How to Unleash Your Inner Innovator: Dr. Tessa Forshaw and Richard Braden, Co-Authors of Innovation-ish

Van Ton-Quinlivan

Hello, I’m Van Ton-Quinlivan, welcoming you to WorkforceRx, where I interview leaders and innovators for insights into creating a future-ready workforce.

Research has long established that less than fifty percent of people see themselves as being creative. So how can people overcome this lack of confidence and contribute to creative thinking and innovation at work? What can leaders and managers do to help encourage them? And what role does AI play in this?

All of these questions are addressed in the new book, “Innovation-ish: How Anyone Can Create Breakthrough Solutions to Real Problems in the Real World” by design strategist and CEO Richard Braden and cognitive scientist Dr. Tessa Forshaw, who are my guests today.

Rooted in learning science and applied design, the book distills the system the authors use to teach creativity and innovation at Harvard and Stanford universities, and addresses what spurs innovation in organizations.

Thank you very much for joining us today.

Dr. Tessa Forshaw

Absolutely.

Rich Braden

Yes, thank you.

Van

Well, let’s open up by asking you both what inspired you to write Innovation-ish and what’s the backstory of the title?

Rich

Great. Well, Tessa and I had both been teaching creativity and creative problem solving in various different ways when we met. So we both had our own independent history of it. And when we did, we really sparked with a shared view of the world that much of how we had learned it and how it had been taught could be done in a different way that might be a little bit better.

And after seeing the impact of doing that on our students as we changed and adapted to evolve into the way we have presented it in the book, we really wanted to share it with a lot more people.

I mean, I think that instinct of teaching is instilled in me from my mother being a teacher from long ago and Tess is an amazing educator and learning scientist and we both really wanted to find a way to bring it to people. Our students kept asking for a deeper look and they wanted a book. So we decided, okay, we know it’s working, we see it working with people we consult with, let’s put it down in a book.

But it was not where we started by a long shot. We did not start out saying hey, we should write a book. Let’s figure out what it should be on, which maybe is backwards, but that’s how we got there.

Tessa

I would just add that for me, I think one of the most impactful reasons behind wanting to teach creativity and innovation and to understand the cognitive science behind it to sort of supercharge how it’s taught and make it more accessible is what you mentioned earlier — that less than fifty percent of people see themselves as creative.

There are so many myths out there around, you know, we’re left brain, we’re right brain, we’re creative, we’re analytical…none of that’s true. We’re all whole-brain humans. At the beginning of our classes for years, we’ve asked students in elite universities who have opted into design spaces, hands up if you think you’re creative. And even in that environment, only about ten percent of the class will put their hand up. That just always blows my mind because I know these students to be such incredible creative thinkers.

So something was going on there with how they were seeing themselves in relation to creativity, how we talk about creativity and innovation. I think I just really wanted to help people have the confidence that they can be creative and they can be innovation-ish if they do not believe they can do innovation. I mean, I think they can, but at the very least I want them to believe they can be innovation-ish.

Van

Before we dive into this question of how creativity can be learned, I was wondering if you could just for the audience for a moment just state why it’s important to be creative in this economy and the economy that is to come.

Rich

I think part of the answer is because we don’t know what comes next. We’re still creating in the future and it feels like, and I think in many ways it actually is happening faster and faster. And so the ability to be creative and solve problems and adapt as you go is becoming less optional and more necessary all the time.

And to be clear, when we say “creative,” I think a lot of people think, but maybe I’m not creative or I’m not an artist or I’m not a musician and that’s what creativity is. But creativity is so much more than that. Those are expressions of creativity perhaps, but a lot of being an artist and painting is about the technique you use, not coming up with what you are trying to express or using creativity.

And creativity is also strategies that you can use that change the way you think and approach your thinking and that can open up new possibilities. And so for innovation, that means applying your creativity and your creativity skills to solving problems or creative problem solving.

Tessa

We’re also in this situation with generative AI right now and agentic AI where if you have a task that you need done and you know what good looks like, computers are getting pretty good at doing it when we know what good looks like and we have a sense of that logic and approach.

But if that task is ambiguous or shrouded in ambiguity, computers still are not — and I do not think for a very long time — will be good at that. And how do we deal with that? By being creative and engaging in creative problem solving. And so I think it’s becoming an inherently essential skill to what is the human side of work in the future.

