Unlocking The ROI of Creativity With Natalie Nixon

Skot Waldron (00:00.216)
doing okay, but sometimes it doesn't when I hit record and keep recording. anyway, if it gets all glitchy, just hang out with me. It's going to be fine. and it's recording high res on your side and on my side. don't go anywhere. If it, if it bombs out, I'll come back and I can edit afterwards. Cool.

Natalie Nixon (00:18.734)
Do you do video and audio or just audio? Okay, so I'll try to look into the camera.

Skot Waldron (00:21.848)
I do audio and video.

Whatever you want to look at Natalie, you know, you're the guest, but yeah, just, um, whatever you're doing is fine right now. Right. You just want to, I don't know if you're flipping up and down. What's fine. Um, how can I serve you best today? What's what's, what's your goal? What are you working on right now that I can kind of weave in?

Natalie Nixon (00:35.042)
Okay.

Natalie Nixon (00:48.302)
Well, first thank you as always for having me on. It helps to amplify my work and my message which I know we'll get into. If you would direct people to my website. I don't know when this comes out. Do you have an idea of when it comes out?

Skot Waldron (01:02.35)
It'll probably be February-ish timeframe.

Natalie Nixon (01:04.938)
Okay. So then in that case, I think the most evergreen message would be to invite people to go to figure8thinking.com. That's the number eight and to subscribe to my newsletter, which is obvious when you get to the homepage and that way they'll learn about some exciting boot camps we will have launching throughout 2025 and to definitely follow me on LinkedIn because that's where I also share out lots of content. But sign up for the newsletter, the ever wonder newsletter.

on figure8thinking.com

Skot Waldron (01:36.954)
Cool. Speaking, you're out there in the world doing your thing. Okay. Is that the main part of your business or is it the coaching part?

Natalie Nixon (01:43.34)
Yes. Yes.

Yeah. So, yeah, I don't know who your audience is, but yeah, that's also pretty obvious when they get to the website, but I help leaders and organizations apply creativity's ROI to get better business results. So I'm always connecting the dots between creativity and business impact. I, yeah, I'm a global keynote speaker. I'm an award winning author.

Skot Waldron (02:05.092)
Okay.

Natalie Nixon (02:13.322)
and an advisor. yeah, love to do keynote speaking. that's of interest to your guests. They should get in touch with me.

Skot Waldron (02:16.738)
Okay. Yep. And your book.

Natalie Nixon (02:21.858)
The book is called the creativity leap, unleash, unleash curiosity, improvisation and intuition at work. the book before that is a book I edited called strategic design thinking. And my next book, I'm actually spending my winter break, tightening up my final manuscript is a book that comes out in September 2nd, 2025. If you want to announce that, that would be awesome. It's about redesigning work.

Skot Waldron (02:24.346)
Okay, when did it come out?

Skot Waldron (02:46.233)
Cool.

Natalie Nixon (02:49.132)
And the name of that book, the third book which comes out in September is called Move, Think, Rest, Redefining Productivity and Our Relationship with Time.

Skot Waldron (03:01.314)
OK. my goodness. We will always need that. So that's awesome. wow. Very cool. Well, congrats on getting the manuscript done. And you already have a publisher for it?

Natalie Nixon (03:06.894)
Yes

Natalie Nixon (03:12.642)
Thank you.

Natalie Nixon (03:17.964)
Yeah, yeah, it's published by Hachette on the Balance imprint.

Skot Waldron (03:19.832)
OK, all right. Cool, very fun. All right, well, let's rock this thing.

Natalie Nixon (03:27.479)
Okay.

Skot Waldron (03:30.552)
Any questions you have for me?

Natalie Nixon (03:32.714)
No, I read it. I read your bio, scanned your website. So I know that you're not Scandinavian. Love your work you're doing. Now I'm just happy to get into it.

Skot Waldron (03:37.688)
Yes, thank you. Okay.

Skot Waldron (03:42.916)
Cool. Awesome. Alrighty. Well, then let's have some fun. All right. Here we go.

Skot Waldron (03:52.566)
Natalie, let's do this thing, you ready?

Natalie Nixon (03:55.668)
Awesome, I'm ready.

