Everyone in Events Thinks They Have ADHD
Then Iain Morrison asked a different question—and changed what we’re actually talking about
Editor’s Note: Before this piece runs, I want to acknowledge a response it sparked. After publishing, I heard from Iain Morrison, who shared his experience of being diagnosed with AuDHD at 53 after decades in the events industry. His reflection is thoughtful, direct, and worth reading in full. Iain makes an important point. While many people in our industry use the language of ADHD informally to describe how they work, for others it is not a metaphor. It is a lived neurological condition that often goes unrecognized for years.
I also recognize that I come from a generation where much of this language—and much of this understanding—simply wasn’t part of the conversation. Many of us built careers without frameworks for how our minds worked, and we are now encountering them later, sometimes all at once. If you recognize yourself in this conversation, it is worth taking seriously. I’m grateful to Iain for sharing his story and expanding the lens on this topic. Here is the original article.
A response to David Adler’s Column “Does Everyone in Events Think They Have ADHD?”
By Iain Morrison
David, I read your piece and I want to share something with you.
I’m 53. Two weeks ago I was diagnosed with AuDHD. Autism and ADHD combined. The two conditions fight each other constantly. I’ve spent decades not knowing why I could deliver events for tens of millions of people across four continents but couldn’t sit through a meeting without my brain trying to leave the room.
Your article calls that “fluency in motion.” I’ve got a different name for it now.
I grew up in Queensland, Australia in the 70s and 80s. If you got in trouble at school, you got sent to the headmaster. I was sent there a lot.
You’d line up in this hallway. Concrete floor, brick walls. Queensland heat, no aircon, no fans, just this thick, humid stench that stuck to everything. Shirt plastered to your back. You’d wait. You could hear the kids in front of you. The screaming. Pants down, bare backside, full strength. The cane. This bloke never held back.
Sometimes it was a blessing to be first in line. The waiting was worse than the cane.
I was always in trouble. Always. And nobody, not one person, ever asked why.
I failed basic maths. Failed basic English. I wasn’t stupid. I knew I wasn’t stupid. But I couldn’t do what they wanted the way they wanted it done.
What I could do was the creative stuff. Photography. Sculpting. Theatre. I walked into the school theatre as a kid and never left the industry. I built a 35-year career around the parts of my brain the system said were worthless. Delivered shows for U2, Coldplay, Taylor Swift. Single events of over 200,000 people. Built a company, sold it, built another one. But for all of it, every year, I carried this thing I couldn’t name.
You want to invite all your friends over for a party. You’re excited. You plan it. They arrive, and every part of you wants to tell them all to leave because you need your own space. That’s what it’s like inside my brain. Every day. Wanting connection and wanting to disappear.
I just didn’t know that’s what it was.
My discovery started with a LinkedIn post. A woman called Alicia Teltz wrote about masking as an autistic woman. About sensory overload behind the smile, the overthinking behind the calm, the relief of finally being alone. She wrote about spending years perfecting the mask until she forgot what was underneath.
I read it and something cracked open. Not a dramatic moment. More like a door I’d walked past a thousand times and suddenly noticed was there.
That post led to a conversation with my wife. The conversation led to a GP. The GP led to a specialist. And two weeks ago, at 53, I got the answer to a question I didn’t know I’d been asking my entire life.
AuDHD. Autism and ADHD combined.
When you find that out at 53, you start looking backwards. Reconciling decades of behaviour you could never explain. The cane at school. The failed subjects. The careers I built on instinct and pattern recognition while the structured world kept telling me I was doing it wrong. All of it suddenly makes sense. And that is both a relief and a grief, because you can’t get those years back.
Which is why your article hit me the way it did, David.
You acknowledged that ADHD is a real condition with real consequences. Then you spent the rest of the piece reframing it as environmental conditioning, a competitive advantage, a kind of workplace superpower you called “fluency in motion.” You wrote that the people in our industry saying “I think I have ADHD” aren’t describing a neurological condition. They’re describing a skill set.
Some of them are. But some of them aren’t reaching for a metaphor. They’re reaching for an answer.
I was one of them. For decades.
Here’s what I think you’ve missed.
When you tell an industry full of people who mask, compensate, and burn out that what they’re experiencing is actually just proof they’re good at their jobs, you close a door. The door that leads to diagnosis, to understanding, to finally building systems that work with your brain instead of against it.
The “superpower” framing is the oldest trap in neurodivergence. If it’s an advantage, nobody needs to accommodate anyone. Nobody needs to change anything. You just perform. And when you can’t perform, when you crash, when the masking stops working, when you sit in your car after an event unable to move for reasons you can’t explain, that’s on you. Because you were supposed to be thriving. You had the superpower.
The events industry already has a phrase for that. We call it hero culture. And I’ve spent the last three years trying to dismantle it.
I know this isn’t your intent. You’re writing about adaptability, about the future of work, about how the skills forged in live environments translate to an AI-driven world. There’s a valid thread in there, and you pull it well. The observation that event professionals are conditioned to operate with incomplete information, to iterate in real time, to read a room and adjust without waiting for certainty, that’s real. I’ve lived it.
But when you borrow the language of a lived neurological condition to make that argument, you undercut the people in your audience who actually have it and haven’t found out yet.
I nearly didn’t find out. And I’m one of the lucky ones.
Alicia’s post did something your article could have done. It made someone feel seen. It gave me permission to take the next step. It didn’t reframe my experience as a workplace advantage. It said: this is real, you’re not imagining it, and you deserve to understand it.
