Neuro News
Neuro News
Week of 7 September 2026 | Neuroinclusion for workplaces and individuals
Happy Tuesday!
Last week I had the pleasure of attending a women of influence dinner run by Jane Anderson. It was educational and filled with connection. I had a wonderful time and really enjoyed hearing the challenges and opportunities of female consultants. It definitely made me feel less alone.
I also received some very kind LinkedIn messages that highlighted what I can bring to the table. Honesty, passion, authenticity and a directness that just makes people laugh. You are Welcome!
If you're looking to expand your network and upskill, I highly recommend reaching out to Jane. Jane initially reached out to me, and it felt like a pivotal moment of being seen. To know that what I'm trying to build actually matters.
In other news I got nominated for my first ever TNV related award! Super exciting!
Next Friday I have a small spot to speak at PsychLab: illuminating the missing psychosocial safety conversations at Fortitude Valleys Precinct. You can find more information on the event here. I will be speaking about my lived experience as a late diagnosed adult and how that has shaped my previous employment. I will also give people something to walk away and reflect on - because you don't know what you don't know.
If your organisation only redesigns a role after someone's filed a formal adjustment request, you're missing every piece of friction that person didn't think was "big enough" to raise — and Birkbeck's data suggests that's most of it. I work with leaders to build informal, low-cost mechanisms like job crafting alongside the formal adjustment process, not instead of it. Reply to this email or visit neurodivergencevoice.com to start the conversation.
Cass
Founder | The Neurodivergence Voice
0419 423 746
Neuro at Work
The Adjustment Nobody Applied For
Most neuroinclusion effort still runs through a formal channel: disclose, request, assess, approve. That gate catches genuine cases, but it misses a much larger set of everyday friction that never rises to the level of a "reasonable adjustment request" — because the person doesn't think what's bothering them counts, or doesn't want the paperwork trail that comes with it. The scale of that gap is measurable. Birkbeck's 2023 "Neurodiversity at Work" study (McDowall, Doyle & Kiseleva; 990 neurodivergent employees, 127 employers) found that even among people already inside a formal support process, only 47% had someone to actually discuss adjustments with, and just 34% felt the support they did get was tailored to them individually rather than generic. Job crafting is the informal complement to that formal process: letting an employee reshape which tasks, relationships, or approaches make up their role, without requiring a diagnosis, a disclosure, or a case file first. An ADHD employee who's a strong pattern-spotter under pressure and a reluctant scheduler can trade meeting-coordination duties for a colleague's data-cleanup backlog. Nobody had to apply for that. The audit question: does your organisation have any sanctioned way for an employee to say "I'm strong here, weak there, can we shift the split" — or does a role only get redesigned after someone has already gone through a formal adjustment request?
Neuro Hacks
Make the Cost Real, Not Just the Intention
Ariely and Wertenbroch's classic 2002 study on procrastination gave students either a single end-of-term deadline, three deadlines they set for themselves, or three deadlines imposed externally and evenly spaced. Self-imposed deadlines improved performance over having no structure at all — but externally imposed ones did better still, because people generally know they'll procrastinate and try to bind themselves against it, just not as effectively on their own as when the stakes are set by someone else. That's the logic behind a commitment device: attaching a real cost to not following through, decided now, before your future self gets a vote. It works on loss aversion rather than motivation — you don't need to feel like doing the task later, because the mechanism doesn't ask you to. The practical version for a task you keep not starting: put a genuine stake behind the deadline before you begin, not after you've already missed it. Pre-pay for a coworking session so the sunk cost is real. Tell one specific person you'll send them the draft by Thursday, not "soon." Use a stake-based app that donates your money to a cause you dislike if you miss the deadline. The common thread is that the cost has to be external and unpleasant enough to notice — a private promise to yourself is just a resolution with extra steps.
Neuro and Cass
The Common Disorder Nobody's Heard Of
Seventh in this series on profiles beyond autism and ADHD, after dyslexia (27 July), dyspraxia (3 August), dyscalculia (10 August), dysgraphia (18 August), Nonverbal Learning Disability (24 August), and Auditory Processing Disorder (31 August).
Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) is a persistent difficulty learning, understanding, or using language that isn't explained by hearing loss, autism, or a lack of exposure to language, per the US National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD). It affects roughly 1 in 14 kindergarten-aged children — making it more common than autism — and the difficulty doesn't resolve with age. It changes shape. In adults, DLD tends to show up as limited use of complex sentence structures, difficulty finding the right word under time pressure, trouble with figurative language and inference, and disorganised storytelling or writing, according to NIDCD. A large Scandinavian population study (more than 46,000 individuals) found the gap between how common DLD actually is and how often it's formally recorded is stark: questionnaire-based estimates put prevalence around 3.4–3.7%, versus roughly 0.04% showing up in hospital diagnostic registers — meaning the overwhelming majority of people who meet criteria for DLD have never been through a process that would name it. Workplace-specific research backs this up from the other direction: a study on manager awareness of DLD found it sits well below awareness of autism or ADHD, despite DLD being at least as prevalent. Longitudinal data on young adults with a DLD history shows a similar employment rate to peers overall, but fewer hours, less secure contract types, and a narrower range of employment — consistent with a workforce compensating around a difficulty nobody's named for them. Because verbal fluency in casual conversation can look intact while structured language tasks — writing a report, following a fast multi-person meeting, explaining a plan in the right order — are genuinely harder, DLD gets misread as disorganisation, low effort, or "just not a strong communicator." It's the same misattribution that's run through almost every profile in this series: a processing difference read as a character trait, because the alternative explanation was never on anyone's radar.
Cheers,
Cass Nicholson | Founder | The Neurodivergence Voice
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