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The Creativity Leap: Unleash Curiosity, Improvisation, and Intuition at Work
"Natalie Nixon's new book provides a fresh primer on how to cultivate creativity in the workplace."
--Nir Eyal, bestselling author of Hooked and Indistractable
Too many people associate creativity solely with the arts, even though to be an incredible scientist, engineer, or entrepreneur requires immense creativity. And it's the key to developing breakthrough products and services. Natalie Nixon, a creativity strategist with a background in cultural anthropology, fashion, and service design, says that in the fourth industrial revolution a creativity leap is needed to bridge the gap that exists between the churn of work and the highly sought-after prize called innovation.
Nixon says that since humans are hardwired to be creative, it is a competency anyone can develop. She shows that it balances wonder (awe, audacity, and curiosity) with rigor (discipline, skill-building, and attention to detail), and that inquiry, improvisation, and intuition are the key practices that increase those capacities. Drawing on interviews with fifty-six people from diverse backgrounds--farming, law, plumbing, architecture, perfumery, medicine, education, technology, and more--she offers illuminating examples of how creativity manifests in every kind of work.
Combining creativity tools and techniques with real-world stories of innovative people and businesses, this book is a provocation, an inspiration, and an invitation to unleash the innate creativity that lies within each of us. It offers a more dynamic and integrative way to adapt and innovate, one that allows us the freedom to access our full human selves.
--Nir Eyal, bestselling author of Hooked and Indistractable
Too many people associate creativity solely with the arts, even though to be an incredible scientist, engineer, or entrepreneur requires immense creativity. And it's the key to developing breakthrough products and services. Natalie Nixon, a creativity strategist with a background in cultural anthropology, fashion, and service design, says that in the fourth industrial revolution a creativity leap is needed to bridge the gap that exists between the churn of work and the highly sought-after prize called innovation.
Nixon says that since humans are hardwired to be creative, it is a competency anyone can develop. She shows that it balances wonder (awe, audacity, and curiosity) with rigor (discipline, skill-building, and attention to detail), and that inquiry, improvisation, and intuition are the key practices that increase those capacities. Drawing on interviews with fifty-six people from diverse backgrounds--farming, law, plumbing, architecture, perfumery, medicine, education, technology, and more--she offers illuminating examples of how creativity manifests in every kind of work.
Combining creativity tools and techniques with real-world stories of innovative people and businesses, this book is a provocation, an inspiration, and an invitation to unleash the innate creativity that lies within each of us. It offers a more dynamic and integrative way to adapt and innovate, one that allows us the freedom to access our full human selves.
224 pages, Paperback
Published June 23, 2020
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Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews
November 30, 2020
I have read over 20 books on the topic of creativity and very much enjoyed this, the examples, and memorable language. Here is a summary of my highlights:
Like a physical leap, a creativity leap is essential for crossing boundaries; it is also an active, dynamic process that honors intuition. Creativity leaps are needed to bridge the gap be-tween the churn of work and the highly sought-after prize called innovation. This holds true on both the individual and organizational levels. Creativity leaps matter because creativity is the engine for innovation. To be human is to be hardwired to be creative. Truly innovative people in any field regularly practice honing their creative competency. They apply a combination of the 3 I’s—inquiry, improvisation, and intuition—to the ways they think through problems and work with others to continually increase their creative competency. This is called the 3iCreativity™ model.
Inquiry. Curiosity results from an information gap. You want to know more about something that you currently don’t understand.
Improvisation. Improvising is about building on ideas within minimal constraints. There is freedom to experiment, but there are also rules and fluid structures that help you to correct course and embrace mistakes.
Intuition. There lies in all of us a visceral, internal wisdom that allows for unconscious pattern recognition and insights for decision-making. Harriet Tubman, Albert Einstein, and Steve Jobs are examples of famous innovators and leaders who relied on and valued their intuition, coupling it with their rational intellect to make decisions.
