About Me
My name is Dan Harvey. For 30 years I’ve been working in the corporate, charity and education sectors. I’ve had several roles with varying levels of responsibility and workload. Sometimes I was doing work I believed in – sometimes I definitely wasn’t. But without fail, every few months I would burn out. Usually this happened slowly, a feeling of running out of gas until I got to my next holiday and could get just enough time to recover. A couple of times it was more dramatic, something like a full breakdown, requiring extended breaks from work.
I tried all sorts of solutions, from productivity to wellbeing. But the only thing that truly worked, that seemed to rest and restore me every time, was connecting to nature. Something fundamental seemed to shift when I stepped outside and spent time, even just a few minutes, aware of my natural environment. It was as if some core part of me, fundamental to my human functioning and flourishing, was coming back online.
As a student of psychology, I was fascinated as to why this might be, so I began to do some research. And what I discovered was both enlightening and, frankly, depressing. I realised that the modern working environment, along with all the advances in technology that it’s embraced, had utterly divorced us from who we naturally are as human beings.
The field of evolutionary psychology in particular – how our minds have developed over hundreds of thousands of years – revealed a significant mismatch. Almost everything modern organisational life asks of us – constant availability, fragmented attention, indoor everything, busyness as virtue – runs directly against how we’re wired.
But that raised a harder question. If this mismatch affects everyone, why did I seem to feel it so much more intensely than the people around me appeared to? Why did work leave me utterly flattened while colleagues were managing to struggle through?
Canary in the coalmine
The answer came very recently, when I was diagnosed as autistic at the age of 51. It turns out that I wasn’t simply more sensitive to a bad system by chance – it’s how my brain is built. An autistic mind notices what others filter out and questions what others accept. The same mind that gets overwhelmed by the world is actually perceiving more of it.
When I realised this, I decided it was time to put this feature of my brain to good use, to alert organisations to the silent toxins in their environment, acting as the canary in the coalmine, and support them in finding solutions.
I’ve developed a framework of five dimensions where the evolutionary mismatch most commonly shows up inside organisations: Rest and Recovery, Deep Work and Attention, Nature Connection, Psychological Safety, and Meaningful Work.
Find out how I can support your organisation to understand this framework and apply it to build a truly sustainable and flourishing workforce.