Natalie Nixon: the C-suite’s creativity whisperer

Transcript

Stuart Crainer:

Hello, I am Stuart Crainer, co-founder of Thinkers50. Welcome to our weekly LinkedIn live session, celebrating some of the brightest new stars in the world of management thinking. In January, we announced the Thinkers50 Radar community for 2024. These are the upcoming management thinkers we believe individuals and organizations should be listening to. The 2024 list was our most eclectic challenging yet. This year’s Radar is brought to you in partnership with Deloitte, and features business thinkers from the worlds of fashion, retail, branding, and communications, as well as statisticians, neuroscientists, and platform practitioners from the Nordics to New Zealand and Asia to America. 

Among the highlights for me are Ludmila Praslova, author of The Canary Code, teaching how to design healthier, inclusive organizations. You might’ve heard our conversation with Ludmila a few weeks ago. We also feature Jenny Fernandez, author of Zig-Zag to the Top, and Martin Gonzalez, principal of AI Talent Development at Google and co-author of The Bonfire Moment. Over the next few weeks, we will be meeting some more of these fantastic thinkers in our weekly sessions, so we hope you can join us for some great conversations.

As always, please let us know where you are joining us from and send in any comments, questions, or observations at any time during the 45-minute session. Our guest today, I’m really pleased to announce, is Natalie Nixon. Natalie describes herself as a creativity strategist and has been described as the creativity whisperer for the C-suite. She advises leaders on transformation by applying wonder and rigor to amplify growth and business value. She has lived in Brazil, Israel, Germany, Sri Lanka, and Portugal, as well as Philadelphia, and has a background in anthropology, fashion, academia, and dance. Natalie is the author of The Creativity Leap and President of Figure 8 Thinking. Natalie, welcome.

Natalie Nixon:

Hi, Stuart. Thank you so much for having me.

Stuart Crainer:

I’m not sure where to start. I think the best description of what you do comes from Jessi Hempel, who described you as a personal trainer for your creativity muscle.

Natalie Nixon:

Yeah, that was high praise coming from Jessi. I like that one.

Stuart Crainer:

Yeah, you are comfortable with that, are you?

Natalie Nixon:

Yes.

Stuart Crainer:

So where did it all begin? How do you make sense of what you do and where you’ve come from?

Natalie Nixon:

Well, I make sense of all that I do by… I think it’s an acknowledgement that if one has a very diverse background and skill set, and is willing to follow one’s gut and heart, it actually could all work out. Because I’m in a very magical place in my career, where the divergent threads and pathways I’ve explored all make sense now in my work as a creativity strategist, where essentially, I’m helping companies connect the dots between creativity and business value. But as you said, I have a background in cultural anthropology, which I always said gave me an appreciation for the worm’s eye view of society versus the bird’s eye view. And cultural anthropology really helped me to learn how to observe deeply, and frame and reframe questions. My background in dance is the gift that keeps giving, especially as a speaker, which needs some dimension of performance. But to study dance, you need both the discipline as well as the zany inspiration to try new things that’s in a very kinesthetic exploratory way.

And my background in fashion, I worked in fashion first as an entrepreneurial, not profitable, hat designer in the ’90s, in my 20s living in New York City. And then I worked in global fashion sourcing, which took me to live and work in Sri Lanka and Portugal making bras and panties for the Victoria’s Secret brand. And people who have never worked in fashion think that fashion is either really glamorous or really frivolous, and it’s neither. It’s not frivolous, it’s not glamorous, it is business, and it really taught me not only the value of trends and trend research, but the role of technology and logistics, and the role of beauty and desire, and building consumer insight. And then of course, I was a professor for 16 years, and all that teaching and research has brought to the fore. So I’ve been able to integrate all of those streams into my work at Figure 8 Thinking.

Stuart Crainer:

I mean, you argue that humans are hardwired to be creative, and yet it seems that modern organizations are not hardwired in the same way. In fact, the reverse is largely true you think, has that changed?

