Design your culture to thrive amid constant change
Lead your organization to shape its evolution with confidence and resilience, boosting employee mental health and engagement by connecting diverse thinking styles to release the collective genius.
Higher innovation revenue
Improvement in
well-being
68%
19%
43%
51%
Your organization operates in an environment of rapid change and high-stakes innovation. Research shows that teams with a mix of cognitive styles—and the skills to connect them—excel at solving complex problems. By building a culture that attracts and integrates diverse thinking styles, inspired by the strengths associated with neurodivergences such as autism and ADHD, your organization gains a critical competitive edge.
Traditional neuro-inclusive approaches are reactive, accommodating people who declare a need. My proactive, top-down framework integrates cognitive inclusion into everyday leadership and team practices. This approach ensures that diverse thinkers are actively sought out and supported, leading to healthier, more engaged employees and improved organizational outcomes.
Better employee retention
Larger pool of talent
Employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS) points in 1 year
+34
eNPS points - resilience and connectedness over 3 years despite COVID lockdowns and a major organizational restructure.
+64
Why a top-down approach complements bottom-up accommodations
A top-down approach integrates cognitive inclusion into leadership behaviors, team practices, and organizational policies, ensuring that inclusion is proactive, scalable, and sustainable. It complements bottom-up accommodations by creating a culture where every thinking style is valued, reducing the need for reactive adjustments. Here’s why it’s essential:
Organizational culture transforms faster when it’s leadership models inclusive behaviors, setting the tone across all teams.
Scalability
Embedding cognitive inclusion into everyday behaviors, processes, and policies ensures lasting change and reduces over-reliance on individual accommodations.
Sustainability
Many neurodivergent employees are not formally diagnosed or choose not to disclose their differences due to stigma or bias. A universally inclusive culture meets these hidden needs without requiring self-identification.
Fairness
Assuming that neurotypical employees are always in the majority and so should adapt is unfair; tech teams, for example, may have a higher proportion of autistic thinkers than neurotypical thinkers. Cognitive inclusion is not one-size-fits-all and requires mutual respect and shared accountability among all team members.
Shared responsibility
Guided by the cognitive styles of neurodivergent individuals, cognitive inclusion benefits everyone—transcending age, background, disability, ethnicity, gender, and other identities. This approach amplifies the universal principle that inclusion drives innovation, resilience, and success for all.
Universal design benefits
Hi, I’m Lisa.
In this short film, I’ll explain what I can do for your organization.
I want to tell you about a kind of diversity that you can’t see.
This is diversity in the way we think.
Psychologists call it cognitive diversity.
It’s about how we prefer to take in information. How we perceive it. How we use it.
You can’t see cognitive diversity, but you can feel it. You can experience it.
When you get it right, you see transformations such as one I led even through a reorganization and covid lockdowns that saw the employee-NPS rating increase from -33 to +30 over 3 years.
Intuitively it makes sense.
Let’s say you’re a visionary. You can see where you want your business to go.
Now, if you hire a lot of people who think like you, you’ll have wonderful, stimulating discussions about how to bring value to your customers and be super-successful.
But you won’t be very good at making a strategy to get from here to your vision.
Or at executing it.
That’s because the brain skills involved in being visionary, and designing and executing a strategy, are different.
You don’t naturally find them in the same person.
Sure, you can learn to become OK at another style, but you won’t excel at it.
So with lots of the same kind of brain, you start to get into trouble.
Your innovation stagnates. It’s difficult to respond to changes like artificial intelligence, a new competitor, or a new customer need.
It’s hard to attract new talent, to compete with others to secure people with the skills you really want. It’s also hard to keep the talent you already have.
Result – your customers get less satisfied, your productivity drops, your success declines.
The solution is to have teams that mix up different types of brain.
For example: research about team problem solving has shown that diversity you can see – gender, age, ethnicity – doesn’t make any difference to being successful in solving a problem.
A group of white men can be better at solving a problem than a group that looks diverse.
The reason is cognitive diversity.
Yes, a group of white men can be diverse too – if they have different thinking styles.
You need 2 things to make sure you’re innovative, attractive to talent, and successful when faced with change:
The first is cognitive diversity.
The second is the right culture to make sure these different brains can work together effectively.
That is a culture of curiosity, mutual support.
Of succeeding as a team not as an individual.
This cognitively inclusive culture allows the collective genius to emerge.
It will make sure your organization excels at all the behaviors you need:
To be successful now
To keep growing
And to thrive with whatever changes are heading your way.
You can learn more about how I do this by watching the short film on the Services tab of this website.
Or, connect with me for a chat.
I’d love to meet you and discuss the potential for your organization.