Hi, everybody. My name is Kate Maxwell and I'm the Chief technology Officer for Worldwide Defense and Intelligence at Microsoft. I'm also a small business owner with my company, Kate Maxwell speaks. I am delighted to be here with you today.Let me give a huge thanks to the women tech network for hosting this event for us all and for uh the opportunity to join the stage with you here in this session. We're gonna focus on the topic of creativity, which is a subject that I am passionate about. I am an engineer by trade. The entirety of my career has been spent serving the global public sector community and I'll be honest with you. This is a community that does not use the word creativity enough, but given everything that's happening in the world today, given the pace of change that we're seeing, especially in technology, creativity is needed now more than ever, we need to harness the power of creativity to solve some of the world's hardest challenges.

And there are a lot of them out there right now. This is true in my industry, which is defense and intelligence. It's also true in every single other industry on the planet, including yours, whatever that might be. So we are gonna explore this topic of creativity and I want you to know that when we talk about creativity and innovation today. Certainly, yes, we're talking about creating new products and new capabilities. But we are also talking about the way that we can disrupt and challenge the status quo, the way we can develop and test and deploy new capabilities, the way we do business and the way we approach the world at large, we can be creative in every single one of those things. It's not just about new capability development. So today in this session, I wanna share some tips with you on how you can foster creativity for yourself in your teams, either at work or in other organizations and why it is a business and career imperative for us to do so. So here's a quick look at the agenda for this session and how we're going to be spending roughly the next 30 to 45 minutes.

We're gonna talk through the psychology of creativity first because I think it's important that we understand creativity and where it comes from in order to endeavor to be more creative ourselves. We're also gonna talk through some of the habits that hold us back and I will tell you, I have fallen victim to many of these myself. So I'm curious to see what resonates with you. We'll talk about how to foster greater creativity for yourself and then your team, we're gonna spend some time on the power of diversity, which is such an important topic when we're talking about creativity and then we'll close with the business case for creativity and I'm gonna open it up for questions.

So please, if you have any questions, I'd love for you to share them in the Q and A on the webinar. And I'm gonna get to those at the end. So I look forward to seeing what's on your mind and I'll just give you a heads up too. There's gonna be one brief creativity exercise here and I hope you'll join me in it. It's low stress. You're not gonna have to share anything but please have, you know, maybe a piece of paper and a writing instrument handy and we'll get to that exercise in a little bit. So as we go through each one of these sections in the agenda, I want to start each section with a quote from a renowned innovator or someone who's considered to be an original thinker if you've heard that phrase before. And these are folks that I suspect you'll recognize. At least some of them. I think they've got great wisdom to share. And I wanna start here with the psychology of creativity with Maya Angelou, famous, world renowned poet. I think that we have to understand the psychology of creativity so that we can figure out how to make ourselves more creative. And Maya says this, you can't use up creativity, the more you use, the more you have, has anybody ever experienced that?

I know I have, I have found in my career and life in general, creativity is contagious, right? If you surround yourself with these original thinkers or with creative types or, or known innovators, you will often and find yourself becoming more creative and innovative as a result, right?

Nothing gets the creative juices flowing like the sharing of ideas and seeing other people taking those risks and throwing, throwing their ideas out there. And that often is contagious, which is a great thing. So yes, creativity is contagious. And there's another expression that I think about all the time, which is you are the average of the five people that you spend the most time with. Think about that for a second, the average of the five people you spend the most time with. What does that mean? And who are your five? I think what it means is we are all influenced and conditioned by the people that we surround ourselves with in our lives in our work, in our day to day in our friend group, right? And we're also influenced by the circumstances and the environments that we find ourselves in. So if you are actively looking to boost your creativity, quotient, seek out creative types, get them in your circle, spend some time with them, you might even ask somebody to be a mentor to you or maybe find an opportunity to join them on a project. And I guarantee you will start to feel yourself becoming more creative as a result that creativity is contagious. So that's the first thing. Where else does creativity come from? I will tell you this and this is the good news. Everybody has some capacity to be creative and innovative.

