Creativity and leadership in the age of AI, with Natalya Shelburne

Chat, this is the last episode of season one! Thank you for listening and supporting the show!

Yes, we’re (finally? unfortunately? depends on how you feel) going to talk about AI for real. Love it or hate it, AI is here—but don’t worry, this episode isn’t just breathless hype and grim job fears. Natalya is a long-time colleague and industry friend, and I can’t think of anyone better to share an optimistic, curious, human-centered exploration of what it means to be creative in an increasingly technological world.

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🎧 listen to Episode #17 with Natalya Shelburne on creativity and leadership in the age of AI.

Read on for a peek into the episode.

Natalya Shelburne joins me to explore how design leaders can cultivate creativity in an era of rapid technological and organizational change. Drawing from her degree and research in creativity, Natalya shares insights on fostering innovation, overcoming fear-driven management styles, and why embracing artistic thinking is essential for teams navigating the age of AI. She explains the importance of creating safe environments to unlock creative potential and why outdated corporate structures simply can't compete. Plus, flow state, goats, expansive thinking, and hobbies. 

🎧 Creativity and leadership in the age of AI, with Natalya Shelburne — #17 (58min)

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Elyse:

What would it be like, if you can actually build something by gesturing, by speaking, by drawing, all these things that we can't do right now or can't conceptualize right now. That to me is really interesting, because I wonder how it's going to expand our human brain capacity, for having big ideas, when we aren't constrained by the Figma surface, or the notepad, or the code editor.

How do you think about creativity in these expansive ways, and what are some ways that we can bring some of that creativity in now, even though we are constrained to this immediate surface?

Natalya:

I think that's an amazing question, and I think about that exact thing all the time. And I think this is where my focus on augmenting human creativity, that's the next chapter of my creative career, is focusing deeply on human creativity.

What happens when you don't need a button? Does AI need my button in the style guide? No; but so, what am I augmenting here? What patterns am I trying to abstract out?

For me, a design system, I'm growing my own personal definition of it. It is a reflection of what we designed as an organization. I mean, we're a reflection of how an organization designs, right? We collect, we bottle the magic from everybody, and we say, here you go, one magic. Here are the Legos or whatever it is, like, we're just distributors of the magic that happens all around us.

Moving forward, it's how can we provide more guidance, and provide more of this creative thinking for the ecosystem around us.

We are zoomed out. We see the whole organization, and we are considering all use cases at once. Whereas platform and feature teams might be thinking about their specific thing. So what are we gonna be doing with design systems? Great questions. We are figuring this out right now. But if we ask the question underneath that, is, what are we designing? What are we creating and how do we help people create? I feel that's what got us in the game in the first place, is, I wanna make cooler things than the same button 80 times.

We are still trying to create a great user experience for the designers doing the work, and caring for the design user experience, the engineer user experience.

Because the arts don't have dibs on creativity, and I know any domain can be creative, I have seen the most creative people who are engineers, front end, back end. I've seen some of those creative people who are product folks, who are designers, whatever discipline they're in. I've seen amazing minds freed up from the repetitive, whatever tool they're in, whether it's slicing up things in Photoshop, which, or mired in a million style sheets, trying to figure out where are these styles coming from, you know?

Elyse:

Arguing with TypeScript. For me it's writing freaking type interfaces. I'm just like, come on, like, just, just understand, like be in my brain. You know what it's supposed to be, come on computer. I'm ready for that to not do that anymore.

Natalya:

So my question becomes, what does it mean to augment human creativity, and how do we do that best? It is very open right now. And for me, my, my training falls back to the arts world, of working with artists and seeing what does it mean to create, to create ideas with value. But it also goes back to the psychology world because the legacy system we're currently working with is human brains.

What is human creativity? How do we remember things? How do we accomplish things? How do we feel good about accomplishing things? How does our attention work? I mean, think about what we're gonna have to do in the future when we have an infinite attention scrolling machine just made for you. What are those tools gonna do to us? What is it gonna mean?

Elyse:

I kind of feel like we're already there. The infinite scroll algorithm is already, it's already shaping us.

Natalya:

It's also shaping kids brains, which is one of my favorite things to think about. What are the brain scans showing of children who grew up with a whole lot of screen time? How's their attention span doing? And what does it mean to to grow up from a very early age, always being able to find out the answer, or never being bored, and never having to wonder. Just questions I'm asking, and I'm not really sure what those answers are!

Elyse:

When I went to school, it was about teaching facts to memorize. And it was actually outside of school where I learned things like problem solving and the multiple why's, like the Socratic method of investigation, getting into, how do I actually like untangle this problem? Or how do I investigate my own feelings about something? We didn't really get that in school in the U.S. And I dunno, maybe other countries have better school systems, but at least here, like, we didn't get that.

And that's gonna have to change. Because if you can get the facts, … you can look up some information, the things that you're gonna have to do to engage with the world are different.They're going to be around seeing patterns, around problem solving, around this broad bucket of creativity, right, of knowing what question to ask. Because it's not just facts or data, and I think a lot of us use LLMs right now as like fact machines.

But I think the really interesting stuff is in abstraction— they are abstractions of tools for creation. So what is it that you're creating?

Natalya:

And creativity is a, is a practice, so how are you practicing creating? And so it's really cool that you said at the beginning, we used to focus on memorization. You know, the tools that we needed were outside of us, like, you just need access to information. Well, now we have access to everything.

So now it's how we access the information. Better searching and better problem finding, not just problem solving. And what's gonna come next? What will it mean to always have a teacher with you?

 I'm very curious about how AI is also gonna play out in education, when there's someone watching and assessing what your level of understanding is, and guiding you to the next question, to the next discovery, to the next bit of creative leap.

Again, it goes back to human creativity: what are we capable of when we have tools that augment what our creativity is.

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See you next episode!,

Elyse