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How to rethink creative productivity without burning out with Natalie Nixon
00:42:54
Discover how Natalie Nixon’s Move, Think, Rest framework redefines productivity and boosts creativity, innovation, and well-being at work.
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- [00:02]
A
Welcome back to Insights Unlocked. In this episode, I'm joined by Natalie Nixon, creative strategist, author and CEO of Figure 8 Thinking. We dive into our framework from her new book Move, Think, Rest and explore how rethinking productivity can lead to more creativity, better collaboration and stronger business results. We also talk about burnout, intuition, and even how AI can be a creative partner. Enjoy the show.
- [00:31]
B
Welcome to Insights Unlocked, an original podcast from User Testing where we bring you candid conversations and stories with the thinkers, doers and builders behind some of the most successful digital products and experiences in the world, from concept to execution.
- [00:51]
A
Welcome to the Insights Unlocked podcast. I'm Nathan Isaacs, Principal Content Marketing Manager at User Testing and our guest today is Natalie Nixon. Natalie is a creative strategist, award winning author and CEO of Figure 8 Thinking, where she helps global organizations transform how they innovate by blending wonder, rigor and human centered design. Welcome to the show, Natalie.
- [01:16]
B
Thank you, Nathan. It's great to be here.
- [01:19]
A
Natalie, you've become well known for helping leaders rethink creativity and productivity, especially with your new book, Move, Think and Rest, which I believe you were just telling me that it was selected as one of the best productivity books for the year. So congratulations for that.
- [01:37]
B
Yeah, the next Big Idea Club select is one of the 12 best productivity books of 2025. That's high praise. I was really thrilled to hear that.
- [01:47]
A
Yeah. And it's not the only praise your book has received. I mean you've a lot of, you know, just somebody needs to just type your name into a Google search and, and they'll see all the news articles about, about you and the book and, and kind of what you're talking about and what we'll be talking about today. For listeners who may be meeting you for the first time, can you give us a quick snapshot of your journey and what led you to the all this work?
- [02:11]
B
Yeah, the short of it is that I've done a lot of different things and I finally got to a crossroads in my life where I was able to merge and converge all of those varied interests and experiences. I have a background in cultural anthropology, I have a background in education, both I was a middle school English teacher in my 20s and also a university professor for 16 years. And I've worked in the fashion industry in as an entrepreneurial hat designer as well as in global sourcing for division of the limited brands. I actually started my current company, figure 8 thinking as a side hustle. While I was an academic, while I was a professor, I gave a TEDx Philadelphia talk in 2014, proclaiming that the future of work is jazz. And that talk catapulted me into getting invited into companies to help them build more improvisational ways of working. And I was doing so many of these engagements. John, my husband, said, babe, this is a thing, you should formalize it. So I did. I created Figure 8 thinking as a side hustle and woke up a year later and realized I'm actually having a lot of fun with my side hustle and decided to give it a try full time. Have not looked back. And what I do as a creativity strategist is I help leaders and organizations catalyze creativity's roi. Because in my experience and from my perspective, there's not a fuzzy dotted line between creativity and business results. There's a solid bolt line.
- [03:46]
A
The I just still thinking about the future of work as being jazz and that sort of improvisation, that improvisational nature of all that. We're big jazz fans here at the house, so I I oh good. I love that we're getting ready to go take, we've taken our kids, we're brainwashing them into, into love and jazz. So we're taking to a show here in a couple days.
- [04:16]
B
That's awesome. That's awesome.
- [04:17]
A
You said many people are dying a slow death at work and that traditional notions of productivity are relics of the first industrial revolution. How should organizations rethink productivity today, especially those pushing for speed, efficiency and constant output? Kind of like my job.
