This article explains why I am stepping back from writing about neurodiversity as a primary lens for my work. Not because the subject no longer matters, but because over time it has begun to obscure achievement rather than illuminate it. This is a reflection on explanation, authority, and the point at which context stops being helpful and starts getting in the way.
Contents
1. Why I Started Talking About Neurodiversity at All
I didn’t begin writing about neurodiversity as an act of identity, branding, or advocacy. I wrote about it because, at a certain point in my career, it became the least-worst way of explaining friction.
It explained intensity. It explained why I worked the way I did, why I saw systems differently, and why certain environments drained me while others amplified me. It gave language to masking, exhaustion, and the quiet cost of translating myself into spaces that were not built with people like me in mind.
At the time, that language was useful. It helped people understand why I operated differently, and it helped me make sense of experiences that hadn’t previously had a coherent frame. It also helped others (particularly neurodivergent people earlier in their careers) feel less alone in experiences they often struggled to articulate.
None of that was performative. It wasn’t about foregrounding difference for its own sake. It was about clarity, offering context so that work, behaviour, and outcomes could be interpreted more accurately.
But explanation, like any tool, has a half-life. What starts as illumination can, over time, become distortion. And that’s the point this article begins from.
2. When Explanation Becomes Obfuscation
At some point, the language I was using to explain myself stopped clarifying and started interfering.
What had once helped others interpret how I worked began to sit in front of the work itself. Conversations that used to centre on outcomes, delivery, and impact increasingly opened with diagnosis, condition, or category. Neurodiversity became the first frame rather than the background context it was meant to provide.
That shift wasn’t hostile or malicious. In many cases, it was well-intentioned: curiosity, inclusion, an attempt to “do the right thing”. But its effect was cumulative. Explanation began to function as a filter. Achievement was subtly reframed as exception, accommodation, or anomaly.
It was around this time that a conversation with my friend Chris crystallised what was happening.
Chris had been running Deloitte in the UK. He has spent decades around complex organisations, high performers, and people who actually deliver. At one of the many gigs we attend together, he said something deceptively simple: he liked it more when people asked why I was so clever. When I would reply, “I don’t sleep, and I read a lot”, he said that had always been enough for him.
Over lunch, we talked further, and his point became clearer. By foregrounding neurodiversity (autism, ADHD, diagnostic language) I was allowing that framing to sit in front of my achievements. Not deliberately, and not out of insecurity, but out of a habit formed when explanation had once been necessary.
His argument wasn’t that neurodiversity was irrelevant. It was that it was doing work it no longer needed to do. It had become the headline rather than the footnote.
That’s when the realisation landed: explanation can become a veil. A thing that once illuminated now obscured. The very language that had helped me survive and be understood was quietly getting in the way of the thing that mattered most: the work itself.
Once that frame shifted, it became hard to unsee.
3. The Unintended Cost of Labels
Once an explanation becomes the dominant frame, it begins to reshape how work is perceived: often in ways that are subtle, unintended, and difficult to challenge directly.
Labels are meant to clarify. In practice, they often precondition judgment. When neurodiversity moves from background context to foreground identity, achievement is no longer encountered neutrally. It arrives pre-qualified. Success is quietly reframed as impressive given the condition, rather than impressive in its own right. Failure, when it happens, is more easily attributed to difference than to the ordinary risks and complexities of demanding work.
This shift doesn’t require bad intent. It emerges from cultural habits: a desire to be inclusive, to contextualise, to explain. But the effect is cumulative. Over time, labels start doing explanatory work that crowds out other interpretations. Competence becomes conditional. Authority becomes annotated.
In wider culture, this dynamic is amplified. Neurodiversity has increasingly become a topic of consumption, discussed, shared, branded, and debated across platforms. Some of that visibility is valuable. Much of it is reductive. Complex lives and difficult realities are compressed into digestible narratives, and the distinction between explanation and performance becomes harder to maintain.