Natalie Nixon:

I think that increasingly, we’re seeing that people are realizing that as they’re seeking out to be innovative, there is an undercurrent there that’s necessary of creativity. But what I find is that we still have very siloed ways to think about creativity, that we assume that there are creative types. We’ll still overhear people talking in their organizations about people on the marketing, or advertising, or design teams are more the creative types. Sometimes it’s stated out loud, and other times it’s just assumed, the more important stuff gets done by finance operations strategy. But strategy is an incredibly creative endeavor in terms of the way I think about creativity. I actually landed on my focus on creativity as the real energizer for strategy when I was getting invited, in the early days of building Figure 8 Thinking, to build cultures of innovation. But what often happened … it was that it became innovation theater, and we didn’t have a lingua franca about how we thought about innovation.

And I quickly realized it was my nudge, my intuition, that we needed to start a little earlier in building the creative capacity of individuals, of teams, and of organizations if we were going to be able to consistently and sustainably innovate.

Stuart Crainer:

And how do you build that creative capacity? Because it’s going to  … there’s a number of things that work here, aren’t they? Because we’re saying that humans are hardwired to be creative, organizations don’t encourage that. So it requires a fundamental change of culture, doesn’t it?

Natalie Nixon:

Yeah, you’re right. And where does culture change start? Well, from my perspective, it requires a shift in our mental models. And once we shift the ways we’re thinking, that shifts behavior. And finally, that leads to a shift in culture. So it is not just a top down change in the way we’re thinking about the opportunity for creativity, in the way we hire, in the way we build strategy, in the way we identify market opportunities. It’s not just a bottom-up or lateral, it’s a very integrative process. And so as you know, Stuart, the way I think about creativity is this idea of toggling between wonder and rigor to solve problems, generate novel value, and also deliver meaning. Everyone at companies is talking about… Whether they are selling bots and apps or chicken and vegetables, they’re trying to sell their products, services, and experiences in more meaningful ways. And the way meaning gets delivered is by starting with creativity. And I talk about a business ROI of creativity.

And what I mean by that is, if you commit to building the creative capacity of wonder and rigor in your organizations, it means that you necessarily become a lot more curious. And that curiosity leads to new strategic partnerships, those new strategic partnerships can lead to identifying new revenue streams. That’s a business result, that’s a business impact. If you commit to being more creative, you also commit to being a bit more experimental and improvisational in the way that you work. Improvisation benefits from collaboration. When we collaborate long-term, productivity increases, efficiencies go up, and when efficiencies go up, costs go down. That’s a business value and impact of being creative. So we can connect the dots in a very solid, bold line, not a fuzzy line, between creativity and business impact, but it starts with committing to wonder, which even in financial services, healthcare, technology, there is capacity for wonder and for rigor.

Stuart Crainer:

Yeah, I really like the wonder and rigor, different parts of the entire process. Talk to me about wonder, because it seems to me, Natalie, that wonder isn’t something that’s encouraged in organizations.

Natalie Nixon:

Yeah, it’s not. And if we take it a few steps back, it’s not necessarily encouraged in the way we’ve been educated either. So wonder is about audacity, deep curiosity, awe, and pausing. I often remind people that it’s really hard to wonder when you’re going 80 miles an hour, but some really smart people paid a lot of attention to the value of wonder. So Albert Einstein, for example, talked about how wonder is the root of wisdom and knowledge. Socrates also put a lot of emphasis on the value of wonder. So if you actually want to build your body of knowledge, your intelligence, you must start with that liminal space, following the ambiguity of not knowing, of being in awe. And I grew up in Philadelphia. By the time I graduated from high school, I went to three different sorts of schools. The first school I went to was an urban public school, I know it’s different in the UK than in the States, but a taxpayer-paid public school in our community.

