October OD Chat: Designing for Neurodiversity with Arnold Levin
Designing for Neurodiversity: Weaving Org Design & Workplace Design to Rethink Inclusion
When organizations try to support neurodivergent employees, conversation usually veers toward the physical environment: quiet rooms, noise-cancelling headphones, adjustable lighting. These accommodations matter, but on their own they leave deeper and more meaningful cultural levers untouched, like how work is structured, how roles are defined, how meetings run, how performance is assessed, and how decisions get made. These organization design questions are often missing from neurodiversity initiatives.
In 2016, our guest speaker Arnold Levin, wrote a three-part series for WorkDesign Magazine, “What I Learned About Workplace Strategy from My Daughter.” His daughter has severe ADHD and dyslexia and he’s watched her navigate university and the workplace, noting neither system was designed with people like her in mind. As a result, Arnold has reshaped his practice as a organizational strategist, using his awareness of how the neurodivergent “user experience” can help expose design gaps in both the space and the organization. He finds lasting solutions emerge only when workplace strategists, facilities professionals, and organization designers abandon their silos and work together on these shared challenges.
This session offers OD, HR and facilities professionals a dual-perspective approach, treating environmental and organizational design as two halves of the same intervention. This session reframes neurodiversity from an accommodation problem into an opportunity to access strengths the organization is currently leaving un-tapped, placing change management at the center of any neurodiversity initiative rather than at the end.
Participants will leave with:
- A clear picture of the facilities and organizational areas that need to be addressed for neurodiversity initiatives to succeed, and why both must be considered together.
- Practical methods for using neurodivergent employees’ lived experience as design input, so solutions reflect real needs rather than assumptions.
- Strategies for building transdisciplinary partnerships among OD, HR, facilities, and workplace design teams, including how to frame shared goals and avoid hand-off gaps.
- A change management roadmap for neurodiversity initiatives, covering how to prepare managers and teams, address stigma, and sustain adoption beyond the initial rollout (role design, workflows, communication norms, meeting practices, performance management, and leadership behaviors).
- A strengths-based framing that helps practitioners make the case to leadership that designing for neurodivergent employees improves the work experience for everyone.
Who should attend: OD and change practitioners, HR and talent leaders, workplace strategists, and facilities professionals who want to move neurodiversity efforts beyond environmental fixes.