Beyond the Template

Stop Looking for Conformity

Years ago, I worked as an employment consultant placing people with disabilities. Some of my clients had what we called “functional autism”: not the Hollywood version, but splinter-skill brilliance.

I had one client who could glance at a topographical map for ten seconds and immediately tell you how many non-compliant easements or kilometres of roadside gradient above 10% were present. Not approximate. Exact. His brain processed spatial patterns like most of us process our own phone numbers (although not other people’s anymore — thanks, smartphones).

Fast-forward to my world today, and I know more diagnosed (or self-diagnosed) autistic and ADHD consultants than I can count on both hands. Turns out I’m not the only one who’s noticed.

Software company SAP has been running their Autism at Work programme since 2013, recruiting over 215 employees on the spectrum across 16 countries. The results? 94% retention rates, increased innovation, and managers reporting “more respectful and inclusive team culture.” One employee, Nico Neumann, designed a tool that automated invoice posting: 20,000 line items that previously took 2-3 days now process in 20 minutes. The kind of repetitive pattern work that makes neurotypical brains scream for mercy but made Nico’s brain hum with satisfaction.

But does this translate to strategy roles?

Absolutely.

Here’s my theory: autism brings hypersensitivity to incoherence and a fixation that won’t quit until the logic actually works. ADHD offers expansive span: more factors held simultaneously, hyperactive synthesis across domains most brains keep rigidly separate. These aren’t deficits. They’re strategic superpowers your typical recruitment process systematically screens out.

Question: When you think about your organisation's most wicked problems, are you inadvertently designing team selection to exclude the cognitive styles best equipped to crack them?

---

When the Horizon is Measured in Lifetimes

In 1833, Britain made a decision that wouldn’t finish paying dividends (or recoup its cost) for 182 years.

The government borrowed £20 million (40% of its entire annual budget) to compensate slave owners for abolition of slavery. Yes, the owners. Not the enslaved people (they had to work a further 6 years to ‘earn’ their freedom). That debt was rolled over through generations of government bonds and, astonishingly, wasn’t finally cleared until 2015. British taxpayers today helped retire a loan taken out when their great-great-great-grandparents were young.

This kind of multi-generational bet is rare in strategy, but when it happens, it reveals something profound about institutional courage.

The Manhattan Project spent roughly $2 billion (about 0.4% of US GDP at the time) between 1942-1945 to build the atomic bomb—a bet that shaped geopolitics for the next 80 years and counting.

Closer to home, Australia made a similar generational bet in 1949 with the Snowy Mountains Hydroelectric Scheme. Prime Minister Ben Chifley called it "the greatest single project in our history." Twenty-five years of construction. Over 100,000 workers from 32 countries. Sixteen dams, 145 kilometres of tunnels carved through mountains, 121 workers dead. Final cost: $820 million, which was a staggering sum for a nation of just 8 million people. The scheme didn't fully deliver its designed output until 1974. Leaders who launched it were long retired or dead. But it still provides 32% of eastern Australia's renewable energy and transformed agricultural irrigation across the Murray-Darling Basin.

I see nonprofit and government leaders wrestling with similar horizon questions constantly. Should we invest in workforce pipeline development that won’t bear fruit for a decade? Fund basic research with no clear application? Build infrastructure for a community that doesn’t yet exist?

The strategic answer is often yes. But the political answer — the one that survives budget debate and leadership changes — is usually no.

Yet someone pressed the button at Adaminaby in the Snowy Mountains in 1949. Someone signed the Slavery Abolition Act knowing the debt would outlive them. These weren’t acts of political calculation, they were acts of institutional courage.

Question: If your organisation knew it couldn't claim credit for the outcome, what long-term bet would you make anyway?

---

Convergence Before Difference

A friend’s daughter, Ellie, came home from school in tears last year. “I saw a monster. I don’t want to go tomorrow.”

The “monster”? A badly disfigured older girl named Cassie.

Ellie’s mother, at a loss, phoned the school for advice. They promised to fix it. “Give us two days”, said the Early Years Head.

And they did. Two days later, Ellie bounced home: “Guess what! Cassie’s in my group. She’s really nice!”

The school’s secret weapon? It was a deceptively simple exercise: put kids in circles and have them find things they ALL like: favourite fruits, movies, characters. Within minutes, anxiety dissolved into laughter. Convergence before difference.

Team specialist Katie O’Keeffe runs a variation with executive groups. Eight people, one circle. Two say random words simultaneously. Next round, different people link those words. By round five, everyone’s saying the same “random” words without planning it.

Our brains literally synchronise during convergence exercises, switching from competitive to collaborative neural patterns. Less grandstanding. Less point-scoring. More collective possibility.

And it turn out I’ve used this principle in strategy workshops for years without knowing its neural basis. I never start with contentious issues. I ask people to find shared territory first. Executives who arrived with entrenched positions suddenly discover unexpected common ground. The velocity of agreement becomes remarkable.

Question: How will your next “difficult” meeting change if you started by finding what you all agree on?

---

We’re almost a month into 2026, so no champagne, but here's to the misfit strategists, the generational thinkers, and the convergence-seekers.

If you enjoyed reading, you know what to do (press the heart) to let me know.

Until next Friday, have a great week,

Andrew