What’s the blueprint for innovation? ADHD traits and a lesson from evolution (with video)
Published on 16 May 2024 • Written by Dr Lisa Colledge
Hello, I'm Lisa. I'm Dr. Lisa College, the founder and CEO of Lisa College Consulting, and I work with organizations to shape their culture so that they are welcoming, attractive, and enabling to people of all different cognitive styles. By that I mean ways of thinking, ways of engaging with information.
Now, if you work in this area, you very quickly come across literature about innovation because innovation - being better at innovation - is one of the major advantages of having a cognitively inclusive culture. And indeed you're here because you were interested in an article that I wrote called, “What's the blueprint for innovation? Take a lesson from evolution”.
What I'm going to do in this film is talk through the information that I shared in that article. What I did in that article was to share the results of a paper that was published earlier this year, that's 2024, by a researcher called David Barack, with some colleagues, and those researchers had been looking at the character traits that were associated with survival in conditions of scarcity. Right. So what they had done was to create a computer program, which mimicked an environment in which there was a limited amount of food. So, the food was berries on bushes, and the person who was participating in the research, they had to forage online in an environment for two minutes and find as many berries as they possibly could.
What did that mean? It meant that they started at a berry bush. And the berry bush was replete with berries - full of berries - and they stayed at the berry bush and the berries depleted. They virtually ate the berries, right? And then they had to decide, do I stay at this berry bush? and wait for the berries to regrow, knowing that they won't regrow to quite the amount that they were at when I first got to this berry bush, but they'll regrow again; or do I go and look for a different berry bush which would be full of more berries and so on. So they had to make this call. They had to make this balance between staying at a location where I know that there are berries – OK, I have to wait for a bit for them to grow and there won't be so many, but there will be berries - and going to somewhere new where you didn't know where it was yet.
And what the researchers checked was how many berries each person found when they were doing their two minute trials in this virtual environment. After the trials, the researchers also asked people to complete a survey, which would help them to associate the results with traits of ADHD. So this was a self reported survey which people filled in, and I have to be clear, it wasn't a diagnosis of ADHD. The researchers were looking for traits associated with ADHD, right? So it may be that those people had an ADHD diagnosis, it may be that they were close, it may be just that they had some of the characteristics, but the diagnosis wasn't really important for this research.
So let's get to the results. What the researchers predicted was that people with more traits of ADHD would not stay at each berry bush for very long. And that's indeed what they saw because as is well known, people with ADHD tend to zip around more quickly between topics or activities or things. It's also what they saw at the berry bushes. And the researchers predicted that this was less optimal behavior that would result in fewer berries being collected. And what they found was that they were wrong.
So the people with ADHD traits who participated in this trial were the ones who did best. They got the most berries, the highest rewards. Yes, they did leave each berry bush most quickly. They intuitively seem to sense at which point they needed to leave the berry bushes before they got so depleted that they weren't really collecting very many berries anymore and much better at knowing when to go to the next berry bush.
So that behavior that we know is associated with ADHD of moving around much more quickly between things - in an environment where you need to forage to survive, that's a really massive benefit. So those people are much better able than people with lower or no ADHD traits to know when it's time to move on and look for something new.
So imagine that in your organization. Having people with those kinds of character traits. OK, we're not making berry bushes, virtual berry bushes, for our customers, but we're making some products that they value, and I think it's time that I went and had a look at something else. The resistance to, to trying out something new is much lower than people with lower ADHD traits.
Now that paper was about a tendency to leave patches, right? It wasn't really about the tendency to search. The computer program did the searching for the person. All they had to say was, I want to leave the berry bush. And then the computer program would give them some penalty in terms of a time delay before they got to the new berry bush and could eat more berries. So that research didn't say anything about the searching strategy that that the people with ADHD traits or fewer ADHD traits used, and after I read that new paper, I wanted to find out what the searching strategy was like.
So I located another research paper. It was published in 2019, and that was by Charlotte van den Driesche - hopefully I've said her name correctly - also working with other researchers, and they looked at a group of children, nine year old children, not adults as the first paper had done. And again, they were looking at traits of ADHD evaluated this time - because it was children - by their parents and their teachers.
They were looking at the searching strategy. So the children had to do two things. They were asked, first of all, to find all the silhouettes of bells that they could find on a piece of paper, right? So they had white paper, black silhouettes of all different shapes, and some of them were bells and some of them were distractors, and they had to find as many bells as they possibly could on that piece of paper in two minutes. The second thing that the children had to do was to search their memory, not to search something physical, but to search their memory. And they were asked to name as many different animals as they could possibly name just by thinking about it.
