Natalie Nixon, Ph.D., is known as the “creativity whisperer to the C-Suite.” She helps corporate leaders achieve transformative business results by applying wonder and rigor to their work. In 2021, her firm, Figure 8 Thinking, was named one of the top 20 women-led innovation firms by Core 77. As a popular and increasingly in-demand keynote speaker, Natalie’s accessible advice on creativity, and the future of work and innovation, has landed her on the “Top 50 Keynote Speakers In The World” list for 2022 by Real Leaders.
Nixon’s new book Move. Think. Rest. redefines productivity and our relationship with time by providing readers with practical reflection questions and exercises designed to shift away from burnout and redefine indicators of success.
1) Most productivity models often prize output at all costs. The promise of your book Move. Think. Rest. is to help us shift from the outdated productivity models to meaningful cultivation. What does meaningful cultivation look like in practice, and how can leaders start to measure it differently?
Productivity, as we have traditionally thought about it, is a relic of the first Industrial Revolution. It does not make sense for several reasons: due to burnout, new rules for remote work, ubiquitous technology, and also because it is an “either-or” way of thinking about work. We tend to lean into measuring only what we see. Efficiency and speed are valued. What I am proposing is something I call the cultivation model.
I got to it because I started thinking, if I am going to critique the productivity model that stems from the first industrial revolution, what did society look like before the first industrial revolution? Most societies were primarily agrarian economies, and in an agricultural economy, cultivation is the mode. That got me thinking about what cultivation really is. Cultivation is a “both-and” model. We value both quick spurts of growth and slow growth. We understand, as the Navy SEALs say, that “slow is smooth, and smooth is fast”.
The cultivation model values the solo individual practitioner and the collective. We can ebb and flow between doing solo work, which many of us do in remote work environments, and really leveraging collaboration. The long-term yield is in collaboration. In cultivation, we value both quick and slow, the solo practitioner and the collective, as well as what is happening on the dormant, invisible plane when things are percolating and marinating. At the same time, we still value the idea of measuring what we can see. That is what I mean by a both-and model.
Another way it looks different is in how we think about growth. I find the way we think about growth to be overly simplistic. I read economist Daniel Susskind’s book Growth in preparation for this work, and I really like how he challenges the x-y axis model, where growth is a nice straight line starting at the origin. Maybe there are a few dips to illustrate turbulence, but that is not how natural systems work. Society is made up of humans, and we are natural systems. The model of growth that the cultivation approach values is more like a bicycle wheel turning. We get traction by moving forward, but there are dips. We have to look backward retrospectively, and then we can trend up again. This cyclical way of gaining traction through the bicycle wheel metaphor is a much more helpful and realistic way to think about productivity and growth. It sets us up for success.
2) We live in a world of cheap dopamine and shallow engagement. What are some of the “deep thought modes” that you believe unlock breakthrough ideas, and how do we protect the space for them when our attention is so fragmented?
There is a lot of distraction, which ultimately is not helpful. One way I would answer your question about where and how we can unlock breakthrough ideas is to discuss two states of rest that I learned about while researching the book. One is right before we begin to fall asleep, and one is right as we are awakening. The state of falling asleep is called a hypnagogic state.
Thomas Edison famously used this to his advantage. When he would nap, he held a heavy object or a weighted ball in his hand while reclining on a lounge chaise. As he began to drift off, the ball would drop, startling him awake. He had discerned a pattern that in this groggy, hypnagogic state just before sleep, some of the most creative ideas would emerge. This happens because we are entering the default mode network of the brain. When we tap out of the world, we relieve the heavy cognitive workload and allow different neural synapses to fire and catalyze new connections.
The other phase is when we are waking up, called the hypnopompic state. Many of us have experienced those moments just at dawn when we are still a little sleepy and then suddenly get an insight. Some experts suggest planting a seed before falling asleep. For example, it could be a question you are pondering or something you have been wrestling with. They suggest this because answers often emerge in that state. It feels like immersion because some of our best work is actually done when we tap out. Thinking needs ebb and flow to allow different regions of the brain to activate and do their work.
These liminal states and liminal spaces are critical for unlocking breakthrough ideas. Organizationally, this does not have to mean nap rooms, though that can be great if it fits a company’s culture. There are examples from major companies like Zapier, which experimented with no-meeting weeks. They created a liminal space by not requiring people to attend meetings, and the research showed employees remained productive and even reached more interesting insights.
3M has its 15 percent culture, which is related to the way Google once had 20 percent time, during which Gmail was created. Even though Google no longer formally offers this, we can replicate or create parallel liminal spaces within our teams and organizations. Natural systems have ebb and flow, yin and yang, contraction and release. Whether you are talking about the way blood flows through our valves or how food travels down the esophagus into the stomach through peristalsis, there is a rhythm. In our work environments, we tend to contract, contract, contract without building in release.