I then went to a suburban public school, where my parents were looking for a bit more rigorous education, and then I went to an elite private school, Quaker school, for high school. And what I understood by the time I was around in eighth grade… I went to this private school from seventh through 12th grade, I realized that because the culture of learning was so different in this private school, it was really hard for me to adapt initially. I got so good at filling in the blanks, answering the question, getting the gold star for what the teacher asked. And all of a sudden, I was in a learning environment where it was about falling in love with the process, ask forgiveness not permission, shout out the answer even if you’re unsure. And I realized by around middle school, seventh or eighth, ninth grade, that I was now in an environment where I was around people who were going to be making the rules. And before, I was being educated in a way where we were supposed to just stay in our lane and follow the rules.

So wonder is something that can be seeded early on. It’s actually an innate part of us. If you look at toddlers and small children, they’re full of wonder. But we don’t need to dampen that in the education process because that’s exactly what’s required of us when we to work environments that are full of ambiguity, lots of unknowns, and need us to make sure that we even ask the right question before we go wandering down a squirrely path.

Stuart Crainer:

Another aspect of wonder is pausing, which again, that’s not really encouraged in organizations.

Natalie Nixon:

It’s not. And look at the grand experiment that we had with COVID-19, albeit it was seeded by trauma, but this ability to pause, to collect oneself, is a really necessary phase of exploration and discovery. I just spoke for a major insurance company two weeks ago, and I was talking about falling in love with the gray. I was talking how curiosity is the currency of the future, and how important it is to be comfortable with the gray, that leaders of the future must be able to navigate the gray. It’s not going anywhere. And I was sure… I actually love the color gray. I think gray is an incredibly adaptive color, it’s a very forgiving color, there’s many shades of it. And the more comfortable we get with the pausing and the waiting that’s required, you actually can work in a much more efficient way before you charge ahead, needing to have an answer without really sitting with those unknowns. And how do you get through sitting through and working through unknowns? You ask questions, you call in people who think differently than you do about a particular problem or query.

You practice… In design thinking, we call lateral thinking, learning from near and far adjacent areas. So there are methods and tactics that we can apply that don’t mean we are going to be stumped forever, but there’s some value in the waiting and in the pausing.

Stuart Crainer:

So we need to embrace our grayness.

Natalie Nixon:

We do, absolutely. I do, I have plenty of it.

Stuart Crainer:

Thank you for everyone who’s joined us, and please send in your questions anytime. Frank Carlberg says he attended a workshop and learned about the mind brain, the heart brain, and the stomach brain. “To what extent do you use all three brains when making decisions and living your life?”

Natalie Nixon:

Oh my gosh, Frank, I’m so glad you brought that up. So-

Stuart Crainer:

It’s a thing, is it? I didn’t know that.

Natalie Nixon:

Oh, it’s a thing.

Stuart Crainer:

I thought it was Frank’s Swiss sense of humor.

Natalie Nixon:

Well, maybe a little bit of that, but it really is a thing. And so Stuart, when we were talking in preparation for this conversation, I was sharing how I love frameworks. So after I landed on this wonder-rigor framework to explain how we might think about creativity so that we understand that all attorneys… well, the best attorneys, engineers, scientists, artists, teachers, et cetera, are super creative when they’re toggling between wonder and rigor to solve problems, I then realized, well, it would do people no good if I just told them, “toggle between wonder and rigor, off you go, and you’ll be creative.” That’s not very helpful, so how do you consistently do that toggling? And it’s through what I call the three I’s, which are Inquiry or curiosity, Improvisation or experimentation, and Intuition, which is leading with the heart and pattern recognition. 

So this point that Frank is bringing up about the gut mind is related to intuition. So all of us has something called the vagus nerve. It is the longest cranial nerve that extends from the brain down through the heart into the gut, and it is an incredible nerve role sensory environment in our gut. So much so that neuroscientists have referred to it as the gut brain. So when we say things like, “My gut is telling me,” it literally is. Literally, there is this internal antenna. When I started learning more about the vagus nerve and neuroscience from the vagus nerve, something else was interesting that the research is showing. So there’s something that we all have called interoception. We might have heard of proprioception, right? So dancers, for example, are really good at proprioception, that awareness of where you are in space. Interoception is that internal awareness of, “I’m cold, I’m hot, I’m scared, I’m safe.” And the vagus nerve is what powers up interoception, it’s through the vagus nerve that we have this interoceptive awareness. And there’s been scientific research around the links between interoceptive awareness, which is a term that they use, and rational cognitive strategic decision-making.

