Natalie_Nixon_mixdown.mp3 Natalie: [00:00:00] In the process of learning about improvisation, you necessarily start learning about chaos theory and complexity theory. And then I started finding the word chaos. And it turns out that the gentleman de Hock made up the word chord when he became the first president of Visa, the credit card company. He thought to himself, How could I lead this global organization based on the virtual exchange of currency in a way that mimics more of what I see happening in nature and what he didn't say. What I say is that he fundamentally was saying that organizations are organisms. Harpreet: [00:00:45] What's up, everybody? Welcome to the Artists of Data Science Podcast, the only self-development podcast for data scientists you're going to learn from and be inspired by the people, ideas and conversations that will encourage creativity and innovation in yourself so that you can do the same for others. I also host Open Office Hours. You can register to attend by going to Bitly.com/adsoh forward slash a. Ds0h. I look forward to seeing you all there. Let's ride this beat out into another awesome episode and don't forget to subscribe to the show and leave a five star review. Our guest today is changing lives through ideas so that people can build their creative confidence for years to come. Get paid their worth and make an impact. She's a hybrid thinker, creativity strategist, global keynote speaker and author, whose unique combination of street cred and scholarship has the ability to both inspire and drive action. She's got a background in cultural anthropology and fashion, was [00:02:00] a professor for 16 years and is currently president of Figure eight Thinking, where she advises leaders on transformation by applying wonder and rigor to amplify growth and business value. When she's not busy being a member of the Forbes Coaches Council or a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, you just might find her dancing up a storm in hip hop class or fine tuning her foxtrot on the ballroom floor. So please help me. Welcoming our guest today, a personal trainer for our creativity muscle and author of The Creativity Leap, Dr. Natalie Nixon. Natalie, thank you so much for taking time out of your schedule to be here today. I really appreciate you coming by the show. Natalie: [00:02:47] Hi, Harpreet Thank you so much for that wonderful introduction. You really wove together all these great nuggets. Thank you so much. That was awesome to hear. Harpreet: [00:02:56] Thank you so much. Yeah, I kind of pride myself in my introductions. I try to make them as great as possible. Thank you so much for joining us live on on LinkedIn and YouTube. And Adley, appreciate you being here, by the way. We'll be taking a couple of questions from the audience here and there. And the favorite question, I guess, will be winning a copy of Dr. Nixon's book, which I will send out to you. So go ahead and share this video with your network comments, match your reaction. You just might win a copy of the Creativity Leap before we get into your book, which I really, really enjoyed, as you can tell here by all the wonderful let's learn a little bit about you. Talk to us a bit about where you grew up and what it was like there. Natalie: [00:03:39] Yes. So I am an American. I'm an African American. I grew up in Philly, Philadelphia, on the East Coast of the United States, and I am solidly Gen X. So I grew up in the seventies and was a teenager during the eighties. And I'm the generation that birthed hip hop. So it's very much there's some real visceral and iconic moments [00:04:00] that I can tie to music into my life. And I grew up and I guess it was a lower middle class, upwardly aspiring, blue collar community in Philly. I was a city kid. My parents was very important for them to expose us to being independent. And so I started taking public transportation when I was about nine years old with my younger sister, actually, and we grew up playing Double Dutch and Tag and Jacks and those sorts of games. The front of the stoop and the streets were our playground. And I went through three very different types of schools. By the time I graduated from high school at age 17, I started out in urban Philly public schools from kindergarten through third. Actually, I should say my first indoctrination to education was in a very crunchy granola, very liberal Unitarian Cooperative Nursery School. And then I went to Urban Philly Public School from K through third grades, then suburban public school where I was the first black kid in my class. Natalie: [00:05:12] My parents made the decision for us to go to that school because the academics were stronger, but socially it was very challenging. At first, at least. I was called the N-word for a few days after school, for the first couple of weeks of school in fourth grade at age nine, and then later those same kids, we became buddies because I was I was pretty athletic and play helps kids to form bonds. I then went to a private prep school from seven through 12th grade Quaker School. And I mentioned this because that formalized socialization of education and learning, combined with what our parents equipped us with, which was, I would say my my parents were are deeply curious people. My father [00:06:00] passed away in 2012. My mom is still with us. And they really equipped us with a lot of things I talk about today. Wonder and rigor. They were pretty strict and they also were big proponents of us following our heart and our imagination. And I grew up studying dance from a very young age, from age four. But I mentioned the three different types of schools that I attended because that really shaped what I think was very early on me a. Natalie: [00:06:30] Great capacity to be an observer because I was so often the other and I had to learn very quickly how to adapt, how to make others comfortable with me and how to navigate various boundaries. And I also got exposed at a really young age to very different types of cultures of learning, which was very different in the urban public school environment I was in versus the suburban public school environment versus the Quaker prep school where I graduated high school. And I loved growing up in Philly. I know Philly. We are often a very overlooked city we're in between what are the nation's capital and one of the most dynamic cities in the world, New York City. And what Philly has is just this incredible, these very layered gifts of kind of small town feel and very kind of regular type of vibe, combined with an incredible arts, music and foodie scene. And I and I absorbed all of that growing up, especially as the older I got, I would hop from dance to dance to taking classes at different parts of the city and really got to know so many different types of people that way. Harpreet: [00:07:43] I like Philly allowed. I've been there a few times that I always enjoyed. Every time I go there, I think it's a really interesting place and I like