Today’s blog post is a guest article by Runbo Li, cofounder and CEO of Magic Hour, an AI video and image creation platform. He writes and builds at the intersection of creativity, technology, and company building.
When people talk about neuroinclusion at work, the conversation often becomes abstract very quickly. Awareness. Policies. Training. Those things can matter, but in my experience, the real test is simple: does the way your company operates allow different kinds of minds to do their best work?
I run Magic Hour, an AI creation company, with my cofounder David. We are a very small team serving a very large number of users. In a setup like that, there is nowhere to hide. If the way we work creates friction, confusion, or unnecessary cognitive load, you feel it immediately. And if different thinking styles are not being used well, the company gets weaker fast.
The biggest lesson I have learned is that neuroinclusion is not mainly about making exceptions for a few people. It is about building a working environment that is less dependent on ambiguity, social performance, and one “correct” style of thinking. When you do that, people do better work. Often much better. One of the clearest examples came from how we communicated.
Like many startups, we naturally drifted toward real-time communication. Quick calls. Rapid back-and-forth. Loose verbal handoffs. The assumption was that this was faster. In practice, it was often just noisier. It interrupted deep work, created room for misunderstanding, and favored the people who were quickest at responding in the moment.
At one point, we worked closely with someone who was exceptionally capable but clearly did not do their best thinking in live brainstorms or spontaneous calls. In those settings, they seemed hesitant and slower than they really were. But when they had time to process, write, and respond on their own terms, the quality of their thinking was obvious. The issue was not their ability, but the environment. That forced me to look more honestly at the system instead of the person.
So we changed the system. We moved much more of our work to async communication. We used written briefs instead of loose verbal instructions. We recorded Looms instead of defaulting to meetings. We documented context more clearly in Linear, our project management software. We became more explicit about goals, standards, and decision-making. In other words, we tried to remove the burden of guessing or assuming.
That last part mattered more than I expected. A lot of workplace friction comes from implied expectations. People are supposed to infer what matters, what “good” looks like, what is urgent, what can wait, and how to interpret vague feedback. Some people can navigate that more easily than others, but it is not actually a sign of superior judgment. Often it is just familiarity with unwritten rules.
Once we made more of the work explicit, performance improved. The collaborator I mentioned earlier became far more effective. Their output got stronger. Communication got smoother. Friction dropped. But the improvement was not limited to one person. Everyone benefited. The company itself became easier to operate.
That was important for me because it changed how I thought about accommodations. I stopped seeing them as a special layer added on top of “normal work.” More often, they were just examples of better design. When someone says, “This process is making it harder for me to do good work,” the question should not be, “How much can we bend?” It should be, “What is this revealing about the weakness of the system?” I have seen something similar inside the founding team itself.
David and I think very differently. He is deeply systematic. He naturally thinks in structures, edge cases, and durable architecture. I am more pattern-driven and intuitive. I care a lot about user behavior, momentum, creative direction, and what will resonate in the market. In another company, those differences might be treated as a source of tension to smooth over. In ours, they became one of our biggest strengths.
A concrete example was how we approached building parts of our product. My instinct was often to move quickly, test ideas in the market, and learn from real user behavior. His instinct was to build more modularly and carefully so the system could scale without becoming fragile. If one of those instincts had dominated completely, we would have lost something important. Too much speed without structure creates chaos. Too much structure without speed can make a company slow and timid.
Even early on, we approached the world differently. What worked was not forcing one style to win. It was designing a way for both styles to contribute meaningfully. I could push forward on the exploratory and user-facing side while he built the underlying infrastructure that made those experiments sustainable. The result was not compromise in the weak sense. It was a stronger whole created by different forms of cognition being allowed to do what they do best.
That is why I increasingly think companies misunderstand neuroinclusion when they frame it mainly as kindness. Kindness matters, but that framing is still too small. The deeper point is that when you only reward one style of thinking, you narrow the range of what your company can perceive. You reduce variation in how problems are approached. You create blind spots and call it alignment.
A company built around only one kind of mind becomes brittle. It may look efficient for a while, but it sees less, adapts less, and learns less. I saw a version of this long before I had the language for it. Growing up, I watched my parents run a small hot pot delivery business. My parents contributed in different ways. My mum handled customers better. My dad handled operations better. No one called it neuroinclusion (they’d have no idea what it is!). It was just an intuitive understanding that a business cannot rely on one mode of thinking alone.
That is still how I think about it now.
The most useful changes we made were not grand gestures. They were operational choices. Reduce ambiguity. Make expectations explicit. Let people process information in the format that helps them do their best work. Create room for different cognitive strengths to shape real decisions. Do not confuse one communication style with competence. Do not assume that the person who speaks fastest is the one thinking most clearly.
When companies get this right, the payoff isn’t just moral but practical. Work improves. Collaboration improves. Retention improves. And often, problems that looked like performance problems turn out to be design problems.
Neuroinclusion, at its best, is not about asking people to fit better into a broken system. It is about building a system that draws out better work from more kinds of people. That is not charity. That is good management. And in my experience, it is a real competitive advantage.
