This episode, Dr. Natalie Nixon and I dig into not just what it means to be creative, but also how leaders can create space for creativity and inspire it in their teams by letting in a little chaos.
Dr. Nixon is the author of The Creativity Leap, a creativity strategist, and a highly sought-after keynote speaker. In this conversation, we dive into the ideas behind her book, what makes someone "a creative" (hint: it involves being deeply human), and how important humanity and creativity are to the future of work - Natalie and I agree that we should let our AI overlords do what they do best…and we humans should focus on what we do best - be creative and empathetic!
Natalie and I have three unexpected things in common: Ballroom dancing, an enthusiasm for Chaordic Thinking, and a deep sense that these two things are deeply intertwined!
Dancing looks to regularly resolve the dynamic tension between chaos and order, and find a state of flow between the two.
Chaordic Systems Thinking, if you’re new to it, was first coined by Dee Hock, the founder and former CEO of VISA. He felt an ideal organization would balance order and control with disorder and openness, moving between them as it grew. Chaordic is just a made-up word combining chaos and order. I made a basic diagram of Chaordic systems Thinking for my book, Good Talk.
Total Order (O, on the right) is oppressive and stultifying. It also doesn’t deal well with surprise or adapt to unpredictability. Total chaos (C, on the left) can mean a total collapse of a given system - as Natalie says, without any boundaries, what is it even!?!
A chaordic system moves between the poles of chaos and order, spiraling outward, growing and expanding as it does. A conversation can be chaordic, too, by the way.
For example, in a workshop, I sometimes feel the noise of collaboration and conversation rise, and I wonder, “Is this the moment to rein things in and move the conversation forward?” After all, sometimes that golden “aha” moment is just around the corner, just past my capacity to enjoy the chaos.
In the chaos and randomness, new patterns are sometimes found. Like in jazz, those new patterns are then played with, firmed up, made more orderly…until they get too controlled, boring or repetitive. Then the chaordic cycle swings back towards chaos.
This is why, as Natalie points out, good leaders are also good followers: they are open to changing environments, and take the best of what’s emerging, reading their team and adapting to new situations.
Natalie and I also unpack the misunderstandings many folks, leaders included, have around the idea of being creative - one of most damaging being that the word doesn't (or can't) apply to them.
Natalie's ideas on creativity and flow are critical for the future of work, and something that every leader, whether you lead a team of artists or a team of accountants, needs to hear.
Enjoy the conversation!
Links, Quotes, Notes, and Resources
The Creativity Leap by Natalie Nixon
Your "invisible work" is key to your most productive self by Natalie Nixon
The Extended Mind by Annie Murphy Paul
There is Confusion by Jessie Redmon Fauset
How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia by Mohsin Hamid
Bright Lights, Big City by Jay McInerney
Sand Talk by Tyson Yunkaporta
Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World, interview with Tyson Yunkaporta
Minute 1
Natalie Nixon: And when I talk about leading with questions, leading with inquiry, what it doesn't look like, is to invite your teams, people who you're working with. Come on guys, ask me your best questions. I'm open to your questions because people have been through a lot of question shaming, either through their educational learning experiences, through work. And so they might be a little gun shy for that. It starts actually with leaders being a bit more transparent about the questions that they have.
Minute 7
Natalie Nixon: because the gift that keeps on giving in terms of life lessons is that the best leaders are actually really good followers. Really good leaders are following in the sense that they are trying to align with. They're trying to adapt to the teams, the markets, the customer. They're listening actively. They're really observing. They're not barreling ahead. It absolutely can play out on the individual team and larger scale levels.
Minute 13
Natalie Nixon: But chaos is not anarchy, chaos is randomness. And order is not control, order is a structure, it's boundaries. The cool thing about chaordic systems, and Chaordic Systems Thinking is what a bunch of academics later called it.
And there's a whole group of scholars who have Chaordic Systems Thinking conferences and all that sort of thing. But once you start learning about chaordic systems, you literally cannot stop seeing them. Everything in the world and nature and our bodies is based on this beautiful ebb and flow between chaos and order. I wrote this down, what you just said, Daniel, polarity management and paradox thinking, it makes complete sense to me because it's another way of talking about chaordicness and chaordic systems. Clearly, I was deeply influenced by that way of thinking and I landed on this definition of creativity being toggling between wonder and rigor to solve problems. In all complex systems, all improvisation requires that ebb and flow between chaos and order. Chaos is the wonder part or wonder is the chaos part and rigor is the order part.
Minute 25
Natalie Nixon: To make room for creativity in our organizations, it's going to require a bit of an upheaval and overhaul in the way we are educating and the way we're invited to learn.
Minute 27
Daniel Stillman: How do you feel like you'd like leaders and teams and organizations to be investing in the creativity of their whole company?
Natalie Nixon: It's so interesting you're asking me this question. Before we started speaking, I just got off of call with a client who's asking me that as a starting place. And the question was, how do we begin to design in more space and time for creativity, so that we could build our creative capacity. And I looked at him and I was like, "We decide to build in more space and time for creativity on that space and continuum." How do you become a better writer? You got to write.
Minute 32
Natalie Nixon: What is something that can start happening weekly or monthly or quarterly that begins to tweak the way people are showing up? And it's important. Remember that starting to make creativity core to the capacity of an organization will not happen overnight. Culture change starts with shifts in our mental models, which leads to shifts in our behaviors, which finally leads to changes in culture.
