Have You Tried Being Less Neurodivergent? Other Helpful System Design Strategies
Tracks
Prince - In-Person Only
| Monday, September 28, 2026 |
| 10:50 AM - 11:20 AM |
| Prince Room |
Overview
Dr Rachelle Warner, Adelaide University
Key Learnings
1. Why common advice to neurodivergent people often misses the real problem. Delegates will explore how well-meaning guidance can reinforce the expectation that individuals must adapt to systems rather than systems adapting to people.
2. How organisational norms can unintentionally exclude neurodivergent participants. Delegates will understand how communication styles, expectations, and unwritten rules can create barriers.
3. How small system design changes can improve accessibility for everyone. Delegates will learn practical ways to create clearer, more inclusive processes that reduce the need for constant adaptation.
Speaker
Dr Rachelle Warner
Adjunct Fellow
Adelaide University
Have You Tried Being Less Neurodivergent? Other Helpful System Design Strategies
Presentation Overview
Neurodivergent people are often given remarkably practical advice for succeeding in systems that were not designed with them in mind. Suggestions such as “just try to be more organised,” “maybe speak up more in meetings,” or “have you considered using a planner?” are offered with genuine goodwill and a quiet confidence that the problem is simply one of individual adjustment.
This presentation begins with a radical proposition: what if the issue is not that neurodivergent people are insufficiently adaptable, but that many of our systems are astonishingly bad at accommodating normal human variation?
Across workplaces, healthcare systems, and institutions, participation often requires navigating ambiguous communication, unwritten social rules, unpredictable processes, and environments that demand constant cognitive and sensory interpretation. For many neurodivergent people, succeeding in these spaces requires extraordinary levels of masking, self-monitoring, and translation—essentially performing a version of “normal” that systems find easier to process.
Drawing on experience across healthcare, research, and public sector systems, this session examines how everyday organisational structures—from meetings and forms to communication norms and decision-making processes—can unintentionally function as accessibility barriers.
Using humour, uncomfortable recognition, and a few painfully familiar workplace scenarios, the presentation reframes many “individual challenges” as design failures. It explores how small but intentional changes—such as clearer expectations, predictable processes, and explicit communication—can dramatically reduce cognitive load and improve participation.
Importantly, designing systems that work for neurodivergent people does not require dismantling organisational complexity or lowering standards. It simply requires acknowledging that the mythical “normal person” many systems are designed around does not actually exist.
Until then, neurodivergent people will continue to receive extremely helpful advice like: have you tried being less neurodivergent?
This presentation begins with a radical proposition: what if the issue is not that neurodivergent people are insufficiently adaptable, but that many of our systems are astonishingly bad at accommodating normal human variation?
Across workplaces, healthcare systems, and institutions, participation often requires navigating ambiguous communication, unwritten social rules, unpredictable processes, and environments that demand constant cognitive and sensory interpretation. For many neurodivergent people, succeeding in these spaces requires extraordinary levels of masking, self-monitoring, and translation—essentially performing a version of “normal” that systems find easier to process.
Drawing on experience across healthcare, research, and public sector systems, this session examines how everyday organisational structures—from meetings and forms to communication norms and decision-making processes—can unintentionally function as accessibility barriers.
Using humour, uncomfortable recognition, and a few painfully familiar workplace scenarios, the presentation reframes many “individual challenges” as design failures. It explores how small but intentional changes—such as clearer expectations, predictable processes, and explicit communication—can dramatically reduce cognitive load and improve participation.
Importantly, designing systems that work for neurodivergent people does not require dismantling organisational complexity or lowering standards. It simply requires acknowledging that the mythical “normal person” many systems are designed around does not actually exist.
Until then, neurodivergent people will continue to receive extremely helpful advice like: have you tried being less neurodivergent?
Biography
Rachelle is an Aboriginal researcher and public sector leader who spends a surprising amount of time thinking about how big systems behave when real humans enter the room.
Her work sits at the intersection of health, culture, and the occasional strategic chaos caused by neurodivergent ways of thinking. Rachelle is particularly interested in what happens when systems built for “normal” meet people who are brilliantly, gloriously not. She brings research, policy experience, and a healthy suspicion of the phrase “we’ve always done it this way.”
