Jason S. Bradshaw: What if the secret to your company's next breakthrough wasn't found in your data, your strategy deck or your AI tools, but in something far far more human? Something called WonderRigor?

​

Jason S. Bradshaw: Today's guest has been called the Creativity Whisperer to the C-Suite. She helps leaders unlock the one advantage no algorithm can ever replicate. Human imagination. She's lived in five countries, blended dance with design and anthropology, and now she's one of the top 50 keynote speakers in the world.

Dr. Natalie Nixon. Welcome to Chats with Jason.

Natalie Nixon PhD: Thank you Jason. It's great to be here. Thanks for having me.

Jason S. Bradshaw: Absolute pleasure. I can't wait to dive into the questions, so let's not delay. Let's kick it off.

Natalie Nixon PhD: First they don't really identify the struggle and the pain point as being around creativity. Typically the questions and queries are around innovation, building cultures of sustainable innovation. Sometimes the questions are around what I call the murky middle, and navigating through a significant crossroads. It could be because of an internal organizational redesign. It could be because of external disruption. And what they really are asking for, are to be equipped with practical tools to hit pause, zoom out, and do some strategic envisioning work.

Jason S. Bradshaw: Yeah, I love that.

Do you think there's a bias around the word creativity? Like you mentioned that they come to you looking for help with innovation and things like that. Do you think that leaders see creativity as something soft or a form of chaos?

Creativity, it has been siloed only among artists. And sometimes it's considered a bit woo woo. It's considered as an addendum to air quotes, "the important stuff."

But in actuality, creativity is the engine for innovation. We wanna be able to consistently and sustainably innovate, then we have to build a capacity for creativity as individuals, as teams, and as organizations. Because the way I like to define innovation is that it's an invention converted into scalable value. And that value to be a financial value, social value, cultural value, but it remains this one-off invention until we integrate the conversion factor of creativity.

And I like to define creativity as our ability to toggle between wonder and rigor to solve problems.

Jason S. Bradshaw: Yeah, that makes so much sense to me. I've definitely been in some boardrooms where the word, creativity was seen as maybe that team building exercise that we were going to do, and as opposed to the innovation and the hard stuff that we were really there for.

So tell me, when did WonderRigor first click for you? When did you realize that creativity needed both sides of that equation?

And so I was looking at the [00:06:00] ways that dancer, choreographers, chefs, first responders, I forget the fourth area. It wasn't comedians, but it was another group of people, of professionals about the ways that they act in the moment and build on what the offering is.

Now what's funny to me is that in the days when I was working on a PhD, the theoretical construct that I use is something called Chaordic Systems Thinking. And a chaord, is a word that Dee Hock made up. And Dee was the first president of Visa, the credit card company. And when he [00:08:00] was tasked with leading this very experimental organization, that early sixties, that was based on the electronic exchange of currency, he wanted to design a company that, in its organizational design, mirrored the ways we see nature operating, wherein nature, Dee Hock observed, there's chaos, which is randomness. We're not talking about anarchy. We're talking about randomness, but there's also order, which is not control, but it's structure. And he did a mashup of the two words. Landed on chaord. Turns out that chaords can be directly traced back to chaos theory to complex systems thinking. So I'm giving you that preface because ironically I didn't even have chaordic systems thinking in my head. It was just ingrained in the way I thought about things by that point. But obviously, the way I'm thinking about creativity is wonder and rigor, you can see the [00:09:00] relation back to chaotic systems, where wonder is the chaos dimension and rigor is the order dimension.

And we absolutely need both in all creative acts, whether we're talking about developing a new marketing strategy, a new financial model, a new way to collaborate to approach product development. A new way to anticipate what's next in our sector. We do need to develop the skills for both wonder and for rigor.

Jason S. Bradshaw: Yeah, so much deep research to come up with this concept of WonderRigor. So if there was anyone, listening to this show, thinking that it was something that you had just imagined over a weekend they've definitely been blown away.

I want to make it a little bit simpler just for a moment.

If you were explaining WonderRigor to a 9-year-old using just what's in their backpack. How would you describe it?

The wonder is the way you think about what a flower looks like or the way you think about what a tree or a truck or a bug looks like.