Minute 36
Natalie Nixon: And what I'm really asking is, what if we start to devise, define, dream up new metrics of productivity. I wrote about how in the industrial age, productivity was measured based on output of widgets. In the information age, it's been about time on task. In this Fourth Industrial Revolution where we're going to have robots and AI mastering the task, what I'm observing is that if you followed the Pareto rule, the 80/20 rule, 80% of our most productive work, I don't know about you Daniel, but it's happening when I am letting myself walk away from the laptop, my desk, taking a walk, reframing a question in my head, wondering, sitting with my intuition, it's all those things that help me to, they're creating the scaffolding for the most productive work.
Which then pushes out and synthesizes in that last 20% time. And I know that's a very scary way to think about productivity when we think about this current way of metrics, metrics, metrics. But what if we shift the metrics? And what if we see a bit more control as manager. This way of thinking about productivity requires a lot more trust.
Minute 43
Natalie Nixon: Just what I want people to leave with is, they have the agency and the ability to build a creative capacity and it takes some rigor. It takes some work. It's not always sexy. It's often very solitary. That's the rigor part. But I have this corollary expression, that I think it's in the book and I have this postcard about it, which is that, wonder is found in the midst of rigor and rigor cannot be sustained with that wonder. So when I say that wonder is found in the midst of rigor, it's in the midst of doing the fundamentals, getting the mastery of skill, the solitary stuff. It's in those moments that an aha moment emerge. That's the wonder. And when I say that rigor cannot be sustained with that wonder, we will burn out if we don't integrate moments and time for the dreaming to ask new and different questions. Both are true and we have the capacity to do that. And it starts with oxygenating our ideas. Giving them light, giving them air, sharing them out.
More About Natalie
Creativity strategist Natalie Nixon is “the creativity whisperer for the C-Suite”. She is a highly sought after keynote speaker, valued for her accessible expertise on creativity, the future of work and innovation.
Natalie advises leaders on transformation- by applying wonder and rigor to amplify growth and business value. She brings an innovative and unique perspective to every keynote, strategic advisory engagement, and leadership coaching session. Her experience living in 5 countries combined with her background in anthropology, fashion, academia, and dance distinguish her as a one-of-a-kind creativity expert.
Natalie has been named among the top women keynote speakers by Real Leaders and BigSpeak; and has been featured in Forbes, Fast Company and INC. She’s the author of the award-winning The Creativity Leap: Unleash Curiosity, Improvisation and Intuition at Work and her firm Figure 8 Thinking, was named among the top women-led innovation firms by Core 77. Marketing guru Seth Godin has said that Natalie “helps you get unstuck and unlock the work you were born to do!”; and Jessi Hempel, host of LinkedIn’s “Hello Monday” podcast called Natalie “a personal trainer for your creativity muscle”.
Natalie received her BA (honors) from Vassar College, and her PhD from the University of Westminster in London. Follow her @natwnixon.
Full Transcript
Daniel Stillman: I'm going to officially welcome you to the Conversation Factory. Natalie Nixon, welcome aboard. Oh, it's all right.
Natalie Nixon: Thank you, Daniel.
Daniel Stillman: We can just talk over each other the whole time, see if we can keep that going.
Natalie Nixon: We could do. Thank you, Daniel. Good to be here.
Daniel Stillman: Thank you. And thanks for making the time. Listen, where shall we begin? Actually, I'm wondering, what question you would wish. I was watching a video of yours about problem framing and how often we're solving the wrong challenges. I'm sure you've discovered that's happened from time to time in your work. What question do you wish leaders would ask of themselves more often?
Natalie Nixon: First of all, I love that you started with, I wonder. Your question to me, very meta, because I think literally, there's nothing bad that follows the utterance, I wonder. Actually, it is that level of self inquiry that I actually don't know that leaders do often enough or if they do, they don't share out more transparently their self inquiry. And when I talk about leading with questions, leading with inquiry, what it doesn't look like, is to invite your teams, people who you're working with. Come on guys, ask me your best questions. I'm open to your questions because people have been through a lot of question shaming, either through their educational learning experiences, through work. And so they might be a little gun shy for that. It starts actually with leaders being a bit more transparent about the questions that they have. It's very situational. It requires context. But good questions for leaders to ask are, I wonder if this tack still makes sense. And speaking of this tack, I mean, that story out of, I actually never sailed before my life. It's one of my [inaudible 00:02:14]. Tacking is a part of sailing.
Daniel Stillman: Yeah, it is.
Natalie Nixon: When we never go about sailing and like, this is the course we set. We got to keep going in though. All the alarm bells are going off, clouds are rolling in, thunders rumbling. The waves are getting rockier and rockier. You tack and shift and adapt your course accordingly. Even starting with that question to oneself of, I wonder if this approach still makes sense, and sharing that question that you've had, couple your thoughts with asking teams their thoughts as well, is really important.
Daniel Stillman: It's so interesting. The idea that leaders should be more self-reflective and sharing the questions that they're sitting with, with their teams, is a really interesting one. And I'm wondering, the first thing that comes up to my mind is the resistance some people might have to that. It's like, "Oh, well, I need to show ...
Natalie Nixon: Certainty.
Daniel Stillman: Certainty, and strength and ...
Natalie Nixon: Clarity.
Daniel Stillman: Clarity. But on the other hand, what are the pluses and the what's the what's the cost and the benefit do you think to that strategy?
Natalie Nixon: Yeah. On the other hand, who really knows what's going on? One of the slides I like to show in some of my keynotes is a slide that says, plans are fiction. And I love that statement because plans are fiction. And they're fiction because they haven't happened yet.
Daniel Stillman: Wait, wait, wait. You are a professor of strategic design.
Natalie Nixon: Yes. It doesn't mean that you don't start with a plan. I love my to-do list.