A large reason for why successful companies fail is that they do not cultivate their capacity for human creativity. We don’t hear creativity emphasized more in the boardroom because we don’t actually understand creativity. Creativity is our ability to toggle between wonder and rigor to solve problems and produce novel value. While many companies are trying to figure out innovation, most corporate cultures rarely utter the word creativity, and there is not a carved-out space in the boardroom for creativity. Perhaps creativity feels so inaccessible because it can be such an ambiguous process. It is not formulaic. It is complex. That lack of a rote, step-by-step approach can make it uncomfortable.
Going from having an innovation center to having a culture of innovation demands a creativity leap. It requires intentionality and the integration of a new mindset at all levels of the organization. Otherwise, you have created just one more silo in your company. Innovation is invention converted into financial, social, and cultural value. The engine for innovation is creativity. That means that if we truly want to innovate, then we must design systems, processes, and experiences in our work environments that allow us to be creative and catalyze invention. The first step is making creativity a resource that is accessible to all the people in your organization. Defining creativity as a competency consisting of wonder and rigor, and exercised through inquiry, improvisation, and intuition, is one way to democratize it. Viewed from this lens, creativity becomes available to all of us. It is a Flow Between Wonder and Rigor. Wonder is the catalyst. Then, rigor propels us forward and helps us to sustain the momentum of the leap.
Rigor and Rules - Twyla Tharp advised, “Before you can think out of the box, you must start with a box.” The box is the rules and the rigor. If we romanticize creativity as a mystical, magical process only accessible to a select few, then we miss the point. Rigor is that essential feature of creativity that anchors the wonder; puts guardrails up; and requires us to do the sweaty, muscle-bound work with whatever muse we choose. The rigor is the part of creativity that is often missed—or avoided. But it is essential if we are ever to go about the work of creativity in a sustained way. Rigor ensures that we actually complete the leap we started. It sustains the necessary momentum to create something tangible. Rigor is the grit and resilience that creativity requires for the long haul. It is the accumulation of commitment and knowledge needed to follow through, to get to value, to get to innovation.
The wonder-rigor paradigm consists of two important principles:
1. Rigor cannot be sustained without wonder.
2. Wonder is found in the midst of rigor. Rigor requires intense and deep ways to see, observe, and listen—the same practices required for creativity.
Inquire: Ask a Better Question
You can’t generate something new and novel with the status quo. Warren Berger, author of A More Beautiful Question, investigated the effectiveness of inquiry-driven leadership when he identified that the companies we think of as innovative are actually quite good at leading with questions. He found that they start with asking “Why?” and then “What if?” and then land on “How?” sorts of questions. They start with divergent, big-picture, wonder-driven thinking and move to convergent, rigorous, and applied thinking.
Improvise: Leverage organized chaos - Jazz is the preeminent example of a complex system: adaptive, self-organizing, and emergent. The future of work in our increasingly complex world requires us to adopt the chaordic, improvisational methods of jazz musicians. Coined by Dee Hock, founding CEO of VISA, the credit card company, chaord is used to describe the chaos and order that are both present in complex systems. He observed that nature abounds with systems that thrive during some chaos and some order. Keep in mind that chaos is not anarchy; it is randomness. And order is not control; it is structure. Wonder and rigor are parallel manifestations of the chaos and order in a chaordic system. Frank Barrett, an academic and jazz musician himself, has written at length in Yes to the Mess: Surprising Leadership Lessons from Jazz about what organizations can learn from jazz.
Intuit: Put Bravery before Mastery - As Albert Einstein said, “The intuitive mind is a sacred gift, and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.”
As Kelley Black, founder and CEO of Balancing the Executive Life, put it, “The rational mind can be self-limiting. We need to normalize the intuitive in leadership. Intuition in leadership is critical because it helps you see a broader field.” Intuition helps us lead with our whole selves—creatively and strategically. Think of intuition as a data point.
Commune: Come together to create - Even in the most well-designed community, we must be vigilant to ensure diversity, avoid groupthink, and resist settling for the status quo. This is where practicing inquiry, improvisation, and intuition is essential—so that we have the space to adapt, grow, and take creativity leaps. You must design a community for creativity.
Forecast: Amplify what is uniquely human - Perspective is about mining from the past in order to get insight into the future. Forecasting is about mining those insights in order to anticipate and identify multiple possible futures so that we can adapt to bumps in the road. To that end, forecasting requires a practice of inquiry, improvisation, and intuition; it necessitates an ability to toggle between wonder and rigor. In short, forecasting and preparing for what is to come requires creativity.