- [04:36]
B
Well, the reason, well, that's not bad. It's just that the ways we've thought about productivity are an either or model, right? Either we focus on efficiency, output, speed, or we're not doing anything worthwhile. And to me, that is a relic of the first industrial revolution, which started in the mid-19th century, which radicalized everything. It changed cities and towns and transportation and little villages, relationship to the church and power dynamics, et cetera. And that has gotten us to where we are. The challenge is that the the modes of working don't quite align anymore with that first industrial revolution model of work which is based on you measure only what you see. It is speed based efficiencies only get rewarded and it's output space. And so the model that I offer in my book Move think Rest is one that's grounded in cultivation and it is a both and model. So yes, we should care about speed and efficiency measuring what we see, but we value the solo practitioner and the collective. We value speed and also slow. We acknowledge that yes, we should be measuring what we can see. We also understand that there's a lot happening during dormant periods when we need to sleep on it, when things are in an incubation stage. Even in startup culture there is this language of the incubator right versus the accelerator. We live in a time where we can work differently because of technology, AI, robotics, automation, which is taking over basic tasks. The opportunity that I am provoking us to take a look at is it sticks for the so what behind all of this speed because we can get the answers more quickly. The so what is that? Now we actually have time for deeper critical thinking, for collaboration, for eyeball to eyeball conversations, to really embrace the liminal space, the ambiguity that comes when you are on the verge of discovery instead of just trying to rush through it and charge through it. So that's what I mean when I say we are still operating under this relic of the first industrial revolution when we can really embrace this both and model of. Instead of asking how might I be more productive today or how might my team be more productive this quarter? A different question is what might I cultivate today? What might my team cultivate this quarter? Which is that both and model the.
- [07:23]
A
And I was joking about myself but you know, and maybe I'll include myself in our broader audience which are designers. I mean they are creators, they're designers, marketers, product leaders, even researchers are creative and how they're tackling their work. And I'm just wondering, you know, what would it look like for them to operationalize your framework, your move. Think rest framework. I'm, you know, when we, we've, we, we sort of made ourselves so efficient that I, I can't think of how I'm going to slow down to, to marinate those, those big ideas, right when, when there's a part of me that's, and I'm a former newspaper reporter where I was writing five stories a day, you know, like I don't know how to slow down to, to really do that. What, what should I or other people be thinking about when they, when, when they do this?
- [08:22]
B
Well first let me just address this is just a, a not to put too fine a point on it, but if you know a little bit about my work, you know that I don't like to say, I don't like to ghettoize. Creativity is only something that artists or designers are great. So I love that you point out the researchers are also creative. Right. There's a difference between art and creativity, between design and creativity. So to me I've developed something called the wonder rigor method which which is an on ramp for everyone to realize that to be human part of our birthright as humans is to be creative. So the best CFOs and attorneys and accountants and designers and coders and farmers, teachers, plumbers, are super creative when they're doing this. Talking to wonder and rigor to solve problems. I just wanted to highlight that. But, but to operationalize the Move Think Rest human center operating system just requires some intentionality. It requires like with all crossroads, to acknowledge there's a different way, that maybe the ways we'd be going about it don't serve us in an optimal way. And so operationalizing Move Think Rest first requires that we understand what this human centered operating system is. So the first thing it is not, it's not a siloed process. It's not first you move, then you think, and then you rest. It's very integrative. Movement refers to movement hygiene. So operationalizing movement throughout the day means that we occasionally are standing while we're working. We make sure that we counter in buffers to step away from the desk to. If we're in a building, if we're confined to a building, take the stairs. If we have the ability to walk outside, you know, sometimes we think, oh, I don't have time to take a walk. Because we think a walk has to take 30 minutes. Just like we assume for some reason that a meeting should be 30 minutes long. Says who? Right. We've got to, we've got to challenge a lot of assumptions. But I have walks that takes three minutes long. I have walks that I know will take seven minutes if I'm feeling, you know, but I have particularly a lot of time budgeted in the day. I could take a 15 to 30 minute walk. But the point is, when we move, our ideas move. And the spinal cord is an extension of the brain. So when we are sick, cramped, seated, cramped over our laptop or our computer for even more than 40 minutes, and this is according to research by neuroscientist Dr. John Medina. He's written an incredible series of books called Brain Rules, which we actually are not doing our best thinking because when we sit cramped over, blood flow gets restricted to the brain. And if there's less blood flow, there's less oxygen to the brain, which means we're not doing our better, our better thinking. So movement