The Next Phase in GAIN's Push for Collaborative Neuroinclusion: The GAIN Hackathon

From inception, GAIN has been about collaboration,  We describe ourselves as a hub, and our aim is not merely to dictate how organisations and individuals should foster neuroinclusion but to build bridges and create spaces where neurodivergent individuals, our allies, parents and carers, expert service providers and the industry we serve can jointly solve problems and develop good practice standards that are industry-specific and fit for purpose.

Making this happen isn’t always easy.  Our members will always need some guidance directly from us and from our service providers, and many of the problems we’re trying to solve are both urgent and complex.  For the past 3 years we’ve been building the foundations of this kind of work;

• Launching our corporate round-tables where industry representatives jointly share and discuss neuroinclusion

• Launching OurGAIN, a community of neurodivergent peers where conversation and collaboration can happen

• Running our first design thinking workshops and volunteer working groups in 2024

2025 is the year that we’ve started to see the fruits of this effort, starting with the launch of the Investment Industry design thinking workshop and ongoing working group, and now launching with our first hackathon aimed at tackling a specific industry and neuroinclusion need.

There is a common challenge faced by our members.  When employees first start to feel psychologically safe enough to disclose their needs to their manager and ask for support, they’ve often spent years working without the adjustments that they need.  They can often struggle to identify what specific supports will benefit them.  Likewise, managers and HR want to help, but cannot be experts on every neurotype and worry about dictating suggestions that the employee won’t find useful.

On Wednesday 11th June, GAIN, Aviva, Innovation Team and Beazley brought together 35 individuals from across 6 GAIN companies, as well as 3 representatives from our individual members, and representation from one of our service providers, to collaborate on the following problem statement:

“How might we support neurodivergent colleagues to identify and implement personalised adjustments to enhance their work experience?”

With Beazley providing a comfortable, inviting and well-equipped space for collaboration (as well as a much-appreciated supply of food and coffee to fuel the work!) and Aviva’s innovation team guiding participants through clearly defined and approachable design thinking processes, participants split into teams to each define an example persona of a neurodivergent colleague, identify specific challenges faced by the colleague, and develop a proposal for a solution to those challenges that met the brief and problem statement head-on.  Each team included multiple neurodivergent individuals providing lived-experience expertise, as well as employees in key roles such as IT, HR and inclusion who would be ideally positioned to know what was necessary, and what was possible.  GAIN, meanwhile, remained on-hand to answer questions, monitor progress and keep a record of the ideas developed.

A particularly powerful moment occurred when, partway through the day, two teams giving feedback to each other on their proposals realised their ideas were similar, and chose to combine forces and collaborate on a joint proposal.  In the true spirit of collaboration, this proposal wound up being so well considered and developed that it became the winning idea in the eyes of our judging panel.

The work doesn’t end with the hackathon, of course.  We have five very good proposals for projects, six companies invested in progress and a collaborative community of 47 corporate members and 2,000 individual members.  Next, GAIN will convene a working group to help support the development of these proposals into real, established projects and products with our members.  We’ll be meeting regularly to maintain the momentum created in that room, and see these ideas to completion together.