How Curiosity Culture Turns Neurodiversity Into an Advantage

Forbes

3 days ago

What's needed is a shift from workplace cultures of compliance to curiosity, where cognitive ... More differences are met with genuine interest and inquiry rather than standardized accommodation protocols.
Some organizations approach neurodiversity like they approach fire safety—as a compliance issue requiring basic accommodations to avoid problems. They offer noise-canceling headphones, adjust lighting, create flexible work arrangements and then consider the job done. This kind of compliance culture is a defensive posture focused on risk mitigation rather than opportunity optimization. It's also a lamentable waste of talent and opportunity for both people who are neurodiverse and organizations that employ them, or who could be their employers. According to data from McKinsey, about 20% of the population exhibits neurodivergent traits—for example, autism, ADHD, dyslexia, dyspraxia. But people who are neurodiverse face an 80% unemployment and underemployment rate despite possessing advanced qualifications in analytical and creative thinking: the very skills the World Economic Forum identifies as most critical for organizational success.
What's needed is a shift from workplace cultures of compliance to curiosity, where cognitive differences are met with genuine interest and inquiry rather than standardized accommodation protocols.
Here's what usually happens when a manager learns they have a neurodivergent team member. HR provides an accommodation checklist, perhaps offers brief training on "working with differences," and the manager dutifully implements prescribed adjustments. Well meaning as it can be, this compliance-driven approach often overlooks potential and reinforces stigma. The individual's neurodivergent traits are now a formality in the system — an issue to be addressed and a potential liability to be avoided. This dynamic can provoke shame in the employee and fear in the employer, stifling opportunities for dialogue and missing a transformative opportunity.
In an interview with McKinsey, Dr. Lawrence Fung, director of Stanford University's Neurodiversity Project, said that approximately half of neurodivergent professionals choose not to disclose their conditions precisely because of these well-meaning but limiting accommodation-focused approaches. They've learned that disclosure often leads to being managed as an exception rather than valued for unique contributions.
But when SAP launched its Autism at Work program, the company discovered something remarkable about their applicant pool. These weren't individuals seeking help or accommodation—they were accomplished professionals with master's degrees in electrical engineering, biostatistics, and economic statistics, many graduating with honors or holding patents. The problem wasn't their capability; it was that traditional hiring and management practices had systematically excluded exceptional talent.
The most successful neuro-inclusive organizations have discovered that practices enabling neurodivergent employees to thrive happen to be the same practices that help to unlock potential in all employees. According to Harvard Business Review, a team of neurodiverse software testers at Hewlett-Packard Enterprise (HPE) helped a client to re-engineer its project launch process after 'strenuously questioning' why the client was tolerant of chaotic deployments. The questions of the HPE team, intolerant of apparent disorder, was met with a culture of curiosity.
Again, according to research published in Harvard Business Review, 'At SAP, a neurodiverse customer-support analyst spotted an opportunity to let customers help solve a common problem themselves; thousands of them subsequently used the resources he created.' The key was organizational curiosity about his different way of processing information rather than simply accommodating his social interaction style.
The shift from compliance to curiosity becomes practical through what I call everyday development—integrating growth-oriented conversations into regular work interactions rather than creating separate accommodation discussions. This approach transforms how leaders engage with all cognitive differences.
The foundation is learning to get curious and be dynamic. Effective leaders learn to observe engagement patterns and ask "What conditions help you do your best work?" or "When do you feel most energized in your role?" This shift from deficit-focused accommodation to strength-based optimization changes everything.
Take the practice of noticing sparks of engagement and points of friction. Effective leaders learn to observe when team members light up during certain types of work and when they seem to struggle, then get curious about those patterns rather than applying standard performance management approaches.
We also need to deal with what Dr Fung calls, the Hidden Curriculum—the million-and-one norms of workplace life that everyone takes for granted that might need to be explained. As Dr Fung says in his interview with McKinsey:
'A hidden curriculum, for example, is that most people would expect the leader of a meeting to sit at the top of a 30-person conference room table, with the more junior people sitting in more peripheral positions. But there's usually no book talking about this, and no one verbalizes where people should be sitting. People with autism need a heads-up about those types of things. Another example is if you're planning to call upon an autistic person to give a report or share comments, spontaneously, it's usually not going to go well. But if they're told ahead of time what they are supposed to do, what their responsibilities may be, they can really shine.'
Finally, effective neuro-inclusive leaders foster ongoing dialogue about working styles and encourage personalization. In our executive coach training, our refrain is ABC (always be contracting). In this case, that means regular conversations about optimal working conditions that evolve with projects, stress levels, and team compositions. This amounts to ongoing and fluid accommodation, which allows everyone a say in how they work best together.
Organizations implementing curiosity-driven approaches report benefits that extend far beyond the neurodivergent employees they initially sought to support. Employee engagement increases across teams that include neurodivergent colleagues, as neurotypical employees report finding their work more meaningful and challenging. The perfectionist tendencies that some neurodivergent employees bring to projects have pushed entire client organizations to raise their standards and stop accepting certain problems as inevitable.
Perhaps most significantly, these organizations develop greater agility in recognizing and leveraging diverse forms of talent across all employees. SAP uses a powerful metaphor to describe this evolution: people are like puzzle pieces with irregular shapes. Traditional organizations ask employees to trim their irregularities to fit standard rectangles. But innovation comes from the unique edges, from capabilities that can't be standardized or replicated.
Then, of course, there's what we never speak about. Neurodiversity in leadership. Up to 25% of CEOs may be dyslexic, according to former Cisco CEO John Chambers, yet few feel confident enough to publicly acknowledge neurodivergent traits.
The question facing leaders is not whether to accommodate neurodivergent employees, but whether they possess the cultural sophistication to transform organizational responses to cognitive difference from compliance to curiosity. In an economy increasingly dependent on analytical thinking and creative problem-solving, organizations that learn to optimize for cognitive diversity will substantially outperform those that continue optimizing for conformity.
Are we ready to replace accommodation checklists with curiosity practices, transforming cognitive differences into opportunities for organizational learning and capability enhancement? The most successful organizations of the future may well be those that master this shift from managing differences to maximizing diverse capabilities.