hygiene is integrating movement and how you run a meeting. The Navy has run standing meetings for years. And by the way, the Navy's SEALs are famous for having said that slow is smooth and smooth is fast. So the Ability to slow down is actually advantageous because when we slow down, we zoom out. But the movement part of the operating system is that movement hygiene, the thinking part is really about valuing what I call backcasting and forecasting. So backcasting is about memory, reflection, metacognition. Why do I think the way I think forecasting is about inspiration, curiosity, dreaming, daydreaming. When I talk about thinking in the Move Think Rest operating system, I'm talking about back casting and forecasting. So back casting is about reflection and memory and metacognition. Why do I think the way I think about XYZ forecasting is about daydreaming, dreaming, imagination, inspiration. And if you notice those modalities of thought back casting and forecasting requires to slow down. And they're actually essential for that super sharp, rational, cognitive decision making that we all long for, that we're rewarded for, that gets incentivized. So a lot of what I write about movethink rest is shifting around the way we think about incentivization plans, around our KPIs, around ways to operationalize, institutionalize and integrate these different modalities of working. The rest piece is about intermittent rest and I interviewed 58 people for the book. I was very interested in how people current state are integrating breaks, micro breaks throughout the day, but also scaling it out to sabbatical. So I was really, it was really cool to interview people who are for nonprofit organizations, tech companies that are granted a sabbatical every five years. The challenge is that not everyone takes the company up on that offer because it's not always modeled by leadership. Right. So so much of these shifts in behaviors are they're low hanging fruit. It's actually not a big leap or shift necessarily to make it. What to make these changes in movement and movement hygiene and back testing and forecasting for thought or an intermittent rest, whether it's talking about a day, a week or a whole year. But it's about how it's modeled in leadership, how we think about hiring and retaining practices, how we think about key performance indicators. And in the book I write about, where do you start? You start with key KPEs or key performance experiences. And you start by prototyping. You know all about prototyping. You can prototype not just products, but you can prototype experiences and services so you don't have to throw the baby out the bathwater and say, well, we're not going to run any of our meetings in the same way. No. What is one monthly or every other week sort of meeting that you could switch up and who leads the meeting? How do you begin it and end it? Where does it occur? We have the artifacts in our organizational culture to begin experimenting with these new and different ways of working and then collect feedback from each other, from our colleagues and see how it's going and see what we want to tweak and develop.
- [14:35]
A
Well, I love, I love all that and I'm just reminded of a few things as you were talking about that this idea of short walks or walks where you can be doing the work. And I think back to, I'm not going to remember his name for whatever reason. Apple's co founder who would. Was known for not Tim. Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs.
- [15:00]
B
Steve Jobs. Excuse me.
- [15:01]
A
Would take, you know, they would go with the engineers and they would walk about the campus or whatever it might be and, and get the work done that way. And I, and I think that's great. I also think, and I'm going to give myself a compliment, but that's not the intent here. But people like myself where we're, we're super efficient with our work, right? We're, we're pounding it out. We're also super efficient with our time off, right. We don't actually slow down even in those cases. And I'm thinking about that and I, I do long distance bike riding. So I'm like oh yeah, take, take a few days off, plan a 500 mile bike ride. That's not really, that's not really slowing down. So I think I would.
- [15:41]
B
But you know, in your defense I will say you have to be self aware. You need to be compassionate with yourself. So I used before, you know, when you write a book you learn a lot. You have to talk to a lot of different people. You research, I research and I used to think I'm horrible at meditating. I am a superb daydreamer. I love daydreaming. I take daydream breaks. I recommend that everyone takes daily daydream breaks if it's just one a day. Set your timer for 90 seconds. Standby window. Watch the clouds drift. Daydreaming is really essential for divergent thinking to activate the default mode network so that when you return to the work at hand your, your thinking is actually much clearer. Different neurosynapses are at work that where all the juicy bits of productivity happen. But I used to think I was really not great at meditation until as I was researching the book I learned there's also a type of kinesthetic meditation. So I am a swimmer and so when I'm Swimming laps. I'm sure this happens for you on the road when you're, when you're just cycling. You get into flow state because you are. You're focused. Right. And you get out of your head into your body. And that is a. That, that is a way of breaking away from that overburdened cognitive load and the neocortex. So I think, I think that's fair. It's totally fair.
- [17:09]
A
That's. Yeah. Well, also. But also my takeaway is like, you have to have some intent about all of this. What you're talking about is. Is. And that might be my. One of my takeaways. Yes. I do spend a lot of time just saying, oh, how did that 10 miles just go by? It's because I was in that sort of meditative state, you know, just.