What the researchers found… First of all, with the bells, the children with higher ADHD traits found the same number of bells as the children with no ADHD traits. But the really interesting thing is that their searching journey was much more convoluted. They took a much longer between bells and so, in principle, you can imagine in the wild, you would be able to find, by chance, different things as you were doing that searching strategy. And that's the kind of behavior that will help you to have ideas and, and be original.
With the animals, the children with high traits of ADHD actually named more animals - more unique animals. But there was a cost, so they also repeated animals that they had named before. They seemed not to be so good at remembering - I've already said a giraffe or an elephant or whatever - but they just said it again. But the result was that they could name more animals.
Alright, so that's the end of the two papers I wanted to talk about. So what, what does this tell us about people with traits of ADHD. And now I'm going to say, let's, let's think about it really in terms of our work environment, of our organizations.
People with traits of ADHD probably feel a little bit messy, a little bit disorganized in how they're doing things, right? Because they are quite quick to leave something that's known and go and try something new. And maybe, if that's not our cognitive style, our thinking style, it looks like it's a little bit random and all over the place how these people with ADHD traits are working or are contributing. But, look at the results of those papers, right? In the worst case scenario, that behavior doesn't have any negative impact, right? The number of bells that those children found was the same as the children without or with lower ADHD traits. The best case scenario for those searching strategies is actually better. So if people with ADHD traits are looking for something, like they're looking for berry bushes, berries on bushes, they do better than people who search in a more conventional and structured and careful way, and also when they're searching their memories. Yeah, okay, it's a bit messy, they've got some repetition of the giraffes and the elephants or whatever animals it was, but the outcome is better, right? They can find more examples of unique animals in their memories than others.
So there are certainly really beneficial traits associated with the ADHD style of thinking that you should want in your organization if you want to be innovative, if you want to be resilient in how you respond to change that you're finding in the world around you.
The paper that I wrote is about evolution, right? Now let me bring it back to why I titled the paper evolution. So, if you think about the process of innovation, of course you need an idea at the beginning of it, and the ADHD traits are really, really good at, finding new information that will help an idea come to light. You can imagine that that very vigorous searching and active searching is not so well suited to sitting down and making a plan and sticking to the plan and telling the same message to 50 people because you want them to come along with you on the plan and participate and move in the same direction. And maybe it's also not so well suited to actually sticking with a plan through to the end. Those traits are also really important in terms of innovation, because if you don't have them, of course, you're not going to build anything. You're not going to provide any value to your customers, and they are traits that are more associated with different styles of thinking, right?
But, you need the mix. That's the point. You need the mix of cognitive styles, and you need to enable that mix in a good environment where everybody can contribute their best in order to get the benefit.
One last word about these fantastic traits of ADHD. So you can imagine that if somebody with these traits is able to work in a way where they can explore freely and they have the flexibility to dig into ideas that they've thought about and they're also not constrained by a lot of structure and process, that they're going to deliver very good results for you, right? And they're also going to be mentally very healthy because they're working in a way that their brains are evolutionarily primed for; their contribution to the success of humankind in the world is to be brilliant at searching, right? So if they're able to work in that way in your organization, they're going to be mentally healthy, happy and giving their best results to you.
In a team, hopefully, in a team which is innovative, you don't only have people with traits of ADHD because you're going to have loads of ideas, but not really very much outcome, which you can deliver to customers. So you also need people who - I mentioned - are very good at planning, very systematic, very calm, who can evaluate ideas and all of those sorts of things.
And probably, or maybe you have experienced yourself or otherwise you can imagine: that there's a bit of friction between those different styles of working. Somebody who likes to bing around and have loads of ideas is not a natural fit at working with somebody who likes to make and stick to plans, for example. Of course people with those different traits can learn to work together, but it's not necessarily something that, that is going to happen on its own, especially if people are busy, when these things tend to tend to fall away.
If you're recognizing that for your own team, or if you know of somebody who is experiencing that for their team, then it might be worth having a look at a course that I've designed, which is called “Lead with confidence: enabling ADHD traits for team success”. And what I'm doing is helping you to find a way to support your team members with the traits of ADHD, while also being very fair to other team members who don't have those traits, so that you make sure that the entire team can work effectively.
If you're interested, have a look at my services page and go to the Cognitive Inclusion Kickstart area, where you'll find information about this course, or you can always get in touch with me and we'll have a chat and I'll let you know more about it.
You can boost your innovation culture by mimicking the solution that evolution found to make sure that we thrive in the face of constant change. People are either great explorers, with a low resistance to trying out something new, or exploiters, making the most of every opportunity. These skillsets need different brain settings, and it doesn’t work to squeeze them into the same person.
