I’m autistic.
I’ve never hidden it, and it’s been said out loud in enough rooms that it hardly counts as news. But it’s never been on this site, and the gap between “not hidden” and “not said” has started to feel like an omission. Because clients keep asking a version of the same question — how did you see that so fast? — and the honest answer isn’t a methodology. The honest answer is that my brain doesn’t give me a choice.
Organisations repeat themselves
I keep a pattern library on this site. Stuck organisations rhyme: the transformation that adopted every ceremony and changed no decisions, the AI pilots that never reach production, the executive who can’t get a straight answer. I publish them because they recur — same knots, different rope.
What I don’t usually explain is what it’s like to be on my side of that. When I read a board pack, or sit in someone else’s stand-up, or listen to a founder describe why the last consultancy didn’t work, the structure underneath isn’t something I go looking for. It asserts itself. The three details that don’t fit the official story arrive pre-highlighted. It’s not insight in the heroic sense. It’s closer to not being able to unsee.
That’s the autistic part. Pattern recognition in most people is a skill that spikes under attention. In me it’s ambient — always on, indifferent to whether it’s welcome, applied equally to org charts, train timetables, and the way someone’s answer changed shape halfway through a sentence. Twenty years of consulting taught me what to do about what I see. The seeing came free.
”But your own post says don’t pattern-match”
It does. A few weeks ago I wrote that transformation needs differential diagnosis, and the first rule of differential diagnosis is: generate a differential, don’t pattern-match. If that reads as a contradiction, good — it’s the most useful tension in how I work, and it deserves to be stated plainly.
The pattern is a hypothesis generator, not a verdict. What the wiring gives me is a ranked differential in minutes instead of weeks: this smells like decision rights, not capability; this smells like a verification bottleneck; this one’s the middleware money pit. What the wiring does not give me is the right to stop there. Anchoring on a beautiful pattern is exactly how confident people get things expensively wrong — and involuntary pattern-matchers are more exposed to that failure, not less, because our candidate answers arrive faster and feel truer.
So the discipline runs the other way. Trace three or four pieces of real work end to end. Find where they actually waited. Try to kill the hypothesis before acting on it. The pattern library tells me where to look first; the diagnosis is earned the slow way. If anything, being built like this made me more methodical, because I learned early that the feeling of certainty and the fact of correctness are different things.
What it’s like in the room
Clients tell me the same two things, usually in this order: you say what you actually see, and you don’t seem to care whose idea it was.
Some of what reads as courage is wiring. The social calculation that makes most consultants soften a finding — who sponsored this programme, whose budget dies if we name it — runs quietly in my head, but it doesn’t get a vote on the finding itself. I’ll say the thing. Politely, in writing, with evidence, but I’ll say it. There’s a reason the how I work page ends every engagement with “Leave”: I’m not building a relationship that depends on the problem surviving.
The stereotype says people like me lack empathy. The people I’ve worked with would tell you something closer to the opposite: I care a great deal about the humans stuck inside broken systems — it’s rather the point of the job — I’m just not very good at pretending a broken system isn’t broken to spare the feelings of whoever built it. In this line of work, that trade turns out to be the one clients are quietly desperate for.
The costs, since you ask
I’d rather this didn’t read as a superpower post, because it isn’t one, and that framing does a disservice to autistic people whose experience is mostly cost. Mine has costs too. A full-day workshop is a performance with a recovery bill. Open-plan offices are weather. Ambiguity that most people shrug off — we’ll firm that up later — sits in my head like an unresolved chord. I’ve built a practice with fixed prices, defined ends, and written deliverables partly because clients deserve that clarity, and partly because I need it.
I mention the costs for one reader in particular: the one who’s built like me and is wondering whether it’s compatible with this kind of work. It is. You just stop renting your working style from other people and design your own.
Why say it now
Three reasons. It’s already public, so this page is just consistency. It’s the mechanism behind things I already publish — the patterns, the fixed prices, the diagnosis-first shape of every engagement are all downstream of a brain that needs structure to be explicit — and you deserve to see the working. And because somewhere a leader is reading a pattern page thinking how could he possibly know that from the outside — now you know. Organisations repeat themselves, and I can’t not see it.
If one of the patterns reads like your Tuesday, that’s not a trick. That’s the point.