How to Unlock Everyday Creativity
Using Inquiry to Drive Innovation
Natalie Nixon, founder of Figure 8 Thinking, advocates for embracing a child's relentless curiosity and asking more questions to ignite creativity, discussing various question types and the importance of leaning into ambiguity in her video.
The Engine for Innovation
Natalie Nixon emphasizes that nurturing creativity—defined as the ability to balance wonder and rigor—is essential for individuals and organizations to thrive in the 4th Industrial Revolution, where automation and AI are prevalent, and introduces the 3i Creativity Model to foster this skill.
The 3i Creativity Method (Inquiry)
Natalie Nixon emphasizes the importance of questioning for creativity, advocating for a blend of divergent, convergent, and hybrid questions while embracing ambiguity to foster collaboration and innovation within teams.
The 3i Creativity Model (Improvisation)
Successful teams, much like jazz ensembles, thrive on fluidity and adaptability, embracing mistakes as opportunities for growth while fostering a culture of improvisation and collaboration to navigate constantly changing environments.
The 3i Creativity Model (Intuition)
Alan Alda emphasizes the importance of stepping out of your comfort zone to discover valuable insights, while Natalie Nixon advocates for treating intuition as vital qualitative data that enhances decision-making and embodied leadership by tuning into bodily sensations.
Remix, Reframe, and Repurpose
Natalie Nixon emphasizes the importance of remixes and mashups in business creativity through the SCAMPER method, which encourages innovation by substituting, combining, adapting, modifying, repurposing, eliminating, and reversing traditional ideas and processes.
A Leader’s Guide to Building Organizational CQ
Natalie Nixon emphasizes the importance of cultivating creativity quotients (CQs) in organizations, alongside IQ and EQ, by integrating gratitude, humility, curiosity, empathy, and action to enhance problem-solving and foster productive interactions.
Design Your Organization for Maximum Creative Capacity
John Cleese and Natalie Nixon emphasize that fostering creativity in organizations requires allowing time for play, which enhances problem-solving and collaboration, while advocating for diverse hiring practices and innovative meeting structures to support a culture of creativity.
Innovation is the key to progress and to growing your organization’s relevance and success. And the main ingredient for innovation is creativity. In this class, Natalie Nixon, founder of Figure 8 Thinking, discusses her 3i Creativity Model, a framework you can use to spark your own creativity and maximize the creative capacity of your organization.
Learning Objectives
- Combine wonder and rigor to engage in creativity.
- Cultivate a culture of questioning and improvisation.
- Treat intuition as valuable data.
- Create bold mashups.
- Prioritize CQ development in your organization.