Helena Hosts at the Six Women Dinners "Meaningful Conversations" Event
On 16 September, the Six Women Dinners network held its seventh Meaningful Conversations evening, and Helena Territt was one of the hosts. Around 50 women, five big questions, and a format borrowed from social research: everyone picked two questions to explore, then the room pulled it all back together to see what it had made.
Helena's room took on something close to HATCHED's heart: Looking Elsewhere. Where do better answers come from when we step outside our usual ways of thinking, across neurodiversity, generations, education and cultures?
She built the conversation around the cognitive bias codex, the well-known map of all the ways our brains lead us astray. Rather than treat those quirks as faults to fix, the group flipped it: they started listing their own unusual ways of thinking as positive cognitive biases, the divergent habits of mind that actually produce better answers. Pattern-spotting, systems thinking, thriving in ambiguity, seeking challenge and difference, a broader view of the world. As Helena said afterwards, she only wished there had been more time.
This is the thread running through everything HATCHED does. Neurodivergent minds do not think in straight lines, and that is the point. When you stop asking people to be more consistent, more organised, more like everyone else, and start asking what their difference makes possible, you get to somewhere more interesting.
The other rooms took on equally knotty questions: what it feels like to be young now, the line between admiration and envy, the pink tax, and when speaking up is worth the risk. Hosted across the evening by Clarajane Lewis, Peju The Spark, Vanesa Pazos and Pauline Hughes.
With thanks to Barclays UK and Sophia Raja for hosting at the Barclays Innovation Hub, and to Sandie Bakowski, Noemie Bruel, Iwona Martin and Marianne Powell for organising.