For a long time. I thought that I was not a creative type. I now hold two patents. I'm a CTO of the big tech company, right? Everybody has the capacity for this. But the tendency towards creativity sometimes is naturally stronger in some than in others. And I'll give you some examples. This is kind of the nature versus nurture argument. Some people are just born originals, they are hardwired to question the status quo. They think outside the box all the time. Sometimes they don't even see the, they don't know that the box exists, right? And it's easy for us to pick these people out, especially in work. Um examples that come to my mind, Grace Hopper Steve Jobs, no matter what your feelings are on him. Elon Musk, right? These are the types they are born originals. But as I said, this can be nurtured and some people require just a little bit more guidance or nurturing to bring out their best creative selves. I put myself in this category. So we're gonna talk in a bit about what you can do to foster a more creative environment or thought process for yourself and for your team. And I will also say this, you know, life experiences, inform creativity periods of stress and pressure can make a huge impact on your creativity, both for good and for bad.

You know, when I think about the past, let's say, three years, you know, going through COVID, especially in the early days, working from home while also trying to get my kids to do homeschooling. It was a lot, it was a lot and there were a lot of times where at least for me, it felt like it was too much and I was struggling to get into that flow state and that deep thinking state, you know, I was just trying to keep the wheels on the bus, so to speak. And so in those moments, I was struggling to get creative. I just didn't have the capacity for it at the time. But there were also other days in that really hard period where I felt like my ideas were really flowing because the world had so many problems. I mean, there were so many problems out there that were actively calling for change and for solutions. And sometimes despite the hard stuff, I felt like I did have something to contribute and I had ideas and I was feeling creative. So I want you to know this is normal, your creativity is gonna come and go depending on what's happening in your life depending on your circumstances. And I want you to know that it's normal when that happens. And if you are in a down period with creativity, don't you worry, it's gonna come back. I promise you that and there are things you can do again to nurture it and get back to that, that deep thinking and flow state.

I'll also share um another example where creativity often comes from survival instinct. Creativity is frequently born out of a need to survive. And yes, we see this with individuals and in nature, but we also see it in business. I'm gonna give you an example. There were lots of moments when we look at the company, Apple, one of the biggest tech companies and most successful tech companies on the planet. But they had many times in their history where they were on the brink of being done of closing their doors. There were a few times when they were at the brink of not even being able to meet their payroll on any given day, right? What did they do? They innovated their way out of it when businesses often are on the brink of losing it all that survival instinct often kicks in and it is strong and innovation and creativity is often the result of that. So in the case of Apple, you know, they innovated their way to survival and ultimately to profitability with things like the ipod and the iphone, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. That is creativity at work and it saved that business in a big way. So those are some of the places where creativity can come from. Now, in terms of finding inspiration, I told you this can be nurtured.

And if you're feeling stuck, if you're in one of those down periods for creativity, if you're stagnating on a project or a task at work, how do you move past that? I'm gonna give you four things. And the first is that you need to recognize that you can't innovate in a vacuum. So I would say, actively look for problems in the world or around you or on in your job that need to be solved. I used to say this, I've read led a global Innovation organization for a time at a previous company and I always said this to my folks, challenges and pain points. That is an opportunity. Those are the perfect grounds for creativity. If there is a task or a product or a process, that's just awful and nobody's enjoying it. And if you feel like it could be done better, look at that as an opportunity to get creative. That is the world telling you that it needs your help. And that's where innovation uh can often take hold second thing, shake it up. Um If you're stagnating, maybe, see if you can spend some time on a different project, maybe get a change of scenery for me. Oftentimes it's as simple as taking five minutes between meetings and getting some tea and taking a walk around the block with my dog. Right.

Just to get a change of scenery and to refresh my brain a little bit, maybe play some ping pong if you have a game set up in your office or in your house, play some ping pong if you can't, you know, take a vacation, take a week away and un fully unplugged from work and you're gonna come back refreshed and most likely more creative as a result.

Third thing I mentioned ping pong, make your work environment fun. And I'll give you examples from Microsoft. You know, I I moved to Big Tech about 2.5 years ago. And at first I was amazed by the campuses that we have at the places like Microsoft Meta Amazon, you name it, right? These offices have tree houses, they have Xbox lounges, they have in our case, Minecraft inspired offices and all of this is in place not only to appeal to talent but to make your workplace fun because fun often sparks creativity. So if you can make the environment around you fun, you're gonna be more creative. As a result. I always keep little toys on my desk that I can just tinker with during the day because it helps light the creative spark and keep my brain moving in different directions. So think about that. How can you make your work environment, more fun to breed, more creativity. And finally, if you're really stuck on a problem, try and reframe the question, turn it on its head, drop your constraints, unpack your assumptions. You might even briefly drop the laws of physics and say there are absolutely no constraints here. What would we do now? Now, how would we solve the problem? And that's gonna lead you to some crazy places that probably won't work in the real world.