- [17:31]
B
Yeah.
- [17:32]
A
Going down the straight road and just thinking about life and work and whatever it might be.
- [17:38]
B
But, Nathan, do you find that sometimes when you come back from those rides, a challenge that had stymied you or a place where you felt stuck, it's something you weren't thinking about it consciously? But do you find that sometimes things sudden, we'll click together or you'll. You'll think of someone will pop you that you should call and talk to who could be helpful in the conundrum?
- [18:00]
A
Oh, yeah, absolutely. There's always a to do list. I come back and all that sort of has filtered out. Right. You. You've been able to kind of make sense of a lot of things that are going on. And you got to quickly write down all that so you don't lose it or else you have to go out for another bike ride and remember.
- [18:18]
B
Oh, shocks.
- [18:22]
A
You kind of talked about this when you talked about starting figure 8. And this point of like, I don't want to do this anymore. I'm at a turning point here. How can leaders recognize early signals of burnout within themselves or their teams before it becomes a crisis?
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B
Well, unfortunately, within ourselves, you know, there's that wonderful book, the Body Keeps the Score. The body knows. The body will tell you. And in my own personal burnout moment, I was doing my dream job. I loved my work. But sometimes, what happens when we love our work and it's a passion project? At least in my case, I wasn't really good at setting boundaries for my personal space, for my own personal rejuvenation, for my time. And I was walking down the hallway around 5:15pm on a Wednesday afternoon from the photocopier. I was a professor at the time. I was the founding director of a really cool strategic design MBA program. And I was walking down the hallway with my my arms full of folders of papers to grade and I heard someone say out loud, I don't want to do this. And it was a really terse voice through gritted teeth and that voice was my own and I could not bottle it up anymore. It surfaced and it tumbled out of my mouth and I walked into my office, I closed the door, I sat down, I thought, oh, okay, I'm going to have to reckon with this because I the other piece in my career building is that I've always followed my heart. I received an incredible gift from my parents when I was a sophomore in college trying to figure out what I would major and I didn't want to disappoint them. I wanted to get a really good job at the end of a very expensive education. And the short of it is as I was talking in circles about majors I thought sounded impressive because they know me well. They said well what are you interested in? And I confessed I love anthropology and these Africana studies classes are so cool. And almost at the same time they said that's what you should study. And my father said, natalie, if you study what you love, you'll have to turn away opportunities because no one will have to tell you to get up earlier, stay later, work harder. And it was like this load lifted off my shoulders and it was this permission slip which probably to their chagrin at different times in my life I kept following their advice to follow my heart. And so when that burnout moment happened for me, I reckoned with it. Which doesn't mean it was easy. But I acknowledge I couldn't keep stifling in this friction between work that work that at once fulfilled me but was now starting to deplete me. And I think if we're leaders, if we're managers of teams, we have to be cognizant of the boundaries that we are setting for our team that hopefully we are setting boundaries and respecting those boundaries. It's not enough to say we no emails over the weekend, but then you are sending an email every now and then. Are you a little snappy or short with people if they don't respond at 10:30pm at night or something like that. So I think we have to use our words, we have to collectively and collaboratively I think design rules of engagement as a team. For example, when I facilitate I always start with rules of engagement which are pretty light hearted like only blue sky thinking but also some things that are Pretty important like actively listening. And I always end invite people in. What have I missed? What do you want to make sure that we adhere to in our time together? And I think the same bodes really well when you are leading a team because when people have buy in they are much more likely to acquiesce. They're much more likely to be engaged. So setting some collective rules of engagement is really important. And then leadership is increasingly inside out work. So it's making sure you practice what you preach. And if you are taking care of yourself and attuned to your emotional recovery in addition to the mental and physical, please be attuned to those with whom you're working. If you see that people are struggling or they seem to be taking a lot of longer hours, ask questions. I just had a conversation Kimmer with whom just the other day. Oh it was just last night. I was catching up with a friend over a cocktail and she was saying that there's someone who she would love to groom in her office because she's going to be moving on to take over the role. But she notices that this person makes a lot of assumptions about the, about interpreting people's behaviors and she. So she'll ask the person. Well, did you ask her, did you ask her if she would like to get extra training and xyz? Well. Well no. I mean I. She doesn't seem like she does but ask her, you know and turned out this person totally would be open to extra training in this particular. They. They would love it if someone else could could. They could parner with them so they could share the work. So we have to use our words. We have to be self aware. We have to ask questions. But it's, it actually does start with how we are monitoring our own behavior.
