A conversation with Natalie Nixon: creativity strategist, president of Figure 8 Thinking, and author of “The Creativity Leap”.

“I think about creativity as toggling between wonder and rigor to solve problems and the way we can get better at that toggling, the way we can get better at exercising our creativity is through what I call the three I’s. And the three I’s are inquiry, improvisation and intuition.” – Natalie Nixon

Natalie Nixon is a creativity strategist and president of Figure 8 Thinking, where she helps leaders achieve transformative business results by applying creativity and foresight. As a global keynote speaker as well as author, editor, and contributor of multiple writing publications, Natalie communicates awe and inspires teams around the world to reach their maximum business value.

In this episode of Control the Room, I talk with Natalie about polymaths, dance, fashion, and gratitude. Listen in to see how wonder, structure, and grace can make a major difference in an organization when interconnected.

Show Highlights

[01:08] Natalie’s Career Journey
[13:54] Curiosity & the Three I’s
[19:55] Four Clarifying Questions
[24:02] Equity in Our Virtual Environments
[33:32] Natalie’s Closing Thoughts

Natalie’s LinkedIn
Figure 8 Thinking

About the Guest

Natalie Nixon is a creativity strategist, organization president, and global keynote speaker. In addition to consulting for clients around the world, she has also written a book titled, “The Creativity Leap”, and serves as a contributor and editor of several publications. Natalie’s collection of experiences that include, but are not limited to dance, fashion, and African diaspora studies enable her to fluidly move from seemingly unrelated pieces, and find commonalities between even the most unlikely variables.

About Voltage Control

Voltage Control is a change agency that helps enterprises sustain innovation and teams work better together with custom-designed meetings and workshops, both in-person and virtual. Our master facilitators offer trusted guidance and custom coaching to companies who want to transform ineffective meetings, reignite stalled projects, and cut through assumptions. Based in Austin, Voltage Control designs and leads public and private workshops that range from small meetings to large conference-style gatherings.

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Full Transcript

Douglas Ferguson:

Welcome to the Control The Room Podcast, a series devoted to the exploration of meeting culture and uncovering cures for the common meeting. Some meetings have tight control and others are loose. To control the room means achieving outcomes while striking a balance between imposing and removing structure, asserting and distributing power, leaning in and leaning out, all in the service of having a truly magical meeting.

Douglas Ferguson:

Today, I’m with Natalie Nixon, creativity strategist and president of Figure 8 Thinking, where she helps leaders achieve transformative business results by applying creativity and foresight. She is also author of Creativity Leap: Unleash Curiosity, Improvisation, and Intuition at Work, the editor of Strategic Design Thinking, and regular contributor to Inc. Magazine. Welcome to the show, Natalie.

Natalie Nixon:

Thank you, Douglas. It’s a real joy to be here. Thank you for having me.

Douglas Ferguson:

Absolutely. So for starters, let’s talk a little bit about how you got your start. How did you become a creativity strategist?

Natalie Nixon:

Well, it’s been a very loopy journey. I have a background in cultural anthropology and fashion, and I decided many decades ago not to get burdened with trying to narrow myself down. And I actually got that advice as a teenager. I used to be really into radio, and I volunteered early Sunday mornings on a local AM radio show just to help out behind the scenes. And the woman, I’m so sorry, I’m forgetting actually now her name, that’s horrible.

Natalie Nixon:

But she was asking me, I was getting close to graduate high school, what did I think I wanted to do? And she looked at me and she said, “The older you get, the more people are going to try to narrow you down. But if that’s not your thing, don’t be narrowed down by that. Follow your heart. Follow what interests you.” And combined with that, I have amazing parents.

Natalie Nixon:

My parents, my sophomore year in college, fast forward, I was very nervous about what my major was going to be, I wanted to make sure I got a good job at the end of a very wonderful and expensive education. And I called home in tears because I didn’t know what to decide on, because all of the impressive sounding majors where I thought you could get a good J-O-B at the end, I was either failing or I thought they were really boring. And my parents said, “Well, what are you interested in?”