history so much. Amazing. Natalie: [00:07:52] I'm glad you visited. Harpreet: [00:07:53] Yeah. So I'm definitely excited to get into the wonder and rigor that plays a huge theme [00:08:00] in your book. But there's an interesting something interesting you said there that that I want to kind of learn more about. You said that indoctrination to education. Talk to us about what you mean by that. Natalie: [00:08:08] Well, one of the hardest things for me when I first started at this amazing high school where I graduated from Germantown Friends School, it was this very different culture of learning. So, for example, we were allowed to call our teachers by their first name. And these some of these teachers were older than my parents. And that was very uncomfortable for me because in my culture you show a lot of deference and respect to adults. You don't call them by the first name. There was a campus I wasn't in, just in one classroom or one building the entire day. I had to navigate different spaces and be on class, on time and and and have myself collected and ready to learn. There are very different types of sports activities. I had never seen a field hockey stick before seventh grade and I took the bus back and forth to school. So in my neighborhood, walking down the street with a hockey stick after I got off the bus to get home, I was navigating quite a bit sometimes some days. So, you know, there was that. And the other thing, I mean, is that I got really good at giving the teachers what they wanted. I got very good, especially in elementary school. I mean, I was I was a smart kid. I think most children are smart. It's just a matter of having access to environments that really cultivate the type of smart that is special to you. And I had gotten really good at getting gold sticker stars on my worksheets and anticipating what the teacher wanted and that sort of thing. And then I got into seventh grade in a school environment, a learning environment where it was all about ask a better friggin question, beg, ask for forgiveness, not permission. Natalie: [00:09:59] And [00:10:00] I was a bit paralyzed because I didn't know which way to move right away. It was it was just a lot to absorb. And I saw my grades plummet in seventh and eighth grade, not because I wasn't smart, but because the emotional and mental barrage of new information and new things to absorb was a lot. And and it took a beating, I think a bit am my confidence. And once I figured out the codes, the language, the cues that were largely unspoken and once I felt more steady and having mastered that, the academics came right back again. And I and I began to excel because I was more confident in my place in that environment. So that's what I mean by the culture of learning. And I and I think to this day, what tends to happen and not in all, but in some especially urban public school environments, is, is that, you know, at least that's the way I remember. I remember thinking this as an eighth grader. My friends back on the block and back in public school are being are learning how to fill in the dots, how to stay within the guardrails. And now I'm in a place where we're learning how to make up the rules that tell people which dots to fill in. And I didn't quite have that language, but it really struck me around eighth grade that that was that was the difference in the learning environment that I was in. Harpreet: [00:11:32] Really interesting that that point about asking questions, we'll get into how to ask better questions later. But back in seventh grade, I just reminded me I actually got sent to I was called on campus suspension and a phone call home by my language arts teacher because I was asking stupid, stupid questions. Natalie: [00:11:51] You know? Yeah. You know that that reminds me of something I call question shaming. You know, that that experience that you just described. I think [00:12:00] so many of us have a moment where we experience that question shaming. It could have been on a job, it could have been in a learning environment. And that sometimes dramatically and sometimes very subtly, it starts to change the way we show up and our confidence to ask questions. Harpreet: [00:12:17] Yeah, it definitely did play a huge, I think, impact on me going going forward after that. Like I just kind of shut up in class because I mean, I grew up to immigrant parents getting on campus suspension, a phone call home. Yeah, you can imagine what I was dealing with when I got home. I had a very, very sore behind. Natalie: [00:12:32] Not good. Harpreet: [00:12:34] So let's talk about your interesting creativity research. When did that start? How did your interest in that kind of get sparked? Natalie: [00:12:40] Wow. Well, not because I think about creativity as a competency and as a capability that we all must make choices to be much more intentional about. I looking back retrospectively, I understand that I always found the stuff that I was interested in to be incredibly creative. For example, in in college, I decided as a double major in anthropology and Africana studies to write my undergraduate thesis on black women's hair culture. I was I was I had studied abroad in Brazil that my junior year. And I was just so intrigued by how Afro-Brazilian women were kind of like Afro-Brazilian culture in the nineties was kind of where African American culture in the States was in the seventies. And I would bring I asked my mom to send me Essence magazine, the copies of Essence magazine to me in Brazil. And I would show some of my friends there, and they would say things like, Why do so many black American women straighten their hair? They would just be looking at it as and I was like, Oh my gosh, I never saw that way before. But I guess there is quite a lot of that anyway that that began this, this journey to [00:14:00] really explore that from a cultural perspective, from the perspective of ritual and language and artifact and the economics of black hair culture. And this was in 1999, 81. And I remember feeling so energized by that qualitative research process. And I found it incredibly creative, as as creative as I as I found my experiences studying dance and, and being a member of the, of the dance company at the college at Vassar College, where I graduated. Natalie: [00:14:30] And then fast forward, you know, I was I ended up when many years later, when I was a professor, I followed the advice of mentors who recommended that I earn a PhD because they set your great professor give you more options if you have a doctorate. I didn't follow their advice to the T because what they didn't expect me to do was to earn a PhD while working full time, which is what I ended up doing. And I did that in four years and I did that my doctoral studies in the field of design management at the University of Westminster in London. And again, for me, anything that gives me this hum, this, this, this buzz, it's very energizing is, is creativity. And in that period, I really