Unlocking Creativity: The Leadership Advantage You're Overlooking with Natalie Nixon

You've heard of the horse whisperer, right? Well, my guest today is known as the creativity whisperer to the C-suite, a leader who helps organizations reframe their futures by applying foresight, wonder, and rigor to amplify growth and business value. I'm Susan Drumm, and this is The Enlightened Executive, where your personal evolution sparks your leadership evolution. Each week we spotlight cutting-edge strategies to help leaders and entrepreneurs grow in leadership and in life. And my guest today is Dr. Natalie Nixon, a creativity strategist and CEO of Figure Eight Thinking. She helps companies combine creativity and innovation to leverage and greatly increase their return on investment. Dr. Nixon is a top 10 global keynote speaker, and her new book, Move Think, Rest: Redefining Productivity and Our Relationship with Time was just released. Her firm, Figure Eight Thinking, was named among the top 20 women-led innovation firms in 2021, with clients including Microsoft, Salesforce, Comcast, and Bloomberg. OK, welcome to the show, Natalie. It's great to have you here.

Hi, Susan. Thank you for having me. I'm excited to be here.

Yeah, so you've got this new book out. Move, Think, and Rest. Tell us a little bit about your philosophy behind the book and what is its message.

The Move, Think, Rest human-centered operating system is a methodology to help executives and managers and even people who aren't that particular role to redesign work for 3 specific reasons. Due to unprecedented burnout, due to new rules for how we work, specifically hybrid models of working, and due to ubiquitous technology. So those three drivers really mean that we are at a really incredible inflection point to redesign work that is very different from the first Industrial Revolution model that our work tends to be designed around. So it's a model that offers an on-ramp to build our capacity for creativity. And the reason that matters is because if we want to sustainably and consistently innovate, we actually have to start with creativity. We have to start with building our capacity for creativity as individuals, as teams, and as organizations. And so the Move, Think, Rest, or MTR motor system is a both-and model. What I mean by that is the ways we've traditionally thought about work, which are rooted in the first Industrial Revolution, mode, that old model needs to be put to rest because it's an either/or model that's only focused on speed, output, efficiencies, and only measuring what you see. And what I'm offering in the M.O.T.O.R. model is a both/and model. And it is really rooted in, instead of asking ourselves, how might I be more productive this week, or how might my team be more productive this quarter, we might ask a different question. What might I cultivate this week? What might my team cultivate this quarter? And cultivation values the solo practitioner and the collective. It values quick spurts of growth and appreciates slow. And it also realizes that, yes, we need to measure what we see, but we also acknowledge that there's so much happening when we say we need to sleep on it, when things are percolating during dormancy phases. So that's what I mean when I say it's It's a both/and model, again, all to build our capacity for creativity so that we can consistently innovate.

That's so fascinating. So I'm kind of wondering, I know so many people feel the pressure that work is overwhelming, right? And you mentioned the burnout, and it is about like, how can I get more done? Because the, the pace of change is so high and the demands on me are so high. And so what will this this new philosophy require people to do? How do they need to think differently about that?

Yeah, so it's not just a philosophy. It actually is a very proactive, prescriptive way of working that helps us shift away from only focusing on quantity to also focusing on quality, away from only focusing on output to also focusing on impact. And the truth is, that we now have automation, AI, robotics that can and will increasingly replace basic tasks. So it's not up to us anymore to focus on quantity. It's up to us to level up that speed of answers and results that we get and leave time for the spaciousness for critical thinking, for deeper collaboration, for the sort of of conscious work that only humans can do. So those are the shifts that we need to be thinking about. And it's really an opportunity. Right now, there's a lot of overwhelm. We've been referencing the burnout. The latest statistics have estimates, at least in the United States, upwards of 70% to 73% of people self-reporting burnout. And there's a $300 billion cost to burnout to US businesses. And that cost is because of absenteeism, higher turnover, just laggard productivity, low engagement, and higher insurance costs that come with all of that. So there actually is a business case to be made to incorporating the Move, Think, Rest proactive human-centered operating system.

