Leading With Creativity and Intuition in the Age of AI

This transcript has been generated by AI and may contain slight discrepancies from the audio or video recording.

Mo: [00:00:00] Welcome to today's episode of People and Strategy. I'm your host, Mo Fathelbab, President of International Facilitators Organization. People and Strategy is a podcast from the SHRM Executive Network, the premier network of executives in the field of human resources. Each week, we bring you in-depth conversations with the country's top HR executives and thought leaders. For today's conversation, I'm excited to be joined by Natalie Nixon, CEO and founder of Figure Eight Thinking and author of The Creativity Leap. She recently spoke at the Executive Network Experience, ENX, at SHRM 26 in Orlando. Welcome, Natalie. 

Natalie Nixon: Hi, Mo. Thank you so much for having me. Really grateful for the invitation from SHRM. It's good to be back. 

Mo: Well, we are excited to have you, and, uh, I wanna start with your career journey. Uh, tell us about your journey and how you currently focused on helping leaders. [00:01:00] 

Natalie Nixon: Uh, I am a creativity strategist. Uh, no one ever told me about that job title, uh, growing up. I actually made up my job title, and I have a very diverse background in cultural anthropology. I worked in the fashion industry first as an entrepreneurial hat designer and then in global sourcing for a division of L Brands, all-- AKA the Limited Brands. And that took me to live and work abroad in Sri Lanka and Portugal, making bras and panties for the Victoria's Secret brand. And I always say that cultural anthropology gifted me with an appreciation of what we can call the worm's eye view of society versus the bird's eye view of society. It, it taught me the skills of deep observation, contextual inquiry, qualitative research, observational studies. And then fashion, people who've never worked in fashion think it's either frivolous or they think it is glamorous, and it is neither. Uh, it is a business. And what [00:02:00] fashion gifted me with was a real appreciation of the role of trends as well as the role of desire and beauty and aesthetics for forging consumer, uh, insight and connection. I also, in my 20s, was a middle school English teacher for five years, and that inarguably, um, has been the best experience that's led to everything I've gone on to do. I was a professor for 16 years after get- being tired of being in different time zones away from family and friends. In the first 10 years, I taught the business of fashion. The last six years, I was the founding director of an executive MBA program called the Strategic Design MBA Program, which integrated design thinking and how people learn strategy, leadership, finance, marketing, et cetera. And my business, my current business, Figure Eight Thinking, really evolved out of doing a TEDx Philadelphia talk in 2014, and in that keynote, I was proclaiming that the future of work is jazz. That was really my doctoral research [00:03:00] in plain English, and that talk catapulted me into getting invited into companies to help them design more improvisational ways of working, because it turns out that improvisational organizations are actually the most innovative. And I was getting so many of these invitations, I ended up creating this little side hustle called Figure Eight Thinking. Woke up a year later, realized I was having more fun with my side hustle, and decided to retire from academia and have built a blossoming career advising executive leadership teams on how to build creativity as a strategic capability and how to operationalize creativity for its ROI.  

Mo: I love your story. Uh, and I wanna dig into a couple things you said. Desire, aesthetics, and beauty. Um, clearly in the fashion industry, that makes perfect sense. I'm curious to what extent you think that applies to other businesses. 

Natalie Nixon: Oh my goodness. One of the ways that Apple beat out Bluetooth and no- [00:04:00] everyone's like, "Bluetooth who?" is because- 

Mo: And just to be clear, you're talking about BlackBerry, not Bluetooth. 

Natalie Nixon: Oh, excuse me. Yeah, I'm talking about BlackBerry.  

Mo: Yeah, yeah, yeah. 

Natalie Nixon: Apple was able to think like a fashion designer, and what that means is that Apple was very, uh, successful at even though the operational scaffolding of an iPhone is probably not too much different from an Android, I'm sure the engineers would disagree, but through my naive eyes, there's not a lot different. What, what is different is the design, the aesthetic, the, not only the, the product design, but the experience design, and they managed to build fans. Um, the fact that whenever a new version of Apple is being released, people are lined up, especially s- even more so in the past, around the block as if they're waiting for tickets to a rock concert. So Apple's a great example of, of successfully, as a tech company, thinking like a fashion designer. But where thinking like a fashion [00:05:00] designer and, and, and really forging elements of desire and beauty and aesthetics could really go far is in the healthcare industry, for example, and really, um, honing in on experience design. But there are healthcare entities like the Mayo Clinic, which does an outstanding job of really forging that connection. Um, but those are just a couple of examples of, of how it could play out, and there's so many companies that could take some notes from the fashion industry. In fact, like some colleagues and I, of, of mine and I, we used to actually do fashion thinking workshops for, for clients. 

