Dr. Natalie Nixon grew up in Philadelphia playing double dutch and hopscotch on the street. Listening to jazz with her dad and exploring art with her mother taught her the value of improvisation and emotional resonance. Flexing her academic excellence while also being subjected to racial bigotry and red lining helped to hone her ability to see systems and span boundaries. Her experiences are vast and varied, from running a hat business in New York city to earning her PhD in Design Management in London. Today she's the president of Figure 8 Thinking, a Creative Strategy & Design Research consultancy that helps leaders apply creativity & foresight to achieve transformative business results, and the author of The Creativity Leap: Unleash Curiosity, Improvisation, and Intuition at Work.

Read the full transcript here.

Natalie Nixon: We need to figure out, as I put it, how to toggle between wonder and rigor to solve problems. That’s how I think about creativity.

Amy Devers: Hi everyone, I’m Amy Devers and this is Clever. Today I’m talking to Dr. Natalie Nixon. She’s the founder and president of Figure 8 Thinking, a creative strategy and design research consultancy where she helps leaders apply creativity and foresight to achieve transformative business results. And author of The Creativity Leap, Unleash Curiosity, Improvisation, and Intuition at Work. Born and raised in Philadelphia, her story takes us all over the world, from running a hat business in New York City during the early days of Hip Hop to making bras and panties and learning female leadership dynamics in Sri Lanka, to earning her PhD in design management in London. Her experiences are vast and varied and have all added up to the creative strategist, hybrid thinker, boundary-spanner and all around fascinating person that she is. Here’s Natalie.

NN: My name is Natalie Nixon, I’m the President of Figure 8 Thinking and I’m a creativity strategist. I’m based in Philly, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. My mission and my work is to change lives with ideas and I do that by building people’s leaders… Specifically more often than not, their creative confidence, so that they can get paid their worth and make an impact for years to come. And I do this by applying my very loopy background [laughs] in culture, anthropology and fashion and foresight.

AD: Ooh, So, I always like to go back to the childhood and in your TED Talk you told this great story of connecting with your dad over jazz. I like to hear about what kind of kid you were, what your family dynamic was like and how you experienced your hometown from young eyes? Can you set the stage for us?

NN: Yes. I am a Philly girl, born and raised. It’s funny because there is this saying among a lot of Philly people, that Philly people either never leave, or if they leave, they don’t come back. And then there’s that critical mass of us who do leave and come back and I’m part of that critical mass. And I grew up in the city, in Philadelphia in a community called Mount Airy. One thing to know about Mount Airy is that Mount Airy historically went through that classic example of red-lining. And so when my parents bought their two story duplex, twin, in the late 60s, it was that example of sale signs started to go up on the block by a lot of white families. And there’s West Mount Airy and East Mount Airy and East Mount Airy is the more proletariat side of Mount Airy.

I grew up in East Mount Airy, so I grew up playing double Dutch and hopscotch with chalk on the street and playing tag and definitely had that 1970s childhood of during summer days my mom would send me and my sister out to go play and the admonition was, you need to be home by the time the street lights come on and we did that [laughs]. I come from a really loving family. My mom, Carol, is truly an artist, she was a weaver, she is one of those artists who never quite figured out how to earn a living through her art. And my parents made the choice that my mom stayed home with us as we were growing up.

And she, like so many women in the 80s, it’s the time of, remember Dolly Parton and Jane Fonda, that movie -

AD: 9 to 5.

NN: 9 to 5. In the early 80s, by the time we were tweens, she went back out into the job market and my mom ended up being an executive assistant to some of the top researchers at Merck. My father was an incredible man, he died in 2012. He was a big jazz head, as you’ve already referenced and he had an incredible work ethic. He made the majority of his income as a pharmaceutical sales rep. His dream was really to be a dentist. He ended up having, getting a degree in denturistry from McGill University in Montreal. But he was a real hustler and he was what can be called a race man.

He was incredibly proud of being a black man in America. He was actually named after Fredrick Douglass. So his name was Frederick Douglass Weathers. It was weird messaging from my father because I think of him kind of as a kind of classic chauvinist, but we constantly, my sister and I, got messages to, you know, girls, you’ve got to have your own, girls, this is the right way to wash a car, get out here, mow the grass with me. He was very much about self-sufficiency and what he honed into us.

And at the same time he dated us and he wanted to expose us to the best and he was at every single dance recital, every single track meet. And my father was a real hustler. At one point my sister and I, we graduated from a very wonderful and elitist prep school in Philly. We went there from 7th through 12th grades and at one portion of time there, my father was working three different jobs to make sure our family could come up with the tuition money to get us through.

And education is prime in my family and I grew up with the messaging that my father was sacrificing for us to go to these schools. He didn’t mince words about that, he wanted us to be clear that this was not just a given to us. So I grew up in Philly, a real urban kid. I started taking public transportation around 4th grade because I was also part of kind of one of those classic 70s and 80s tales in American public school education where while I started out in urban public school, kindergarten through 3rd grade, my mom who was incredibly involved in our school.

My parents quickly saw that it wasn’t working well because my mom had to fight for us to be in the advanced placement courses, class sections in the public school in our neighborhood.

AD: You were being discounted without, like discounted and shuttled away from proper education.

