Neurodiversity: the data behind not belonging

Imagine my surprise when I opened LinkedIn and saw that the City & Guilds Foundation Neurodiversity Index Report 2026 in collaboration with Prof. Amanda Kirby MBBS MRCGP PhD FCGI FRSA 🟢 had just been published.

It was a real “from my lips to God’s ears” moment.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about whether we are commoditising neurodiversity. I asked whether, in the rush to respond to growing interest, we had started turning neurodiversity into something too neat, too packaged and too easy to consume and, even more concerningly, whether we had created an opportunity for some people and organisations to make a quick buck.

A talk. A training session. A campaign week. A badge on a website. A nice slide explaining neurodivergent strengths. Then back to the same meetings, the same email habits, the same performance systems, the same pace, and the same assumptions about what “professional” looks and sounds like.

This report puts data behind my worst fears.

The key findings, for me, are not complicated, but they are uncomfortable. The report shows a widening gap between employer confidence in inclusion and neurodivergent employee experience of inclusion. It shows that awareness has moved faster than implementation. It shows that adjustments are still too slow, too reactive and too dependent on individual managers. It shows that microaggressions are not incidental, but part of the everyday culture shaping psychological safety. And, perhaps most importantly, it shows that neuroinclusion is still too often treated as a training or policy issue, when it is really a design, leadership and culture issue.

That is why I think this report matters. It does not simply ask, “Do organisations care about neurodiversity?” It asks, “What has actually changed about how work happens?”

And while that is validating, it also makes for a sad and sobering read. Particularly in a week where I have felt less like I belong in some professional spaces than I have for a long time, and where I have heard yet more stories from neurodivergent people being worn down by systems that say one thing and do another.

I was not arguing against awareness in my previous piece. I have benefited from awareness. I would not have been diagnosed, or started to make sense of my own life and leadership journey, without it. Language matters. Recognition matters. Seeing yourself in a framework after years of thinking you were simply too much, too inconsistent, too sensitive, too disorganised, too intense or too difficult can be life-changing.

But awareness has limits. It gave me language. It did not automatically give me belonging. And it certainly has not stopped me coming up against poor systems, performative inclusion, people explaining my own brain to me and behaviour that bears very little resemblance to the values being broadcast.

The report, explores how workplace environments, cultures and contexts either enable or disable neurodivergent talent. Kirby places prevention, accessibility, early intervention and universal design at the centre of the conversation. In other words, the report is not asking whether organisations have heard of neurodiversity. It is asking whether work itself has been designed in ways that allow different cognitive profiles to thrive.

The headline finding is stark. Employers rate their neurodiversity readiness at around 70-75%, rising to 78-80% among senior leaders. Yet only 32-38% of neurodivergent employees report feeling psychologically safe to disclose, trusting that adjustments will be implemented consistently, or believing their organisation understands the impact of their neurodivergence.

That is not simply a communication problem. It is the gap between the story organisations are telling about themselves and the reality neurodivergent people are living inside those organisations. And that gap is very real, and often very painful.

It also validates something I have been pushing back against for a long time: the idea that neuroinclusion can be achieved by talking about neurodiversity, without changing the wider systems people are expected to survive inside.

Because this is bigger than neurodiversity. If we do not update our ideas about work, performance, professionalism and what constitutes acceptable behaviour between human beings, then we have a much larger systemic and commercial problem. We are still too often designing work around a very narrow model of the “ideal worker”: fast, linear, constantly available, emotionally contained, socially fluent, comfortable with ambiguity, able to read between the lines, and apparently unaffected by poor communication, unclear expectations or relentless pace.

That model does not just disable neurodivergent people. It burns out plenty of neurotypical people too. So perhaps neurodiversity is not the niche issue some organisations still imagine it to be. Perhaps it is one of the clearest mirrors we have for what is no longer working in the workplace.

When neurodivergent people ask for clarity, consistency, psychological safety, humane treatment, better communication and less performative urgency, we are not asking for special treatment. We are often naming the cracks in the system first.

And recently, I felt it myself.

In one of my voluntary roles I found myself asking for what I can only describe as human adjustments. Not a gold-plated neurodivergent utopia. Not a personal concierge service for my ADHD brain. Just clearer ways of working and trust. Basic scaffolding. The kind of thing that helps a capable person contribute well. The kind of thing that, frankly, helps most people contribute well.

And yet the experience of asking for it was draining and painful, and ultimately resulted in me being rejected from yet another system I am still convinced I could improve. Not because anyone was setting out to be cruel, but because every time I ask for something that helps me participate and I am met with resistance, confusion, defensiveness or a reminder that I am somehow “different again”, something very old gets activated.