So the experiment that was done was they asked people to sit calmly on a chair, hands on your lap, and they asked people to just tap out on your thigh, on your leg, the beat of your heart. Now, some people were like, “What the heck are you talking about? I can’t feel my heart. I have to touch the pulse on my wrist.” And other people are like, “Okay.” And they just tapped their lap to the rhythm of their heart, that’s called interoceptive awareness. It was a funny example, a husband and wife did the same experiment. The woman was terrible at it, the man was terrific at it, he completely could feel the inner rhythm of his heart. But what their research has shown is that people who have high interoceptive awareness also are quite good at strategic decision-making. And I love this research because it’s one more example that intuition is not woohoo, not this esoteric addendum to the important stuff. The more attuned we are to the body, to the way we feel internally in connection with others, in our environment.

There actually is a direct correlation to being able to make strategic decisions, which is incredibly important for leadership, for management, and for the types of teams we need to build right now and for the future of work.

Stuart Crainer:

Can we go back to rigor? It’s easy to forget it, isn’t it? Wonder and rigor. Because the wonder is the interesting bit, isn’t it? Audacity, daydreaming. “What if” questions, pausing. It’s interesting. But then we get the rigor combination, which is attention to detail, discipline, and practicing a lot is the dull stuff of professional management, isn’t it really?

Natalie Nixon:

Well, it depends on how you go about doing it. So you’re right, rigor is the dimension of creativity that we typically forsake. So a lot of the time when we think about creativity, creative acts, we think, “Oh, it’s doing whatever you feel like. It’s being really super freewheeling about stuff.” Not so fast. Let’s say you’ve only been thinking about creativity in the realm of the arts. So let’s say you dabble in a bit of music, or dance, or drawing, or sculpting, whatever it is, you are astutely aware… Let’s take dance, I’ve studied dance for many years and I consider myself a lifelong dancer. Before you can leap across the stage, before you get invited to leap across the stage and audition, you’ve not just spent hours, weeks, and months, you spent years really mastering technique. And the great American dancer and choreographer, Twyla Tharp, famously said, “Before you can think out of the box, you must start with the box.” And I love that because we overuse, “Think out of the box, think out of the box,” so much when thinking about creativity.

You must know the rules in order to break them, extend them. So rigor is not particularly sexy, it’s often very solitary, and it is essential. But there’s another expression that I made up, that I write about in The Creativity Leap, which is that wonder is found in the midst of rigor, and rigor cannot be sustained with that wonder, so they’re copacetic. When I say that wonder is found in the midst of rigor, think of any kind of rigorous task you do. So for me as a writer, I have to sit down and I have to… if it’s 15 minutes, I just put down whatever I can put down. Sometimes it’s  really fun, sometimes it’s really agonizing. Stuart, you’ve completed a PhD, so you know how agonizing a process that can be, but it’s sometimes, in the midst of that painful focus, that you have these aha moments. Similarly, just focusing on rigor without wonder, you will burn out. But what I find sometimes in companies is that they are conflating rigidity for rigor. They think they’re being rigorous, but they’re actually quite rigid.

And the difference between rigor and rigidity is… let’s think of the little animal, the groundhog, which is very common. There’s actually a whole family of them in our backyard, they’re very popular in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, where I live. We have this mythology in Pennsylvania that every February if the groundhog peeks its head out from the cold earth and they see their shadow, we’ll have x number… If they do or don’t see their shadow, we’ll know how many more weeks of winter we have. The groundhog is rigorous, the groundhog is doing sense-making of its environment. Rigidity does not take into account the environmental signals. Rigidity says, “Nope. We said we’re going to go this way and off we go,” and all red flags are alarming. So rigor can actually be quite inspiring. It gives us the chance to do some solo work, to do some heads down quiet work, and it really is necessary if we truly want to be wondrous.