Daniel Stillman: Yes.
Natalie Nixon: Every single morning, I start with that to-do list. But because I understand that plans are fiction, I can approach it more comfortably, in a much more adaptive way. There's a wonderful artist named Avery Williamson. She has a great Instagram channel. She posted something recently where she ... Her Instagram by the way is aisforavery, you must follow her. She's got outstanding visual art. But one of the things she posted recently was her rules for her studio and said something like, create your to-do list, cut that in half and then cut it off again. Just to be just to be adaptive and actually a bit more focused. That idea of leading with certainty is something that every MBA program worth its salt tries to instill. And yet, once we graduate people out into the ambiguous world of business and commerce and markets, we realize that you've got to be super adaptive. One of the reasons why I love behavioral economics, which didn't really take off until the early eighties is because it reconciled that markets are made up of people.
Daniel Stillman: Yes.
Natalie Nixon: And therefore markets are imperfect, inconsistent and not predictive, which was a total departure from the way economics had been thought about and taught, which was, and this is something in my previous life, I used to have to read through those academicy journals and older business marketing and finance journal article, scholarly articles to start with hypotheses. They try to be very scientific in their approach. But now we understand that we've got to be a lot more adaptive. And so leaders have to be much more adaptive. And actually, that level of transparency is absolutely terrifying, as a leader. And it opens the door for trust. It opens the door for communication so that you can actually lead in a much more effective way.
Daniel Stillman: It's really interesting. I'm wondering if we can apply this thinking. One of the hypotheses that I've been having about communication and conversations is they exist on these different levels. There's the conversations we have with ourselves, there's team conversations. In an organization, it's just the marketplace of conversations, with loads of conversations. I'm wondering if you feel like that reflective questioning is something that you'd like to see happening at all of those scales in an organization, at the leader level, maybe even at the individual practitioner level, at the team. What does that look like, do you think?
Natalie Nixon: Well, I shared a post a month or so ago on LinkedIn that got a lot of engagement and I was happy to see it. I actually shared a bit more of a personal part of my life. I shared how I'm a lifelong dancer and I study ballroom dance.
Daniel Stillman: I saw that. I want to talk about dancing with you. But yes, please proceed.
Natalie Nixon: I was going to kind of go there at this point because, you are right, there's opportunities to be much more transparent, self reflective on the individual team, society level, we can scale it on those three ways. Because one of the things I've learned from ballroom dance, as a student of ballroom dance, because the gift that keeps on giving in terms of life lessons is that the best leaders are actually really good followers. Really good leaders are following in the sense that they are trying to align with. They're trying to adapt to the teams, the markets, the customer. They're listening actively. They're really observing. They're not barreling ahead. It absolutely can play out on the individual team and larger scale levels.
Daniel Stillman: Let's talk about ballroom dancing for a second, because this is important. On Facebook somebody posted, it was a high school gym elective. It was the most popular, I don't know if this is the most popular. It was coveted by some nerds, gym elective in my high school. And so I took ballroom dancing and it wasn't many, many years later that I started swing dancing. Swing is my happy place.
Natalie Nixon: Nice.
Daniel Stillman: And I think one of the hardest things for people to understand, who are new to this is, is the dynamic tension.
Natalie Nixon: Yes.
Daniel Stillman: The push and pull. For those of you who are listening at home, Natalie and I are sort of putting our hands together and tugging because there's this feeling, it's like chewy. It's just like it's a very great feeling when at the end of a twirl or there's not a saggy arm. There's tension.
Natalie Nixon: No. It's not a hard rigid arm.
Daniel Stillman: No.
Natalie Nixon: It's not a saggy arm, but there is that slide you're there, I feel you, I'm with you, I'm responding to you so that I know what to do next. So that if I'm the leader, I have the confidence that you're going to have clarity about what I'm asking you to do next. If I'm the follower, there's going to be a clear transmission of the direction you want me to go there. There's intuiting at every single moment, but it requires that contact.
Daniel Stillman: Contact, yes.
Natalie Nixon: It requires that contact, that communication.
Daniel Stillman: And sometimes I think my wife will interpret my signal differently. And she'll be like, "Oh, sorry." And I'm like, "No, that's okay. That's a great idea. Let's go with that."
Natalie Nixon: We have to go with it.
Daniel Stillman: So this is the thing that I was thinking about. Wonder and rigor as these two poles that you talk about in The Creativity Leap, your book, that's behind you on the shelf. I've been doing a little bit of reading on this idea of paradox thinking and polarity management. And this is not my research. There's tons of research out there. I feel like I want to just zoom in on that set point. If wonder and rigor are on a little infinity loop and we're not supposed to just go all the way onto wonder and all the way onto rigor. We want that dynamic tension right in the middle. What's there at that beautiful set point?
Natalie Nixon: I believe what's there at that beautiful set point is flow. One of the biggest things that I think people misunderstand about creativity is that, when people think that creativity is woo-woo and that it's only about doing whatever you feel like, which couldn't be further from the truth. That wonderful polarity that you're talking about, I really became equipped with the language of how to think about those dualities, that very dynamic ebb and flow, tension, however you want to call it when I learned about Chaordic Systems Thinking. And I learned about Chaordic Systems Thinking when I naively decided to earn a PhD while working full time, because I thought I was just a big old paper. How hard could that be?
Daniel Stillman: Classic blunder, like a land war in Sicily and whatever else discussed in the Princess Bride.
Natalie Nixon: Exactly.
Daniel Stillman: For those of us who are listening in the audience, I have a little snippet about chaordic thinking in my book, but do you want to talk about Dee Hock's chaos order hypothesis on a sticky note?
