Andy Dunn, CEO of Bonobos, an e-commerce apparel company, has said that “The history of innovation is the story of ideas that seemed dumb at the time.”  I love that!  But here is the thing: everyone talks about innovation without really knowing what it is and with inconsistent explanations for it.  As a result, we end up talking over and around each other.  When you are given the charge to innovate, pause and consider the following:  what people are really asking for is creativity, fueled by purpose that ultimately creates value.  

The challenge is that creativity is not a word allowed in the corporate board room.  That’s primarily because people don’t actually understand what creativity is.  

Creativity is the capacity for the re-mix.  To be human, is to be hard-wired to be creative.  

To break it down further, I define creativity as toggling between wonder and rigor to solve problems and produce novel value. It's a system grounded in insight and moving in and out of curiosity, improvisation and intuition.    I call it the 3i Creativity™ framework.  It is all about the human capacity to transpose, flip and re-connect dots never before synthesized in order to create something new and valuable.   In order to do that, you must be an intentional proposer of questions, be adaptive and then focus on applying your insights to the needs at hand. You must become what I call a ‘What If Wizard’. 

The 3i Creativityâ„¢ Framework: Source- Natalie Nixon, PhD

We more easily associate creativity with the arts: dance, painting, music and theater.  Sadly, our society does not value the arts, as evidenced by: a) low federal spending budgets compared to other Western nations; b) the lack of emphasis on the arts in our educational system; and c) the constrained budgets of many arts non-profit organizations.  Still, there is a wealth of knowledge that we can gain from artists around creativity.  Consider the wisdom from dancer Twla Tharp who has explained that “To think outside of a box, you first have to start with a box!”  And the jazz bassist, Charlie Mingus: “Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that's creativity.”

Many a person has incorrectly declared “I’m not a creative type” just because they are not skilled in an artistic discipline.  Newsflash: creativity is not only found in the arts!  Creativity gets relegated to a narrower realm than what is its actual domain.  In truth, to be an incredible engineer, a pioneering scientist, or an audacious entrepreneur, you must be super creative. 

Creativity can be understood from the perspective of complexity and chaos theory as a chaordic system.  Dee Hock, the founding president of VISA credit card company, made up the word “chaord”.  He needed a phrase that would capture how VISA might operate as a global company based on virtual currency exchange.   It would have to be a firm not bound by organizational charts full of boxes and straight-line arrows- but more in step with nature.

Chaordic systems are really cool- and once you understand them you start to see them everywhere.  Hock observed in his walks through the woods that throughout nature there are self-organizing, adaptive, emergent systems with a bit of chaos and a bit of order. Keep in mind that chaos is not anarchy, it is randomness; and order is not control- it is structure.  Similarly, creativity is a chaordic system, ebbing and flowing between boundaries and randomness.  In fact, creativity is a holonic chaordic system, consisting of chaords (improvisation and intuition) within chaords (creativity itself).  

Let me explain.  Here are the 4 shifts you must begin to make in order to optimize creativity in your work and in your life.  

Shift #1: From Certainty to CURIOSITY

You don’t have to know it all.  All creative endeavors start – and end- with questions.  Curiosity is an adaptive and exploratory mindset and mental model.     Embrace going from myopic certainty to exploratory and experimental curiosity.  Curiosity is the route in to sensemaking and placemaking and requires deeply cultivated skills in observation and listening.  The sooner you realize that you “never arrive” (this was one of the most memorable pieces of advice a dance teacher once gave me while in an agonizingly long relevé) at a definitive answer the better off you are to remain open and discover lots of stuff.  One of the reasons I have so enjoyed Warren Berger’s A More Beautiful Questionis that it values questions and explains inquiry-based leadership in an elegantly simple way. 

As Berger points out, somewhere along the line of growing up and getting educated, we forget that asking questions is a way of thinking, exploring and learning.  Berger advises that we start with “Why…?” questions, then “What if…?” questions, and converge down to “How…?” questions.  

The root and stem of all creativity is curiosity.  

But our curiosity quotient will decrease over time if we are not careful.  We all start out in this life by probing and exploring. If asking questions reveals your ignorance on a topic- so what?  Ignorance leads to new possibilities.  

TIP:  Visit some place new (a park bench, town center, train station, cafe, etc) where you have never before been, set a timer for 20 minutes, observe your surroundings and then list as many questions as possible. Follow Warren Berger's "Why…What If… How" framework.

Shift #2: From Planning to IMPROVISING

I know this one may make you nervous. You are either conjuring up images of having to hop up on a stage and simulate a Saturday Night Live comedy sketch or an interpretive modern dance.  Have no fear! As I learned at the Institute for the Future- a plan is actually fiction.  Plans scope out events that have not yet actually happened.  

Jazz music, a complex, adaptive chaordic system, is one of the easiest ways to understand improvisation. Improvising, is notdoing whatever you feel like.  Improvisation is a chaordic system full of rules, boundaries and structures, as well as the space to rebound off that structure in random and responsive ways.   Its beauty and your mastery of it lies in your capacity to navigate, ebb and flow between chaos and order. 

Improvisation has both temporal and spatial dimensions.  

One of the benefits of improvising is that it requires you to be firmly in the present. As Peter Himmelman, author of Let Me Out has written, “Being in the moment is our state of mind when we are at our creative best.  Getting yourself into that mental state can be learned.”  Think about how important that is on your way to truly innovating!  If you are too far in the past you are stuck on what used to be or on old models.  If you are too far in the future, it may be hard for people (your clients!) to relate to you.  

Improvising is critical because in our daily lives we must work without a script, observe and adapt. 

TIP: Sign up for an improvisation class at your local theater, community center, community college or arts center.  Then bit by bit, start transferring light bulb moments from class into your daily life.

Shift #3: From Rationale to INTUITION

There are times when you just know, what you know, what you know.  You cannot explain it, but it is as real to you as the nose on your face. This is intuition, a form of pattern recognition based on mining data from past experiences and exercising sensemaking in the present.  I have called it “the nudge imperative”.  

Intuition is like a muscle or a radar: the more you use it the stronger and clearer it gets.  

The less you use it, the flabbier and dimmer it will become.  Thought leaders like Steve Jobs, Albert Einstein and Harriet Tubman regularly used their intuition.  Steve Jobs called it more powerful than intellect; Albert Einstein referred to it as the sacred gift we have forsaken; and Harriet Tubman liberated hundreds of enslaved African-Americans by paying attention to her dreams.    

When you think of intuition in these ways, you realize that intuition is a tool for strategy.  Add to that the reality that startup leaders regularly reference “Something told me to do X over Y” when they reflect on their humble beginnings.  That “something” is not taught in business school, yet it is a constant element in every entrepreneur’s origin story.   

TIP:  Keep a Nudge Journal.  Start documenting the intuitive nudges- small and large- in your life. List the outcomes when you listened to your intuition, and the outcome when you ignored your intuition.  This will help you start to attune to your intuition signals.  

Shift #4: From Deliberation to INSIGHT

Interweaving between improvising and intuiting is only part of the story.  Those pathways contribute to big, divergent thinking.  You must also pause and test your moments of brilliance – the insight- and see where and how it lands.  This is convergent thinking.  As the German writer and statesman Johann Wolfgang von Goethe wrote, “There is nothing so terrible as activity without insight”.  Insight, the third component of 3i Creativity™, is the synthesis of hindsight and foresight.  It can be scaled large and small, and at varying touchpoints in this process. Sometimes I also refer to insight as impact.  This is critical towards the end of innovation, because this is where practical use and value are explored.   Insights only comes with experience.

If you follow this definition of creativity- to be intentionally curious and then interweave between improvisation, intuition and insight-  then you and your team will fully realize the capacity to truly innovate, with passion, purpose and practicality.   

So, a question for you: How do you practice intentional curiosity, embrace improvisation, intuit as if your career depended on it, and delight in the insights? Please share!

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The WonderRigorâ„¢ EcoSystem

1. Check out this 2 min video on WonderRigorâ„¢ and this short video on creativity.
2. The WonderRigorâ„¢discovery deck is available here.
3. The WonderRigorâ„¢ Lab course will launch in July 2021.
4. Download your WonderRigorâ„¢ Tip Sheet

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About the Author

Natalie Nixon is the creativity whisperer to the C-Suite, Founder & CEO of Figure 8 Thinking, a global keynote speaker and an award winning author. Subscribe to her Ever Wonder…? newsletter for more great content and follow her @natwnixon.