Posted in PR and Communications, Interview,
DIFFERENT MINDS, BETTER MESSAGES
A series on neurodiversity in communications
Interview by Madeleine Weightman
As someone who is neurodivergent myself, I have always been curious about how others navigate an industry that does not always make space for different thinking styles. The barriers are real — but so are the opportunities, and so is the potential for neurodiversity to be a genuine superpower, when the right structures are in place to support it. I wanted to explore all of that honestly: the friction, the breakthroughs, and what the communications industry needs to do differently if it is serious about harnessing the full range of talent available to it. I had the pleasure of sitting down with Dominic Nutt — communicator, campaigner, journalist, and, as I discovered, a brilliant example of what happens when a neurodivergent mind is given the freedom to do what it does best.
Dominic Nutt has spent three decades doing what most communicators aspire to — and some never quite manage. He has run media strategy for a reforming lord. He has blown the whistle, on camera, about one of the country’s most respected charities. He has won Journalist of the Year and Interviewer of the Year at the same ceremony. He has shaped campaigns that moved political mountains, and built a consultancy practice that attracts clients who need more than competence. They need someone who sees what they cannot.
What Dominic will tell you, if you ask, is that the instinct driving all of that is not separable from how his brain is wired. That the angle that cracks the story, the reframe that unlocks the campaign, the question that nobody else thought to ask — these are not techniques he learned. They are, he would say, just how his mind moves.
He was diagnosed with AuDHD — both autism and ADHD — only last year. He is fifty-something. The diagnosis put a name to something he had always known was there.
This is his contribution to Different Minds, Better Messages.
Dominic does not hesitate. “The search for dopamine.” He smiles. “I like interim work — hence my love of The Work Crowd. I like new, I like different, I like challenge. And I like things that go bang. I love a crisis. Shouldn’t say that, but I love a crisis.”
The connection between that restlessness and the AuDHD diagnosis, he says, is now obvious to him in retrospect. The pull towards the independent model, the hunger for novelty, the ability to hyperfocus under extreme pressure — all of it maps onto what he now understands about his own neurology.
“I think I was driven by the autism bit of my brain. And the ADHD bit is all bangs and buzzes and whizzes — that constant desire to search for the next thing.”
Dominic has two stories, and they are both remarkable.
The first is from Mozambique in 2000, during catastrophic flooding. He had hitched a ride on a South African Air Force helicopter pulling survivors from trees. “I wasn’t helping drag people out,” he says, “but I was watching. And one person dragged out was a woman called Rosaria. She’d had a baby in a tree.” He saw it immediately for what it was — not just a news item, but a door.
“Anyone can say we need food, water, sustenance. That’s generic. But if you start with the woman in the tree, you’ve got rapt attention, and then you can unpack everything. It’s the Trojan horse.”
The second story begins with a cigarette. A few days into the same trip, sitting in a yard where food was being moved for flood distribution, he noticed his chair was uncomfortable. He looked at it properly. It was made from chopped-up AK-47s. He asked a colleague. “He said, yeah — we go and disarm rebels. The two armies that have been fighting, they won’t give their guns to the government because they’re scared, so they give them to us. We give them training, sewing machines, bikes — legitimate work. And then we give the guns to artists, who cut them up and make them into art.”
Dominic banked it. Back in the UK, working with Arsenal Football Club on a Christian Aid appeal, he found his moment. He tracked down the artists, commissioned a story, took photographs, and wrote it up for the Sunday Times. The UN built an exhibition around it. Christian Aid commissioned the artists to create something called the Tree of Life — a sculpture made entirely from weapons. It was brought to Britain. It has been in the British Museum ever since.
“The point is that this was simply from sitting down, having a cigarette, and going — what on earth is this? This is a story. I remember popping into a church later, and they had an exhibition, and they were showing pictures that I’d been there when they were taken. I felt overwhelmed.”
His framing of the two instincts at work is precise: “The autism gives you the forensic detail — I cannot abide not knowing every spit and cough. But the ADHD is what takes you somewhere else entirely with what you find.”
“Yes. Many times.”
When Dominic joined Christian Aid around the year 2000, the press office was old school. “Bang out a press release, send it to X, and 99% of the time they’ll ignore it. Rather than letting me find the story, report the story, make the story happen in my own way.” He kept inadvertently breaking the rules, thinking differently, doing things his way — and it was not, at first, welcomed.