You know, it's so interesting. I imagine that some people would say, like, I love the idea that you're putting rest in there. Can you share a little bit more about the rest part?

Yeah, let me actually back into that. So the motor, the 30,000-level view of the motor framework is that when I talk about movement, I'm not just talking about going to the gym. I'm talking about movement hygiene. So we are actually designed to move. The spinal cord is an extension of the brain. It's an extension of the medulla oblongata. And if we're hunched over our laptops, actually, Dr. John Medina, who's written a great series of books called Brain Rules, he says that we actually shouldn't be sedentary for more than like 30 to 45 minutes maximum. The more we're hunched over this laptop or this computer, we are restricting blood flow to the brain, which actually means we are reducing oxygen to the brain, which means we're not doing our best thinking. So movement hygiene is what I mean by movement. Thought is about heightening our critical thinking and our cognitive quick analytical thinking by engaging in what I call backcasting and forecasting. So backcasting is the role of memory, reflection, metacognition, why do I think the way I think about things. And this is not just for individuals, but for teams and organizations to be putting on these lenses as well. And then forecasting is all about dreaming. It's about inspiration. It's about curiosity. And we need to spend more time in those backcasting and forecasting modalities in order to do our best critical thinking. And then rest is about intermittent resting. It's about making sure that we design micro breaks into our day, that we have policies in our organizations that incentivize those breaks. And those breaks could be everything from— I interviewed almost 60 people for Move, Think, Rest. One of the people I interviewed is Brendan Boyle, who is a toy designer. He teaches a course on play at the Stanford D School. So I flew out to Stanford, interviewed him, sat in on his class. And he talks about how play is engagement. So play is actually kind of the— end-all, be-all version of the motor movement. Because when we are at play, we're thinking very differently. We are resting and taking a break from that kind of intense neocortex sort of thinking. So that's the rest part. And we often can be moving. We can be not sedentary necessarily when we are at play. So the rest is about micro breaks for us during the day, during the week, but also the role of sabbatical. So some of the people I interviewed work for tech companies, work for nonprofit organizations. That actually offer sabbaticals. So for a lot of tech companies, if you have at least 5 years of employment, you are eligible for sabbatical. The challenge is that not everyone takes the sabbatical. But those who do, what's really counterintuitive, it doesn't add to people not wanting to return to work. They actually are more vested in the organization and the company because they feel seen and heard. They have had time to recharge and to reflect on how they want to contribute differently and more generatively when they return to work.

And so I was going to ask you more about your background, but this is so fascinating. I want to delve into each of these pieces a little bit more. And I want to get a sense for what might a leader think about doing differently in each of these pieces. So let's start with the move piece.

Yeah.

The recommendation— you mentioned something about every 30 to 45 minutes you should be moving. What does that look like for the typical person that is at an office?

The first thing to do is you have to— whatever is the trigger that is going to help to carve out a different neurosynapse pathway in your brain so you can form new habits, you need to do that. For me, I literally have to put a timer on my phone.

Yeah.

Or I literally write in buffer into my calendar to step away from the desk. And it could— I have the privilege to work from a wonderful home office. It might, it might be going downstairs to empty the dishwasher and then coming back upstairs. It could be right now I'm talking to you from a standing desk and it's not really a standing desk. It's a contraption that I can either— I can lower it, I can raise it. So going back and forth between standing and being sedentary and also making sure that you actually are doing movement if you can build in walks. Now, what I found is that a lot of times people aren't walking more because they feel they're like, oh, I don't have 30 minutes, or I don't have 60 minutes.

Right.

You don't need that much time. I literally have walks timed that I know will take me 3 minutes. I have a walk time that I know it's going to take me 9 minutes. And if I'm feeling really luxurious that day, I can take a 30-minute walk. But the benefits of walking are incredible. I start each chapter with a quotation from someone who said something really interesting about the topic of the chapter. And for the chapter of movement, I quote and reference St. Augustine, who apparently said, "It is solved by walking." And I love— it's such a beautiful, simple, discreet declaration. And it's true. Like, how often have you been stumped by something or upset about something or just like, you just need to like reframe—

Change the energy, right? Exactly. Change the environment. Yeah.