Researchers looking for some of the character traits that make people successful at exploring find that they are the very same traits associated with ADHD. People with dyslexia, autism and other neurodiversities, as well as neurotypical team members, bring other specializations to the table. If you combine all these specializations together and provide an environment where everyone can thrive, your innovation will be best-in-class.
Moral of the story? Make sure your organization is attractive to both explorers and exploiters, so you have a load of great ideas and also the skills to implement them. The quickest and most sustainable way to do this is to build a culture that makes sure everyone can do what they do best.
Three key takeaways
Innovation is about stepping into the unknown. We excel at adapting to the unfamiliar — it’s why humans are still on the planet, so looking at how evolution solved innovation is a winning strategy. That strategy balances the behaviors of exploration and exploitation. Explorers have a low resistance to change and think about problems in unusual ways. Exploiters are good at making the most of every opportunity by evidence-based planning. People specialize in one mode; humanity has thrived by pooling all these skills in a social group.
Researchers have uncovered the traits of good explorers. The people who achieved the highest scores in a virtual game to collect the most berries from patches of bushes were the ones who were more likely to move to the next patch before the berries in front of them ran out. Another study showed that some children, whose searches gave just as good and sometimes better results than others, used more meandering searching strategies that were more likely to reveal unexpected connections. Both groups of specialized explorers had a higher prevalence of ADHD traits.
ADHD is part of the evolutionary solution to thriving in the face of change. People with ADHD offer exceptional exploring skills to groups they participate in. Mixing in people with other kinds of neurodiversities supplies other specializations, and neurotypicals are great at deepening our knowledge to gain maximum benefit from each opportunity. When you need innovation to keep growing and stay competitive, your best solution is to is to copy evolution and make your organization a place that attracts all of these specializations. Create an organizational culture that welcomes neurodivergent people as well as neurotypical. It’s doable.
Innovation is change. It is about stepping into the unknown. You might want to make a process take half as long. Perhaps you want to move to a new business model because your current one is based on factors that made sense 20 years ago. Or maybe you want to improve the happiness and satisfaction of your employees. Whatever the change is, you need to brave the unknown.
Humans excel at adapting to change. Change used to be about surviving predator threats, or food and water shortages. Now it is about continuing business growth and remaining competitive. But the behavior we need to succeed now remains the same.
So, if you want to make sure your organization thrives when faced with change, your best bet is to mimic what evolution has had hundreds of thousands of years to get right, when the price of getting it wrong would have been an end to humankind. After all, the price of getting it wrong now might be your organization.
How exactly has evolution solved innovation?
Evolution has understood that facing change is essentially a search. When you’re searching for food, mates, ideas, memories — anything — you need to be good at balancing two very different behaviors: exploration and exploitation. Researchers in many different domains have written about it; you can find the references I’ve used at the end.
Good explorers have a low resistance to change. They find it relatively easy to decide to leave the old behind and try something new. They can quickly grasp the pros and cons of the current situation. They can think about things in a different way, free of the constraints of what most others think is ‘right’. They question assumptions.
Good exploiters make the most of the opportunity in front of them. They are fantastic at analysis and pattern recognition. They use the information available to them to create a plan. They can resist the lure of instant gratification because they know that the rewards will be bigger later, and they think they are worth waiting for.
I think that executing the plan is a third behavior. It’s about action, not planning and analysis. It’s about coordinating people and resource availability, communicating, motivating, monitoring. It’s the ability to follow someone else’s plan and make decisions within the constraints it sets out.
Evolution found that these skillsets need different brain settings. If you try to put all these specializations into one person, they don’t excel at any of them (and they died out and aren’t around anymore). The solution is to split up the specializations between people, so that we each excel at one type of thinking. A fantastic explorer is not very good at exploiting.
The result is that humans are social so that we can all have access to all of the skills, shared by different members of our group. This is described by the new and, I think, extremely exciting Theory of Complementary Cognition for which there is a load of evidence.
How can we see that different brains are specialized in different ways?
One example: a recent paper investigated what makes someone great at exploring. They asked more than 450 people to pretend that they were trying to survive by finding food and looked at the effectiveness of their survival strategies. In an online game, participants needed to collect as many berries growing on bushes as possible in 2 minutes. Each participant chose whether to ‘exploit’ the same patch of bushes by continuing to collect berries from it, or to ‘explore’ by moving to a new patch. Moving to a new patch came with a time penalty of not being able to collect berries while they ‘moved’. Participants knew that there were limitless patches of berry bushes available, and that a berry patch would eventually be empty if they kept on collecting from it.