was learning a framework to suss together a very integrative way of thinking about the world, which had always been a part of me. I was always very hybrid, but I never had what I call the hook on, which I could hang my hat. And suddenly, when I was learning theory and epistemology and all that sort of thing around design management, I was able to frame the way I thought about creativity and business design and strategy. And so that was that was kind of a more formal way that I really began to, to [00:16:00] to dig into creativity and research. And now in my company figure a thinking, it's really an offering, a lens to help people, leaders who are trying to design cultures of innovation to instead of just starting with we got to innovate because that becomes a buzzword and people begin to be a bit spastic in trying to innovate. Natalie: [00:16:23] My offering is that we actually need to pause, take a step back and start with creativity, because creativity, from my perspective, is really the engine for innovation. Without creativity, we actually cannot innovate. The challenge, of course, is that in most of the corporate hallowed halls, hallowed halls of corporate America, if you if you lead with the word creativity, people look at you like you have three heads, because we don't understand creativity. We think creativity is something that only artists do, which then the assumption is it's is foo foo. It's, it's, it's, it's really it's an addendum to the important stuff, which is the furthest thing from the truth. Artists are exceptional and manifesting the ambiguity of the creative process. They invest the time and the space to wrestle with that ambiguity. But if you start thinking about creativity as toggling between wonder and rigor to solve problems, then you realize the best strategists, the best engineers, scientists, entrepreneurs, teachers, farmers, plumbers are super, super creative. And so now in my work, I still in many ways I feel like I'm a teacher. I just do it differently. It shows up differently, I execute it differently. But one of the things I loved about being a professor and I was a professor for 16 years before that there was another chapter of my life where I was a middle school English teacher. And what I always loved about teaching is that. I essentially got paid to learn. I love that. [00:18:00] And I still bring that to the way I show up in my work. I'm getting paid to learn and to think differently about big problems. Harpreet: [00:18:09] I absolutely love that about being a data scientist. I get paid to learn. It's such an amazing feeling. I love what you're saying there about creativity. And the the artistry is not just for for artists. I mean, it's part of the reason why my podcast is called The Artists of Data Science. Yes, but but how can we make creativity more accessible and not just something that feels like it's in the domain of of artsy people? Natalie: [00:18:35] That's a really great question. I think. And this is a big kind of overarching response. But I think part of it is to air more on the side of process rather than on the set of solution. And what I mean by that is so much of the way we tend to be taught is to fill in the dot. What's the answer? Come up with a solution when in fact in reality, life is full of gray. And for example, I taught in a business school, I created and launched a strategic design and B.A. program. And a lot of what we were doing and developing the Strategic Design MBA program was zigging away and zagging away from traditional mindsets of MBA of traditional MBA programs, which is about you get these case studies for these 25 year olds of you are the senior vice president of the Latin American region of the global national company and blah, blah, you know, and it's like and first of all, it's it's not necessarily something that the student has much to to they don't have much personal data to mind from to make those sorts of to lay out those, those options. But if we started to teach in a way that would equip us for what we're really going to be needing to deal with, which is scenario planning, [00:20:00] right? Which is to identify multiple possible future scenarios. I'm sure as a data scientist, you go through a lot of decision making of if this than that, which requires a ton of creativity. Natalie: [00:20:12] And I always remind people that that that's kind of linked to foresight work. Foresight has less to do with predicting a future, but is everything to do with being hyper rooted in the present so that you can be super observant and identify what I call the the blips on the radar, right? The signals that make you say, I don't really have a rational reason yet to pay attention to this, but I'm paying attention. This is interesting. This is like veering off the beaten path. And let's let's follow the breadcrumbs a little bit further. So I think that one of the reasons that we're that we've kind of lost our our creative capacity and we have ghettoized creativity in the arts is is in large part, unfortunately, because of of how we're educated and then graduate school programs sometimes tend to just double down on that. So, for example, one of the ways I help people to think about creativity is my three I creativity framework, right? Because I thought, well, it's not enough for me to tell people, okay, guys, toggle between wonder and rigor to solve problems and off you go. You'll be creative. Like, how do you do that? How do you do that on a consistent, intentional basis? And I think one way to do that is to practice the three I's, which are inquiry, improvization and intuition. So let's just take the intuition piece for for a second. Natalie: [00:21:40] Intuition is a type of pattern recognition. It's that visceral nudge that I should work with that person and not this person that I should that I should not take this off and take that offer, that I should go left and not write. And every of the 50 plus people I interviewed for the Creativity Leap, when I started to [00:22:00] get into conversation with them about intuition to a person, they all acknowledge that intuition was really crucial for their strategic decision making. And at the same time, we don't touch intuition in business school, law school, medical school. We don't touch it, we stay away from it. And yet it is an integral part of how some of the top leaders way find sense, make and figure out combine sometimes with cold, hard, quantitative, rational data. I mean, that's I don't I don't personally believe there's any such thing as objectivity. But leave that aside for a moment. There is this hybrid approach that most stellar leaders have. They don't ignore that pattern recognition, that that intuition. So that's a longer way of just just trying to point out that that it would behoove us, especially now. In this time where we can acknowledge we are in the middle of a fourth industrial revolution. The train has left the station. Tech is ubiquitous. We need to make more room for the