Neurodiversity Leadership Summit 2026

Pre-Conference Workshop

09:00 Neurodivergent Leadership Masterclass 

This one day practical workshop is designed specifically for neurodivergent leaders and professionals who want to perform at a higher level without compromising how they think and work.

Too often, leadership expectations are built around a narrow definition of performance. This session challenges that model and focuses on how you can lead, work and succeed by leveraging your natural strengths rather than masking them.

Throughout the day, you will explore practical tools, strategies and frameworks to better manage energy, improve focus, navigate workplace expectations and build a leadership style that is both authentic and effective.

Key Course Takeaways:

• Reframe your neurodivergence as a strength and understand how it shapes your leadership style

• Build practical strategies to manage energy, focus and avoid burnout

• Learn how to structure work and workflows to improve productivity and consistency

• Develop a clear and professional way to communicate your working style and preferences

• Strengthen your confidence to lead without masking or over adapting

• Walk away with a clear, practical plan to improve your performance immediately

Conference Day 1

SESSION 1:
9:30 AM: The Normal We Never Questioned

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.

10:40 AM: Morning Tea

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.

1:00 PM Lunch

2:00 PM From Insights to Action: What lessons have we learned so far?

SESSION 4
2:20 PM: Leaving No One Behind: How Inclusive Leadership Leads to Better Systems

SESSION 5:
3:30 PM: Loud, Late and Unapologetic: Rewriting Success on Your Own Terms

Diagnosed with ADHD at 42, then autistic soon after, Em Rusciano spent decades performing "normal" before her real mind was ever seen. In this fireside chat, Em shares the story behind the headlines: masking, unmasking, raising neurodivergent kids, and building a career and a family life on her own terms.

This is not a leadership framework. It's proof that late diagnosis doesn't mean a smaller life, and that performance built on masking is performance built to burn out.
Attendees will leave Day One with a genuinely uplifting, funny, and disarmingly honest reminder of what's possible when people stop hiding how they think.

4:20 PM Closing Reflections and Insights to Action

4:40 PM Close of Day one & Networking Drinks

Conference Day 2

SESSION 1:
9:20 AM: Nobody Wins on the Standard Program

Elite sport has spent decades ruthlessly optimising human performance. It did not arrive at a standard program. Workplaces did.

No elite team has ever won anything by putting every athlete on the same program. Yours is running one.
Associate Professor Erin Hoare holds the chair in Neurodiversity and Mental Health at the University of Melbourne. She is a 2026 Fulbright Scholar and 2025 Churchill Fellow - and was, until recently, a professional athlete across two codes, netball and AFLW.
Sport works backwards from the individual. It measures, personalises and adapts, because anything else leaves capability on the field. Most workplaces claim to want performance, then run everyone through identical conditions, hours and environments, and call the people who do not fit a management problem.
Drawing on her Churchill Fellowship research into neuroinclusive high-performance systems worldwide, Erin shows what your organisation can take directly from sport - and what it is costing you not to.
You will leave with a model for designing performance around people, not averages.

Many of the most valuable ideas come from people who approach problems in different ways.

This session will explore how cognitive diversity contributes to innovation, creativity and better problem solving. We will look at how leaders can create the conditions for new ideas to emerge, be heard and be acted on, rather than unintentionally filtering them out.

Attendees will walk away with a clearer understanding of how to harness different perspectives to drive innovation and unlock new opportunities within their teams and organisations.

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

Amanda Barker has spent over a decade bringing rigour to how organisations measure and report on what matters — from ESG strategy at Aware Super to human rights consultancy work nationally. In this session, she applies that same discipline to neuroinclusion: what happens when the cost of getting it wrong is real but unmeasured, and how leaders can start treating it with the same accountability as any other business risk.

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.

12:40 PM: Lunch

SESSION 4
1:40 PM: AI, Focus and Cognitive Strengths

SESSION 5:
2:30 PM: Building Teams That Actually Work

Strong teams are not defined by alignment alone, but by how effectively they work through difference.