NN: Absolutely. And this was a school that was 95% African American and when I would go into those classes, I was the only little brown kid and my mom would say, well how are you liking the classes and I would say, “I don’t like them.” And she’d say, “Why not?” And I’d say, “Because my friends aren’t there.” And she’d say, “That’s why you’re there.” [Laughs] But my father figured out that if we went to a neighboring suburban public school, we’d get a much more solid education. But in that school environment, for the first couple of weeks in 4th grade I was called the n-word every other day.

And that was my first consciousness about race and racism, at nine years old. By the end of 4th grade I was friends with those same boys because I was a pretty good athlete, very athletic growing up and play kind of helps kids to bridge those differences. But we were in that school environment from 4th through 6th grade and then went to German Town Friends School, a really great school in Philly from 7th through 12th.

So, I grew up very early needing to learn how to span boundaries. There were the kids back on the block; there were the kids in my church environment. There were the kids, my family members and then there were these very different school environments that I was exposed to, which I understand now really, I benefited from because it helped me to become multilingual. It helped me to become incredibly observant and to have a real clear sense of self-awareness. It’s something that I now call ‘boundary spanning.’

AD: Boundary spanning is a really good way to put that. It’s fascinating and heart-breaking, also, but interesting that you’ve been able to distill and synthesize all of these different sections of your childhood, into a more comprehensive understanding of how systems work.

NN: Yes.

AD: And how the systems were, in some ways, helping you even though they were also creating these really unfortunate social situations and I’m also wondering how you were feeling in this really loving family system where it was very clear that there were sacrifices being made so that you could be a part of this education which was also sort of a mixed bag for you. Did that put undue pressure on you or how do you feel like that informed your identity as it was growing and evolving?

NN: That’s a great question. I definitely experienced an incredible amount of; I’ll say cultural dissonance growing up -

AD: That’s a great way of putting it, yeah.

NN: Now that I’m older, I don’t know that that experience was incredibly rare. I’m African American, there are so many African American, black and brown people in our country who grow up dealing with that sort of cultural dissonance. And perhaps it was a situation of, take your medicine now or take it later. I think eventually I would have needed to adapt. I would have needed to figure out how to be multilingual. I would have needed to figure out how to convert my perceived deficiencies, my perceived disadvantages, my perceived, you know, fill in the blank, into assets.

And I’ve got to be honest, that didn’t happen immediately, at all, and I liked the way you use the word ‘systems’ in your question because being a boundary spanner means you really are learning to be a systems designer. When you are on the margins, no matter what it is for you, in my case it’s typically because of my ethnicity and my gender. But every person listening to this has had some experience where they have been on the margins.

And the gift of being on the margins, I now understand, is that it gives you incredible perspective. Because I am a black woman who is highly educated, who has a confidence about myself, when I walk into a room where I’m typically the only one or one of a few, what that has meant is that I need to, in pretty quick succession, identify the power dynamics, have been able to cultivate incredible political savvy. I have really poignant EQ. A lot of black Americans joke that being black in America means that you are excellent at making white people comfortable with you. [Laughter] You really are good at it.

You don’t even realize, like that’s what you, that’s a pretty savvy move that you constantly have to do, is to make other people comfortable with your presence. In my 20s, I had my hands on my hips a lot, I was like, this isn’t right, this doesn’t make sense that there’s so few of us in these rooms, at these tables. And then I shifted in my early 30s and that was because, I realize now, it was because no matter how much my mom and dad had been trying to explain this to me for years, I’ll put that aside, it was because I had this incredible career opportunity in my late 20s where I ended up living abroad in Sri Lanka and Portugal and travelled throughout Asia making bras and panties for Victoria’s Secret brand.

I worked for a division of the Limited brand, it’s a company called Mast Industries, which is now its own stand-alone company. When I live in Colombo, Sri Lanka, I would often find myself in meetings led by really dynamic powerhouse South East Asian women who would show up to these meetings, were typically buyer, merchandize teams from the West, from USA or Europe, would be courted and wined and dined and get tours of the factories and go through all their expectations for a really big order.

And these are women who would show up in their saris or when I was in Hong Kong they would be dressed to the nines in incredible funky fashion. And I would observe, because that was really my role at that time, I did not have any clout in the organization as it appeared to these women. I would observe the ways they would, in a really kind of subversive way, convert the perception of them into an advantage. And I would observe that these typically white Americans or Europeans would enter their place of business and these women had an agenda from the beginning to the end. And by the end of the meeting they had gotten exactly what they needed to get.

And that was something that I observed over and over and I’d be yeah -

AD: So fascinating and because you had this heightened sensitivity to all the boundary spanning and the perspective from the margins and the EQ that you talked about, you can read the room and see the emotional and power structure topography even though it’s technically invisible. You can read it. So when you go into these experiences, all of this is demystified for you because you have this, I guess extra toolkit or really honed toolkit that you’re working with. And so that must have been informative to see how that played out.

NN: And you know, it was like I had up to that point been learning the alphabet. At that point I was basically learning the basic rules of grammar for this language of what I’m now calling boundary spanning. And it was seeing it modeled for me in action, that I became more fluid in it. That I saw more modeled for me by specifically Asian women, executives, how this thing can work. How this can really be an incredible currency. And so by my 30s I totally had a very different perspective about being the only one, being one of a few, albeit, it’s not where we should be, I started to convert it into an asset.

AD: Do you think that that had anything to do with high context cultures versus low context cultures?

