Neurodiversity, neurodivergence and the non-linear operating system: three frames for the same minds
Four people can use the word neurodivergent in the same meeting and mean four different things.
A clinician means a diagnosable condition with measurable impairment. An advocate means a claim about who gets to count as normal. An HR director means a category in a policy document. A founder usually means something closer to “my mind does not work the way this company assumes it does”, which is the meaning none of the other three were built to serve.
That confusion is not academic. It decides whether a capable leader gets treated as a patient, a cause or a design problem.
Nobody agrees on the word, starting with where it came from
The term has no settled definition, and the disagreement runs all the way back to its origin.
Neurodiversity first appeared in print in September 1998, in a piece by the journalist Harvey Blume in The Atlantic. Judy Singer used it the same year in her honours thesis and has been widely credited with coining it, largely through Steve Silberman’s account in NeuroTribes. In 2024 a group of autistic scholars published a correction in the journal Autism, arguing that the concept was developed collectively across an online community rather than invented by one person, and noting that Singer herself did not originally claim the coinage (Botha, Chapman and Giwa Onaiwu, Autism, 2024).
A word whose own parentage is contested is unlikely to have arrived with a clean definition. It did not.
Reviewing the field, Patrick Dwyer concluded plainly that defining neurodiversity is difficult, and set out several competing approaches that differ in important ways, above all in how each one relates to the social model of disability (Dwyer, Human Development, 2022). Damian Milton, writing in The Psychologist, noted that the neurodiversity movement has been attacked from both directions at once: for sitting too close to the medical model, and for sitting too close to the social model (Milton, The Psychologist, 2019).
When a word is used this loosely, the useful move is to separate the frames travelling under it.
Frame one: the medical model
The medical model treats a cognitive difference as a condition located in the person. It names, classifies and where possible treats. Its instruments are the DSM and the ICD, and its output is a diagnosis.
It deserves better than its reputation in some quarters. It gives access to medication that works, to legal protection, to adjustments at work and school, and to an explanation that ends years of private self-blame. For many people a diagnosis is the most useful thing that ever happened to them.
Its limit is structural rather than ideological. A diagnosis requires evidence that the pattern impairs functioning. A leader who has built workarounds for thirty years, who compensates with intelligence and energy and who delivers results does not present as impaired. The model cannot see that person, by design.
The research bears this out. Adults with ADHD and higher IQ show far fewer measurable deficits in executive function than those with average IQ, which led the authors to conclude that intelligence can mask the condition and complicate clinical diagnosis (Milioni et al., Journal of Attention Disorders, 2017).
So the medical model answers one question, and answers it well: what, if anything, needs treating?
Frame two: the neurodiversity movement
The second frame came out of activism rather than research. It holds that neurological variation is ordinary human variation, that much of what gets called disability is produced by environments built for one kind of mind, and that the right response is acceptance and adjustment rather than correction. It draws on the social model of disability developed by physically disabled advocates in Britain and formalised in Mike Oliver’s work (Oliver, The Politics of Disablement, 1990).
It has won real arguments. Workplace adjustments exist because of it. The language has shifted in a decade. The word neurodivergent, credited to the activist Kassiane Asasumasu, gave a great many people a way to describe themselves without a pathology attached to it.
Its limit is the mirror image of the first. The strong version of the social model holds that disability is caused by society alone, which runs into difficulty the moment someone is genuinely struggling and needs help with something inside themselves rather than around them.
Most people do not hold that strong version in practice. In a survey by Dwyer and colleagues, even respondents who strongly supported the social model still endorsed interventions aimed at individual skills and at treating co-occurring conditions.
Editor’s note for Sven: I have the finding but not yet the full citation for that survey. Tell me to pin it down before this publishes, or I will cut the sentence.
The second frame also answers one question well: what needs accepting, and what needs changing in the environment?
The two frames are answering different questions
Set them side by side and much of the argument dissolves. One asks what needs treating. The other asks what needs accepting. Both are legitimate questions and both have real answers.