Creativity in the Fourth Industrial Revolution - Balder Onarheim, a creativity neuroscientist and president of PlatoScience, has proposed that we have been asking the wrong questions of artificial intelligence. Instead of wondering how to make AI creative, we should be asking, “How might we combine the calculating power of AI with the creative power of the human brain?” Instead of trying to make AI creative, let’s explore how we can link humans’ innate creativity with AI.
Heather McGowan, a future of work strategist, has called for a shift away from learning to work and toward working to learn. In other words, the future of work is the future of learning.
Creativity is about the remix: repurposing, recombining, and reframing. Originality is not the result of a purist singular production. Rather, it is the product of common memes that are consistent temporally and spatially throughout the world. Creativity loves constraints. All that you need is right within you and sitting before your eyes. You must shift your paradigm. Take, for example, hip-hop music. Gen X is responsible for hip-hop music, currently the number one music genre in the world. But let’s examine its origins. Amid the greatest rollback in funding for arts education in public schools in the late 1970s, black teenagers figured out a new musical instrument: the turntable. As formal teaching in the music diminished in public schools, the scratching of the record player’s needle on vinyl rose to the level of a percussion instrument. Now that’s a paradigm shift! It is that level of reframing and repurposing that continues to spark hip-hop artists such as DJ King Britt, who, while rooted in hip-hop, R&B, and jazz, has acquired an adept muscle for constantly remixing what is in front of him.
Like a physical leap, a creativity leap is essential for crossing boundaries; it is also an active, dynamic process that honors intuition. Creativity leaps are needed to bridge the gap be-tween the churn of work and the highly sought-after prize called innovation. This holds true on both the individual and organizational levels. Creativity leaps matter because creativity is the engine for innovation. To be human is to be hardwired to be creative. Truly innovative people in any field regularly practice honing their creative competency. They apply a combination of the 3 I’s—inquiry, improvisation, and intuition—to the ways they think through problems and work with others to continually increase their creative competency. This is called the 3iCreativity™ model.
Inquiry. Curiosity results from an information gap. You want to know more about something that you currently don’t understand.
Improvisation. Improvising is about building on ideas within minimal constraints. There is freedom to experiment, but there are also rules and fluid structures that help you to correct course and embrace mistakes.
Intuition. There lies in all of us a visceral, internal wisdom that allows for unconscious pattern recognition and insights for decision-making. Harriet Tubman, Albert Einstein, and Steve Jobs are examples of famous innovators and leaders who relied on and valued their intuition, coupling it with their rational intellect to make decisions.
A large reason for why successful companies fail is that they do not cultivate their capacity for human creativity. We don’t hear creativity emphasized more in the boardroom because we don’t actually understand creativity. Creativity is our ability to toggle between wonder and rigor to solve problems and produce novel value. While many companies are trying to figure out innovation, most corporate cultures rarely utter the word creativity, and there is not a carved-out space in the boardroom for creativity. Perhaps creativity feels so inaccessible because it can be such an ambiguous process. It is not formulaic. It is complex. That lack of a rote, step-by-step approach can make it uncomfortable.
Going from having an innovation center to having a culture of innovation demands a creativity leap. It requires intentionality and the integration of a new mindset at all levels of the organization. Otherwise, you have created just one more silo in your company. Innovation is invention converted into financial, social, and cultural value. The engine for innovation is creativity. That means that if we truly want to innovate, then we must design systems, processes, and experiences in our work environments that allow us to be creative and catalyze invention. The first step is making creativity a resource that is accessible to all the people in your organization. Defining creativity as a competency consisting of wonder and rigor, and exercised through inquiry, improvisation, and intuition, is one way to democratize it. Viewed from this lens, creativity becomes available to all of us. It is a Flow Between Wonder and Rigor. Wonder is the catalyst. Then, rigor propels us forward and helps us to sustain the momentum of the leap.
