Natalie is consistently one of my graduate class’s most well-received guest lecturers. More a facilitated studio lab than a ‘lecture’, her time with our students pushes their thinking in ways that are both rigorous and practical. Her sessions serve as an effective bridge between modules.

The framework that Natalie and the design thinking process helped us create has now been embraced across our entire organization.

By the end of the session ALL participants grew from it; indicating it was the best session in which they had participated in a very long time. Natalie elevated my team’s ability to understand and solve for growth in a more creative and innovative way. She astutely guided a cross-functional senior team to think about the inputs to a challenge in a more iterative manner – and to embrace the ‘process’ of discovering new opportunities & solving for effective solutions.

It was the best investment made in pushing us forward so that we are collectively future-ready to deliver solutions grounded in creativity; ones that drive growth and add value in numerous ways.

Natalie is a wonderful scholar-practitioner; she is able to connect the dots between theory and practice. Her remarkable, diverse background allows her to be a unique contributor to the new global, interdisciplinary world that is rapidly emerging.

Natalie is a superb facilitator! She is a great listener and helps your group to land on new insights at the end of a workshop.

We are always looking for a rockstar keynote speaker to inspire and inform…Dr. Natalie Nixon had us all on the edge of our seats for her entire presentation! …My attendees absolutely loved her work across a multidisciplinary set of insights and anecdotes…punctuated with references to both her research and to hyper-relevant themes.

It was inspiring, but not cliche.
It was fun, but not trite.
It was academic, but not condescending.
It was informative, but not a lecture.

Natalie led a fantastic session with my consumer insights, sensory, and analytics teams! We focused on storytelling with data, using unique tools to simplify complex data for various audiences. In advance of the session, she took the time to build customized, relevant activities with me… and during the session she passionately brought to life new ways of thinking that could easily be applied. She was a pleasure to work with, AND I received a ton of great feedback from the team after the session.

Success is when in the days immediately following, more than a few team members came to me excitedly to show new ways that they were packaging data and influencing their teams!

Natalie’s hands-on, design thinking workshop with our team led to key insights that we will plan to incorporate in our program design in the future.

Natalie is brilliant, confident, creative and empathic- a combination of traits that allowed those of us who were unsure of how to navigate our project to relax, and feel excited about the process. Natalie inspires, motivates, encourages, and holds people accountable. I would never hesitate to engage with her again.

Natalie is a fabulous, engaging and informative keynote speaker for all groups, especially executive and leadership audiences. We have worked together for several years and audience feedback is excellent for her approaches to innovation, creativity, change management and the future of work. We highly recommend Natalie as a keynote speaker and/or consultant for any organization needing improvements in these areas.

A design strategist and hybrid thinker, Natalie is a phenomenal leader in foresight, strategy and applied creativity. Her brilliant mind, experience, and energy is engaging and authentic. From the Women Executives workshop at the Great Ideas Conference in 2017, to the Xperience Design Project in 2019, Natalie was an incredible addition to the ASAE faculty team. My favorite lessons? The yin and yang of her WonderRigor™ framework to leverage inquiry, intuition and improvisation as a driver for creativity and innovation. That, and her astute observations about the future of work — that “soft skills are hard core”. Anyone looking for cultural transformation, leadership development, team collaboration and growth would be smart to give her a call.

Natalie’s talk on creativity helped the VectorWorks team to understand the very meaning of creativity: how to connect things to our software business that aren’t normally related. It also helped us to understand the role of intuition on the decision making process as well as the role of improvisation that enables one to engage with a situation as it actually unfolds.

Dr. Nixon has the astute understanding of a sophisticated academic and the practitioner’s awareness of what organizations and businesses need. The combination uniquely creates sustainable value for a myriad of stakeholders.

Figure 8 Thinking is a stellar team who brought commitment, compassion, and courage to our partnership. Their landscape analysis on the wealth disparity in the United States was superb. Figure 8 Thinking brought excellent qualitative research, scenario planning and analysis to the project and exceeded our expectations with suggested experiments to test their recommendations.