Neither is the question a chief executive actually arrives with.
That question is narrower and far more practical. How does this mind operate, and what should we build around it on Monday?
Frame three: a non-linear operating system
A non-linear operating system describes operating logic. It asks how a particular mind perceives, processes and acts, where it produces disproportionate value, where it costs disproportionate effort and what structure makes the difference sustainable.
It starts from a different premise than either of the other two. Strengths and difficulties are not separate ledgers to be totalled against each other. They grow out of the same architecture, which is why smoothing out the difficulty tends to remove the strength along with it.
From the book:
Non-linear operation is not a flaw. It is a way of perceiving, processing, and acting that favours speed, creativity, pattern recognition, and decisive movement. It often produces exceptional results, especially in uncertain or fast-moving environments. But it carries a cost when leadership systems are designed for steadiness, containment, and control. This is not a matter of preference or personality. It is a matter of operating logic.
Three things this frame deliberately does not do.
It does not diagnose. The question of whether someone has ADHD, dyslexia or anything else is a clinical question, answered by a psychiatrist or clinical psychologist and by nobody else.
It makes no claim to clinical validity. It is a leadership frame, built from executive practice and from interviews with leaders whose minds do not run in straight lines. It is not a validated instrument and should not be described as one.
It does not replace rights. Medication, formal adjustments and legal protection run through diagnosis. Nothing in an operating-system view changes that, and anyone who needs those things needs an assessment.
Where this sits in work that already exists
The observation that these minds show an uneven cognitive profile is not new, and I do not claim it.
In occupational psychology it is called a spiky profile. The term traces back through the education literature and was formalised by Nancy Doyle, who defines it as large, statistically significant disparities between the peaks and troughs of an individual’s cognitive profile, and who proposes a biopsychosocial model of neurodiversity at work that sits deliberately between the medical and social accounts (Doyle, British Medical Bulletin, 2020). Anyone working seriously in this area is building on that.
What I am adding sits one level up, and it is a question of altitude rather than of disagreement.
That literature is largely about employment: assessment, adjustment, recruitment, retention, getting capable people into work and keeping them there. The people I work with are already at the top. Their spikes built the company. Their troughs are now being absorbed by a leadership team, a board, an executive assistant and a family, usually without anyone naming what is happening.
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So the unit of design changes. It stops being one person’s accommodation and becomes the operating system of the organisation around them: who owns which work, how decisions get made, what the board measures, where the energy goes. That is the territory a non-linear operating system is meant to cover.
The same leader, three frames
A founder in her forties takes her company through a hard year. Her strategic calls are good and the board knows it. Her reporting is late. She works in bursts, then goes quiet for a week.
In the medical frame, the question is whether she meets diagnostic criteria. The answer may well be no, precisely because she is performing.
In the inclusion frame, the question is whether the company is treating her fairly. The answer is probably yes, at least in intent, and the conversation ends there.
In the operating-system frame the questions are different. Which parts of this work does her mind do better than anyone else’s in the building? Which parts cost her three times what they cost her COO? What should move, and to whom?
Only the third produces something to do on Monday.
Where this frame has to defer
A frame is only useful if its edges are marked.
If someone is struggling in a way that touches their health, the right move is clinical rather than structural. No amount of operating design substitutes for a doctor.
If someone wants medication, formal adjustments or legal protection, they need an assessment. The route runs through diagnosis and there is no way round it.
And this frame says nothing useful about people with high support needs. Milton, who is both a researcher and the father of an autistic son with severe learning disabilities, has made this point about the wider neurodiversity conversation repeatedly, and it applies with full force here. A vocabulary built for chief executives describes chief executives. Treating it as a general theory of human cognition would be a mistake, and a self-serving one.
What it is built for is narrower: a capable person whose results are real, whose cost is hidden and whose system was designed for a different kind of mind.
How common is neurodivergence among founders?
Research suggests that neurodivergent traits and conditions may be more prevalent among entrepreneurs than in the general population. Studies examining ADHD, dyslexia, autism and cognitive ability have reported notable differences, although estimates vary considerably depending on the population studied, the definitions used and whether findings are based on clinical assessments or self-reporting.