Skot Waldron (03:57.4)
Well, I'm just going to coin you the creativity genius. Is that cool? Can I do that? I know, I know, I know. Especially coming from me. no, we're going to talk all about creativity and it's something that I love and something that I think gets lost. And I'm willing to bet you think the same thing.

Natalie Nixon (04:03.316)
wow. That's high praise. Thank you.

Natalie Nixon (04:22.272)
I do. am in total agreement with that. Yes.

Skot Waldron (04:25.004)
Okay, why are you in agreement with that?

Natalie Nixon (04:27.712)
Well, I believe that, and I've experienced that to be human is to be hardwired to be creative. I've also experienced that in a lot of my corporate advisory work, I would, I hear murmurings of comments such as, I'm not a creative type. We'll have the creatives over there work on XYZ. But it's, it's coined as a way of almost like creativity is an addendum to the important stuff of management and finance and.

and strategy when actually if we're trying to consistently and sustainably innovate, we actually have to start with creativity. But the challenge is that a lot of people, not everybody, but a lot of people think that creativity is something that only artists do. And so my work has really been about to dispel the myth that creativity is woo-woo, that creativity is something that only artists are great at, and to really help people realize that

Skot Waldron (05:13.944)
Hmm

Natalie Nixon (05:26.382)
creativity is the engine for innovation and that it is an imperative. It's actually essential for our productivity, for our well-being, and for our sustainable growth.

Skot Waldron (05:38.958)
When, when is the last time, let me ask you this, you're, you're in a room full of people and you heard somebody say, if you're not creative, please leave. Like we only want the creative people in this room. Has anybody ever said that?

Natalie Nixon (05:53.352)
No, I haven't heard that one, but I have heard kind of dismissive remarks about the creatives as if they are this blob of people. And in corporations, some, not all, they tend to be talking to people in marketing and branding and design and advertising. What I always like to remind people of is that artists and designers are exceptional at wrestling with the ambiguity of the creative process.

The reason why I think we try to give ourselves a break from embracing creativity is that it's actually hard work to be creative. It's not something that you were, that the gods from above anoint a few, talented few. It's something that is about, I like to say, toggling between wonder and rigor to solve problems.

Skot Waldron (06:49.178)
Hmm. Wonder and rigor. That's beautiful. Um, yeah, cause I mean, I just, I get really frustrated when people are like, oh no, no, no, I'm not creative. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no,

Natalie Nixon (06:59.178)
I do too.

Natalie Nixon (07:06.766)
Thanks.

Natalie Nixon (07:16.51)
Well, it absolutely gets drummed out of us in our educational system. And I like to jokingly say I am a recovered academic. So I was a professor for 16 years, even before that chapter of my career in my 20s, I was a middle school English teacher. And I reflect on the fact that I went through three very different sorts of educational experiences between ages four.

and 17. So I started out in a, I mean, that's really four types of learning experiences. I started out in Crunchy Granola Unitarian Nursery School, Cooperative Nursery School. then, I'm from Philly and then I went to Philly Public Schools from kindergarten through third grade. And then I went to suburban public school from fourth through sixth grade. And then I went to Quaker Prep School from seventh through 12th grade.

And the reason my parents decided it was from urban Philly public schools to suburban public schools is because my mom was spending so much time teaching us a lot of basics, our multiplication tables. And she was in the school so often, some of my friends thought she was a teacher in the school. So my parents were really frustrated with that. We ended up going to a school in a suburb of Philly where we learned our three Rs really well. And I was a stellar student.

But what I realized by the time I got to this Quaker Prep Schools, I had gotten really good at staying in my lane, giving the teacher what he or she wanted, filling in the dots, making sure I got my gold star. I was very attuned to what it would take to get that gold star or stars on my worksheets. And then I get to this private school where the culture of learning was so different. It was all about falling in love with the process. It was all about,

ask a different question. It was all about beg forgiveness, not permission. And I was frozen with like fear. Definitely the first year of seventh grade, little bit into eighth grade because it was so much to maneuver and to adapt to. And by the time I was end of ninth grade, I really hit my stride again. But what if everyone, not just people who could afford private, expensive private school education, but everyone