NN: Yeah, I do, absolutely, the ability, I mean to make huge generalizations, in South East Asian cultures, first of all, gender dynamics can be very different, although they have a much better track record of having women in political leadership as queens and as presidents and prime ministers, that sort of thing. But there’s a different way that social hierarchy is understood. Observation and listening happens very differently and that is something that I learned, that was a huge lesson for me. And then I began to connect the dots back to being an African American woman in the United States.

It was like, so, because I see how this works, huh, this reminds me of that time when… But this reminds me of, you know, this situation, when I’m in a situation like this in the future, maybe I could try to ask the question in that way. Or wait a beat, you know what I mean? So that was the lessons that I took. But even though I wasn’t exactly articulating it as such in the way that I am now, it was watershed moment. It was huge.

AD: Wow, okay, so chronologically, I want to go back a little bit because I know you studied anthropology and Africana Studies at Vassar College and so at the point that you have this job opportunity and you’re working in fashion, I’m assuming that’s after you got your masters of science in global textiles?

NN: Yes.

AD: So you have a lot of education and I don’t know if it played out back to back to back, it sounds like there was some work experience in there. Can you just kind of do the bullet points of how this played out chronologically in your life and then we’ll fill in the gaps?

NN: I graduated from Vassar with a double major in anthropology and Africana Studies and by the way, it was only about three months ago [laughs] that I realized, reflecting back on my studies, I was having a similar conversation as what you and I are having right now. I realized that studying Africana Studies, which was basically an incredibly multidisciplinary, transdisciplinary major, where we were learning about people of African descent in the African diaspora, from the perspective of sociology, economics, philosophy, literature etc. And I actually ended up doing a double major in anthropology because for some odd reason there were no cross-listed courses between Africana Studies and anthropology, so that’s why I ended up doing a double major. I realized about three months ago that studying Africana Studies was my first foray into systems thinking and systems design. I didn’t know it then but because we were being trained to think about a group of people as part of a larger network and understanding that when one node in the network, maybe a historical point, maybe a social event, had a cascading effect throughout the system and were really educated to be curious about that to get more finessed at connecting the dots between having a systems perspective, that’s really where I first honed my chops in that.

Even though more formally it was what I earned a PhD in design management. So I just want to do a shout out to anyone who is studying ethnic studies in that kind of way, in a very multidisciplinary way, that there’s a real traction, I have found, in my work later in business, absolutely. So yeah, my undergrad degree was in anthropology and Africana Studies. I have to do another shout out to my parents because when I had to declare a major, I was terrified that I would pick the wrong major, that I wouldn’t get a good J-O-B at the end of a lovely and expensive education.

And I called home to my parents and they qualmed my fears and they both, almost at the same time said, Natalie, you should study what you love. And my father said to me, if you study what you love, you’re going to have to turn down opportunities. And he has never been wrong about that. When you study what you love, when you’re doing what you love, no one has to tell you to stay up longer, get up earlier, you know, put in the extra time. And so you create -

AD: That’s such a gift from your parents, to give you that -

NN: Oh, huge gift! It was this load that lifted off my shoulders. So that’s what I studied undergrad and I was given that permission by them to follow my heart. And I then worked a very short stint in City Government, New York City, then I became a middle school English teacher at an amazing school in Manhattan on the Upper West Side for poor, smart kids. And in the middle of all this I started a hat design business. And I started Nats Hats -

AD: I love you! [Laughs] Nats Hats, this story just gets better and better! [Laughs]

NN: Well, I started Nats Hats out of need, I couldn’t afford to buy all the little pretty frocks in all the boutiques in Manhattan, so I started sewing everything. I sewed my winter coat; I sewed outfits for work because my mom taught us how to sew when we were girls, like eight/nine years old. And my friends would say, Nat, you should sell this, I would totally buy this. And I would say, oh, I can’t sell this, I just make it because I can’t afford anything.

And on one of my many subway rides back and forth between work and home, I started dreaming about, maybe I could do that and if I did start a little fashion biz what would I want to make and what would I call it and I thought, Nats Hats is fun, it’s rhymes and hats are easy and cool, this is the beginning of hip-hop as well in New York.

AD: For context, what kind of year are we talking about?

NN: This was between 1991 and 1994, this was Mary J. Blige, What’s the 4-1-1, this was Spike Lee and the Marcellus Brothers were blowin’ up at Fort Greene, Brooklyn, this was all the parties in the meat packing district were literally in a banded warehouse, the meat packing was not what it is today [laughs]. And it was one of those moments, you don’t realize, I am Gen-X and I’m part of the generation that launched hip-hop and we had no idea what we had started and what we were a part of. And it’s pretty awesome when you think about it in that way.

But doing Nats Hats, which was totally this entrepreneurial wing and a prayer, taught me so much. The business was never profitable, to be quite honest with you, but I learned that I loved bringing something from concept to market. And my hats were sold in little boutiques in Manhattan and Brooklyn, a few in Philly, where I’m from. And I did it for about three years and I kinda got the bug for business, which is why about seven years out of undergrad, I ended up doing a master’s degree in global textile marketing.

I frankly didn’t know if I wanted to go back to school yet. I thought maybe I should just try to get more experience, but this was a program that was so cool because we studied for four months in the States, four months in Israel and four months in Germany. So I finished that degree by age 28 and then I was hired by Mast Industries and that’s when I got to make bras and panties all around the world for the Victoria’s Secret brand.