human to show up. And part of what makes us so uniquely human is our capacity for creativity. Harpreet: [00:23:14] So let's talk a little bit about your definition of creativity. I like the definition you kind of lay out in the book. I think now would be an excellent point to otouch on that. Natalie: [00:23:23] Yes. So I think about creativity as our ability to toggle between wonder and rigor to solve problems full stop. And one of the reasons I wrote the Creativity Leap is it's an offering, it's a provocation to hopefully offer a simple and accessible way for everyone to think about creativity and wonder is about all and audacity and asking big blue sky what if questions? It's about deep curiosity and it's also about [00:24:00] pausing, which we aren't particularly good at, even though the last 18 months of this global pandemic have been. I think the universe is a collective push for us to take a collective pause and to sit ourselves down. Rigor is about deep focus, discipline, time on task, mastery of the fundamentals, and both are essential in the creative process. Sometimes people just stop at the wonder dimension of creativity, right? And that that's when we begin to think, Oh, creativity is doing whatever you feel like. Actually, it's not. Creativity is really hard work, which I suspect is why most people don't truly engage in it and they're really end up doing a lot of copy pasting versus copy iterate because copying in and of itself, there's no shame to that. In a creative process. The great masters in European painting they would literally copy and the the the the great artists painters who came before them. Why? So that they could veer away from that. So they could really understand what those boundaries are. You need boundaries in creativity. Creativity loves constraints so that you can push up against them, you can stretch them, you can extend them, and you can see how you want to reinterpret them. The American dancer choreographer Twyla Tharp set wrote in her great book The Creative Habit, that before you can think out of the box, you've got to start with a box, right? So sometimes we just start with the wonder piece, which is amazing and important, and we can't forget that and we need the rigor. Natalie: [00:25:42] And I wrote in the book what I call this corollary to help people understand that wonder and rigor or esthetic, they are interdependent. And the corollary goes like this wonder is found in the midst of rigor, and rigor [00:26:00] cannot be sustained without wonder. So when I say that wonder is found in the midst of rigor, I think think of, I don't know, maybe for you when you're coding that, I'm sure for you coding is like totally wondrous. For me that would be pretty rigorous. And maybe at the beginning when you were first learning, it was it was really rigorous because there was there was so much so much of the fundamentals you were learning. But I believe that so so much of our rigorous work and process, that's the middle of that rigor that we get this are like this, this, this like awakening moment. Aha. Moment happens for us. That's what I mean when I say wonder is found in the midst of rigor. So that's one way it's esthetic. The other way is when I say that rigor cannot be sustained without wonder. So when we're going from meeting to meeting and zoom palooza, our teams palooza, and we don't pause and we don't have time to breathe and to have breaks, we will burn out and yet we want to innovate. It won't happen. And you can't wonder at 80 miles an hour is can't. Right. So the two are really essential in any creative endeavor. Harpreet: [00:27:11] Yeah, definitely love that because in data science, right, there's, there's definitely when you're learning it, there's a lot of rigor in terms of how do I go from data to decision, right? You want to be rigorous in the way that you conduct these these experiments. We're doing science at the end of the day. Right. And be rigorous with the way we conduct ourselves and from end to end. But once you get that rigor in place and you understand it, and it becomes very much ingrained as a part of how you think through a problem that opens up so much more space to think creatively about making different connections. Right? I definitely see that that aspect of wonder and rigor in the work that I do, it makes total sense to me. Am I thinking of it the right way? Natalie: [00:27:55] Yeah. And you mentioned experiments. The best experiments [00:28:00] start with really great questions and really great questions stem from deep observation or not even deep observation. Just noticing, noticing something and pausing and asking, what if? And also, I think literally nothing bad can follow the phrase. I wonder, like I wonder what would happen if I wonder, like nothing bad happens when we after we uttered those those first few words. Right. And so great scientists are incredibly creative because they allow their curiosity, their powers and skills for observation, to drive them to discovery, which needs the rigor of process, which needs the rigor of training and skill and the fundamentals of whatever the heuristic is that that you're working from. Harpreet: [00:28:56] So talk to us about the asking better friggin questions. I love that you had that asset that like, yeah, look, what's wrong with the way that we are currently asking questions and let's let's start with that. What's wrong with the way that we're currently asking questions? Natalie: [00:29:12] Well, I don't know if it's with the way maybe it's partly the way we're asking the questions, but it's also we we have like these quotas on question asking and you know, you could I start out the conversation just kind of reflecting on how in our personal lives and different so many people have experienced question shaming so there's that there's just one of these unspoken eye rolling if people are asking questions and it can sometimes come from the person who is leading the charge, which is unfortunate. So there's that there's the personal experience we might have had from question shaming, but there's also this challenge of kind of only stopping at the the what, when, where, how kind of didactic questions [00:30:00] versus the super expansive or not. I won't say excuse me, I won't say versus but adding in, including in the super expansive questions such as what if I wonder, I'm curious about why, you know, adding in an equal dose of those sorts of very expansive questions along with the kind of brick and mortar sorts of questions. I'm a big fan of the work of Warren Burger, who I actually interviewed on a I did an experimental podcast called The Wonder Rigor Lab, and I interviewed Warren, who's the author of the Book of Beautiful Questions and a More Beautiful Question. He calls himself a question ologist, and he's convinced that we should be teaching how to ask questions. You know, and I and I think it's a really intriguing idea that we kind of assume that people do know how to ask questions. And