Natalie Nixon: Yeah. That's when I was introduced to Mr. Dee Hock who was the first president of Visa, the credit card company, most of us have a credit card.
Daniel Stillman: Perhaps you've heard of it, everyone.
Natalie Nixon: You've heard of Visa. And to his credit, when he was asked to lead this global organization, based on the virtual exchange of currency in the early sixties, late fifties, he was a big naturalist. He's taken a walk through the woods, lots of walks through the woods. And he thought, what if I could lead and organize this company in the ways that I see nature behaving? Where there's some chaos and there's some order. And what Dee Hock was identifying. And these are my words, not his, he was identifying that organizations are organisms. Because they're made of humans because they're made of people. He did a mashup of those two words, chaos in order. And he made up the word chaord. And he has a great book, by the way, it's really a memoir called One from Many, if anyone is interested in reading more on Dee Hock's work. But chaos is not anarchy, chaos is randomness. And order is not control, order is a structure, it's boundaries. The cool thing about chaordic systems, and Chaordic Systems Thinking is what a bunch of academics later called it.
And there's a whole group of scholars who have Chaordic Systems Thinking conferences and all that sort of thing. But once you start learning about chaordic systems, you literally cannot stop seeing them. Everything in the world and nature and our bodies is based on this beautiful ebb and flow between chaos and order. I wrote this down, what you just said, Daniel, polarity management and paradox thinking, it makes complete sense to me because it's another way of talking about chaordicness and chaordic systems. Clearly, I was deeply influenced by that way of thinking and I landed on this definition of creativity being toggling between wonder and rigor to solve problems. In all complex systems, all improvisation requires that ebb and flow between chaos and order. Chaos is the wonder part or wonder is the chaos part and rigor is the order part.
Daniel Stillman: You used the word toggle. Do you think a switch or is it an equalizer? Are you moving it again? What is the knob you're spinning when you're doing that?
Natalie Nixon: Well, we rarely listen to AM/FM Radio anymore.
Daniel Stillman: I know.
Natalie Nixon: But if any of your OGs out there-
Daniel Stillman: I am an OG. We didn't even have the search function on my first radio. We had those push buttons you could program the five stations.
Natalie Nixon: The five stations and there's a round knob and you hear the static and you got ... Exactly. You start to hear the clarity. And actually, we started our conversation talking references to sailing. I suspect when sailors are out in the middle of nowhere, they're trying to get a signal, it's similar. It's like getting to that signal and doing these small, it's tweaking. That's what I mean by the toggling.
Daniel Stillman: Yeah. It's so interesting. I'm wondering, I'm wondering, there it goes. You just put it in my brain.
Natalie Nixon: There you go.
Daniel Stillman: You've incepted it in us. Maybe we should take a step back for those of you who are listening who haven't read Natalie's book. It's behind her. You can't see it because you're listening to this. What made you decide to write this book? This idea is so important. I'm going to write a whole furshlugginer that's Yiddish for this pile o' book. You're going to do take all these ideas and just boil it down into this slim volume. What was that journey like for you?
Natalie Nixon: Well, most things I set out to do in my life, I was very naive about what would be involved. It all starts from passion. It all starts from deep curiosity on my part. What had happened was ...
Daniel Stillman: That is the best beginning of ... I feel like that's a meme, isn't it? So what had happened was ...
Natalie Nixon: What had happened was, I used to be a professor. I give this talk in 2014 at TEDxPhiladelphia about the future of work is jazz. And here's why and how. After I gave that talk, I get invited into companies to help them figure out how to be more adaptive and improvisational in the way they're designing their own work. And I'm getting so many of these invitations. My husband John, correctly said to me, he's like, "Babe, this is a thing. You should formalize it." I was like, okay. I created Figure 8 Thinking as my side hustle.
And then I woke up a year later and realized, "Oh my gosh, I'm having more fun with my side hustle." And this is really the cliff notes version. There's a lot more that was evolved in this process. But basically, I decided to leave academia. After 16 years as a professor, I move on and full time, I'm a creativity strategist leading and building Figure 8 Thinking. First couple of years of work at Figure 8 Thinking, a lot of the projects I was getting invited to do were to help these organizations build cultures of innovation. It was all about the, I word.
Daniel Stillman: She's raising her hands up in a rah-rah symbol.
Natalie Nixon: Yes.
Daniel Stillman: What year was this around?
Natalie Nixon: This is like 2017, 2016, 17.
Daniel Stillman: Yeah. I mean, it's still a thing. It was definitely a thing then. We all need to be innovative, rah-rah, and let's get everyone rah-ing about it.
Natalie Nixon: Rah-ing about it. Sometimes that we were talking over and around each other, we were missing each other. What does innovation really mean? What does it mean to us specifically as an organization? And it also would sometimes end up in what a lot of us, who work in this space called innovation theater.
Daniel Stillman: Yes.
Natalie Nixon: Which is not very sustainable.
Daniel Stillman: Or impactful.
Natalie Nixon: Or natural. That got me to thinking, and it was really the sense, I was like, "I don't think we're going about this the right way of just landing, we got to innovate." And I started thinking, I knew enough to know, one cannot critique a system without offering up an alternative way to go about doing the work. I was like, "I can't critique some of my clients to start innovation if I can't give them an alternative way of where they might start.
Daniel Stillman: Yes.
Natalie Nixon: And I thought, I think we should be starting with creativity now. Now here's the challenge, in the how old halls of Corporate America, if you utter the word creativity, people look at you like you've three heads. Creativity is not murmured in the corporate boardroom.
Daniel Stillman: Yes.