I then got tired of being in different time zones from my family and friends. And I found out through a series of informational interviews, I got an offer to join, what at the time was Philadelphia University, which is now Thomas Jefferson University. And got an offer to become an assistant professor there. And about six, no, maybe five years into being an assistant professor, I was promoted to associate professor and by then my mentors were recommending that I earn a PhD. They said, you know, you love teaching, you’re a great professor, this will just give you a lot more options in higher ed and frankly, I was really dragging my feet. I was like, I really don’t need to prove up to anybody how smart I am and on a little itty-bitty topic, which is how I thought about doctoral studies.

Looked at a few programs in the States, realized none of them were really cut out for me for where I was in my life. And I was on my way to London in 2005 and a week before I left a friend sent me an email and said, have you heard of this field, it’s called design management, it’s totally new. And I had never heard of it, I Googled it, saw it was huge in the UK and Europe and I then looked up if there were academic stuff related to it. There were.

And I basically just emailed directors of doctoral programs in design management at Leeds, Manchester and Westminster and said I’ll be over there next week if you have some time, I’d love to chat with you. And long story short, I ended up doing my PhD at the University of Westminster in London. And the Brits have a very different approach to the doctoral process. They have a timeline, they have a deadline, so I had to finish in three to four years or else the clock would start over.

And it’s much more like an independent study, which is the good news/bad news, they give you enough rope to either fly or hang yourself. So I was working full time while earning my PhD in the field of design management. I focused more specifically on service design and that’s where you heard a lot of the ideas in that TEDx Philadelphia talk I gave in 2014 that the future of work is jazz, that the most innovative organizations are actually improvisational. That was totally an outgrowth of my doctoral studies.

AD: So design management, for our listeners and also for me, can you give us an overview of what that might mean academically and what it means professionally?

NN: Sure, so design management really started out as a field to address the hybrid work that designers often have to do once they reach management level. They have to apply their skills, craft, technical know-how around design, but they also need to start managing people and they need to start understanding much more explicitly the business impact of design. And so from an academic perspective it was this emerging field that people realize, should be addressed. It was incredibly hybrid; you’ve already gotten a sense that I really am drawn to interdisciplinary hybrid fields.

And so it was really this kind of catch-all for the intersection of design and business, is kind of the short end of it. And then you will see in some companies, there actually are titles of design managers which in the academic realm, it started to grow a little bit beyond that. So that’s why service design is sometimes an area of those programs and experience design and emotional design, all cool hybrid mash-ups of words and of practices that I just found super compelling.

AD: After achieving your PhD, Dr. Nixon, did you, I mean that’s pretty cool [laughs].

NN: Thank you.

AD: Did you want to go back into academia or is this about when you conceived of and felt compelled to form your consultancy, Figure 8 Thinking?

NN: I was super into academia still. You know, to be honest with you, when I was in undergrad, I dreamed of becoming a professor. In fact my primary professors, by senior year at Vassar were really encouraging me to get my PhD in anthropology. And I thought being a professor would just be the dream job and what happened was, I [laughs] ended up, so I had done my undergraduate thesis on black women’s hair culture and what’s interesting is I did my thesis on black women’s hair culture after having lived abroad in Brazil my junior year, I was in Bahia.

And I was just observing how the whole hair thing, how it showed up differently for black Brazilian women than black American women and took that topic and ran with it when I got back to write my thesis and my professors were like, this is awesome, you should consider this. So I remember I attended a meeting of the American Anthropological Association, I’m probably botching up that name. And I just got so turned off by how myopic, my opinion, I felt the field was at the time. It was still, cultural anthropology still very much, was typically black and brown people, you rarely saw anthropologists studying corporations or white middle class American families, which of course now that started to shift quite a bit.

But I just felt like huh, I think I want to work a bit more. I don’t think this is quite for me. So fast forward after working in industry, I’m now a professor, I’ve completed this PhD, I’m still loving academia. I’m loving the way, I believe I can contribute to it and we had a new president come on board at the University, Steve Spinelli, another very hybrid thinker, he was co-founder of Jiffy Lube, he had a PhD in economics.

And he came on board, I would start chirping to him in the provost office and any leaders deemed to listen to me. Listen guys, this whole thing called design management, design thinking, this is really cool. This makes sense for the ethos of our university; we should be doing something in this space. And what often happens in any organization when you start piping up loudly like that, they turn to you and say, okay, you do it.

So I did and I, with the help of some amazing colleagues, I launched the Strategic Design MBA program and I launched that in 2013 and a year later I gave the TEDx Philadelphia talk. That TEDx Philadelphia talk around the future of work is jazz catapulted me into starting to get invited into companies and organizations to share these ideas and facilitate workshops. And after about six months of that, John, my husband, looked up at me and he said, babe, this is like a thing, you need to formalize this.

And I was like, okay, so I created Figure 8 Thinking. And at the time Figure 8 Thinking was just my side hustle. It was the holding arm of all my practice and I then looked up a year later in 2016 and realized, huh, I’m starting to have more fun with my side hustle projects than I am with what was becoming a real bureaucratic load as a program director. And I wasn’t having as much fun and as you know now, I followed my parent’s advice of following my heart, of doing what I loved.

Now, I can recount all of this now in a very glib way, but it was my first world existential crisis because here I was, by this I had 15 years in. I had put in so much sweat equity, so much hard work, there was status attached to being a professor, there was my ego involved and I really had no idea what was awaiting me on the other side of really leaving, you know, the perceived safety of academia and becoming a full time entrepreneur.

