Simon Williams. AuDHD. LGBTQ+. Raised above the St Giles Hotel on Tottenham Court Road. Founder of partnerships.community. Fractional and advisory work in the LGBTQIA+ sector. This is the operating system behind all of it.
My father ran a hotel. My mother arrived in London with 40 pence and got a job at The Ritz. I grew up watching two immigrants build something from nothing — and I have been doing the same thing, in my own erratic, hyperfocused, pattern-obsessed way, ever since.
— Simon Williams, Founder · partnerships.community · LGBTQ+-founded consultancy, co-founded with Roddy Williams
These are not coping mechanisms. They are optimised workflows — each trait doing a specific job in the operating system.
Individually, each set of traits is powerful. In co-occurrence, they produce something specific: a founder who can go deep and wide, build and iterate, systematise and reinvent — simultaneously.
Every internal tension produces an external capability. Here is how the operating system resolves each apparent conflict into a competitive advantage.
Because my internal system is simultaneously over-structured and chaotic, the external system has to be bulletproof. This is not compensation — it is leverage. The infrastructure I build for myself is the same infrastructure I build for partners.
Self-awareness is not a soft skill here. It is load-bearing infrastructure. Each of these is a known failure mode with a documented fix.
Novelty drive creates commitment velocity that outpaces processing capacity. In April 2026 I stepped into a 40-day operational sprint at an LGBTQIA+ venue — physical build, contractor management, licensing, staff restructure, press, a Grand Reopening — simultaneously running partnerships.community. I ended up in a hospital waiting room with an NHS wristband. The body gave way before the conviction did.
Hire finishers early. Build completion into the team structure, not the individual. My co-founder and husband Roddy is the execution anchor — his role is to make sure my high-level architecture actually meets the ground, especially when I can't.Seeing structure everywhere is powerful. It is also occasionally wrong. The autistic mind can lock a pattern in before enough evidence exists — and then defend it long past the point it should have been revised. I have done this in rooms I should have listened to longer. I have done it in Camden streets I thought I already knew.
Mandate contradictory data. Every strategy document I produce requires a "steel man the opposition" section before it ships. I cannot rely on my own pattern library alone — no matter how much time I have spent in a place.It cannot be scheduled like a meeting. When it locks, I have built 27-subdomain ecosystems in sprint windows that should have taken months. When it does not arrive, forcing it produces worse output than stepping back entirely. The an LGBTQIA+ venue sprint taught me this at full volume — there are days when the right thing is to put the wristband on and breathe.
Sprint structure, not time structure. I do not work 9–5. I work in high-intensity windows and document everything during them, so the low-intensity windows are never blockers for anyone else. Rest is not failure. It is maintenance.
I am writing this with an NHS wristband on.
My husband — who is also my co-founder — thought I was going crazy.
He said it with love. He's not wrong that I am at the edge of something.
But the edge is exactly where I need to be.
I cried in public for the first time. Not in private, not alone. In a room full of people. Because I cared too much about something to hold it in. That is not a breakdown. That is what happens when you finally let yourself feel something all the way through.
It's okay to cry. It's okay to be erratic when Camden Council has demolished your childhood memories in asbestos in a single day. When your christening boxes are gone. Your Star Wars collection — gone. All of it stored in the outside shed next door, not across the city, next door — and then deleted. Erased. One call, one decision, one day.
The buildings where Sebastian and Max and I used to play. The summer nights at Tasha's house — sneaking through the side door because she had the Barbie dolls and it felt like the most free place in the world. The friends from St Joseph's RC Primary in Covent Garden. The years at The Oratory. All of it compressed into a single morning I wasn't there for.
Dust is skin.
Skin is people.
I am covered in it — day and night.
That is not a metaphor. It is physics. Every surface I walk through is made of everyone who ever walked through it before. Working in an LGBTQIA+ venue — breathing it back to life — I am covered in the dust of those buildings, those streets, those summers. From the places my mates used to play to the lovely summer nights at Tasha's. It is all still there, in the air. In me.
Sometimes this project is too much. More than I can hold. I know that now, and I am saying it here — because this page is about what AuDHD actually looks like, not the polished case-study version. The version where your nervous system runs at fight-or-flight for months and you don't notice until you are sitting somewhere clinical with a wristband on, wondering how you got here.
The answer is: you got here by caring. By caring so much about a community, about a place, about a Trans woman who built something magnificent and needed someone to stand beside her — that your body gave way before your conviction did. That is not a flaw in the operating system. That is the operating system doing exactly what it was designed to do.
I feel the world differently. I always have. I feel it all at once, sometimes — simultaneously, with no buffer. People call that erratic. I am choosing to call it accurate. The world is erratic. I am just not pretending otherwise.
Does it make me crazy? No. Does it make me difficult to be around sometimes? Almost certainly. Does it make me a different kind of builder, a different kind of thinker, a different kind of person? Yes. And I have stopped apologising for that.
It is okay to cry. It is okay to be erratic. It does not make you broken. It makes you honest.
The magic is not in the grand cave or the eureka moment. It is at the edge of your comfort zone — right at the line where you do not know if you can hold it. Original thinking happens in the void, not the conference room. Connection — real connection, with the earth, with each other — does not require a ceremony or a grand stage or the right circumstances.
We just have to all stand still
for a second.
And breathe.
— Simon Williams, 8 May 2026 · Camden · NHS wristband · covered in dust
Not a discovery call. A genuine conversation about your opportunity — and whether my operating system, my team, and our values are the right fit for yours.
Start the conversation →“I don’t sell time. I sell certainty. Build with me. Or break with me. Either way, you walk away with something that works.”
Simon Williams — Founder, partnerships.community