Thoughts on people, consulting, onboarding, and neurodiversity

I've been deep in the work...
and it always comes down to people.

Hey Reader,

I know it’s been a while since I landed in your inbox…

I’ve been deep in the work. The kind that’s hard to surface from long enough to write about. But a few threads have been running through everything I’ve been doing lately, and I think they’re worth sharing.

Here’s the short version. I've been:

Taking a course called Coaching Neurodiversity at Work.
Doing a large, long-term Notion/operations/change management consulting project for a large academic institution.
Contributing to the development our newly launched course, Architecting Workspaces, which is essentially the most comprehensive guide to working with teams in Notion (specifically the onboarding and training module).

On the surface, these feel like very separate things. But every one of these experiences has been teaching me that humans are wildly different from each other, and most systems (workplaces, tools, onboarding processes) are built as if they aren't.

Here’s what’s been coming up and some themes that have been emerging through this work:

One in 5 people are considered neurodivergent. This means that the way those folks process information, learn, and behave falls outside of what we consider to be the "typical" standard or "norm."

And yet most workplaces don’t really talk about it in onboarding, in diversity and inclusion conversations, and most team trainings don’t address it in any meaningful way. What ends up happening is that you have a lot of people at work who spend enormous energy masking: adapting, performing, contorting themselves to fit systems that were never designed with them in mind. It's exhausting in a way that’s hard to quantify.

It's one of the many reasons I began my self-employment journey over 20+ years ago; it became very clear to me that I didn't easily fit into a traditional workplace environment, and I also believed for a long time that I couldn't work with teams or large organizations because my experience was almost exclusively small-scale, working with solo business owners in very small collaborative environments (less than 10 people).

I had a lot of stories and limiting beliefs around my area of expertise and what was possible for me as a neurodivergent person.

I’ve been sitting with this as I work through my consulting engagement where a big part of the work involves onboarding different teams of people into Notion workspaces. And what keeps surfacing is how different everyone is. Different workflows, different levels of clarity, different relationships with technology, different motivations, different capacities. Some teams have well-defined processes. Some have shadow systems living inside three other tools. Some are starting completely from scratch. Some are excited to learn a new technology, while others are frustrated.

We’ve been doing prototype sprints, requirements gathering, current state mapping, future state mapping, and generally trying to understand how each team actually works before we build anything. What has made this deeply complex work not only possible, but successful, is that there are many different types of brains working together to bring this project to life.

It's the first time I've been able to work with a team at a much larger scale and feel like the weird mix of experience I have and work that I do is uniquely suited for a particular organization and group of people. It's some of the most rewarding work I've done in my career so far, and I feel deeply grateful for that sense of alignment.

And of course, it hasn't been without its challenges.

In the same week, I had a call with a team member who was raving about how Notion had transformed workflows that used to feel completely chaotic. She was so excited, and despite some initial reservations (”I knew it would be so easy to go back to my Google Sheet… but I decided to challenge myself and just try it!”), she persevered and was absolutely delighted with the new process for logging her event transactions.

And then I had a call with a different team member, and there was confusion, frustration, and resistance. "This is supposed to make my life easier!" What became clear pretty quickly was that some important “setting the scene” hadn’t happened upstream. This person felt they had been thrown in the deep end, and their emotional reaction was getting in the way of everything else.

It was a reminder that onboarding is never just a technical problem. It’s equal parts technical and adaptive strategy.

You can easily grant access to a hundred people to a Notion workspace in a few clicks. But there’s no button to transfer your specific workflows, no shortcut to translate organizational intelligence, no wand to wave that makes people actually use the system you’ve built. The truly hard part of onboarding is designing experiences that meet the unique needs of the humans involved, and every organization is a distinct blend of people, perspectives, processes, and even politics. There is simply no one size fits all when it comes to onboarding people into software or workflows.

This is exactly what Ben and I have been addressing through Architecting Workspaces, our new course for Notion consultants and team workspace builders. I contributed heavily to the onboarding lesson, and it’s some of the most practical, hard-won material I’ve put together.

Onboarding a team into Notion is one of the most challenging things a consultant can do, and it deserves way more than a post-build checklist. It needs to be designed into the consulting experience from the very first discovery call.

If you’re already a member of Notion Mastery, you can request access to the Architecting Workspaces beta right now (send an email to support@notionmastery.com and we'll get you hooked up). If you’re not yet a member, joining Notion Mastery is your best way in.

What all of this is work has been pointing me toward is continuing to lean into the hardest parts about getting work done: understanding and clarifying how we uniquely work, how those ways of working translate into actual workflows and projects, and then how to do that work in collaborative environments.

I’ve been wanting to build something that meets people before they ever open a tool.

This thinking and work that i’ve been doing over the past few years, and the learning I’m doing around neurodivergence at work is shaping a new Workflow Design series that is Notion-agnostic, and helps you not just think in systems, but in terms of how you uniquely work best.

This is the work that's most alive for me right now.

I believe that the insights we uncover from the friction of our day-to-day work experiences have so much to teach us... if we are listening closely.

If you're curious about this series, reply to this email and let me know! Stay tuned for more information about the upcoming series!

On the Podcast

I've been so head-down in the work that I haven't done a good job of sharing these fabulous conversations we've published with these amazing humans on our podcast this season! We explore a rich variety of topics this season including identity work and authenticity, skepticism in an increasingly AI-focused tech landscape, building calm businesses, working with our brains natural rhythms, creativity and the imperative of joy, and how our environments and culture shape our work, and more.

Explore the full episode list here.