But it's gonna get you thinking about new things and that is divergent thinking, which might lead you to an idea that is, you know, actually revolutionary. So unpack that problem and that will also help you get the new ideas flowing and get you thinking in a different way. So next, we're gonna move on to the habits that hold us back. I would love to see and chat as I'm talking through these, which of these resonate with you. Um There's a wonderful quote by Robert Frost, the poet who says the brain is a wonderful organ. It starts the moment you get up in the morning and it does not stop until you get to the office. I feel that one hardcore even though I work from home now, right? My office is just downstairs, but still some of my very best ideas come to me, not when I'm working, they come to me in my free time when my brain is not focused on a million and one things that I have to do that day when I'm not thinking about the contents of my inbox or my to do list or my meeting schedule, we live and we work in a very execution driven world.

And when we do not have a single moment to spare for free thought, our creativity is suppressed as a result. We live in that execution space. We're not letting our mind go and that is not good for creativity. So there are ways that we can work around that. I'm gonna share some of those with you in a bit. But first we're gonna get to an exercise. So this is where I'm looking for some participation. Um If you've got a piece of paper and a pen, I would ask you just like you see on the slide here, let's write, draw maybe 1015, 20 circles. Don't fill them in yet. Just draw the circles and I'm gonna do this with you. So be drawing those circles now, please. OK. I have my 15. What we're gonna do here is I'm gonna put a timer on, we're gonna take 30 seconds and your challenge is to draw something in as many of these circles as you can in a one minute period. You can see here, I gave you some examples. Pizza. I don't know what that is. A cheeseburger and a face, right? Fill in as many as you can in 30 seconds and the focus is on quantity, not quality. All right, let's go. 30 seconds. Go ahead. Many circles as you can and I promise I won't ask to see them after you've got about 10 seconds remaining. Five seconds. All right, that's time. Now, I'm not gonna ask to see them. But if anybody is brave enough to share, how many circles did you fill in?

Drop that number in the chat? I'd love to see how many we got. See an 89 978. All right. These are good numbers. There's a, we got some double digits in there. Thank you everybody for doing that. Now, let me tell you why we did this. Hopefully, first of all, I hope it was fun. I always like doing this exercise and it reinforces for me that my drawing skills are not so hot. But why we did this exercise is if I had asked you to focus on quality of drawing, you would have worked for perfection. You would have spent your time on one, maybe two circles and you would have self censored your creativity. But when we focus on speed and pure volume of ideas, you go for it. You're, you're not worried about self censoring. You are not worried about being judged on the end result. You're not concerned with whether your idea is good or bad. You're just throwing your ideas on your paper. You were not afraid to fail and that's the place that we need to get to on a regular basis, that pure creation mode where we're not afraid to fail. So I wanna share with you some habits that hold us back. But thank you for joining me on that exercise and related to that very exercise habit. Number one that holds us back is fear of judgment. And this is a huge challenge. And frankly, it's one that I've struggled with for a long time. Right?

When we are afraid of being judged, when we're afraid of failing, we don't have the psychological safety to bring new ideas forward. And this is a learned trait when young Children are exercising creativity. I see this in my kids, they're excited to share their work quite frankly, even when it's not that good. And I'm not gonna tell them that because I'm a good mom, but they're excited to share their work. They're not embarrassed, they're not concerned, they're not worried about failure or what somebody is gonna think of them. But at some point in our lives, we are taught to conform and we are afraid to be different. We start fearing failure and it hurts our creativity. We are more creative when we are less afraid to fail. So we have to figure out how to work past that fear of judgment and failure. Embrace the messy, embrace the vulnerable, be brave in your authenticity, believe in yourself and don't be afraid to fail because it holds us back so much. The second thing I want to share another habit, self doubt and imposter syndrome. And I have struggled with this one too.

