Workshop Case Studies
Dr. Natalie Nixon’s interactive workshops are the ideal companion to her keynotes—helping teams internalize the insights, apply the frameworks, and turn inspiration into measurable outcomes. Here are a few case studies.
case study
Identifying Your True North: Redefining Purpose After Organizational Shift
A national team of 20 leaders at Google faced an unexpected crossroads when their role within the larger organization fundamentally shifted due to policy changes. While their work remained critical, their identity, purpose, and value proposition within the broader Google ecosystem became unclear. The team found themselves stuck in a pattern of mourning what they’d lost, unable to see possibility beyond constraints. Leadership recognized that without clarity on their new direction, the team would remain paralyzed—unable to move forward or inspire their broader organizations. They needed more than a strategic pivot; they needed a fundamental reset in how they viewed their role and their capacity to create value under new conditions.
Figure 8 Thinking was engaged to design and facilitate a full-day workshop that would help the team move from loss-oriented thinking to possibility-oriented action.
Help leaders get aligned around a new “north star” by redefining who they are as a team and what work they do together. Shift the organizational mindset from constraint-as-limitation to constraint-as-catalyst for creative thinking. Enable the team to collaboratively explore new ways of working—both internally and externally—that would energize them and position them as leaders within Google.
Natalie designed “Identifying Your True North,” a full-day workshop grounded in three pivotal questions that guided leaders through deep inquiry: What if? So what? Now what?
The day opened by anchoring the team in neuroscience and emotion. Drawing on Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett’s research on how our brain constructs emotional experience, Natalie helped leaders understand that their current sense of loss wasn’t inevitable—it was constructed, and therefore could be reconstructed. This reframe was critical: the team wasn’t victims of circumstances; they were architects of meaning.
From there, the workshop moved through both divergent and convergent thinking phases. Leaders explored expansive possibilities (What if?) before narrowing to what mattered most (So what?), and ultimately landed on concrete commitments (Now what?). The facilitation emphasized a principle core to Natalie’s approach: creativity loves constraints. For an organization accustomed to operating without limitations, this was a new muscle to develop. Rather than seeing their new constraints as restrictive, leaders learned to see them as conditions that could spark innovation.
Throughout the day, leaders drew on their own expertise and backgrounds, collaboratively building new ways of working that leveraged their existing strengths while honoring the new reality they operated within.
The workshop catalyzed several key outcomes:
Alignment & Vision: The team left with a clear, shared north star and renewed understanding of their collective identity and purpose within Google.
Mindset Shift: Leaders moved from a scarcity mindset (“we can’t do anything anymore”) to a possibility mindset (“here’s what we can still do”). This cognitive reframe became the foundation for everything that followed.
Actionable Ideas: The team generated concrete ideas for skill-building initiatives and new ways of working that would expose their broader organizations to capability-building opportunities.
Train-the-Trainer Model: A critical outcome was the realization that success meant equipping their own teams to understand why change was important. Leaders committed to cascading learning and helping their direct reports see possibility rather than loss.
Re-energization: Perhaps most importantly, the team emerged with renewed excitement about their work. After months of navigating change and uncertainty, they had moved from mourning to momentum.
case study
Cooley
Building a Culture of Curiosity in a High-Stakes Legal Environment
Cooley, a national law firm with a fierce reputation for legal excellence, faced a challenge common to high-performance organizations: their culture inadvertently penalized questions. In environments where precision and expertise are paramount, asking questions can feel risky—like admitting you don’t know the answer. Yet Cooley’s leadership recognized that this dynamic was costing them. Without psychological safety to ask questions, their teams couldn’t collaborate effectively, challenge assumptions, or adapt to a rapidly changing legal landscape. More critically, they were struggling to attract and retain top talent—particularly younger lawyers who wanted to work somewhere they could grow, learn, and feel valued for their thinking, not just their output.
When the firm’s CIO heard Natalie Nixon speak at a Zoomtopia event, she saw a clear path forward: build curiosity as a cultural value. The CIO brought together 10 C-suite leaders to work with Figure 8 Thinking on a focused engagement: normalize curiosity and make question-asking feel safe, rewarded, and essential.
Transform Cooley’s culture so that asking questions becomes a valued, normalized, and rewarded behavior rather than something to fear. Position the firm as the law firm of choice by building psychological safety, fostering intellectual collaboration, and creating an environment where curiosity drives excellence. Establish leadership modeling that incentivizes question-asking at all levels.
Working with Cooley’s C-suite, Natalie designed an engagement centered on a simple but powerful reframe: curiosity isn’t a sign of weakness or knowledge gaps—it’s the engine of innovation and competitive advantage.
The work began with leadership acknowledging the current dynamic and understanding its cost. Through facilitated conversations, executives explored how their own behaviors modeled either curiosity or defensiveness. Natalie helped them see that normalizing curiosity starts at the top—that C-suite leaders asking thoughtful questions creates permission for everyone else to do the same.
