A strategic challenge for senior leaders

British policing faces a talent paradox rarely discussed at command level.

We invest significantly in recruitment, training, and development, yet we systematically lose officers whose cognitive profiles do not match our institutional assumptions about what “good” looks like. I would suggest that we are not only losing difficult-to-manage individuals; we are losing precisely the capabilities our organisations will need most as policing becomes more complex.
The issue here is not accommodation or compliance. It is whether senior leaders have the strategic imagination, training and understanding to recognise capability that does not present in conventional ways.

The uncomfortable question

Consider an officer profile: consistently late despite genuine effort, loses equipment regularly, takes three times longer than colleagues on written work, questions established procedures, and appears disorganised during routine periods. Most performance management systems would flag this officer for intervention, and many would eventually exit the service.
Now consider the same officer: spots patterns others miss, performs with exceptional calm during critical incidents, builds deep community relationships, works complex cases with obsessive focus, and thinks laterally when standard approaches fail.
These are not two different officers. They are the same person, one whose neurological profile includes ADHD. The question for senior leaders is not whether such officers exist in our forces. They do, in significant numbers. The question is whether our leadership culture can recognise that the second set of characteristics may be worth more to policing than the first set costs us.

What the evidence shows

Recent research has reframed our understanding of ADHD and similar neurodivergent conditions. This is not a matter of making excuses for poor performance; it is a matter of understanding that we are dealing with different neurological architecture, not deficient character.
Dr Russell Barkley’s work, supported by the largest neuroimaging consortium study ever conducted on ADHD, demonstrates measurable brain structural differences that persist into adulthood regardless of behavioural presentation. The prefrontal cortex, responsible for planning, organisation, and impulse control, develops and functions differently. This is not something officers can simply try harder to overcome, any more than they could try harder to be taller.

The point of strategic significance is that the same neurological differences that create challenges in routine, low-stimulation environments produce advantages in high-stimulation, rapidly-changing contexts. Research confirms that ADHD involves baseline under-arousal: the brain requires more external stimulation to reach optimal cognitive function. Crisis situations provide exactly that stimulation.

This helps to explain a notable finding. A US Forest Service study found nearly 20% of wildland firefighters had ADHD profiles, four times the general population rate. Similar elevated rates appear in military combat roles and emergency services globally. These are not statistical anomalies. They suggest that high-stakes, high-variability operational environments naturally attract and retain individuals whose brains are suited to exactly those conditions.

A 2023 UK police survey found 78% of officers with ADHD reported that their condition provides benefits for policing work, specifically citing their ability to thrive in fast-paced environments and their commitment to justice. It is worth paying attention when our own officers tell us their “disorder” makes them better at the job we need done.

The strategic capability we are discarding

Rory Sutherland, the behavioural scientist, uses an analogy that should resonate with any leader thinking about organisational resilience. Approximately 20% of honeybees ignore the waggle dance, the efficient communication system that directs foragers to known food sources. For decades, scientists assumed these “rogue bees” were defective because they were not following the optimal path.
Researchers then realised something important: without these rogue bees, hives would starve. The rest were so efficient at exploiting known food sources that when those sources failed, no bee knew where alternatives existed. The rogue bees were not defective. They were the hive’s insurance policy, constantly exploring while everyone else exploited.
This maps directly onto organisational theory. James March’s foundational work established that organisations need both exploitation (efficiency, refinement, implementation of known approaches) and exploration (discovery, experimentation, recognition of new patterns). Organisations that over-optimise for exploitation become brittle. They perform excellently until conditions change, at which point they can fail badly because no one was looking elsewhere.
British policing has spent decades optimising for exploitation. Our performance frameworks, our promotion criteria, and our cultural assumptions about professionalism all reward consistency, process compliance, and predictability. These are genuine virtues, but they are not the only virtues policing needs, and they may not be the virtues we will need most as the operating environment becomes less predictable.
When county lines operations shift tactics faster than our response protocols can adapt, who spots the new pattern first? When a vulnerable person does not respond to standard safeguarding approaches, who thinks differently enough to find another way in? When a critical incident unfolds chaotically, who performs better rather than worse under pressure?
The evidence suggests that neurodivergent officers are disproportionately valuable in exactly these scenarios. A 2023 study found that neurodivergent employees are significantly more likely to identify and report inefficient processes and dysfunctional practices; they are less susceptible to groupthink and make decisions more independently of social conformity pressures. Research on cognitive diversity in teams consistently shows that homogeneous groups miss important information, process facts less carefully, and fall prey to collective blind spots.
The IMF’s post-mortem on why it failed to anticipate the 2008 financial crisis traced the failure to “a high degree of groupthink” and “intellectual capture” stemming from homogeneous leadership backgrounds. Every organisation believes it values diverse thinking. Few have looked closely at whether their systems actually retain and promote it.