So we're gonna look at something called the creative process which you see on the right hand side of the slide, I can't take credit for this. This is from the amazing Adam Grant. I'm a huge fan. He's got a great TED talk called The Surprising Habits of original thinkers. And Adam says this a lot of times when we have new ideas, we start in this, this is awesome place. We're pumped. We're excited, we believe in the idea and then we start rolling. Maybe we've got some budget. We're trying it out. Now, we're developing an MVP, whatever we might discover that it's tricky trickier than we thought, but we're still moving forward at some point. Perhaps we get to a place where, oh my goodness, this is not going well. This, this idea might be terrible. I might be looking for an off ramp. This isn't turning out the way that I thought what we need to not do is go to the I am terrible place. It is one thing to judge your idea. It is an entirely other thing to judge yourself just because an idea failed, right? We cannot go to that place because we will get stuck in it and it will suppress our creativity so much. So it's ok to judge your idea and get back to that creative process. But do not get stuck in the I am terrible place. It's not about you. Everybody's got ideas. Some are good, some are bad. That's ok. We gotta keep moving forward next habit that holds us back. Busyness, this busy life that we lead.

How busy is too busy, innovation and creativity demands large chunks of uninterrupted distraction free time. When was the last time you gave yourself that uninterrupted distraction free time or gave your team that right? I know in my role, I just by the nature of my job, I'm in meetings a lot, a lot, a lot. And as you climb the corporate food chain, it can be more difficult to create these large chunks of time for yourself. But what you can do is create those large chunks of times for your teams. Schedule times when your team can work, can ideate no interruptions, right? No meetings, no phone calls, no emails, just creative thinking and deep thinking and maybe learning and working on what they want to work on. We do this at Microsoft, it's called Focus Fridays. I do not schedule meetings for myself or my team on Focus Fridays. That is our time to do deep work and that's where the creativity often happens. So look for those opportunities and finally put down the phone. And this is really a statement about kind of, you know, digital means in general. We I think are becoming as a society addicted to digital media to, needing to be entertained with electronics. Every time we have a free second, I find myself sometimes, you know, in the checkout line at the grocery store or even in my car at a red light.

And as soon as I'm paused, I, I'm thinking I need to, I need to fill this time. I need to entertain myself. I wanna get my phone out. Don't do it. Use that time to your advantage, even if it's only 30 seconds, just let your brain wander and it's gonna pay dividends for your creativity. So if you can share and chat, I'd love to see if any of these resonate with you, fear of judgment, self doubt, imposter syndrome, you know, being too busy or that kind of addiction to digital media, any of these a struggle for you. Um I'm gonna give you some examples to overcome them. But yeah, it looks like they're resonating a bunch of them. Thank you for sharing that. All right, let's talk about how we can get past this fostering creativity. I love this quote. It's from Thomas Edison who of course is one of the um most renowned innovators in the course of human history. And he says I make more mistakes than anyone I know and sooner or later I patent most of them. I love that. I love that right. He's owning up to the mistakes, but he's saying ultimately, some of them turn into good things and I think this speaks to a number of things, the pure volume of ideas that's needed before you get to a winner.

The willingness to accept failure as part of the creative process, the need to take risks and put forward ideas that might seem a little bit crazy or out there. Um Thomas Edison, great example of this, one of the most, you know, renowned innovators, certainly of our time, this guy went through a concrete phase. I learned this when I was doing research for this talk. He at some point was sure that concrete furniture and concrete appliances and concrete musical instruments were gonna take off. He was sure of it. That was his big idea at the time. Now, I don't know about anybody else. I think concrete countertops became a thing, but I don't have a concrete couch. I don't have a concrete piano. This one didn't pan out for Thomas Edison and yet he's still regarded as one of the most prolific and important innovators in human history. So don't be afraid to fail. Don't be afraid to put lots of ideas out there. Even if people think them crazy, that's not a reflection on you. Keep innovating, keep trying. All it needs is one of those ideas to hit and it might be revolutionary. So what can we do then to foster more creativity for ourselves, for our teams, for the people around us first.

The number one indicator of how well a team is likely to perform is if they have trust and respect and security and for any team leaders or hiring managers out there, we gotta keep this in mind. If you can foster an environment where your people trust each other and trust you, they are generally much more willing to bring big ideas forward and take bigger risks because there's less fear of judgment and less fear of failure. So we have to be really thoughtful in any organization about building relationships and psychological safety in our teams because that is gonna pay dividends for creativity. People will bring big crazy ideas forward if they know it's not ultimately gonna reflect on them as poor performance if it doesn't work out, right? Psychological safety is critical. Second thing I already mentioned, but I'll say it again. Schedule that an uninterrupted time. Super important.