But then something shifted. He started attracting journalists into the team. “By the time I was leaving, we had the former editor of Newsnight, the defence correspondent from The Times, people from The Guardian, Channel 4 News, the editor of Smash Hits. Suddenly, we were a massive newsroom finding our own stories.” He describes it as “a primeval swamp of creativity — exhausting, difficult, but because we set really high standards, anything was possible.”
The contrast he reaches for is the tide tables. Early in his career at the Whitstable Gazette, he was tasked with copying numbers from a graph onto a page — so that fishermen wouldn’t go out and drown because someone got the tides wrong.
“Every week I’d get them wrong. All I had to do was copy numbers onto a page. I struggle with process. But if I own the principle of what I’m doing, and I’m free — then nothing goes wrong.”
The other thing he raises, which he clearly thinks matters as much as any structural point, is masking. “A lot of autistic and ADHD people have to become chameleons to fit in. We’re not mainstream — so we learn to mitigate our ways of being with different sorts of people. And in so doing, we learn to be empathetic.” It is exhausting, he says, but it is also a professional asset that rarely gets named. “You have to have a connection with people, even if you can’t speak the language, in order to get their story in a sympathetic way. That chameleon effect teaches you to fit into the other person’s world.”
“I have no data for my answer,” he says, “just life sense.”
On AI, he is straightforward: “Process-driven roles AI can replicate. But it’s the creative thinking, being able to think differently — that’s where the real value is.” What he is more cautious about is whether the industry is ready to act on that.
“Just as we’re still on a long, painful journey with all forms of diversity — women in the workplace, different ethnicities, different abilities — everyone will have it in their mission statement. In many cases, people will mean it in principle. But operationally, on the ground, it doesn’t always happen. With neurodiversity, we’ve just started that journey.”
He speaks carefully here, not critically. And he has personal evidence for the gap. Recently, he says, he had “a very bad experience with an organisation where ADHD was cited as a problem.” He does not dwell on it, but the point lands.
The first thing on his list is tolerance. “Not tolerance of the unacceptable — but that understanding that we’re all different. I’ve certainly been out of order sometimes, never intentionally. And I will play it back in my mind for years, even if the other person was never upset.”
The second is clear objectives — not instructions. “I would love bosses to write down, not detailed instructions, but: here are the three things I want you to achieve by this date. How you do it, you knock yourself out.” He describes what happens when that contract is honoured:
“I understand the principles, and I’ll deliver, and it’ll be better than you could ever imagine.”
What does not work, he says with equal clarity, is top-down process without principle. “If I say to you, why do you want to do it that way, and you say we do it this way because it’s the way we do it — I now hate this. Let me know the principles. Don’t tell me the process.”
Micromanagement, he says, is particularly corrosive for someone with ADHD. “If you start micromanaging someone with ADHD, they’re going to assume they’ve done something wrong, that they’re rubbish and bad and you hate them. You get into an emotional spiral.” The inverse is equally powerful. He describes working in Afghanistan when 9/11 happened — one of very few journalists on the ground, working 20-hour days for a month, completely hyperfocused.
“By the end I was doing BBC World Service interviews in my sleep. I didn’t even know. And I just did it. Nothing I couldn’t do. I was so confident and so calm and so happy. Super empowered.”
His advice to his younger self, and to any neurodivergent person starting out now, is simple: “From the start, set out how you need to work. Ask people to write down the objectives. Check in after your first week and say, this is what I’m experiencing — is this where you want me to go? Hold them to account. And don’t let anyone make assumptions about how you work before you’ve had the chance to show them what you can do.”
He checks himself at the end. “Actually,” he says, “I don’t think any of that only works for neurodiverse people. I think it works for everyone. It’s just that for us, the stakes are higher when it doesn’t."
Dominic Nutt is a communications, media, and campaigns consultant working across health, public affairs, and crisis communications.
Different Minds, Better Messages is a series by The Work Crowd exploring neurodiversity as a professional asset in communications, PR, and public affairs.
Madeleine Weightman is Co-Founder and COO at The Work Crowd, working with businesses to find flexible solutions and helping consultants build rewarding portfolio careers.
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