a curriculum describing roughly what they should learn and when.
Progress is measured against prescribed expectations.
We try to move a large number of very different human beings through a reasonably consistent system because at scale there has to be some structure.
Again, that’s not evil.
How else do you educate millions of people?
The difficulty begins when we confuse the system’s requirements with the natural requirements of human beings.
- Sitting still becomes evidence of attention.
- Eye contact becomes evidence of listening.
- Finishing work within a particular time becomes evidence of competence.
- Being able to explain your reasoning in the expected way becomes evidence that you understand it.
- Learning something at roughly the same age as everybody else becomes evidence of appropriate development.
And the child who doesn’t fit neatly into those expectations starts receiving feedback.
- Sit still.
- Stop talking.
- Pay attention.
- Don’t interrupt.
- You’re distracting everyone.
- Stop arguing.
- Do what you’re told.
- Why can’t you just apply yourself?
- You could do so well if you tried harder.
Sometimes that feedback is appropriate. Children need boundaries. They need to learn that other people matter. Learning to get along with each other (especially things like learning to hold multiple points of view). They need to learn how to operate inside communities. Neurodivergence doesn’t mean every impulse needs to be indulged, and it certainly isn’t permission to behave badly.
But there is a very important difference between teaching a child how to live with other humans and teaching a child that their natural way of being human is wrong.
We have blurred that line far more than we realise.
Parents play a role here too, usually with the best intentions in the world.
- Parents want their children to be okay.
- They want them to have friends.
- They want them to succeed at school.
- They want them to get a job.
- They want them to be accepted.
So if the world rewards conformity, teaching a child to conform can look exactly like responsible parenting.
- Look at people when they’re talking to you.
- Don’t say that.
- You can’t talk to people like that.
- Stop making a fuss.
- You need to learn to fit in.
- That’s just how life works.
I don’t see most of this as malicious.
I see people using the prescription (the old playbook, if you will) they inherited to prepare their children for the world they understood.
The problem is that repeated positive and negative reinforcement is incredibly good at teaching human beings what gets rewarded and what doesn’t.
“Do we blame Pavlov here? Naaaa”
So children learn.
- They learn what behaviour gets praise.
- They learn what gets punishment.
- They learn which questions are welcome.
- They learn which interests make other people roll their eyes.
- They learn when they’re being too intense.
- They learn to suppress things.
- They imitate.
- They practise.
- They observe other people and work out how they’re supposed to behave.
Sometimes that’s just ordinary social development.
Sometimes it becomes something much bigger. Hello, Masking??
The research into autistic camouflaging or masking is now giving us a much clearer picture of this. Camouflaging can involve imitation, suppression, practising social behaviours and changing the way somebody presents themselves in response to social expectations. People report doing it for connection, self-protection and to avoid rejection, discrimination or bullying.
And this matters because adaptation can be incredibly useful.
- It can get you through school.
- It can help you make friends.
- It can get you a job.
- It can help you navigate environments that weren’t built with you in mind.
- It can also become exhausting.
Recent research continues to find an association between greater autistic camouflaging and poorer mental health outcomes, including depression, anxiety, stress and burnout. Importantly, that relationship is complicated and doesn’t mean every person who masks will develop mental health problems, or that masking alone causes those problems.
The trauma part needs the same care.
I’m not saying every neuro-complex child is traumatised.
I’m not saying that every parent who told their child to behave caused trauma.
I’m not saying that being expected to conform automatically creates psychological injury.
But we can’t go to the opposite extreme and pretend that years of bullying, rejection, punishment, social exclusion, repeated failure and being told in hundreds of small ways that the person you naturally are is unacceptable just disappear.
For some people, those experiences become part of their trauma history.
And then something fascinating happens later in life when they finally start discovering themselves.
- They discover autism.
- They discover ADHD.
- They recognise themselves in their child when the child gets assessed.
- They meet someone whose brain seems to work like theirs.
- They read an article.
- They watch somebody describe an experience they’ve never had language for.
And suddenly thirty, forty or fifty years of life get rearranged.
- Things that were character flaws acquire another possible explanation.
- Things they were ashamed of start making sense.