Yes. Yes. And let's take those walks without listening to a podcast. You don't need your earbuds in. I've written about in other platforms, and I incorporated into this book, that you're already seeing the blurred lines between the move and thought, rest framework. It's not a first you move, then you think, then you rest. Yeah. It's not siloed. So I was about to reference micro-retreats, right? And one of the types of micro-retreats you could take is a walking retreat, a listening sort of retreat, and going to a neighborhood or community that isn't your own in your city or town and just observing and walking. But you could do that in your own neighborhood. So it could be more aurally, oriented. So listening to the brakes of a car or birds or the sound of your own feet on the pavement. These are— this helps with pattern interruption. So one of the things that's really interesting about taking a walk, for example, on a trail versus on cement is that the serendipity and the unexpectedness of where my foot is going to be planted next is actually really good for our brain cognition. It's really great for our awareness. It keeps us much more present. So all those sorts of things are things that we can actually do that won't consume tons of time but have exponential value and results for helping our brain to synchronize ideas. I call those neural synapses in the other regions of the brain, the recesses of the brain, that happen when our default mode network gets activated. So that's— the default mode network in the brain gets activated when we tap out of the world. When we are in an engaging conversation, when we are reading a great book of fiction, when we have had a great rest, and as we're waking up, we've had a shower, we have those light bulb moments. That's not coincidental. We actually need to disengage on a periodic basis so that our best thinking can happen. And I call that the juicy, sexy bits of productivity. That's actually where our best thinking is. So those are a few examples of movement.

And I think, look, I deal with so many executives who are essentially marathoners. And they've been rewarded for this ability to be just go at it and grind it out. And I think there's a belief that if I just grind it out, that's what it's going to be. But all the neuroscience says that you actually need these types of breaks and to step away in order to be— if you want more output, you don't do it by keep grinding it out.

You do not.

And I remember exactly, yes, why I thought, gosh, you'd be so good on the podcast because everything we talk about is about pattern recognition and pattern disruption. So this is what we're really talking about here is deep-seated patterns that we've created over time of ways of working. And really shifting those requires also just these habits that have been ingrained when we have back-to-back meeting schedules and we don't have time to do this type of work. And there are simple things you can do. I mean, you, Why did we become a slave to the 30-minute or 60-minute meeting?

Yes, says who?

Says who? Start booking, make all your meetings 50 minutes. You've got then 10 minutes, right? We've got to, first of all, biologically take care of things, right?

That's right.

But taking that time or 30-minute meetings become 25-minute meetings. That's right. I've seen a lot of success for leaders for doing that type of work. Is that also the type of thing that you've seen be successful?

Yes, I mean, one of the people I interviewed is the vice president at Atlassian, which is a 100% remote global organization. And they have started with the OG of organizational artifacts, which is the meeting, the almighty meeting.

Yeah, yeah.

So much about organizational culture based on when meetings happen, how long they happen, the cadence of the meetings, who gets to lead the meeting, how they are ordered. Right? So starting with meetings is a beautiful place to begin to launch what I call MVEs, Minimal Viable Experiences, that help you to, as an organization, as a team, start to interrupt the patterns and challenge the assumptions about— that we may have about what creates the best output of our greatest work. So talking to Annie Dean from Atlassian was really enlightening and informative. But the meeting is a really great place to start. The other part about— you started just by referencing the executives you coach. They've kind of gotten oriented into the grind and pushing through. And a lot of executives and leaders have been rewarded for, what's the answer? I did the answer yesterday. Not falling in love with process. And the truth is that in our daily work, there's a lot of gray. And we have to educate increasingly in a way that's much more experiential in nature and that helps people to— it helps learners to fall in love with the gray and with the process. And so as a result of that pushing through, what we don't talk about a lot, but which I delve a lot into in Move, Think, Rest, is the role of emotional recovery. For a lot of executive leadership coaches, they spend a lot of time talking about physical rest. The big-time leaders, of course, are going to the Mayo Clinic. And you need to make sure that your leaders and executives are super healthy physically. That matters, right? We want to make sure that they cognitively, they're sharp. It's the emotional dimension of how we show up as leaders that is often forsaken. And there's so much emotional labor, especially in uncertain times and economic uncertain times when there's layoffs, when there's all sorts of nuances of bad news to deliver, to manage. How are you dealing with the emotional recovery as a leader? And the MOVE THINK REST, the MOTER framework, really is an antidote to that kind of burnout.