Mo: I think that's a great example. Thank you so much. I love it. So, uh, Natalie, a lot to dig into here, uh, and a lot of the work you do is focused on helping organizations understand the ROI of creativity and innovation. Uh, so let's talk about that. Uh, there's a lot of pressure on organizations right now to innovate, uh, but you argue, uh, that starting with innovation is actually the wrong move. Uh, why are companies getting the sequence [00:06:00] backward, and what does it cost them, and why is it backward? 

Natalie Nixon: Well, I think we first have to level set what an innovation is. And so the way I define an innovation is that it is an invention converted into scalable value. And that value could be financial value, cultural value, social value. But while it's still a one-off innovation, it's not actually an innovation. It's not yet scaled. So how do you go from this one-off invention to a scalable innovation? The converting factor is creativity. So creativity is what is actually required to scale from a one-off invention to an innovation. So that's the piece that people are getting wrong, and it often results in kind of copy-paste approaches to innovation or siloed innovation initiatives, or we will acquire this scrappy startup and hopefully some of, through osmosis, the ways that they work will, um, kind of, uh, filter [00:07:00] into our ways of working. But building, again, building creativity as a strategic capability has to be the place to start if we want to consistently and sustainably innovate.  

Mo: Mm-hmm. And you've also made the case that, uh, creativity drives measurable business outcomes, higher revenue, increased productivity, uh, stronger retention. Walk us through the connection and, and where does the ROI actually show up? 

Natalie Nixon: So I can draw a solid, bold line between creativity and business results, not a fuzzy dotted line. And I'll give you, uh, three examples. So there are three conditions that we could easily point out that are required for creativity. One condition is inventive thinking. Another convention, uh, convention, another, uh, condition is curiosity, and a third con- con- condition is collaboration. So let's start with, with inventive thinking. Creativity loves audacious, bodacious, um, sometimes [00:08:00] ridiculous thinking at the onset. The, the broader, more blue sky, the better. And inventive thinking actually helps us to see around the corner. It helps us to see what visual artists call the negative space. So for example, if any of your listeners and viewers have ever taken an illustration class, if you're asked to draw a vase, you're not actually drawing the density of the vase, you're drawing the outline of it. You're learning to see the negative space. And so there's that famous, uh, uh, psychological test where it's do you see a vase or do you see a woman's profile, right? So that's, that's an example of negative space. So inventive thinking helps you to see differently, and that seeing differently unlocks new revenue streams that you would not have seen before. So Airbnb is a great example of a company that was really leaning into not just the functional problem to be solved, but the social and emotional problem to be solved, and they totally flipped the business model of hospitality on its side when they decided to lean into, um, building a business around the, the, the [00:09:00] value of trust. What would it take for a homeowner to op- open her home, her loft space, to a complete stranger? And what would it take for a traveler to decide to stay in a stranger's home instead of, um, a hotel, right? So that's a, that's an example of inventive thinking. Um, a second condition of creativity is, uh, curiosity, right? Asking new and different sorts of questions. And what that really leads us to is what we often-- what I often see in a lot of legacy companies, which, which, which is the, the ode to we've always done it this way, or we fall in love with our beautiful baby and we can't... It's precious. We can't touch it. But when we begin to cultivate a practice of curiosity, we not only ask the very tactical questions such as who, what, when, and where, but we ask very expansive, divergent questions such as why What if? So what? Right? Which can feel, depending on where you're s- sitting and standing, depending on the [00:10:00] day, you might feel-- you might bristle at those questions, but a lot of the time it just, it just, it's like a load is lifted off your shoulder. And in my experience, people lean in and are really have-- they approach the work with a lot more greater joy. So curiosity helps us to get out of the building, to question and challenge our assumptions, and to fall in love with the challenges and the problems and the desires of our clients and our customers, which leads us to identifying greater brand resonance and value in the marketplace. And then a third condition for creativity, in addition to inventive thinking and curiosity, is collaboration. And most of us, if we're honest, don't really enjoy collaborating a lot, at least not short term. Longer term, we see the value, but shorter term, our assumptions are challenged. We have to explain our acronyms. We feel like it slows down the process. But longer term collaboration actually increases productivity, and when [00:11:00] productivity goes up, efficiencies go up, and when efficiencies go up, costs go down. So that's a business result. So those three conditions of inventive thinking and curiosity and collaboration can lead us to new revenue streams, um, greater market value, and lower costs. So that's what I mean by the, the business ROI of creativity. 