And I have to give a ton of credit to my husband, John, who is one of my biggest encouragers, who, John is an attorney, he is the yin to my yang, he’s a planner, he’s much more linear thinking than I am. But he saw in me this excitement and this passion for being entrepreneurial. And in fact I was a very entrepreneurial academic; I did a ton of stuff under the radar. I tended to ask forgiveness, not permission. And he saw my increasing frustration with the bureaucratic load.

And he said, you’ve got clients, you should try this, you can always go back to academia. It was about a year of personal work, I call it now my year of developing my own creativity hacks, which I’ve now converted into a course, it’s called Your Creativity Leap. I made the leap. And I have not looked back. It’s been incredible. So, to answer your question, I loved academia until I didn’t anymore and when I didn’t anymore, I had to really do very hard emotional work dealing with my ego, dealing with my dreams, dealing with my confidence about what else might I do.

AD: Well, and there’s a lot of uncertainty in the entrepreneurial sphere, you’ve already had a taste of it with Nats Hats and so you know it can be a complex hustle and you saw your dad sacrifice so much for your education and now you built this really strong foundation, so I can imagine leaping from that would have been kind of counterintuitive but as I read in your Forbes profile, you believe there’s a direct line from creativity to business results and in some way I think the universe was pushing you to live that personally, so that you could practice it wholeheartedly.

NN: Yeah, you’re right, there is a lot of, a huge amount of unknowns, a huge amount of ambiguity. There is this perceived safety and security in academia, why would I leave that for something that I have no idea how it’s going to turn out. Often, as I was creeping closer to this decision, to move on from academia, I would wake up some nights in a cold sweat and think to myself, what if the clients I have, what if that’s just a fluke. What if the only reason they really like me is because I have the halo of academia, will anyone pay me to do this work once I step out on my own?

I’ll tell you something funny, for the first year after I left academia, I feel like it was about, on a weekly basis, my mother would call me or when I’d be with her she’d say, she would think she’s being slick and she would just kind of calmly bringing up the topic, she would say, how are you doing, are you okay? Do you regret that you left and I’d say, no, I’m good. And then that shifted to monthly and then once a quarter and now probably like twice a year she’ll [laughs] ask me.

So I’m coming from a place where, what are you doing? You’re fine, you’re good. So to make that shift I really did have to practice what I now preach, which is that as you just said, there’s a solid bold line between creativity and business impact. And the reason I call myself a creativity strategist, first of all, I made up the title, I had never heard of a creativity strategist before, but I thought to myself, if I’m gonna do this my way and in the way that makes sense for me, I might as well go full out.

I chose a title that encapsulates what I’m really good at and what I love. And I was observing, especially among my corporate clients where often I’d be hired to help them build cultures of innovation, they were throwing around the word ‘innovation’ quite a lot and it ended up being a bit copy/paste, it wouldn't be sustained. And I thought, there’s something amiss here, we’re missing a step. And it became my opinion that the step we were missing was to actually start with creativity.

The problem, of course, is that you can’t very well lead with creativity in most corporate environments, right? And that’s because creativity isn’t actually understood and that began my work of figuring out, okay, how could I offer a simple, accessible, democratized way to explain to these folks that they are A, all are creative, it’s just a matter of exercising that capacity. And that creativity is actually the engine for innovation, that sought after in result of being innovative. And that began a lot of the, I began to have a bit of a side hustle on the side of Figure 8 Thinking to really figure out how to help people be more creative who are in these corporate environments where they have KPIs, where it’s about shareholder value, not stakeholder value.

How do I help them lead with creativity and really hire for creativity, cultivate this creativity and sustain it? And that’s how I got to ultimately writing the book, The Creativity Leap.

AD: Well, I’m high-fiving you so hard over here. In a systems thinking kind of way, I know you made the leap from academia to being an entrepreneur, but at the same time you’re teaching, just in a different sector. And -

NN: Yeah.

AD: The work that you’re doing is making a business case for creativity which ultimately blows back very favorably onto our educational system in support of creativity. So it’s all connected and I think you found that the path where you could create the most impact started to be in a different place than academia. And you’re making a very strong case for it. I want to hear about writing the book, but I don’t know if you can hear it, my heart is full because I’m so excited at the work that you’re doing -

NN: Oh, thank you!

AD: I’m in academia right now, I’m a full time professor of furniture design at Rhode Island School of Design, so I have very strong feelings about empowering creative agency in people and also strong feelings about economic drivers that are creativity based. So more power to you, let’s talk about Creativity Leap because this is a really exciting book that you’ve written that anybody can get their hands on.

NN: Well and just to build a bit more on what you’ve just shared. For me Amy, I realize I was becoming less enchanted with the business of higher ed and much more interested in the future of learning. And when I realized that was the shift I was making from education to learning, I then realized that gosh, learning could happen in so many places, in so many ways. And so my mission of changing lives with ideas, which is what got me out of bed every morning when I was an educator, it’s still what motivates me and drives me in my work with my clients.

And I even have, I think it’s right now a download on my website, it’s about the business ROI of creativity that when we are creative, we necessarily, especially in organizations, you’ve got to have more inventive thinking and when you have more inventive thinking, that means you uncover different business models, which lead to new strategic partnerships, which result in new revenue streams. That’s a business impact.

