Posted in Interview,
A series on neurodiversity in communications
Interview by Madeleine Weightman
I first met Sam Henry during the pandemic. We were both doing what so many of us were doing at the time — sharing learnings, pooling experience, trying to make sense of what the freelance market was going to look like on the other side. Sam was part of a session we ran through The Work Crowd network, and she spoke about her dyslexia. But honestly, what stayed with me was not that. It was her. She was one of the most intelligent, curious and emotionally perceptive people I had come across in a long time. She was funny, she was direct, and she read people the way good communicators are supposed to but rarely do. She talked about using Myers-Briggs to understand clients and to build more effective working relationships — not as a theoretical exercise, but as a practical tool she had woven into the way she operates.
When I started thinking about who I wanted to speak to for this series, Sam came to mind immediately. As someone who is dyslexic myself, I have always been drawn to conversations that go beyond the deficit framing and ask a different question: not what does neurodiversity make harder, but what does it make possible? Sam is, I think, one of the best answers to that question I have found.
Samantha Henry is a freelance PR director with over 20 years of experience across consumer and entertainment communications. She has led campaigns spanning everything from tech and retail to crisis and issues management. She is also founder of Pup Chic Boutique, an award-winning dog accessory brand she launched in lockdown and now runs through live TikTok selling and influencer partnerships. She sits, in other words, right at the intersection of where modern consumer PR is moving.
She is also dyslexic, suspects she has ADHD, and spent the best part of two decades hiding both. This is the story of what happened when she stopped.
This is her contribution to Different Minds, Better Messages.
Sam knows exactly when things shifted for her. "I spent the first 17 years of my career thinking I wasn't as good as everyone else," she tells me. "I needed to put extra time in, work harder. My writing wasn't going to be as good. I'm very creative and bubbly, but I focused on all the things I wasn't good at."
She didn't feel confident enough to ask for promotions. She felt undeserving. It was only through therapy — which she had started for other reasons entirely — that she began examining her self-worth. And then something happened in a meeting room that changed the frame entirely.
"It was a brainstorm for a charity rebrand. They gave us all the insights they'd been looking at, and within two seconds I came up with the brand name. Everyone said, that's it. It was a five-minute meeting."
To Sam, the answer was obvious. She could take the information presented, connect the dots, and land on the solution almost instantly. The problem was that arriving at answers too quickly often worked against her. "Half the time people wouldn't want to listen," she says. "They'd come back days or weeks later with exactly what I'd said, but because I came to it too quickly, it couldn't be right."
One client even complained to her manager that Sam couldn't have done a thorough job because she had responded to a brief only 15 minutes after receiving it. "If I don't do it now, I'll forget it. It was a 15-minute task for me."
Sam does not hesitate. The speed, the instinct, the ability to connect disparate things and find the angle — all of it maps onto the fast-moving world she has increasingly made her own.
She gives an example from a campaign she worked on with Ginny Patton, and a colleague she hugely admires, analysing Kayak search data for a travel brand. Most years, she explains, the top 20 holiday destinations barely change. Then Sam spotted something nobody else had: the year Ekin-Su won Love Island, the top 20 had reshuffled. New Italian towns. New Turkish ones. Destinations that had never made the list before.
"I was like, we can link this to the Love Island effect. Ginny said she never would have put those two things together."
This is the thing Sam wants people to understand. You might assume a dyslexic person struggles with numbers and data. In reality, patterns jump out at her that others simply do not see. The data is not the barrier. The barrier is the assumption.
She also points to how she approaches a campaign brief. "I can see the whole campaign in my head, every little thing that needs to be done, from start to finish. But putting that down on paper to present back to a client — that is not my strength." Her answer has always been to partner with neurotypical people who are strong wordsmiths. "We work together. This is what we want to do. How do we articulate that?"