Well, ultimately, it's the emotional capacity where you start to see the patterns live. So in the work that I think many leaders need to do is to notice the emotional patterns that they get into, whether they be patterns of frustration or anger or sadness or anxiety. I think what people don't see is they're actually patterns. If I go back into their history, there is a pattern of responding in a certain way. Things are not fair. I'm not safe. It's these underlying beliefs that keep creating that emotional pattern. Without the time to really reflect and step back and notice that that is there is really where I think the opportunity is for many leaders on this topic.

I agree with you. That's the backcasting, the forecasting that I—

Yeah.

Discuss in Move, Think, Rest. It's essential to hit the pause button and think about the examples that you used of I feel scared, I don't feel safe, I feel anxious, I feel worried, I'm ruminating. These are not safe words to use if you're a leader. You're not allowed to say that out loud, right? Yeah. But one way that I advise my clients about how to be more transparent in their leadership model to do that is to lead with curiosity. And the way to lead with curiosity is to start with self-inquiry. And that tends to be a safer way to dip into the pond of— if you want to have a team that asks better questions, you have to model the ways that you are asking those questions and the way that you're starting to reflect on, you know, that competitor that we said we would never work with again, I'm starting to think maybe what if we revisited that? I'm wondering if there's a way that we could explore a model of coopetition, right? So being able to share that kind of inquiry does wonders for leaders to be more respected and more relatable and approachable.

Yeah, I think showing the questions of themselves in addition to questioning their team, I mean, just simple things like, How much time are you talking in a meeting versus asking your team questions in the meeting? I mean, a very simple thing you could start paying attention to. But so many times people think, I'm the leader, so therefore I need to manage and I need to talk and I need to share vision and all of these things. Whereas the most powerful leaders I see actually just sit there and ask questions or observe or encourage dialogue. Between team members, not them being sort of this hub and spoke. OK, so what about— tell us sort of the most important piece about THINK. What does a leader need to know about that piece?

Well, I think we've kind of started touching on it. I think the backcasting and the forecasting, the grounding of being able to backcast, to engage in reflection, memory, metacognition, the value of forecasting. Foresight is curiosity. And curiosity, we've spent a lot of time, especially we saw a lot of things in the popular culture on LinkedIn and a lot of the business press about empathy and empathetic leadership. And empathetic leadership is essential. But the antecedent to empathy is curiosity. You cannot empathize with a soul if you cannot first frame a question and pause and wonder, well, why do they do it that way and not our way? How come? Why do they sit over there and not over here? Why? What if we tried to do this in twice the amount of— what if we stretched it out? What if we decrease the amount of time? Why do we continue to approach it in XYZ way, right? That to me is a really important place to start. And I talk about how one of the reasons why we don't have richer cultures of inquiry is because we actually are really out of practice. We're really great at it when we're little people, when we're toddlers, when we're first learning. But sadly, our educational systems kind of guide us to err on the side of certainty versus curiosity. But it's actually curiosity that puts you at the precipice of discovery. If you really want to be innovating, you have to check yourself when you begin to get super certain and secure that you have all the answers and that, well, we've always done it this way, and why should we change? Well, what if you don't change? What's at stake if you continue at this clip? What's at stake if you don't shift? What's at stake if you don't start to go to a conference that is totally in a different sector? If you work in ag tech, Go to a conference in the fashion industry. If you work in fashion, show up at a communications industry conference. Because that, in design thinking, we call that lateral thinking. And you learn from near and far adjacencies. One of the things you learn is, huh, we do something similar, but we call it blank. And this is an interesting twist on that. Or we've never approached that sort of problem that way. What might that look like in our context? So from the thinking domain of the MOTR Framework, I think starting with curiosity is really a theme and how we can get better at the backcasting and the forecasting.