We can't get bogged down by this fast paced world, create time for your brain to to breathe, give it the space it needs to think and be creative and do that same thing for your people. Third break the stigma of mistakes. This is huge and I think especially in corporate environments, there is a real stigma around mistakes that we've got to get past. We have to recognize that failure is a natural and necessary part of the process. Failure is part of the creative process. It is. But we forget that oftentimes in our execution driven world. So we have to build cultures and workplaces where failing forward is celebrated, celebrated. We used to do something at a previous job. It was called Face Palm Friday where we would talk about what didn't go well that week.

But what we learned from it, that's the thing that helped us move forward. And that's why we were failing forward because we learned from it so related to that, then fail, fast, fail, gracefully fail forward, learn from our mistakes. Back when I was responsible for that innovation organization, I had a couple million dollars at my disposal to fund innovation projects. I would much rather know in the 1st $10,000 of spend rather than get to a million dollars. If something is gonna fail, I wanna learn that early so we can off ramp gracefully take our lessons learned and go put that money elsewhere, right? So fail as fast as you can learn from it, use that to refine your approach or off ramp and ultimately use it to improve and grow, fail, fail, fast, fail forward and finally leverage diversity. This one is such an important topic when it comes to creativity that I wanted to give it its own section in this talk. And I don't know if there's any fellow introverts out there, but I love Susan Cain. She wrote a great book called Quiet, The Power of Introverts in a world that can't stop talking and see. Susan says this. She says there is zero correlation between being the best talker and having the best ideas.

I don't know if there's other introverts out there in the audience today. But have you ever been in a meeting where it's like all of the air time gets sucked up by maybe one or two or a handful of folks on a regular basis. And yet, you know, there are other people in that team who have good ideas and they just may be not getting an opportunity to raise them, right? I think this speaks to the differences that can and should exist in all of our teams and extroverts and introverts is just one example of this. There are personality types that behave differently in meetings. There are different work styles and work preferences. You know, in in this particular case, you might have an extrovert who is jumping up and down to share their idea. They can't wait to say it and that's great because they're gonna put that idea forward. But you might also have an introvert who's biding their time. Maybe they don't want to interrupt, maybe they don't want to share it in a big public community forum. They're waiting for just the right moment. Those folks often need a little bit of nurture and care to draw those ideas out. But those ideas are still there and we have to recognize that. So being the loudest person in the room does not mean you've got the best idea in the room. So if you are a team leader.

If you're a meeting facilitator, if you are maybe one of the more quiet people look for ways to share your ideas or draw out ideas from other folks in the room, leverage differences and diversity to ultimately come to better solutions because we're always better when all voices are included.

So on that note, there's this diversity wheel, right? When we talk about diversity, obviously, we need to leverage diversity when we compose our teams and some di diversity is easier to see than others. But I want to give you this wheel of diversity because there's many dimensions of it, right, age, race, career path in it, in defense and intelligence, industry or military background, education, geography, um gender identity, so many things and then there's also the deep level stuff which you might not see or even know about until you really get to know a person, but that factors in here as well.

And I want to give you an example of some of that deep level diversity. Once upon a time in that innovation organization, I was leading, I was putting together a leadership team and we were trying to find the right composition for that team. And so my team and I, we took a test to get to know each other better. And it was called the Innovation strengths preferences indicator test or is B and if you're familiar with is B their hypothesis is this, there's basically three types of innovative mindsets out there. There's the builder, these people are very execution driven, they get things done, you can count on them to get things done. Program managers often fall in this category and they tend to prefer gradual change built on existing ideas rather than big revolutionary change. That's entirely a shift from what you know, exists today. Then you have pioneers on the opposite end of that spectrum. These are visionaries, you know, they bounce from idea to idea, they tend to lean towards revolutionary change more than evolutionary. Sometimes you can't even keep them on task because they're all over the place. But in a good way and then you have the flex people, the people that can bridge the gap between the two and also make sure that they're not burning the building down when when those two personalities get together.

And what we found on this team that we were building when we took this test is we had all of those personalities represented to some degree, right? We had the builder and the pioneer, we had a flex person in the middle to kind of keep us moving forward. And we discovered that for a team that is really high performing and creative, you have to representation from all of these different personality types. If you skew towards he too heavily towards builder, you're gonna get a lot of things done, but you probably won't be thinking too out of the box. And if you have a whole bunch of pioneers, you're gonna have a bunch of wild and crazy and awesome ideas, but you might not get a lot done. You have to have all of these, the entire spectrum of personality represented. And again, this is about deep level diversity, work styles, work preferences, different mindsets and why they're all important in creativity. So I'll give you one quick example. I love this example. Um Just because I think it's fun builder and pioneer. And the example was we were hosting an innovation event and we had free swag because what's an event without free swag, right?