She has always been better verbally than on paper, and agencies knew it early. On her last day at one agency, before leaving for a new role, they took her along to a pitch for an account she would never work on. "They just knew I'm good in the room. I hate over-rehearsing because that just muddles it in my head. I need to know the page, understand it, and then I'll just be present. I'll say what needs to be said."
Sam is unequivocal. For someone who has spent her career navigating a profession that prizes written output above almost everything else, AI has been transformative.
"I don't even have to type. I can verbally tell it what I want to say and ask it to turn that into a caption, a script for a video, a slide breakdown. It takes the hard work out of the bit I find hardest."
I know exactly what she means. The time you would once have spent wrestling with structure and sentence construction, you can now spend on the thinking — which was always the part that mattered most. AI does not replace the creative instinct. It removes the friction that was stopping it from getting out.
But Sam is nuanced about what AI can and cannot do. "When you're collectively thinking together as a team, you're always going to come up with things AI wouldn't. That is still irreplaceable." Where it earns its place, she says, is in taking the weight off the admin side of the work. She describes using it on a recent pitch to pull a competitor analysis in minutes that would previously have taken a junior hours — not replacing that person, but freeing them from the grind so they could focus on the thinking.
"Teams are smaller now. Selling into media is harder. I see it more as a time saver than a staff saver — because you still need a human to analyse what it produces."
Sam has thought hard about this, and her view is clear. The industry asks too much of individuals and rewards the wrong things.
"PR has always fascinated me because you've got to be a jack of all trades. Finance, client services, selling in to journalists, copywriting, creative, events. In other parts of marketing, you just wear one of those hats."
She points to advertising as a model worth borrowing from. In advertising, a copywriter and a creative are typically paired together, often from university onwards, with each person's strengths held in counterbalance. PR has never quite built that into its structure, and Sam thinks it is weaker for it. She has seen agencies try to get at something similar through tools like the Myers-Briggs colour wheel — deliberately building teams that have a balance of thinking styles rather than a room full of the same type. When it works, she says, it is transformative.
She also has pointed words for the way seniority and pay are structured in the industry. "We pay people based on years of experience rather than actual skills. But if you've got someone who can solve a problem in five minutes that would take the rest of the room two hours, that is an enormous value. The industry doesn't price it that way."
The consequence is that people are routinely put into work that forces them to compensate for their weaknesses rather than deploy their strengths. Sam's view is that this is not just unfair. It is bad for clients.
When Sam started out, every time she was asked about her weaknesses in an interview, she led with dyslexia and immediately began listing the workarounds: I work late, I get things proofed, I write ahead of deadline so I have time to review. She framed it as damage limitation. I did exactly the same thing for years.
Now she does it differently.
"I still name it as a weakness. But I also talk about what I bring to the table that other people in your team probably don't. The problem solving. The ability to come up with a solution in seconds that saves the whole room two hours. That's a skill. Lead with that."
A turning point for her came through a sustained working relationship with Ginny Patton, who not only recognised what Sam could see that others could not, but named it back to her explicitly. "She'd say, I never would have come up with that. And I'd think, really? It's obvious. And she'd say, no, it's not. But to me it's black and white. To them, it's not."
Having someone in your corner who can see what you offer before you can see it yourself matters enormously. I find myself thinking, as Sam says this, about a conversation on ageism I had recently for a podcast. We landed in exactly the same place: the linear career structure, the assumption that seniority equals value, the way a profession that is supposed to prize communication has built internal structures that make it very hard for people to communicate what they are actually best at. The structural challenges cut across more communities than we tend to acknowledge.
Sam's message to anyone carrying neurodiversity as a quiet secret, the way both of us did for so long, is simple.
"You don't have to wait 17 years to flip it."
And, having spent the first half of my own career doing exactly that, I can tell you she is right.
Madeleine Weightman is Co-Founder of The Work Crowd and Partner at Hanson Search Group.
Different Minds, Better Messages is a series by The Work Crowd exploring neurodiversity as a professional asset in communications, PR, and public affairs.