But we need both. You only had the pencil and you didn't have the imagination, the curiosity, to dream up different sort of shape. That's only one part of it. And similarly, if you didn't have the tool, the pencil or the marker or whatever it is to execute on that, it would remain if, I wouldn't say the word ephemeral to a 9-year-old, but it would remain, it remain in your head or in the clouds. But we need both.

I think the only thing that I was hoping for you to say was that they needed to get out their crayons because then I could have used a line that every boardroom needed a crayon in it. But...

Natalie Nixon PhD: I agree with that. I think... I think that would be a great addition. Absolutely.

So I, I'm a big advocate of doodling. I think it's awesome.

Jason S. Bradshaw: Yeah, I think for me, when you say to someone, oh, can you get up and draw what you're talking about everyone, or maybe not everyone, a lot of people just freeze. I dunno how to draw,

Natalie Nixon PhD: Right?

I think if we can just embrace it a little bit more, it will help us be more effective as communicators if nothing else because people connect with the visuals as more than the words at times.

Natalie Nixon PhD: Yes.

Jason S. Bradshaw: We'll skip a beat a little bit.

You've talked about burnout and you've said that in your work, you've talked about burnout and that it isn't a weakness, it's sabotage.

In your keynote burnout to breakthrough, you challenge the hustle culture that has become more and more prevalent of late.

What's the mindset shift that leaders must make right now if they want their teams to thrive again?

The statistics are pretty staggering on burnout. State side, in the United States, upwards of 71% of knowledge workers reported burnout around the time of the pandemic 2020-2021, and that number of 71% has not really decreased over the past four years. And there's a cost to burnout. The business cost of burnout is estimated to be about $300 Billion with a B to US businesses alone, and that's because when people do struggle with burnout, there's absenteeism. There's higher turnover. There's knowledge transfer. There's higher insurance costs. All of these are cost to a business.

One of that is now we have spaciousness. Now we have time for greater critical thinking. For reflection. For collaboration. For eyeball to eyeball conversation. The key here is that we now have new tools for working, but we haven't shifted the systems of how we work, which requires us to pause and zoom out, and rethink things like the meeting, the cadence of meetings, how long meetings last. Incentivization plans. KPIs and not just minimum viable products, but what I call minimum viable experiences.

Jason S. Bradshaw: So in your new book you take us through the Move.Think.Rest. framework and when I was looking at it, it almost felt radical in a corporate sense, considering where, many corporations act today, the way that they acted 40 years ago, 50 years ago, 60 years ago. They've just changed some labels, bought in some new pieces of equipment maybe complicated their business in the process.

The Move.Think.Rest. framework really does make us think differently about that. Which of those three elements of the framework do you think leaders are resisting the most? And what actually happens when they stop resisting and embrace it?

Natalie Nixon PhD: I think the resistance is really situational. There are examples and pockets within companies that are embracing the Move.Think.Rest model. So for example, a company like Atlassian which is a 100% remote global company. They've been very proactive about thinking critically and creatively about when and how they meet. How they use meetings. And it's because they have this distributed work model. So they have an opportunity to that.

And when I talk about movement, I'm not just talking about exercise, but I'm talking about what we could call movement hygiene, making sure that we're designing the space of work and the cadence of work in ways where people are able to not just be sedentary all day. If there's an opportunity to have a standing desk. If you can design in breaks to walk instead of having a zoom or teams meeting. Maybe it can be on the phone or in person. And the reason that's important is that as humans, we are not designed to be sedentary. We're designed to move.

So while critical, sharp cognitive thought is rewarded in the workplace, it's essential, our best critical clear thinking comes when we can back cast, reflect. Use memory . Use metacognition, but as well as forecasting using the imagination, curiosity, dreaming. And we need both in order to do our best clear cognitive thinking.

So those are just a few examples of companies and I would say, the rest part is probably the most challenging area. Having a moratorium on meetings for one morning a month might be a way to experiment with that. Or maybe it could be one [00:21:00] morning a week. It depends on the culture of the organization. But the key is to start launching small experiments with seeing how your particular organizational culture resonates with these different ways of working.

Jason S. Bradshaw: Yeah, we're a little bit over halfway through the show, and we've talked about creativity. We've talked about moving and thinking differently and allowing people to rest in ways that make sense to them while not actually impacting in negative ways the business.

And if I was a naysayer listening to this, I'd be like, oh, this is great woo woo stuff, but it doesn't have a return on investment.

What would you say to that person?