Natalie Nixon (09:39.502)
was in a school environment that really fostered. So what we learn from that mistake? It's not about the right answer, but about asking better questions and what's the process that we can fall in love with. So it's really about cultures of learning that we have been exposed to. And we tend to think that it's more efficient to teach to the test, to make sure that we have these standardizations of learning. But one the things I've learned in

growing up as a lifelong dancer is that the arts really teach learning for mastery. So it's less about the grade, but you advance once you have demonstrated mastery. And that could happen in two months or it could happen in two years, right? But that sort of culture of learning is something that I think really helps to, instead of dimming the light of our creativity, really expand that light because creativity

is so inextricably linked to problem solving and ambiguity, which we are never going to get away from ambiguity and problem solving.

Skot Waldron (10:48.13)
I think a lot of organizations and I'm going off of some of your thinking here is that, Organizations look at this creative process as kind of a, we only need it right here. And then we don't need it anymore. Right. we just needed at the very beginning of concepting this idea or whatever. Let's get all the people. And then when we go to marketing, that's when all the creative, the other creative stuff happens.

but when, when you talk about it, you think of it as a must have, not a nice to have. why should organizations think about it that way?

Natalie Nixon (11:29.698)
Organizations should think about creativity as an imperative and as a must have for several reasons. Number one, they will be able to attract and retain the best talent if they build cultures of creativity. And again, if they want to embrace my way of thinking of it as talking between wonder and rigor, they also need it because they also need to think about creativity as this must have because whether you're talking about

launching new product into market, developing a sourcing supply chain strategy, figuring out a better financial model. These are all initiatives that require wonder as well as rigor. They require creativity and creative problem solving because nothing in real life looks like a Gantt chart, nothing. Nothing looks like this lockstep process.

When I worked in the fashion industry for Division of the Limited Brands, I worked in global sourcing. And if I took away nothing else from that chapter of my career, is that if anything that could go wrong will go wrong. There's gotta be a big wedding and a village that is home to like 40 % of the people who are on this, working this garment assembly line. There's a strike at the port.

There is a climatic event that's going to stall shipments and the inputs from the mills getting to the factory, right? So this need to be adaptive is never going away. Whether you work in strategy, finance, supply chain management, you need creativity and that creativity as a competency, thinking of it as a competency, thinking of it as a KPI.

in order to be nimble and adaptive in what all great business schools like to point out as VUCA environments, environments that are volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous. You need creativity to navigate that ambiguous environment.

Skot Waldron (13:38.052)
There's a really big idea around that and this whole idea of motivation and where we go with that and thinking about that. How you talked about retaining talent is a, is a reason. Now I can just take your word for it and just go, okay, but what do you have to back that up?

Like why would you say that creativity is essential to retaining talent?

Natalie Nixon (14:11.502)
A few statistics. So back in 2015, the Rural Economic Forum declared that creativity would rank as the number 10 job skill by 2020 and beyond. This was in 2015. One year later, they said, hang on, we've actually revised those numbers. We now think that creativity will rank as the number three job skill for 2020 and beyond. That was in 2016.

Last year's World Economic Forum Future Jobs Skills Report in 2023 ticked up creativity as the number two critical job skill that companies needed to recruit for by 2027. So it's now not just number three, but the number two job skill by a very storied institution like the World Economic Forum. Another data point comes from research, 2023 research from Market Splash.

Their research learned that 70 % of executives believe that creativity is essential for market competitiveness. 70 % of executive leaders believe that. On the other hand, research from, I'm just forgetting the source, I can send it to you, but research from another organization in 2023 have found that 60 % of people

you know, just slogging away every day, do not believe they have reached their potential creatively. And so what those two data points show is a major gap analysis as to all three show, a major gap analysis between us recognizing that creativity is essential now more than ever. And I'll talk to that in a moment. But at the same time, people don't believe they're given the space and the time to be creative. So we are increasingly

We being, you know, researchers much smarter than MI, big storied institutions like the World Economic Forum understand how essential creativity is. And yet we continue to work in a way. We design work in a way that doesn't allow for people to build that creative capacity. And the reason why this matters now more than ever is for three essential reasons. Number one, unprecedented burnout and quiet quitting. Number two,

Natalie Nixon (16:33.166)
new rules for hybrid work. So the COVID pandemic was this really unfortunate experiment, proof of concept that we actually can work in much more flexible ways if we need to. have the technology to allow for that. And the third driver for why we need to redesign work and build a more creativity is because of technology, ubiquitous technology that can do basic tasks. It can replace things that...

