Building brands, running teams, and teaching the next generation of leaders. What I kept seeing, in every room, was the same thing: people doing their best inside systems that had no idea how they were actually doing. I help leaders see clearly where you are, how you got there, and what it takes to build a team that can keep pace with where you’re going — using the latest research on what makes teams flourish, not just function.

I spent 20 years on both sides of the table.

I started as an art director inside some of the biggest agencies in the country. The brands were household names: Chevrolet, USPS, Home Depot, Michaels, Fruit of the Loom, Florida Department of Citrus. Being inside those rooms gave me an early, close look at how the biggest companies in America thought about people: who they were, what they wanted, what would make them move.

Working on Frito-Lay brands taught me something that stuck: the person buying and the person consuming are not always the same person. Speak to one and you might miss the other. That kind of precision — knowing exactly who you're talking to and what they actually need to hear — never left me.

There was something no one talked about in those agencies: creatives weren't developed — they were tested. Work got killed or it progressed, with almost nothing in between. You competed against your own boss for the win. You learned to get back up the next day, but no one taught you how. There was no real guidance, no investment in your growth. Just the work, and whether it survived.

That experience sent me back to school. While earning my MBA, I worked in university admissions at SMU — watching students make one of the biggest decisions of their lives — I became obsessed with a different question: not just how you craft a message that moves someone, but how you build environments where people are genuinely invested. Where they care about the work, the team, the outcome. I earned my MBA from SMU thinking I'd find those answers in corporate.

What I found instead was that most organizations weren't even asking the question. Almost no one at the top was asking how the people underneath them were actually doing. Not performatively. Not in a survey that went nowhere. Actually asking — and actually changing things based on the answer.

That frustration followed me into the classroom. When I started teaching at SMU — lectures of 90 students, courses on advertising, media, and business communication — I hit the same wall. A room full of people, and no real way to know what was happening inside it.

So I built something. I'd used live polling tools in corporate to read a room. And I'd encountered the feelings wheel in a personal context — a tool for naming what you're actually experiencing, not just the surface version. So I combined them! Before class, I'd project the feelings wheel and ask students to vote on where they were. The word cloud would appear in real time — and what I saw stopped me cold. Week after week: anxiety and overwhelm filling the screen. Curiosity and excitement barely visible. Ninety students, silently carrying things no one had thought to ask about.

I shared those results with my department. I couldn't not. And I started asking a bigger question: what would it mean to build a tool that didn't just capture the feeling — but told you what to do next?

That became Interplay™

ArtWorks is the practice I built around a simple conviction: when people understand what's actually driving them — and what's blocking them — they move faster. Teams communicate better. Leaders stop guessing.

I work with executives and leadership teams through one-on-one coaching and facilitation. I design workshops that use Creative Problem Solving, LEGO® Serious Play®, and the same flourishing research I bring into my classroom at SMU Cox School of Business and UT Dallas. And Interplay™ — the measurement tool I built — is now being used by organizations that want to stop guessing and start knowing.

The methodology is intentional: Creative Problem Solving to unlock how people think and collaborate, and the science of human flourishing to understand what creates the conditions for sustainable high performance. Not a quick fix. A system that actually holds.

I don't believe people stall because they lack drive or talent. I believe they stall because something in the conditions around them is working against them — and no one has named it yet. I help name it. And then to help build something better.

My perspective on AI in education has been quoted in The New York Times. I have served on the Board of Trustees of the Creative Education Foundation and am a member of the Harvard Human Flourishing Network.

We already believed in our people. What Nicole helped us see was whether our day-to-day leadership was actually reflecting that. We didn’t just do one session and move on — we worked together consistently over time, which made all the difference. The commitment to growth was built into the process itself. The work on communication and accountability — especially around how we were handling order accuracy as a team — gave us a shared language and a process we could all own. Our team leads came out of it more confident, more connected, and clearer on how to hold each other accountable without it feeling personal. It’s how we uphold what Chick-fil-A stands for at the operator level.

— Macy Agnew, Franchise Operator, Chick-fil-A, Dallas, TX

  • Lecturer, SMU Cox School of Business — Global Leadership (MBA)

  • Lecturer, UT Dallas Naveen Jindal School of Management — Business Strategy & Policy

  • Instructor, Business Leadership Center SMU Cox

  • Lecturer, SMU Temerlin Advertising Institute

Teaching

  • Published in The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Leadership and Organizational Change — Global Mindsets: Leading with Cultural Intelligence and Empathy

  • Member, Harvard Human Flourishing Network

  • Served on the Board of Trustees, Creative Education Foundation

  • Quoted in The New York Times on AI in education

Research & affiliations

  • MBA, Southern Methodist University

  • Certified Creative Problem Solving Facilitator

  • Certified LEGO® Serious Play® Facilitator

  • Certified Creative Leadership Facilitator, IDEO

Certifications

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