Hello, Folks! This week, our wonderful geeky girl Angela Mondor interviewed the amazing Sara Kedge. Here’s a bit about her:
Sara Kedge (she/her) works with corporate leaders to create inclusive, healthy and more productive workplaces that work for everyone. A renowned DEI Design Thinking Strategist, Coach and Trainer, Sara blends curiosity and playfulness with deep cross-functional knowledge. She prides herself on helping teams move out of stressful dysfunction to create human-focused workplace cultures where critical thinking – and people – are encouraged and valued.
Sara carries the collective experience of the neurodivergent community into the solutions she co-creates with her clients. As the founder and curator of How 2 Entrepreneuro, an online community supporting neurodivergent entrepreneurs, Sara is constantly learning and hearing from the people she supports, most of whom have suffered burnout within the corporate or public sectors.
Sara’s clients vary in reach from global to local, across a range of industries including academia and training institutions, public and third sector, technology, bio-medical and international development. Sara co-creates bespoke solutions for each new client challenge, drawing on years of change management consultancy and her current role as a lecturer for the Business and Management faculty at Oxford Brookes University.
Sara’s commitment to delivering a playful, human-centred approach to transition and culture development, makes her an outstanding – and refreshingly unusual – asset to her clients.
And here’s a little sneak peek of our conversation for you:
“And part of that is because most businesses have amazing human beings in them. And what they’re doing is: they’re working within constraints and processes and systems that are designed to get things from A to B as efficiently as possible. That doesn’t work for most humans and it never has. So what you’ve got? You have amazing humans trying to [be] human in an imperfect and really difficultly designed institution.”
“The experience of a lot of neurodivergent people is because we have been given the message since we’re very small, [and] we’ve been given requests to modify, which is “you´re not okay” and “how your brain works isn’t okay.” and “you should just work harder, get better at it.” So we have had this message that we have to try harder and we just keep trying and trying and trying. So although the Karen’s of this world will have gone out for smoke breaks and walk down the hall and yadda yadda. Most neurodivergent people you’ll find will be working extra hours. They’ll be working twice as hard. They’ll be doing over and above. They’ll be volunteering for projects because they’re trying to be good enough in a world and a business that is not designed to acknowledge their brilliance or to support them to deliver good.”
“And I think when people are setting up their business, again, neurotypical model of how you should plan a business … if you Google business planning, you will see a whole fuck ton of stuff around. ‘Set yourself some smart goals.’ ‘What are your sales projections?’ ‘Who’s your target audience?’ All of this. And you fill these business plans and you put them on the shelf, even if you get through your damn business plan, because hello ADHD, I’m going to get two pages in, get bored, hello dyslexia, you’re asking me to write a thousand words, you know, hello autism, you’re asking me to sort of think in an abstract, just doesn’t work.”
For this and more, check out the full interview Wednesday on our podcast, The Overgivers Anonymous Podcast. And, Sara, thank you for the wonderful talk.
Website: sarakedge.com
Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/sara.kedge https://www.facebook.com/groups/298987737971570