Actually, the opportunity now is to allow for what makes us uniquely human to expand at work. And what makes us uniquely human is our capacity for the imagination, for curiosity. That was a time for greater experimentation, collaboration. These are all the components of creativity.

Skot Waldron (17:22.138)
The, uh, the I'm reading prime to perform right now. Um, not sure you've read that book yet. So, uh, Steven shed, let's ski. Do you know shed? I'm not sure it can go shed. Okay. Um, he was another guest on my show, amazing person. Um, and you worked with Simon Sinek and still does, uh, quite a bit on, some of the things he's doing, but prime to perform talks about the, um, motivation factors in a team and what it takes to do that. And at the top of the.

Natalie Nixon (17:32.439)
No.

Skot Waldron (17:51.85)
of what they've determined through research and through other things that they've looked at is that the idea of play is the top leading indicator of direct motivation, like a direct cause of people feeling motivated at work and feeling like they're going to get something. And that idea of play is, I think what you're talking about, creativity fits into that idea of play. But as Shed talked about a lot too, it's...

It's how do we create an idea of psychological safety to where people feel like they can be creative and play and experiment and imagine and wonder and all those things. So what do you think holds people back from, I don't know, expanding into that full potential of like, I want to be imaginative and I want to wonder and I want to be creative and I want to ask questions, but I don't.

Natalie Nixon (18:50.902)
so, so first just to build on your points about play. Yes, play is essential for a really dynamic future workplace. And, one of the people I interviewed for my next book, which is about redesigning work in a more humanistic way is Brendan Boyle, who is a toy designer. teaches, visited his, visited his course on play at Stanford and

He talks about how the opposite of play is not work. The opposite of play is boredom. And the reason why play is so essential is because it actually activates all of the attributes that we equate with executive leadership skills. So when we are at play, we must get better at actively listening, at empathizing, at asking better questions, at negotiating, at collaborating. These are all the skills that we want our leaders to have. So why wouldn't we devote

more time to foreplay, gamify things, et cetera. The reason why we don't see people taking the plunge and having the courage to be more creative, to be more playful, to be more curious, for several reasons. Number one, it's not modeled for them enough. Let's say it is modeled. Some people are not intrinsically motivated just by what they see other people doing. Maybe it needs to be built into an incentivization plan.

maybe in terms of you'll be given more time, you'll be given more money. Maybe you could gamify ways to build in creativity, play, curiosity. And one the things I always caution leaders about is the way to get, for example, people more curious and do normalized question asking in the workplace so it doesn't feel like it's punitive if I ask a question and get my hand slapped, but to actually make it a part of the culture is that it's not enough for leaders to say,

Okay, guys, give me your best questions. I'm all ears. You will probably be met with crickets and like during the headlights because most of us at some point in time have been questioned, shamed. We've dared to raise our hand, ask the question. We were either met with giggles or even worse silence. And you soon get the message. That's not what we do around here. We don't ask a lot of questions around here. So the way to model it is that leaders actually have to be a bit more vulnerable.

Natalie Nixon (21:12.376)
humble, transparent, and they have to practice self-inquiry and sharing the questions that they are beginning to pose about a project that launched six months ago and say something to the effect of, know, that project we launched and we thought it was going just fine. And the just individual feedback I've been getting from the team, I've realized that maybe you all aren't all admitting it out loud, but I think we are...

having some fatigue around the project. And I was wondering, what if we kind of regrouped, started all over again, and maybe even approach that former competitor to collaborate with us and model some co-op petition, right? That vocalizing of self-doubt and acknowledging this is not perfect, acknowledging new questions is a green light and opens up the...

the space for more people to be brave, to ask questions themselves when it is modeled by leaders.