Mo: Okay. That is a straight line and is not dotted. Love it. Thank you. Uh, so Natalie, when we talk about creativity in a business context, uh, there's often an eye roll or the assumption that it belongs in a design department. Um, how do you define creativity for leaders who never thought of it as their, as, as part of their domain? Like, what if you're a CFO? 

Natalie Nixon: Yeah. I like to define creativity as your ability to toggle between wonder and rigor to solve problems, deliver novel value, and discern meaning. And if you think about creativity as this ability to toggle between wonder and rigor to solve [00:12:00] problems, then you really quickly realize that the best chief financial officers, attorneys, engineers, scientists, artists, designers, plumbers, executive assistants are at their most creative when they are de- de- designing the space and the time for both wonder and for rigor. Now, wonder is a word that may get some eye rolls in some business environments, but the leaders who are attuned to where the most incredible opportunities have come from are astutely aware that it's a condition of wonder that's led them to that, or that's led their team to that. So wonder is about curiosity, awe, audacity, pausing, because it's really hard to wonder when we're going 80 miles an hour. Rigor is the dimension of my creativity model, the wonder rigor model, which is, um, that we typically are surprised to hear about, right? Because b- before [00:13:00] hearing about wonder and rigor, we might think that, well, creativity is just something that some people, some of us have, and others of us don't, or it's, it's just some, some kind of gift that falls from the clouds and it's just like, it's like this nice to have. But, but creativity actually requires an incredible amount of rigor, and rigor is about focus, discipline, time on task. Um, it's about knowing and learning the rules so that you can extend them, so you can adapt, so sometimes you can break them and, which is something, uh, something like a company like Airbnb did, in order to maybe reinvent an entire category, to recharge a team, to, um, get an entire organization back on track, um, it requires both wonder and rigor. And interestingly, rigor also requires us to slow down. And in my experience, sometimes- Organizations think that they're being rigorous and they're actually being a bit rigid. And the difference between being [00:14:00] rigid and rigorous is that rigor is adaptive. Rigidity says, "Nope, we said we were gonna do it this way and we need to save face and we're gonna continue going in this direction even though all these alarm bells are going off." So the-- So when I explain creativity in this way to teams at insurance firms, at financial services firms, at healthcare organizations, at global media companies, it is a, uh, a light bulb goes off in people and there, and there is this wonderful ,orus何 on�/ yze, shepherd 

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Mo: Great stuff. Okay, so a lot of leaders equate employee resistance with a talent problem. How often is it actually a creativity problem in disguise? 

Natalie Nixon: Well, I can't quantify how often it's a creativity problem 'cause of course it has to be situational. You have to know the context of, of what, um, employee-- the, the root of the employee resistance is. But I know that there is some really interesting data around the acknowledgement about how significant [00:18:00] creativity is, how significant curiosity is, for example, which is a condition for, for creativity. And then there's this gap analysis between, you know, executives... Uh, research studies have shown that executives have said that, um, curiosity, for example, 65-- s-75% of executives, uh, who were, who were polled said that curiosity is an important condition for productivity and efficiencies. However, 65% of employees report that they don't work in environments with-- that prompt conditions for curiosity. Um, and so-- and that's actually research from, um, HR Morning. So the, the, the challenge with that is that we, on the one hand, say as, as maybe as executive leaders in business, that, uh, we need to have these conditions of cu- of curiosity, of creativity, but we don't allow the space and time for our employees. So that's an example of maybe looking more closely about what's the root cause of that resistance. It could a lot of times be frustration [00:19:00] and, and, and your audience, SHRM members know that one of the great motivators for high performance is for people to feel seen and for people to feel heard. And one of the, the great ways that we feel seen and heard as humans, organizations are organisms because they're made up of humans, is when we are allowed to tap into that reservoir of humanity, one of which is our capacity for creativity. But if we work in environments where we're kind of treated like cogs in the wheel, you're gonna get resistance. You're not going to get the kind of flourishing output that's desired. 

