About this Episode
Callie Elward-Barrett spent years as a senior executive in the Australian Public Service before founding Executive Functioning Leadership Australia and co-founding ndWILD (Weird, Intense, Loud, Different). Her take is simple: neuroinclusion is easy once you treat it as leadership practice design.
Callie shares what she saw after setting up the Department of Health’s neurodiversity network, when people from grads all the way up to Deputy Secretaries quietly asked her whether it was okay to have ADHD at work. She also explains why so few senior leaders disclose, and why that matters for everyone else.
Together, Bree and Callie look at why a low sensory space on its own barely scratches the surface. The bigger shift is asking everyone how they work best and how they want feedback, so nobody has to disclose to get what they need.
Callie also walks through her 5 C’s: clarity, culture, conditions and capacity, with compassion at the centre. It’s a simple lens any leader, facilitator or DEI practitioner can use to check whether their practices work for different brains.
What You'll Learn
Why neuroinclusion is mostly about how leaders lead, not about special spaces or equipment
How low disclosure among senior leaders makes it harder for everyone else to speak up
Why low sensory spaces help some people but can’t be your whole strategy
How “how do you work best?” conversations work for everyone, with no disclosure needed
Callie’s 5 C’s and how to use them to check your practices, facilitation or DEI strategy
Why getting it wrong is okay when you’ve built a culture where repair can happen
Resources Mentioned
Keep Learning & Connect With Bree
Want to know why DEI strategies stall and what to do about it? Register for my free webinar on 19 November. There’ll be time at the end for your questions.
If this episode sparked ideas or questions and you want to talk more about how I can support your team or organisation, book a free 20-minute call with me. I’d love to hear what you’re working on and explore how we can move the work forward, together.
📬 And don’t forget to subscribe to my newsletter for fresh insights, events and tools to support your inclusion journey.
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Bree: Welcome back to DEI Will Not Die. I'm sitting here today again on Wadawurrung Country, where I live, work and play. The sun is shining, and it certainly hasn't been for the last few days. It's been a really wet and miserable weekend. You'll all be sad to know that I didn't get to play cricket this weekend. It was washed out. But that's okay. I replaced it with pickleball, so don't stress. I'm still getting my exercise in. Well, actually, my social time in.
I do want to acknowledge the Wadawurrung people and their continued care for Country, and the education they are providing to local people living on Wadawurrung Country to help us learn to care for Country in the way they have for thousands of years. Always was, always will be, Aboriginal land.
I've got a guest today whose webinar I had the pleasure of sitting in on last week, and I was really excited by what I heard. A lot of it was things you may have heard me say, but there were also some really different and useful ways to create neuroinclusion in workplaces and other settings as well. So I was really excited that Callie agreed to come on the pod today. Callie, I'd love you to introduce yourself. Tell us a little bit about who you are, what type of work you do, and maybe what Country you're coming in from today.
Callie: Thanks, Bree. Hi everyone, I'm Callie Elward-Barrett. I'm dialling in from Ngunnawal and Ngambri Country. I'd love to give my respect to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people who might be listening, and to Elders past, present and emerging, and the storytellers and narrative holders of the land, seas and skies here. I find myself feeling constantly privileged to be able to live and work and play on this Country.
Thank you for having me. It is amazing to be here. I'm a queer AuDHDer, so an autistic ADHDer, as part of my lived experience. I also have physical disability, but today we're obviously going to be talking about neuroinclusion, so I'll focus on that side of things. And you can probably hear my accent. I'm British, and I've been in this beautiful country for about 21 years now. I don't think I have an accent, but people keep telling me I do, so I guess I have to accept that one.
I work in neuroinclusion now. For about the last year I've been working for myself. I have a company where I decided to take the stuff I was doing in a workplace and see if I could do it with more scale, so I could make more of a difference in helping people, leaders and organisations to be a little more neuroinclusive. And just make workplaces a little bit less rubbish for those of us who struggle with some of those traditional expectations.