Skot Waldron (22:12.198)
I am, I guess I get encouraged when I see certain things happen. mean, when you look at what Google's doing with their 20 % work policy, where 20 % of their time is supposed to be, they can allocate towards innovative projects or things outside of their core responsibilities. When you see things like that now, that's Google, right? And, but that's led to so many product innovations.

inside of Google too, things that they've done, but also allowing people that freedom to exercise that part of their brain so that when they do get into the core responsibilities of their job, they can be a little bit more innovative in question and break molds and kind of do things outside of the box. Now I know that there's a lot of in the box people that are like, no, no, no, no, no, stay in the box.

Don't go outside the box because we like the box. If there's structure around the box, it's predictable. It's got boundaries. Like people, there are people that really need the box. And I, and I get that. So let me go, let me go there for a second. What do you think about the idea that of those individuals that are very structured, they're very linear in their process. That's how they think and that's how they work and that's how they live their life. And there's those other people that are very exploratory.

everything and sky's the limit and we can do all these different things. How do you bring together those two types of personalities in a culture and build a culture of play and curiosity and creativity?

Natalie Nixon (23:50.56)
Those are actually the best cultures when you have that multiplicity of styles and of what feels normal and safe for me. So I naturally dwell in this sphere of wonder. I love big picture thinking and asking big juicy what if questions. It requires me to double down a little bit more for the rigor. let me also just...

Clarify, just an update. Google actually does not do 20 % time anymore. They decided, I don't know the behind the scenes conversations, but they decided to shut that down. But what's really cool is that Gmail was birthed out of that. there's other, companies can still do their own versions of 20 % time and giving people time to tinker. But the though.

In my parlance, the wonder and the rigor is a really dynamic copasetic coexistence. I've written about, need both. Wonder is found in the midst of rigor. Rigor cannot be sustained without wonder. Wonder is about curiosity and audacity and awe and pausing. It's really hard to wonder when you're going 80 miles an hour. Rigor...

is not rigidity in some of the clients I've had in the initial time of our work together, they're kind of conflating rigidity with rigor and they're very different. Rigor is about focus, time on task, discipline, skill mastery. And so the way I like to think about it, I created a card game called the Wonder Rigor Discovery Deck. When I was first prototyping this game and I would observe people playing it,

So there were four, there was a two by two, course, because I'm a nerd and I love two by twos and frameworks. And I created this two by two that was looking at dimensions of when you're working with high rigor and low rigor and high wonder and low amounts of wonder. And so there were four dimensions of that. So when you're working with a lot of rigor and very little wonder, I call that specialization. When you're working with low rigor,

Natalie Nixon (26:03.186)
and low wonder, call that hacking when you're just duct taping everything together. We work with a lot of wonder, a little bit of rigor. That's called being super audacious. And then there's the domain that we all want to get to working with both wonder and rigor. But when I was first prototyping this game, I would overhear people say, I'm a specialist or I'm a hacker or I'm a provocateur, the audacious

Quadrant and what I didn't want people to do is say I am this sort of archetype because that actually misses the point the point is to become adaptive and Situational so as I've just admitted I love dwelling in the space of time and space of wonder but there's no way I could have for example, I Completed a PhD while working full-time in four years. There's no way I could have done that without

A healthy dose of rigor, which is about time on task, doing the darn thing, unpacking it into all its components and taking it step by step by step. So situationally, it's important to identify how much more wonder do we need to build into this process or how much more rigor. Who are the people who are specialists who we know can give us that dose of rigor?

Who are the people who will really just knock our socks off and help us to think so much more expansively about this? And that's when it's really a beautiful dynamic to have this range of people who naturally gravitate towards the lines and the linear thinking versus people who do not. know, Twyla Tharp, who is an incredible American dancer, choreographer, she wrote a really great book called The Creative Habit.

She famously wrote that before you can think out of the box, you must start with the box. You need the box. You need to know the rules so that you can break them so that you can stretch them and rebound off against them. The last example I'll just share is my husband, John. John is an attorney. He's an executive compensation attorney. He kind of built his career as a tax benefits lawyer. So he's a very different type of beautiful brain than I have.

Natalie Nixon (28:16.146)
And I see the creativity in his work all the time because he feels very secure and safe in the plan. However, his job is really to do scenario planning. His job is to really, given the law, given the realities of the constraints that we're working with, what are different angles and ways to think about this problem? That is a creative act. So no one gets off the hook saying,

I like rules and I like standards and I like, you know, great, you are also creative, you know? So it's part of all of us and all of the prowess that we can bring to a problem at hand.