Natalie Nixon:

And so I apologetically began to explain how much I loved anthropology and of all these cool interdisciplinary Africana studies courses. And almost at the same time they said, “That’s what you should major in, that’s what you should study.” And I was like, “Really? You’ll be okay with that?” And they’re like, “Yep, that’s what you should study.” And my father said, “If you follow your heart and you study what you love, you’ll have to turn away opportunities.”

Natalie Nixon:

And it was this huge load that was lifted off my shoulders and it was wonderful permission to follow my heart. And that is something I have been steadfast about my entire life, my entire, most of my life, and my entire career. And so that loopy background in cultural anthropology and fashion has been super useful in the work that I do today as a creativity strategist. There was a chapter in my career where I was a professor for 16 years, and the last six years of that time, I created and launched the Strategic Design MBA program. And it was very multi-disciplinary and really an attempt to creatively disrupt graduate business education.

Natalie Nixon:

We integrated design thinking into the way people were learning strategy and leadership and financial operations and branding. And I actually started Figure 8 Thinking, my company today while I was still a professor, it was my side hustle. I gave a TEDx Philadelphia talk in 2014 and after giving that talk, I was invited to a lot of companies to share out and workshop with them what my talk was about, which was basically the future of work is jazz. And in my view, the most innovative organizations are improvisational.

Natalie Nixon:

So what’s really cool about where I am in my working life right now is that all of the divergent, disparate paths, especially from someone from the outside, looking in on me, didn’t make sense to them. It totally made sense to me because I was just following my heart, which by the way, is just a lot of courage. It’s not easy to do, but the more we do it, the easier it becomes.

Natalie Nixon:

I’m at this really magical, amazing moment in my life and my career where all of those super diverse experiences and skill sets I’ve developed come in handy as a creativity strategist. So as a creativity strategist, I made up the term, by the way. I had never met a creativity strategist, but when I thought about what I really love and what I’m good at, that’s what I decided I am. In my practice at Figure 8 Thinking I help leaders in executive leadership teams and people to get to transformation, transforming their businesses. Sometimes, a lot lately I’ve been doing a lot more coaching and it’s transformation in their lives to make shifts by applying principles and techniques from creativity and from foresight. And I love it.

Douglas Ferguson:

So much cool stuff there. And maybe the most recent connection that I made when I was listening to you and you’re clearly passionate about what you do by the way, and that’s infectious. So I love that. And you mentioned not being tied down by one thing, and I just had Sarah Beth Burke on my show and she has a book called More Than Your Title. And she had come up with this concept of the hybrid professional. So carving out these identities that are unique and that you can own, I just love that. I connected with Sarah Beth on this level of, I kind of felt like I myself was a hybrid professional and had gravitated toward it. And then here you are as well. And I think people are finding their way there and she’s helping people that aren’t realizing it.

Natalie Nixon:

I love that. I’m glad that she’s doing that. You know what’s funny? The moniker for the strategic design MBA program was The MBA For Hybrid Thinkers. We were promoted as the best of design school meets the best of business school.

Douglas Ferguson:

I love it.

Natalie Nixon:

So I am also a hybrid thinker. I think most of us are really, but it gets drummed out of us in our educational pathways and-

Douglas Ferguson:

Well, and the models that we learn and we get comfortable with also impact how we see the world.

Natalie Nixon:

That’s right. That’s right. One of the creativity leaps I encourage people to make is a way from erring on the side of being a deep specialist, to being a polymath like, Leonardo DaVinci who was a mathematician and an artist and an astronomer. And my mom told us when we were really young, all learning is interconnected. And that’s what you see that polymaths really get and understand, that something they learn in the sciences is really going to inform the way they understand history, it’s really going to inform the way they understand carpentry and et cetera, et cetera.

Douglas Ferguson:

As a facilitator, I often think back to the moments and my early career where I was sitting in the room, listening to two people who were in the heat of an argument and thinking to myself that you’re saying the same thing. And I think that’s where the polymaths, these hybrid thinkers, that’s a real strength, right? They can see past the veneer.

