Natalie Nixon

Natalie Nixon, PhD, is a creativity strategist, global keynote speaker, award-winning author, and CEO of Figure 8 Thinking. Known as “the creativity whisperer to the C-Suite,” she helps leaders achieve transformative business results by applying wonder and rigor. Named to the Thinkers50 Radar List and recognized among the Top 50 Keynote Speakers in the World by Real Leaders, Natalie has been featured in Forbes, Fast Company, and Inc. Her clients include Microsoft, Salesforce, Comcast, and Bloomberg.

A Career Built on Creative Connections
Natalie built her career by connecting dots others did not see – working in global apparel sourcing for The Limited Brands in Sri Lanka and Portugal, earning a PhD in design management from the University of Westminster in London, and spending 16 years as a professor at Thomas Jefferson University where she founded the Strategic Design MBA program. Her diverse background spanning anthropology, fashion, design thinking, and dance across five countries distinguishes her as a one-of-a-kind creativity expert. She is also a Fellow at the Paris d.School and a lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania.

The Creativity Leap
Natalie is the author of the award-winning The Creativity Leap – Unleash Curiosity, Improvisation and Intuition at Work, which won innovation awards from Porchlight Books and received an Honorable Mention in Fast Company’s 2021 World Changing Ideas Awards. Her 3i Creativity framework – inquiry, improvisation, and intuition – provides leaders with accessible, actionable techniques for building creative capacity and driving innovation.

Natalie’s energetic keynotes challenge traditional thinking about creativity, equipping organizations with practical tools to design adaptive cultures primed for innovation and meaningful growth.

Making Innovation Stick in A Hybrid Work World: Activate the 3i’s

“Creativity is the engine for innovation.” -Natalie Nixon

What exactly does “working in the office” mean in our post-pandemic world? There are lots of opportunities to reframe collaboration, teaming and leadership to yield the best innovation and meaningful work. The place to start is by applying Natalie Nixon’s 3i Creativity™ framework: inquiry, improvisation and intuition. In this talk, Natalie shares examples and tactical methods to boost critical skills in our new working world of blurred boundaries.

Creativity & Leadership: Getting Buy-In Through Empathy & Curiosity

“Curiosity is the new currency.” — Natalie Nixon

The businesses and organizations that lead with inquiry and empathy are ultimately the most innovative. Integrating design thinking, lean and agile methods are a few ways to do this. That’s because curiosity and empathic leadership are rooted in open, growth mindsets. They also generate collaborative work environments and lead to building customer-centered products and services. In this session, Natalie Nixon shares the major and practical business outcomes that are directly tied to inquiry-based leadership.

The Future of Work: The 4 Shifts Your Organization Must Make…Now!

“The best algorithms will still depend on humans asking a better question.” — Natalie Nixon

The future of work will require more than a familiarity with virtual reality, big data, artificial intelligence and robotics. It will require people with a heightened creative capacity.

In the 4th industrial revolution where cloud technology, automation and cryptocurrency are realities, boundaries between technology and humans have completely blurred. Now more than ever, the human quotient and the creativity are critical business assets. In this session, Natalie Nixon offers provocative ways to embrace the future of work and outlines 4 shifts every organization must make to be nimble and adaptive.

Adapt & Disrupt: Getting Excellent at Change

“Plans are fiction. They haven’t happened yet. Learn to improvise.” — Natalie Nixon

We all know that the only constant in life is change; yet we don’t design adaptive organizations. Most companies are disrupted because they do not know what business they are actually in and what their customers really need. This session will lead you through principles of improvisation and the key questions your leadership should be able to answer and then use to assist teams and employees.

Innovation IQ: How to Master the 3 Drivers to Stay Out Front & Lead

“The more diverse the inputs, the more innovative the output.” — Natalie Nixon

Business management guru, Peter Drucker, was famous for having written that “culture eats strategy for breakfast.” He was right. Unfortunately, most companies only pay attention to organization culture when it’s too late in the game. In this session, Natalie Nixon will leave you with tips for developing the 3 tenets of culture—people, process and place—to design an organizational culture that is primed for innovation and a prosperous future state.