Rigor and Rules - Twyla Tharp advised, “Before you can think out of the box, you must start with a box.” The box is the rules and the rigor. If we romanticize creativity as a mystical, magical process only accessible to a select few, then we miss the point. Rigor is that essential feature of creativity that anchors the wonder; puts guardrails up; and requires us to do the sweaty, muscle-bound work with whatever muse we choose. The rigor is the part of creativity that is often missed—or avoided. But it is essential if we are ever to go about the work of creativity in a sustained way. Rigor ensures that we actually complete the leap we started. It sustains the necessary momentum to create something tangible. Rigor is the grit and resilience that creativity requires for the long haul. It is the accumulation of commitment and knowledge needed to follow through, to get to value, to get to innovation.
The wonder-rigor paradigm consists of two important principles:
1. Rigor cannot be sustained without wonder.
2. Wonder is found in the midst of rigor. Rigor requires intense and deep ways to see, observe, and listen—the same practices required for creativity.
Inquire: Ask a Better Question
You can’t generate something new and novel with the status quo. Warren Berger, author of A More Beautiful Question, investigated the effectiveness of inquiry-driven leadership when he identified that the companies we think of as innovative are actually quite good at leading with questions. He found that they start with asking “Why?” and then “What if?” and then land on “How?” sorts of questions. They start with divergent, big-picture, wonder-driven thinking and move to convergent, rigorous, and applied thinking.
Improvise: Leverage organized chaos - Jazz is the preeminent example of a complex system: adaptive, self-organizing, and emergent. The future of work in our increasingly complex world requires us to adopt the chaordic, improvisational methods of jazz musicians. Coined by Dee Hock, founding CEO of VISA, the credit card company, chaord is used to describe the chaos and order that are both present in complex systems. He observed that nature abounds with systems that thrive during some chaos and some order. Keep in mind that chaos is not anarchy; it is randomness. And order is not control; it is structure. Wonder and rigor are parallel manifestations of the chaos and order in a chaordic system. Frank Barrett, an academic and jazz musician himself, has written at length in Yes to the Mess: Surprising Leadership Lessons from Jazz about what organizations can learn from jazz.
Intuit: Put Bravery before Mastery - As Albert Einstein said, “The intuitive mind is a sacred gift, and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.”
As Kelley Black, founder and CEO of Balancing the Executive Life, put it, “The rational mind can be self-limiting. We need to normalize the intuitive in leadership. Intuition in leadership is critical because it helps you see a broader field.” Intuition helps us lead with our whole selves—creatively and strategically. Think of intuition as a data point.
Commune: Come together to create - Even in the most well-designed community, we must be vigilant to ensure diversity, avoid groupthink, and resist settling for the status quo. This is where practicing inquiry, improvisation, and intuition is essential—so that we have the space to adapt, grow, and take creativity leaps. You must design a community for creativity.
Forecast: Amplify what is uniquely human - Perspective is about mining from the past in order to get insight into the future. Forecasting is about mining those insights in order to anticipate and identify multiple possible futures so that we can adapt to bumps in the road. To that end, forecasting requires a practice of inquiry, improvisation, and intuition; it necessitates an ability to toggle between wonder and rigor. In short, forecasting and preparing for what is to come requires creativity.
Creativity in the Fourth Industrial Revolution - Balder Onarheim, a creativity neuroscientist and president of PlatoScience, has proposed that we have been asking the wrong questions of artificial intelligence. Instead of wondering how to make AI creative, we should be asking, “How might we combine the calculating power of AI with the creative power of the human brain?” Instead of trying to make AI creative, let’s explore how we can link humans’ innate creativity with AI.
Heather McGowan, a future of work strategist, has called for a shift away from learning to work and toward working to learn. In other words, the future of work is the future of learning.
Creativity is about the remix: repurposing, recombining, and reframing. Originality is not the result of a purist singular production. Rather, it is the product of common memes that are consistent temporally and spatially throughout the world. Creativity loves constraints. All that you need is right within you and sitting before your eyes. You must shift your paradigm. Take, for example, hip-hop music. Gen X is responsible for hip-hop music, currently the number one music genre in the world. But let’s examine its origins. Amid the greatest rollback in funding for arts education in public schools in the late 1970s, black teenagers figured out a new musical instrument: the turntable. As formal teaching in the music diminished in public schools, the scratching of the record player’s needle on vinyl rose to the level of a percussion instrument. Now that’s a paradigm shift! It is that level of reframing and repurposing that continues to spark hip-hop artists such as DJ King Britt, who, while rooted in hip-hop, R&B, and jazz, has acquired an adept muscle for constantly remixing what is in front of him.