clearly, as little people, as children, that's the way we make sense of the world is through asking questions. Natalie: [00:31:02] And then to really expand upon that. And actually the first book of his that I read a more beautiful question, that book is based on his curiosity about what makes the most innovative companies so innovative anyway. And he went around to them, interview them, collect a lot of data. And learn and I'm super simplifying what he learned. The book is great, so people should read the book, but really learn that leaders at these companies tend to start with big y questions. They start by asking super divergent types of questions why? Why do we only hire people from those sorts of schools? Why? Why don't we have anyone here who's really older than age 50? Why? Why have we never marketed to the Southern Hemisphere? Why, why? Why, why? And then you ask even bigger. You diverge even further to ask what if questions? What if we started recruiting people who had incredible life and practical experience [00:32:00] but only had a high school degree? What if what if we started hiring people who went to who don't have a graduate degree or went to a different type of school? What if we started marketing to the Southern Hemisphere? And then he starts he he reflects that. Then they start to do convergence sorts of questions. How, how might we do that? We have to get really tactical and super practical. So there is that process. Why, what if, how? And actually, when I first read the book and learned about that framing, I loved it because it really also was in parallel to a lot of the way design thinking thinks about problem definition. And a lot of my, my, my background is in anthropology, fashion, design thinking and that that idea of diverge, converge, diverge, conversion. Natalie: [00:32:49] There's a few additional questions that in design thinking one might ask, but I love how he really distills it down to why what if? How so that's that's a way we could think about asking questions. But the other thing that I think we have to remember is that as leaders. It can't just be. About asking your team. Come on, guys, ask me any question. I welcome your questions because we've all been through some sort of. Most of us have been to some sort of question shaming. And most of us are bit like arms flowed across the chest, hands on the hips, like, yeah, och you go first. I'm not going to ask a question. So what has to happen is that leadership has to model what they are asking for and the best way to model that is to show a bit of transparency and to reflect back questions that you yourself are having about this marketing strategy we just launched. We might need to pause on this because I'm now wondering if X, Y, Z, what if we started forming a strategic partnership with a former competitor and explored competition? And so one of the things Warren Burger mentioned to me in our conversation for the Wonder Burger [00:34:00] Lab podcast was that when leaders commit to asking questions of themselves and invite questions, they are fundamentally ceding control. And that is terrifying. That is admittedly terrifying. But once you get over the terror. You embrace that level of humility that comes with being open to asking questions and inviting questions? The Man Some really magical collaboration can start to happen. Harpreet: [00:34:28] Yeah, absolutely love that. I mean, I've got an 18 month old son and pretty much all the time he's just like, What's this? Why is that? Who's this? Why this? And for me personally, like I feel like I used to ask a lot of questions. And this question shame thing happened. And it wasn't until recently where I was just like, I'm just gonna ask questions like, you know, if you're it used to be a fear of looking dumb, like I'm supposed to be this yes, educated guy. I should know answers. And I kind of like got rid of that and to start asking questions and I mean. Yes, I just ask questions. Natalie: [00:35:01] Yeah, I certainly I remember being in high school and I was in the physics that I probably shouldn't have been in because I had to always prove something. So I was in like the really hard work quantitative physics, which totally was not my jam. I should have been like physics for everyday people. That's the class I should have been, but I wasn't. And I would like work so hard to triple check my work and then very shyly raised my hand. And meanwhile, meanwhile, the boys at the back of the class and they tended to be boys in the back of the class would be loud and wrong. They would just blurt out an answer. And because we were graced with really great teachers, the teachers say, well, that wasn't what I that wasn't the answer. I was looking for it. But let's explore that. If we go down that path, what would happen? And let's say we look at it in this other way, right? So what you begin to learn is, wow, the world is not come crashing down on you. And it really leads to further exploration. But still, for a number of reasons, I [00:36:00] was in a position in that particular going back to learning environment where I was so self conscious of my difference and heard a lot from home, you know, as one of the few African American girls and students, you'll stand out if you make a mistake, you know, it will be it will be larger than than if others make a mistake. And so our parents mean well when they give us these sorts of admonitions, but sometimes it can play out in weird ways. But it wasn't until probably more as an adult where I began to really embrace being what I now call a clumsy student of something that I in my personal life that I became. Natalie: [00:36:41] I was able to transfer that level of humility and curiosity and just self-effacing ignorance, I don't know, into my work environment and didn't always feel like I had to look like I was on top of things and had the answer. The other thing that helped me personally was actually the more I learned about design thinking and when we created this strategic design MBA program, the way I taught fundamentally changed. I went from a teaching style. I was never really sage on stage because I never even loved learning like that. But I definitely did more like seminar style teaching to a model of learning that was much more like what we see in design studio or art studio, right where I became a coach, a provocateur, a facilitator. If it was a three hour studio class, content was delivered maybe a quarter of the time. 75% of the rest of time was about collaborating with students, collaborating with each other. They were co teaching with each other. I was it was very physical. It was very kinesthetic. It was noisy. There was laughter. There was people weren't in seats in one place for the whole time. I began to cede control right. I became more confident that learning was still going to take place without me [00:38:00] having to be in the front of the room all the time. And that gave me more of my confidence in how I showed up with