- Things they thought everybody experienced turn out not to be universal after all.
That doesn’t erase the trauma.
Understanding why something happened doesn’t magically undo what happened.
But it can change the story somebody has been telling about themselves.
Another contradiction in education is worth celebrating too.
The same system that can reinforce conformity has also created some wonderful places for difference.
- The art room.
- Music.
- Drama.
- Woodwork.
- Metalwork.
- Technical education.
- Sport.
- Libraries.
- Computing.
- Gifted programmes.
Different subjects where suddenly the child who didn’t appear particularly remarkable in one room walks into another room and comes alive.
That is one of the genuinely good developments of modern education. We give people access to worlds they might never have encountered inside their family or village centuries ago.
Sometimes those subjects are considered peripheral to the “serious” curriculum because the serious curriculum has traditionally been tied to career preparation.
But those supposedly peripheral subjects can be where somebody discovers who they are.
That gives us another answer to where people have been hiding.
They’ve been wherever their difference was useful.
Trades are an obvious example.
Mechanics, construction, engineering, fabrication, accounting, architecture, and technical work create opportunities for practical problem solving, spatial reasoning, attention to detail, systems thinking, experimentation, and curiosity.
Then along came electronics and computing. The digital age arrives.
And bloody hell, did computing create some interesting places for unusual brains.
- Programming.
- Networks.
- Databases.
- Cybersecurity.
- Infrastructure.
- Systems engineering.
All these beautiful invisible worlds where somebody can build extraordinary complexity almost entirely inside their mind and then represent it through code, logic and systems. It’s like living in a different reality or an entire new virtual world. Ever heard of Second Life?
Again, I’m not saying technical people are neurodivergent.
I’m saying some forms of work naturally reward capabilities that some neuro-complex people have spent their whole lives being told were inconvenient.
And that meant we found another socially acceptable place to put them.
The technical department.
I’ve seen this throughout my career.
Someone can be brilliant.
- They understand the system better than almost anybody.
- They notice problems others don’t.
- They see connections between things.
- They have extraordinary technical judgement.
- They question assumptions.
- Then someone decides they’re not management material.
- They’re too direct.
- They aren’t polished enough.
- They’re a bit intense.
- They don’t communicate in the right way.
- They’re fantastic technically, so we’ll keep them over there.
And that’s where this stops being merely a neurodiversity conversation and starts becoming a leadership conversation.
Because eventually the person who sees the problem wants to fix it.
The person who notices an injustice wants to challenge it.
The person who understands the system can see how it could be better.
The person whose brain automatically connects six seemingly unrelated pieces starts asking why everybody else treats them as separate problems.
That person starts trying to create change.
Those are leadership behaviours.
They might not look like the leadership behaviours we’ve traditionally rewarded.
They might not be delivered with perfect executive presence, whatever the hell that is supposed to mean.
But seeing something that needs changing and influencing people toward something better is leadership.
And the research is showing us that autistic people can experience real barriers when they try to progress at work.
A 2024 scoping review of autistic career progression found significant underemployment and poor job matching, organisational barriers, inaccessible promotion processes, difficulties created by workplace social expectations, systemic stigma and instances where autistic people were working below their skills or qualifications. The review also found that many autistic people do want career progression but can struggle to get the opportunities or support required to do it.
So some adapt again.
They learn the corporate language.
They mask harder.
They develop scripts.
They work out what meetings are really for rather than what everybody says they’re for.
Some become successful leaders inside the existing structures.
Some burn themselves out trying.
Some decide that work is simply where the money comes from and stop trying to make it mean anything else.
And some leave.
They become:
- Consultants.
- Tradies.
- Artists.
- Freelancers.
- Creators.
- Contractors.
- Entrepreneurs.
- Small business owners.
They create an environment around themselves where the thing somebody else regarded as too much becomes part of why customers love dealing with them.
Then the internet arrived and blew the doors off every one of those little communities.
Before the internet, if you were obsessed with something wonderfully obscure, you needed enough people nearby who were also obsessed with it to form a club.
Now there can be six people in Australia, twelve in America, three in Germany, somebody awake at 2:00am in Finland and another person in a spare room in New Zealand, all discussing something nobody else in their lives understands.