April 18, 2026
The author was one of the speakers at the IIA GAM conference this year. Her speech was interesting enough for me to order her book, but I now wish I'd have left it at the presentation.
July 12, 2020
The Creative Leap by Natalie Nixon
Do you ever start reading a book and get caught up in the base-line relevant title of the book? I kept looking for the Creative Leap as I read the book. The book had such an overall foundation of logic and analysis that I found myself SEARCHING for the leap.
Ultimately, I decided it isn’t the book. It’s the title. Had the title not mentioned “creative leap” I would have been fine, because I found the author to be exceptionally creative. But as a creative, I didn’t find any leaping going on, just consistent creative license. But the actual story in the book was wholesome, real, and heart-changing. There were innovative solutions based on creative thinking and action-taking steps that allowed the visions to be fulfilled.
I agree with the author about maintaining the wonder of a child throughout your lifetime to inspire creativity. You must have that wonder in order to see new visions, new views, and to have the hope required to find creative perspectives of everything that comes your way. When you lose that sense of wonder, it’s all gone. You have to hold on and keep a sense of wonder.
The use of Venn Diagrams throughout the book was a bit exciting, because they are my favorite unitized graphic. There’s so much comprehension goes into the process of developing the value of various efforts, when you realize they are set up to determine the outcome not the process.
Understanding the diagrams is necessary to understanding the book.
The exercises at the end of each chapter were helpful as I read through the book as well. I got a lot of interactive play from reading those a second time with my granddaughter who caught me reading the book this morning, and decided she wanted to know more about inspired creativity and how to be more creative. I’ll be ordering her a book because she’s leaving to go home, and I want to keep mine!
Using interactive intuitive problem solving to find creative solutions for anything that happens is definitely a good training ground for younger teens, or employees. I believe both would benefit from reading and studying, but even more so applying the principles I read in this book.
There were several advice concepts within the book, including journaling to find what solutions work over the long haul, and for individual creative adaptation. But the ones I found most useful were the collective, or tribal “group think” processes that brought people together to apply creative ideas, adopt group development concepts, and even the process of round table discussions or think tank idea mapping.
When Nixon suggested a variety of ideas to bring focus and innovation to the process of creative thinking, I loved the approach. She offered cognitive non-repetitive tasks as ideas that would help bring people together to strategize creative solutions. These creative ideas were culminated in the 21 Questions and Suggestions to Jump-Start Your Creativity, a list of questions in the back, recommended by NIxon as you journal your way to a Creative Leap to solve whatever problem you may be facing.
4 Stars – I really do like the book, but that title kept kicking me out of context.
Do you ever start reading a book and get caught up in the base-line relevant title of the book? I kept looking for the Creative Leap as I read the book. The book had such an overall foundation of logic and analysis that I found myself SEARCHING for the leap.
Ultimately, I decided it isn’t the book. It’s the title. Had the title not mentioned “creative leap” I would have been fine, because I found the author to be exceptionally creative. But as a creative, I didn’t find any leaping going on, just consistent creative license. But the actual story in the book was wholesome, real, and heart-changing. There were innovative solutions based on creative thinking and action-taking steps that allowed the visions to be fulfilled.
I agree with the author about maintaining the wonder of a child throughout your lifetime to inspire creativity. You must have that wonder in order to see new visions, new views, and to have the hope required to find creative perspectives of everything that comes your way. When you lose that sense of wonder, it’s all gone. You have to hold on and keep a sense of wonder.
The use of Venn Diagrams throughout the book was a bit exciting, because they are my favorite unitized graphic. There’s so much comprehension goes into the process of developing the value of various efforts, when you realize they are set up to determine the outcome not the process.
Understanding the diagrams is necessary to understanding the book.