more brazenly asking questions. So there were a number of things, professionally and personally that helped me to get more confident with asking questions. Harpreet: [00:38:17] Design thinking is something that kind of need to have. I've heard it. I've heard people talk about it, I've heard about it, a couple of books that I've read, and you kind of walk us through what design thinking in is and like, how does that help us be more creative? Natalie: [00:38:30] That's a great question because that's connecting the dots between a part of my career that I used to really be deeply rooted in and now as kind of an additional tool in my toolkit. So the way I define design thinking is that simple as possible. It is a problem solving process. It's a problem solving process that is 50% ethnography and qualitative research and being deeply observant and 50% the application of design principles like prototyping and visualizing data. And you do a mash up of those two skill sets and you get design thinking. And then the four things design thinking tends to really highlight and value are empathy being able to be. And in the perspective of the people who are buying your stuff, people are buying your goods or services, your experiences, lateral thinking, which is this idea of borrowing from near and far and adjacent sectors to understand what can I learn? So if I work in education, what can I learn from the fashion industry? How the ways that they work that could inform what I do in building out a new program. If I work as a as a marine biologist, what can I learn about the way auto mechanics work that could inform what I do? Right? So that's lateral thinking. And then there's prototyping prototypes are rough draft, ugly mockups of a concept. And [00:40:00] typically we think of we can prototype tangible objects, you can prototype garments, apparel, clothing, you can prototype furniture, you can also prototype services and experiences and processes. You can prototype the intangible pop up shops are a great way to sometimes prototype the intangible. So we have empathy, lateral thinking, prototyping in the fourth is story and stories are human truth telling. And when we allow people to tell their stories and when we include stories as data, as my friend Valerie Jacobs likes to say, stories or data, too, we humanize things. We actually bring layers and texture to just the wire of an of a of a launch of an idea. And it makes it it makes the venture much more accessible and relatable. Harpreet: [00:40:54] Thank you very much for that. And a couple of other things that you're talking about that I'd love to get more more clarity around is divergent and convergent thinking. So let's start with with the divergent thinking. Like, what does that mean? Does that just mean like, yeah, I can't even I don't have a good definition of working definition of what that means. If you could help me out with that, I'd really appreciate that. Natalie: [00:41:12] Yeah. So divergent thinking is letting your mind wander. It's so divergent. Thinking is literally, if you've ever done any kind of mind mapping and you just it's just kind of. I won't call it mental gymnastics, but it's it's it's kind of like purposely letting your mind get lost. That's divergent thinking. And it's it's going out and out and out and out of focus, right? Or zooming out, zooming out, zooming out. That's divergent thinking. Conversion thing is now we have all we've now collected all these dots, right? And now we have to begin to converge. We have to begin to connect the dots. We have to begin to see patterns. We have to see themes. We have to and qualitative research [00:42:00] is called sorting and sifting through the patterns of beginning to form clusters and identifying meta themes, and then how they're interrelated, interconnected. So for example, I'll use the example of qualitative research if you're trying to figure out what's next after the iPhone, that's a really big question. Maybe maybe it's not so big a question, but like what's next? So divergent thinking is just starting to really observe behaviors and going into the context of where people live, where they work, how they're living and working. And by the way, this question of what's next after after the smart device was very different 18 months ago, we would have answered the question and observed very different data two years ago, excuse me, before March 2020 then. Right now. Right. Because now the constraints in our living, our needs have changed. The ways that we work are changing. Right. But we begin to gather all these different data points based on a lot of different contexts and a family situation in a person who is a who's in their twenties, which is a person who's in their fifties and etc., etc., and then you get all these data points on this very divergent thing that you're letting your mind just really wander and saying, Okay, now what are the patterns and themes, if any, that we can begin to discern? And that's more of the convergent thinking. Harpreet: [00:43:22] So, so seems like wonder kind of goes hand in hand with divergent thinking and then rigor with convergent thinking. Is that kind of like that? Natalie: [00:43:31] Absolutely, yes. Harpreet: [00:43:33] And when wonder come together, as you mentioned in your book, it forms something called a chaotic system. Yes, that was a very interesting word. I love that word. Chaotic about what chaotic systems are and how they work. Natalie: [00:43:49] So I first learned the word K aud C, h a d when I was in the middle of my PhD research, I was looking at the ways [00:44:00] the Ritz-Carlton Hotel designs experiences for guests, and as I was doing interviews and observational studies, what kept coming up was when staff would say things like, When it works really well, it's like jazz. When it works great, we're just vibing, it flows. And the word jazz kept coming up. And I mentioned this to my principal doctoral advisor, Alison Ripple, and she said, Oh, right, you're talking about Improvizational organizations. And it turns out there's this whole body of literature about how we can understand behavior from the perspective of improvization. And some scholars look at it from the perspective of comedic improv. Others look at it from the perspective of musical jazz improv. And I was really attracted to jazz improv because I grew up in a home filled with jazz music. My father was a big jazz head. He played he learned to play the upright acoustic bass in the service in the Air Force right after high school. And so. I love that. And I'm African American and jazz is as black Americans contribution to America as America's classical music form. So there's a lot that really compelled me to dove more deeply into that. And in the process of learning about Improvization, you necessarily start learning about chaos theory and complexity theory. And then I started finding this word chord, and it turns out that the gentleman de Hock made up the word K, or he, when he became