Distance disappeared.
People found their people.
People found language for themselves.
People found communities.
People also became able to build careers, businesses and audiences around things that previously wouldn’t have supported a local or a traditional physical market. Digital products, services, businesses, entire new economies, and ecosystems.
That matters enormously when we’re trying to understand why neurodivergence appears more visible now.
The internet didn’t create all these people.
It made it much easier for them to find one another.
At the same time, something even bigger began happening inside work itself.
Digital started eating the industrial workplace from the inside.
Digital work is weird because so much of its value is invisible.
- Software is invisible.
- Data is invisible.
- Networks are invisible.
- Algorithms are invisible.
- Intellectual property is often invisible.
1’s and 0’s in electrons that cant be seen.
We see the result on our screen, but we don’t see the first place where it is influenced and created.
A programmer can sit at a desk for an entire day looking as though almost nothing has happened, change a few lines of code and alter what ten thousand people are able to do tomorrow.
That has a very different relationship with time, labour and value than putting another widget on an assembly line.
And here’s one of my favourite little clues that the old thinking was starting to fracture.
In 2001, seventeen software developers got together and wrote the Agile Manifesto. (And far too many ways that technologists have solved leadership, quality, rapid response, and resilience issues to list here right now.)
Its four core preferences were individuals and interactions over processes and tools, working software over comprehensive documentation, customer collaboration over contract negotiation and responding to change over following a plan.
That was a significant shift in thinking.
The industrial world became extraordinarily good at repeatability, process, predictability and control.
Software developers were dealing with a world in which the requirements changed (often quickly), complexity emerged, customers discovered what they actually wanted while you were building it and sometimes faithfully following the original plan was the dumbest possible thing you could do.
So, a completely different way of approaching work emerged.
BTW – I am not retrospectively diagnosing the people who wrote the Agile Manifesto. I have no idea whether they were neurodivergent, and it doesn’t matter to this piece.
What interests me is that one of the industries most deeply immersed in digital complexity produced an approach that said people matter, interaction matters, reality changes, plans are imperfect and our way of working needs to adapt as we learn.
That’s generations ahead of some of the leadership systems organisations are still trying to use today. The old leadership playbook no longer works.
And work has continued moving in that direction.
Jobs themselves are less interchangeable than they once were.
Take an accountant from one modern organisation and move them into another.
They are still an accountant, but almost everything surrounding the profession may have changed.
- Different software.
- Different datasets.
- Different processes.
- Different customers.
- Different reporting requirements.
- Different automation.
- Different culture.
- Different workflows.
- Different intellectual property.
- Different organisational expectations.
- Different invisible systems.
- Different ways to deliver value.
Yet, it’s the same profession and its potentially very different work.
We can see the consequence of that changing environment in career research too.
The Victorian TAFE Association’s TAFE Value and Perception Challenge, produced by McCrindle and reported by Wodonga TAFE, states that today’s school leavers are expected to have 18 jobs across six careers during their working life
- Eighteen jobs.
- Six careers.
Compare that with the prescription or rules many of us grew up with.
Get educated, work out what you want to be, get a good job, work hard, get promoted, buy a house, stay sensible, build your superannuation and eventually retire.
That prescription/formula wasn’t stupid.
And It worked for a lot of people.
That’s why parents passed it to their children.
That’s why schools reinforced it.
That’s why society built institutions around it.
The problem isn’t that the old map was bad.
The roads moved.
And we’re still handing people the old map.
At exactly the same time, we’ve started asking work to become far more integrated with the rest of who we are.
- We want purpose.
- Meaning.
- Belonging.
- Identity.
- Connection.
- Fulfilment.
Employers tell people to bring their whole selves to work.
That would have been a fairly strange thing to tell someone on a production line a hundred years ago. So, things are getting confusing.
The bargain was clearer.
Come here.
Do the job.
We’ll pay you.
Then go home.
Who you were at the football club, church, theatre group, car club, family dinner or in your shed wasn’t necessarily any of your employer’s business.
Now we say bring your whole self to work, and then sometimes become quite uncomfortable when the whole person actually arrives.