The result is a paradox. The very language intended to foster understanding can end up narrowing it. By foregrounding condition, we risk flattening contribution. By leading with identity, we subtly displace outcomes.
This is not an argument against neurodiversity, nor against the language used to describe it. It is a critique of how that language is consumed, and of the quiet cost that consumption can impose on how work, capability, and achievement are ultimately seen.
4. Achievement Does Not Require a Footnote
Before neurodiversity became the dominant lens through which some people encountered my work, there was simply the work itself: delivered at scale, under pressure, and with real-world consequences. What follows is not a catalogue for validation, but a record of outcomes.
I became the youngest Chief Technology Officer of a billion-plus-pound technology company in the UK at 35, serving as CTO of Sun Microsystems UK & Ireland between 2006 and 2009. That role sat at the intersection of enterprise systems, national infrastructure, and global technology delivery at a time when Sun was a foundational player in modern computing.
Between 2013 and 2016, I led the redesign of the UK’s Border Control system for the Home Office and Border Force, the first substantive redesign in 27 years. The previous programme, eBorders, had failed at £7.2 billion (paid to Raytheon). The system we delivered supports over 250 million border crossings and checks every year. It operates quietly, continuously, and at a national scale, which is exactly how infrastructure of that kind should behave.
I also developed a charitable lending platform that went on to support more than 56% of all charitable loans in the UK, with over £600 million in total loan value. I served as a trustee of the organisation for around a decade, helping to steward both the technology and the mission behind it.
In cyber security, I am the founder, inventor, and Head of Technology for two firms, with a third currently in boot-up. One of these, Cyber Tzar, works closely with the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) and the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT). I remain hands-on as Head of Development across both platforms, focused on delivery rather than distance.
Most recently, I have been involved in launching a Cyber Hub in the West Midlands (funded by DSIT, via Innovate UK) to provide a physical and organisational home for the cyber security community in Birmingham and the surrounding region. It is intended as infrastructure, not branding: a place for practitioners, collaboration, and capability to grow.
That work is built upon several years of ecosystem-level contribution, convening regional cyber communities, supporting sector coordination, and advising on the evaluation of public cyber funding, focused on capability-building rather than visibility.
Alongside this, I publish one of the most widely read technology blogs in the UK, currently ranked as the 12th most read worldwide in the UK Tech category, positioned among long-established industry publications rather than personal sites.
Over the course of my career, I have led or shaped technology and architecture functions at organisations including Direct Line Group, Manchester United, Thomas Cook, Sun Microsystems, and Border Force, among others.
I was born in Nechells, raised in Handsworth, and still live in Castle Bromwich. My professional recognition includes Chartered Engineer and Fellow of the IET, Chartered IT Professional and Fellow of the BCS, Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Information Security, and Master of the City and Guilds Institute.
These are outcomes: they are the result of sustained work, responsibility, and delivery over decades. They do not require a diagnostic preface to be legible.
Neurodiversity is part of my life, and I remain a committed advocate for neurodivergent employment rights, particularly because only around 16% of autistic people are currently able to sustain employment, making them one of the most marginalised groups in the workforce.
My experience sits at a particular point on the spectrum: what was once termed Asperger’s. High cognitive ability and verbal fluency have enabled professional outcomes that remain statistically rare among autistic people. My challenges centre more on social connection and emotional projection than on daily living skills, and my needs differ accordingly. Recognising such variation matters… not to create hierarchy, but to ensure support reaches those who face the greatest barriers.
But the work itself stands independently. It always has.
5. Masking, Revisited (Briefly)
Over several years, I’ve written extensively about masking, not as a single behaviour, but as a constellation of survival strategies shaped by environment, expectation, and power. I’ve explored its psychological cost, its impact on identity, its relationship to burnout, and its role in professional life. I’ve written from lived experience, drawn on research, and interrogated the structures that make masking necessary in the first place.
That work stands. It doesn’t need revisiting here.