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Mo: So along with creativity, another tool that leaders have in their toolbox is, uh, intuition. Uh, and this is something everyone has capacity for, but not everyone has built the skill, uh, of listening to their intuition. Um, so leading with intuition can sound abstract and even risky, uh, in data-driven business environments. How do you make the case that intuition is a legitimate and powerful tool and not a liability?  

Natalie Nixon: Well, you know, the subtitle of [00:21:00] my book, "The Creativity Leap," has a second edition out. The subtitle is "Unleash Curiosity, Improvisation, and Intuition at Work." And I interviewed about 50 people for that book, and as a qualitative researcher, there's always like a series of questions that I make sure I ask the same questions to each person so we begin to have like a, a data set of responses that I can go through. And I recall that as I was preparing to answer-- to ask the following question to an electrical engineer who is CEO of a tech firm, a tech firm called Vectorworks, I was really nervous about asking him, "Please tell me a story about a time when you've used your intuition for a strategic decision." I thought, "Gosh, as an electrical engineer, CEO of a tech firm, he's gonna scoff at this question. He's gonna laugh me out of the room." And I was completely wrong. Instead, he gave me so many examples of times in his experience as an engineer, [00:22:00] as a leader, where he has leaned into his intuition as a data point to marry with the data that comes from the Excel sheets or that comes from the hardcore research. So that's an example, that's a real-life example of the value of intuition in, um, in making decisions, in building your capacity for leadership. Now, what's really important is that leaders become more transparent about the ways in which they're using their intuition to make strategic decisions. And I'll give you an example of research from neuroscience that's really starting to catch up- Mm-hmm ... with my hunch some years ago that intuition is really significant for strategic decision-making. So there was a research study that was done around 2010 called the Heartbeat Detection Study. 

Mo: Mm. 

Natalie Nixon: And in this experiment, people were asked to sit on a chair with their feet on the ground, their hands on their lap, and they're asked to tap out the rate of their heartbeat, not by feeling [00:23:00] their pulse, by just being still, tuning in, and beginning to tap out their heartbeat rate. Now, some people were horrible at it. They were like, "What are they talking about? I-- there's no way I can feel my heartbeat if I'm just sitting here." And other people were so aware and so accurate in their ability to be attuned to the rhythm of their heartbeat. And it turns out that people who are really good at this are, have something with, that's called interoceptive awareness. And when they're really-- So even the ability just to even kind of be still and feel that heartbeat is interoceptive awareness. And people who are really accurate at, at tapping out the rhythm, that's called interoceptive accuracy. So interoception is a word that means the, that inner awareness, that inner knowing. So for, for example, uh, the inner knowing that I'm cold or I'm tired or I'm safe. Um, interoception is powered by the vagus nerve. And the vagus nerve is the longest cranial nerve in our [00:24:00] body. So it goes, extends from the base of the brain at the medulla oblongata, all the way down through our heart and our lungs and into our gut, and is actually an incredibly, beautifully complex system of nerves that spreads throughout our gut system. So when we say things like, "My gut is telling me," it literally is. So there's a reason why we are saying things like this. So this vagus nerve is kind of this highway of messaging, um, for interoception. And so this heartbeat detection study back in 2010, it started to, to trace and track people who had high inter- interoceptive awareness, high interoceptive accuracy, and it turned out those same group of people were-- It had a, had a 26% higher, uh, likelihood of making correct decisions in high-stakes environments. In other words, people with... who were attuned to their intuition, the interoceptive awareness and accuracy, were far more likely to make [00:25:00] strong strategic decisions. So that's just one example of a scientific research study that is connecting the dots between our intuition and strategic decision-making. So for all of you who are listening and watching who are already doing this, brava, bravo. Keep paying attention to that nudge, because intuition is like a radar or a sonar, um, or some people call it a muscle, and the more we listen to it, uh, and exercise it, the, the stronger it gets and the clearer it gets, and the more we ignore it, the flabbier it gets and the dimmer it gets. So do not ignore your intuition. 

Mo: Natalie, I'm on board. I love it, but I have to challenge you just for the sake of our audience. Can you really go to a board meeting and say, "This is what my intuition tells me, and this is what we should do"?  

Natalie Nixon: Um, so you can, if you're an enlightened leader, go to a board and understand that intuition is a data point. So what I'm not [00:26:00] saying is that intuition is the only data point. 