Natalie Nixon:

Yes.

Douglas Ferguson:

Because they can see those deeper connections.

Natalie Nixon:

Right. When you decide to be okay with being a hybrid and having these multiple interests, you really are honing your ability to be a systems thinker, a systems designer. It was only about five months ago that I realized that studying Africana studies was really, and this is 35 plus years ago. That was my first foray into systems design and systems thinking. And it wasn’t equipped with the language or the lens to understand it as such back then. But now, that’s the value of that training of ways to understand problems and the interconnection between things. Because we were studying people of African descent throughout the diaspora around the world. And so you really were getting into understanding things as networks and nodes and the cascading effects, when something over here in the system shifts, how that has an effect in all other dimensions of the system. And that came from one of my majors being so, I don’t know if the right word would be multidisciplinary or interdisciplinary, it felt very interdisciplinary. But yeah, that’s something I only was able to articulate as such, only like a few months ago.

Douglas Ferguson:

I was just working with a client recently and they were debating whether or not interdisciplinary was too restrictive and that they should refer to themselves as transdisciplinary.

Natalie Nixon:

Yeah. That’s a good one.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah, I was looking at this chart and I was like, “Oh yeah, that does make sense. You’ve got multi-interdisciplinary, and then transdisciplinary.”

Natalie Nixon:

Right.

Douglas Ferguson:

Is where you’re looking at all of the interconnectedness between them and more of the holistic kind of systems.

Natalie Nixon:

Yeah. Transdisciplinary probably is a bit more accurate. Yeah.

Douglas Ferguson:

So I also loved this moment that you shared about just that unburdening that happened when you had these notions that there was a way to move through the world, and a trusted advisor told you, no, it doesn’t have to be this way. And I think that if more leaders were to treat their employees that way, and we brought together teams that help them understand that there’s many ways to carve out the road in front of them, we would see a lot more innovation.

Natalie Nixon:

We would see a lot more innovation. I think we would see a lot more productivity, because in my view, we are basically having to show up to work each day in drag. It’s like, Natalie’s greatest hits, best of. And no one really gets to see, like I just got back from my social ballroom dance classes, mask on, because this is still COVID quarantine. But today I was practicing the Rumba and a West coast swing. And there are so many dimensions to the people would work around every day that we have no idea what makes them tick. What is actually informing the way they understand the marketing strategy or the financial model or the sales pitch, that if we invited them to share those other sides of themselves, then they’d be a lot happier. It takes work disguising parts of yourself, it takes work trying to put on whatever, fill in the blank, whatever the facade is that seems to pass us as appropriate.

Natalie Nixon:

I believe that, what if the KPIs in organizations, the key performance indicators also included elements of creativity in the way I think about creativity, if it included how wondrous you are, how you really are applying rigor to things and not rigidity, but rigor. And given the time to do that and how you ask better and different questions and how you really lean into improvising and being adaptive. And it would be hard at first because it would be such a culture shift for people to be like, “Really, that’s what you want me to do? It’s okay, I won’t be penalized?” But ultimately it would be inviting people to relax a bit, to share more of their full human selves.

Douglas Ferguson:

I love that. I was thinking of my head as you were wrapping up, I was like, we’re letting them be more human. And then you said, share more of their human selves. And this is something I’ve been talking about a lot for a while around how this belief that with the onslaught of AI and automation, there’s going to be tons of things that computers continue to do better than we do. And especially when you think about the rote, kind of redundant, just repetitive stuff, they’re going to take on more and more and more of that stuff, even the complicated and complex versions of that. And we’re going to have to show up more and more as humans. So what you’re speaking about right there is going to be even more important as time goes on.

Natalie Nixon:

Right. To me, that’s the silver lining of this fourth industrial revolution. You’re absolutely right Douglas, that there’s going to be more room for the human to show up, but are we prepared for that? Because yeah, task related stuff, the robots have it, the algorithms have got it down. So the organizations that are first to invite, make space for, hire for, incentivize more of the human to show up, they’re going to be the organizations that attract the best talent and retain people in more interesting ways.

