How Nathaniel Hawley turned lived experience and a fascination with the brain into a social enterprise helping organisations rethink inclusion.
Long before founding Divergent Thinking, Nathaniel “Nat” Hawley was trying to understand why he could be underestimated in one setting and flourish in another.
At school, conventional teaching often hid his strengths. As an autistic, dyslexic and dyspraxic pupil, he was seen as unwilling to learn. Yet away from the classroom, he was absorbed in science and psychology, using video and text-to-speech to explore ideas that printed pages made harder to reach.
Curiosity was never the problem. Finding ways to learn that worked for him made the difference.
Visual, practical learning helped reveal his abilities. An art and media foundation led to a first-class degree in Television Production at Bournemouth University. He also helped young people use film to tell their own stories, discovering the difference between speaking for someone and giving them the tools to be heard.
As a teenager, Nat had shown that same determination when seeking support. Told that a group was referral-only, he found the person who could help and returned the next day with the required letter. The experience stayed with him, particularly the importance of finding somewhere he felt accepted.
His career took him from supporting neurodivergent jobseekers to helping employers reconsider the systems those applicants were trying to enter. Over more than a decade, he has helped deliver hundreds of talks, workshops and programmes for organisations including HSBC, Disney and the BBC.
Across different workplaces, he kept encountering a familiar problem. Awareness alone achieved little if recruitment, communication, meetings and workloads continued to favour one way of thinking.
Nat wanted to understand more. His interest in the brain led him to an MSc in Applied Neuroscience at King’s College London, giving him another way to explore attention, stress and sensory processing.
It also helped him examine a question rooted in his own experience: why do some environments leave people struggling, while others allow them to contribute?
That combination of personal experience, study and work with employers became Divergent Thinking, a certified social enterprise helping organisations put neuroinclusion into everyday practice.
Through training, coaching and work with managers and teams, Nat helps employers recognise barriers and consider what they could change. His starting point is that neurodivergent people “should not have to break themselves to belong.”
Sometimes, the changes are straightforward: clearer instructions, written decisions, predictable priorities, time to process information or a quieter space. Offering more than one way to participate can allow someone to contribute without spending so much energy managing the environment around them.
Making those adjustments last requires managers to build them into everyday working habits. A colleague should not have to repeatedly explain why written instructions help, or why an unexpected change needs a little more discussion.
For social care, these questions matter both to the workforce and to the people receiving support. A rushed conversation, an unclear handover or an overwhelming environment can make it harder for someone to understand what is happening or express what they need.
Nat’s approach encourages curiosity before judgement. What looks like reluctance may reflect uncertainty, sensory overload or information presented in an inaccessible way. Asking what could change in the environment opens up possibilities that assumptions about the person can close down.
In 2026, Nathaniel won the Making a Difference Award (Independent) at the National Learning Disability and Autism Awards. Judges recognised his commitment to learning, his curiosity about how minds process the world and his belief that support should adapt to the individual.
Today, Divergent Thinking works across the UK and internationally, reinvesting part of its corporate-training income in neurodivergent young people and grassroots organisations. That purpose keeps the work connected to the experiences that first motivated him.
For Nat, the question has shifted from why he struggled in particular environments to how those environments could change. His ambition for workplaces is simple: stop asking how people can better fit existing systems, and start asking, “How do we design work better for human beings?”
