I will start with something I am not proud of. Earlier in my career, I used to quietly file people away. Dumb as a post. Abrasive. Other words I will not repeat here. It is true that a few of those people were not a good fit for the role they were in, and part of leadership is being honest about that. But the filing itself was the mistake. I was pathologizing them, sitting there wondering what was wrong with them, as if their brain were a defective copy of mine that someone had shipped by accident.
What finally changed my mind was noticing the defect in my own copy. I have prosopagnosia. I struggle to recognize faces, sometimes including people I know well, occasionally including my own wife across a street. It is a real and well-documented condition, a specific gap in the brain's face-processing machinery, and it has nothing to do with how much I care about the person I am failing to recognize.
Five hundred years ago, I would have been possessed
Picture someone watching me fail to recognize my wife in a public place, five hundred years ago. With no framework for what they were seeing, the only explanations available were moral or supernatural. He is cold. He is rude. He is possessed. Their observation would have been perfectly accurate, and their conclusion would have been perfectly wrong, because the one thing they could not do was name it as wiring rather than character.
Today I use a handful of simple prostheses, small strategies and cues, and I navigate the world of faces about as well as anyone. Nobody had to fix me. I did not have to become a warmer or more attentive person. I needed a few workarounds that let my particular wiring meet the world on fair terms. And that is the whole reframe: many times, a little prosthesis is all it takes to adapt a different brain to a task, where wondering what is wrong with the person accomplishes exactly nothing.
The word prosthesis carries no shame
I choose that word deliberately, because of what it does not carry. We do not think less of someone for wearing glasses. We do not ask what is morally wrong with a person who uses a wheelchair, or a hearing aid, or a calendar reminder. We treat the tool as unremarkable, remove the obstacle, and get on with the work. Somewhere along the way we decided that the body is allowed accommodations but the mind is not, that a physical limitation deserves a ramp while a cognitive one deserves a performance review. That distinction does not survive contact with the actual brain, which is just another organ with variation built in.
There is real science underneath this. Our brains are not sealed units; they are built to offload cognition into the world around us, using external tools and structures to extend what the mind can hold. A grocery list is a memory prosthesis. A checklist is an attention prosthesis. When you let someone use the tool that fits their wiring, you are not lowering the bar. You are doing the most natural thing a thinking system can do, which is to reach for the right support at the right moment.
What prostheses look like at work
In practice, a cognitive prosthesis is usually small, cheap, and specific. The person whose brain fights silent sequencing might need thirty unhurried seconds to think out loud, or the agenda a day early so they can pre-sequence. The one who cannot hold six things in working memory might need the decision written down rather than delivered in a hallway. The strong but scattered engineer might need a shared checklist, not a lecture about focus. The blunt colleague might need one gentle cue about tone, and in return gives you the honest read nobody else will offer. None of these are heroic interventions. They are ramps.
The leader's job is to notice where a person keeps hitting the same wall and to ask what small structure would let them past it, instead of concluding that the wall is a character flaw. That shift, from what is wrong with them to what would help them, is most of the work. It changes you from someone the person has to survive into someone who makes them more capable.
Why this is a competitive edge, not charity
It would be easy to file this under kindness and stop there. That undersells it. The teams that learn to fit the work to a range of minds, rather than demanding one standard-issue brain, consistently get more out of the people they already have, and a growing body of work treats neurodiversity as a genuine competitive advantage rather than a compliance obligation. The very wiring that produces the annoying behavior is often the same wiring that produces the pattern nobody else sees, the relentless thoroughness, the uncomfortable truth spoken plainly. Pathologize it and you lose both halves. Give it a prosthesis and you keep the strength while smoothing the friction.
So here is the question I had to learn to ask, and the one I would offer you. Not what is wrong with this person, but what is this brain good at, and what small prosthesis would let that strength through? Who have you already written off, and what might they become if you adapted the task instead of judging the mind?
References
- Susilo, T., & Duchaine, B. (2013). Advances in developmental prosopagnosia research. Current Opinion in Neurobiology, 23(3), 423-429. doi:10.1016/j.conb.2012.12.011
- Risko, E. F., & Gilbert, S. J. (2016). Cognitive offloading. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 20(9), 676-688. doi:10.1016/j.tics.2016.07.002
- Austin, R. D., & Pisano, G. P. (2017). Neurodiversity as a competitive advantage. Harvard Business Review, 95(3), 96-103. hbr.org
Adapted from the Neuvero video Prosthetics for Your Brain. Related: The Snap Judgments That Make Leaders Misread Their Best People (the judgment that comes first) and The Human Harness, on optimizing your own cognitive architecture.