These figures should therefore be read as signals of a potentially important pattern, not as definitive prevalence rates. The more useful question is how different cognitive profiles influence entrepreneurial behaviour, decision-making, leadership and the environments in which founders perform best.
Questions people ask
What is the difference between neurodiversity and neurodivergent?
Neurodiversity describes variation across a population, so a team or a company can be neurodiverse. Neurodivergent describes an individual whose cognitive profile differs from the dominant norm. One is a property of a group, the other of a person. Calling a single individual neurodiverse is common and technically muddled.
Is neurodivergence a deficit or a difference?
That depends on which frame is asking. The medical model records it as a disorder, because a diagnosis requires evidence of impairment. The neurodiversity movement treats it as ordinary human variation made disabling by environments built for one kind of mind. An operating-system view holds that the strengths and the difficulties come out of the same architecture, which is why removing the difficulty often removes the strength with it.
Do you need a diagnosis to have a non-linear operating system?
No. A non-linear operating system describes how a mind works rather than whether it meets clinical criteria. A diagnosis answers a different question, which for many people is an important one, and only a psychiatrist or clinical psychologist can answer it.
Is the non-linear operating system a clinical model?
No. It is a leadership frame, built from executive practice and from interviews with leaders whose minds do not run in straight lines. It carries no diagnostic authority and makes no claim to clinical validity. It is designed to sit alongside clinical assessment rather than in place of it.
Why not just use the word neurodivergent?
Because it now carries at least three incompatible meanings, and in a boardroom the wrong one tends to get picked up. A word that signals either a medical condition or a political position makes it harder to have the practical conversation about how work should be organised. Describing operating logic keeps the discussion on ground a board can act on.
About the author
Dr Sven Mulfinger is a founding partner of Kuma Partners in Barcelona, where he coaches founders and C-suite leaders and facilitates executive offsites across Europe. He has been building companies for twenty years and has run businesses inside large corporates, which is where most of what he writes comes from.
His current research, with IESE Business School, looks at how cognitive differences shape the way leaders decide and operate. He is a co-author of The Non-Linear Operating System, written with Prof. Thomas Kluetter of IESE and Prof. Nicolas Deuschel of IE.
He was diagnosed with ADHD at fifty. He works in Barcelona, Madrid, Munich and Brussels, and online in English, Spanish, French and German.
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References
• Blume, H. (1998). Neurodiversity: on the neurological underpinnings of geekdom. The Atlantic, September 1998.
• Oliver, M. (1990). The Politics of Disablement. Macmillan.
• Milioni, A. L. V. et al. (2017). High IQ may ‘mask’ the diagnosis of ADHD by compensating for deficits in executive functions in treatment-naive adults with ADHD. Journal of Attention Disorders, 21(6), 455 to 464.
• Milton, D. (2019). Disagreeing over neurodiversity. The Psychologist, 32, 8.
• Doyle, N. (2020). Neurodiversity at work: a biopsychosocial model and the impact on working adults. British Medical Bulletin, 135(1), 108 to 125.
• Dwyer, P. (2022). The neurodiversity approach(es): what are they and what do they mean for researchers? Human Development, 66(2), 73 to 92.
• Botha, M., Chapman, R. and Giwa Onaiwu, M. (2024). The neurodiversity concept was developed collectively: an overdue correction on the origins of neurodiversity theory. Autism, 28(6), 1591 to 1594.
• Mulfinger, S. The Non-Linear Operating System. Book One: The Non-Linear Mind. Forthcoming.
This article describes leadership and governance work. It is not medical advice and it is not a diagnostic framework. If you want to know whether a pattern you recognise is ADHD, dyslexia, giftedness or anything else, ask a psychiatrist or clinical psychologist for a proper assessment.
Working out how your own operating logic fits the company you are running? More information at neurodisruptors.com and mulfinger.com for individuals and kuma.partners for companies.