Ad: Mm-hmm. 

Natalie Nixon: But what I, but what I am saying, Mo, is that in this time when AI is taking over basic tasks... You know, I was just, I was just in a conversation earlier where people were like, "Well, how, how will we, how will we future-proof ourselves? How will we job-proof ourselves?" The way you job-proof yourself is not to master an AI tool. Like, that's a total waste of your time. The way that you stand out and are significant and needed and necessary is to amplify what makes you uniquely human, and to use all of these assortment of tools in a complementary way. So understanding the vast array of data that we have to our avail is really the key. To only stop at- дереначально …orig littlezw März研究лишком em aстройствапреки6зкиiquement [00:27:00] We are in the middle right now, Mo, of a, of an imagination era. And we are actually not in the midst of a technological revolution. We are in the midst of a human revolution. And what I'm seeing so many people getting wrong is they are being consumed by fear, [00:28:00] FOMO of not adopting the right technology platform versus having a prototyping approach, experimental approach before you investing so much money in, in the solution that you're seeing your competitors do. What are, uh, small stakes ways that you can test these out and absolutely u- use your intuition and not... And b- and just to put a bow on this part of our conversation, the reason I got really interested in the role of intuition in leadership and business and strategic decision-making is because when I was this director of the Strategic Design MBA program, on Friday evenings, we, we would invite successful startup leaders, entrepreneurs, executives, and consistently when they would share their origin story, across the board, there was always this moment in time they would say something like, "Something told me not to do the deal," or, "Something told me to hire her and not him, and she turned out to be the best partner I ever had that is responsible for the, our business growth." And that something [00:29:00] is intuition, and we don't touch intuition in business school, in medical school, or in law school, and yet every successful leader, when they're reflecting back on their success, acknowledges the role of that nudge, that intuition. So that's really my point. I, I, I am a very hybrid thinker. I never have an either/or approach. I w- but I do think we, we have got to be much more forward-thinking and expansive in our approach of how we're thinking about data, and intuition is, is one example to start including. 

Mo: A- and I would also just, since you, uh, brought AI to the conversation, I mean, we all know you don't just plug something into AI and use whatever it gives you. Like, w- we have to use our, our skills and our intuition and, and, uh, the years of, of practice that we've done whatever we've done.  

Natalie Nixon: Absolutely. 

Mo: Yeah. Uh, so Natalie, you've worked with a, a CIO at a law firm, uh, who focused on normalizing curiosity across his team. Uh, what did that actually look like in practice, and what, uh, shifted [00:30:00] as a result? 

Natalie Nixon: So it was a really interesting engagement for a CIO of a law firm. And I'm married to a lawyer, so I'm very aware, uh, that certainty and being able to, uh, have, present out linear outcomes is very much valued. Um, but this was a really interesting example where they wanted to normalize curiosity so that it did not feel punitive in their work environment. So one of the things that we practiced, and, uh, it's, it's a, it's a very helpful tool that anyone can start to integrate, for example, when they're leading meetings, is something called question storming. And question storming is different than brainstorming. Instead of ideating on answers and solutions, you build up that muscle and that practice to ideate questions. So let's say the prompt is a new hiring model or a new marketing tool or a, um, what to do for the holiday party. It doesn't really matter what the prompt is, but instead of ideating a bunch of answers [00:31:00] and solutions, what you're ideating are questions. And even specifically in question storming, I like to start by asking people to ideate and to make a list of just what if questions. And it can take just 90 seconds and give people stretch mark of trying to ideate like 20 what if questions around the particular prompt. That's quietly to yourself, and then you pair off. So if you and I, Mo, were doing this on a Zoom call or a Teams call, we would then in a breakout room share and compare the questions that we came up with. And 90% of the time there's some nice overlap and merging and mashup of questions, and then that, maybe that's done over a period of like five minutes, and then we come together as a larger group and we as a pair, we share our top two favorite questions that we heard from each other. And then the leader of the meeting can gamify this. You can make it a competition. You can vote on the group's favorite questions, and that can become a question that you decide to focus on. And what this did for this team is it began to [00:32:00] democratize, you know, between extroverts and introverts. It began to shift the ways that they thought about their work. It made them a lot more courageous about raising their hand in meetings, especially outside of the IT area in, in the law, in the law firm, and to be much more, um, bold in their thinking and imaginative in their thinking. So, so thinking in questions is something that my colleague, uh, Warren Berger talks a lot about, writes a lot about in his books, um, "A More Beautiful Question." So I really encourage your, your viewers, your listeners to, to try quiet storming because if it can be done in a, an environment like a law firm, it can be done anywhere. 