QBE has just launched its fifth Reconciliation Action Plan — proof that inclusion, done well, is never a one-off initiative but a practice rebuilt year after year. Anu Wettasinghe, QBE's Inclusion and Wellbeing Manager, is joined by a colleague to close out the summit with what that actually looks like in practice: the systems, habits and everyday decisions that keep a mature program moving rather than stalling after the first win.

Attendees will leave with clear, actionable approaches to build teams that are more effective, more resilient, and equipped to perform in complex environments — drawn from an organisation several iterations into doing the work.

3:20 PM: Afternoon Tea

SESSION 6:
3:30 PM: The Day You Stop Being Needed

 Every organisation can name someone who pushes for inclusion. Far fewer can name a change that happened without them.

Name one inclusion change your organisation made last year that nobody had to fight for.
Tegan Acton is Head of Inclusion and Diversity at NAB. Before the bank, they spent five and a half years at the Queensland Department of Education, taking it to Gold Tier in the Australian Workplace Equality Index in under two years.
This session begins with a moment that surprised them. NAB made a significant change to make its workplaces safer for trans and gender diverse colleagues - and Tegan, the Head of Inclusion and Diversity, found out it had happened without them asking, chasing or convincing anyone.
That, they argue, is the only test that counts. Not the policy. Not the engagement score. Whether the work still needs you.
Tegan sets out what has to be true for inclusion to move without a champion. You will leave with one question to ask on Monday.

4:20 PM: Conference Close

Post-Conference Workshop

Full Day Workshop | 9:00 AM – 5:00 PM | 13th November 2026: Building a Neuroinclusive Organisation: Reducing Friction, Elevating Performance

Organisations are increasingly recognising the value of neurodiversity, but many struggle to translate this into consistent performance across teams.
This full day workshop focuses on how to embed neuroinclusion into the way your organisation operates, not as an initiative, but as a driver of productivity, engagement and results. Moving beyond awareness, you will explore how leadership capability, team design and workplace practices can either unlock or limit performance — and how the internal maps leaders and teams are navigating with often shape that outcome more than capability does.

Many of the challenges within teams are not caused by a lack of capability, but by differences in the internal maps people use to think, communicate and approach their work. Throughout the day, you will build awareness of how these maps are formed, learn to direct focus and discernment more deliberately, and develop the agility to recognise and work with different thinking styles — gaining practical frameworks to better support different ways of thinking across recruitment, onboarding, communication and day to day operations, while improving overall business outcomes.

Key Learning Outcomes:

• Build a clear understanding of what a neuroinclusive organisation looks like in practice

• Identify gaps in your current leadership capability, systems and processes

• Understand how different thinking and communication styles create friction within teams

• Learn how to embed neuroinclusive practices across the employee lifecycle

• Improve team performance by designing roles, workflows and environments more effectively

• Strengthen leadership capability to support different thinking styles at scale

• Learn practical techniques to improve clarity, reduce misunderstandings and reduce friction in teams

• Improve team dynamics without forcing uniformity or over standardisation

• Develop a practical roadmap to implement change within your organisation

Reducing Friction in Teams and Communication: 1:30 PM – 5:00 PM | 13th November 2026

Many of the challenges within teams are not caused by lack of capability, but by differences in how people think, communicate and approach their work.

This practical workshop explores how leaders can reduce friction, improve communication and create more effective team dynamics across cognitively diverse environments. By understanding where misalignment occurs, you can address common breakdowns that impact performance, collaboration and engagement.

Throughout the session, you will explore practical strategies to improve clarity, reduce misunderstandings and create stronger, more productive working relationships.

Key Benefits of Attending:

• Understand how different thinking and communication styles create friction within teams

• Identify common breakdowns that impact collaboration and performance

• Learn practical techniques to improve clarity and reduce misunderstandings

• Strengthen your ability to communicate effectively across diverse teams

• Improve team dynamics without forcing uniformity or over standardisation

• Apply simple, actionable strategies to improve day to day team performance