Bring your whole self.
But not quite so much of that bit.
- Could you be less direct?
- Could you stop questioning everything?
- Could you communicate more professionally?
- Could you tone down the intensity?
- Could you develop more executive presence?
- Could you be a little more like everybody else while demonstrating your authentic self?
That’s a bloody confusing set of instructions.
For someone who has spent their entire life working out which version of themselves is acceptable in which environment, it can be exhausting.
And this is why I reckon the idea of people hiding in plain sight matters.
They weren’t necessarily hiding under the bed.
They were compartmentalised.
The conforming version went to school.
The professional version went to work.
The obsessed version went to the hobby club.
The creative version played music at night.
The eccentric version came out around family.
The technically brilliant version was permitted to exist in the server room but apparently wasn’t suitable for the boardroom.
The masked version navigated the social world.
And increasingly, those walls are disappearing.
- Digital removed some of them.
- The internet removed others.
- Remote work knocked a few more down.
- AI is now challenging what parts of human work continue to create value.
Work and life are beginning to intermingle again in completely different ways. Entrepreneurs today know this better than ever. They also know that boundaries, energy management, and a cross-functional life are the world they need to live in. Some do it well; others don’t. See people like Dan Martell who talk about managing everything at once.
Oddly enough, there is almost a faint echo here of the pre-industrial world.
Not because we’re about to go back to farming our own potatoes and organising the day according to sunlight, but because the clean industrial boundaries between work, community, identity, learning, creation and life are becoming much harder to maintain.
We can work from home.
Run a business from a laptop.
Build an international community around a niche interest.
Learn while we’re working.
Create something at midnight.
Sell it to somebody on the other side of the planet before breakfast.
Our job can be part employment, part contract work, part intellectual property, part creativity and part something we haven’t invented a decent word for yet.
If those worlds are coming back together, then inclusion becomes incredibly important, more than ever before. (And we need those to lead and shape it as they naturally have the skills to do so.)
Not inclusion as a special programme for the people who don’t fit.
I mean designing the way we work broadly enough that far fewer people need to ask for permission to function.
Communication is a wonderfully simple example.
If I say, “I’m hungry”, when what I actually want to communicate is, “I’m going to lunch and I’d like you to come with me”, then I’ve created a little communication puzzle.
The other person has to infer what I meant.
Some people will do that instinctively.
Others won’t.
I can then decide the person who didn’t infer my hidden meaning has a communication problem.
Or I could just say, “I’m going to lunch. Would you like to come?”
- Nobody loses.
- The neurotypical person understands me.
- The neurocomplex person understands me.
- Nobody needs an accommodation.
- Nobody needs to disclose a diagnosis.
- Nobody needs a policy.
- I simply communicated what I meant.
That’s the kind of inclusion that interests me.
When we design things clearly enough for a wider range of humans, quite often we make them better for everybody.
This is not an argument against accommodations.
There will always be disabled people who need specific support, and there are neurodivergent people whose disability is profound regardless of how brilliantly we design an environment.
We shouldn’t erase them from the conversation in our enthusiasm for strengths.
However, accommodation shouldn’t be our only imagination for inclusion.
We can also stop creating some collisions in the first place.
And all of this is happening at what I call the Catalyst Moment.
That’s not an accidental phrase.
My leadership framework is the Catalyst Leadership Model because I believe this is exactly where we are.
We are standing at the intersection of an industrial age that shaped almost everything we recognise about modern work and a digital age that is turning many of those assumptions upside down.
The old age valued predictability because predictability created enormous value.
The new one increasingly has to operate in complexity.
The old one became brilliant at repetition.
The new one has machines and AI getting extraordinarily good at repeatable work.
The old one could create leadership structures around control, hierarchy and having the answer.
The new one increasingly needs people who can cope when there isn’t one.
That changes what becomes valuable in a human being.
- Curiosity matters.
- Judgement matters.
- Creativity matters.
- Pattern recognition matters.
- Relationships matter.
Being able to connect things that weren’t supposed to belong together matters.
Having the courage to question something everybody else has quietly accepted matters.