And so two members of the team each took a box of swag and they went to set up their swag table and they couldn't see each other. The tables were like around the corner from one another. And so the person on the left was a builder type and I took honestly a very military approach, straight lines. I mean, if I had given them a ruler, I'm certain they would have used it. It was beautiful, it was very structured, it was very builder. And then the person on the right decided to get creative and they started spelling out like the name of the organization, the acronym in with swag. And I mean, they got really creative about it. And when they came back together, we had to laugh just because they both accomplished the task and they both did it beautifully, but they did it in very different ways. And so we could very much see the different styles um in real time here. And bottom line is diversity breeds creativity, right? So be really thoughtful about that as you compose your teams and ultimately you'll have higher performance and get better results from everybody. So before we come to Q and A, I wanna close with the business case for creativity and I'll start with this Peter Drucker quote, you know, he says business has only two functions, marketing and innovation. And I think at the at the core of it, that's true, right?

How do businesses maintain competitive advantage? They create new things and then they market them. That's it. Creativity and innovation, that's what it's all about. So this is what helps keep us relevant in business. Creativity is what helps us deliver on the needs of our customers and it's what helps us deliver on the world at large. And messaging is a big part of that too per Drucker with the marketing comment. So the business case for creativity is this, you know, to sustain growth, organizations need consistent streams of new products, new services, new processes and new business models. And this is important. Like I said, at the beginning of this talk, we're not just talking about the new products and services, we're not just talking about what businesses ultimately sell, we're talking about that. Plus the need to innovate and disrupt the business itself, right? The world is changing around us.

An organization that is not constantly looking to disrupt and change itself is gonna get innovated right out of its use, disrupted right out of its use. It will go out of business, right? So businesses cannot be comfortable, they cannot stagnate, they can't accept what is and say this is always gonna work for us. That's not the truth. So what I would offer to all of you is in your careers, see that as an opportunity be raising your hand when you see opportunities for things that could be done better at work, whether it's a process that seems a little outdated or maybe a little painful, a new idea for a product or services, raise your hand and offer it up.

Use your creativity. Don't be afraid to put those ideas forward and ultimately, your organization is gonna flourish. Thanks to your perspectives, your customers will benefit from it and you will experience career growth as well. Don't be afraid to put those big ideas forward. Now, I work for Microsoft.

Of course, I have to close with a quote from Satya Nadella. He's our Microsoft CEO. He's an all around brilliant and truly decent human being. And Satya says this industry does not respect tradition, it only respects innovation. And I think that's so true and it's true in every single industry on the planet. It's true in global public sector that I serve. It's true for the militaries and the defense organizations that I support. It's true in commercial industries. It's true for nonprofits. It's true for every organization on the planet. And this is not just a problem for business leaders to figure out how to solve no matter where you are in an organization. This is your job. Every single one of us has ideas to contribute. Every single one of us has had those moments where we think, why are we doing it this way or why does this process exist? Why does this have to be so painful or does this task really have to cost us this much time? I can think of a better way. I want you to use those moments as a call to action for creativity and for innovation. Those are the moments where you raise your hand and you toss your idea out there and you tactfully push back against the status quo. That is how we deliver innovation. And it's ultimately quite frankly how we change the world. So go light that creative spark for yourself, go light that creative spark for your team and go use it to make your business and your organization and the world a better place.

So thank you very much. Um I will share this too if anybody is interested in continuing their learning on this topic. There, here's a few of my favorite resources on topics of innovation and creativity, creativity, inc it's a super fun book actually about the story of Pixar and how they boosted their own creativity quotient. It's amazing. Uh The innovator's dilemma is a classic Quiet. Is that book from Susan that I referenced. Darren greatly is great if you're a Berne Brown fan and she talks about how to embrace kind of your vulnerability to get through that fear of judgment and failure that we talked about. And of course, Adam Grant, um he's got a lot of amazing books and content out there. But if you only have 15 minutes, go watch this TED talk, the surprising habits of original thinkers, really, really good stuff. So with that um happy to take any questions at this time, I'm gonna take a peek through chat here and if anybody wants to drop questions in the Q and A session, uh the Q and A bubble as well, that would be great. Let's see. Very cool tips for nurturing creativity. My creativity gets triggered by reading, especially humor. Yep. Wondering whether you have other rituals apart from the ones you mentioned with toys on the desk. So I do this thing.