Natalie Nixon: If it is mentioned, it's kind of an afterthought, it's country, like lipstick on a pig.
Daniel Stillman: And it's something that somebody else does. They're like, "Well, I'm not a creative like you all."
Natalie Nixon: I'm not a creative like you all over there.
Daniel Stillman: Yeah. I mean, you can't see Natalie's glasses, she's clearly creative.
Natalie Nixon: Exactly. You're right. These very kind of simplistic ways of thinking about creativity.
Daniel Stillman: But they limit people. You walk around with the whole, easily more than half of a company thinking, "I can't access that part of myself."
Natalie Nixon: No agency. We've cut off agency that's embedded, in my view, in all of us. All of us are hardwired to be creative. That led me down this path of, how can I offer an accessible, simple way for people to think about creativity? And I use my keynotes speaking as a way to prototype ideas. Every time I give keynotes talk I'm landing with what my client, what they need, but I'm also trying to play with new concepts, new ways of framing things. And consistently, people who enjoyed my keynotes would come up to me and say, "That was awesome. Where can I read more about this?" I was getting enough of those questions to realize, I got to put all these ideas in a consolidated fashion, into a book. At the time, I was writing for Inc. Online. And I could send them that but they were kind of one off articles.
Daniel Stillman: Yes.
Natalie Nixon: So the real impetus for writing the book was what I was hearing from clients. This need that I identified as this need to really be able to explain very tactically, how people could really apply creativity in order to innovate.
Daniel Stillman: Yes. Because they need to. And I guess now's a good time to maybe transition into this idea of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Anything that can be put into a spreadsheet, eventually an AI or some sort of mechanistic approach can do it better than us. The only things that are left to humans in the future is being human. Being creative is something that only we uniquely can do.
Natalie Nixon: It's interesting because the engineers and scientists who are playing around with AI, which we've thought of as artificial intelligence have also been playing around with dividend of AI, which they artificial imagination. They actually have been tiptoeing into this realm of how might machines be programmed for that randomness, that randomization. The thing about imagination is that imagination is so multidimensional. It's catalyzed by our past and in many other ways, it's contextualized in the present and what we are seeing around us. And then it's all about our ability to dream. And how one programs that into machine learning, I'm not really sure because I'm not an engineer. Who by the way, are incredibly creative in the ways that they are designing.
Daniel Stillman: Most definitely.
Natalie Nixon: The sort of AI. But you're absolutely right, in this Fourth Industrial Revolution where tech is ubiquitous, because tasks are going to be taken over, the opportunity is for organizations, companies, associations, to figure out ways to invite our humanness to show up. Our humanity to show up. What only we as people can do. And whoever figures that out on consistent basis, those are the companies that are going to flourish and thrive. Because they're going to be able to attract and retain the best talent. People have been dying a slow death of only being asked to fill in the dots. I mean, we go back to our educational systems.
Daniel Stillman: Sure.
Natalie Nixon: Where we have a two track system. I came up through the two tracks. I started out in urban public school in Philadelphia, where very clearly, I didn't realize until I was out of that system, we were being educated to fill the dot. To complete the worksheet, to stay in your lane. And then later in high school, I went to an elitist Quaker prep school in Philadelphia from seventh through 12th grade. And it was a culture shock for me on several levels. The main levels was the culture of learning. I was being invited to beg forgiveness, not permission. I was invited to be loud and wrong. I was invited to ask a better frigging question, which was counter. I had gotten so good. I showed up an A student in seventh grade because I gotten so good at knowing what the teacher wanted and really delivering what the teacher wanted.
Daniel Stillman: Playing the system.
Natalie Nixon: Playing the system. And then all of a sudden, it was a different system. It was about, we don't know. Maybe the questions we've asked weren't quite the right questions. And so it took me two years to really understand that. And then it was around eighth, ninth grade, I thought, "Oh my goodness, my friends back on the block, my friends who are in public school." We were being trained to fill in the dots. And now I'm around people who are being educated to figure out the dots to figure out the lanes. I didn't have that language back then, but I remember the shift in me when I thought, it was like this, you had peeked under the kimono. And I was like, "Oh my God. This is what's happening."
Daniel Stillman: Sure.
Natalie Nixon: To make room for creativity in our organizations, it's going to require a bit of an upheaval and overhaul in the way we are educating and the way we're invited to learn. Which by the way Daniel, have you noticed how many companies now are in the business of learning? Everyone from Lincoln, the Fast Company, let alone MasterClass, which now has Outlier and Coursera. And it's about learning on people's own time, on their terms, highly produced, high entertainment value from people of street credit. It's just a very interesting shift about how we're even starting to see how we're delivering learning very differently.
Daniel Stillman: I have to say though, I find that people are crunched hard. And their ability to take time out, to even watch a 10 or 15 minute video between one session and another session two weeks later, is limited. Because there's a culture of, we got to do it all. We got to keep going. And I guess what I'm wondering is, I feel like I've used wonder more in this conversation than I have in the others. So thank you Natalie.
Natalie Nixon: I guess you're more aware of it probably.
Daniel Stillman: Yeah. It's probably true. Dr. Nixon is good at incepting wonder in people. And going back to my first question of what should we be asking ourselves. Back in 2017, my hypothesis about where companies should be spending their, we want to have a culture of innovation dollars was, if I'd known you, I would've said, "Go hire Natalie Nixon to be a speaker and hire me to train everybody on design thinking tools." And I don't know what would create lasting impact and real needle moving today, in today's culture. I would say still call Natalie and hire them to speak to your people. I wouldn't say train everyone on these tools because it's different for everyone. What would will create in their context an ability to be more creative? How do you feel like you'd like leaders and teams and organizations to be investing in the creativity of their whole company?
