Introversion was a personality disorder until ten years ago.
And Western cultural attitudes are still catching up.
THOUGHT ESSAYS are your weekly dose of open-ended, playfully subversive explorations that invite you to think differently about the everyday and the systemic alike.
For much of the last century, the World Health Organization classified introversion as a personality disorder. See the ICD-9:
Code 301.21 “introverted personality”
Code 313.22 “introverted personality disorder of childhood”.
It wasn’t removed until the ICD-10 was released in 2015.
This history mirrors a broader cultural pattern: Western societies have long favoured extroverted traits as indicators of strength, health, and leadership potential. And that bias still shapes how organisations identify talent, promote leaders, and design their cultures. Extroverts get visibility. Visibility is interpreted as readiness. Readiness gets rewarded.
Meanwhile, an enormous reservoir of cognitive, creative, and cultural value sits under-leveraged. It’s not that introverts lack capability — they simply don’t perform the personality style we’ve artificially coded as “high potential”, so there is propensity to be overlooked.
Nobody here is debating “whether introverts should lead” (I hope).
But we should ask:
How much organisational value do we leave on the table by designing leadership pipelines around a single personality aesthetic?
Our next era of economic growth will be shaped by ideas, depth, and cultural intelligence. So, we need leadership architectures that surface, develop, and legitimise the multitude of ways that divergent thought takes.
The organisations that figure this out will unlock talent that their competitors can’t even see.