THE QUIET MAJORITY: Neurodivergence in Live Entertainment and Why Training Must Catch Up

I am dyslexic. I have worked in live entertainment for thirty years, across multiple technical disciplines. For a long time, I thought those two things were in spite of each other. I've since learned otherwise.

In this industry, what you can do has always mattered more than how your brain is wired.

The Industry Selects for Neurodivergent Minds — Whether It Knows It or Not

Neurodivergent people, those with dyslexia, ADHD, autism, dyspraxia, and a range of other neurological differences, make up an estimated 15 to 20 per cent of the global adult population. That is already a significant proportion. But step inside a creative industry, and that number looks very different.

Research published in 2025 by Understood.org, conducted in partnership with the American Association of Advertising Agencies and Havas, found that nearly half — 48 per cent — of people working in creative industries identify as neurodivergent. That is more than double the general population rate. A broader range of studies puts the figure somewhere between 20 and 50 per cent, depending on the discipline and the methodology.

There is no equivalent study focused specifically on live entertainment and technical operations. But anyone who has spent meaningful time on the technical side of this industry — in the grid, on the fly floor, behind the console, running automation, managing a venue — will not find that number surprising. They will probably think it's conservative.

This is not a coincidence. It is a selection. The environment, the work, and the way knowledge moves through this industry have always suited certain kinds of minds. The question is whether the industry has ever acknowledged that and built its training around it.

Wired for This World

Live entertainment, particularly on the technical side, is not a conventional working environment. It doesn't run nine to five. It doesn't reward sitting still. It doesn't ask you to read a manual and report back next week. It throws you into a system that is constantly moving, constantly problem-solving, and constantly demanding that you think on your feet.

For a certain kind of mind, that is not a challenge. That is home.

Neurodivergent cognitive profiles, the systems thinking of the dyslexic brain, the hyperfocus of ADHD, and the pattern recognition of the autistic mind are not weaknesses in this environment. They are precisely the skills the environment selects for. The ability to look at a complex rigging plot and immediately sense where the load path is wrong. To walk into a venue and know, before anyone has said a word, that the speaker's coverage isn't right. To manage fourteen moving parts simultaneously on opening night and hold the whole system in your head at once.

The research is almost a job description for technical operations: 30 per cent more productive in the right environment, more consistent in decision-making under pressure, less prone to cognitive bias. The right environment, it turns out, looks a lot like show week.

My own path into this industry followed a pattern I now recognise as entirely typical, even if I didn't have the language for it at the time. Academia felt closed off. Formal education was intimidating, not because the knowledge wasn't there, but because the system for delivering it wasn't built for how I learn. So I went looking for environments where I could see the system, touch it, and understand it by doing it.

I became an electrician because I could see where the wires went. I could see the load, understand the limits, and know instinctively when a system was being pushed beyond what it could handle. That same logic, follow the system, find the limits, understand why, carried into audio, into carpentry, into rigging, into every discipline I've worked across in thirty years.

The industry didn't accommodate how I learn. It just happened to be built in a way that made sense to me anyway.

The Right Mentor Understands Without Knowing

For most of its history, live entertainment has trained its technical workforce the same way. You find your way in,  through a contact, a lucky break, a willingness to carry cases and ask questions, and then you learn from the person standing next to you. No curriculum. No structured assessment. No learning objectives written on a whiteboard. Just a more experienced professional, a live environment, and the pressure of a show that has to go up regardless.

For neurodivergent learners, this model is — accidentally — close to ideal. It is hands-on, immediate, and contextual. The knowledge is attached to something real. You are not reading about load calculations in a classroom. You are standing in the grid, looking at the system, with someone who knows it explaining why it works the way it does.

My own experience of this could not illustrate the point more clearly. Early in my rigging career, I had the privilege of working alongside Brixton Banner, a rigger with exceptional skill, deep industry knowledge, and a reputation that preceded him wherever he went. What set him apart as a teacher was not just what he knew. It was how he chose to share it.

When the mathematics of rigging needed explaining, the forces, the angles, the safety margins- Brixton didn't hand me a textbook. He picked up a pencil and drew it on graph paper. He used the page's grid to make the geometry visible and the numbers tangible. Spatial, visual, practical. Without either of us using the word, he had found a way to teach that my brain could actually receive.

That foundation is a significant part of why I was able to go on and pass my National Rigging Certificate. Not because the formal qualification suddenly became easy, but because I arrived at it having genuinely understood the underlying principles in a way that worked for the way I learn.

Here is the problem. What Brixton did was instinctive. It was not something he was trained to do, not something any programme told him to do, and not something that every mentor in this industry does. The informal apprenticeship model is only as good as the human being at its centre. When that person is exceptional,  patient, intuitive, and willing to find a different way, it works brilliantly. When they are not, or when there is no mentor at all, the neurodivergent learner is left to find their own way around a system that was never designed with them in mind.

The industry has never systematised what Brixton did on that graph paper. And that is a significant failure — because the workforce it is trying to develop is, by a substantial margin, made up of exactly the kinds of minds that needed him.