the first president of Visa, the credit card company, he thought to himself, How can I lead this global organization based on the virtual exchange of currency in a way that mimicked more of what I see happening in nature and what he didn't say. Natalie: [00:45:49] What I say is that he fundamentally was saying that organizations are organisms, right? They're made up of human humans, and therefore they are not predictive, they [00:46:00] are nonlinear, they are inconsistent, all the things that make us human. And so in nature. And he was a big naturalist. He was taking a walk through the woods. And he has a great book about this called One from Many, if you want to read up more about it. But he observed that in nature there's a ton of chaos, but there's also order. And so I thought he did a mashup of the two words and he thought, What if I could lead? We could we could run this organization much more like a K board. And so what's important to remember is that chaos is not anarchy. Chaos is randomness, and order is not control. Order is structure. Right. And so. So I'm first introduced to this concept when I'm looking at improvizational organizations. But lo and behold, once you start learning about chaotic systems, you see them everywhere. It's the way our bodies heal. It abounds in nature. It's jazz. Jazz music is a complex, chaotic system. Chaotic systems, all complex systems are emergent, adaptive, self organizing, and you begin to see them everywhere. And so it's no surprise to me and this was not even intentional, but the definition that I landed on for creativity really is mirroring a chaotic system, right? Where wonder is where that chaos and rigor is more of that order. Harpreet: [00:47:27] Absolutely love that. Something I started actually just recently, a couple of days ago, I started just watching a few lectures on a complexity theory after that. So, so fascinating. Natalie: [00:47:36] And it is it is. Harpreet: [00:47:38] So, I guess something that you talk about in in in your book is how we can some lessons that we can apply for improving the way we work. And you talk about a few different things that there's being present, there's valuing the outlier and then designing fluid structure. [00:48:00] I wonder if you could talk to talk to us about about these kind of like at a high level. And if you guys want detail, you can check out now. Natalie: [00:48:07] You can check out the book. Yeah. I mean, maybe I ask that question by talking about a couple of the leaps that I think about that we have to be making in the way we're approaching our work. But I'll share to one leap that I think is really important that we make is that we have to leap away from a mindset that's only valuing our deep subject matter expertize. And this is coming from a former academic where your subject matter expertize is super important. But we we actually will do much better in a world where change is constant. Things are very fluid in flux. If we adopt, adapt, much more of a polymath way of learning and thinking. And so a polymath, someone like Leonardo da Vinci was a polymath. So he was a mathematician. He was an artist. He was an astronomer. You know, so so those of us who can really cultivate both breadth and depth, because that's really going to build our curiosity, it's really going to help us with that diversion and conversion, thinking we are better aligned with a multiplicity of strategic partnerships and how we go about problem solving. So one shift, one leap is towards having more of a polymath mindset and really committing the time to that. The other shift we have to make is a way from silos in our organizations to really building community. And we have literally in our organizations, our institutions for like division and departments and tribes are important. I'm not going to say that tribes don't matter. We need tribes because tribes ground us and tribes are what give us identity. And the best organizations really know how to interweave those tribes and find some sort of commonality. And if [00:50:00] not commonality, then an appreciation for the different approaches so that we truly built community. The best communities, the thriving communities don't disavow tribes. They allow those tribes to exist and find synergy between them. Harpreet: [00:50:15] A bit of interesting synchronous synchronicity here. I'm actually listening to a book by Peter Hollands called Polymath. Natalie: [00:50:23] Oh, I don't know that one. Peter Cullen. Harpreet: [00:50:25] Yeah. Peter Hollands It's the short books like a three hour listen on Audible. Natalie: [00:50:30] Oh, nice. Harpreet: [00:50:32] Thing. Yeah, I listen to everything like 1.5 X, so it's like less than 3 hours. All right. Yeah. The thing where I'll listen to, like, a long audiobook, like, I just got done listening to some Nassim Taleb book, and then I'll listen to a short one, and then I'll go back to another long one. Natalie: [00:50:46] Oh, nice. Harpreet: [00:50:47] I like that stuff. So talk to us about the remix, the reframe and the repurpose, and how they help play a role in being creative. Natalie: [00:50:58] Yeah, so the remix free from Repurpose, so remixing is really about the need to do to be open to read combinations of things to instead of saying that clearly we're not going to be in the office five days a week, most of us are not. Then it's about how does this hybrid way of working now? What are the myriad ways that it might look? And it doesn't necessarily have to be Tuesday through Thursday. We're in the office, Monday, Friday we're out. But there's there's all different sorts of cadences that we can begin to explore. So that's about the remix in this hybrid way of working, for example, between home and an office, virtual and in high touch in person. And the reframing is that we begin to question our judgments. We have judgment calls and value statements about every choice that we make. And if we are now in a in a time and an era where we're we're revisiting the attributes of being able to work from home and being closer, [00:52:00] if you have a young family, being closer to your children during the day, then reframing that not as being lazy or not as productive, but actually this is a work culture that actually values reframing to valuing the human much more so, so that people actually feel seen and heard and therefore show up much more productive at work. And then the repurposing is that we show up very differently. To our work, we end up showing up in a way that means we're more energized, we feel more appreciated. And we we therefore ultimately are giving even more creative output than we would before when we're, you know, half of a third of the day is spent in a commute. We get home, we're exhausted. We we don't have as much interpersonal connection with our loved ones. And that has a spillover, cascading effect, detrimental spillover, cascading effect than how we show up. Harpreet: [00:52:56] To really appreciate that. So let's start