Neurodivergence and Change at Work

The number, and what it isn't

In August we ran a poll in the Kaboose app: Have changes at work ever affected your ability to concentrate or be productive?

Two hundred and forty people answered. Forty-eight per cent said often. Thirty-eight per cent said sometimes. Which leaves fourteen per cent who said rarely or never, and who we'll come back to, because they turn out to matter more than the majority.

What happened next was more useful than the number. Answering the poll opened a discussion group, and for the next two weeks people wrote about restructures, new managers, desk moves, software migrations and the specific tiredness of rebuilding something that used to run by itself.

Hardly any of it matched the stereotype.

Nobody in that chat was "bad at change"

The lazy version of this story writes itself. Neurodivergent people don't like change. It's tidy, it's memorable, it fits on a slide, and the conversation demolished it inside about four messages.

Several people described the opposite problem: not change, but stagnation. Workplaces that refused to improve anything, roles that calcified, the slow flattening of being underused for years. For them, the damage came from things staying exactly as they were. More than one person named that as the thing that had actually ended a job.

Others drew the distinction differently again. It wasn't change or no change, it was which change, and whether the process of bringing it in was any good. A change with a sound rationale and a shambolic rollout landed worse than a genuinely unwelcome change handled properly.

And then the finding we didn't expect at all: for some people, planned change is harder than the surprise kind. A sudden change throws you and then you adjust. An announced change gives you six weeks to analyse every possible version of it, run each one to its conclusion, and arrive at the actual event already exhausted. The lead time everyone assumes is a kindness can become a rumination window.

What looks like resistance to change is often the work of adapting to it.

Strip out the stereotype and something more precise is left behind. Not an aversion. A cost. One that varies wildly by person, by change, and above all by how the change turns up.

Your brain had a system. Now it has to build another one

Here's where the research gives us some footing, with its limits showing.

Adult ADHD is the best-evidenced piece of this picture. A meta-analysis published in Psychological Medicine compared thirteen studies of adults diagnosed with ADHD against control groups, and found medium-sized differences on executive-function measures including inhibition and set shifting - the mechanism you use to disengage from one task and pick up another. The effect sizes sat between 0.62 and 0.89.

Sitting alongside it is a separate body of work on uncertainty. A 2020 systematic review and meta-analysis in Autism found autistic participants reported substantially higher intolerance of uncertainty than non-autistic comparison groups. The interesting part is what it didn't find: the strength of the link between uncertainty and anxiety was much the same as in non-autistic people. Uncertainty isn't processed differently. There's simply more of it arriving, and less headroom to absorb it.

Now hold those two things next to an ordinary Tuesday at work. A new manager. A changed approval process. A desk move. A restructure. A recurring meeting shifted by ninety minutes. Each one quietly deletes cues and routines that were doing unpaid background labour, and someone now has to consciously rebuild them.

A change rarely changes just one thing

Move someone's desk and you haven't adjusted one variable.

Research on workplace accessibility for autistic employees sorts accommodations into four domains: how job performance is communicated, interpersonal communication and attitudes, daily workplace routines, and the physical and sensory environment. The point isn't the taxonomy. It's that a single organisational decision can reach into all four at once, which is why "it's only a desk move" is one of the least accurate sentences in management.

The environmental evidence has been reviewed systematically, and the result is bracingly honest. A 2022 review in Applied Psychology screened 319 studies and found twenty worth including, most of them about autism. The adjustments people needed most often involved sound and light, with others covering crowding, decompression spaces and control over their own environment.

The community's version of all this was blunter and better. The failure mode people described again and again wasn't a bad idea. It was five ideas delivered at once, in a single meeting, by someone excited, with no room to process any of them. The content was fine. The delivery mechanism was the problem.

Why productivity dips before it recovers

Here is the same job, in the same role, at two different moments. The work hasn't changed. The number of steps required to do it has.

The five extra steps are invisible. They don't appear in a workflow, they aren't in anyone's job description, and they consume exactly the resource that was already under pressure.

Two mechanisms came up constantly in the group that almost never appear in a change plan. The first is rumination, and its habit of compounding. People described turning a change over for weeks before it happened and weeks afterwards, and being clear-eyed that everyone does this to some degree. The difference they named was duration and frequency: stuck more often, and stuck for much longer. It bleeds into sleep, and once sleep goes the productivity dip stops being about the change at all.

The second mechanism is more counterintuitive. The dip can look identical to your best work. Several people described responding to a change by researching it exhaustively — pros, cons, second-order effects, alternatives — and then presenting their findings to management. They knew precisely what it was costing them. Genuine strength in spotting what nobody else had spotted; genuine weakness in the hours it took from the actual job.

The person interrogating your change is frequently the person doing the most thinking about whether it will work.

What actually makes it easier

The largest review we found on this — 26 studies, just over 7,000 participants aged 13 to 75, across seven countries - looked at disclosure and workplace accommodations for autistic people. What people received or wanted clustered around scheduling flexibility and remote options, changes to job content and working conditions, environmental changes like lighting and quiet space, and support with communication. It also found that disclosure itself carried real risk of stigma, which is its own uncomfortable finding for anyone designing a policy that depends on people putting their hand up.

Six things that cost nothing

1. Give notice. Lead time is the cheapest accommodation in existence. Finding out at the all-hands is the expensive version.
2. Say what isn't changing. Announcements describe the delta and leave everything else ambiguous. Naming the stable parts shrinks the problem dramatically.
3. Put the specifics in writing. Not the vision. The specifics: what, when, who, and what happens to the thing it replaces.
4. Stage it. One change, discussed, then the next. Not five at once because they happened to fit on the same slide.
5. Protect the routines that still work. If someone's deep-work block or standing one-on-one still functions, don't sacrifice it for tidiness.
6. Ask. "What would make this easier for you?" beats any inference you can make from across the office.

And note the tension in that list. Point one says give notice; the rumination problem says notice can hurt. Both are true, which is exactly why point six exists. The only reliable way to know which person you're dealing with is to ask them.

Ask a better question

The default organisational response to a difficult change is to ask people to be more resilient. It's cheap, it sounds supportive, and it moves the entire cost onto the individual. The alternative isn't lowering the bar - it's asking a different question about the same event.

There's one more thing the chat made plain. If someone has spent two years learning the unwritten rules of your workplace - who to ask, what tone to use, which meetings are real — a restructure doesn't just change their reporting line. It resets the rules they worked hardest to learn, and none of that work shows up anywhere you can see it. Change doesn't have to mean unnecessary friction. Most of the friction comes from how it arrived - and how it arrives is entirely within your control.

Maybe the question isn't "why are they struggling with this change?" but "how much extra work have we just asked their brain to do?"

Kaboose is a support platform, not a substitute for individual clinical care. If any of this is sitting heavily with you, talking to a GP or a clinician is a reasonable next step.