At a playground in London in September 2025, in a conversation with a friend about what could come next, Nedixa took shape. The groundwork that made that moment possible had been building for years. This page is where it is documented.
The Blueprint holds the ten works that contributed most directly to Nedixa’s design principles. The Wider Picture holds the broader frameworks, research, and influences that continue to shape the work. The Arguments section is where the framework meets the world directly — through argument, observation, and challenge.
It is evolving. It is a process. The arguments grow as the work grows. So does the architecture behind them.
ARGUMENTS
This is where the thinking leaves the framework stage and meets the world directly — arguments on workplace behaviour, systems failure, policy, law, masking, fairness, ambiguity, power, and the cost of unclear communication.
The playground moment — 3 min read
What the Employment Rights Act 2025 actually means for how your teams communicate
Coming soon…
Coming soon…
The Blueprint
These are the works that contributed most directly to how Nedixa thinks, trains, and designs communication. Some introduced a single principle so precise it changed the structure immediately. Others built a cumulative picture over time — one that kept repeating across psychology, linguistics, behavioural science, crisis communication, law, and neurodiversity research until the pattern became impossible to ignore.
Simon Baron-Cohen
The Essential Difference · Zero Degrees of Empathy · Autism and the Technical Mind
With Baron-Cohen it is the cumulative picture his whole body of work builds. Across his research, one thing becomes increasingly clear: autism is a differently configured mind, with different focuses, different strengths, different costs. The systematising tendency, the pattern recognition, the precision. These are not compensations. They are the thing itself. His work helped me understand my own cognition as an architecture with its own logic. That shift is the foundation of why I believe communication environments need to be redesigned rather than individuals trained to fit them. He also carries an anxiety I share entirely — that the human rights of neurodivergent people remain practically unaddressed, and that every aspect of life needs to be rethought through this lens. A fundamental redesign. We are nowhere near that conversation yet.
BJ Fogg
Tiny Habits
Behaviour change happens when friction is low and prompts are well-timed — not when motivation is high. I recognised this when I noticed something that had been sitting in front of me for years: people already know how to communicate better. They just do it inconsistently. That is the behaviour design failure Nedixa exists to fix. Fogg works at the level of individual habits. The step I take — and that most people do not — is applying the same logic at interaction level, between people. That is where Nedixa operates. That step is the whole design.
Peter Gollwitzer
Implementation Intentions (1999)
I did not know it had a name. For as long as I can remember, I had pre-structured the world so I could process what mattered without being overwhelmed by everything else. Pre-decided responses to specific situations. If this happens, I do this. I thought everyone worked like this. Finding Gollwitzer’s research was one of those moments where the ground shifts — because it turned out to be a precise, replicable mechanism. The whole of Nedixa is, at its core, building collective implementation intentions. That is precisely what we are doing.
Gabor Maté
The Myth of Normal
Maté separates commonality from normality and refuses to let us conflate them. Just because something is widespread does not make it healthy, neutral, or inevitable. That distinction dismantles the assumption that the baseline organisations operate from is a reasonable one. What I took from it and built on: what looks like poor communication is often a predictable response to an unclear system. Fixing the person while leaving the interaction unchanged is wasted effort. The baseline is the problem. Most people are responding normally to it.
Nancy Doyle
Research on neurodiversity at work and performance conditions
Most of the neurodiversity space talks about labels, awareness, and acceptance. Doyle operationalises something more useful: what conditions allow people to perform at their best. That shift — from identity to capability conditions — is where I start. The principle I take from her and sharpen: performance variance is about the fit between cognitive style and communication environment. What Nedixa does is work at individual and interaction level — changing the communication behaviours of the people in the room, one group of twelve at a time. The system changes through repeated interaction, not declaration.
Devon Price
Unmasking Autism
What Price names precisely: masking is sustained cognitive labour in response to unclear or unsafe environments. People expend enormous energy performing acceptable behaviour. That performance is invisible, unrecognised, and costly. Her challenge to the idea that professionalism equals a neutral baseline is one I share entirely — it is a coded communication style, and it was constructed that way. My translation into Nedixa is deliberate: your organisation is requiring people to spend energy interpreting instead of doing. What I would add is this: neurotypical colleagues also spend energy unnecessarily on unclear communication — they carry it for longer before it becomes a visible problem, but the cost is still there. The difference is one of threshold, not of kind.
Daniel Kahneman
Thinking, Fast & Slow
Ambiguity is structural. It is the natural output of System 1 thinking under pressure. Kahneman makes communication failure a design problem rather than a personal one — a predictable outcome of fast decision-making under pressure — which is exactly the argument organisations need to hear before they take it seriously. Most workplace miscommunication is not malicious or careless. It is cognitively predictable. And what is predictable can be redesigned.
