Neurodiversity Leadership Summit 2026

Every workplace has an idea of what “good” looks like. A good communicator. A high performer. Someone with potential. Someone who looks like a leader. Far less often do we ask where those expectations came from, or whose ways of thinking, communicating and working became the standard against which everyone else is measured.

Tia Squire is Director, Neuroinclusion Workplace Strategy at the National Disability Insurance Agency and Chair of the Public Sector Neurodiversity Community of Practice. An autistic and ADHD leader, her work brings together lived experience, neuro-affirming and evidence-informed practice, psychosocial safety, and organisational systems to examine how workplaces can create the conditions for people to contribute at their best. Drawing on both her own experience and her work advancing neuroinclusion across the Australian Public Service, Tia explores a contradiction at the heart of workplace neuroinclusion.

Organisations increasingly say they value different thinking, while many of our ideas about professionalism, capability and leadership continue to reward familiar ways of thinking, communicating and behaving. What changes when we stop asking people to fit our existing idea of normal and start getting curious about the expectations, environments and systems around them? This keynote invites leaders to question what we may have mistaken for capability, notice the invisible expectations shaping who gets recognised and heard, and consider how context and conditions can influence the contributions people are able to make.

Because neuroinclusion may not be about making more room for people who are different. It may be about finally questioning how narrowly we have defined normal.

Most workplaces are designed around a narrow set of assumptions about how people think, communicate and get work done. For many neurodivergent people, the challenge is not capability. It’s navigating systems that were never designed with them in mind.

Emily Kendall is an AuDHD engineer and founder of All Minds Belong. After years of carrying the personal cost of adapting to workplaces that didn’t play to her strengths, she realised her experience wasn’t unique. The barriers many neurodivergent people face are not individual problems to solve. They are often system design problems.

Rather than continuing to adapt, Emily set out to change the systems around her. She helped establish neurodiversity employee resource groups within ASX200 organisations and contributed to practical changes spanning leadership development, recruitment, performance management and workplace design.

Applying the same systems thinking she uses as an engineer, Emily approaches inclusion as a design challenge. This work ultimately led her to establish All Minds Belong, helping organisations move beyond awareness and create workplaces where different ways of thinking are understood, valued and able to thrive.

Attendees will leave with practical ideas to reduce friction, unlock performance and design work that enables people to succeed without requiring everyone to think alike.

The assumption that alignment requires sameness is one of the biggest barriers to building high-performing teams.

Around 25% or more of today’s workforce is neurodivergent — and if you think your team doesn’t include any neurodivergent people, the data suggests otherwise. It’s more likely they’ve learned it’s safer to hide it. HESTA’s Lizzy Keenan shares an honest, in-progress account of what happens when an organisation starts asking why, and what that costs.

Drawing on HESTA’s own culture journey — learning together, adapting along the way, and building the muscle to genuinely believe in neuro-inclusivity — Lizzy unpacks what it actually takes to shift a team from expecting conformity to celebrating the full range of human potential.

Attendees will leave with a practical, unpolished look at how a real organisation is building a team that performs because of difference, not despite it. Because the goal isn’t for everyone to show up the same. It’s for everyone to show up as themselves.

Nicole Smith has undergone an impressive professional journey, from primary school teacher to support worker, then community development manager to the head of her department. Through leading NDIS’s Local Area Coordination program across two Sydney regions at Settlement Services International, and as a neurodivergent mother to children with autism, she has become a fierce advocate for people with disability, bringing both lived and professional experience to the table.

In this session, Nicole shares how her time and engagement with multicultural communities while at SSI has helped inform her practice, elevating overlooked voices, platforming culturally diverse workforces, and building fairer and more accessible systems for all communities across Australia.

Most inclusion strategies are written in an office. Most work isn’t done in one.

Inclusion efforts often assume a desk, a laptop and a predictable day. Yet in most large organisations, many people work in the field, on shifts, across project teams, in customer-facing roles or remotely, where those assumptions don’t hold. Ashleigh Cantori, Inclusion Manager at Lendlease, explores what it takes to make inclusion work across very different parts of a business. She also looks at what that means for people who think and work differently.

You will leave with practical ways to design inclusion for every part of your workforce, not just the people at desks.

The best idea in your last workshop probably wasn’t said out loud.

Dean Said leads Enterprise Learning, Leadership, Talent and Performance at Australian Retirement Trust, one of Australia’s largest super funds. Before that he spent fourteen years at PwC, latterly as Director of Modern Enterprise Leadership and Transformation. His craft is designing and facilitating the rooms where organisations think together – and he is neurodivergent himself.

Which makes him unusually well placed to say what those rooms actually select for. Fast verbal processing. Thinking out loud. Comfort interrupting. Reading a room in real time. None of which is the same as having the better idea.

Dean shows what standard collaboration formats quietly filter out, and how to redesign them so they don’t: how questions are issued, when people generate versus discuss, who speaks and in what order, what happens before anyone enters the room.

You will leave able to run your next workshop so the quietest person in it is heard.

When leadership capability does not match team complexity, the impact is often hidden but significant.

Attendees will gain a clearer, evidence-based view of where these costs show up in their own organisations, and practical steps to start measuring, reducing, and reporting on it.

And why does that matter? The neurodiverse and disabled community have a long history of being excluded from decision making forums, of being told rather than asked, of having to make adjustments to systems rather than being included in their design. Because inclusion is more than who has a seat at the table, it’s about who gets to speak at that table.

Catherina Behan has worked in diversity & inclusion for over 20 years in Europe and Australia, across not for profit, public and private sectors. Most recently, she spent 8 years as Head of Group Diversity & Inclusion at Suncorp, and currently sits on Diversity Council Australia’s Disability & Accessibility External Advisory Panel. Drawing on her professional expertise and lived experience as an AuDHD woman, Catherina will explore what changes when neurodivergent and disabled people share real decision-making power, how lived experience can be a practical tool for change, and why inclusion designed this way works better for everyone.

In this session you will learn the power of agency and how a disability rights slogan from the 90s can transform the workplace of the future.