The exercises at the end of each chapter were helpful as I read through the book as well. I got a lot of interactive play from reading those a second time with my granddaughter who caught me reading the book this morning, and decided she wanted to know more about inspired creativity and how to be more creative. I’ll be ordering her a book because she’s leaving to go home, and I want to keep mine!
Using interactive intuitive problem solving to find creative solutions for anything that happens is definitely a good training ground for younger teens, or employees. I believe both would benefit from reading and studying, but even more so applying the principles I read in this book.
There were several advice concepts within the book, including journaling to find what solutions work over the long haul, and for individual creative adaptation. But the ones I found most useful were the collective, or tribal “group think” processes that brought people together to apply creative ideas, adopt group development concepts, and even the process of round table discussions or think tank idea mapping.
When Nixon suggested a variety of ideas to bring focus and innovation to the process of creative thinking, I loved the approach. She offered cognitive non-repetitive tasks as ideas that would help bring people together to strategize creative solutions. These creative ideas were culminated in the 21 Questions and Suggestions to Jump-Start Your Creativity, a list of questions in the back, recommended by NIxon as you journal your way to a Creative Leap to solve whatever problem you may be facing.
4 Stars – I really do like the book, but that title kept kicking me out of context.
May 12, 2020
With "Creative Leap," Natalie Nixon has gifted us a wonderful primer, packed with primary interviews and research, for those who are unsure how to bring (more) creativity into the workplace. I've been "doing creativity" professionally for 20 years now and yet I found new insights and reminders of forgotten practices in every chapter.
September 8, 2024
Natalie Nixon’s The Creativity Leap: Unleash Curiosity, Improvisation, and Intuition at Work isn’t groundbreaking, but it’s an interesting exploration of how creativity can be shaped and applied in different areas, especially outside the arts. For me, creativity is one of the most powerful forces we have, and as someone who works in the arts, I think it's massively underestimated. We often focus on creativity as a product — something tangible we produce — rather than a process that helps unlock new ways of thinking, problem-solving, and innovation.
What Nixon does well is shifting the conversation towards creativity as an ongoing practice, something that isn't just for artists but for everyone, whether in business, tech, or education. She highlights the role of curiosity, improvisation, and intuition in fostering creativity, which are elements that are often overlooked in more traditional work environments.
While the book didn’t blow me away, it does offer some valuable insights into how we can harness creativity more effectively in everyday life and work. If you’re looking for a fresh take on creativity as a process rather than just an end result, it’s definitely worth a look.
What Nixon does well is shifting the conversation towards creativity as an ongoing practice, something that isn't just for artists but for everyone, whether in business, tech, or education. She highlights the role of curiosity, improvisation, and intuition in fostering creativity, which are elements that are often overlooked in more traditional work environments.
While the book didn’t blow me away, it does offer some valuable insights into how we can harness creativity more effectively in everyday life and work. If you’re looking for a fresh take on creativity as a process rather than just an end result, it’s definitely worth a look.
June 16, 2025
I had to read this for a work book club, so considering that it was for work and not for pleasure, this was actually a fun read!
I especially liked Natalie's final chapter about ways to increase your creativity and totally align with her messaging (which is to make more room for play/and getting outside of your routine), but the problem is that culturally, corporate America is not really designed for that. If you're a wage worker, more than likely, you don't have great PTO options, and there is probably a grind culture. It's kind of sad when we know what our bodies and souls need, but we can't always give in to those needs - there's a lot of pushing through and ignoring signals our bodies and minds give us, which can lead to complacency.
I appreciate Natalie's work in this book, and it's a good reminder to cherish our own creativity and find ways to tap in more!
I especially liked Natalie's final chapter about ways to increase your creativity and totally align with her messaging (which is to make more room for play/and getting outside of your routine), but the problem is that culturally, corporate America is not really designed for that. If you're a wage worker, more than likely, you don't have great PTO options, and there is probably a grind culture. It's kind of sad when we know what our bodies and souls need, but we can't always give in to those needs - there's a lot of pushing through and ignoring signals our bodies and minds give us, which can lead to complacency.
I appreciate Natalie's work in this book, and it's a good reminder to cherish our own creativity and find ways to tap in more!