Van

Well, Rich and Tessa, you’ve laid out the case for why we need to be creative. Now, tell us why or how we begin to learn this skill because it’s not creativity. It’s not a talent that some people are just blessed with. It’s something that we can acquire over time. So tell us more.

Tessa

Yeah, absolutely. I might jump into this with some of the cognitive science to get us started. So we know from young children that all of us have the ability to be creative from a very young age.

I’m sure that everyone listening to this, if they do not have children, they were children themselves — I’m going to take a wild guess there — and they’ve probably been around children in some capacity or the other. And you can see in that interaction that kids think expansively.

They come up with all sorts of crazy reasons for things, concoctions that mash up all sorts of ideas and anything that is actually a thing in the real world, they pretend it’s something else, right? I have a five-year-old and I see this on a daily basis.

And yet somewhere along the way — it’s sort of seen through the academic literature to be seen as about twelve or about sixth grade — we start to lose the instinct to be creative.

There are a couple of reasons for that, but most of them are considered to be more socialized reasons than cognitive ones. So it’s not that we lose the cognitive ability to do it. It’s that we’re socialized in such a way that means that we stop prioritizing it or become a little bit risk averse or embarrassed because we really start to recognize that being part of and accepted as part of a group is really important.

We start to believe that if we do something embarrassing that could have a negative consequence for us and we want to avoid that feeling.

And we also prioritize other skills as a society. We prioritize obedience. We prioritize answering the question that’s put exactly in front of you. We often prioritize wearing a uniform or adhering to a dress code or whatever it is. So we do not prioritize those skills anymore that we did once when kids were young. So it socializes out of us.

So I think the first thing to know here is that you have it. Like, you have the core creative skills, the core cognitive processes that are involved in creativity. You had them when you were five and you have them today. It’s just about intentionally turning those on.

Van

So you mentioned becoming more risk averse or being socialized to be risk averse, becoming embarrassed, prioritizing other values. I wonder if these things lead to the topic of innovation hesitation, like what holds people back from engaging in creativity and innovation?

Rich

Absolutely, it very much does. We say with innovation we’re talking about creating things that are new and haven’t been done before, so by definition they are going to be uncertain. They are going to be ambiguous. You’re not going to be able to know if you can get there or not, and so right off the bat, that has some implications for us because we as humans do not really love to engage in that kind of ambiguity and for good reason.

That instinct comes from a long time ago of being uncertain about who the person was coming up to your group, or what was rustling in the bushes could be a mortal difference, right? You could end up being eaten by the thing in the bushes.

But when we’re engaging in modern daily life and trying to innovate and having ambiguity, there is no wild creature in the grass trying to come and eat you, but it feels the same. And so we have a resistance to it.

But that can be overcome. You can build tolerance to that over time. But we call that cognitive caution. Out of the gates, our brains are wired to push that away by default and it keeps us healthy most of the time. But in this place, we need to suspend that and get used to it. So that’s one component of innovation hesitation.

A second one is the story of who we are. Are we innovators? Are we capable of being innovators? And much of the media and films and movies are all geared around this idea of there is a person who has an insight. They’re super smart, and overnight, they invent the new thing — the social media or the big new app or device or thing that comes out — and instantly they’re hugely successful.

And it is a great story. The problem is it’s a myth. That’s not how any of it actually happens.

The overnight success story hides the ten years of struggle and failure that came before it, the team and collaborators that are necessary to do all of that work. So the innovation mythology is incredibly intimidating to think about how could I do that? But if you’ve got a team around you and you have time and you’re okay with failure and it’ll take a while and all that’s in bounds, well, all of a sudden that mythology kind of blows away and it’s easier and it’s a little bit more doable. So part of innovation hesitation is that resistance and part of our book is to try to clear that cloud away.

And then the third piece is what we talked a little bit about earlier, the creativity gap… the “am I to be creative or I don’t believe that I am” that Tessa outlined so beautifully is a piece of it as well. Combine all three of those and now of course there’s some hesitation to innovation that people do not want to engage in because it’s pretty intimidating.

