ADHD: From Affliction to Asset - A Framework Built From the Wins and the Losses
- dougkatz8
- Apr 27
- 7 min read
Updated: 2 days ago
PART 1: Optimizing as a Team Member
This is part one of a four-part series on ADHD, leadership and organizational dynamics.
Full disclosure, I use the word ADHD because it’s the common language. Not because I accept the disorder framework. What I carry doesn’t look like a disorder when I examine it honestly. It looks like a mismatch — between the wiring and the systems that were never built for it.
I’m not a clinician. Everything here comes from the wiring.
In a stone arch every piece matters. But the keystone is different. Different in shape, different in position. It bears the most stress of any stone in the structure. It doesn’t blend into the arch — it can’t. Its difference isn’t decorative. It’s structural. Remove it and the arch falls.
That’s you on a team. Not the piece that needs to look like everything else. The piece the structure cannot function without.
The question isn’t how to blend in. The question is how to become indispensable.
Every team member has one job underneath all the other jobs: add value. Consistently. That’s the ledger. Keep it positive.
That sounds simple until you examine what it actually requires — because for someone wired like me, adding value isn’t the problem. Pointing that value in the right direction is. The ledger doesn’t care how much energy you spent. It only registers what landed. And for most of my corporate career, enormous energy was producing far less than it should have — not because the capability wasn’t there, but because I was deploying it against the wrong terrain.
Understanding how to keep the ledger positive — and how to keep it from going negative when the environment isn’t optimal — is the whole game. Everything that follows is in service of that.
I graduated West Point in the top third of my class. My Officer Evaluation Reports throughout my Army career were consistently strong. I was not someone who couldn’t perform. I was someone whose performance was highly dependent on the environment demanding the right things from me.
The military, it turns out, favors high-frequency thinking. The environment rewards pattern recognition under pressure, decisive action under uncertainty, the ability to hold multiple problems simultaneously and move on all of them. It rewards amplitude. I didn’t know that’s what I was doing — I just knew the work felt natural in a way that school rarely had. The wiring and the environment were compatible. The ledger stayed positive almost by default.
Then I entered corporate America. And the environment flipped.
The same wiring that had been an asset in volatile, high-stakes conditions became friction in stable, process-driven ones. I could still perform — and I did, on teams especially — but the degree was different. The environment didn’t demand what I naturally produced. And because corporate life was unfamiliar terrain, I made the mistake that cost me the most across that entire chapter of my career.
I modeled the behavior of people who were succeeding around me instead of working to my own strengths.
I watched what worked for others and tried to replicate it. I met normative expectations. I fit the role as defined. I performed a version of myself that was built for a different kind of mind. The overhead of performing as someone I wasn’t consumed most of what I was actually adding. The value was there. It just never had room to compound.
The instinct most people with this wiring develop in that situation is defensive. Manage the weaknesses. Compensate for the gaps. Try not to be too much for the room. I understand where that instinct comes from — it gets trained into you early, and the corporate environment reinforces it constantly.
But defense keeps the ledger flat at best. It doesn’t build anything.
The better move is offense. Volunteer for the tasks and roles that play to your wiring before someone assigns you the ones that don’t. Initiative and quick problem-solving are natural outputs of this wiring — they aren’t things you have to manufacture. Use them as your entry point. Find the problems that need solving, move on them, and let the relationships build around the work. That’s how the ledger goes positive — by deploying strength deliberately instead of waiting to be placed correctly by someone who may never figure out how you’re built.
And when the environment pulls you outside your best terrain — when the role or the moment requires something that doesn’t come naturally — think of the salmon.
The salmon is a saltwater fish. That’s its terrain — where it’s built to thrive, where its strength fully activates. But when the mission demands it, it doesn’t negotiate with the river. It doesn’t wait for the fresh water to change. It transforms completely and conquers terrain that should have stopped it. Not because the fresh water became hospitable. Because it refused to accept the barrier.
You are built for salt water. Many corporate environments are fresh water. Know the difference. Spend as much time as you can in the water that suits your wiring. And when the mission pulls you into fresh water — don’t accommodate it. Move through it deliberately, with purpose, and return to your terrain.