Natalie Nixon: It's so interesting you're asking me this question. Before we started speaking, I just got off of call with a client who's asking me that as a starting place. And the question was, how do we begin to design in more space and time for creativity, so that we could build our creative capacity. And I looked at him and I was like, "We decide to build in more space and time for creativity on that space and continuum." How do you become a better writer? You got to write.
Daniel Stillman: Yes.
Natalie Nixon: You got to read a lot. How do you build your capacity of creativity? You have to decide to design in the time and space for creativity, which look like the-
Daniel Stillman: Intentional practice.
Natalie Nixon: Number one, I love etymology. I love understanding, what's the root meaning of these words and how they come to be. And the word decide is so beautiful to me because embedded in decide is caesa, which is cut, scissor. When one really makes a decision. You are cutting off what was, and you are embracing and going for it with the new. When you make a decision, it is a cut off from what you used to do. First, the organization has to decide, this is what we want to do. And then doing it does not have to be these radical revolutionary changes. In fact, the best revolutions have been through these small cracks and fissures in the system. It's by doing these small tweaks. You start to change the way you begin and start meetings.
You don't radically change. We're not going to have XYZ meetings anymore because that would be too much change. Because everyone is already going through change fatigue. But the way we're going to begin and end the meeting is going to shift in this way. The way we're going to start to introduce inquiry and questions could be having quarterly meetings that are just focused on questions that we're collecting from the group, or it could be meetings that we're just focused on generating questions. I mean, your mind can just go wild once you're given the permission to think through what's something that we're going to change that's small, that's tiny, that we're going to tweak. Every organization has a culture, which means that every organization has the icons of culture, which are language artifact, ritual, symbol. We can start with just those four things.
You can start right there and identify, in each of those categories, which are icons of our culture. What are we going to start to tweak? And I'm going back, I now realized it's funny in this conversation too, the way I learned in my educational history. I just shared earlier, I went to a Quaker prep school in Philadelphia for high school. Philly has a lot of Quaker prep schools. It just the history of Philadelphia.
Daniel Stillman: Yes.
Natalie Nixon: But you had to go to something called meeting for worship every week.
Daniel Stillman: Yes.
Natalie Nixon: Whether you were in kindergarten, first grader or an 11th grader. And what that involved was, going into this very plain simple meeting house, just creaky old wooden benches with saggy cushions along the benches. And you sat in silence for the equivalent periods, like 40 minutes.
And what's fascinating is that to an alum. When you were in high school, you slept through it. You hate it. You're so bored or you would just be ruminating over a test it was going to be later that afternoon, whatever it was. Everyone misses that into adulthood. You miss that space and time that was dedicated to instigating, instituting that icon of Quaker culture. What does that look in your organization? What is something that can start happening weekly or monthly or quarterly that begins to tweak the way people are showing up? And it's important. Remember that starting to make creativity core to the capacity of an organization will not happen overnight. Culture change starts with shifts in our mental models, which leads to shifts in our behaviors, which finally leads to changes in culture.
Daniel Stillman: What is so beautiful about that—So, many people do not know about Quaker meeting.
Natalie Nixon: That's true.
Daniel Stillman: And I have been to some Quaker meetings and I talk about Quaker meetings when I talk about turn taking in meetings often with people. The idea that, usually what happens in a meeting is one person tends to speak first. And that sets the terms of the debate for everyone else versus having a round Robin where everyone sort of speaks in turn. Versus in a Quaker meeting, it's not a popcorn meeting where everyone pops and you want all the kernels to pop. A Quaker meeting, for my understanding is you only speak when the spirit of God speaks through you.
Natalie Nixon: Correct.
Daniel Stillman: Literally inspiration or aspiration in this case. The idea of having more Quaker meetings in a business context has always thrilled me.
Natalie Nixon: It's thrilling. And it also could be painstaking because Quakers also believe in consensus, which can be mad if you're trying to come to a decision, because they really hold fast to consensus.
Daniel Stillman: Yes.
Natalie Nixon: And actively listening to your point of view and then rehashing it and listening again, and then reconsidering. Consensus is serious for Quakers.
Daniel Stillman: Yes.
Natalie Nixon: By the way, there are such things in Quakers, it called popcorn meetings, it's a meeting that there's a lot of people.
Daniel Stillman: Yes.
Natalie Nixon: That's Quaker humor, I guess. The Quakers believe that the light of God shines in each of us. When you feel stirred or they would say quake, that's where they got the name Quaker, one was moved to stand up and speak what was on one's heart.
Daniel Stillman: Yes.
Natalie Nixon: And sometimes what follows is another point related to that. Other times it's a different point. But that idea of making time to pause for silence, to try to commune to hold the space of another person's thought or energy and let it sit with it and maybe you let it go or maybe you don't. It was phenomenal. It was something that I found that I really would crave at different moments of my life thereafter.
Daniel Stillman: Because our time together is growing nigh. We need to talk about Invisible Work. For a culture that values doing and producing over being and existing and non-production. Dreaming, daydreaming wondering can look lazy. In fact, there's an old joke about this. That when you walk by a mathematician's desk and they've got their feet up and their eyes closed, they're hard at work. Because they're still thinking about math.
Natalie Nixon: I don't know that. I love that. That's good. I like that.
Daniel Stillman: It's not much of a job, but fair enough.