Van

I was in this workshop once where one of the participants said, “I would love to be called the master of play. Like if my job title could be changed to being the master of play, then it would give me the permission to take risks and to come up with things that are nonlinear.” And you both are right in the sense that the environment that we’re in doesn’t encourage that after a certain age.

Rich

Yeah, you asked about the name and Tess mentioned that people feel like they can be “ish.” I think it’s the same thing you just said. Part of what we noticed is innovation was intimidating and innovation-ish is a softer, gentler, less intimidating version of it that’s doable by people.

And we’ve heard people say that just adding that makes it more accessible, that I can be sort of “innovation-y,” and that’s what we’re really going for.

It’s just lowering the bar so people can start and once they do, they discover that, I am creative. That is still inside me. This isn’t what I was told, and it’s doable. I can do this.

Van

So I’m CEO of a nonprofit organization and there are listeners who are supervisors and have responsibility for their culture. I wonder if you both could give us some advice about what can we do to promote a more innovative, creative environment and maybe decrease some of our behaviors where we’re causing the avoidance of risk, for example.

Tessa

I often talk about three key things that I think managers can do to help foster innovation in their team. I’m sure Rich has some others, but for me, the three are firstly, just naming that hesitation exists…that we as a society disincentivize it.

We have created this sense of hesitation and that everybody might feel that — they might feel their amygdala, the almond-shaped part of your brain that tends to have that fight-or-flight response or the anxiety response — they might feel that coming up if they’re asked to engage in innovation, and that that’s okay.

We’re all feeling that but now is not the time for it because, to Rich’s point, a bear isn’t going to jump out of the bush and eat us. We’re safe.

So firstly, I would just say naming that that is a real thing that everyone or at least a lot of people go through and that it’s okay. But it’s also not helpful in asking people to put that anxiety at the door. As I say to my five-year-old, tell your amygdala thank you, but no thank you right now. So that is sort of one.

The second is mindsets. So this idea of putting on a mindset or a cognitive framework by which you see the world. A cognitive framework is a lens that essentially helps you make better decisions: you notice things, perceive things through that lens.

There’s a lot of research that’s been done out of Stanford and other universities that look at mindsets in things like exercise and healthy eating. Having participants in their studies adopt particular mindsets resulted in different outcomes in exercise and healthy eating than in many cases like other drug-based or programmatic-based interventions. That’s kind of wild. We’re talking about a mindset, right?

To put that in the context of innovation, adopting a mindset as a team, saying quite loudly, “Right now we need to adopt a different mindset to the one that we’ve all walked in with today. We need to make sure we also all have the same mindset. So it looks like with this problem that we’re solving, we’re not really sure what the problem is. So how about we take on a mindset of going out there today into the real world and uncovering the problem and have that mindset influence the decisions that we make about what we’re going to do next, what we perceive from the interactions that we have, et cetera.”

In the book, we have six different mindsets and we can get to those. The reason I’m not saying them now is because they’re just six illustrative mindsets. You can have mindsets about just about anything. And what the mindset is is less important than the whole team being aligned and it being a mindset that represents the thing you need to achieve.

So naming the fear, putting on a mindset, and then the third thing is something that I think all leaders intuitively know, and that is that they have to model it.

One of the things about cognitive processes is that we do not learn them necessarily by being told about them. So if somebody just sits here and says to you, the default mode network is engaged in divergent thinking, you’re gonna be like, great, where’s my multiple choice quiz?

But that does not mean tomorrow that you know how to go do that, right? The way that you learn how to do a lot of cognitive tasks like this is by having them modeled for you.

When you see them modeled, then you start to lean into it and engage in it. And we’ve seen that not just in creativity, but in a lot of other things like cognitive processes, like transferring learning from one context to another or reasoning with analogies. All of those are things that we learn through being exposed to them and having them modeled for us.

So in this case, I think modeling is very, very, very important. Albeit it can be hard, but it’s very important.

Van

I wonder if you could give an example of an exercise or a workshop where you’ve taken a team or an organization through some of these principles that Tessa has laid out and what did they uncover?

Rich

Yeah, absolutely. I think a good example is the Native American community clinics. We were working with them and they were trying to figure out how to allocate their resources and the building space that they had.

They noticed that one of the consistent problems was they would send people out to give medical care where the unhoused community was, and they realized a lot of the medical problems were related to their lack of housing. So providing housing could help solve a lot of the medical issues.