Um I recognize this is probably my privilege showing not everybody can do this, but I do this thing twice a year where I intentionally block time on my calendar for three or four days for deep work. And I go somewhere else like I will rent an airbnb in another town and I will hunker down just me. No meetings for three or four days and I will ideate and sometimes that means I'm writing a keynote. Sometimes it means I'm working on something that really requires me to get in the zone that I know if I did it at work in, in my normal day to day, I'd be interrupted 1000 times. Um I, I don't take my kids along, they a couple days with grandma, but I block those times intentionally for me to go do deep work and get creative and I do it off site. Um, and that has been huge for me. I love doing it. So if you can do that, even if it's just an afternoon, like four hours, no meetings, you know, maybe take it in a different part of the house or book a conference room for yourself. Get that change of scenery. Don't take any distractions and just go do deep work and creativity. It really, I have found that to, to be a huge help for me. It works. Uh, let's see. What are other sentences that block our creativity. One that holds me back is, oh, I can't.

Oh, my goodness, that one. Yeah. Oh, I can't is big. Um, I will just share with you. I'm a big fan of therapy. I think we have to invest in our mental health just like our physical health. And my therapist always flags me when I say, say things like, well, I shouldn't, she's always like says, who, who says you shouldn't do this thing? Um I think sometimes we get too comfortable accepting social norms. I'll just say, and that's where my shouldn't come from. And so she always helps me challenge myself on those who says you shouldn't do it anyway. That's how we drive change. Um Let's see, got about four minutes left. Um You shared many inspiring quotes. What's the mantra you turn to when you're really discouraged. I'll say this as somebody who has suffered with imposter syndrome for a long time. Um I'm, I am afraid of failure and have been for a long time now. I, now I'm recognizing the stigma that even I hold around failure and I have a post it note that I keep on my desk that says, be brave enough to suck at something new. Be brave enough to suck at something new. I need to be brave enough to fail. I need to go wade into that hard stuff and know that it's probably gonna be hard for a little while, especially when it's new to me.

But that ultimately, if I stick with it, it's gonna get less hard over time and you kind of build that muscle too where it's not so uncomfortable as you get used to it. So be brave enough to suck at something new. That's, that's the one that I think about all the time. Um Tips on getting past fear of judgment. Well, therapy one, see that only partially tongue in cheek because that's, I do spend a lot of time talking about exactly that um, other things you can do I think is surround yourself with a support network. I mean, at the end of the day, haters are gonna hate. Um, and that's oftentimes more about them than it is about you. I, for some reason to this day, I get a lot of hate mail on linkedin on social, like I've been investing in writing collateral, putting thought leadership out into the world on social media. I have a lot of people that I don't know and that I'll never meet, send me D MS to, to tell me that I'm wrong to tell me that I don't look like a CTO to tell me all the things that used to occupy headspace for me. And I, like I, I took that judgment to heart from strangers. Now I have a support network for myself and I also find my validation internally. So I don't even, I don't need to listen to the haters.

I don't even, in most cases, I don't even read those messages anymore. Right? So I think we have to be brave enough to surround ourselves with people that we know, love us and trust us and, and not care about what the world at large is gonna tell us we're doing right or wrong and find that validation within if at the end of the day, you know, that you did your best work.

You tried your hardest and you grew maybe it was only by 1% but you grew just a little bit that day. That's all the validation you should need. Who cares what those other people think? Especially if you didn't ask their opinion. That has been what has helped me move past that fear of judgment. So thank you for that. It's a great question. Um Oh, this is a good one, Jennifer Baxter. One quote that helps me is no one can make you and feel inferior without your consent. Nailed it so true. That's exactly right. Um So thank you everybody. If there's any other questions, I'm gonna stick on for maybe 30 more seconds, feel free to drop it, but really, really appreciate everybody joining today. Thank you so much. Connect with me on linkedin. I'd love to continue the conversation there. Let me know what you're up to. Let me know what resonated with you and I hope you have a fantastic rest of the conference. Thank you so much. Take care. Bye everybody. Thank you.