How to become a high-performing & neuro-inclusive software team

Why?

Developing software applications and IT systems is a challenging undertaking. Development teams find themselves in a complex environment called a “socio-technical system”, where the quality of interactions among people and between people and technology is crucial for success.

Teams often face difficulties managing their jobs to be done, retaining trust with management or stakeholders, or keeping team morale and psychological safety high. This leads to frustration from management, colleagues and clients, resulting in a waste of money, time, motivation and talent.

Adding that an estimated one in five people is neurodivergent (with ADHD, ASD or autism, dyslexia, giftedness, high sensitivity (HSP), and more), it’s even more critical for companies to build neuroinclusive environments and to focus on psychological safety, managing work and cognitive load, and enabling self-organisation.

By focussing on five core guiding principles that also take neurodivergent team members into account, development teams can be upskilled to perform on a higher yet sustainable level. This drastically improves retention rates and the well-being of the team, while allowing them to deliver high-quality working solutions sooner.

What and for whom?

Based on our popular keynote “ADHDeveloper – Thriving as a neurodivergent software engineer”, we have composed a workshop helping teams discover and apply guiding principles to thrive as a neuroinclusive, high-performing development team.

The workshop is valuable to all roles in software development, including software engineers, team leads, architects, UX/UI experts, designers, QA engineers, product managers, system engineers, engineering managers and CTOs.

Available as a three or six hour session, online or in-person, in English or Dutch.

What you’ll learn

Putting people and well-being first

Discovering the need and value of psychological safety. Why is this important for neurodiverse teams? How can we ensure that everyone in the team is valued and appreciated, and is able to let their strengths and skills shine?

Making many small and valuable steps

Introducing the principles of walking skeletons and evolutionary design, and showing how value can be delivered to clients or stakeholders continuously.

Limiting cognitive load

How to define goals, value and impact, and how can we use these to define priorities? Here you’ll also learn the importance of one piece flow and saying “no”.

Celebrating, reflecting and experimenting

Don’t forget to celebrate. 😉 But also learning the why and how of debriefing, retrospectives and running experiments.

Mentoring and coaching

Learning the basic principles of mentoring and coaching, so team members can support each other and share knowledge in the best possible way.

Facilitated by

Dietrich Moerman is a software engineering expert turned neurodiversity consultant and trainer. He learnt the power of psychological safety and limiting cognitive load while leading software development teams, gradually discovering the values for his own ADHD and autistic brain. Today, he helps leaders, HR professionals and teams to thrive with neurodiversity.