Natalie Nixon: I like that. I wrote this article for Fast Company about something I call invisible work. And again, all of my work typically starts with this nudge inside of me, which turns into a provocation, an offering of how I'm inviting people to think through something in maybe a new way, maybe a different way. And what I'm really asking is, what if we start to devise, define, dream up new metrics of productivity. I wrote about how in the industrial age, productivity was measured based on output of widgets. In the information age, it's been about time on task. In this Fourth Industrial Revolution where we're going to have robots and AI mastering the task, what I'm observing is that if you followed the Pareto rule, the 80/20 rule, 80% of our most productive work, I don't know about you Daniel, but it's happening when I am letting myself walk away from the laptop, my desk, taking a walk, reframing a question in my head, wondering, sitting with my intuition, it's all those things that help me to, they're creating the scaffolding for the most productive work.
Which then pushes out and synthesizes in that last 20% time. And I know that's a very scary way to think about productivity when we think about this current way of metrics, metrics, metrics. But what if we shift the metrics? And what if we see a bit more control as manager. This way of thinking about productivity requires a lot more trust.
Daniel Stillman: Yes.
Natalie Nixon: I reference a book I used ... When I was a professor and I taught for the first 10 years, I taught the business of fashion and I used to teach a course about apparel sourcing. Apparel sourcing is a lot more interesting to do, than it is to learn and teach. And I was like, "Oh my God, how I'm I going to make this exciting and interesting for these young people." And I found a book, it's a memoir by the founder of Patagonia called Let My People Go Surfing. And it literally is a handbook for sourcing. It's a handbook for sourcing disguised embedded in this memoir. Each chapter is taking you through vendor relationships, through sourcing a fiber and all that thing. And one of the things he shared is that, he had this macro management philosophy that, if members of his team were into surfing and they knew the surf was going to be up between 2:00 and 4:00 later today, they're out of there. They're in the ocean. They're playing in the waves.
Daniel Stillman: Yes.
Natalie Nixon: And he was okay with that because he had the trust that they go have dinner with the fam and they would come back and grind out the work that needed to be done later that evening, if that met their fancy. And I've never forgotten that because it was so, in my view, Liberal and liberating.
Daniel Stillman: Yes.
Natalie Nixon: And really ahead of its time. That's the type of invisible work. That allowing people to play, to really be embodied in their work is this other dimension of invisible work. When we believe that work is only when we're at the whiteboard, on the Zoom call, we are only showing up to work from the head up. From the heart up, never from the gut up. And the opportunity now is to show up to work from the gut up, which requires different type of management, different type of leadership. And actually, in this hybrid office setup that we have now, there's more opportunity to allow people to go ahead and do that.
Daniel Stillman: Going back to this question of how teams and orgs and leaders should be investing in this, it looks like they should be investing in doing less instead of doing more. I wrote something recently about how we need to have a meeting about meetings. And the first meeting of that meeting should be, what meetings can we not have. Now let's have meeting about which meetings to not have so that we can give people some time to find their unicorn space, speaking of invisible work.
Natalie Nixon: Yes.
Daniel Stillman: And our mutual friend, Eve Rodsky's lovely book is on your bookshelf.
Natalie Nixon: That's right.
Daniel Stillman: The idea that we should be encouraging people actively to be just doing joyful things that nourish them, that have nothing to do a direct economic output so that they will be happier people, so that we can get more out of them.
Natalie Nixon: And yet they do. Listen, when we allow people to show up to work from the gut up, people will feel seen and heard.
Daniel Stillman: Yes.
Natalie Nixon: And that fundamentally is the problem. And whether we're talking about a fourth grade class or a multi-billion dollar company, people need to feel seen and heard. And when any of us don't feel seen or heard, I don't know about you, but I start to like, dumb down, pulling back
Daniel Stillman: Yeah. I'll show you only as much of myself is absolutely required.
Natalie Nixon: You have to absolutely value me. All right. Okay, cool. How authentically productive an organization are you really? You're not really getting the most and the best from people.
Daniel Stillman: No. Listen, our time together ... We don't have too much more time. What have I not asked you that I ought to have asked you? What is really important to make sure that we capture the message you'd everyone listening to grok from your ethos?
Natalie Nixon: I think you asked a lot of wonderful questions, Daniel.
Daniel Stillman: Thanks.
Natalie Nixon: And thank you again for inviting me. Just taking the time to dive into my work, I see that you did that and I really appreciate that. I don't know necessarily the question that you haven't asked, but I think that what's always just really important for me that people leave with is, is the opportunities to build their creative capacity and to, what I call oxygenate their ideas. That's how you go from an idea to reality. And oxygenating your idea, I made up that word, it's not really a verb, but to oxygenate your idea-
Daniel Stillman: No, it's totally a word.
Natalie Nixon: Oh, it is a word?
Daniel Stillman: Yeah.
Natalie Nixon: Okay, good.
Daniel Stillman: You can oxygenate water. Put more oxygen, take oxygen out.
Natalie Nixon: I'm going to look out.
Daniel Stillman: It's okay. My first degree is in science.
Natalie Nixon: You can oxygenate water, interesting.
Daniel Stillman: Oh, you totally can. You can deoxygenate water. And then if you do, a fish will not be able to live in that deoxygenated water.
Natalie Nixon: Oh, I'm feeling a new metaphor coming up. Nice.
Daniel Stillman: It's a good word and you're allowed to use it. Even if it wasn't a real word, you still could. But anyway, please proceed with the thought that I have disrupted.
