Many leaders in the corporate world are frustrated that their go-to growth strategies and solutions don’t work the way they used to.
Perry Knoppert aims to offer the business world a new way to look its most challenging problems via the Brain Forest Alliance, a collaborative platform for “diverse, nonlinear thinkers focused on tackling complex global challenges.”
“We’re transitioning from the linear, industrial model of business to digital, which is very decentralized—and everything is connected,” says Knoppert. “People are recognizing there is another powerful way to think. Non-linear thinking is not the solution. The solutions are the systems that are already in place, but they need to be inspired by a different way of thinking.
Companies and organizations that join the alliance can tap into the network to a team of non-linear thinkers, who will study the problem and deliver a white paper with answers, inspired by the mission “We solve the unsolvable.”
“There’s a lot of talk in corporate life about bringing a diversity of thought, but they have trouble in the companies actually orchestrating that,” says Knoppert.
Perry Knoppert is bringing neurdiverse thinking
One reason is culture fit. A consultant who truly “thinks outside the box” may find it hard to be accepted by leaders of a very buttoned up company. With the Brain Forest Alliance, Knoppert says, consultants “don’t have to be made to conform to the culture. Their strength is that they don’t.”
The Brain Forest Alliance is an offshoot of The Octopus Movement—a nonprofit global network, founded in 2021 in Amsterdam, to call attention to the gifts of non-linear thinkers, where Knoppert is founder and CEO. Its several thousand neurodiverse members include people with ADHD, dyslexia, dyspraxia, and autism. Often, they’ve gravitated to careers such as entrepreneurship and the arts where unconventional ways of thinking are welcomed but have found themselves at odds with the more linear ways of the traditional business world. The Brain Forest Alliance, which charges for its consulting services but relies on the volunteer labor of its members, helps to fund the nonprofit.
To enlist consultants on each project, the Alliance sends out an email to all registered members of the network announcing the project, so they have the option of joining the solutions team. “You determine if you want to be involved with that specific think tank,” says Knoppert.
When I spoke with Knoppert in January, the Brain Forest Alliance had served eight clients. One recent client was an NGO that teaches refugees to be filmmakers and was looking for a way to be more effective in its mission.
Hinrik Josafat Atlason founded the eight-person education startup Atlas Primer, which is pioneering new ways of incorporating audio and other modalities in education to support neurodivergent learners—primarily people with ADHD and dyslexia—in flexible and customizable ways. The venture-backed company, based in both New York City and Reykjavik, Iceland, has developed an audio learning AI assistant app called Atlas Primer that turns any text to speech for the benefit of people who learn best through listening. A founding member of the Brain Forest Alliance, he requested that the alliance tackle the question “What is the problem with education?” as his company, founded in 2020, transitioned from marketing its app to schools to the students who are end users. The group’s answers to that general question gave him insight he planned to apply as he continued to grow his business.
“We had people gathered in a room who had varying experiences with education, and they all saw it from different perspectives and different ways to improve it,” Atlason said. “You get an amazing brainstorm going on. The ideas they produced were really insightful….there was a common thread of humanity that made it more about the individual to allow them to explore their potential instead of squeezing them into a box. It was just beautiful. It was everything we expected, and I’m tremendously happy we did this.”