- [23:51]
A
I'm also thinking as. I'm hearing you say that as, as yeah. Ask. Ask those questions. Ask what. What may be behind this burnout. Right. The. It could be that they, they've plateaued. Yep. My. My kids, the school. I don't. You could. You'll tell I don't approve of this. But they've, they have this initiative they're starting this week where if you have to they want all the middle schoolers in their seats on time when the bell rings instead of just in the hallways dragging it. And that makes total sense especially with the limited actual education time that they get. But they're. They're like if you do this, we'll give you a reward at the end of the week. If you don't, you get Punished by going to silent study hall. And I'm like, well, what is it about the first periods for all these classes make them more interesting? Right. Like, you know, if you don't have to give candy. But what's that equivalent in education? Right. Make. Make it something that they want to be in their seats, you know, the.
- [24:56]
B
Yeah.
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A
Type of thing. But, yeah, instead of looking for that punishment, we're going to make you. We're going to force you into this behavior because we think that's the right. Well, I know when I do that with my kids, sure, I can get it. But they're not learning anything. They're not. They're not changing their behaviors. They just know that they're not going to get in trouble.
- [25:15]
B
That's right. Right. I think that's a really good point. And I think that points out that the role of gamification, not that everything has to be a game, but. But really what is play? Play is a big area of behavior in terms of work that I explored and move, think, rest. And I interviewed Brendan Boyle, who is a toy designer. He teaches a course on play at Stanford D School. And I went out to Stanford, observed the class, participated a bit in the class, interviewed Brendan, and he defines play as engagement. The reason why the kids are so engaged out in the hallway, they're playing. How could you integrate play in class? And some people think, well, learning isn't about play. Well, let's unpack what play is. Play is about curiosity. Play is about active listening. Play is about collaboration. It's about experimentation. It's about negotiation. When we are at play, we're doing all of those things. I was always bored in history classes in high school because, number one, as a black girl, there was never any. Anyone they talked about who remotely seemed to be like me. So I was. I was like, trying to figure out, like, why are all these dudes the only ones are always interesting? So that was one thing. But, man, if I learned the way some YouTube channels talk about history, if I could learn in terms of story and, and just because people are a trip historically. So if we just. If we taught history and like the whimsical and odd ways that people behave, that's. That's a much more engaging way and playful way for people to learn. That's why Hamilton the Musical has been such a hit. I mean, that people are learning incredible American history by learning the lyrics to music and to rap songs. So it's, it's, you know, it's. Experimentation is key. Mix it up a bit.
- [27:11]
A
Yeah. The that kind of leads us to another next question here. So you've talked about how creativity is an ROI driver, not a nice to have, and outline how it fuels innovation and business impact. Can you share any examples for our listeners on that?
- [27:30]
B
Yeah. So there is a clear business ROI between creativity and innovative return on investment for organizations. So one example is when you commit to building the creative capacity of yourself, of your team, of your organization, you necessarily have to engage in much more inventive thinking and imaginative ways to explore the problem at hand. And when you engage in more inventive thinking, you identify variations in your product offering and the service offering and the experiences that you're delivering. Maybe you decide to instead of selling experiences, you're going to productize it or vice versa, and that leads to new revenue streams. That's a business result between draw lines, inventive thinking and new revenue streams. Another example of the business ROI of creativity is that when we collaborate, creativity increases. Now, most of us, if we're honest, despise collaboration because we think, why do we have to bring these people in? We're fine skipping along the way. We've always done things around here. But when we collaborate long term collaboration, it challenges our assumptions. It ultimately increases productivity. When productivity goes up, efficiencies go up. And when efficiencies go up, costs go down. That's a business result that you can link between collaboration, which is an essential ingredient in creativity, and lowering costs. And then a third example that highlights the business ROI of creativity is that an essential underpinning of creativity is curiosity. It's being able to ask very different sorts of questions. P.S. we get better at asking questions when we collaborate, either because questions are being asked of us or we need to understand why our colleague does it this way and not our way. And so we just get better at priming questions, learning the difference between convergent questions, which are like who, what, when, where and divergent questions which are why, what if? And I wonder. And both sorts of questions are important. But when we ask more questions, we no longer are obsessed with our beautiful little baby, the trinket that we've made over over the past 14 years. And we fall in love with the problems our customers have. We turn that curiosity to to problem finding, problem definition. And when we do that, that often leads to greater brand loyalty and increased market value. And that's a business result.
