How we show up, for you and for each other.

A Note from Scott

I started Forge because I believed design could be done differently. Not just the work itself, but the way people do the work together.

I have ADHD. I'm neurodiverse. I've known this most of my life, and I've spent most of my career learning to work with a brain that doesn't always cooperate with the environments that professional life tends to create. Meetings that move too fast or too slow. Communication norms that reward a kind of clarity I have to work hard to produce. The assumption that intensity means aggression, or that a wandering thought means a weak one.

What I've learned is that the same brain that makes communication hard makes really hard things possible. Pattern recognition across systems that most people see as unrelated. The ability to hold ten variables in the air at once and find the connection nobody else noticed. Genuine, almost inconvenient curiosity about everything. A low tolerance for adhering to the status quo only because it's the way things have always been done.

I've also learned that none of that potential gets realized in an environment where people are afraid to say the wrong thing, ask the obvious question, or admit they don't understand. Psychological safety isn't a nice-to-have. It's the condition under which good work becomes possible at all.

So when the team wrote our values, and when I read things like we feel safe showing up as our authentic selves and we ask questions to gain clarity, I recognized something I'd been trying to articulate for years but couldn't quite say out loud. This is what I've always wanted Forge to be. A place where the way your brain works isn't a liability to manage. Where the dumb question is the one nobody asked. Where being wrong early is better than being confident late.

I'm telling you about my ADHD not because it's a disclaimer, but because I think leadership sets the ceiling on vulnerability in any organization. If I'm not willing to say it, I can't expect anyone else to. And if nobody says it, we end up with a culture that performs psychological safety instead of practicing it.

This document is our attempt to practice it. Hold us to it.

Scott Perket
Founder