The Tool That Changed Everything

For most of my career, the gap between what I understood and what I could demonstrate on paper was the single biggest obstacle I faced. The knowledge was there. The experience was there. The ability to walk into a venue, read a system, identify a problem, and fix it — all of that was there. But ask me to write it down in a way that the academic or corporate world could receive, and the barrier went up.

That changed in two stages.

The first was Grammarly. I was introduced to it around six years ago, and the effect was immediate. For the first time, my written communication reflected the professional I actually was. Emails, reports, and presentations stopped being a source of anxiety and started being a tool I could use with confidence. But Grammarly did something I hadn't anticipated. Over time, it didn't just correct my writing. It taught me. I began to understand structure, phrasing, and how to organise my thoughts so that someone else could follow them. Assistive technology became a learning tool.

The second stage was large language models, AI in the fuller sense. And this is where something genuinely significant happened.

What I found, over the past two years of using these tools seriously, was that they replicated something I hadn't had reliable access to since Brixton Banner stood with me in the grid. A thinking partner. Something I could talk to, push back against, ask questions of, and work through a problem with, conversationally, iteratively, without judgment and without a time limit.

I want to be precise about how I use it because the way neurodivergent professionals tend to engage with AI is meaningfully different from how it is often portrayed. I don't ask a question and accept what comes back. I push. I redirect. I ask it to ask me questions. I tell it when something doesn't sound right or has drifted from what I actually meant. We built the thing together. It is a tool. Not a replacement.

That process, conversational, adaptive, back-and-forth, is almost exactly how I learned from the best mentors in my career. The difference is that it is available at any time, for any subject, with unlimited patience. For someone whose brain works the way mine does, that is not a convenience. It is a fundamental shift in what is accessible.

The evidence supports this beyond personal experience. Research from the UK's Department for Business and Trade found that neurodivergent workers report 25 per cent higher satisfaction with AI assistants than their neurotypical counterparts. They are more likely to adopt these tools, advocate for them, and find them genuinely transformative rather than merely useful. Neurodivergent people were not late to AI. In many respects, they were first — because they felt the gap that AI fills more acutely than anyone.

For me, the proof is concrete. In 2019, I decided I wanted more. I enrolled in a Higher National Diploma in Business Administration,  my first serious engagement with formal academic study as an adult. It was intimidating. The writing, the structure, the exams. But I pushed through, passed, and kept going. I am now on course for a first-class honours degree in Business Management.

The academic system did not change. I found the tool that let me meet it on my own terms.

The Challenge to Those Who Build the Training

That tool should not be a matter of luck. It should be built into every training platform, every professional development programme, and every learning environment this industry offers. Because the people who need it most are already in the workforce — quietly finding workarounds, building their own bridges, and delivering extraordinary results despite a system that was never designed for them.

This article is not written for the neurodivergent professionals already working in live entertainment. They know who they are. They know how they learn. And they have already proven, many times over, often without any formal acknowledgement, that they belong here and are exceptional at what they do.

This is written for the people who design the training programmes. The content creators. The platform developers. The organisations that decide how knowledge is structured, delivered, and assessed in this industry.

Because here is the reality: you are building training for a workforce that is, by a substantial margin, neurodivergent — and you are almost certainly not building it with them in mind.

The informal apprenticeship model that has carried this industry for generations worked because it was human, adaptive, and hands-on. It worked, when it worked, because the right mentor found the right way to reach the right person. These were not formal accommodations. They were good humans, being instinctively inclusive. The industry cannot continue to rely on that instinct. It needs to systematise it.

What does that mean in practice? It means building training platforms that lead with the visual and the contextual rather than the written and the abstract. It means designing an assessment that measures what someone actually understands rather than how well they can perform in a format that suits a neurotypical learner. It means incorporating conversational and adaptive learning tools, including AI, not as an afterthought but as a foundational design principle.

Consider the chain hoist. It was never designed for live entertainment. Its origins are in the factories and workshops of the Industrial Revolution, a tool built to move heavy loads at slow, single speeds in industrial environments. The entertainment industry borrowed it, adapted it, painted it black, turned it upside down, and built an entire discipline around it. It is the first piece of equipment to go in and the last to come out. Nobody questions whether it belongs here anymore. It belongs here because the industry recognised what it could do and built around it accordingly.

Inclusive training design works the same way. The tools and principles already exist. The evidence is already there. The only question is whether the industry is willing to look at what works for the people it has always relied on most and build around it accordingly.

The neurodivergent workforce in live entertainment is not asking for lower standards. It is not asking for special treatment. It is asking for the same thing it has always quietly asked for, a way in that reflects how it actually thinks.

Back in 2008, a man called Brixton Banner picked up a pencil and drew a picture on graph paper. He had no training in inclusive education. He just paid attention to the person in front of him.

He was not alone. Peter Lines taught lighting design through stencils and scale drawings, spatially, before it was ever theoretical. John Fitzpatrick explained how microphones actually work, not what the spec sheet says. John Mann and Chris Dunkin taught sound design through audio image, where sound lives in a room, and why an audience feels it before they understand it.

None of them was trained to teach the way they taught. They simply looked at the person in front of them and found the way in. Across disciplines, across years, the same instinct appeared again and again: meet the learner where they are, make it tangible, make it real.

That is all we are asking the industry to do now. Not occasionally, and not by accident. By design.