Skot Waldron (28:58.702)
What do you think the difference is? And I don't know if you have any thoughts on this or if you've done any research on this or you've read any research on this, difference between the now adults who continue on the framework of, I'm a creative person. Cause I believe that as children, we don't think we're not creative or are creative. just kind of are, we just do our creative thing. Right? We play and we.

make things and we draw things and we say, I'm going to be an astronaut when I grow up or whatever we say. And then at some point, whether then it's staggered throughout everybody's life of when it turns off of when all of sudden we stopped doing the wonder thing or we stopped doing the creative thing, whatever we define creative to be. What's the difference between those that grow up and continue to have that thought versus those who grew up that say, no, I'm not.

I'm not creative. I'm not like, what's the difference between those personality types? Do you know? Do you think about that at all?

Natalie Nixon (30:01.774)
I think that it's not so much some of us turn it off and that's it. Some of us keep it on. I think that I think creativity loves constraints and that when you reflect, when most people reflect back on their lives, they are really turning on the creativity during times when there are credible constraints, constraints on time, constraints on money, constraints on people, talent. And,

we tend to keep going in the direction where we are rewarded, where we see positive results. So for some people, the positive result might be in the form of, feel really great about myself. I feel more productive. I feel like I have purpose when I'm behaving and working in this way. For other people, that realization comes in bits and spurts, or it comes much later in their lives.

I link it back to intuition. And I think that intuitively, all of us at some point are driven to a much more creative approach. But depending on how loud that judgmental voice is, that's not practical. That will make you money. That makes no sense to people on the outside, can be a deterrent. I know in my case,

when I was in college trying to decide what to major in, I wanted to really not disappoint my parents. They invested a lot in our edu- in a very expensive education. I wanted to please them. but the subjects that I loved, I was like, my gosh, there's no way they'll support me in that. And it was when I was having this conversation with them and I admitted, air quotes, I really loved culture and anthropology. And I also love these courses in Africana studies. You know, they said,

almost at the same time, that's what you should study. And my dad said, Natalie, if you study what you love, you'll have to turn away opportunities because no one will have to tell you to get up earlier, stay later, stay longer. And that was like this load was lifted off of my shoulders. And I will tell you that now that I am in my fifties, I really witnessed friends and colleagues who having these, these crises of life of figuring out.

Natalie Nixon (32:23.212)
What is it that I really want to do? Who am I? What do I love? What's my purpose? And I think that following that intuition to guide you to follow your heart, to do work that may not make sense to others on the outside is actually a more efficient way to live. Now, I know that people like Scott Galloway, my dear friend Seth Godin have a very different opinion about that. And it's not to say that you don't

You're not practical. I've been incredibly practical to sustain my life at various stages and getting work that I need to do, but I've never forsaken listening to that nudge. And I've never ignored that drive to still, you know, do a mashup of the wonder and the rigor.

Skot Waldron (33:15.236)
That's beautiful. When you write about these things, you, in fact, you have a new book you're working on, that comes out September, 2025. If you're listening to this before that, stay tuned after that, go get it. So, but excited to hear about that because it talks about this idea around creativity, but also the idea of, of.

work and how we think about work and how we need to rest from work and those ideas. I don't know how, how do all those things interplay together when we're really talking about work and then how much we work and the, and the rigor part of work and the wonder part of work and the rest part of work. How do you, how do you bring all those together?

Natalie Nixon (34:05.964)
Well, when I think about my portfolio of offerings and work, whether it's wonder and rigor, the three eyes, which is how you activate wonder, rigor through three eyes or inquiry, improvisation and intuition, whether it's the leap method, method to go from a fuzzy ambiguous crossroads to actionable next steps or the motor framework, which is about move, think and rest. All of these

these platforms ladder up to helping people get to creativity's ROI. Creativity absolutely has an ROI. There's not a fuzzy dotted line between creativity and business impact. There is a solid bolt line. And my next book, which thank you for the shout out. Yes, it comes out September, 2025. It's called Move, Think, Rest, Redefining Productivity in Our Relationship with Time.