The leadership culture question

This leads to territory senior leaders must engage with: our institutional culture may be systematically selecting against capabilities we genuinely need.
Our performance management systems are good at identifying visible weaknesses such as lateness, administrative delays, and non-compliance with routine procedures. They are far less effective at identifying invisible strengths such as pattern recognition, creative problem-solving, crisis performance, and deep community knowledge. We measure what is easy to measure, then mistake our measurements for reality.
Our promotion processes reward officers who navigate institutional expectations smoothly. The officer who questions why we do things in certain ways, not from insubordination but from a genuine cognitive need to understand systems before following them, tends to be coded as “difficult” rather than “potentially valuable for exactly the reason that makes them uncomfortable.”
Our assumptions about professionalism conflate conformity with competence. The organised desk, the timely paperwork, and the predictable presence are proxies for professionalism, not professionalism itself. An officer with chaotic administration but exceptional operational judgment may be more professionally valuable than one with immaculate files but routine thinking.
None of this means standards should be lowered. It means we should be more sophisticated about which standards actually matter for organisational capability, and more clear-eyed about which of our standards are performance-related rather than merely culturally comfortable.
The organisational resilience imperative
The policing environment is becoming more volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous. The challenges of the next decade, from evolving serious organised crime to radicalisation pathways to technology-enabled offending to public order contexts we have not yet imagined, will not be solved by doing what we have always done more efficiently.
We will need officers who see what others do not, who question assumptions others accept, who remain calm when chaos would overwhelm conventional responders, who connect disparate information in unexpected ways, and who care enough about outcomes to persist when standard approaches fail.
These are not rare, exceptional individuals we must somehow recruit. They already exist in our forces, and many of them are currently being performance-managed, culturally marginalised, or quietly leaving because our organisations could not recognise their value.
The research is clear that cognitive diversity improves team performance on complex problems. It is equally clear that organisations do not achieve diversity through good intentions; they achieve it by examining which of their systems inadvertently select against difference, then changing those systems.
For senior leaders, this requires something harder than policy change. It requires examining our own assumptions about what good officers look like, how reliable performance presents, and whether our instinctive judgments about professionalism are serving our organisations or merely reflecting our own cognitive preferences.

A different leadership proposition

I am not suggesting we accommodate neurodivergent officers despite their differences. I am suggesting we deploy them because of their differences, strategically, as organisational assets whose capabilities complement rather than duplicate the neurotypical majority.
This means supervisors who understand that brilliant crisis performance and chaotic administration can coexist in the same officer, and who manage accordingly. It means HR systems sophisticated enough to distinguish between performance issues requiring intervention and cognitive differences requiring adaptation. It means promotion panels capable of recognising leadership potential that does not present in conventional ways.
Most fundamentally, it means senior leaders willing to articulate a different vision of organisational excellence, one that values cognitive diversity not as a compliance requirement but as a strategic capability. One that recognises our forces need both the officers who follow the waggle dance efficiently and the officers who explore in different directions.

The officers we are currently losing are not broken versions of the officers we wish we had. They are different officers, ones we will wish we had retained when the next challenge arrives and the standard approach of “that’s just how we’ve always done it” no longer works.

The question for senior leaders is whether we have the imagination to see that before it is too late, and the courage to build organisations that can hold both kinds of excellence.

The author is a serving police sergeant with ADHD who has witnessed both the challenges and the strategic value that cognitive diversity brings to operational policing.