Amanda Ripley
The unthinkable
By the time organisations notice communication problems, they are already managing consequences — the causes happened earlier. Ripley’s work on crisis, preparation, and human behaviour under pressure confirmed the prevention logic that runs through everything Nedixa does. The intervention that matters is the one that happens before the incident. Communication failure is a predictable system outcome. And because it is predictable, it can be redesigned. That is the Nedixa argument in one sentence.
Marshall Rosenberg
Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life
The feelings component never worked for me in professional settings. Not because feelings are irrelevant — they are not — but because asking people to name them in a workplace context creates conditions the workplace has not earned. What I kept was everything underneath: the insistence on separating what you directly observed from what you concluded about it, the requirement to name what you actually need rather than what you assume should be obvious, the discipline of making a specific request rather than issuing a vague instruction and hoping. Those three — observation, need, request — became the structural logic of the Decision-Grade Ask and the Before / Gap / Redesign framework. I did not apply Rosenberg. I used him as load-bearing material and built something different on top of it. The modification is the point.
Phillippa Lally et al.
How habits are formed: modelling habit formation in the real world (2010
The 21-day habit myth is everywhere. It is also wrong. Lally’s research replaced it with something more honest: habit formation takes between 18 and 254 days, depending on the behaviour, the person, and the context. What mattered more than the average was the shape of the curve — steep difficulty early, inconsistency through the middle, gradual reduction in effort as automaticity begins to arrive. The 30-day workbook taper is built directly from that curve. Daily prompts when the implementation intention is most fragile. Every two days through the plateau where most programmes lose people. Reducing frequency afterwards not because the learning is finished but because the scaffolding has to come down before you can know whether the behaviour is standing on its own. The day 10-12 group check-in sits exactly where it does because that window is when the dropout risk is steepest. Lally told me when to show up.
What connects these is not agreement. Several of these thinkers would likely disagree with each other — and sometimes with me. That is not the point. The point is utility. Each contributed something structurally important to the methodology behind Nedixa. Some of these influences operate at the level of individual cognition. Others at the level of systems, institutions, behaviour, language, or power. Nedixa sits in the overlap between them: the interaction level, where communication becomes operational reality.
THE WIDER PICTURE
These are the frameworks, the research, and the people whose work continues to shape the architecture of Nedixa. Not all of it made it into the Blueprint — some contributed a single idea, some a cumulative pressure, some a challenge that remains unresolved. This section is a living document. It grows as the work grows.
The cost of environments built for the wrong mind
Devon Price · Vikki Honeybourne · Chloé Hayden (Different, Not Less) · Bessel van der Kolk · Stephen Porges · Tinu Cornish · CIPD · Uptimize
Communication is a system, not a personality trait
Gloria Mark · Daniel Kahneman · George Lakoff · Jefferson Fisher · Kim Scott · Eric Berne · Irvin Yalom · Esther Perel · Barbara and Allan Pease · Noam Chomsky · George Orwell · John Dewey · Ferdinand de Saussure · Marshall Rosenberg · Pam Mueller and Daniel Oppenheimer · Reading judicial judgments (professional practice)
Why intentions change nothing without structure
BJ Fogg · Peter Gollwitzer · Phillippa Lally · Donald Kirkpatrick · Icek Ajzen · Albert Bandura · Edward Deci and Richard Ryan · Alfie Kohn · Kenji Murayama · Lokhorst et al. · James Clear · Charles Duhigg · Mel Robbins · Patti Shank · Robert Brinkerhoff · Robert Mager · Mihaly Csikszentmihályi · Adam Grant · Elaine Fox
Power, institutions, and the design of the world we work in
Isaiah Berlin · Winston Churchill · Henry Kissinger · Yuval Noah Harari · Mary Beard · Gisela Bock · Lord Sumption · Baroness Hale · Brené Brown
Preparation over reaction
WHO Surgical Safety Checklist · Amanda Ripley · Aviation Crew Resource Management (CRM) · Tenerife 1977 · High Reliability Organisation research (Karl Weick et al.) · SBAR communication framework (medicine) · IFRC field communications (professional practice) · Employment Rights Act 2025 · Equality Act 2010 · ACAS · auticon
Is something missing here? Does a resource belong on this page that shaped how you think about communication, behaviour, or the cost of getting both wrong? I say what I mean and I mean what I say — reach out. Thinking has always been done in dialogue. That is still the intention.
Contact
Address: 167-169 Great Portland Street, London W1W 5P
Phone: +44 7447 583758
E-Mail: hello@nedixa.co.uk
© 2026 Nedixa Communications and Training Ltd
Reg: 16756793