Douglas Ferguson:

So let’s talk a little bit about how that manifests. And you mentioned something a moment ago that caught my ear because it’s one of my favorite topics and that’s questions. So how do we get asking questions and what are some of your favorites?

Natalie Nixon:

Well, I have been deeply influenced by the work of Warren Berger who wrote A More Beautiful question. I also, probably because Warren in his book referenced Ian Leslie. Ian Leslie wrote a great book called Curious, and Ian explains that curiosity is the product of an information gap. You need to know just a little bit about something to want to know more. And we see that in toddlers, right? They touch something, they taste something, they bump into something, they see something, they hear something. And all of a sudden they want to understand and learn a little bit more. And so I define creativity, I think about creativity as toggling between wonder and rigor to solve problems and the way we can get better at that toggling, the way we can get better at exercising our creativity is through what I call the three I’s.

Natalie Nixon:

And the three I’s are inquiry, improvisation and intuition. And that inquiry piece is super important. I was just saying to someone earlier today, nothing bad ever follows the phrase, “I wonder if,” “I wonder what would happen?” Like really nothing bad ever follows that phrase. It always leads to exploration, discovery, experimentation. And somewhere along the way, we are penalized for asking questions. And obviously when you ask a question, you don’t know the answer, obviously you’re admitting ignorance, but so what, it’s really the beginning of identifying something new.

Natalie Nixon:

And so what Warren Berger found in his research is that the most innovative companies practice inquiry based leadership. They ask questions of themselves, they encourage questions from their teams. And he has a really beautiful, heuristic, which is that they start with asking why, like why do we only hire people from those sorts of schools? Why? Why do we not have anyone here over age 50? Why? Why don’t we ever sell to the Southern hemisphere? And then they diverge even further to what if, what if we started recruiting people who have maybe a high school diploma and rich professional experience? And what if we started selling our stuff to Brazil, the Brazilian market?

Natalie Nixon:

And then it converges into how questions, so how might we do that? And it’s just really, the first time I started reading Warren Berger’s work was when I was a professor heading up the strategic design MBA program. And what I was first attracted to about that series of question asking is that it was really aligned to design thinking, a design thinking process of being very, doing a lot of divergent convergent thinking. So curiosity is everything, and so yeah, some of my favorite questions are, I wonder if, fill in the blank.

Natalie Nixon:

And I just posed a question, I actually think it comes from the second book from Warren Berger, which I have is called The Book of Beautiful Questions. And there’s a great question in there, what would I do if failure was not an option? What would I do if I knew for certainty, this won’t fail? So you put failure off the table, what would you then try? What would you go for? And I think it’s just such a titillating question. It’s a really good one, what are some of your favorite questions?

Douglas Ferguson:

Oh gosh. As a facilitator, maybe one of my favorites is, why don’t we just do that?

Natalie Nixon:

Good one.

Douglas Ferguson:

Anytime I can. I love getting the group talking, so anytime I can pose a question that just like gets people, even, who haven’t we heard from? Love that one. Because especially dealing with an over talker, I don’t really have to point them out. I don’t have to call on the people who aren’t being as included. And then maybe the other thing is, there’s another great question for a facilitator, which is, why am I talking?

Natalie Nixon:

So I’m writing these down, these are good. Why don’t we just do that? And who haven’t we heard from? I like those.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah. They’re fun ones. And I stumbled on as it’s been a while now, but DeAngelo’s book White Fragility has a facilitation guide with it and there are some really amazing questions. One of the things I picked up from her was, what did you mean by that? Which depends on the tone you use. But if you’re gracious with that question, it can be a really soft out for someone who said something that didn’t consider the impact of what they were saying. And they might say something very offensive without intent, but as we know, intent does not matter. And so, what do you mean by that? And then if they have to explain it, then they start backing away from it really quick, and it can create a safer place for everyone.