I also set up a nonprofit at the same time, because my form of neurodivergence means I always have to do the most. It's called ndWILD, which stands for Weird, Intense, Loud, Different. So we do the things where we can make a profit in my normal business, which is coaching, education, keynote speaking and MCing, that type of thing. Then I make all the stuff free under the nonprofit, and we go into schools and into organisations that just don't have a corporate budget.
One thing I get very excited about is that we have WILD Pride under our WILD movement, and we just got accepted into Mardi Gras for the second year running. So we're going to take a group of 40 people to march in Mardi Gras again next year.
Bree: Wow. I love that self-awareness, "I always have to do the most". That's beautiful. What cool stuff. And I think that's an absolute genius tagline: to make workplaces a little less rubbish. I think we can all take that on and use it in our work going forward. We might need a DEI banner.
Callie: It would be nice, right?
Bree: It's so funny, because just yesterday I was running a workshop and someone came up to me afterwards. He was talking about how his children keep getting told they've got a really strong accent, and he keeps reminding them that everybody has an accent. When you said that, I was like, yes, everybody has an accent.
Callie: Right? Yeah! The British accent. I'm actually Welsh, but I don't sound very Welsh, because I got picked on for my Welsh accent when we moved to England. So I basically trained myself not to speak with a Welsh accent when I was about nine. But the people where I moved to were from Coventry. The UK has loads of different accents, and everyone knows about the Birmingham accent because it's really strong. The Coventry accent, and I'm so sorry to any Coventry people who may be listening, I just wasn't having it. I wasn't doing it. So I made one up. That's effectively what happened.
Bree: The rabbit holes we've already gone down! All right, we should probably talk about what we agreed to talk about, but I'm sure we'll both take us down many other paths along the way. I know that you've held some quite senior roles in the Australian Public Service prior to doing this work. What did leading as a neurodivergent person teach you about what workplaces are still getting wrong?
Callie: Great question. I didn't know I was neurodivergent until I was 42, to be honest. So it took me a little while to find out, which, honestly, is bonkers. I think about that almost daily.
I've been a police officer. I joined the police at 19 and did that for a few years in the UK, then wrote a program for police officers to come to Australia, because I wanted to come and there wasn't a visa category. That was a whole thing. Then I went into the finance sector, because I didn't enjoy policing over here. Then I didn't enjoy the finance sector, because I'm too motivated by social justice. Making money just didn't do it for me. So I went into social housing.
Then I got really frustrated with implementing well-intentioned, poorly designed policy, shall we say. So I decided to join the federal public service and be part of making those policies. I was a senior executive with the Department of Health, Disability and Ageing not that long ago. I set up the neurodiversity network there, worked on the whole-of-public-sector community of practice, and got a question into the APS Census so we could start gathering data.
What really struck me was when I first spoke about ADHD Awareness Month. This was before I'd even said I was neurodivergent, the year I found out. I had about 74 people come up to me, from Deputy Secretaries all the way down to grads. They'd stop me in the corridors and ask, "Is it okay to have ADHD here, then?"
I was just like, my goodness. Even in a place that was really good at other forms of inclusion, there was such a lack of awareness around ADHD. And I hadn't realised that, through all the things I was doing just trying to be an empathetic leader, I was gathering all the ADHDers into my branch or my team. That happened over and over again.
TL;DR, because I will use a thousand words instead of 10, so I'll try to keep myself on track: what I realised was that the things I was doing, which are what I now talk about as neuroinclusion and now design more thoughtfully, were working for everyone. I would almost have a group of people follow me between branches, because I moved around a lot doing COVID response.
As a neurodivergent leader, I was so used to expecting criticism, because that's what I'd grown up with my entire life, that I was hyperaware of how to make sure other people didn't feel like they didn't belong. I think I just had that flexibility as a leader.
I was going to have one of my big corflutes behind me, but I've just realised I forgot it. It says "Neuroinclusion is easy". It was one of our Pride corflutes from last year, a giant black thing with our overthinking octopus on it. It says neuroinclusion is easy, because it actually is.