- [30:20]
A
As I'm thinking, many companies are great at tracking. Again is this focus on efficiency, focus on customer metrics. But you've also argued that we need inside Outwork and intuition to truly understand people. How can teams blend quantitative data with intuition and lived experience? Or I'm sorry, how can teams blend quant. Yeah, Quantitative data with intuition and lived experience to reach more meaningful insights?
- [30:52]
B
Well, the truth is they already are integrating qualitative intuition with the quant. We just are afraid to say it out loud. There really is no such thing as objectivity even when we are collecting, when we're doing quantitative research, which is essential for understanding what are the patterns. Right. Let's say the quantitative research results are collected through survey data. Well, the way people answer surveys is self reporting. Right. So if I answer a survey, if a company decide if they should open a new gym, a gym membership company in my community, and they sent out a survey and one of the questions, how often do you go to the gym each week? I say, oh, I go to the gym five days a week. You know, that might be a false positive. And they built this gym and then no one comes or not at the frequency they thought because they didn't integrate it with qualitative research. Right. So the first nudge the intuition would be like, okay, looks like in this community 78% of the people go to the gym five days a week. That's incredible. Is that really true? Right. So the qualitative research, which is the worm's eye view, does deep observation and interviews and contextual inquiry and they observe. Oh, actually she goes maybe two, at most three days a week. And it has nothing to do with the gym. It's more about childcare issues or is more about transportation. So then you might do an interesting mashup and realize what if we are the first group of gyms that offers round the clock childcare or make sure we do a partnership with the local public transportation authority, whatever. You know, the point is that if we only stop at the quantitative, we're fooling ourselves if we don't acknowledge those nudges that come when we don't have the proof yet. But there's just like what I call a blip on the radar screen. We have to investigate that. And I started observing the role of intuition in strategic decision making when I was a professor of the strategic design MBA program, we would invite in startup leaders on our Friday night design and dine evenings. And to a successful startup leader when they would be sharing their origin story, there was always this moment when they would say, something told me not to do the deal or something told me to work with her and not him. And I kept hearing that something told me so often I thought, I think that something is intuition. But we don't touch intuition in business school and medical school and law school. Every successful leader has those moments, those inflection points. So what's really exciting is now that there is more neuroscience research studies that have come that are, that, that I, that I write about and move, think, rest that, that show the connection between intuition and strategic decision making. So there is, there was a study, I think it was, I'm going to get the date wrong. So I'm not going to say the date, but there was a study that basically that's called the heartbeat detection experiment. And it's really looking at something called interoception. So as humans, we are sense making sentient beings. We have something called proprioception, which is your awareness of where you are in space. And we have something called interoception, which is your awareness of your inner state of being. So proprioception dancers are really good at proprioception or skateboarders are really good at birds that can zoom through the sky and nail landing on a branch through a thicket of, of barbel branches. Right? They're really good at proprioception. Interoception is I'm cold, I'm hot, I'm tired, I feel safe, I feel hungry. And interoception is powered by the vagus nerve. The vagus nerve is the longest cranial nerve in the body. It extends from the brain down through the heart and lungs and into the gut. So when we say things like my gut is telling me, it literally is. We literally have a neural highway system linking our brain, our heart, our lungs and the gut. And the, the heartbeat detection study asked people to sit in a chair with their feet on the ground and their hands on their lap. And they were asked to tap out on their lap, their heartbeat rate, not by putting their fingers on their, their wrist to detect a pulse. And some people are outstanding at this. They can sit very stillly and they just begin to tap out their heart rate. And other people are like, what do you mean, I can't do that. But that's called interoceptive awareness and interoceptive accuracy. And so the experiment went on to find that people with high levels of interoceptive awareness are attuned to that inner state, also are really good at accurate strategic decision making in high stakes environments. And that experiment blew my mind because it, it demonstrated that this is not woo woo, that there is now scientifically documented connections between our interoceptive awareness powered by our vagus nerve, which is responsible for our Intuition and rational cognitive strategic decision making in intense high stake environments. So for in our work environments one of the things I suggest that we start is we just talk about it more. You know that we just that have managers just share moments when they have married the data that's on the Excel sheet with that nudge and what was the result. And just having more open conversations about how those occurrences are a lot more frequent than maybe we want to admit.
