Does James Bond Have ADHD? That’s the Wrong Question

James Bond is comfortable with chaos

Bond is very good in a crisis. Ridiculously good, actually. Things go horribly wrong and, while everybody else is still working out what just happened, Bond is already doing something about it.

Skyfall is full of this. At the beginning of the film he is chasing Patrice through Istanbul. Cars, motorbikes, rooftops, a train. Any sensible plan becomes irrelevant almost immediately, but Bond just keeps adapting to whatever happens next.

At one point he uses a digger to reconnect the separated carriages, then uses it to get onto the front carriage before climbing inside and calmly adjusting his cuffs.

This is a man whose brain appears quite comfortable with chaos.

Later, when Silva is coming for M, Bond doesn't sit around waiting for the approved MI6 response. He gets M out, takes her to Scotland and turns his childhood home into a collection of improvised traps.

There aren't enough weapons, there isn't enough equipment and there isn't much of a plan, so he uses an old house, a shotgun, some dynamite, whatever else he can find and an elderly gamekeeper.

He works with what he has, and he is brilliant at it.

ADHD traits or useful spy traits?

That got me thinking, because quite a few of the things that make James Bond good at being James Bond look remarkably similar to traits we associate with ADHD.

He thinks quickly, improvises, takes risks and acts instinctively. He seems unusually calm when everything has gone horribly wrong, becomes intensely focused when something is interesting or urgent, spots possibilities other people haven't and breaks rules when the rules are getting in the way. He makes decisions quickly with incomplete information and, beneath all that cultivated coolness, is often driven by emotion.

Sound familiar?

Imagine Bond’s annual appraisal

Now imagine Bond doing a normal office job.

Actually, imagine his annual appraisal.

He has saved the country again, so that's obviously gone quite well. Unfortunately, he hasn't completed his expenses, his mandatory training is four months overdue, he's ignored several direct instructions from his manager, failed to follow the agreed process, made unauthorised purchases and his company car is at the bottom of a river.

HR would quite like a word.

And suddenly some of those traits look rather different.

• Quick thinking becomes impulsivity.
• Improvisation becomes failure to follow process.
• Independence becomes difficulty with authority.
• Risk taking becomes poor judgement.
• Intense focus becomes an inability to manage competing priorities.
• Working brilliantly under pressure becomes leaving things until they become urgent.

Breaking rules to get something done becomes a performance management issue.

The person has not changed. The environment has

And that's the bit I find interesting, because we spend an enormous amount of time talking about ADHD in terms of deficits. Difficulty concentrating, poor organisation, impulsivity, emotional dysregulation, problems with time and difficulty following instructions.

Those things can cause very real problems. I'm certainly not suggesting ADHD magically becomes wonderful if we give everybody an Aston Martin and send them chasing international terrorists.

But perhaps we are sometimes too quick to look at the person when we should be looking at the situation we've put them in.

Bond's complete disregard for procedure drives M mad throughout Skyfall, yet she keeps sending him out. Presumably that's because when something has gone spectacularly wrong and nobody quite knows what to do next, the irritating bloke who doesn't follow procedure suddenly becomes rather useful.

There is another part of Skyfall that makes this more interesting. Bond isn't presented as some flawless superhuman. He's ageing, injured and carrying quite a lot of emotional baggage around with him. He fails his physical and psychological assessments. His shooting is off. Measured against the neat collection of things MI6 thinks an agent should be able to do, he's not actually doing terribly well.

M sends him out anyway.

She knows something the tests don't capture. Put Bond in the right situation and he can do things other people can't.

What workplaces can get backwards about ADHD

I wonder whether workplaces sometimes get this completely backwards with ADHD.

We take somebody whose brain may be very good at novelty, urgency, problem solving, creativity, connecting apparently unrelated things or responding to rapidly changing situations.

Then we put them in an environment dominated by routine administration, rigid processes, long meetings, arbitrary deadlines and tasks with no immediate consequence.

When they struggle, we ask what's wrong with them.

Maybe we'd learn more by asking why somebody who can perform brilliantly in one set of circumstances falls apart in another. What changed?

It wasn't the person.

This happens at work too. Someone may be praised for rescuing a crisis, then criticised for struggling with the routine work surrounding it. If that sounds painfully familiar, read why people with ADHD can always feel behind at work.

ADHD traits are not superpowers

None of this makes ADHD a superpower. I don't particularly like that idea either, because a trait doesn't have to be a superpower or a deficit. It can just be a trait, and whether it helps or hinders depends partly on what you're trying to do with it.

Fearlessness is useful when you're running towards a crisis. It's less useful when you're deciding whether overtaking on a blind bend is a good idea. Hyperfocus can produce extraordinary work, but it can also result in suddenly discovering that it's 3am and you haven't eaten since breakfast. Ignoring unnecessary rules can produce new ideas. Ignoring necessary ones can produce a meeting with HR.

Human beings are inconveniently complicated like that.

I have written before about being powered by ADHD. That does not mean pretending the difficult parts disappear. It means looking honestly at what a person's brain does, where it works and where it needs support.

The better question

So no, I'm not diagnosing James Bond with ADHD. I don't think that's the interesting part.

What interests me is that we can watch someone like Bond and quite happily accept that his particular collection of traits makes him unusually suited to one environment. Yet when somebody with a similar collection of traits struggles in an environment that demands almost the opposite from them, we're remarkably quick to decide that the person is the problem.

Perhaps before asking how we make somebody with ADHD function more like everybody else, we could occasionally ask something else.

What sort of environment would allow this particular person to be really good at being themselves?

And I'd still get somebody else to do Bond's expenses.

FAQs about James Bond and ADHD traits