So speaking of curiosity, tell me a little bit about your journey and what's helped you the most in your experience of becoming more and more conscious about your own leadership.

My journey is very diverse. I have a background in cultural anthropology and in the fashion industry. I worked in fashion first as an entrepreneurial hat designer. And then I worked in global fashion sourcing for a division of the Limited Brands, which took me to live and work abroad in Sri Lanka and Portugal, travel throughout Asia, making bras and panties for the Victoria's Secret brand. The fashion industry taught me a lot about— I'll say this, people who've never worked in fashion think it's either frivolous or glamorous, and it's neither. It's not frivolous and it's not glamorous. It is a business. Is a multibillion-dollar business. And so it really equipped me to learn about the— about business, about supply and demand, about supply chain, about the role of technology. But the other thing that specifically working in fashion helped me to appreciate— fashion is outstanding at integrating the value of beauty, desire, and aesthetics in building consumer confidence and consumer insight. And so there's a whole— body of my work and my portfolio of work called Fashion Thinking and helping organizations outside of fashion understand how to think more like a fashion designer to innovate. Fashion also equipped me with the value of trends and foresight. Anthropology is the gift that keeps giving because with anthropology, I studied cultural anthropology, I learned how to ask questions. I learned how to be deeply observant, how to really engage. Later, when I did my PhD in design management, to grow as a qualitative researcher and to get those skills. I was a professor for 16 years. The first 10 years, I taught the business of fashion. And the last 6 years was at Thomas Jefferson University. I was the founding director of a strategic design MBA program. And so this was an MBA for hybrid thinkers. We call it the best of design school meets the best of business school. In the middle of that portion of my academic career, I gave a TEDx Philadelphia talk where I was proclaiming the future of work is jazz, and here's why and how. It was basically my doctoral research in plain English. And that talk catapulted me into getting invited into companies to help them design more improvisational ways of working. I was getting so many of those invitations that my husband, John, said, babe, this is like a thing. You should formalize it. I was like, OK. So I created Figure Eight Thinking as a little side hustle. Woke up a year later and was— I was having more fun with my side hustle and decided to leave academia after a wonderful 16-year career and have been building my business, Figurative Thinking, ever since. So I'm a creativity strategist. All of the work that I have done has converged into helping me— help me help my clients dream big. And I do that through proprietary frameworks I've developed to help them understand that creativity is not something only artists are great at. But it's the wonder-rigor model that I've designed, which is that creativity is your ability to toggle between wonder and rigor to solve problems. And if you begin to think about creativity in that way, then you realize that the best CFOs and attorneys and physicians and farmers and teachers and plumbers and artists are super creative when they're doing this toggling between wonder and rigor. And for me, as a leader, My greatest lessons have come from my mistakes. They've come from my own personal burnout moment. I was probably about 15 years into being an academic. It was my dream job. It was my passion project. I worked so hard to get to where I was. And I also was burning the candle from both ends. And so to reconcile with how I was feeling, reconcile how I was doing, getting comfortable with the ambiguity of not knowing what was next, learning to ask for help. These are all of the tools that I garnered the courage to do and realize that I don't have all the answers. I don't need to know all the answers. But I better get good at asking questions, questions that help me to take the next step and then the next step. The other thing that I've learned as a leader is the value of being a bit more personable. And I definitely have fallen into the certainty trap. And a lot of times it comes out of insecurity or how I fear that people will perceive me, that I have to be doubly prepared. I have to be all my i's dotted, all my t's crossed. I can't afford to mess up. But when I am more personable, I am more relatable. And when I am more relatable, then I'm a nerd, so all of the theories and the frameworks and the stuff that I want to help my clients incorporate into their businesses, into their companies, that becomes something that they buy into a lot more. But I did not know that 8 years ago when I first started building Figure Eight Thinking. But over the years, through the feedback I've gotten, I realized that that actually is an asset. And that's something that I lean into.