Being able to operate when the path isn’t obvious matters.
Those aren’t exclusively neurodivergent capabilities.
Let’s not create another silly stereotype where every neurodivergent person is suddenly some kind of superpowered innovator.
We’re human beings.
Some of us are brilliant at those things.
Some aren’t.
Neurotypical people can possess every one of those capabilities as well.
My point is that some of the characteristics we have spent generations trying to constrain in neuro-complex people can become incredibly useful in an environment that requires difference rather than repetition.
Which creates one hell of an opportunity.
The people we’ve told they’re too much might be exactly the people we need to step forward.
The technically brilliant person we’ve decided isn’t leadership material might understand the emerging world better than the person who perfectly learned the old leadership rules.
The person asking annoying questions may be seeing something everybody else has missed.
The child who wanted to know why everything worked the way it did might grow into the adult capable of redesigning it.
Maybe those people haven’t been missing at all.
Maybe we’ve simply been looking for leadership in the wrong places.
And there’s one more thing starting to happen that I reckon takes us into the next rabbit hole.
There is now an entire generation moving through adult working life that was handed the old prescription & formula, and is discovering, sometimes rather painfully, that it no longer produces the promised result.
- Get a qualification.
- Get married.
- Have a few kids.
- Build a career.
- Work hard.
- Be loyal.
- Keep progressing.
- Buy the house.
- Do the sensible things.
- Eventually you will have security.
- Millennials heard that message loudly.
- A lot of them followed it.
And now many are looking around at housing, career instability, changing work, restructures, digital disruption, cost of living, AI, non-linear career paths and a very different relationship between organisations and employees, and asking a fairly reasonable question.
I did what you told me to do.
Why doesn’t it work?
That’s becoming its own conversation in popular culture, sometimes described as a millennial career crisis or mid-career crisis.
But I reckon there is a much bigger idea hiding inside it.
What if this isn’t simply a generation having a crisis?
What if we’re watching the old industrial life playbook finally lose its grip on the world it was designed for?
Because if people entering the workforce today really are looking at 18 jobs across six careers, then we’re not talking about tweaking the old career model. (Perhaps the topic of my next piece.)
We’re talking about something fundamentally different.
And here’s the part I find particularly interesting.
Neuro-complex people may have been dealing with versions of that problem for generations.
What do you do when the standard path doesn’t quite fit?
You adapt.
You build around yourself.
You learn new things.
You follow curiosity.
You change careers.
You find your people.
You create strange combinations of skills.
You develop a niche.
You start something.
Did you know that some of these people have been solving the leadership issues we’re experiencing now for all those moons already?
Have we been listening?
It’s an exciting time because the leadership of toxic, manipulative or coercive influence has no place in the world we’re building. We need something different. And some of the people who understand that best are neuro-complex people. That sense of justice, knowing when to say no, seeing ideas and connections that matter, challenging things that don’t make sense and finding another way forward are needed more than ever.
Think about all those “tech people” we’ve spent decades setting aside in the workplace. The Agile Manifesto is only one example of technical communities finding completely different ways to deal with leadership, quality, complexity, rapid change and resilience. While the rest of the organisation was often still working from the old industrial playbook, these people were already experimenting with something different.
That’s bloody exciting.
Now is the time to recognise these people, see their brilliance and creativity, value the unique ways their brains work, and make room for them to help build and lead the world we need next.
There is no better moment than now.
References and further reading
Crompton, C.J., Sharp, M., Axbey, H., Fletcher-Watson, S., Flynn, E.G. and Ropar, D. (2020) ‘Neurotype-matching, but not being autistic, influences self and observer ratings of interpersonal rapport’, Frontiers in Psychology.
Davies, J., Romualdez, A.M., Pellicano, E. and Remington, A. (2024) ‘Career progression for autistic people: A scoping review’, Autism.
Davis, R.A., Conroy, J.C. and Clague, J. (2021) ‘Schools as factories: The limits of a metaphor’, Journal of Philosophy of Education.
Hodge, E.K. and Meltzoff, K.K. (2026) ‘The relationship between autistic camouflaging and mental health: A scoping review’, Frontiers in Psychiatry.
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