Masking explains how I navigated certain systems, particularly early in my career and in environments that were not built to accommodate difference. It helps explain survival. It does not explain what I’ve built, delivered, or led.
At this point, returning to masking in detail would be repetition, not progress. The analysis exists. The arguments are on record. Rehearsing them again would not add clarity; it would dilute their force.
This article is not a continuation of that exploration. It is a boundary around it.
Masking mattered. It still does. But it does not need to remain the lens through which everything else is interpreted.
6. This Is Not Rejection, It’s Integration
Stepping back from writing about neurodiversity as a primary lens is not an act of rejection. It isn’t denial, distancing, or embarrassment. And it certainly isn’t a claim that neurodiversity no longer matters, to me or to the world.
Neurodiversity is part of my life. It informs how I think, how I work, how I perceive systems, and how I experience pressure and exhaustion. None of that disappears because I choose not to foreground it in my writing.
What changes is placement.
Neurodivergence can still inform how my work is understood. It no longer needs to introduce it.
For a long time, neurodiversity sat at the front of the conversation because it needed to. It provided missing context in environments that had no language for differences. It helped explain friction that would otherwise have been misattributed to personality, temperament, or intent.
But context is not the same as centre. Integration means allowing neurodiversity to inform the work without standing in front of it. It means letting contribution lead, and letting identity follow where it is relevant rather than mandatory.
This distinction matters. When identity becomes the primary frame, it reshapes how competence is perceived, often subtly, sometimes unconsciously. Integration resists that by insisting that work be judged on what it does in the world, not on the category of the person who produced it.
For many people, neurodiversity will, and should, remain a central and necessary frame, particularly where safety, rights, or access are still contested. My choice here is not a prescription for others. It is a decision about how I want my own work to be encountered.
Even in organisations that claim to embrace neurodiversity, genuine acceptance often remains thin. Expectations around constant eye contact in video calls, suppression of natural stims, or discomfort with visible intensity persist. These aren’t neutral norms; they quietly reinforce the very structures that made explanation necessary in the first place. In competitive environments where cooperation and rivalry coexist, those norms still hold most of the power. Change is frequently rhetorical rather than real.
Integration is not erasure. It is proportion.
7. What Comes Next
Stepping back from neurodiversity as a central theme does not mean stepping back from writing, thinking, or contributing. It means changing the focus.
As we advance, this blog will return more explicitly to the things it has always been about at its core: systems, technology, resilience, delivery, leadership, and the practical realities of building and operating complex things in the real world.
Neurodiversity will still be present where it is relevant, but it will no longer be the organising principle. It will appear incidentally, as context rather than headline, part of the texture of work rather than its framing device.
That shift reflects where I am now, professionally and personally. The questions that interest me most are no longer about explanation, translation, or accommodation, but about what works, what scales, and what endures.
This isn’t a closing of a door. It’s a narrowing of focus.
8. Final Statement
For a long time, explaining myself was necessary. It created understanding where there was none, and it reduced friction in environments that were not built with people like me in mind.
That work is largely done.
The record exists. The outcomes are visible. The contribution is documented. The work speaks clearly enough without continual translation.
I am not withdrawing, and I am not becoming quieter. I am choosing where my energy goes.
Success has brought recognition for usefulness: what I can build, solve, and deliver. But usefulness is not the same as being truly known or connected. The intensity that drives achievement can also create distance, such as difficulty reading others, feeling reciprocally understood, or escaping the sense of separation. This shift is, in part, choosing to let the work stand visible while guarding what remains private.
From here on, I would rather be known for what I build, what I deliver, and what endures, than for the explanations that once helped others make sense of how I do it. And that, finally, feels like enough.
In Shelley’s Ozymandias, the ruined statue boasts: “Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair”. The irony is transience. For me, the line reads differently: look on the works, quietly operating infrastructure, secure systems, community hubs, and see what endures. No preface required.