For much of my career, I did two jobs at once: the work, and the work of looking like I belonged while doing it. I'm a Black, autistic, ADHD Air Force veteran. I help organizations find the expectations that drain people, then redesign them so difference doesn't have to be hidden or translated.
What Inclusion Hides and What Belonging Demands
What if belonging is not simply something institutions offer, but something people are required to earn by becoming easier to interpret, manage, and trust?
I wrote this book around a question that has followed me across workplaces and institutions: what happens when people are welcomed, but the terms of that welcome still require them to explain, translate, soften, or reduce themselves? It looks at who gets believed, who gets read as professional, who has to justify what they need, and what belonging can cost when those rules go unnamed.
Each can be shaped as a keynote, fireside chat, executive session, or workshop. For audiences that need a different entry point, I also build custom conversations from the wider body of work below.
What neurodivergence teaches us about performance, belonging, and the energy we spend being acceptable.
Masking means hiding how you naturally think, talk, or move so you'll be read as competent. It costs energy every day. Organizations pay for it in burnout, turnover, and ideas that never get said out loud.
Explore The Cost of Fitting In →Neurodivergence, executive presence, and who gets seen as leadership material.
Executive presence and culture fit often reward resemblance to a familiar style more than the ability to lead. This talk helps leaders tell the difference and see what gets lost when they cannot.
Explore The Hidden Rules of Leadership →Building workplaces and events around how people actually vary.
Most organizations wait for someone to disclose, document, and ask. By then, that person has already paid a price. This talk shows how to build flexibility into meetings, events, and systems from the start.
Explore Beyond Accommodation →The talks are the delivery. The frameworks below are the engine behind much of the thinking.
I remember being asked for feedback and taking the question seriously. I answered carefully and candidly because I believed that was what the invitation required. What stayed with me was not the feedback itself, but what seemed to change afterward: the subtle shift in how the relationship felt, and the realization that being invited to speak and being safe to speak were not necessarily the same thing.
Experiences like that taught me to pay attention to the rules nobody writes down. The expectation may say, "Tell us what you think." The hidden rule may be, "But understand what happens when you do."
I'm a Black autistic and ADHD adult, Air Force veteran, author, educator, neuroinclusion strategist, and organizational leader. My career has moved through military service, corporate environments, higher education, project and program leadership, inclusion work, and civic service.
I learned the rules of professionalism in uniform, in corporate offices, on campuses, and at a Police Commission table. I also learned what those rules cost the people they were never written for. Being Black and autistic means I'm often read twice, once for my race and once for my brain, and rarely as both at the same time. That double reading is where much of my work begins.
The work is not about making people better at surviving the system. It is about becoming more willing to redesign the system.
A lived-experience-informed framework examining how neurotype and socially situated identities can shape the meaning, risk, and regulation of expression.
Explore the framework + paper →Neurodivergent leaders often get seen, but only in pieces. The Prism Ceiling explains why the parts that do not match the leadership template get filtered out, and what organizations lose when that happens.
Explore Prism Ceiling →Start from the assumption that people vary. Build access in before anyone has to disclose, explain, or justify a need.
Explore Liberatory Access Design →A goal-setting method that asks two questions: can this goal be reached, and can this person reach it safely and sustainably given their energy, history, thinking pattern, and barriers?
Explore STEPS™ →An event-design framework that plans for communication, sensory needs, participation, and energy from the first planning meeting.
Explore ACCESS™ →A way to weigh lived experience and research or data together when deciding what counts as evidence, so inclusion decisions do not become purely technical or purely anecdotal.
Explore Authority of Experience →A facilitated learning activity that uses the familiar structure of a pizza to make the distinct roles of diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging visible, then gives groups a shared way to talk about how those pieces work together.
Explore DEI Pizza™ →Neurodiversity, performative inclusion, workplace culture, and what changes when organizations move beyond awareness.
Watch the full conversation →A longer-form conversation on neurodivergence, military experience, equity, workplace culture, and organizational inclusion.
Video clipAnother conversation with RolondoA shorter look at the voice, pace, and style I bring to public conversations.
Earlier systems work: Entrepreneurial Project Management with Rolondo Talbott.
Neurodivergence, race, work, leadership, masking, agency, recognition, and organizational systems.
Read the essays → The EvoLLLutionMicroaggressions and the Threat to ProductivityHow repeated slights and exclusions shape productivity, culture, and the experience of marginalized employees.
Read the article → Professional archiveLinkedInAdditional writing, speaking updates, professional experience, and current public conversations.
Visit LinkedIn →What Inclusion Hides and What Belonging Demands
This is the book where many of the questions running through my talks and essays come together: who gets believed, which differences are treated as acceptable, what access requires, and what belonging can quietly ask people to give up.
Earlier books and creative work include Corporatysm: Being Black and Autistic in Corporate America, The Spectrum Awakens, 1000 Papercuts, and the Uniquely Me series.
A profile exploring purpose, resilience, creativity, and the experiences behind the work.
Read the Bold Journey profile → AutasticAdvocates & voices to listen toListed among autistic advocates and voices whose work is worth following.
View the Autastic advocates list → VoyageLAAn Inspired Chat with Rolondo TalbottA newer conversation on identity, work, creativity, and the ideas shaping my current body of work.
Read the VoyageLA feature → We HyperfocusA play about being Black, autistic and surviving corporate AmericaOn late discovery, corporate life, poetry, and turning Corporatysm into a one-person stage work.
Read the We Hyperfocus feature → ShoutoutLAMeet Rolondo TalbottA conversation about systems thinking, creativity, inclusion, and DEI Pizza™.
Read the ShoutoutLA profile → Speaker profileExecutive Woman MediaA public speaker profile covering leadership, project management, inclusion, and authorship.
View the speaker profile → UCLA NewsroomHelping student veterans translate military experienceA look at mentoring, military transition, and translating experience across systems.
Read the UCLA story → EDUCAUSE Annual ConferenceMicroaggressions: The Threat to ProductivityPoster session in the Leadership and Future Workforce track on how repeated slights and exclusions damage teams, belonging, and productivity.
View the EDUCAUSE program →For conferences, leadership retreats, and employee gatherings that want honesty more than inspiration.
Hands-on sessions where teams find the unwritten rules in their own work and decide what to change.
For teams that want access built into the plan instead of patched in later.
I can provide approved bios, headshots, talk descriptions, AV needs, and accessibility information once we begin planning an engagement.
Share your event, audience, date, and what you hope changes afterward. If I'm not the right fit, I'll tell you and, when I can, point you toward someone who may be.