The people who collected the most berries stayed at their patches for a shorter time. They were quicker to decide to leave a patch and didn’t wait for the berry bushes to empty. Their decisions matched most closely with the theoretical optimal strategy for foraging as predicted by the Marginal Value Theorem.
After their virtual foraging, the participants all completed an ADHD self-screening survey. Those who collected the most berries also rated the highest for traits associated with ADHD.
If I’d started by describing these traits as distractibility, restlessness, risk taking, a focus on instant gratification, and difficulty controlling behavior in return for later gain, you might have recognized it as a typical description of ADHD which tends to focus on the negative interpretation. But I’m betting there’s a good chance that you didn’t recognize it until I mentioned the self-screening survey. However we label the behaviors associated with ADHD, they give the best results when we want to explore the unknown.
Another study that looked at searching itself, instead of the decision to move to something new, also found that being good at exploring is associated with ADHD characteristics. Children searched for as many silhouettes of bells as they could on a page filled with silhouettes of all kinds of things; all children found about the same number, but those with stronger ADHD traits found them in a different way. Their route was longer and more variable, so they were more likely to notice other things as well — obviously useful for exploring the unknown. The same children also named as many animals as possible, and those with ADHD traits thought of the most unique animals, although they repeated some of the same ones more. ADHD traits enable searching behavior that is more likely to reveal unexpected opportunities.
ADHD is a specialization for exploring the unknown
ADHD is an solution, honed through hundreds of thousands of years of evolution, to being outstanding at deciding to risk exploring the unknown. Interestingly, nomadic tribes are more genetic variants associated with ADHD than those who stay put.
Exploring is no good if you can’t exploit what you find. Other neurodiversities, such as dyslexia and autism, fill in other specializations. And neurotypical people are amazing at deepening our knowledge so that we get the most out of every risky step ito the unknown.
If you put everything together, in conditions that allow everyone to do what they do best, then you have the most innovative group you can get.
Innovation thrives in teams that are cognitively diverse
Those with ADHD traits often bring a burst of creativity and fresh ideas. But turning those ideas into real value for customers requires a blend of cognitive styles—including team members who can plan, execute, influence, and keep everything on track. If you want to bet on your organization being able to succeed when faced with change, your best solution is to mimic what evolution has had hundreds of thousands of years to perfect. Make sure your organization is a place where people who bring the full range of specializations are able to gather to contribute all cognitive styles; different styles of thinking are all needed in certain circumstances.
It’s natural for friction to arise between these different approaches. Idea generators may clash with those who prefer structure and sticking to the plan. Left unchecked, this friction can lead to a breakdown in productivity and leave team members feeling like they're working against each other.
But there’s a way forward. The key is creating an enabling environment where cognitive inclusion thrives. With the right strategies, you can guide your team of brilliant, diverse thinkers to work together seamlessly, fueling innovation while protecting their mental well-being.
If this resonates with you—or if you know someone facing these challenges, my Lead with confidence: enabling ADHD traits for team success course is designed just for you. Learn how to empower team members with ADHD traits while maintaining balance and fairness across the entire team.
You can find out more here or reach out to me directly to chat about how this course can help your team.
References
Search is about the balance between exploration and exploitation: Thomas Hills, Peter Todd, David Lazer, David Redish, Iain Couzin, and the Cognitive Search Research Group (2015) ‘Exploration versus exploitation in space, mind and society’, Trends in Cognitive Science 19(1) pp. 46–54.
Theory of Complementary Cognition: Helen Taylor, Brice Fernandes and Sarah Wraight (2021) ‘The Evolution of Complementary Cognition: Humans Cooperatively Adapt and Evolve through a System of Collective Cognitive Search’, Cambridge Archaeological Journal 32(1), pp. 61–77.
People with ADHD traits are superior at exploring, as judged by virtually foraging for berries: D.L. Barack, V.U. Ludwig, F. Parodi, N. Ahmed, E.M. Brannon, A. Ramakrishnan and M.L. Platt (2024) ‘Attention deficits linked with proclivity to explore while foraging’ Proceedings of the Royal Society B 291, article number 20222584.
People with ADHD traits show more diverse searching strategies: C. Van den Driessche, F. Chevrier, A. Cleeremans and J. Sackur (2019) ‘Lower Attentional Skills predict increased exploratory foraging patterns’, Scientific Reports 9, article number 10948.
I'm Lisa, and I help leaders create inclusive cultures that embrace all neurostyles. By empowering every team member to contribute at their best, while fostering mental well-being, you will boost innovation, retention, and talent acquisition—leading to enhanced business performance.
Click here to learn more about how my services can transform your team.