And the reason I wrote this book is because I was observing people kind of dying a slow death at work. And also people having experienced in this trust gap with this onslaught of technology and feeling this kind of inner terror of like, what does this mean for me and my place and my value? And one of the things I propose in this book is that we put our...

are old models of productivity to bid because the way we've thought about productivity is really a relic of the first industrial revolution. The ways that we think we have thought about productivity do not make sense as much anymore in a world where we do work that is based on the intangible that we cannot see. So for example, GDP has no way to measure search engines. There's no way

to measure so many of the tools that we use that are to borrow from what feminists call invisible work. So the reason why we need to redesign work is that we have an opportunity to shift away from a way of thinking about productivity, which is based on what's visible, what's fast. We measure what we can see. We value what we can measure. It's outputs based and shifting to what I call cultivation 2.0.

Natalie Nixon (36:24.578)
So before the first industrial revolution in the 1860s, most societies around the world, where the economy was tied to the land, it was tied to agriculture. And in an agricultural based economy, cultivation is the MO. So where productivity is kind of an either or paradigm, cultivation is both and. Cultivation values spurts of growth and slow. Cultivation values the solo practitioner and the collective.

and cultivation values, we can see on the visible realm and what's happening underneath on the dormant level. So this is what I'm really proposing we embrace, not just in the future of work, but now because we have technology that can do basic tasks. have unprecedented levels of burnout and we have new rules for hybrid work. So we have all these great opportunities to,

put humans back in the center of work. So that's what MOVE think rest is about.

Skot Waldron (37:28.827)
very good. Okay, cool.

You're speaking everywhere about all kinds of stuff around this idea. And people are like, I want more of her brain. want more of her smart brain. I got some of your smart brain here on the show, which I'm so grateful for. but people want more of your smart brain because you have a smart brain, Natalie, and I think people should hear more of it. So, but they want to find out more how about how to get you to come speak at their events. where do you speak?

Natalie Nixon (37:54.552)
Thank you.

Skot Waldron (38:02.532)
How does that all work and how do they get you?

Natalie Nixon (38:05.154)
Well, thank you so much, Scott. I, if people go to figure eight thinking.com, it's like figure eight ice skating, but it's the number eight, not spelled out figure eight thinking.com. One thing to do is to sign up for the ever wonder newsletter. So there's going to be a link. That's pretty obvious at the top of the page is signed for the newsletter. That way I just described to my blog, get my newsletters, get really actionable content that you can deploy in your personal life with your team.

There, I'm always interested in speaking around the world, whether it's on a topic around leadership, around change management, around future of work. The common thread in all of my keynotes is again, creativity's ROI. That's the lens that I use to think about change management, supply chain management, leadership, et cetera. It's really about helping you to understand that creativity can amplify business results.

So there's an easy link to use to get in touch with me. can have a short chat. I'd love to learn more about your event. And of course, ways to dig into my content or buy the books, check out the card game and follow me on LinkedIn.

Skot Waldron (39:16.386)
Rockstar, thank you. Please, please, please keep preaching this. The world needs to hear it. And I mean, I see the slow death at times too. I just see the struggle, you know, I see the struggle and the pressure and all the stuff. And if we could just integrate a little bit more of this idea into our work culture and what we're trying to do and be, we would just, I wonder what we'd be capable of, you know?

Natalie Nixon (39:21.943)
Yeah.

Natalie Nixon (39:45.694)
well, we, first of all, it's totally within our grasp because this is less of a technology revolution. This is a human revolution. We keep putting our focus on the tech. We keep putting our focus on the speed. We're forgetting that because we can get the answers this more quickly, now we have time for spaciousness. Now we have time to collaborate. Now we have time for greater experimentation.

Skot Waldron (39:46.036)
Natalie Nixon (40:10.038)
So what I do in this next book is lay out some very practical things that you can do. I lay out the why and then the how. But what this world could look like is a world where more of us are flourishing and where we are truly using our imaginations for good and for dare I say, better business results. The two are not mutually exclusive.

Skot Waldron (40:34.17)
Keep bringing it, Natalie. Keep bringing the smile. Keep bringing the good, the good smart stuff. I appreciate you.

Natalie Nixon (40:40.248)
Thank you so much, Scott, for having me. This was a great conversation. Thank you.