winding down with a couple of last questions here before we jump into a quick random round. But real quick, something you talked about in your book, like all these different frameworks for thinking you share in the book, we talk about design thinking, convergent thinking, divergent thinking, and then there's something that you talk about called fashion thinking. So talk to us about this this fashion thinking framework that you've got. Natalie: [00:53:17] Yeah, well, fashion thinking is something I started to get into the early stages of working on my PhD. I thought I was going to do research on something. At the time it was called Fashion Diffusion. And then I watched a TEDx Talk by Johanna Blakely, who was talking about it in a slightly different way. She was saying how fashion's knockoff culture actually made the fashion industry much more innovative. And I thought, Oh my gosh, I got to talk to this woman that were thinking about this in similar terms. So I reached out to her. We decided we want to collaborate. We like kind of academic paper, something we call fashion thinking, and we get a phone call, an email one [00:54:00] day from a woman who's now become a great friend of mine, Valerie Jacobs, who is the chief growth officer at LPP k, a branding firm. And she was leading the Trends and Foresight Practice at Lpsc. And she comes from fashion and fashion trends. And she said, Oh my gosh, your article was forwarded to me. I also think about fashion in similar ways. And in other words, instead of thinking of fashion as this really woo unimportant, nonsensical, superficial industry, we actually were bringing to the table way for people in tech, in food and beverage and transportation and government and education to be innovating their own companies by thinking more like a fashion designer. Natalie: [00:54:43] So, for example, fashion uses style unapologetically, and style is really a curation device. Style is a way, excuse me, of mapping out similarities and, and and coalescing what otherwise could be very random looking. And it actually helps you, your brand to make a lot more sense to the customer. It helps you to tell the story about your brand a lot, a lot more cohesively. So for example, you know, Burberry ad, you know, two blocks away or a Ralph Lauren ad two blocks away because it's highly curated with styling techniques. And we also talked about how fashion really delves into the street as well as taps into the elite. So the fashion industry pays attention to what subcultures are doing and incorporates that into their work in their launches. So anyway, we laid out these seven principles. People can read more about it in in a couple of places they can contact me if they're interested later. And, and really it kind of built a nice following. We were able to actually consult a number of different companies about how they can incorporate fashion thinking into the way they thought about their business. Harpreet: [00:55:59] Nathalie [00:56:00] Last question here before we get into the random round, but people, you guys got to check out Natalie's book, The Creativity Leap. Absolutely. Recommend it. I will be going through the the shares and and reactions to this post, and I'll pick somebody who will win a copy of Natalie's book. I'll announce that on Friday during our happy hour session. But Natalie, it is 100 years in the future. What could it be remembered for? Natalie: [00:56:25] I mean, my mission in my work is to change lives with ideas. And I hope that what I. Offer as a way to help people, no matter what their work is, no matter what they do to find purpose in their work, in their lives, through creativity. If that is that, if that has been my contribution, that will be huge. And I would also just add, I also want to be remembered as an African American woman who really contributed to the thought leadership and innovation and creativity and hopefully will be inspiration for so many others who want to be additive to these conversations. So that's that's how I would answer that. Harpreet: [00:57:08] I love that. Thank you very much, Natalie. Let's jump into real quick random round. First question is, what are you currently reading? Natalie: [00:57:14] Oh, I'm reading Glen Glennon. Glennon Doyle's. Yeah, I just took it off. Glennon Glennon Doyle's book Untamed. I was reading my almost I have like 25 pages left. Actually, Valerie Jacobs gifted me that book. I really love it because she's an outstanding writer. It's memoir. And I just I just love her honesty and it's just exploring her, her personal growth. Harpreet: [00:57:37] What song do you currently have on repeat? Natalie: [00:57:40] Well, I don't know the song, but I was interviewed by Aiden McCullen, who is an Irish former pro rugby player who has a great podcast called The Innovation Show. And he hipped me to a hidden orchestra. So I often ask Alexa to play Hidden Orchestra radio. So it's kind of like. Lounge [00:58:00] acid jazz zero seven type five she's already she's going off already but but hidden orchestra that that vibe I like. Harpreet: [00:58:08] Definitely to check that out that is said that definitely the type of music that I that I enjoy listening to. We're going to go into just a couple of random questions here, like this random question generator. First question we've got here is what's the best thing you got from one of your parents? Natalie: [00:58:26] The permission to follow my heart from both of them. Harpreet: [00:58:29] I do love that. In your group of friends, what role do you play? Natalie: [00:58:35] Oh, goofball dreamer. Harpreet: [00:58:41] What fictional place would you most like to go to? Natalie: [00:58:46] Oh, I don't know. Maybe the first thing that came to my mind was backstage with Billie Holiday. But that would be, like, historical. Harpreet: [00:58:58] We'll take that. That's a good, good one. And we'll do the final random question here. Pizza or tacos? Natalie: [00:59:04] Gluten free dairy. Free pizza by diet because I can't eat dairy anymore. Harpreet: [00:59:11] Natalie, thank you very much. And I went ahead and I shared the one director tip sheet on the LinkedIn comment section. I'll also be sure to include that right there in the show notes for the show. Natalie, how can people connect with you? Where can they find you online? Natalie: [00:59:24] Awesome. Well, first of all, thank you so much for having me. People can find me on Figure eight thinking and there's three ways people can engage. You can hire me to speak, you can hire me for my strategic advisory work, and you can also pick my brain and all of that's on Figure eight thinking now. Harpreet: [00:59:42] Thank you so much for taking time out of your schedule to be on the show today. I really appreciate having you here. Natalie: [00:59:46] Thank you for having me. It was awesome talking to you. Harpreet: [00:59:49] My friends, as usual, remember, you've got one life on this planet. Why not try to do something big? Cheers, everyone. Look. [01:00:00]