When you’re more creative you ultimately can drive creativity further when you collaborate which, let’s face it, collaboration is hard. [Laughs] People just kind of want to stay in their silos, I get it, but there’s this proverb, I think it’s an African proverb that, ‘Alone faster, together further.’ And when we collaborate, especially in creative endeavors, we have to unpack our jargon, we have to learn new jargon, we have to start answering questions about the way we do things. We can pose questions to others and when we collaborate, we end up being more productive which leads to increased efficiencies and when efficiencies increase, costs go down. That’s a business impact of creativity.

And there’s a few more that I list, but those are just a couple of examples of how creativity is not this frilly whoo-whoo addendum. It is A, all of us are hardwired to be creative, what I talk about in The Creativity Leap is that we have ghetto-ized, creativity among artists in the arts, which isn’t fair to artists.

Creativity is the means to the end for artists, but creativity is the means to the end for every great engineer's work and scientist’s work and entrepreneur and techie’s work and educators work. And we need to figure out how to, as I put it, toggle between wonder and rigor to solve problems. That’s how I think about creativity, I defined it as toggling between wonder and rigor to solve problems and produce novel value that could be social value, financial value, cultural value.

And in the book, I try to be both inspiring and super practical, so each chapter ends with Creativity Leap tips for the individual, for the organization and it wasn’t enough for me to just end on toggling between wonder and rigor to solve problems. That’s how you’ll be creative. I realize it would be helpful to offer people ways to exercise that and that’s where my Three I framework comes in handy, so the three I’s are inquiry, improvisation and intuition. Those are the ways we can exercise and get better at toggling between wonder and rigor.

AD: Just to back up a little bit, can you elaborate on what you mean by wonder and rigor as the two main arms of creativity and how they work together to solve problems?

NN: Yes, wonder is about awe, audacity, asking big blue sky what-if questions. And wonder is also about pausing. It did not escape me that right now during the covid quarantine, we have this big pause, especially in the beginning months. That was very difficult for a lot of people, for a lot of organizations. But it’s really an opportunity to engage in wonder, to redesign our relationship with time, to redesign our relationship with our work, with our family members, with ourselves. Rigor is about discipline and time on task and it is incessant practice in showing up over and over and over again.

And rigor is not sexy. It’s often very solitary work. And it was important for me to have people understand that both of those domains, wonder and rigor are essential in creativity because I was tired of people saying, oh, I’m not a creative type or I’m not creative because I can’t… You know, fill in the blank, paint, sing, draw, dance etc. And that creativity is hard work which may be more of the reason why we don’t see it showing up because it’s hard. You know, I listened to a great interview on the podcast, Hello Monday, with the actor Laura Linney and she talked about how there’s always this moment in every live theatrical engagement she’s done during the rehearsal process where the cast hits a wall.

It hits a wall of ambiguity and all the things that they thought they were ra-ra’ing about at the beginning stages of rehearsals and had such clarity on, you hit these walls. And she just talks about how artists are exceptionally good at sitting with the discomfort of ambiguity because artists realize, you’ve got to fall in love with the process. And what’s happened in our educational systems is that not all, but a lot tend to err on the side of what’s the answer? What’s the solution?

Fill in the dot with your number two pencil and don’t draw outside the dot, right? Versus being educated to explore process. Because the truth is -

AD: This whole concept of, there’s one right answer, is also really doing a disservice to critical thinking.

NN: Right. Even let’s take a subject like math, even though I never considered math to be my forte, the best math teachers I had.. you could arguably say, well, in mathematics there’s one answer right? But my best math teachers were much more interested in how did you get to that answer and all the different ways you could get to that answer, right? It was still about process. The other thing that happens when we err on the side of the solution, what’s the answer, is that we stem, we stifle curiosity. We stifle, right -

AD: Yes.

NN: The encouragement for people to ask a different question, ask a better question.

AD: Okay, so toggling between wonder and rigor makes a lot of sense in terms of solving problems. You mentioned the three I’s, inquiry, intuition and what was the other one?

NN: Improvisation.

AD: Improvisation, can you break down those a little bit? I am so fascinated.

NN: So inquiry is curiosity, it is fundamental to being creative. Knowing how to ask questions is learned behavior. Actually maybe it’s not because when we’re small, when we’re, like toddlers, we’re so good at asking questions. Because we understood at a young age that inquiry is the beginning of exploration, experimentation and discovery. And then somewhere along the line, in the way we’re educated, it only becomes lumped with ignorance.

And of course you’re ignorant about something, you ask a question, you ask the question, but I’ve gotten so much knowledge and inspiration by reading the work of Warren Berger and Ian Leslie, Warren Berger wrote A More Beautiful Question, Ian Leslie wrote a book called Curious and you know, Warren Berger reminds us that asking questions is a way of thinking. What if we had more schools where you were rewarded more for the questions that you posed and then the pathways of discovery you took on.

What if more of our work cultures were ones where curiosity was modeled in leadership? So that’s inquiry. Improvisation is not about being able to do a really great jazz riff solo, it’s not about being a great comedic improv, stand-up comedic artist. It’s about being adaptive. It’s about the build; anyone who has taken any kind of introductory improv workshop knows it’s about yes and… Not yes but or a flat out no. And that’s what I mean when I say it’s about the build, it’s about being super present, actively listening and that’s what it means to be improvisational. Improvisational systems are adaptive, they are emergent and they’re self organizing. We see that in jazz music, we see that in nature, in the way forests grow over eons and we see that in the way our bodies heal, these are all complex systems, creativity is a complex system.