It is not just about the adjustment in front of me. It is the whole cycle of shame and not-belonging starting again: the feeling of being the child in the classroom who has misunderstood the rules nobody explained. The one who can see the club, can often help build the club, but somehow still cannot quite get accepted into it.

That may sound dramatic if you have not lived it. But reasonable adjustments are not just administrative requests. They often sit on top of a lifetime of correction, exclusion, masking and trying to make yourself easier for other people to tolerate. So when someone asks for something that makes participation possible, they may be asking not to be put back into the same old story: that belonging is conditional on their ability to absorb the cost of a system that was not built with them in mind.

In this case I was met with this phrase:

“I know you want things to be neuroinclusive, but we need to make it neurotypical friendly too.”

And honestly, I think that sentence says almost everything about where we are.

Because I do want things to be neurotypical friendly. I want work to be human friendly.

What is essential for the few will benefit the many.

If by “neurotypical friendly” we mean preserving vague briefs, hidden expectations, unclear ownership, fast-moving informal channels, messy handovers, last-minute changes, performative urgency and the expectation that everyone should somehow just know what is going on, then I am not sure that is especially friendly to neurotypical people either.

It is just familiar. And familiar is not the same as good.

This is where the report’s design argument matters. If neuroinclusion is a training issue, we can solve it with a webinar. If it is a policy issue, we can solve it with a document. If it is a branding issue, we can solve it with a campaign week and a cheerful graphic. But if it is a design issue, then we have to look at how work is actually built.

That means looking at meetings, recruitment, onboarding, performance conversations, feedback norms, decision-making, email culture, use of chat platforms, expectations around responsiveness, the social rules nobody writes down, the way conflict is handled and the way “tone” is policed.

And, perhaps most importantly and uncomfortably, it means looking at ourselves. Our own behaviour. Our own bias. Our own beliefs. Our own need to be right. Our own discomfort when someone asks us to do things differently.

Because it is much easier to celebrate neurodivergent strengths than to get curious about what happens in us when we meet difference. Do we listen? Do we assume? Do we make it personal? Do we hide behind process? Do we try to become the expert to avoid listening to the experience? Do we call someone difficult because it is less confronting than admitting we are carrying our own stuff?

I have also been struck recently by how many people have contacted me after seeing my work online, working with me, or attending one of my talks, to say that they have disclosed their neurodivergence at work.

Some have done that because they finally had language for something they had been carrying for years. Some because they wanted to stop masking quite so hard. Some because they hoped that naming it might make work less exhausting. Some because they wanted the people around them to understand that what looked like inconsistency, intensity, sensitivity, directness, distraction or overwhelm was not laziness, rudeness or lack of commitment.

And some, more painfully, have disclosed because they felt they had no choice.

I have heard stories of people effectively being forced to out themselves because they were challenged for not making eye contact, for wanting their camera off, for needing written instructions, for asking not to be put on the spot, or for struggling with workplace norms that others treated as neutral and obvious.

This is the bit that keeps troubling me.

Disclosure should be a choice, not the price of being treated fairly.

No one should have to reveal something deeply personal in order for a manager to consider whether a meeting could have an agenda, whether feedback could be clearer, whether a deadline could be explicit, or whether “professionalism” has become a very narrow performance of comfort for the dominant group.

And yet this is still happening.

People are not always asking for grand interventions. Often, they are asking for the conditions that would allow them to do their jobs well without burning through huge amounts of energy translating, masking, apologising and anticipating other people’s reactions.

This is why the report’s findings on manager capability matter so much. It found that capability and consistency remain two of the weakest links. Many organisations now have statements, policies and training initiatives, but the actual experience of support still depends heavily on individual managers and local HR capability. Line managers are both the primary gateway to support and the single biggest point of failure.

That will not surprise anyone who has ever had to rely on one person’s interpretation of whether their needs are “reasonable”. One thoughtful manager can change everything. One careless comment can shut everything down. One person with enough humility to listen can create safety. One person who sees every request as inconvenience can make a supposedly inclusive organisation feel hostile.

This is why I keep saying inclusion is not a niche HR initiative. It is a leadership capability. It is about whether people in positions of power can tolerate difference without making it personal, receive a request without becoming defensive, distinguish between someone being difficult and someone naming friction in the system, and understand that “I need this to work well” is not the same as “I am asking to be treated as special.”

It is about whether people in positions of power can tolerate difference without making it personal. Whether they can receive a request without becoming defensive. Whether they can distinguish between someone being difficult and someone naming friction in the system. Whether they can understand that “I need this to work well” is not the same as “I am asking to be treated as special.”

