Dear Reader,
This email in 30 seconds:
Your emails land differently depending on the brain receiving them. What's a mild preference for one person is a genuine barrier for another and completely inaccessible for someone else. The bridges already exist inside your existing tech. Read on for the full picture, or ask Copilot to summarise this for you. (Yes, I see the irony.)
I've been designing a workshop this week on how technology can bridge the gap between neurodivergent needs and workplace demands. And in the process, I landed on something that I think changes how we talk about inclusion entirely.
We spend a lot of time in the neurodiversity space talking about "different brains" and "thinking styles." All true. But it can stay a bit abstract. So I want to make it concrete. With an email.
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The Email
Picture this. It's 9.15am on a Monday. You open Outlook and there it is: a lengthy email from HR. Mutiple long paragraphs. No headings. No bullet points. It covers three separate topics, each with different deadlines, different actions and different links. The information is all there. It's accurate, thorough and well-intentioned.
Now here's my question: what happens next?
For some people, this email is fine. They scan it, extract what they need, move on. Maybe they'd prefer bullet points, but it doesn't slow them down.
For others, this email is a problem. My ADHD brain, for instance, skips words in dense text. I'll read the first three lines, drift, come back, re-read, lose my place, start again. I can get through it, but it takes me three times as long as it took you to send it.
For others still, this email is functionally inaccessible. A person with severe dyslexia finds the letters shifting and blurring across a 2,000-word block. An autistic colleague in sensory shutdown after a morning of back-to-back meetings cannot process any more written input. For these people, the information in that email might as well not exist.
Same email. Same words. Completely different experiences.
From Preference to Disabling
When we talk about how people experience workplace information, processes and environments, the responses don't fall neatly into "fine" and "not fine." They sit on a scale.
Before I explain the scale, ask yourself: "if that email landed in your inbox right now, how easily could you extract what you need from it?"
The framework I've been developing helps us understand where individuals might need support, simply by asking them a question about the task in hand. But more importantly, it normalises difference.
Preference (the 5-10 zone): "I can work with this, even if it's not how I'd choose to receive it." This is where most people sit for most things. You might prefer bullet points over paragraphs, or a Teams message over a formal email. You can adapt. It might be mildly irritating, but it doesn't change the outcome.
Barrier (the 3-4 zone): "I can get through this, but it costs me significantly more time and energy than it costs you to send it." This is where it gets interesting. My ADHD brain re-reading that email three times sits here. The dyslexic colleague whose processing slows dramatically with dense text sits here. The work gets done. But there's a hidden tax on time, energy and cognitive resource that the sender never sees. Over a full day, over a full week, that tax accumulates into something much bigger: exhaustion, missed details, slower output. And none of it is visible to the person who hit send.
Disabling (the 1-2 zone): "This information doesn't exist for me in this format." This isn't about preference or even effort. It's about access. Without a different format, a different channel, or a piece of technology that translates the information into something usable, the person is excluded from the conversation entirely. They miss the deadline. Not because they don't care, but because they never received the information in a way their brain could use.
Why This Matters for Every Organisation
Here's what makes this framework powerful: the email didn't change. The sender's intention didn't change. What changed is the experience of receiving it, and that experience is determined by the interaction between the format and the person's brain.
Most organisations design their communications, their processes and their systems for the preference zone. They assume that if the information is there, everyone can access it. And for most people, most of the time, that's true enough.
But "most people, most of the time" leaves a significant chunk of your workforce either paying a hidden tax to keep up or being quietly excluded altogether. The CIPD's 2024 research found that only 10% of organisations include neurodiversity in their people management practices. Which means 90% of workplaces are designing for one type of brain and hoping everyone else can adapt.
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Where Technology Comes In
And this is where it gets exciting, because the bridges already exist. They're not expensive. They're not specialist. Most of them are already sitting inside the software your organisation pays for.
That same dense email?
- Immersive Reader (built into Outlook, Word, Edge and Teams) strips out the visual clutter, increases line spacing, changes the background colour, and reads it aloud.
- Copilot/Claude/Chat GPT and any other preferred AI tool can summarise a 20-message thread into three action points.
- Read Aloud converts text to speech so an auditory processor can listen instead of decode.
None of these tools require anyone to rewrite the email. They don't require a formal reasonable adjustment request. They don't require a diagnosis. They sit between the information and the person, translating it into a format that works.
That's what I mean by bridging technology. Not fixing people. Not overhauling systems. Just placing a bridge where there's currently a gap.
The Question Worth Asking
So here's what I'd encourage you to take away this week. Next time you send that long, detailed, well-intentioned email, or publish that 12-page policy document, or run that fast-paced meeting with no agenda shared in advance, ask yourself:
Where on the scale does this land for the different people receiving it?
And then ask: What bridge could I offer that would move everyone closer to access?
Sometimes the bridge is better design. Sometimes it's technology. Often it's both. But it starts with recognising that the same information can land in very different places depending on the brain that receives it.
And finally, a question for you?
I'm running a workshop later this month on exactly this topic: how readily available technology can bridge the gap between neurodivergent needs and workplace demands. If your organisation would benefit from practical, immediately implementable strategies using tools you already have, let's have a conversation.
And if this framework resonated with you, I'd love to hear where you've seen the preference-barrier-disabling scale play out in your own workplace.
See you next week.
Tania
P.S. Found this useful? Forward it to someone who writes long emails. They need to see it more than anyone.
P.P.S. If you read all the way to here, you're probably in the preference zone for long emails. If you skipped to the bottom, you've just proved my point.
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