Last year, we were honored to have creativity strategist Natalie Nixon kick off Norwest’s Growth Marketing Summit with a motivating keynote speech on the ROI of creativity. As CEO of Figure 8 Thinking, Natalie advises leaders on applying wonder and rigor to amplify growth and business value. It may be no surprise she’s been dubbed the “creativity whisperer to the C-Suite” or that marketing guru Seth Godin has said “she can help you get unstuck and unlock the work you were born to do.”
Following the Growth Marketing Summit, I was excited to dig even further into Natalie’s work and share the learnings with our ecosystem of portfolio companies and beyond. So I asked her three burning questions that are top of mind for business leaders who want to harness creativity for a larger impact.
1. Every business leader wants to be innovative. What’s the connection between creativity and innovation from your perspective?
Creativity is the engine for innovation. Which begs the question, ‘What exactly is an innovation?’ From my perspective an innovation is an invention converted into scalable value. That value could be financial value, social value, or cultural value.
For example, about a year into the COVID-19 pandemic, I walked into a post office to mail a letter. When the postal staffer invited me to pay for my postage, I noticed a container of cotton ear swabs near the credit card keypad. I asked her, “What are those Q-Tips for?” She replied that as a courtesy for people who did not want to touch the keypad for hygienic reasons, they placed the swabs there so that people could use those to key in their PIN numbers and avoid contact. Hmm, I recall thinking to myself. That’s a pretty nice inventive hack! But it wasn’t an innovation. A container of cotton swabs by a checkout register is an interesting one-off — not a scaled innovation. The innovation materialized six months later when I received mail from a marketing products company; it was a sample gift: a metallic object about the length of my index finger resembling a mix between a hook and a pointer. The instructional material explained that it could be used to both open doors and punch keypads. Now that was an innovation — it was scalable, sold in mass, and addressed people’s pain point for a device that would help them avoid contact with public doorways and other surfaces during a time when people were very sensitive about exposure to germs and bacteria.
I have found that sometimes, in the attempt to innovate or build a culture of innovation, we end up doing a bit of “innovation theater”. And by that I mean we tend to “keep up with the Joneses”. An example of innovation theater would be a company that launches a “Center of Innovation” without any sort of strategic plan to integrate those skills of innovation across departments. That center becomes the place where people go to ‘play with post-its all day’ and consequently the work of human centered innovation is siloed and not taken seriously.
First, we have to pause and build our creative capacity. That is to say, we have to commit to designing space and time for both wonder and rigor in our organizations. We must hire for those capabilities and incentivize our teams to audaciously dream as well as focus and develop expertise. Only then can organizations sustainably innovate and solve problems in inventive ways.
2. Let’s say you inspire a reader to tap into their creativity. They come up with a concept that has potential, but it’s just too ambiguous. How can people translate their abstract concepts into viable services/experiences/products?
I developed a four phase process called the L.E.A.P Method™ to help people go from a fuzzy idea to developing an early stage and actionable service, experience or product. It includes four iterative phases that work like this. Essentially, the L.E.A.P Method™ helps you to embrace the gray — because VUCA (volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity) environments aren’t going anywhere!
Phase 1 is Leveraging. This phase is all about backcasting and examining your past experiences, skill sets, etc., and documenting them. On an individual level, I call this your “inventory of courage,” identifying all of those seminal moments in your life that have increasingly built up your courage to do the next big thing, and then the next, and so on. Your pains plus your gains are assets. Again, this is scalable on an individual level as well as on a team level.
Phase 2 is Envisioning. Think about envisioning as forecasting. It’s a process to identify an incredibly audacious future. Be dreamy in your approach. Honestly, so many of my clients need this phase because they don’t set aside the time to be audaciously dreamy — or as the pop star Dua Lipa would say, “radically optimistic”! They spend so much time being reactionary and churning through the work. But to innovate, you must pause and build in the time to dream.
Phase 3 is Asking. Asking is an important phase. It hones in on curiosity, involves self inquiry, learning how to ask questions, and understanding the types of questions you can ask. For example, there are both divergent (those asking for many answers) and convergent (those asking for one right answer) questions. The asking phase is also about asking for help. There’s no shame in admitting ignorance when you hit a wall, or you’re not sure what the next step should be. So building up a cadre of known advisors and experts in adjacent sectors who can shed light on a problem is essential.
A quick aside about the organizational value of asking questions: One of the best ways to boost creative capacity is by normalizing question-asking. Many stellar organizations are staffed by people who were educated, rewarded, and incentivized to have the answer and come up with a solution. In reality, in our VUCA work environments we need to normalize curiosity instead of making questions punitive.
Phase 4 is Prototyping. After you have done the back casting (leveraging), spent time forecasting (envisioning) and framed new enlightened questions about the problem (asking), then you can prototype. Prototypes are a rough draft version of the service, experience or product that you think you’re leaning toward. The prototyping phase is about “oxygenating your idea”. You’re metaphorically giving it air, light and rain. In this phase, you’ll learn a lot — the response could be “no one wants this” but it’s better to hear that sooner rather than later!
Using the L.E.A.P Method™ (leverage, envision, ask and prototype) can help you to go from a fuzzy idea to a crystallized version. Here’s a helpful Inventory of Courage worksheet for your readers to jumpstart their appetite for L.E.A.Ping!
3. Do you believe that technologies like AI and automation are threats to our creativity?
Au contraire. I actually think that AI and automation can be our co-pilots, our co-conspirators and our collaborators. What we should not do is stop at the first result generated from an AI tool. They can jumpstart ideas and help us remix them. They certainly save a lot of time and unburden cognitive load so that we can get to the business of imagination. So I am an optimist. I am not naïve about the embedded threats of AI technology in terms of, for example, bias. I do think that they can be incredible assets to creative endeavors.
About Lisa Ames:
Lisa Ames is a marketing operating exec at Norwest. She leverages her more than 20 years of B2B SaaS experience working shoulder-to-shoulder with CEOs and marketing leaders to help them thrive. Lisa helps portfolio companies in every aspect of marketing including hiring, strategy development, board prep, resource introductions and “business therapy.”
About Natalie Nixon:
Creativity strategist Natalie Nixon is “the creativity whisperer for the C-Suite”. As CEO of Figure 8 Thinking, she is a highly sought after keynote speaker, valued for her accessible expertise on creativity, the future of work and innovation.
She brings an innovative and unique perspective to every keynote, strategic advisory engagement, and leadership coaching session. Her experience living in 5 countries combined with her background in anthropology, fashion, academia, and dance distinguish her as a one-of-a-kind creativity expert.