- [36:46]
A
Yeah. As we wrap up and we can't get through an episode without talking about AI. Now many teams worry about AI that they worry that it will either speed them up to an unsustainable level or flatten their creativity. And you argue the opposite. That I can be a co creator that sparks wonder and deeper thinking. What does it look like for a product or design team to work with AI in a way that enhances rather than replaces human creativity?
- [37:16]
B
What it looks like is. Is making is ensuring that the AI tool or app is not the end point. I'm ensuring that it's just the beginning. That it could be a launch pad and from there turn it off, have the eyeball to eyeball conversations, collaboration. So for example, I study ballroom dance and my teacher and I were talking about how some of the AI generated music is sneakily really good. Like you can't even tell if it was between. If it was composed by. Sung by. Sung by air quotes, a human or a machine. And in my book the Creativity leap, there's a second edition coming out in 2026. And what's making it new is I have a new chapter that explores what does creativity look like at a time of AI. And I look at in the arts especially, you know there's a jazz musician like Herbie Hancock who was always super experimental back in the 70s and the 80s he was exploring experimen electronic music. He has dove, you know, quickly into AI. He loves the experimentation he can do. There's another musician composer who I reference in the new chapter who, who was on a podcast talking about she has a love hate relationship between it. But, but the, the. My dance teacher and I were. Were talking about this and we were saying we were listening to an AI generated rap which was really good and I can't rap. I'm not, I'm not good at rap. But I was thinking if I was a rapper and I had a few phrases that were just at the beginning point and I put it into the AI tool to turn up the beginnings riffs of something as I think that's fair game if that you don't end there. If that becomes your co creator, your instigator, you're a rap battle person, so to speak, where you're going back and forth and you're riffing with the technology. I think that that could be super interesting. The challenge is, what about young people who don't know music theory yet or don't know the basics of grammar and writing? For them to be able to start with the analog, to know the rules so that they can break them, I think is what really matters. Otherwise we'll get really lazy and we actually will not be co creating with the technology.
- [39:45]
A
Yeah, and that's exactly what I was thinking about as you were sharing that story. And I was thinking about, like Herbie, I believe he played with Miles Davis before he, you know, verged off on his solo career. Picasso was, you know, could paint me to look like an exact picture before he went off into Cubism and so.
- [40:07]
B
On and so forth. Rothko before Rothko was doing just the fields of co. If you look at early Rothko, very intricate figurines and streetscapes that he was doing before then he. And then he went into abstraction. So we got to know the rules to be able to break them.
- [40:22]
A
Yeah. So that was great way to end the show. I thank you so much for joining us today and I enjoyed our conversation. How can someone learn more about you? How can they get the book? How can they follow your thought leadership and what you're doing over at figure 8?
- [40:41]
B
Yeah, well, go to figure8thinking.com. That's the word. Figure the number 8thinking.com. Definitely sign up for the Wonder Rigor Newsletter. It's a monthly newsletter that we share. I have monthly blogs that are available on the website. So the first place to start is figure8thinking.com and then they should follow me on LinkedIn because I give and share a lot of content on LinkedIn as well.
- [41:05]
A
Natalie, thank you so much.
- [41:08]
B
Thank you, Nathan. This was a pleasure. Want to keep the conversation going? You can find the show notes@usertesting.com podcast if you haven't already, don't forget to follow us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast or Google Play, so you never miss an episode. And if you enjoyed today's show, please share it with a friend or leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts and on until next time. This is Insights Unlocked, an original podcast from User Testing.