There is a direct, bold, solid line between creativity and using creativity as a strategic competency and business results. It's not a fuzzy dotted line. So for example. When you commit to building creativity as a capacity in your team and the way you think about hiring practices, and your incentivization, and KPIs. You necessarily collaborate more. Now, most of us, if we're honest, we don't really like collaboration in the short term. We feel like it slows us down. We have to explain ourselves. However, in the long term, collaboration boosts productivity because the more diverse the inputs of skillset, of experiences, then the more innovative the output.

That is a direct line between collaboration, which is an element of creativity, of building creativity as a habit and a competency and lowering costs as a business result.

A second example is that when we commit to building creativity as a capacity, we necessarily do much more inventive thinking. We no longer cling to our default mode of... we've always done it this way around here. Or our default mode of... it's worked fine for the past five years. What's the need to change? Our market share is just fine. Let's just keep humming along.

When you look in the rear view mirror and you don't see anyone behind you, that's exactly when you need a bit more urgency, because scrappier smaller entities could eat your lunch.

When we do more inventive thinking, we identify new sorts of products and services and experiences, which lead to new revenue streams. That's a business result between inventive thinking and new revenue streams.

And then lastly, I would say, when you commit to building a capacity of creativity, then you shift away from falling in love with your beautiful baby, which is the products and services you've been selling for the past decades, to falling in love with the problems that your clients have, right?

Challenging your own assumptions. And as you get better and better at that, then you build brand loyalty and build market share and brand value. And that is also a business result.

These are all just three examples of business results that we can connect back to building a capacity for creativity

So it's not woo woo.

Jason S. Bradshaw: And I was, yeah. Yeah. I think the simplest way to say it is that creativity, isn't a nice to have, it's a non-negotiable. It's a growth lever.

So I don't know about you, but it seems like everyone is talking about this thing called AI right now, but you say the real advantage is an Artificial Intelligence, it's Authentic Imagination. In the imagination era, what must leaders protect that AI can never replace?

Natalie Nixon PhD: It is their capacity to imagine. And imagination is a combination of curiosity, human consciousness, dreaming. The sentient intelligence that we have as humans.

But there's also the data that we get, which is discerned, which comes from this collective historical knowledge of learned experience of people. It's those signals, those blurp, those beeps that you get on your own personal radar screen that you have to pause and pay attention to. There's been a lot of interesting experiments and research connecting the dots, for example, between intuition [00:27:00] and rational strategic decision making.

So one such experiment is about something called interoceptive awareness and interoceptive accuracy. So Interoception is this internal - I call it an internal radar sonar system of... I feel cold. I feel tired. I feel safe. I feel in danger. It's all powered by the autonomic nervous system, and more specifically, it's powered by interoceptiveness by the vagus nerve, and the vagus nerve is the longest cranial nerve in the body. It extends from the brain down through the heart and lungs into the gut. And so when we say things like, my gut is telling me, it literally is. And it's a really complex neural system extending throughout the gut.

So now there's more and more of the neurosciences showing connections between interoceptive awareness and strategic decision making.

Jason S. Bradshaw: I think we could probably spend the next hour just unpacking that even further. But we don't have time today. I'm going to end our time together, Natalie, with this question.

When people experience your work, when they truly apply WonderRigor, how does it transform not just their business, but the world around them?

Because before being exposed to the WonderRigor theory and these different ways to think about process and uncertainty, it becomes something that you try to control, that you try to... you smushing a square peg into a round hole. But equipped with the WonderRigor theory, people are left with an understanding of how to navigate that ambiguity, fall in love with the process and understand that only when you get more comfortable with that ambiguity by tapping into wonder rooted in rigor, that [00:30:00] you actually can make your way forward. And that actually gives space for deeper and greater collaboration with peers, with competitors. It just really shifts the way you've been seeing what's possible, what's essential, and what's transformative in your work.

Jason S. Bradshaw: What a great way to end the show.

Natalie, thanks so much for your time today.

Natalie Nixon PhD: Thank you for having me, Jason.

Jason S. Bradshaw: So whether it's curiosity, intuition, or imagination, Natalie reminded us that creativity isn't a luxury. It's leadership's greatest currency. Because when we dare to wonder with rigor, we transform more than results. We transform ourselves.

I'm Jason S. Bradshaw and this is Chats With Jason. Transform the experience. Transform the business and the world around you.