What is Neuroinclusive Systems Design?

Neuroinclusive systems design is an emerging approach to systems design, implementation, and organizational learning that recognizes cognitive and epistemic diversity as relevant to how systems are understood, shaped, evaluated, and improved.

Too often, neuroinclusion is framed primarily as accommodation, awareness, representation, or support within systems that remain fundamentally organized around dominant assumptions about communication, cognition, professionalism, participation, and expertise. But neuroinclusive systems design asks a broader question:

What changes when different forms of cognition and perception are able to shape how systems are understood, designed, implemented, and improved from the beginning?

Within Neurodiversity Change Foundation’s emerging framework, neuroinclusive systems design is not only about designing for neurodivergent people, or even designing with them through consultation. It is also about designing with different forms of cognition, systems perception, communication, and lived systems insight; a true co-design.

This includes recognizing that cognitive and epistemic diversity may influence:

• what gets noticed • what is measured • what is recognized as meaningful evidence • how problems are interpreted • and which solutions become imaginable or actionable

Work in this area, specifically writing by Maureen N. Dunne, Ph.D. , has explored how different cognitive processing styles may contribute distinct forms of systems insight, including:

• lateral thinking • hyperfocus • visual thinking • associative thinking • pattern thinking • bottom-up processing • detail sensitivity • cross-domain synthesis • and persistence on unresolved problems

Within complex systems design, these forms of cognition may influence:

• how barriers and risks are identified • how systems relationships are understood • how environments are interpreted • how problems are framed • and how solutions are generated, implemented, and refined

This is where questions of epistemic justice become important.

If systems privilege traditional assumptions about what counts as legitimate evidence, expertise, professionalism, communication, or methodology, then important forms of systems knowledge may remain peripheral — even when they are identifying real barriers affecting participation, access, safety, and belonging.

From this perspective, neurodivergent participation is deeper than being “included in the room.” Neuroinclusive systems design also involves recognizing neurodivergent cognition as a legitimate and valuable contributor to systems knowledge.

Because if different forms of cognition contribute different forms of systems insight, then excluding those perspectives from design processes is also a knowledge-production issue. If we are restrictive with form, we are also shaping and restricting outcome. How systems gather information, recognize expertise, structure participation, define evidence, communicate knowledge, and allow solutions to emerge shapes the outcomes that become possible.

While institutions are beginning to engage with neurodiversity, accessibility, and inclusion to varying degrees, there remains relatively limited engagement with questions such as:

• how cognitive difference may influence systems perception and design • how epistemic diversity shapes problem identification and implementation • • or how neurodivergent cognition may contribute to leadership, organizational learning, innovation, and systems change itself

In many sectors, neuroinclusion remains framed primarily around accommodation, awareness, compliance, or representation rather than around systems methodology, design processes, implementation, or knowledge production. This is part of where NCF sees its role.

This includes developing and providing practical examples of what neuroinclusive systems design can look like across sectors by:

• developing frameworks that facilitate understanding of neuroinclusive design in practice • piloting implementation approaches collaboratively • translating lived experience into systems insight and integrating evidence with operational realities • and demonstrating how cognitive and epistemic diversity can shape program design, implementation, systems improvement

NCF is asking: what methods, processes, forms of collaboration, implementation approaches, and systems practices emerge when cognitive and epistemic diversity are treated as central to design itself rather than peripheral to it?

We are creating space for new ways of understanding, designing, and implementing neuroinclusive approaches across systems that shape daily life, including:

• accessing healthcare • participating in leadership roles • participating in education • influencing policy • engaging in workplaces • participating in elections • communicating within institutions • or carrying out specific jobs and social roles

Examples of Neuroinclusive Systems Design in Practice

Pattern Thinking in Healthcare

A neurodivergent systems designer may be particularly attuned to recurring patterns and meaningful solutions within and across patient experiences such as:

• delayed diagnosis,

• care avoidance,

• sensory overwhelm,

• communication breakdowns,

• and crisis-driven care pathways.

Rather than viewing these as isolated patient issues, and/or providing isolated feedback on an issue, pattern thinking identifies and focuses on recurring system dynamics and hidden structural relationships.

Bottom-Up Processing in Program Development

Traditional systems often begin with policy assumptions, institutional priorities, or abstract models. Bottom-up processing starts differently - from what is seen, experienced and encountered in real-world conditions shaped by:

• from lived experience,

• environmental realities,

• operational friction,

• institutional harm,

• and other forms of real-world implementation conditions.

Rather than assuming the system is functioning because it appears formally compliant or successful, bottom-up processing asks: “What is actually happening at the level of human experience?” This can reveal barriers that top-down approaches miss entirely, or will get to far later in a process, and potentially less completely.

