ADHDaptive Ltd
Neurodiversity Illuminated
A workshop for the Technician Partnership Conference 2026 at Newcastle University
Technical teams are often exceptionally good at keeping things working. Sometimes too good.
When decisions are late, information is missing, priorities change or nobody is quite sure who owns something, somebody has to pick up the slack. In technical environments, that often falls to the same people again and again.
They solve the problem, chase the answer, fill the gap and make sure the thing still works. Most of that effort is invisible.
For the Technician Partnership Conference 2026 at Newcastle University, I developed a workshop around that problem.
The session, Designing Systems That Don’t Burn Out Your Technicians, sold out, with 61 delegates booked.
The workshop started somewhere else from the usual conversation about resilience. Rather than asking how people could cope better, we looked at where the pressure was coming from, where it was being hidden and who kept having to absorb it.
Technicians often sit between decision and delivery. They are expected to keep things working, manage risk, deal with complexity and respond when plans collide with reality.
The problem is that they do not always have control over the things creating the pressure.
A late decision still has to be delivered. Missing information still has to be found. A badly planned change still has to work somehow.
Because good technicians usually find a way, organisations can become dependent on people quietly absorbing all of that. The work gets done, so the cost of getting it done is easy to miss.
Then, when those people start struggling, the answer is too often resilience training.
The workshop started somewhere else. Rather than asking how people could cope better, we looked at where the pressure was coming from, where it was being hidden and who kept having to absorb it.
Before starting ADHDaptive, I spent much of my career working in technical roles and inside large public sector organisations.
I worked as a School IT Technician and Enterprise Architect at Newcastle City Council, then as a Faculty IT Manager and Head of IT Business Relationship Management at Newcastle University.
I now work as an executive and neurodivergent coach, alongside working with organisations around neurodiversity, pressure, workload and the way work is designed.
My own lived experience of ADHD and autism is part of that work, but this session was not only about neurodivergent staff.
Responsibility without control, invisible work and badly designed pressure can affect anyone.
I did not want to stand at the front for an hour talking about burnout while everyone nodded politely.
The session mixed short pieces of input with discussion and practical exercises.
We looked at responsibility without control, invisible work and the difference between helping people manage pressure and asking whether the pressure should be there in the first place.
Delegates then mapped some of the pressure in their own working environments. They looked at:
The point was not to solve everything in one conference session. It was to help people see the problem differently and give them something useful to take back into their own teams.
Everyone also received a practical handout to use after the session.
A sold-out workshop does not mean an organisation has changed. What it does show is that there is a real appetite for a more honest conversation about workload, pressure and burnout.
The conference organiser had previously described my earlier session as “brilliant and really thought provoking”, and invited me back as part of continuing the conversation around neurodiversity and inclusion.
For the 2026 workshop, 61 delegates booked and the session sold out.
After the session, one delegate came up to me and said she had never found anyone who “gets it” before. That stayed with me.
Another attendee later got in touch to say how much he had enjoyed the session and asked whether he could share some of the ideas with a group he was speaking to in New Zealand.
The ideas were already travelling beyond the room.
ADHDaptive works with organisations that want to understand what is creating pressure, rather than simply teaching people to put up with more of it.
That might mean:
The exact work depends on the organisation and what is going wrong.
The starting point is usually to stop looking only at the person who is struggling and look properly at the system around them.
ADHDaptive works with universities, technical teams, research environments and professional services teams on workload, pressure, burnout and neurodiversity.
The work can start with a workshop, a team session, a review of what is creating pressure, or a conversation about what is happening in your organisation.