The engagement focused on practical strategies: How do you ask questions that open thinking rather than shut it down? How do you respond to questions in ways that make future questions more likely? How do you reward and recognize curious thinking? The goal was to move from intellectual understanding to behavioral change—to help leaders model, incentivize, and celebrate the kinds of questions and thinking they wanted to see throughout the firm.
Through this engagement, Cooley’s leadership built a shared commitment to cultural transformation:
Leadership Modeling: C-suite leaders identified concrete ways they would shift their own behavior to model curiosity—asking more questions, creating space for others’ thinking, and publicly valuing intellectual exploration.
Psychological Safety Framework: The team developed guidelines and practices for how questions should be received, creating shared language around what safe, curious collaboration looks like.
Talent Strategy: By establishing curiosity as a cultural value, Cooley positioned itself as a place where lawyers could grow intellectually and feel valued for their thinking. This became a powerful recruitment and retention tool.
Cascading Impact: Leaders committed to bringing these principles into their own teams and partnerships, creating the conditions for curiosity to spread throughout the organization.
Competitive Advantage: By normalizing questions and valuing intellectual exploration, Cooley strengthened its ability to navigate complexity, challenge conventional thinking, and deliver more innovative legal solutions.
case study
ORIBE
Inspiring Leaders to Navigate Complexity, Build Connection, and Shape the Future
Oribe, a national luxury beauty brand, brought together 30 leaders at a strategic retreat facing multiple, interconnected challenges. Post-pandemic, the organization needed to reimagine how work got done. Simultaneously, they were navigating increasingly complex global compliance issues that required sophisticated thinking across silos. And underneath it all, leaders at all levels were grappling with questions about hierarchy, voice, and how to build an organization where people felt empowered to contribute their best thinking.
The team had experienced ups and downs over the previous months and needed more than a status update—they needed inspiration, renewed connection, and a shared sense of direction. Leadership brought in Natalie Nixon to deliver a keynote followed by an intensive, full-day workshop designed to address these interconnected challenges and position Oribe as a forward-thinking, inclusive, high-performing organization.
Inspire leaders at all levels. Help them learn new frameworks and ways of thinking about complexity. Build confidence for leaders at all levels to speak up, challenge assumptions, and contribute ideas. Strengthen connection and collaboration across the organization. Develop forward-thinking approaches to global compliance issues and post-pandemic work redesign. Build on previous workshop outcomes to create momentum toward a shared vision of Oribe’s future.
The engagement began with Natalie’s keynote, which set the tone for what was to come: in a world of accelerating change and complexity, organizations don’t win through hierarchy or control—they win through imagination, collaboration, and the collective intelligence of their people.
The full-day workshop then guided leaders through deep work on three interconnected fronts. First, Natalie helped them tackle global compliance challenges through a design-thinking lens—reframing compliance not as a constraint to work around, but as an opportunity to build more resilient, thoughtful processes. Leaders learned to ask: What if we approached this complexity as a creative problem to solve?
Second, the workshop addressed post-pandemic work redesign. Rather than asking “how do we get people back to how things were?” leaders explored: What do we want work to feel like? What new ways of working have we learned? How do we build on what’s working while reimagining what isn’t? This forward-looking approach energized conversations around flexibility, collaboration, and purpose.
Third, Natalie guided leaders through a hierarchy-of-needs exploration, helping them understand what people actually need to thrive—autonomy, mastery, purpose, connection, psychological safety. From this foundation, leaders built strategies for how to create an organization where people at all levels felt seen, valued, and confident to contribute their thinking.
Throughout the day, Natalie emphasized convergent and divergent thinking, drawing on her background in design, anthropology, and foresight to help leaders see old problems in new ways. She created space for junior leaders to voice ideas alongside senior executives, modeling the kind of inclusive collaboration she was asking them to build.
The workshop delivered on all three success metrics:
Inspiration: Leaders left energized about Oribe’s future. They saw possibility where there had been complexity and burden. The keynote and workshop reframed their challenges as opportunities and created a sense of collective purpose.
Learning: Leaders gained new frameworks and language for thinking about organizational challenges—design thinking, emotional intelligence, systems thinking. They left with concrete tools to bring back to their teams.
Connection & Collaboration: The intensive day-long workshop built relationships across silos and hierarchies. Leaders who had worked in parallel discovered shared challenges and started collaborating on solutions. Junior leaders felt heard and valued; senior leaders learned from frontline perspectives.
Momentum for Implementation: The team left with renewed commitment to pushing that work forward. Leaders understood how it connected to broader organizational values around innovation, collaboration, and forward-thinking.
Confidence & Voice: Perhaps most importantly, leaders at all levels felt more confident in their ability to contribute, challenge, and shape Oribe’s future. The workshop modeled the kind of culture leaders were being asked to build—one where curiosity, diverse perspectives, and bold thinking were not just welcomed but essential.
