MISREAD: How the Workplace Misunderstands Neurodivergent Brains – and What We Can Do About It

by Howard Chambers

Alex spends eighteen hours preparing for a meeting. In ten seconds of silence, the room decides what he is worth.
MISREAD is the story of what happens when a neurodivergent senior technologist and the manager who has been misreading him for two years finally — almost — understand each other.
Through alternating fiction and research, MISREAD follows Alex, whose cognitive profile makes him exceptional at his job and largely invisible to the people assessing it, and Marcus, his manager, who has been writing his reviews for two years without the tools to read what he is actually seeing. Neither of them is the villain. The system is.
One in three neurodivergent workers fear being fired if they disclose. Ninety-one percent mask their condition daily. Only twenty-nine percent of UK managers have received any neurodiversity training.
MISREAD documents the human cost of those numbers — not through data alone, but through the people living inside it.
The book includes a contributed governance chapter from Yolanda Pemberton, Founder of the National Workplace Adjustment Framework, and draws on the Institutional Legitimacy™ framework of Eva Redford, Institutional Design Theorist.
Decent people. Wrong system. A book that asks what needs to change — and what it would take to change it.

177 pages, Kindle Edition

Published August 17, 2026

About the author

Howard Chambers has forty years of experience as a workplace needs assessor, disability advocate, and assistive technology specialist, including roles at Remploy and Posturite. He worked directly with neurodivergent adults navigating employment — many of them under performance review, convinced they were the problem.
He is a Level 2 England Athletics coach based in Crete, Greece, and the author of Halo Handicap, a book examining how appearance bias shapes opportunity for women and girls in sport.
MISREAD is his second book — a hybrid fiction and research account of how the workplace misunderstands neurodivergent brains, and what needs to change. It includes contributed sections from Yolanda Pemberton, Founder of the National Workplace Adjustment Framework, and draws on the Institutional Legitimacy™ framework of Eva Redford.