The modern workplace is full of mazes — overlapping rules, rituals, and routines that look orderly from above but feel disorienting on the ground. Meetings are the most obvious corridors. They multiply, collide, and repeat until the day becomes a blur of log-ins and log-outs. On paper, they’re about alignment; in practice, they often scatter attention and drain energy.
For neurodivergent professionals, and especially for those with ADHD, these mazes don’t just frustrate — they disable. Each extra rule, each arbitrary rhythm, adds friction to focus and corrodes confidence. What gets lost isn’t only productivity, but participation and presence: the sense of belonging that turns contribution into influence.
Behind this dysfunction lies something more strategic. Rules are not neutral — they are instruments of power. When they dictate where attention must go, they shape who holds agency and who is left diminished. The Meeting Maze is more than a scheduling problem. It’s a structural one, and solving it requires more than better diary management. It requires questioning the rulebook itself.
Scenario: The Meeting Maze
Situation
A senior analyst’s calendar is broken before the day even begins: four squads, four daily stand-ups, all slightly overlapping. Each expects her presence, yet the timings make it physically impossible.
Her screen is a carousel of video calls, chat notifications, and half-finished documents.
Impact
She arrives late to one meeting, leaves another early, and struggles to contribute meaningfully in any. When she does manage to speak, the conversation has already moved on.
Colleagues start to bypass her updates, and her reputation quietly slips from valued contributor to unreliable presence.
Tension
The conflict isn’t just logistical but reputational. She knows she has insights the teams need, but the forced context-switching keeps her fragmented. The more she obeys the calendar, the more she feels invisible.
In a culture that prizes seamless performance, the rulebook casts her as an outsider.
Approach
She leans harder into compliance: attempting to multitask across meetings, typing notes in one call while speaking in another, skipping breaks to keep up.
The system’s demand is clear — be everywhere, all the time — and so she tries, even as it drains her focus and energy.
Resolution
By week’s end, she survives the schedule but at great cost. Her insights are thin, her analysis shallow, and her presence diminished.
The rules remain intact, the system unchallenged — but she is left exhausted and eroded, carrying the consequences of an unhappy path designed for failure.
Time & Urgency
The Meeting Maze is a tempo trap. On paper, overlapping stand-ups look efficient: quick daily check-ins to keep teams aligned. In practice, the scheduling grid ignores human limits. Instead of focus, it produces fragmentation. The analyst in our scenario wasn’t undone by lack of skill or effort — she was undone by the artificial tempo the system demanded.
This is a classic category error. The stand-ups treat dynamic, unpredictable work as if it were routine and orderly. The Cynefin Framework describes this mistake: trying to force a “complicated” rulebook onto a “complex” environment. Instead of creating alignment, the rigid cadence clashes with reality, leaving people trapped in churn.
When rules enforce urgency rather than clarity, they impose a hidden tax on attention. Every forced context switch dilutes insight, every truncated conversation leaves risks unvoiced. For professionals with ADHD, the cost is even sharper: arbitrary cadence magnifies overwhelm and corrodes their ability to deliver the very value they were hired for.
Strategically, tempo needs to be a design choice, not a default. Meetings that flex to context rather than obeying a rigid metronome unlock focus, belonging, and contribution. Systems that cling to arbitrary urgency preserve only the appearance of order — while silently degrading the work they claim to protect.
Identity & Belonging
The Meeting Maze doesn’t just waste time — it corrodes belonging. Each late arrival, each missed contribution, chips away at how the analyst is seen by her colleagues. The rulebook says attendance equals reliability, so absence or silence is quietly recast as failure. What starts as a scheduling flaw ends as a reputational one.
This is exactly what Double-Loop Learning warns against. Instead of asking whether the rule itself makes sense — “should everyone really attend every stand-up?” — the system blames the individual for not fitting the rule. It corrects behaviour at the surface level but never questions the assumption beneath. That assumption, left untested, turns difference into exclusion.
For ADHD professionals, this dynamic is especially harsh. Their divergence is too easily read as incompetence when in fact it often signals a mismatch between rigid process and real-world contribution. The system’s refusal to interrogate its own rules leaves them stigmatised, their value discounted before it’s even heard.
Strategically, the lesson is clear: belonging cannot be conditional on compliance with broken scripts. Organisations that rewrite their assumptions — focusing on the value of input rather than the optics of presence — create inclusion by design. When they don’t, they not only marginalise talent but also reinforce dysfunction, mistaking conformity for competence.
Power & Agency
Beneath the time traps and reputational erosion lies the deeper dysfunction: agency. The analyst is bound by rules she didn’t write, rules that dictate where her attention must go and how her value will be measured. She isn’t asked to prioritise outcomes — she’s told to be everywhere, all the time.
This is Goodhart’s Law in action: when presence (the metric) becomes the target, it distorts behaviour. The organisation chases visible attendance rather than meaningful contribution. In the Meeting Maze, the system protects its rulebook but strips individuals of control over how they add value.
For many ADHD professionals, this distortion is starkly visible. Their divergence isn’t rebellion — it’s clarity. They see that gatekeeping, calendar mandates, and proxy measures are not neutral tools but mechanisms of control. By questioning them, they expose how power has been misallocated, where outcomes are sacrificed for appearances.
Strategically, this is where ADHD becomes strength. The capacity to interrogate rules, to resist optics-driven measures, is exactly the lens organisations need if they want to redesign systems for outcomes that matter. Agency should not be surrendered to arbitrary rulebooks — it should be reclaimed as the organising principle. That’s how the maze is rewritten, not endured.
Conclusion
The Meeting Maze is not just an ADHD story. It is a systemic story — about what happens when rulebooks cling to order at the expense of outcomes. Time rules that clash with reality. Belonging that is made conditional on compliance. Power that is guarded by metrics instead of trust. Each layer corrodes clarity until even the most capable professionals are left diminished.
But the unhappy path is not the only path. Rules are not sacred texts — they are artefacts, written by people, and they can be rewritten. This is where the ADHD perspective has strategic weight. What looks like nonconformity is often foresight. What gets labelled as distraction can actually be diagnosis. The ability to see through arbitrary demands is not weakness — it is clarity in disguise.
Empowerment, then, begins not with obedience but with interrogation. Who wrote this rule? Does it serve the outcome it claims to protect? And if not, how should it be redesigned? These are not acts of rebellion, but of responsibility. They are the work of professionals who understand that systems must evolve if they are to remain credible.
The maze can’t be escaped by running faster through its corridors. It must be redesigned. And those who live with its dysfunction most acutely are often the best placed to lead that redesign. For ADHD minds, the challenge of bad rules is real — but so is the gift: the strategic strength to see what others miss, and to rewrite the rulebook for clarity.
Strategic Markers
The Meeting Maze: Time, Belonging, Agency
-
Tempo without context
Arbitrary urgency creates churn, not clarity. -
Belonging on false terms
Conformity mistaken for reliability corrodes inclusion. -
Metrics as masters
Presence becomes the target, value is sidelined. -
Agency misplaced
Rules dictate behaviour, outcomes are left behind. -
ADHD clarity reframed
Divergence exposes systemic misfits others overlook. -
Rulebooks are artefacts
They can be questioned, redesigned, and renewed.