Stuart Crainer:

Wonder is found in the midst of rigor.

Natalie Nixon:

Yes, it is.

Stuart Crainer:

Yeah, I’ve written that down. What about your international experiences, Natalie? I mean, you’ve lived in Sri Lanka, Germany, Brazil, Portugal, now you’re back in Philadelphia. Are there different approaches and appreciations of creativity and its importance as you travel and work around the world?

Natalie Nixon:

Yeah, I haven’t done any kind of deliberate research around this… This will be totally anecdotal and observational, but I do think that all cultures have their own particular way of manifesting creativity. So let’s take, for example, when I lived in Brazil versus living in Germany, which one might think, on the surface, two diametrically opposed cultures. Weather might have something to do with that, because even when I lived in Portugal, the way the Portuguese speak Portuguese versus the way the Brazilians speak, it’s very different. The Portuguese keep their mouth very closed, the Brazilians very much more expressive, their mouths are open. But … you know … the more kinesthetic way of moving through a process… I’m talking about Brazil right now. Not having the reticence to slow down, to pause; to be very exploratory is something that I really appreciated as an American, where we are not like that at all, and I understood the value of that ability to slow down because the external environment dictated that. Either because of things like weather or economic crises – which happened when I was living in Brazil – are really admirable.

On the other hand, in Germany, I lived in Bavaria, in a little town called Reutlingen just south of Stuttgart, and I had certain assumptions about Germany. My mom lived in Germany when she was a girl because my grandfather was stationed there after the war, so she had generally positive memories and reflections about it. But I also had very big assumptions that Germans really work hard. They do, but there’s also this carved out space for relaxation, for play, for family, for hiking, for enjoying, which we don’t have that yin-yang give and take between work and rest in the States that, for example, that I saw in Germany. And that was just on a meta level, this example of the wonder and the rigor that can take place. So those would be just a couple of examples.

Stuart Crainer:

Yeah. I’m thinking about technology and AI in particular. How does this rest with wonder and rigor and creativity?

Natalie Nixon:

Well, I think technological innovations like ChatGPT, or CRISPR, or these micro travel devices called Scooters that are popping up in cities all over the place, like the company Line, these are all incredibly creative apps. And if you take for example, ChatGPT, we have this new category of jobs called prompt engineers, which didn’t exist five years ago, and what did they need to be really good at? They need to be really good at framing and reframing questions. That’s one of the three I’s that I talked about, the value of inquiry. So the coders themselves must be really good at inquiry, which means they need to be able to zoom out, be much more observant about society, about the sorts of needs that society might have. At the same time, if you yourself have done any sorts of play and experimentation with ChatGPT, you know it’s only as good as the questions that you can frame and ask. So there’s huge opportunity for these sorts of AI tools to not be the pilot, but to be our co-pilot, to be our collaborator and co-conspirator as we’re exploring different things.

They’re not the end point, they often can just speed up the process for us to generate better questions and get to more interesting discoveries. Something like CRISPR, for example, is this genome editing tool, is now being extended to the field of agriculture, which has its complications, its ethical concerns, but as an objectively creative act, it’s really interesting. That started with the questions… In terms of what I can understand, it started with a question of, “What’s going on with this bacteria and this particular group of cells?” But that one question led the inventors of CRISPR down this path to create this kind of genome editing reading device. At the end of the day, what excites me about the technology is that because basic tasks can be taken over by this technology, there’s the opportunity to offload some of the cognitive load that we have in our daily work and amplify what makes us uniquely human, which is about imagination, and memory, and consciousness, and sense-making. And those are the things that we can now amplify as a result of a lot of these tools and technologies.

Stuart Crainer:

If people want to find out more, we’ve just published a report actually called ManagementGPT with Capgemini, which looks at management and generative AI. Natalie, when you go into organizations or you meet individuals, how do you take the creative pulse? What are you looking for when you walk into an organizational headquarters to gauge how creative they are or how welcoming of creativity and wonder that they are?