And then intuition, I define intuition as pattern recognition. Intuition is key to decision making. I interviewed over 50 people for The Creativity Leap and all successful leaders acknowledge intuition coupled with their decision making. And intuition is like a sonar and a muscle, the more we use it and listen to it, the stronger it gets, the clearer it gets. And the more we ignore it, the flabbier it gets and the dimmer it gets. So I was really jazzed to learn from… I participated in a great conference series called BIF. The year I presented, Kelly Black is an executive coach and she talked about the Vagus Nerve in her talk, it was the first time I’d ever learned about it and the Vagus Nerve is our, each of us is equipped with this internal antenna. It’s the only nerve that extends from your cranium down through your heart into your gut. And so there really is something to, when we say my gut tells me, right?

AD: Yeah.

NN: Or my heart is telling me, it literally is, there’s this hard-wiring in us to connect them. So we’re doing ourselves a real disservice when we don’t try to teach it and have people explore it in business school, in law school, in medical school.

AD: Oh, I love hearing this, I agree with you wholeheartedly. And one of the things that came up for me, as you were talking about this, is how we equate inquiry with ignorance culturally at a certain point. The asking of questions is not met with the kind of reception that it should be. And I think the cousin to ignorance is exasperation. I can remember so many times my questioning just being met with exasperation from people who probably didn’t know the answer and so didn’t want to entertain my questions because they were uncomfortable with their own, I guess perceived ignorance. Or just didn’t find the value in my questioning. And I feel like, these are like little toxic vapors that kind of squish curiosity as we grow. [Laughs]

NN: I love that!

AD: Or suffocate curiosity and just to put another point on it, I love that you framed so much of your work around the business ROI of creativity because one of the most damaging myths, I think, that is pervasive throughout culture is that artists are both tortured and starving. And that automatically creates a situation where parents want to dissuade their children from pursuing the creative arts because they feel like it’s not a secure or happy future for them. That subtle dissuasion turns up in all of these different ways. Sometimes it’s exasperation, sometimes it’s encouraging them to study something that’s less creative. Before we wrap-up, I really want to know a little bit more about you personally, if you’re willing to share. I read that you love dance and -

NN: Yes.

AD: And you’ve also talked about kinesthetic learning and how rocking back and forth with your dad, listening to jazz music was a way of connecting. And so I wonder if you can elaborate on, like how dance and music fulfills a need for you?

NN: Well, it turns out that while I did not go onto become a professional dancer, one who earned her living through dance, I use dance constantly, my dance training. I started out studying. I started out studying court technique, modern dance at age four. And I was in a very hippie [laughs] environment and my mom says that she first put me to dance class cause she would observe that from my playpen, as she was doing her own exercises, I would be mimicking her. I also think it’s because I’m incredibly clumsy to this day and there’s a joke among dancers that, you know, if it’s not choreographed, dancers are a bunch of klutzes.

But what dance taught me was curiosity about other cultures, especially through music, when a piece is set to a different type of music and that you learn really, as a dancer, you’re telling stories through movement. I think about choreographers as systems designers because they are having to zoom out and put movement and pattern together in a way that will tell a story from so many different angles and dimensions.

Dancers are trained at seeing movement outside of their body, incorporating it into their own body and then executing in a way that is meaningful and makes sense to others. Dance taught me incredible discipline. There’s nothing frilly about dance. Dance is incredible, sweaty, hard, athletic work that requires you to reverse engineer the body, to deconstruct all of the movements and to hone in on stretching and toning and strengthening different parts of your body so that you can be graceful. Grace takes an incredible amount of strength.

Dance taught me how to take feedback. I think dance teachers are arguably some of the most evil people in the world [laughs] and I say that with love. But they don’t mince words; they give it to you straight. I often thought about why were so many of my dance teachers so tough and I think it’s because they were trying to prepare us for a world that’s really unforgiving. I mean the audition process is tough. You show up and you either make it or you’re cut.

And then you’ve got to show up again, and you show up again and so I got my feelings hurt many times and wasn’t chosen. And you have to learn to not take yourself so seriously. You have to learn to brush yourself off. You learn to observe not just the teacher in the room, but your friends and peers in the room. How did they do that? How did they execute that? Let me practice them in the hallway so I can learn to be better.

So all of those, and then of course there’s performance, which I took into my teaching, I take that into my public speaking and it’s just a love of art that dance equipped me with. And to this day, I did it this morning, I stretch my body 10-15 minutes every morning, it’s part of my morning ritual. Just last night I was at my social ballroom dance class, I was honing in on the West Coast Swing and the Waltz last night, but my favorites are Salsa, Rumba, Foxtrot, as a middle aged woman who is not in the same shape I was [laughs] years ago, it’s a really great way to still engage in dance.

I also take hip-hop classes, I love hip-hop dance. So that’s the way I carry dance forward in my life and it’s, right now, being a student of social ballroom is my version of the advice I give to others, which is to be a clumsy student of something. I’m not good at the Waltz. I keep messing up at the same point in West Coast Swing and I have to practice those three I’s, asking the question differently, improvising, following my intuition.

And that’s activating neuro synapses in my brain that when I come to my daily work, I show up with a creative confidence right? I don’t take myself so seriously. I dare to ask a question to a client even though I might be hesitating initially, I go ahead and I ask it. And all of those elements are the value for me of what dance has brought to me. But for anyone, whatever your jam is, whatever rocks your boat that you want to be a clumsy student of, please do it because it will build that toggling between wonder and rigor that you can then transfer into your work.