And this is where the report becomes more than data for me.

I think about the people I have spoken to after talks who come up quietly and say some version of, “This is me, but I don’t know how to say it at work.”

I think about clients carrying huge responsibility, leading teams, managing boards, building businesses, raising investment, handling complexity most people never see and still finding themselves floored by the basic admin of being believed.

I think about senior women who have spent decades translating themselves into acceptable shapes. Not too direct. Not too emotional. Not too intense. Not too fast. Not too scattered. Not too clever in the wrong way. Not too much.

I think about the people who have been told they are brilliant but exhausting, strategic but chaotic, insightful but hard to follow, passionate but too much, sensitive but overreacting, direct but rude, struggling but not struggling enough to warrant support.

And I think about all the people I have coached who have been told they have “executive presence” issues, only for us to discover there is nothing wrong with their presence. They are just not a clone of the person assessing them or the company meetings are being facilitated so poorly they simply have no space.

This is where neuroinclusion, leadership development and performance assessment start to overlap. Because if we keep defining leadership presence as the ability to succeed inside badly designed rooms, we should not be surprised when the same kind of people keep being seen as “ready”, while others are coached to sand themselves down.

The report’s findings on microaggressions sit right in this territory. Neurodivergent employees report frequent experiences of being interrupted, tone-policed, criticised for communication style or subject to assumptions about competence. These behaviours show up not just in formal HR processes, but in meetings, emails and performance conversations.

That matters because this is how culture accumulates: the raised eyebrow, the sigh, the “we’ve already explained this”, the “you’re overthinking it”, the “can you just be more concise?”, the “that’s not how we do things here”, the “everyone else seems fine”, and the well-meaning banter that may be okay with the person you are engaging with, but gives others a clear signal of what is tolerated and rejected.

Each moment can be explained away as small. But the accumulation is not small. It shapes whether people disclose, whether they ask for help, whether they trust leadership, whether they stay, whether they burn out, and whether they ever bring the very difference the organisation claims to value.

The report’s findings on adjustments are equally sobering. Workplace adjustments are still described as slow, reactive and uneven. Neurodivergent employees are more than twice as likely as others to wait extended periods for adjustments, and delays of three months or more are now more common than in previous years. Around six in ten neurodivergent employees say adjustments would help them perform better, yet only half feel their organisation provides support.

This is where I want leaders to pause. Adjustments are not a bit of admin at the edge of inclusion. They are often the moment an organisation’s stated values meet its real operating system. Before that point, inclusion can remain beautifully theoretical. Everyone agrees in principle. Everyone believes in fairness. Everyone wants people to thrive. Lovely. Put it on the website. But then someone asks for the workplace to change slightly rather than requiring them to absorb the cost silently. And suddenly we find out whether inclusion is a belief or a behaviour.

The report also makes an important point about intersectionality. Neurodivergence does not exist in a neat little box separate from the rest of a person's identity. It notes that unpredictable, socially effortful or cognitively overwhelming work can build into anxiety, burnout and low mood, and that women and non-binary respondents report significantly higher exposure to microaggressions.

Again, this validates what so many of us see in real life. People are not bringing one isolated “need” to work. They are bringing a whole nervous system, a whole life, a whole history of being understood or misunderstood, and a whole set of strategies they may have built simply to get through the day. No, organisations cannot fix everything. But they can stop making things harder than they need to be.

This is why I struggle when neurodiversity work becomes too clean and cheerful. When it becomes all about quiet rooms, creativity and superpowers. When we skip too quickly to the shiny, palatable bits and avoid the deeper work. Of course there is a business case: lost talent, burnout, attrition, poor decision-making and underperformance created by environment rather than capability. The report itself states that neuroinclusion is not just an inclusion agenda, but a productivity strategy, a health imperative and a test of organisational maturity.

But if we only talk about neurodivergent people when they are useful, creative, productive or commercially attractive, we are still not really doing inclusion. We are just rebranding exploitation with good intentions and poor results.

Real neuroinclusion has to include the hard bits: looking in the mirror, challenging our own stuff, choosing what is right over what is familiar, and being brave enough to call out behaviour that damages the very fabric of what we are trying to create, even if that ruffles feathers or makes things feel a bit less “fun”.

I also think about a moment from a previous working life that has stayed with me. I was at a leadership away day. In the evening, when one member of the team went to the bathroom, the rest of the leadership team hid from him as a joke. He appeared to take it well. People laughed. It could easily have been dismissed as harmless fun.

But I felt deeply uncomfortable. I have been bullied at school and something in my body recognised the dynamic before my brain had fully caught up. It felt excluding. It felt unsafe. It felt like the kind of behaviour that tells people belonging can be withdrawn at any moment if the group decides you are the joke.

