Insights Unlocked
How to rethink creative productivity without burning out with Natalie Nixon
02 Feb 2026
Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Welcome back to Insights Unlocked. In this episode, I'm joined by Natalie Nixon, creative strategist, author, and CEO of Figure Eight 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.
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 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 Eight Thinking, where she helps global organizations transform how they innovate by blending wonder, rigor, and human-centered design. Welcome to the show, Natalie.
Thank you, Nathan. It's great to be here.
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Chapter 2: What innovative framework does Natalie Nixon propose for productivity?
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.
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.
Yeah. And it's not the only praise your book has received. Somebody needs to just type your name into a Google search and they'll see all the news articles about you and the book. 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 all this work?
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. So I have a background in cultural anthropology. I have a background in education, both I was a middle school English teacher in my twenties and also a university professor for 16 years.
And I've worked in the fashion industry as an entrepreneurial hat designer, as well as in global sourcing for division of the limited brands. I actually started my current company, Figure Eight 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.
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Chapter 3: How can integrating movement, reflection, and rest enhance creativity?
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 Eight 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 bold line.
I'm still thinking about the future of work as being jazz and that sort of improvisational nature of all that. We're big jazz fans here at the house. Oh, good. I love that. We're getting ready to go. We've taken our kids. brainwashing them into love and jazz. So we're taking them to a show here in a couple days. That's awesome. That's awesome.
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?
Well, that's not bad. It's just that the ways we've thought about productivity are an either-or model, right? It's either we focus on efficiency, output, speed, or productivity. 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 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.
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Chapter 4: What are the risks of the current obsession with speed and efficiency?
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 versus the accelerator. So 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 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?
And I was joking about myself, but 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 in how they're tackling their work. And I'm just wondering, what would it look like for them to operationalize your framework, your move, think, rest framework? When we've
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?
Well, first, let me just address, this is just 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. It's only something that artists or designers are great at. So I love that you point out the researchers are also creative, right? There's a difference between art.
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Chapter 5: How does the 'Wonder+Rigor' method contribute to creative problem-solving?
and creativity, between design and creativity. So to me, I've developed something called the Wonder Rigor Method, 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, to highlight that. But, but to operationalize the move, think rest human center operating system just requires some intentionality. It requires like with all things, 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'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 challenge a lot of assumptions, but I have walks that take three minutes long. I have walks that I know will take seven minutes.
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Chapter 6: What strategies can leaders use to recognize and prevent burnout?
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. 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 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 systems at 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 backcasting and forecasting. So backcasting is about reflection and memory and metacognition. Why do I think the way I think about X, Y, Z?
Forecasting is about Daydreaming, dreaming, imagination, inspiration. And if you notice, those modalities of thought, backcasting 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 Move, Think, 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. 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, um, 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 backcasting 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.
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Chapter 7: How can intuition and lived experiences complement data in decision-making?
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, 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.
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 was known for- Not Tim. Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs.
Steve Jobs, excuse me.
They would go with the engineers and they would walk about the campus or whatever it might be and get the work done that way. 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 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 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 slowing down.
In your defense, I will say you have to be self-aware. You need to be compassionate with yourself. 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 thinking is actually much clearer, different neurosynapses are at work 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 just cycling, you get into flow state because you're focused, right? And you get out of your head into your body.
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Chapter 8: In what ways can AI serve as a co-creator in the creative process?
I was the founding director of a really cool strategic design MBA program. And I was walking down the hallway with 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, OK, 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 measure. And I didn't want to disappoint them.
I wanted to get a really good J.O.B. 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 had 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 no emails over the weekend, but then you are sending an email every now and then, or you're a little snappy or short with people if they don't respond at 10.30 PM at night or something like that. 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 lighthearted, like, you know, only blue sky thinking, but also some things that are pretty important, like actively listening. And I always invite people in, what did I miss? What do you want to make sure that we adhere to?
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. You know, leadership is increasingly inside out work. So it's making sure you practice what you preach.
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