Natalie Nixon:

That’s a great question. I really love the space-time continuum, so I’m very interested in how they are dividing up time and how they’re also using space, the spatial environment. So for example, if it’s a meeting-crazy culture, that’s just going to lead to burnout. It’s not just enough for leaders to say, “Oh yeah, we don’t want back-to-back meetings.” But if they keep scheduling them or if they are modeling behavior that’s different, that’s giving very different signals. So the use of time… and the meeting is one of the greatest artifacts of all organizational culture. And how we meet, when we meet, who gets to lead the meeting. That’s a great place that I like to start in an audit to really understand the culture of an organization, and as you put it, the creativity pulse. Because it says so much about … is there vertically integrated leadership? Is it bottom-up as well as top-down? Is it emergent? Space is also really important.

So I know that there’s a lot of tensions and conversations, at least in the States right now, about back to work for all five days or four days at work, one day at home, and some companies are even… a little bit more in the Silicon Valley, permitting three days in the office, two days away. But there’s been research about spikes in productivity. Microsoft, for example, did an interesting experiment in Japan, I think in 2019, where in the month of August, they allowed people to not be at work I think on Fridays, saw a nice spike in productivity. We know that years ago when Google used to do their 20% time, and every fifth day, they let people tinker and explore what they wanted to explore, one of the things that emerged from that was Gmail. So we have evidence that when we shift away from this micromanagement model, which is not where creativity flourishes, but to much more of a macro management model that is based on trust, that’s where we see much more of the capacity for creativity flourishing.

I also am always interested to know, are we assigning the word creativity only to certain departments and groups? Which, from my perspective, is problematic, as you’re already now putting down a wall in terms of assuming that people in the finance area are not creative. I know we don’t want to go down the path of creative accounting, but that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m just talking about the problem solving that happens in operations, and manufacturing, and finance, and HR, etc.

Stuart Crainer:

Yeah, creativity is universal.

Natalie Nixon:

Yes, it is. But it’s contingent upon the commitment to design space and time for the wonder and the rigor. It’s not just a given.

Stuart Crainer:

Yeah, yeah. And how do you manage your own space-time continuum?

Natalie Nixon:

Wow. Well, for me, I’m in my home office right now and the design of the space is one where I feel a lot of clearing. It’s very light, and that matters for me. I used to think that back in college that I was procrastinating when I really wouldn’t start burrowing down and finishing a paper until my room was organized and clean, and I was able to sit down and then really focus, but it’s actually a thing, where our spatial environment … some people can work in more of a cluttered space, and for them, that’s what is stimulating that creative process. For me, I need it, figuratively and metaphorically, a blank slate. The other thing that I do is I actually time and put into my calendar, I’ll have the word “pause”, I’ll have the word “lunch”, I’ll have the word “take a break”, because I know, personally, I won’t do it, I’ll continue to grind away if I don’t do that. And the other thing I do is I give myself five minute daydream breaks, which may seem a bit zany to some until you try it.

It’s not meditation, which is about focusing; daydreaming is actually giving your mind the permission to wander. And it typically consists of me standing by a window, watching a leaf fall, watching clouds float by. It’s just the act of standing and letting my mind zone out. I even got… I’m showing you this Stuart, this really cool five-minute… It’s not an hourglass, I guess it’s a five-minute glass. And when you flip it over, it’s just another nice way for me to do the five-minute time.

Stuart Crainer:

Yeah, we’ve all got different techniques, I guess. One of the benefits when I used to smoke, which I don’t recommend obviously, and I haven’t smoked for a long time, was that it made you stop work every 45 minutes or an hour.

Natalie Nixon:

That’s true.

Stuart Crainer:

And I can see the attraction. Just walking around and having a break, and thinking about something else does actually work.

Natalie Nixon:

It does.

Stuart Crainer:

You talked about conscious businesses. What does that mean, and what inspires you about them? Asks Frank Carlberg again. 

