How celebrating ‘neurodivergent superpowers’ lets employers off the hook- and obscures the real work of identifying what needs to change.
There’s a narrative that has become popular in corporate spaces: neurodivergence is actually a gift. ADHD brings creativity and hyperfocus. Autism brings attention to detail and pattern recognition. Dyslexia brings spatial reasoning. Look at all these amazing people with neurodivergent brains doing brilliant things! This narrative sounds positive. It sounds inclusive. It performs acceptance. And it functions, almost perfectly, to let organisations off the hook from doing any actual work.
The Problem With Superpowers
The superpower framing does something subtle and effective. It makes neurodivergence about what neurodivergent people are good at, rather than about what needs to change in the workplace. It centres the gift rather than the barrier. And implicitly, it suggests that if you’re neurodivergent and you’re struggling, maybe you’re not using your superpower right. Maybe you’re not leveraging your gift effectively. The problem becomes your failure to capitalise on what you’re supposedly good at.
But the actual experience of neurodivergence at work rarely maps onto superpowers. A neurodivergent person with attention difficulties isn’t struggling because they’re not hyperfocusing hard enough. They’re struggling because the workplace demands sustained attention to things that don’t activate hyperfocus. They’re struggling because meetings happen in real time, on someone else’s schedule, about topics that don’t compel their attention. Hyperfocus is real, but it’s not something you can summon on demand. It’s not something you can apply to tax returns or email management or annual reviews. An autistic person isn’t struggling because they’re not using their detail-oriented gift. They’re struggling because meetings are designed in a sensory context that makes it hard to listen, because communication is expected to happen in real-time when they need processing time, because the social rules shift unpredictably and the workplace environment contains sensory assaults.
The superpower narrative is also profoundly unrealistic. Not all neurodivergent people have superpowers. Some people with ADHD are just struggling with executive function without any compensatory genius. Some autistic people are dealing with sensory overwhelm without getting anything back from it. Some dyslexic people never developed the spatial reasoning they were supposedly given in exchange. The narrative flattens the diversity of neurodivergent experience into a single triumphalist story, and in doing so, it erases the people for whom neurodivergence brings primarily difficulty.
What It Covers Up
By focusing on what neurodivergent people are good at, the superpower narrative obscures the actual legal and ethical duty: to identify the practices in your workplace that create barriers and fix them. It obscures the fact that neurodivergence becomes a disability when the environment isn’t designed for how that brain works. A neurodivergent person isn’t failing. The workplace is failing to accommodate.
An organisation that celebrates neurodivergent superpowers while running all meetings in real-time without agenda hasn’t done anything. They’ve just praised neurodivergent people while continuing to exclude them. They’ve done the minimum possible work—the visibility work, the celebration work—while changing nothing. It’s inclusion theatre. It feels good and it changes nothing.
The real work asks different questions. What about how we run meetings makes it hard for neurodivergent people to participate? What about our communication defaults creates barriers? What about our deadlines, our open offices, our meeting culture, our expectations around communication style and turn-taking and eye contact? What needs to change in how we work, not what superpowers can we celebrate?
From Celebration to Systems
Shifting from superpowers to systems means asking uncomfortable questions. It means acknowledging that the way you currently work excludes neurodivergent people. It means being willing to change not for celebration, not for diversity points, but because the legal obligation exists and the ethical obligation is clear.
It means written agendas become how meetings work, not a special accommodation for a few people. It means asynchronous communication is a real option, not an exception for people who ask nicely. It means understanding that if significant portions of your team are neurodivergent, that’s not a reason to hire more neurodivergence. It’s a reason to examine what about your workplace attracts neurodivergent people and what about it systematically creates barriers for them.
The superpower narrative is comfortable for organisations. It lets them feel good about neurodiversity without changing anything meaningful. It’s cheap celebration. The systems approach is harder. It requires looking at actual practices and being willing to alter them. But that’s the only approach that matters. The legal duty isn’t to celebrate neurodivergence. The duty is to make workplaces where neurodivergent people can actually succeed.