Natalie Nixon:

You bring a really good point about tonality, delivery, eye contact if possible, body language. So what is it, like 70% of what we communicate is through our body language. I have a couple others, I just want to share real quick.

Douglas Ferguson:

Sure.

Natalie Nixon:

I love Esther Perel, the psychoanalyst. I have a professional crush on her. She’s just so brilliant. And I listened to her podcast, which is called Where Should We Begin? But one of the questions that she poses regularly, and sometimes she poses it as a directive, as a declarative statement so that she poses it as an interrogative statement. And it is, say more. Like the person just said something, and she’ll say “say more” it’s so simple. And it just invites people to say more.

Natalie Nixon:

And the other four set of questions. I shared this next one, especially with, I started a group coaching online creativity course. And I shared how when we decided to make creativity leaps, these are major mind trips, you have to fortify your brain. And so one of the people, a person and who I consider a, she’s a distant teacher. I’ve never met her, but I’ve learned so much from Byron Katie. And so she’s done something called The Work and there are four questions. And so the four questions are, is that true? Is that really true? What are you experiencing with that thought? Like, how are you feeling physically, emotionally, all that.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah.

Natalie Nixon:

And what would you be without that thought? Which is, right? That’s the best one. Where would you be without that thought?

Douglas Ferguson:

Nice. Yeah I really love this idea of challenging people’s mindsets or thinking patterns. What sorts of frameworks are they bringing to the situation that may be incongruent with everyone else. So I love this lateral thinking stuff so saying if you were to remove that, what would surface for you? That’s really cool.

Natalie Nixon:

And the frameworks are stories. A story is a framework, it’s stories that we’ve been telling ourselves, and you get to interrupt the story. You actually can interrupt it. That’s another Esther Perel gem.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah, I like that, interrupting the story. That’s cool.

Natalie Nixon:

Yeah, another one, oh, gosh, she’s so wise, there’s another one that she says, “Are you ready to have a revolution with your mind?” Yeah.

Douglas Ferguson:

I think so. Maybe that sounds like a great Wednesday afternoon. I want to come back to your point a moment ago about eye contact and tonality. And it’s something we were talking about, it surfaced, this point of our pre-show chat that I wanted to also kind of stitch together, which was this notion of equitable distribution. And so when we think about the tools, we both have good selling mics. We have headphones, we have solid internet, because I haven’t seen any issues here. And then when we’re bringing together folks for creative collaborations in this time of COVID, equity is a real challenge when we think about supporting everyone’s needs.

Natalie Nixon:

Yes, absolutely. And before I get into the equity piece, around meeting, meeting up, connecting, remember that book Love In The Time of Cholera, someone will write a book Love Tn The Time of COVID, maybe someone already has, about tonality and physicality. I’m just very conscientious about kinesthetic learning and making and moving in order to understand, and how we embody learning, how sometimes we’re not even aware why we’re terrified to do something. And we have to be conscious of how we’re stiffening up or how we’re feeling queasy in our stomach. And what was that first experience where that way of reacting helped us, and now may not be so helpful, it’s more of a barrier.

Natalie Nixon:

But being very conscientious about moving, it comes from my background studying dance. I studied dance since I was four years old. So I, even I mentioned earlier in our conversation about being at ballroom dance class earlier today, it’s some of the most joyous moments in my week is being at dance class because there are moments literally when I’m in class, either in my private lesson with my instructor or in a group class where I remember myself as five years old excited like, “Okay, when do I get to try it? When do I get to do it?” And being so happy to be moving and communicating in that way. So I just wanted to mention that.

Natalie Nixon:

But yes, you’re absolutely right that we have to have a conscientiousness about equity or lack thereof when we’re talking about meeting and connection in this virtual environment. I like to watch 60 Minutes on Sunday nights because it’s very nostalgic for me. Just that like tick, tick, tick, tick, tick.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah.