That’s what changed my life. Not being told I was good at my job. I already knew that. What changed my life was being told there might be a reason I’d spent 50 years feeling like I was wired differently, and that the reason had a name.
You have a massive platform in this industry, David. People read what you write. They trust you. Imagine what your article could have done if instead of rebranding ADHD as a skill set, it had said: if you recognise yourself in this description, take it seriously. Talk to someone. Get assessed. It might change everything.
Because it did for me. Two weeks ago. At 53.
I’m sharing this because Alicia helped me and I want to pay that forward. If one person in our industry reads this and thinks, “that sounds like me,” and that thought leads them to a conversation they’ve been avoiding, then this was worth writing.
Now I know what I’m dealing with, I can work with it instead of against it. I built everything I have off the back of the bits of my brain that school said were worthless. The creative thinking. The pattern recognition. The ability to see what other people don’t. That’s all part of it. But it’s not a superpower. It’s me. And I’d rather understand it than romanticise it.
The article I’d love to see you write next is the one that opens that door for someone else. And if my story is useful to you in telling it, it’s yours.
Iain Morrison, Founder, Behind the Stage CEO & Co-founder, The Imagination Collaborative
Closing Editorial Note: I want to come back, briefly, to Iain Morrison’s response.
What he describes doesn’t contradict this piece so much as deepen it. There are people in this industry shaped by the demands of live environments—fast, responsive, operating in motion. And there are people living with neurodivergent conditions that have gone unnamed, sometimes for decades. Sometimes those overlap. Sometimes they don’t. The distinction matters. Because while it’s useful to recognize how certain ways of thinking are becoming more valuable, it’s just as important not to overlook the lived experience behind them—or the cost that can come with it.
If this piece resonated with you at a deeper level, beyond how you work, it may be worth asking why. As Iain suggests, that question can open a door.
Iain, thank you for writing what you wrote, and for trusting me—and this audience—with it.
If This Resonated
If you recognized yourself in parts of this conversation—beyond how you work—it may be worth exploring further.
A licensed clinician can help determine whether a formal evaluation makes sense.
Such a powerful conversation…. One of my daughters, now 18, has recently had an adhd diagnosis added to her autism diagnosis 4 years ago - AUDHD. Our understanding of this is only just beginning but with the diagnosis, and autism before it, is like a light switch - not just for her in her starting to understand herself, to love herself instead of hating herself, but for us her parents in deepening the admiration and love we have for her with our new realisation of how bravely she tries to fit into her group of friends, into the school system and how and why she has to often shrink away from view, to recover and gather herself for the next “normal” every day task.
Often people forget that there are different types of adhd too - our daughter with AUDHD is not the hyperactive kind but the inattentive kind - a real battle going on inside her every minute of every day. My other daughter also diagnosed with ADHD but the hyperactive kind - very different challenges. But the two of them are unique and I am realise we are all so privileged to have the opportunity to have had these diagnosises now so that they have the opportunity to find lives that work for them and in which they can find a more peaceful place to exist, that they can learn to love themselves and admire themselves through their new lens, not those of people that have little understanding or curiosity.
Squeezing yourself into a world that won’t accept you no matter how hard you try, is an exhausting and for some, life crushing, way to live. The bravery and resilience of people that live like this with no diagnosis or understanding of themselves for a lifetime is staggering to imagine.
Dear David I have so much respect for you as a thought leader and would like to start by saying you are one of the best content writers in our industry. When I read this content, something hit me that felt misinformed. So I read it again. and shared it with my friend Iain Morrison.
His reaction was honest, sincere, and informed. That is how we met and how we have remained close. For the last couple of years, I have spent every waking day and night on an unpaid mission out of privilege to support the mental health of our industry. Having spent 20 years in it, I understand how so many are finding themselves questioning their careers, their passion and if getting into this industry was a good choice or not. This all lies in the cocoon behind the scenes that most don't pay attention to because we as an industry lack the patience and empathy for those who struggle.
There has always been a real misunderstanding around mental health in all of its forms and our industry has shut it down like a plague. I shared your post with Iain because I wanted his thoughts as we are friends. I am thankful to Iain for sharing what he wrote with you because, 99.9% of people in this industry lack the courage and strength to even discuss it out loud. And for good reason I might I add.,. Why is that? The reason in my humble opinion is that our associations and many organizations make no space for conversations to happen that support prioritizing people first. They always use wellness as the default when the core problem is mental health. People are very caught up and concerned about their reputation and the retribution that comes with opening up their mouths to the truth. I am honing in our illustrious leaders who in response to any attempts to reach out, end up ghosting me and my solutions which are psychological safety and emotional intelligence training.
An example of the ignorance is a statement made to me from the leader of education at PCMA telling me that mental health is an HR problem, because event professionals don't have the time to deal with it. We are supposedly the 6th most stressful industry according to the internet, but the first 5 have psychological safety training as a mandatory requirement.
I decided after 4 years, to stop drinking the Kool-Aid and tear off the bandages that our leaders use to pay lip service to one of the most serious problems our industry has now. People like Iain and myself and many others are trying very hard to pave a road that the next generation can protect themselves from and be mentored by people like us who can teach trust, safety and human sustainability.
I am opening up a peer support program within Club Ichi because it's important to make space to share how we can support each other in this industry. From the focus group you graciously gave your time attending with me, leading to a survey of 600 industry profs over the summer. we are finally in the works of a curriculum which will unfold into a 6-part course on both training and resources to change the narrative for an industry who forever defaults to wellness. Thank you for making space for Iain's thoughts and now mine.