3) Rest is often treated as a mode of recovery, a way to recharge so we can work again. You are reframing it here not only as recovery, but also as a way to improve performance and retention. What does rest look like when it is intentionally designed as part of an organizational operating system?
In terms of the organizational operating system, rest can be scalable. What I mean by that is it can look like intentionally making sure people are not in back-to-back Zoom or Teams meetings. It can mean building micro breaks into the day. It can look like intentional recess. One of the people I interviewed for the book is Brendan Boyle, a toy designer who teaches a course on play at Stanford’s d.school. Brendan is a big advocate of recess. So is Gerry Laybourne, the founder of Nickelodeon. She actually used to have recess where there was no agenda. It was a moratorium on meetings, a chance to pause and reset.
Rest at an organizational level can also scale up in more significant ways, such as sabbaticals. In academia, there is the opportunity to earn a sabbatical every seven years; however, in many tech companies, sabbaticals are available every five years. The challenge is that not everyone takes advantage of them. Sometimes this is because sabbaticals are not modeled by leaders, and sometimes people fear that they will be penalized for actually taking them. From a policy perspective, sabbaticals and other formalized breaks are really interesting ways rest can show up in an organization.
In my research for the book, I also learned something I thought was very important. We often think of recovery only in terms of physical recovery after exercise, or mental recovery when our brains are fried. But there is also a need for emotional recovery. Leaders, especially during times of layoffs, have to make difficult decisions. People who see colleagues lose their jobs are emotionally impacted. That takes a toll on us. We are emotional beings. I love the work of Lisa Feldman Barrett, who writes about how emotions are made. It turns out emotions are constructed and predictive. Instead of “I think, therefore I am,” it is “I feel.” We are sentient beings. Paying attention to the value of rest and recovery for emotional recovery is important.
4) Your book introduces the idea of building one’s own MTR (Move. Think. Rest.) operating system. What have you seen happen when individuals start to consciously design their own personal rhythms of movement, thought, and rest? What does success look like using this OS, and what do the KPIs look like?
This book is a provocation, and it is meant to be additive. I am not suggesting that we throw traditional ways of thinking about key performance indicators out the window. Metrics like market share, sales increases, and similar indicators are absolutely critical for measuring the health and resonance of a business. What I am suggesting is that we also integrate new types of KPIs.
For example, a KPI that incentivizes prototyping and experimentation, and then tracks what sorts of new ideas are yielded and implemented as a result of that prototyping and experimentation. Another KPI could be identifying new connections made through play. For example, connections across the organization, connections interpersonally, and even connections within our own minds as we juxtapose new ideas.
When you think about it, all the attributes of play — curiosity, inquiry, co-negotiation, and active listening — these are the same attributes we say we need in great leadership. Why wouldn’t we want more play? And I am not talking about dartboards on the walls or foosball tables, but real play, which Brendan Boyle likes to say is about engagement. Don’t you want engaged employees? Without engaged employees, you will not have an innovative organization.
So, another KPI could be tracking the types of new connections, both in terms of ideas and relationships that are surfacing because of play. Another KPI could be one that revisits current metrics for productivity that may no longer serve you. I am not sure the right word for this, but it would be like a self-reflective KPI that challenges your assumptions. It asks whether a particular existing indicator is still helpful or whether it is just creating more work. For instance, is it busywork? Is the old KPI just adding to “productivity theater” or is it actually functionally still relevant?
5) We’re living in a reality where AI is now omnipresent. You argue that to thrive, we need to lean into what makes us distinctly human. How do you see the MTR operating system helping people harness AI as an amplifier of creativity rather than a replacement for it?
One of the book’s features is that it offers reflection questions and exercises at the end of each chapter, suitable for individuals, teams, and organizations. Embedded in many of those exercises and questions is an invitation to think about using technology to delegate routine tasks so that you can free up cognitive load in the brain. Another way to use AI is to have it reflect back to you. If you have input a conundrum or a draft of how you are thinking about something, you can ask AI, “What am I missing?” This allows AI to serve as a critic that helps open up new, expansive ways of thinking.
There are also great apps that help minimize distraction. There is an app called Forest that helps block distractions. I use my timer all the time in micro breaks to schedule daydream breaks. There are technologies like Miro and MURAL that help with mind mapping and virtual collaboration, which can lead to more creative outcomes.
Overall, the value of AI as our co-creator and co-conspirator lies in the fact that we can obtain answers so quickly, which actually opens us up to spaciousness. It allows us to dwell in that liminal space where discovery can happen. It opens up time for deeper, more meaningful collaboration. That is why I say in the book that we are in the midst of a human revolution, not a technological revolution. All of this technology is a tool. That is what it is, fundamentally. It is helping us revisit the ways we can be more human.