Natalie Nixon:

Oh, consciousness. Yeah. And I’m at the beginning stages, Frank, of just exploring this word, consciousness as relates to business. But when I think about AI, it’s done a masterful job of mimicking intelligence. It has, and there’s already… there is not just artificial intelligence, there is a bit of artificial imagination. So there are AI tools that can mimic jazz improvisation, but there are dimensions of the human experience that, as of yet, hopefully for a while, the machine cannot mimic, and one of those is consciousness. And when I think about consciousness, I think about the role of memory, I think about sense-making. I think about imagination, in terms of the brain’s ability to synchronize memory, consciousness, sense-making, and dreaming. And I think that those are actually… I don’t know if I would call them skills, but they’re dimensions of being human that I think we can add into the organization.

I think that we really are at a crossroads, where we can decide if we want to continue to run organizations like a Gantt chart, which is not very realistic because companies exist to serve and exist in markets, which now behavioral economists have explained to us, markets are inconsistent, they’re imperfect, they’re not predictive, so let’s stop trying to make them like that. Organizations are organisms, why? Because they’re made of people. So while we are at this time where we are introducing much more technology that can do the basic tasks, what are the ways that we can amplify these uniquely human dimensions that we can bring to work for the purpose of innovation, for the purpose of new product development and new experiences, and that sort of thing. I’ll tell you an example of a company that I think had leadership that was integrating consciousness really early, early as the ’90s before a lot of other companies were, and that’s Patagonia. And you understand that if you read Yvon Chouinard’s memoir, Let My People Go Surfing, just the title of that book, Let My People Go Surfing.

He had a perspective of macro management, he was managing humans. And early on in this book, he explains that if I have someone who’s responsible for sourcing woolens, but they’re really into surfing, and they know the surf is going to be up at 2:30 and she wants to go surf at that time, let her go. And maybe she gets in the office a little earlier, maybe she comes back and stays later. But that level of consciousness about what it’s going to take for us to get the work done was pretty prescient. He’s done other prescient things, as you know the whole ad campaign of, “Don’t buy this jacket in the interest of sustainability.” So those are the kinds of things that I’m thinking about when I am advocating for amplifying what makes us uniquely human and what we bring to strategy, what we bring to org design, what we bring to hiring.

Stuart Crainer:

And Natalie, your book, The Creativity Leap, which we recommend, is now out in paperback. Came out a couple of years ago, what are you working on now? Where’s the work led you since The Creativity Leap?

Natalie Nixon:

Right. Well, since The Creativity Leap, I have been aghast at… I think it really stood out to me during COVID… a slow death that so many people are experiencing at work, which I think we can self-correct that path. I think that we have the opportunity to re-examine productivity. So I’m writing a book, tentative title, Move, Think, Rest: How We Can… I’m forgetting the subtitle, but really this pathway forward to flourishing. I’m exploring this question of what if it turns out that our most productive selves are not when we’re turning through email, on Zoom or Teams and at the whiteboard, but when we step away and we engage in what I call motor activity movement, thought, and rest, MTR. So this book is a provocation on a new way to think about productivity, opportunities to redesign work because we really haven’t shifted the way we think about productivity since the First Industrial Revolution. We still think about productivity that’s output space, what’s measurable. It’s boxing out time on our calendar, it’s squeezing time out. And the fact is that we are at a juncture of unprecedented burnout, ubiquitous technology, and hybrid work.

So let’s reexamine that, and that’s what the book is about. It’s about movement, thought, and rest as activities that could actually generate much more of the juicy bits of thinking. So that when we return to the work at hand, it’s far more outstanding than if we were just hunched over our laptops for the next two hours.

Stuart Crainer:

Yeah. It goes back to the Patagonia thing about getting the work done, which is the most… It seems to me the most important thing rather than filling time.

Natalie Nixon:

Exactly.

Stuart Crainer:

And the emphasis of the traditional organization has been filling people’s time.

Natalie Nixon:

Yes.

Stuart Crainer:

And do you think that message is getting across… I mean, there’s a lot of stuff in the media in the UK, for instance, about criticism of people working at home, or there’s a kickback against that, which seems amazing to me.