I raised it, and was told I was being silly. That it was fine. Perhaps I felt differently because I was not drinking. But it was not fine. And I have to own my part in that too. I was in a senior leadership role. I felt something was wrong, but I did not properly call it out in the moment. Part of me feared being seen as humourless, difficult, or the person making everything less fun.

But inclusive leadership is not about making organisations joyless. It is about knowing the difference between connection and exclusion, between shared humour and group-sanctioned humiliation, between playfulness and a culture where people have to laugh along to stay safe.

That moment has stayed with me because behaviour does not have to be intended as cruel to land as unsafe. And when leaders dismiss discomfort too quickly, they teach everyone in the room what will and will not be protected.

And this is where the forest, as ever, gives me a useful slap round the face. A forest does not become resilient by deciding one species is the default and everything else may apply for reasonable adjustments. Different conditions support different forms of life. Some are obvious and easy to value. Some are quiet and underground. Some look messy but are doing essential work. Some only become visible when they disappear and the whole system starts to weaken.

Healthy systems do not tolerate difference as an administrative inconvenience. They depend on it.

That is what I wish more organisations understood about neurodiversity. If the only people who can thrive in your organisation are those who can process quickly, respond instantly, sit comfortably in ambiguity, read between the lines, tolerate constant interruption, regulate their emotions invisibly, communicate in the dominant style and recover quietly in their own time, then you have not built a high-performance culture. You have built a filtering system. And it may be filtering out exactly the people you claim to value.

So yes, I am glad this report exists. I am glad the data is there. I am glad we can point to something and say, “This is not just anecdote. This is not just sensitivity. This is not just a few difficult people making a fuss.” But I also feel weary that we still need data to prove what so many people have been living.

For me, the key findings are clear. The confidence gap tells us organisations are often measuring effort while employees are experiencing impact. The adjustment gap tells us inclusion succeeds or fails at the point of need. The manager gap tells us this is not a niche HR issue, but a leadership capability issue. The microaggression gap tells us culture is made in everyday moments: meetings, emails, feedback, humour, tone, silence, defensiveness and what leaders choose to challenge or ignore. And the design gap is the big one. Neuroinclusion will not be achieved by asking neurodivergent people to keep adapting to systems that remain fundamentally unchanged.

So what do we do with that?

We stop treating awareness as the outcome. We stop assuming a policy means practice has changed. We stop asking neurodivergent people to keep telling their stories while doing too little to redesign the rooms, systems and behaviours they are being asked to survive in.

And we start doing the harder work on ourselves.

Because neuroinclusion is not just about understanding terminology. It is about increasing our tolerance for difference. It is about noticing what happens inside us when someone communicates differently, processes differently, asks for clarity, challenges the pace, misses an unspoken rule, or does not perform professionalism in the shape we expected.

We train managers properly, not just to know the language, but to listen, respond, follow through and hold difference without making it personal. We look at meetings, feedback, recruitment, onboarding, performance, communication norms and workload with fresh eyes. We ask whether our idea of “professionalism” is genuinely linked to performance, or whether it is simply rewarding people who already know how to perform the dominant culture.

And we build systems where clarity, consistency, psychological safety and humane treatment are not treated as special requests, but as basic conditions for good work.

And we remember that what is essential for some will often be beneficial to many.

This is increasingly the work I find myself doing with leaders and organisations: helping people move beyond awareness into the harder, more useful work of behaviour change, leadership reflection and redesigning how people actually work together. Not because organisations need another polished conversation about neurodiversity, but because they need to understand where the gap is between what they say, what they reward and what people actually experience.

If you are a leader, HR or L&D professional, or organisation looking at this report and thinking, “We probably have a gap between our intentions and our reality,” that is a good place to start.

Uncomfortable, yes. But useful. And much better than waiting until your most thoughtful, creative, divergent or exhausted people have already left.

So perhaps the question for leaders is not, “Are we neuroinclusive?” Perhaps it is, “When someone asks us to work differently, what happens next?” Do we listen? Do we get curious? Do we redesign? Or do we defend the system?

Because if the request for human adjustments is still treated as a problem to manage, then we are not as far along as we think. And if making work clearer, kinder, more consistent and more accessible is seen as being unfriendly to neurotypical people, then we have misunderstood the whole point.

Neuroinclusion was never meant to be about making work better for a special category of people over there. It was meant to show us where work was less human than we had allowed ourselves to notice.

Reference: City & Guilds Foundation Neurodiversity Index Report 2026, produced with Professor Amanda Kirby.