Every team, product, and organization is shaped by invisible cognitive assumptions. The way people form mental images, manage attention, perceive time, and filter sensory input varies far more than we account for. When we design for one type of mind, we create friction for everyone else — and we never know it, because the people struggling have already learned to work around us. In this session, you will not just learn about neurodiversity. You will experience it. Through live cognitive experiments, real-time audience data, and AI-powered analysis, you will discover things about your own mind and see how cognitive diversity creates both blind spots and breakthroughs in any organization. Josh Penzell brings 20 years of theater directing, enterprise experience at Amazon, Zillow, and Skillsoft, and his own late diagnosis to deliver a session that is equal parts research-grounded and viscerally felt. You will leave with the structured freedom framework, the curb-cut design principle, and at least one thing you will change on Monday.
