Joanna Weber
2 min readJan 27, 2025

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You might enjoy the book 'Corporate Rebels' if you haven't already read it.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Corporate-Rebels-Make-work-more/dp/9083004805

But, yes, we neurodivergent types often struggle in 'legacy' companies because of the very things you mention. I survived such an environment in the past by hanging out with my fellow wibbly-brained weirdos.

The funny thing is how quickly the Pippin-in-the-ent-moot battle cry of "FFS! Take a risk! We must act more quickly!" can turn to Pippin-when-talking-to-Merry if you make the move to a startup culture: "FFS write a risk register! We must slow down and consider the impact of our actions!"

Those big legacy companies survived to this point by doing the things they've been doing: a lot of those things (thinking long term, rigorous application of standards) are the distinguishing factors between companies that go bust and those that don't (source: HBR article on 100-year-old companies). If there's one piece of advice I could give to these nimble tech startups, it would be to behave more like a 100-year-old company.

However, you're right that there are things that legacy companies can learn from startups, too, and one way to do this is to limit the cost of failure through experimentation.

An endemic mistake in startup culture is to continuously "disrupt" without establishing the thing it's disrupting, behaving recklessly until the company runs out of money. This is the behaviour that the legacy companies are so keen to avoid.

Instead, accept that over 90 out of every 100 products/ideas will fail, and try to limit the cost of failure by weeding out the unworkable ideas as quickly as possible, by creating a walled-off sandbox where a team of cross-functional innovators can hackathon their way through ideas to identify the promising ones (via elimination) early and often.

I don't know if Intuit are still offering their 'Innovation Catalyst' cascaded training programme, but a company I worked for had great success from that. The difference between ours and most Design Thinking initiatives is that we had highly-experienced, properly qualified designers and researchers in every cross-functional team, so the result was technically 'Human-Centred Design'.

https://hbr.org/2011/06/the-innovation-catalysts

https://online.hbs.edu/blog/post/what-is-human-centered-design

That's one place to start, suggesting similar initiatives where you work. That previous company started off with an internal innovation competition, a few pilot projects and eventually the creation of a 'discovery lab' to develop and test ideas and lightweight apps away from the confines of Business As Usual.

Although the lab struggled (as most do) to return the anticipated profits and was eventually absorbed into Business As Usual, those Human-Centred Design practices permeated the rest of the company until they became how we do things around here, making it the most successful experiment of all.

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Joanna Weber
Joanna Weber

Written by Joanna Weber

UX research and product development | author of Last Mile

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