Mo: Well said  

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Natalie Nixon: SHRM 

Mo: Uh, so, uh, as you've shared, the ability to lead with intuition and creativity can make a big impact on a business. Let's discuss how leaders can build these practices into, uh, their routines. So for leaders listening right now, what is one habit they can adopt this week to start building creativity into their daily lives? 

Natalie Nixon: I'll give you two examples. One is on, on a personal realm of something they can begin doing this week, and another is something they can bring into the office. So on a personal level, I really encourage everyone to become a clumsy student of something-  

Ad: Mm ... 

Natalie Nixon: in their life. There has to be something in your existence where you are not the smartest person in the room, where you're a bit clumsy at it. And what it does is it helps to activate what I call the three I's. It activates inquiry [00:34:00] and improvisation and intuition. What that's actually doing is it's activating different neural synapses in the brain so that when you return to the work at hand, those neural synapses are a lot stronger. And I noticed in myself when I began to be a little less shy about raising my hand if I didn't understand something, if a new client was talking, was, you know, putting on all these acronyms and I had no idea what they were talking about, I asked the clarifying question, and the world does not come to a screeching halt. In fact, a lot of the time people forgot why they-- why do we call it the ABC of XYZ, right? So become a clumsy student of something and hopefully it's something that, that is joyful for you, that you really look forward to doing. For me, it's ballroom dance. I also am new to open water swimming. Um, it s- on some days it, it works well and smoothly. In other ways, it's, it's really frustrating. I also started taking French. 

Mo: Mm. 

Natalie Nixon: Uh, I speak Portuguese, Spanish. English is my first language, but I, I'm tired of going to Paris and Parisians looking down on me, so I decided let, let me at least try. [00:35:00] So it's very humbling. I'm not good at it at all. Um, the second thing I would, I, I would recommend people do is to try something called doodle sprints. Doodling has nothing to do with your ability to draw. It has everything to do with your capacity for abstract, complex thinking. Because if you can explain something with a simple doodle, and I'll, I'll-- Let's just do a, a quick example. Uh, hopefully this will come up on the screen. But I just doodled a circle plus a square, an arrow, and a triangle. It's really crude. It's not impressive. It's clear that I don't know how to draw well. But anyone from the back of the room could take a look at this and they could-- you could see that abstractly the circle is, is, um, a metaphor or a symbol for something. The plus sign means you're adding in this other entity, and it leads to delta change. And what begins to happen is that you [00:36:00] get clarifying questions. "Well, what do you mean by that? Well, what if instead of we did all of that, we only did like 50% of it?" And so then maybe the person says, "Oh, that's a good idea. Maybe we just, you know, we darken out half of that circle, because we're only gonna start with 50% of this idea." And it invites-- it really democratizes the process. So what that looks like is just to take, again, there's the, whatever the prompt is, and take three minutes. Maybe you start solo by yourself if you're shy to share this with the team, and just practice doodling your idea about what you're thinking about, and then workshop it with other people. Ask for clarifying questions. Doodles are the start of building a culture of prototyping, and that's a great way to begin.  

Mo: All right. Doodling, uh, we shall. Let's, uh, continue. So do you have, uh, a success story that you can share of how leaders building the muscle of doing new things helps them in their work? 

Natalie Nixon: Yeah, I'll share one. Um, this is an attorney, a high-- a, [00:37:00] a, uh, very driven female attorney, partner at a law firm who kind of reached, um, a crossroads, uh, and a block and, um, worked with her on a, on a couple of occasions to help her reimagine what's next for her, not only in her personal life, but also creatively and what she was thinking that she was capable of, especially as she was... A big passion of hers is to lift up more women in the field of law. And that unlocking her capacity for wonder, for rigor, led her to start a new initiative. Uh, it also led her to go for a really major, uh, case to, to, to lobby for, that she would be the, the attorney on record to lead that, and she got the opportunity. But it just, it just started to build what's called a creative confidence in her. Um, and that really just starts right by devoting the time and the space to rethink the ways you've always done things. And most of us are so [00:38:00] busy playing catch-up, reacting, um, that we never are actually devoting the time to, um, to reframe, and that's a lot of what, what I help people to do. 