May 17, 2021
Natalie Nixon The Creativity Leap: Unleash Curiosity, Improvisation, and Intuition at Work
Nixon shares valuable (and creative) models and tools to encourage creativity with your teams and colleagues. Examples of models include:
- The idea of Wonder vs Rigor.
- The 3 I's (Inquiry, Improvisation, Invent).
- Chaord: Organized Chaos.
- Remixing.
- Move, Translate, Play
All great concepts that Nixon explains simply and practically.
Nixon shares valuable (and creative) models and tools to encourage creativity with your teams and colleagues. Examples of models include:
- The idea of Wonder vs Rigor.
- The 3 I's (Inquiry, Improvisation, Invent).
- Chaord: Organized Chaos.
- Remixing.
- Move, Translate, Play
All great concepts that Nixon explains simply and practically.
February 13, 2021
The number of highlighted passages and notes I write in the margins are a sign of how good a book is for me. I can say that my copy of The Creativity Leap has numerous highlighted passages and margin notes. Nixon does a great job of presenting useful frameworks and then using real world examples. I also liked that she provides tools and questions that the reader can use. My only criticism of the book is that it did not end with a chapter that tied it all together. As a result, the ending seemed somewhat abrupt. Nonetheless, I would highly recommend this book.
October 3, 2025
Her big idea: creativity is toggling between wonder and rigor. Wonder fuels imagination and curiosity. Rigor makes sure ideas get finished and create value. The balance is the magic.
She anchors this in the 3 I’s:
Inquiry → Ask better questions.
Improvisation → Build with what you have.
Intuition → Trust the patterns your experience reveals.
Takeaway: Creativity is a practice, not a personality trait.
She anchors this in the 3 I’s:
Inquiry → Ask better questions.
Improvisation → Build with what you have.
Intuition → Trust the patterns your experience reveals.
Takeaway: Creativity is a practice, not a personality trait.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
July 9, 2020
A compact book that may be especially helpful for those who may struggle to see creativity beyond just art and visual design (or for individuals who work with a motivation to encourage creativity in others). This book provides a variety of examples and reinforces the simple dynamic of all creative practices - the mix of rigor (examination, research, etc) and wonder (imagining, exploration, etc).
May 7, 2022
Natalie Nixon offers her own flavour to unleash creativity and innovation. I found her take on intuition and improvisation a different addition to the general approaches to innovation, and worth checking out. The book is an easy read and provides also practical activities to move forward.
December 18, 2022
3.5 stars. An accessible primer on creativity, broken up into catchy, memorable, bite-size pieces. Read it for a book club at work, and it does have a bit of a corporate vibe to it, but I’ll definitely be holding onto some nuggets of wisdom from within these pages.
September 17, 2021
Enjoyed this one. Great stories and advice at the end of every chapter to tap into your creativity. Also appreciated the PHL shoutouts!
November 25, 2021
Good ideas and great little insights are found inside the book.
January 13, 2022
This is one of my favourite recent reads. Natalie's work has given me so much to think through and apply to my work and creative life. Will definitely be re-reading this one.
April 25, 2022
Thought provoking. I really enjoyed stretching my knowledge learning about creativity quotient and how it can impact your work. Recommend!
August 16, 2020
Creativity in everything!
I’ve appreciated taking a deeper dive into the principles and how to’s of being creative as I’ve read this book because we’re not getting those skills in other ways.
Even for people who call themselves creative we’re giving ourselves less and less space to open our minds and create new discovery for ourselves. But in this book, Natalie challenges, but more importantly guides, us to use the tools of wonder and rigor to step out of whatever box we’re in to find something “new” in our revelation.
Definitely a good read to broaden one’s perspective and mindset tool box in being creative in everything we do!
I’ve appreciated taking a deeper dive into the principles and how to’s of being creative as I’ve read this book because we’re not getting those skills in other ways.
Even for people who call themselves creative we’re giving ourselves less and less space to open our minds and create new discovery for ourselves. But in this book, Natalie challenges, but more importantly guides, us to use the tools of wonder and rigor to step out of whatever box we’re in to find something “new” in our revelation.
Definitely a good read to broaden one’s perspective and mindset tool box in being creative in everything we do!
Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews