Women@Goodwin recently welcomed Dr. Natalie Nixon as the keynote speaker for its 2021 Owning Your Career + Owning Your Success programs. Dr. Nixon, a design strategist and hybrid thinker who helps teams make creative leaps, presented to the Goodwin community, including friends of the firm and clients, on how to unleash curiosity, improvisation and intuition at work.
In her presentation, Dr. Nixon introduced the idea of the three I’s: inquiry, improvisation and intuition. She emphasized that these are all important skills to practice in the workplace to amplify your work and analytical mindset.
The first I, inquiry, allows work spaces to become more well-rounded, permitting people in all sections of an organization to have a say in important decisions. Dr. Nixon referenced the example of Jerry Hersberg, the former Head of Design at Nissan, who practiced inquiry in his design challenges, bringing in people from finance, HR, manufacturing, marketing and other areas to get their opinions on his designs. “Let’s bring in people who ask different questions who have a different perspective and let’s relish in the most possible solutions. You could try that by bringing in unusual suspects into your team,” Dr. Nixon noted.
The second I, improvisation, seems more intimidating, but Dr. Nixon insists that this is a skill that can be practiced and is something to work on every day when dealing with clients or even family members. We can get better at improvising by introducing prototyping into our work. These prototypes are meant to be rough drafts of an idea or a concept on which we can collect feedback and learn from what we have already done.
The final I, intuition, allows us to be more confident in our work and usually trusting intuition leads to better work. Dr. Nixon asked the audience about times when they trusted their intuition and times they went against it, and this reflection allowed everyone to acknowledge the importance of following one’s intuition.
By following the three I’s, we can all become more well-rounded, more adaptive, and more confident workers.
The Goodwin community would like to thank Dr. Nixon for giving this informative presentation and we encourage everyone to view a recording of the session below.