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Incident response processes can disproportionately disadvantage neurodivergent engineers. This talk shows how small, intentional changes to incident management can reduce cognitive load, support neurodivergent engineers, and improve reliability for everyone.
When incidents happen, on-call engineers are expected to reason about complex systems under intense time pressure, ambiguity, and social stress. Yet most incident management practices quietly assume strong working memory, rapid context switching, comfort with implicit rules, and emotional resilience under impact escalation. Those assumptions disproportionately disadvantage neurodivergent engineers.
ADHD responders pay heavily for context switching and memory load. Autistic responders are forced to infer implicit expectations under stress. Anxious responders face amplified threat perception when escalation, severity, or stakeholder expectations are unclear. The current processes also increase operational risk for teams as a whole. Unclear ownership, emotional escalation, misunderstood decisions, mistaken actions, fragmented communication and missed handoffs are not just human problems; they are systemic problems.
This talk reframes incident management as a designed system, not just a runbook. If anything, the more complex and detailed a runbook is written, the quicker it gets out-of-sync, becomes inconsistent, and too overwhelming to read. Drawing on real incident patterns and leadership experience from various organisation sizes and structures as a neurodivergent engineer, this talk explores how cognitive load, ambiguity, and emotional pressure show up during incidents and how leaders can redesign response processes to be more predictable, explicit, and humane without slowing teams down.
Attendees will learn practical, low-cost changes they can make immediately: reducing cognitive complexity in runbooks and alert descriptions, making expectations explicit, eliminating backchannels (with a caveat), narrating visuals and metrics, defining severity by impact rather than emotion, allowing emotional processing (separately from execution), permission to slow down/have a break/hand over, designing clearer on-call and recovery practices, and building the incident management muscle memory through trainings, game days/hours and shadowings. These changes improve inclusion, decision-making, and system reliability at the same time.
Key takeaways
- A new way to look at incident management as a socio-technical system with cognitive constraints
- Concrete practices to reduce cognitive load during incidents
- Leadership tools for building incident response skills across diverse teams and brains