Lean into your strengths to keep the ledger positive. Manage the difficult terrain to keep it from going negative. That’s the operating model.
There’s one more thing that changes when you go on offense — and it’s the most underrated tool someone wired like me has on a team.
Tell people how you operate before they misinterpret it.
Not as a disclaimer. Not as an apology. As a working manual. Here’s what makes me tick. Here’s what’s going to look deliberate but isn’t. Here’s how to slow me down or flag me when I’m moving too fast. That’s not a confession — that’s a team contribution. You’re giving the people around you the information they need to work with you effectively instead of spending months building a misread that quietly drains the ledger.
I’ve written before about proactive disclosure in the context of leadership relationships. The peer context is different. Your colleagues don’t have authority over you but they shape your reputation, your opportunities, and the team dynamics you operate inside every day. A misread at that level doesn’t get corrected by a performance review. It calcifies. And once it does, you’re spending energy managing a perception instead of doing the work — and the ledger pays for it.
The disclosure doesn’t have to be formal or heavy. It can be as simple as — I move fast and I’ll sometimes push before I’ve fully thought it through. Call me on it. I’d rather be corrected in the moment than have you wondering if it was intentional.
That one sentence has done more for my working relationships than any amount of trying to appear more measured than I actually am.
The partnerships that worked in my corporate career happened by accident. I didn’t engineer them. Chemistry emerged and I benefited from it — but I never looked at a piece of work and asked who the right person to attack it with was. I never identified an initiative and then deliberately sought the person whose steadiness would anchor my amplitude, or whose follow-through would complete what my pattern recognition started.
That’s the move. Find the initiative worth pursuing. Then find the person whose wiring accentuates yours on that specific work. Engage deliberately. Build around the task.
Look for people whose strengths sit where yours don’t. Not someone to carry you — someone to trade with. Mutual value creation. You bring the initiative and the pattern recognition. They bring the follow-through and the steadiness. Both of you get stronger. That’s not a weakness admission. That’s team architecture. And when it works, the ledger doesn’t just stay positive — it compounds.
One caveat — and it matters. Some baseline chemistry has to exist or none of the complementary wiring means anything. You can’t engineer a working relationship out of pure structural fit. But when the chemistry is there, stop calling it luck. Start calling it what it is and build on it deliberately.
This matters beyond the immediate result. The instinct you develop doing this as a peer — identifying complementary wiring, building intentional partnerships around shared work — is the exact instinct you’ll deploy later when you’re building teams under you. You’re not just collaborating. You’re developing the architecture you’ll lead from.
Which brings the last practical question — what if the environment itself is the problem?
I’m not going to tell you not to take a job. That’s not realistic and it’s not honest. Paychecks matter. Opportunities matter. Timing matters.
But go in with eyes open.
If you have a choice — and sometimes you do — find a culture that matches your wiring and your values enough to give you room to flex. Not a perfect match. Enough. Enough that you can anchor in terrain that suits you, collaborate with people who complement your wiring, and shift when the mission demands it without spending every day swimming upstream just to stay employed.
If you don’t have that choice — treat the position as temporary. Not as failure. As a deliberate placement. Create value where you can. Bend the culture through demonstrated results. Some environments have more flex than they appear to from the outside.
But don’t get locked in. The longer you stay performing as a normative version of yourself, the harder extrication becomes. Golden handcuffs are real. So is the slow erosion of a ledger that never quite gets where it should.
The job should serve the framework. Not the other way around.
The keystone doesn’t ask the arch to change its shape. It takes its position, bears the load, and holds everything together by being exactly what it is.
The world was not built for this wiring. Your framework has to be.
I am not a clinician but a person with a lived experience that I feel can help others and positively impact my fellow Children of Chaos. If this framing resonates, I speak on this. The Children of Chaos keynote is built for organizations, leaders, and parents who want to understand how high-variance minds work — and where they create disproportionate strength. Learn more at douglasmkatz.com/thechildrenofchaos
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