Natalie Nixon:

It is amazing, and I love the Financial Times series of podcasts. I listened to just about all of them. And there’s one, I’m botching up the name, I think it’s At Work or Working, but it’s a really great series about us at work. And it was actually talking about observations of London versus New York City back to work. In London, it seems to be a lot more happening than in a city like New York City. And we’ve all heard how the titans of industry on Wall Street are demanding everyone to get back to work, but I think the difference is that you’re not talking to Gen Xers or Boomers only. You’re now talking to Millennials, you’re talking to Centennials, Gen Zs who have a very different value system, who have very different motivators about what will make them want to give 1000% to work. And I think the future organization that will be able to attract and retain the best talent will be the ones that figure out how to integrate motor activity: movement, thought, and rest. Not just on an individual level, but on a team level. The designs work in that way.

And I think it’s going to be slow, but what’s going to ultimately shift the tide is performance, is the numbers. Is the fact that they actually can still be profitable and retain great talent because there’s a real opportunity… sunk cost when people move on, when people leave. And so that, I think, will eventually begin to shift the tide. So I think there’s just a couple of drivers, it’s the supply of labor has a very different value system than it did 20 years ago. And we have technology that gives us the opportunity to shift the ways we think about what do we need humans for. And I hope the answer is not, “Don’t hire people,” that’s not the answer, but how do we use people differently?

Stuart Crainer:

Well, that was the amazing thing about the pandemic, really, which is not really talked about, but people and organizations continued to perform in really difficult circumstances. People suddenly having to work at home, organizations have to change their focus entirely and their strategies, but the work was still done. And that’s really-

Natalie Nixon:

The work still got done.

Stuart Crainer:

… which was an amazing thing, really.

Natalie Nixon:

Yeah. Well, the work still got done, the flexibility that people had was appreciated. Sometimes we’re still managing those boundaries, but what I’m also interested in exploring in this next book is a new metaphor for productivity. I think we need to put… God bless his soul, but Taylorism’s scientific method … I think  we need to give him a bit of a funeral. Taylorism, not Mr. Taylor, but Taylorism, a bit of a funeral. Maybe the metaphor is one of cultivation instead of productivity. Because when I think about cultivation, it’s about valuing slow and fast, it’s about valuing work on the visible and invisible realms. It’s about valuing both the solitary input as well as the collective, and so we think about, for centuries, the world was based on agrarian economies, and then we had the Industrial Revolution. And when the Industrial Revolution came, then it was about cogs in the wheels, about mass production. It was about time becomes a commodity. And now with this technology, what if we can revisit cultivation that was primary in the agrarian economies, but it looks differently so that we’re valuing the human input combined with the technology in very different ways.

That’s what I’m really interested in.

Stuart Crainer:

It’s amazing how often, in our conversations, Frederick Taylor is mentioned because his influence still exists, doesn’t it? Organizations are still built in his managerial image. I wonder if Taylor himself, I suspect, would be absolutely appalled that things hadn’t moved on because he was a really creative, and-

Natalie Nixon:

I know, I think you’re right. I agree with you, I think he would be.

Stuart Crainer:

Yeah, he was actually incredibly curious.

Natalie Nixon:

He was. That’s how he thought of these new ways to figure out how to make sense of these lines of machines combined with people, and how do we make sense of all that.

Stuart Crainer:

Natalie, we’re out of time. I love one of your lines, “I changed lives with ideas,” which is a fantastic thing to do, much underestimated. I recommend Natalie’s book, The Creativity Leap. You can find out more about her work at figure8thinking.com. Eight is a number in that, figure8thinking.com, and look out for… Have you got stuff coming out in the near future, Natalie?

Natalie Nixon:

Well, I write for Fast Company, I also contribute a newsletter on LinkedIn. So follow me on LinkedIn, sign up for my Ever Wonder newsletter on my website, and read my articles on Fast Company.

Stuart Crainer:

We should all do that. Natalie, thanks very much for joining us and thanks everybody around the world for joining this session live, and we look forward to seeing you again soon. Thank you.

Natalie Nixon:

Thank you.