Associative Thinking in Systems Change

Associative thinking connects ideas across domains that are not usually linked together. For example,

• connecting sensory overload in healthcare settings with delayed care seeking, communication breakdown, and patient trust

• linking school discipline practices with sensory regulation, unmet support needs, and later mental health outcomes

• linking inaccessible workplace communication norms with burnout, masking, turnover, and underemployment

• connecting housing instability with healthcare fragmentation, nervous system stress, and long-term participation outcomes

• linking AI systems and hiring algorithms with dominant assumptions about communication, productivity, and professionalism

• connecting policy decisions made in one sector with unintended impacts across healthcare, education, disability support, employment, or justice systems

• linking environmental conditions such as lighting, noise, crowd density, and navigation complexity with regulation, participation, and belonging

This type of cognition may support the ability to identify relationships between systems, experiences, and patterns that more siloed approaches may overlook. It can contribute to recognizing how challenges that are often addressed separately across sectors — such as healthcare, education, employment, housing, or social policy — may in practice be deeply interconnected within people’s lived realities, and therefore may warrant responses that are similarly intersectoral, coordinated.

Lateral Thinking in Organizational Design

Lateral thinking explores alternative routes rather than accepting existing assumptions as fixed, "stepping outside the imagined boundaries of a puzzle or turning some factor upside down or backward to reveal a different perspective" (Maureen Dunne, 2024).

Instead of asking: “How do we help neurodivergent people adapt to existing systems?” Lateral thinking may ask: “What if the system itself is organized around unnecessarily narrow assumptions about cognition, participation, communication, and professionalism?” This creates space for fundamentally different design possibilities to emerge, and is itself a neuroinclusive manner of approaching a problem.

Hyperfocus in Implementation Work

Hyperfocus can contribute to sustained engagement with complex, unresolved, or technically detailed problems over long periods of time. Within systems work, this may support:

• implementation refinement,

• quality improvement,

• systems mapping,

• environmental analysis,

• detailed policy review,

• or identifying subtle barriers others move past.

Rather than dismissing deep focus as excessive, irrelevant or problematic, neuroinclusive systems design asks: “What important systems insight may emerge through sustained attention?” and further, "How do those with resources and power adequately support it?

Visual Thinking in Environmental and Systems Design

Some neurodivergent people understand systems more clearly through diagrams, patterns, movement, visualization, and environmental interaction than through linear verbal explanation alone. This changes how information may need to be communicated and designed collaboratively. Visual thinking may contribute to:

• systems and operational mapping,

• spatial understanding,

• sensory analysis,

• workflow visualization,

• pattern interpretation,

• and therefore, identifying relationships within complex environments that have not yet been identified.

Often, neurodivergent people understand systems more clearly through diagrams, patterns, movement, visualization, and environmental interaction than through linear verbal explanation alone. This changes how information may need to be communicated and designed collaboratively, and what opportunities therefore exist for finding solutions.

Cross-Domain Synthesis in Innovation

Cross-domain synthesis involves integrating insights from multiple fields, experiences, and knowledge systems. For example: linking neuroscience, implementation science, lived experience, sensory design, organizational behavior, and healthcare operations into a single systems framework. This type of synthesis may contribute to more adaptive and interdisciplinary systems design approaches that yield more comprehensive results.

Persistence on Unresolved Problems

Some neurodivergent people persist on problems that systems have normalized, minimized, or stopped questioning, often because those problems may not directly affect people with decision-making power. This may include:

• inaccessible environments

• contradictory policies

• harmful workflows

• fragmented services

• recurring implementation gaps

Yet many systems are not designed to recognize neurodivergent persistence on unresolved problems as a form of systems knowledge. Instead, this persistence is often questioned, pathologized, or treated as resistance rather than understood as a potential signal that something remains unresolved.

Persistence on unresolved problems can be uncomfortable within systems that prioritize hierarchy, speed, stability, or procedural closure. But it may also be essential to meaningful systems change.

Conclusion

Neuroinclusive systems design is still emerging, but its central question is: what becomes possible when cognitive and epistemic diversity are treated not as barriers to manage, but as sources of systems knowledge?

For NCF, this is not only a theoretical inquiry. It is a practical direction for designing healthcare, workplaces, leadership models, policy processes, learning environments, technologies, and public systems that are more responsive to how people actually experience them.

If systems are shaped by what they notice, measure, value, and act on, then expanding who and what counts as knowledge is essential. Neurodivergent cognition can help reveal patterns, contradictions, risks, relationships, and possibilities that dominant systems may overlook.

The work ahead is to move toward neuroinclusive approaches to design, implementation, leadership, and systems change. This means creating methods that do not only invite neurodivergent people into existing systems and structures, but also allow different forms of cognition to help reshape the systems themselves.