Natalie Nixon:

That sound in the introduction. It reminds me of when I was much, much younger and sometimes on a Sunday night, I just want to hear the tick tick, tick, tick, tick, and see who they’re interviewing. And last Sunday, they were looking at the city of Tampa, Florida. And in Tampa, Florida, because of the repercussions of COVID 7000 children did not show up for school. And they followed the social worker and her team as she went from home to home, motel to motel, grandma’s house to grandma’s house to figure out where these little kids were. And one of the things they reported about, at the end of the segment was that actually, they had connected and identified all but 700 kids, which is amazing to me. That they were able to figure all that out.

Natalie Nixon:

But one of the children they interviewed was it was a teenage girl, about 15 or 16 years old. When they tracked her down, she was living in a motel room with her dad, her mom, her sibling. And the interviewer, journalist was asking, “So how’s it coming along with your work? How are you doing in your work?” She said, “Oh, it’s fine. It’s fine.” And she said, “I’ll sit outside on the stairwell and I’ll do my work that way.” And the journalist said, well, “What, what are you using to do your work?” And she goes, “Oh my phone.”

Natalie Nixon:

So she’s using her phone to read a history lesson and try to figure out algebra or geometry or whatever they’re learning at that point. And then she said, “Well, sometimes I’ll take a walk.” And then the journalist said, “Well, it must be hard. There’s so many people around.” She says, “Yes, it can be hard, but you know, I’ll take a walk about a mile down the road to a park.” But then the journalists was like talking over the segment saying, but at the park there’s no wifi. So she has peace and quiet, but she doesn’t have wifi.

Natalie Nixon:

And if we don’t factor in issues around equity, around access, the fallout of the people who’ve been left behind because we don’t, for a number of reasons we don’t have systemic structural support for people who, who are not at an advantage just out the gate, it’s to affect all of us. This idea that we can’t split up the pie differently because I’ll get a smaller slice, no, equity is not about making sure we divide up the current pie differently. Equity is about expanding the size of the pie so that everyone benefits.

Natalie Nixon:

And I borrow a lot from the principles of universal design. Universal design is about designing for people who are differently abled. So like the Oxo kitchen utensils, that’s an example of universal design where the designer’s wife had horribly arthritic hands and so he made the spongy handles for the spatula and the whisk so that it would be comfortable for her. Well, it turns out that when you design for people who are definitely able, it’s actually better designed for everybody. Everybody loves Oxo kitchen tools.

Natalie Nixon:

So this idea about designing for the least amongst us actually raises the playing field for everybody. And we see that in the microfinance examples out of Bangladesh. The gentlemen, the economist who won a Nobel peace prize, where it turns out there are models from understanding how to provide access for emerging entrepreneurs who don’t look like folks in Silicon Valley, who are Brown women and in Southeast Asia from rural villages, that actually is a model for economic development that can be scaled. Also, you know, the Tata car in India. I lived in Sri Lanka, making bras and panties for the Victoria’s Secret brand is an amazing chapter of my life. And yeah, it’s common in Colombo to see a family of five on a scooter, no helmets.

Douglas Ferguson:

Wow.

Natalie Nixon:

A little baby, a toddler up front in front of mom, two little kids smushed between mom and dad. And they’re jamming, they’re going about their day. And countries like Sri Lanka, India said, this could be a big problem if there’s a lot of motor accidents on the road. So how could we design, how can we lean engineer a car that would address the needs of this emerging middle class, a really stripped down an affordable car that’s safe. And that has some bit of a covering that might, for all intents and purposes, be like a scooter with the metal structure outside, I’m over-exaggerating.

Natalie Nixon:

But it turns out that that automotive design is of interest to Daimler Chrysler and to other major automotive companies. So when we design for the least amongst us, when we realize that we are all interconnected and that we must provide equitable solutions during this time of COVID, it raises the bar, it raises the opportunity, and the quality of life for everybody. For me, it’s take your medicine now or take it later, but we have got to deal with this. Otherwise we’ll take our medicine later.