Yeah, well, something that struck me about your career is this ability to delve into different disciplines and find a way to bring it all together. And that's something that I think naturally curious people do. And, but you also made the leap when you needed to make the leap. And even not knowing what it is, just getting curious about it. I mean, I know from my own background, that's been, you know, I went from law school to management consulting to marketing and business development to then getting a master's in acting, right? And so I didn't know how that was all going to play out in the work I do today, but I got really curious that there's something here and I couldn't see it at the time. And so the, the staying in wonder, staying in curiosity about, gosh, why is there this strong pull here? There must be. And I didn't know how I was going to use the acting career, right? But yet it's all factored in so much into the work that we do today. So I love how you've tied that in, and your own life is a reflection of that.

Yeah, I like to say that if you're 50% exhilarated and 50% terrified, you should leap. Because if you're 100% terrified, you'll have analysis paralysis. If you're 100% exhilarated, you're not going to be focused on the details. But that exhilaration keeps you optimistic and buoyant. And that terror keeps you rooted in making sure you do dot your i's and cross your t's to make that leap. But I also really have to credit my parents because when I was a sophomore in college, it's around the time to have to declare a major. And my parents sacrificed a lot for our education. I did not want to disappoint them and make sure I got a good job at the end of a very expensive education. And I called home, beating around the bush. This is in the '80s, so there was a parent— my mom was on the phone in the bedroom, my dad was on the phone in the kitchen. And I said, well, I guess there's economics I could study, even though I almost failed economics. And I guess maybe political science. I went to a liberal arts college. And they said— they knew me and said, well, what are you interested in? So I kind of confessed, I love these courses in cultural anthropology. Oh my gosh, there's these Africana studies courses that are so multidisciplinary. I can learn for life. Philosophy and econ in a different way. And almost at the same time, they said, that's what you should study. And I said, say what? Like, that would be— is that okay? And my pops said, Natalie, if you study what you love, you will have to turn down opportunities because no one will have to tell you to stay later, get up earlier, work harder. And this was a pretty radical piece of advice from two African-American parents who were not looking to be able to hand over to me a trust fund when I hit a certain age. But for them to encourage me to follow my heart, it was like this load lifted off my shoulders. And it was just this permission slip to follow my intuition. But that's where the rigor comes in because that's only part of the story, right? There's the inspiration and the intuition to pause and to tap into that. And it's very energizing. But it's the rigor to figure out what needs— what do I need to have in place to get that done? Who do I need to learn from? What job do I need to work meanwhile while until I can do XYZ, right? So that permission has been something that I think I can credit to my ability to pivot, to pause, to listen to that inner voice that something's got to give. This isn't quite right anymore.

Yeah. And leading all of those are important curiosity questions, even within the rigor piece.

Yes.

I really appreciate you taking the time. Where can people learn more about you and your work?

Well, thank you again for having me. The best place for people to go to is thefigure8thinking.com website. It's the number 8. And they should sign up for the Wonder Rigor newsletter for sure. And also follow me on LinkedIn.

Fantastic. Well, thank you. And if you like this episode, you're not going to want to miss my interview with Jacquette Timmons, a Wall Street veteran with an MBA in finance who discusses the blind spot that almost cost her everything. And what leaders can learn from a financial wake-up call. Let's lead the way. Hope you enjoyed today's episode, and I'd like to point you to the next important step. Hit the subscribe button to get notified when we release new content. I'll see you on the next episode of The Enlightened Executive.