Okay, I'm exaggerating a little. But if you spend a bit of time learning about neuroinclusion and start embedding it into your daily ways of working, I found it really easy. And I found that the people who were seen as the problems, who were being performance managed, would come to me and be promoted within six to 12 months. They weren't a problem. They were just struggling within the system they were in. Sorry, long answer, but that's really where I got to.
The other thing I want to be really clear about is that leaders are the ones who are most afraid of being open about their neurodivergence. And there are reasons for that. There are often ramifications, where you might be seen as less capable after you disclose. The APS Census shows us that. Last year, about 3% of the SES, the Senior Executive Service, identified as neurodivergent, when that is simply not the case. There are way more than that in the SES.
If we're not creating environments where our leaders can disclose, we can't expect non-leaders to disclose. And yet that's constantly raised as one of the biggest challenges in neuroinclusion. I don't know if you get this in your work, Bree, but I get it all the time: "They haven't told me they've got ADHD, but they clearly have. So how can I get them to tell me so I can help them?" And it's like, okay, cool, let's unpack that a little bit. Let's talk about all the things you can do that are free, fairly simple, and will help everybody.
Bree: Exactly. And that doesn't require pathologising that particular employee. It actually focuses on systems change, which I can hear is what you're describing.
Callie: Yeah, 100%. I've done a lot of systems design, user experience and interface design, all those sorts of things. I worked in behavioural insights for quite some time as well. I use all of that and put it into a design thinking framework. But the reality is that it is about design, and it's usually leadership practice design.
Bree: I ran some focus groups earlier this year, and we did one specifically around neuroinclusion. Employees told me that one of the biggest challenges was that none of their leaders were neurodivergent. That clearly tracks with what you're describing. Of course some of them are. But being visible is still too hard, or there's too much stigma that leaders fear will impact their career opportunities, so they're less likely to be open about their neurodivergence.
Callie: Yeah, absolutely. And that's such a shame.
Bree: Absolutely. I wanted to ask about something you hinted at in the webinar too. Quite often I'll work with workplaces and they'll say, "We're now looking at neurodivergence. That's the next thing we're tackling in our DEI work. We've created a network", which is great, "and we've now created a low sensory space for people to go to." Can you talk through why that might be helpful, and also why we might want to think about this more broadly than just introducing a low sensory space?
Callie: Yeah. Firstly, low sensory spaces are great for the very small number of people who need or want them on an intermittent basis, or for some people who need them on an ongoing basis. And this is almost the fundamental issue in neuroinclusion.
There's been quite a bit of research this year from the Diversity Council of Australia and People with Disability Australia. It shows that one of the biggest challenges organisations talk about is that all neurodivergent people need something different. They're almost disappointed that they can't just say, "Well, if we put a low sensory space in and allow people to wear noise-cancelling headphones, we've nailed it."
The problem is, it kind of does what it says on the tin. Neurodivergent means different. In design, we talk about the double diamond: you diverge in ideas before you converge and come back together. We see that as a positive attribute in the design or user experience space. Yet when we use the same word about people, we expect that if somebody's autistic, they have two specific needs. Don't hug them, let them wear headphones. And they must do data. That's the only thing they can do.
Bree: Yes, absolutely.
Callie: And with ADHDers, it's "just don't expect anything from them". The research consistently shows, by the way, that ADHD is the least tolerated of any form of diversity. ADHD is the one that annoys people the most in a workplace.
But, as I alluded to earlier, the most impactful things you can do, and you talked about this in one of your previous episodes, are about having the conversation. How do you want to receive feedback? How do you work best? Those leadership practices are much more important and impactful in a workplace.
The challenge that comes up is, "Well, if everybody wants something different and I've never been trained in how to do it, how do I look after someone's wellbeing? I still need to get outcomes. I still have responsibility to deliver a program or a project."