AD: That was more than I could have even hoped for, thank you for spelling that out [laughter] so beautifully. I have one last major, and it’s a big one, major question for you. As a foresight practitioner and somebody who thinks about the future of work and the future of learning, and in general you think about the future a lot, I feel like we’re in kind of a moment where all of our thoughts about the future this year have kind of really had to recalibrate and realign for maybe a new vision of the future. So as you’re thinking about the future now, what do you think? What do you think about it? [Laughs]

NN: I feel optimistic because I believe that because creativity loves mess and we’re in a lot of mess right now, more increasingly we will see people lean into going far beyond the boundaries that we’ve typically explored, to figure out to problem solve because we have to. I take great hope in that. We’re also at a time when, we’re in this fourth Industrial Revolution where technology is ubiquitous and that actually is going to make more room for the human to show up. So for those reasons I am, I’m a practical optimist and that’s why I’m optimistic.

AD: More room for the human to show up, I want to be there for that. Thank you so much.

NN: I loved our conversation, thank you, thank you.

AD: Hey, thanks for listening everyone. To see images of Natalie’s work and read the show notes, click the link in the details of this episode on your podcast app, or go to Cleverpodcast.com where you can also sign up for our newsletter. Subscribe to Clever on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts. And if you like these interview would you please do us a favor and please rate and review. We also love chatting with you on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook, you can find us at Clever Podcast and you can find me at Amy Devers. Clever is produced by 2VDE Media with editing by Rich Stroffolino, production assistance from Laura Jaramillo and Anouchka Stephan and music by El Ten Eleven. Clever is proudly distributed by Design Milk.

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What is your earliest memory?

Probably 18 months old, waking up in my parents bed, snuggled into my mom.. very warm… shadowy images of my dad getting dressed; my parents voices sounding like ….sounds… no discernible words. I felt very safe and comforted.

How do you feel about democratic design?

Democratic design is essential. Designers get to shape the ways we move through and experience this world- so the more diverse the inputs the more innovative the output. Also, designers do not always know what people/consumers need. Designers would be better off practicing democratic design by truly observing and listening to people, falling in love with their problems. Humans tell us what they need, sometimes tacitly, sometimes explicitly.

What’s the best advice that you’ve ever gotten?

To follow my heart. My parents gave me permission to study what I loved when I was a sophomore in college. I was worried about disappointing them, not electing an impressive sounding major. My parents sacrificed a lot for our education and I wanted to please them by ensuring I got a good job at the end of the 4 years. I called home in a panic and after listening to me go through the list of topics I didn't like, my parents asked, “Well, what are you enjoying?”. I told them and almost at the same time they said, “That’s what you should study.” My dad followed up with “If you study what you love, you’ll have to turn down opportunities.” And he was right about that. They lifted a load off my shoulders. I give the same advice to any young person who asks me. Following your heart may feel like a solo trip at times and it is also incredibly liberating. No one has to tell you to get up earlier, stay at it longer, or get to bed later. You’re driven. Following your heart is about taking your medicine now- or later. So, keep at it! (By the way, I completed a double major in cultural anthropology and Africana Studies. #bestchoiceever 😊)

How do you record your ideas?

I love lists and I need to write everything down so I do not forget. I LOVE Evernote. That’s my go to. It has a doodling function and a scanning function. I have a folder in Evernote called “Write It Down”. I’ve also started using Otter to dictate my thoughts- for some reason I tend not to use the dictation function on Evernote.

What’s your current favorite tool or material to work with?

Neuland Markers.

What book is on your nightstand? (alt: What’s the best book you’ve read this past year?)

The Boy, The Fox, The Mole & The Horse by Charlie Mackesy & The Inner Game of Tennis by Timothy Gallwey- which is less about tennis and more about the inner critic and the subconscious quiet guide.

Why is authenticity in design important?

For the same reason democratic design is important- keeps you curious and honest about your work.

Favorite restaurant in your city?

Suraya- a Lebanese restaurant in the Fishtown neighborhood of Philly. Just spectacular food and great interior design- real sense of place. I love the middle east so it’s like a virtual trip there through food.

What might we find on your desk right now?

A list of things to do and the early doodling of a canvas I’m creating to help clients I coach map their next steps.

Who do you look up to and why?

My parents… Harriet Tubman… professional dancers

What’s your favorite project that you’ve done and why?

Currently it’s The Creativity Leap. It was simultaneously a challenge to write and something that I was driven to write, from the inside out. It is exceeding my expectations in terms of how the impact it appears to be making in people’s lives and work… Helping the embrace and exercise creativity in new ways.

What are the last five songs you listened to?

Can’t recall the titles but the artists were:

Melody Gardo
Etta James
Madeleine Peyroux
Chloe x Halle
Missy Elliot

Where can our listeners find you on the web and on social media?

www.Figure8thinking.com, @natwnixon on Twitter and IG, and linkedin.com/in/natalienixonphd.

Get a free WonderRigor™ Tip Sheet at bit.ly/WRTips.

Clever is produced by 2VDE Media. Thanks to Rich Stroffolino for editing this episode.
Production assistance from Laura Jaramillo and music by El Ten Eleven—hear more on Bandcamp.
Shoutout to Jenny Rask for designing the Clever logo.

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