Talking about hats with Melissa Chevalier of Catalyz

As part of my year end reflections, I had a few questions I wanted to ask my colleagues at Catalyz. Selfishly, it also gave me a chance to get to a nice round 85 in-depth interviews that I've moderated or co-moderated this year! I haven't tracked total interviews very well over the past years, but for working part time I feel I might have reached a personal record. ???

Founder Ben Grossman-Kahn M.Ed. and Creative Director Melissa Chevalier agreed to be interviewed, and I’m sharing some snippets on hats from my conversation with Melissa today.

Me: Hi Melissa! Thanks for setting aside some time to reflect with me. What’s been going on for you this past year? Is there a theme to 2023?

Melissa: Hi Esther, thanks for taking time to do this. This year – in addition to partnering with our larger corporate clients – I’ve been working a lot in the small business world, where you wear a lot of hats. That immersion works well for me because of its holistic approach – digging deeper into details and process while being aware of the big picture and vision. It's not just taking content and making it look good. If that’s where it started and ended, I would miss out and lose interest. Obviously I love organizing content, digesting, and simplifying it into an artifact, but there’s more beyond that.

I get inspired by bringing out the beauty in the work itself. Not just aesthetically in the design, but also the beauty of the people and the process, and the questions we are seeking to answer.?

Me: Are there any new methods, practices, or tools that you’ve embraced this past year? Tell us about it.

Melissa: I saw some of our classic tools evolve. We’re back in person with some clients this year. We were introducing a tried and true tool – The 6 Thinking Hats. [Esther's note: Six Thinking Hats was adapted from Edward De Bono, and a visual is further down in this post]. I created a set of cards of the six thinking hats for each participant. In a working session we introduced the activity with a provocation and asked everyone to pull the card that represented their perspective or ‘hat’ – the one they wear most frequently and discuss why they felt drawn to this perspective. The next activity was alignment on goal setting, and they had some individual time to read and review a document, noting their questions and concerns while wearing an assigned hat. Both activities led to some deeper discussions that felt positive and there was tangible energy as the team consciously chose to include different perspectives in their discussion. It was a lesson in taking on a different perspective, getting out of the comfort zone, and not taking things personally. That last one is often the big ‘aha’ for teams.

It’s a lot like the way you work in a drawing class. Everyone’s in a circle, drawing the same object or model, but some of them see different sides than you do, and their picture will be different. When you look at them all, you understand the subject in a deeper way.

Me: Can you give an example of what wearing the hats might look like in action, not in a workshop? (Spoiler, we don’t have actual colored hats, but you could do that if you wanted!)

Melissa: “Hey, what hats are we wearing for this conversation?” could be a helpful way to start a discussion.?I think this gets at whether you need your team to be in Flare or Focus mode, aka divergent or convergent thinking . They are both necessary but for different reasons - Flare lends itself toward generating ideas, and Focus towards analysing options and deciding. Some hats are most useful for Flaring, and others for Focusing.

Me: Thanks for bringing this one up, and for passing along the 6 Thinking Hat visual, Melissa!

Also Me: At this point in our conversation I got distracted trying to find a picture of Melissa and myself from this summer. We visited an antique mall and stumbled into a huge collection of vintage hats of all colors. Of course we tried them all on:

And a visual reference on The 6 Thinking Hats:

We talked about more than just hats, so I'll share more in the future. Hope you enjoyed this and either learned something new, relearned something you'd forgotten, or otherwise found some inspiration around perspective-taking as a skill.

-Esther