These conversations are how you make that happen, because we do lumpy, inconsistent work. And importantly, if you have them with everyone, nobody needs to disclose anything to get the benefit. Initially it might mean your leadership systems need to change a little. Instead of, "Okay Bree, we've just talked for 40 minutes, you've got 17 tasks, off you go", it might be, "Bree, do you prefer to receive information in writing, as a message on Teams or in an email, or are you happy to just have a chat about it?"
Then, as a leader, I'd know Bree prefers this and Callie prefers that. I'd know that if I need to tell Callie she's done something that maybe wasn't the best outcome, I'll tell her on a Monday afternoon, so she can go home, cry, have a bit of a tantrum, then come back in on Tuesday morning and we'll have a chat about what to do differently next time. It's all these sorts of things, and everybody needs them at some point.
In a workplace, I'm probably never going to use a quiet room or a sensory space, unless you're all really getting on my nerves and that's the only thing available to me. And if someone else is in that room, I'm definitely not going to want to use it. So it's a really limited resource.
Whereas if we've had a conversation, I know that when I'm dysregulated I can grab a fidget from the bowl of fidgets strategically placed around the office. Or we do brain breaks, if that's something we've normalised as a culture. I used to have somebody in my team who would need a brain break when he got dysregulated. I'd say, "Hey, do a brain break", and off we'd go into any meeting room that was available. He'd put his headphones on and listen to thrash metal for four minutes, or however long the song was. Then he'd come back calm and say, "Okay, I'm good now, let's go."
There are so many different things. You've seen it on TikTok or Instagram, or a LinkedIn post that says neurodivergent people like sensory rooms. And there are sensory sensitivities they can help with. But it's really just scratching the surface. It's not hitting anything meaningful.
Bree: I love that focus on leadership practices. It doesn't matter who you are or how your brain works, it helps to have a leader who really understands how you work best, how you receive feedback, and what's going to help when you're feeling dysregulated. What an amazing world we'd be in if all leaders really understood their employees. I love your focus on that: it's actually about good leadership practices that create neuroinclusion. And that's neuroinclusion for everybody, whatever way their brain works.
Callie: Yeah. And it's not something to be afraid of. I know a lot of leaders get worried. "How can I know everything? What if I get it wrong?" I think if you lead with a bit of compassion and curiosity, it's okay even if you get it wrong.
I use she/her pronouns, and I have people in my life who are very dear to me who use they/them pronouns. Occasionally I'll say "she did that", then go, "Sorry, they did that." It's an immediate correction, and everybody knows we're genuine about trying to be inclusive. It's the same with neuroinclusion. If you get it a little bit wrong one time, as long as you're open to somebody saying, "Hey, do you mind doing it a different way?", and you've created a culture where that can happen, it's okay. You don't have to get it perfect.
Bree: Yeah. The repair conversation can be just as helpful, and sometimes even more positive in terms of creating connection. I often say that if people make a mistake with my pronouns and then correct themselves, it can actually create a stronger sense of connection with that person. I can see that not only do they care, but they cared enough to correct themselves and admit they'd made a mistake. That takes a lot, and it definitely builds connection.
Before we wrap up today, I wanted to talk about something from your webinar last week. You had five Cs, which were strategies to help with the leadership practices we've been talking about, but you also shaped them specifically towards facilitation skills, for when you're leading a space or a team. If you're happy to, I'd love you to share those Cs with us and how we might adopt them in our leadership practices.
Callie: I'd love to. These came out of this exact challenge. If everybody's different, every workplace is different and every context is different, what's something really simple you can apply across any scenario to make it more neuroinclusive, without getting tied up in complicated frameworks? I spoke with thousands of neurodivergent people, I do a lot of academic research, and I've got a lot of leadership experience, and that all went into this.