Natalie Nixon: No. Just what I want people to leave with is, they have the agency and the ability to build a creative capacity and it takes some rigor. It takes some work. It's not always sexy. It's often very solitary. That's the rigor part. But I have this corollary expression, that I think it's in the book and I have this postcard about it, which is that, wonder is found in the midst of rigor and rigor cannot be sustained without wonder. So when I say that wonder is found in the midst of rigor, it's in the midst of doing the fundamentals, getting the mastery of skill, the solitary stuff. It's in those moments that an aha moment emerges. That's the wonder. And when I say that rigor cannot be sustained without wonder, we will burn out if we don't integrate moments and time for the awe, for the dreaming to ask new and different questions. Both are true and we have the capacity to do that. And it starts with oxygenating our ideas. Giving them light, giving them air, sharing them out.
Daniel Stillman: Yeah. I remember in grad school people were like, "Oh, I don't want to show people my portfolio without them signing an NDA." And I'm like, "Just show everyone your ideas."
Natalie Nixon: Yeah. First of all, no one's going to interpret it the same way. There's literally nothing new under the sun. It's all about the remix. What's new is your mashup version of, your juxtaposition of the ideas.
Daniel Stillman: Yes.
Natalie Nixon: If you live your life in that way, you're never going to grow. You're never going to take your work to the next level based on, we don't get anywhere alone. It's through sharing-
Daniel Stillman: Yes.
Natalie Nixon: That someone says, "That's interesting. That reminds me of X, Y, Z, or you should talk to someone else about this, or would you to share this at the next [inaudible 00:45:21]." That's how things grow in momentum and energy and capacity.
Daniel Stillman: Yeah. Because you have to recruit other people to be excited about your idea. All right. Very quickly, aside from your book, the Creativity Leap, which everyone should buy and read, what other book do you wish everyone would read? What's your like, God, here's one fiction and one non-fiction book that everyone should just read these two books.
Natalie Nixon: Well, the non-fiction book that I am crushing on right now it's called The Extended Mind.
Daniel Stillman: Yes.
Natalie Nixon: By Annie Murphy Paul. I love this book.
Daniel Stillman: You mentioned it in your Fast Company book.
Natalie Nixon: Yes. Because she's really uncovered and shares out so much research about new ways we should be thinking about the brain. The brain is embodied.
Daniel Stillman: Yes.
Natalie Nixon: The brain is not disembodied from the neck up. I'm learning a lot more myself, teaching myself a lot more about the neuroscience and creativity and that's a lot of what she's getting into in that book. And I was loving this new model of the brain and the mind that she's talking about.
Daniel Stillman: I also want to give a shout out to Tyson Yunkaporta wrote a book called Sand Talk. He's an Aboriginal, I guess philosopher you might say. Sand Talk is writing on the ground as you think and talk and yarn with other people. I think embodied cognition, thinking rooted in land and spaces is ancient.
Natalie Nixon: It is.
Daniel Stillman: It's very ancient. I think people should read both books. Because I want that new brain, people need to see that rigor. But talking to Tyson, you're like, "Oh my God, this is as old as people."
Natalie Nixon: Thank you for that. And that's also what she's talking about in Extended Mind, is the role of gesturing, the role of moving.
Daniel Stillman: Yes.
Natalie Nixon: While you're trying to remember things. And I think back to the way I used to memorize things and prepare for things in college, I would move. And if eventually you have to synthesize information in the seated position, there is that kinesthetic movement.
Daniel Stillman: Yes.
Natalie Nixon: Our brains are taking cues from the body. This idea of embodied work is just thrilling. I'm going to read Sand Talk. Thank you for that. I just it wrote down.
Daniel Stillman: It's super awesome.
Natalie Nixon: The work of fiction, two, one is an oldie but goodie for me. J. California Cooper, African American writer, my favorite novels of hers is There Is Confusion. I'm going to reread that book this spring because it's just a beautifully well told story. Sometimes from the perspective of this little spider. It's kind of, what is that form of literature from South America? It's a bit of natural-
Daniel Stillman: Magical realism.
Natalie Nixon: There's a bit of magical realism in it.
Daniel Stillman: Yes.
Natalie Nixon: It's also a beautiful love story as well.
Daniel Stillman: I think fiction is so important for that wonder part of our brains to get us back into human stories. I'm putting that on my bookshelf.
Natalie Nixon: Fiction is important for building curiosity and curiosity is a precursor to empathy. If you actually want to emphasize more better, you need to read more fiction.
Daniel Stillman: Yes.
Natalie Nixon: And the other work of fiction, again, this is not a new book, but he's a really prolific wonderful writer. A British Pakistani writer named, I think it's Mohsin Hamid, How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia. I love that book.
Daniel Stillman: I remember that.
Natalie Nixon: Is that he wrote it in the second person. Most books are written in the first person, I, we, or the third person. He wrote it in the second person. You sit there and you wonder, dah, dah, dah. There was something so brilliant about, oh my God, I'm there. I love of that.
Daniel Stillman: Yeah. The only other book I know that does that is Bright Lights, Big City by James McInerney, which is so weird to read a book in second person. And if you haven't read, I mean, to anybody listening, I remember when that came out and it's such a catchy title. I'm going to put that on my list too. With the one minute we have left because Natalie probably has another meeting to go to because that's 2022 you all. If people want to learn more about all things, Dr. Natalie Nixon, PhD, where should they find you?
Natalie Nixon: They can simply go to figure 8, the number eight, thinking.com. So figure 8, like ice skating, figure8thinking.com. And they'll learn all about my speaking and advisory work and a lot of cool downloads if they want to download some cool stuff too.
Daniel Stillman: There you go. I think we'll leave it right there. We'll call scene.
Natalie Nixon: Scene. Thank you, Daniel. This was so much fun. I really appreciate your time.
Daniel Stillman: Thank you. I really appreciate it. This was fun. I learned a lot.