Intellectual – Behavioural Intelligence · Editorial

By Moakanyi Magazine · June 2026

Most hiring is built to screen for sameness, then companies wonder why their teams think alike. Addressing HR leaders in June 2026, the managing director of Lyra Botswana put a number to the cost: 15 to 20 percent of people are neurodivergent, and inclusive workplaces, the MD argued, are two to three times more productive.

Neurodiversity covers conditions such as autism, ADHD and dyslexia – differences in how people process information, focus and pattern-match. Framed as deficits, they are managed out of an organisation by default, often before a candidate reaches an interview. Framed as variation, they are a source of the divergent thinking that innovation depends on. The MD's pitch to a room of HR leaders was the second framing, delivered in the language operators respond to: productivity, not compliance.

The Number: One in Five, Already on Payroll

If 15 to 20 percent of people are neurodivergent, then most firms of any size already employ neurodivergent staff, recruited and retained without any accommodation. The figure reframes inclusion from a hiring campaign into a question about people a company has had all along. The cost of a workplace that does not adapt is therefore paid quietly and continuously – in capable employees who underperform their potential, disengage, or leave for somewhere that fits them better.

For a Botswana economy where the diversification debate is ultimately about getting more value from a finite workforce, that is not a soft point. The country cannot import its way to a larger talent pool; it has to use the one it has more fully. Talent already on the payroll, underused because the environment was never designed for it, is the cheapest productivity gain available to any firm – no recruitment cost, no relocation, no training from zero.

If one in five is neurodivergent, the question is not whether to hire them but whether you already have.

The Claim: Inclusion as a Productivity Lever

The two-to-three-times productivity claim is the part that moves a budget, and it deserves to be read as the MD's argument rather than a settled measurement. The mechanism, though, is plausible enough to act on. Workplaces that adapt – clearer written instructions, flexible environments, varied ways to contribute and be assessed – tend to raise output across the whole team, not only for neurodivergent staff. The adjustments that help one group usually remove friction for everyone, which is why inclusive design tends to pay back broadly rather than narrowly.

The cost side is modest, which is what makes the case commercial rather than charitable. Most accommodations are procedural, not capital: rewriting a job description to test for the skill rather than the personality, offering a written brief alongside a verbal one, allowing noise-reduction or flexible hours. These are changes a Gaborone SME can make without a budget line, and they compound – a team that communicates more clearly for one member communicates more clearly for all of them.

The accommodations made for a few tend to lift the output of the many.

For Botswana's HR leaders, the takeaway is procedural before it is moral. Job descriptions, interview formats and performance reviews are where exclusion is built in by accident, and they are also where it can be designed out. The MD's case is that doing so is not benevolence but a productivity decision a commercially minded firm should already be making – and that the firms which make it first will be drawing on a fifth of the workforce their competitors are quietly screening away.

Sources: allAfrica