Initially there were four Cs: capacity, clarity, culture and conditions. Then, as I was talking to people, and from what came out of a lot of tribunal hearings, people kept saying, "I just wish they'd been nicer about it." They could say no to the accommodations, which I like to call customisations rather than accommodations. Or maybe I didn't get the opportunity. But if they'd just been nicer about it and hadn't made me hate myself along the way and feel so much shame. So I added the fifth C, which is compassion. That really sits at the centre of it all.
Very briefly. Clarity: I've yet to meet a conflict or a situation that didn't benefit from being clearer. Taking the implied things, like "professionalism", and I have to do the voice, because what even is it, and actually being clear about what they mean. Professionalism in our context might mean we don't swear in front of our stakeholders and we meet our deadlines, while how we meet those deadlines is completely flexible. And again: how do you want to receive feedback? How do you want me to tell you you're doing a great job? Because some people do not want that publicly. I do. I want the whole thing, tell me everything. That's fine. So being really clear on those things.
Bree: Absolutely. "Professionalism" is rubbish.
Callie: Then culture. You talk about it beautifully in some of your other episodes. It's where we create norms so we don't just see neurodivergence at entry level. We make it safe for our leaders. Maybe we have emerging leaders programs: if you're neurodivergent and you want to become a director or an executive in our organisation, here's a program that looks at what you need to help you get there. And we have a culture that challenges assumptions, where we call people in, not out, that type of thing.
Conditions is about environment. What structures are in place? What are the processes, the lights, the physical environment, the technology environment, the psychological environment? It's about really ensuring everything's accessible, and then understanding what accessible means, and that it's not just a sensory room.
Then capacity. One of the only consistent things we can tell you about neurodivergence is that it's inconsistent. There isn't a one size fits all. We talk about spoons as energy resources. Some days my spoons are going to be low and you'll get nothing out of me. Other days I'll do the whole month's work in three hours, and you're welcome. I'll do all yours as well, and we can all go on holiday for a month.
The five Cs are on my website. I make them freely available, because I think it's important these things are out there. I work with organisations to embed them in a really meaningful way, but everybody can use them. I've applied them across aged care, parenting, schools, collaboration and facilitation, because I like to show they can be applied to anything. They're a way of making things just a little bit less rubbish. And they give you a signpost if you just want to do better and don't know how. It's a good place to start.
Bree: I really thought that when I saw them. You could consistently go through those Cs and look at your practices and the strategies you've developed, and check whether they're meeting those needs. Even through a DEI strategy lens: putting the five Cs over the strategy you've got could be really helpful. It really stood out to me. We'll make sure your website is in the show notes so people can check them out further, and your wonderful podcast as well. Thank you so much for coming on.
Callie: I will say our podcast is a little sweary, so if anybody's not up for that... It's not very sweary, but it's more casual. It's the conversations you wish you could have with your best mate. It's myself and my co-host, and we have guests, but we talk about things at a more casual level. So I just want to put that out there. You have a much better podcast from a professional perspective than we do.
Bree: I highly doubt that. "Professional", in those suspicious quotation marks! Check it out. Thank you so much for coming on and sharing your wisdom and experience with us. We'll make sure all the links are there for people to find out more about you, particularly the nonprofit you run. And good luck at Mardi Gras.
Callie: We're going to be putting out the EOI if anybody wants to come and march with us. You can check us out at ndWILD on Instagram, and we'll put the EOI out there. If anybody wants to join us, you can put in your expression of interest. Bree, if you want to come too.
Bree: What a cool experience. I'll have to check the calendar. Maybe I will. I haven't been to Mardi Gras before, so maybe I should.
Thanks everybody for listening in. Just a reminder before we jump off: I've got a free webinar coming up on the 19th of November that you can register for. You may have seen this one before, and if you have, it will be very similar, but of course you're welcome to come again. I'm going to be talking about diversity, equity and inclusion strategies, and where I see organisations stall or get stuck. There'll definitely be time for questions at the end, so if you've got questions about your strategy, come along. I'll make sure the link is in the show notes.
I hope to have you all listening in for the next episode. Thanks again, Callie, for coming on today.
Callie: Thank you.