INSIGHT ‘‘ O
I’ve been thinking about this film in the context of my current research into knowledge sharing and neurodiversity.
Hélène Russell is a KM consultant at TheKnowledgeBusiness and Chair of the K&IM SIG.
Spoilers ahead! If you haven’t seen Project Hail Mary yet and plan to, you will want to come back to this.
VER the Easter holidays, I saw the film “Project Hail Mary”, based on Andy Weir’s book, which follows Ryan Gosling
as Ryland Grace, a science teacher who wakes alone on an interstellar spacecraft with no memory of how he got there.
As his memory returns, he pieces together his mission: he is humanity’s last hope for solving a crisis that is causing the sun to dim and life on Earth to die. Isolated and millions of miles from home, he makes an astonishing discovery: another spacecraft, carrying Rocky, an alien being from a completely different world, on the same mission to save his own planet. Despite having no shared language, no shared biology, and not even the same sensory experience of reality (Rocky navigates by echolocation rather than sight), the two gradually find ways to communicate, collaborate, and trust each other. I’ve been thinking about this film in the context of my current research into knowledge sharing and neurodiversity. Because what Grace and Rocky are doing, is exactly what most of our knowledge systems never attempt: they redesign how they communicate from scratch around each other’s actual capabilities, through genuine curiosity and a shared motivation to make understanding happen.
The system can’t hear everyone KM systems (their design, their interfaces, their norms around what counts as “contributing”) tend to be built around a particular type of knowledge worker: someone comfortable with verbal articu lation, linear documentation, synchronous discussion, and visible participation. These are entirely reasonable defaults, but the problem is that they are defaults, and we rarely examine what they silently exclude. Neurodiverse colleagues, those with
April-May 2026
ADHD, autism, dyslexia, dyspraxia, and other cognitive profiles, often hold and share knowledge in ways that don’t fit those defaults. They may be deep experts who struggle with the retrievalondemand norms of a Q&A culture. They may have unusually strong patternrecognition or systemsthinking abilities that simply don’t surface in a meeting but would in a different format. They may need more processing time, or asynchronous options, or simply not to be put on the spot in front of peers. It isn’t that they don’t have knowledge worth sharing. It’s that the system can’t hear them.
What can you do right now? Meet them
where they are. My research is ongoing, but these four shifts are already wellevidenced, and none requires a budget or a business case:
1. Build multiple input channels. A written summary is not the only valid form of knowledge capture, and for many people, it is not the most useful. Offer audio or video options for those who think out loud, visual mapping for those who work spatially, and asynchronous options for those who need processing time. You don’t need all of these every time, but you do need to stop treating the written record as the universal default.
2. Reduce performance pressure. Knowledgesharing cultures that rely on people demonstrating expertise publicly (in meetings, on platforms, in front of peers) disadvantage anyone for whom that visibility is disproportionately difficult. Psychological safety helps, but anonymous contribution options, presubmitted questions, and one toone capture conversations all help widen who gets heard.
3. Recognise knowledge that doesn’t look like knowledge. Pattern recognition, longterm memory for
precedent, hyperfocus expertise, the ability to hold and synthesise enormous amounts of detail are all cognitive strengths associated with some neurodiverse profiles. They are genuinely valuable forms of organisational knowledge, but they rarely appear in knowledge audits or expertise directories, because the way we surface knowledge still rewards those most comfortable being visible.
4. Watch for the proxy problem. A neurodiverse colleague’s knowledge is often mediated through a neurotypical intermediary who “translates” it into a standard format. This is sometimes helpful, but frequently nuance and caveats get edited out, and the translator is often credited rather than the source. Where you can, create direct routes for contribution, in whatever form works for the person.
All brains in the game Grace didn’t save Earth alone. He needed Rocky. And Rocky’s knowledge was only accessible because Grace was willing, genuinely willing and not performatively inclusive, to meet him where he was. That meant abandoning the assumption that his own communication style was the right one and doing the painstaking work of building something new together. As KMers, we can influence the system design. We can shape the norms and decide, in practice, whose knowledge gets managed and whose gets left behind. My question for you is a simple one: are all brains actually in your game? That would be “amaze amaze amaze”.
I’d love to hear from you about how you include the knowledge of your neurodiverse colleagues in your KM system. Email me at helenerussell@
theknowledgebusiness.co.uk. And if you are interested in topics like these, join the K&IM SIG, sign up for the monthly Update and join our LinkedIn group for more. IP
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