Mo: Yeah. And I, I also would gather, Natalie, that, uh, from your perspective, creativity is not a one-off event at an annual offsite or a hackathon. Uh, how do you shift from that one-time activity to an embedded leadership practice? 

Natalie Nixon: Well, I think I've given a lot of examples in our conversation that really focus on the meeting. The meeting is a really great place to start. Meetings are what I call the OG artifact of organizational culture. Mm-hmm. We can tell so much about our organizations and our teams' leadership styles by the ways we meet, the cadence of meetings, who leads meetings, how long meetings last. So beginning to just readjust, not throwing the baby out the bathwater, but readjusting the first 10 minutes of how meetings start- Mm ... how meetings end. Um, that's a, that's a great place to begin [00:39:00] to dial up people's capacity for questions. I shared question storming or even for thinking in abstract, complex terms, um, through doodling. And, and then again, the doodling is also going to build that capacity for prototyping. So I would highly recommend that people start where they are with what they have to work with, which is the meeting.  

Mo: You know, that one if tool alone is, is wondrous. I've, I've used it before and, and literally in two, three minutes y- you can get a lot of, uh, a lot of juice out of, out of those questions. So- 

Natalie Nixon: Exactly ... 

Mo: it's not so hard. 

Natalie Nixon: It is not. It is not. And it's fun. I know. Go figure. Yeah.  

Mo: Absolutely. Um, so another thing that's on top of each, uh, leader's mind is retention. How does a culture of creativity specifically impact whether people stay or leave? 

Natalie Nixon: Well, the, the statistics on burnout are really staggering. Um, they went from about 70% of, of, of, of employees reporting burnout around 2021 to now it's down to the low [00:40:00] 60 percents. Um, it's very high for Gen Z, it's a lot lower for, uh, the boomer generation. Um, but burnout is something that is, um, you know, it, it leads to knowledge transfer, it leads to absenteeism, it leads to, um, lower productivity, it leads to higher insurance rates, and it's estimated that burnout is equivalent to about $300 billion a year in cost to American businesses. Mm. Um, one of the, the root causes of burnout is, um, not being able to slow down, something I've mentioned several times in our conversation. Not having the ability to really tap into deep thought, reflection, curiosity. Not being given the time to actually engage in experimentation of ideas, in wonder and rigor. So, um, creativity and building that capacity for creativity in the ways I think about it as, as toggling between wonder and rigor is actually the best [00:41:00] antidote for burnout and increasing retention. 

Mo: Love it, love it, love it. We're gonna close with a bunch of, uh, quick rapid fire questions. Uh, first instinct, no thinking. Are you ready? 

Natalie Nixon: I'm ready.  

Mo: All right. One word that leaders overuse when they actually mean creative. 

Natalie Nixon: Artistic. 

Mo: Huh. The most underrated place to find creative inspiration. 

Natalie Nixon: Nature.  

Mo: Hmm. Uh, finish this sentence. The biggest creativity killer in most organizations is... 

Natalie Nixon: No. The tyranny of no. The tyranny of no is where great ideas go to die. 

Mo: Hmm. 

Natalie Nixon: And we've alwa- we've always done it this way.  

Mo: Yeah. Uh, one book outside of your own that every leader serious about creativity should read. 

Natalie Nixon: Oh gosh, I have a lot. Um, Your Brain on Art, A More Beautiful Question, The Creative Habit. I would start there. 

Mo: All right. [00:42:00] And our final closing question: What is one piece of advice that's shaped your work or personal life? 

Natalie Nixon: Keep your eye on the donut, not the hole  

Mo: Ooh, I never heard that before. Love it. And that's where we'll end it for this episode of People and Strategy. A huge thanks to Natalie for your valuable insights. 

Natalie Nixon: Thank you for having me. 

Mo: Thank you. Thanks for tuning in. You can follow the People and Strategy podcast wherever you get your podcasts. Also, podcast reviews have a real impact on podcast visibility, so if you enjoyed today's episode, leave a review to help others find the show. Finally, you can find all our episodes on our website at shrm.org/podcasts. And while you're there, sign up for our weekly newsletter. Thanks for joining us, and have a great day 

Natalie Nixon: SHRM