Douglas Ferguson:

That’s fantastic. I was thinking, you were saying that it’s not a matter of just a smaller piece. It’s like the pie is getting bigger, but it also tastes better too.

Natalie Nixon:

Yeah, exactly. Tastes a lot better.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah. So I want to come back to your MBA. And I always like to ask people about a meeting or a gathering that they were a part of, or they designed that they thought was more magical than normal. And if nothing else comes to mind, I am curious about the workshops you ran for the future of work as jazz. Like how did you bring those concepts to people in a way that was engaging and memorable?

Natalie Nixon:

Well, the meeting that did come to mind is the strategic design MBA program attracted some really remarkable, amazing people, a lot of whom I’m still in touch with and connected, with a lot of the alums I still am in touch with. And it was a very boutique program. I’m in Philly, I’m in the shadows of Wharton for heaven’s sake. And they’re like design what? That’s not completely fair, they’ve started to embrace design thinking and human centered innovation, but I felt like a David in a sea of Goliaths most of the time. And I wanted to always create a very special exit for our graduate students. So we would have these final dinners. And I bit off of something that NPR does, NPR has often done stories about your life in three songs.

Natalie Nixon:

So I would always ask everyone to send me, what’s your life in three songs? So the playlist at dinner was people’s magical songs. And people said, “Oh, whose song is that, Oh, why did you pick that one?” And so it was always this wonderful conversation. And I had so many amazing colleagues in the city of Philadelphia, who would gift their space, really cool spaces, and say, “Sure, you can have the dinner here.” And I worked with a really cool dude named Ben Walmer, who has this interesting background in farming and engineering and design. And he had this incredible, I think the name of his company was Highlands Dinner Club. But it was basically this mobile dinner party. And he would have scavenger hunt clues and that you’d end up in a little bit of the woods somewhere. And he would always curate these amazing locally sourced meals.

Natalie Nixon:

So that to me is an example of a meeting that was a convening, a gathering that became a bit of a ritual for the program. And I wanted them to know that I thought they were special and I wanted to give them a special sending off that would be memorable. And I was thanking them for taking the chance with me because they took a chance to get an MBA, a strategic design MBA program and exchange, they told me that the program changed their lives. They shared that they shifted to a different trajectory. And even if it wasn’t overtly a different trajectory, mindset shifts. So that’s an example of really memorable meetings and convenings.

Douglas Ferguson:

That’s fantastic. Well, it’s been a pleasure chatting with you today, and I am really inspired to go create wonder, and maybe be a little more rigorous about it. So thank you for all the words. And I just want to give you a moment to leave our listeners with a final thought.

Natalie Nixon:

Well, I guess my final thought is first, if you’re so moved, definitely check out what I’m up to at figure8thinking.com. And if you’re curious about the creativity leap, you can download a free sample chapter on the website, just the top banner. And something I posted on Instagram this week, it was kind of an extension out of coming out of Thanksgiving time. I post a lot of little quotes from my book and just what’s top of mind for me. And I posted that gratitude is the gateway to wonder.

Natalie Nixon:

And so Douglas, you and I are talking just after Thanksgiving, it’s the first week of December. And sometimes it can be really hard to figure out what we’re grateful for doing such a really challenging time like COVID. But if you do a thought experiment of just observing five to 10 objects in your immediate surroundings, and think about the people unknown to you who are responsible for making that thing come to be, or because of that thing that reminds you of that trip you had, and then the people you met, gratitude is the gateway to wonder, and wonder is something that we really need to indulge in more than ever.

Natalie Nixon:

So that that’s the thought I would leave people with that gratitude is the gateway to wonder.

Douglas Ferguson:

That’s so beautiful. Thank you so much for being on the show, Natalie, and I hope to talk to you again soon.

Natalie Nixon:

Thank you, Douglas.

Douglas Ferguson:

Thanks for joining me for another episode of Control The Room. Don’t forget to subscribe to receive updates when new episodes are released. And if you want more head over to our blog, where I post weekly articles and resources about working better together, VoltageControl.com.