The problem wasn’t necessarily that they needed more equipment and mobile medical delivery. What they needed was to prevent the need for medical attention to begin with.

It turns out they had extra space in their building, so by converting that into a project where they had housing, that transformed everything because they looked at the problem in a really different way.

It took very intentionally going through a series of mindsets with the group as they worked through the problem, all working in the same way, so that an idea that was a little bit radical and outside of the normal thinking of a medical facility that also had housing wouldn’t be just sort of set aside as impractical or not doable.

They all stayed with it and they realized the true insight, the real thing that they could do to make an impact with the resources they had that helped them transform what was going on.

I think the power of the team aligning on mindsets in the way that Tessa has described is everyone is working on the problem in the same way as you move through and so there’s less friction. It’s easier to see that insight when everybody is working in the same way.

Van

Well, that’s a brilliant example, especially for the healthcare listeners on our podcast. One of our prior podcast guests had talked about going upstream and figuring out what the source of the problem was rather than just addressing the medical symptoms. And here you’ve laid out a great example about dealing with shortage of housing that is causing the homelessness and the medical issues.

Rich

That’s right.

Van

Tessa, did you have anything you wanted to add here?

Tessa

I would just say Richard told me a story about this client actually and it sounds as well like one thing that was special is that their CEO, who also was an MD himself, participated in and did a lot of the work.

He didn’t just sort of set out a team to go off and do it and report back on the insights. Rich, sorry to throw back to you, but do you have anything else about that you maybe want to share?

Rich

I think that highlights that you need to activate the whole team and stakeholders. You have to go outside of just a couple people going to solve a problem.

So everyone being involved — the CEO in particular being involved — does the modeling that Tess was just talking about of making it more than OK, but helping to teach others. We have other examples of CEOs who do that kind of modeling as well.

The second thing is by incorporating people that were both administrative as well as board as well as medical providers as well as people from the community — putting everyone together — you get better, more complete, richer and more robust ideas.

And the reason for that is because everyone who participates has a default set of knowledge and experience that they bring and if you chain all of those people together, there is a distributed and collective intelligence that they all have that is bigger than any of the individual people.

A smaller group cannot generate the same ideas because they do not have access to the inspiration of all the thinking of all of those people. So it’s not just that it sounds good that a diverse set of people give better ideas, there are real reasons that are based in science and there are studies that show the more diverse a group is, the better quality of creative ideas that they have and that they’re better problem solvers in that way.

Van

In the book, you both described an innovation-ish compass that includes mindset, moves, and metacognition. You’ve talked about mindset. Tell us more about moves and metacognition.

Tessa

Yeah, absolutely. So moves are what a lot of people think of when they think of creative problem solving.

Most people are familiar with those steps in a problem-solving map that you might get, like interview people, do an empathy map and take that and turn it into a point-of-view statement. Those are the very traditional elements. We call those moves.

The most important aspect of a move is not that it’s from the design world. I think everybody has moves from any walk of life. We’ve had students bring in moves from their legal backgrounds, from their family therapy backgrounds, like all sorts of things that I’ve never heard of that they use. But the idea is that it’s an activity that is definable and repeatable and ultimately that you do a move with a mindset.

So you take on a mindset. We were talking before about the mindset of, you know, let’s go and learn more about the problem. So you could do interviews. That might be a way that you do that. But there are lots of other ways that people learn about problems in their worlds. They might do surveys or they might do literature reviews. There are many different strategies that people use to go learn about problems. And so they pick a move and they do it. And the move is the thing that gets you data to move you forward in your problem-solving journey.

The benefit of having moves be small and repeatable and definable in that way is that every time we complete them, we get a lovely little dopamine hit that makes us want to do another one. And that’s a really important part of creativity and innovation, because often when you give someone a problem that can feel like the size of “we’re going to build a rocket to go to Mars.” Like, where do you even start with that?

And a lot of people have a literal physical response when you tell them “I need you to come up with an innovative solution to our problem.” It’s like, my gosh, can I do that? So moves is a way of breaking it down into small steps that you do and you determine as you go and move forward.

How you determine what mindset you need and what moves you need is by being metacognitive. So metacognition — meta meaning above or self-referential and cognition meaning how we think, feel and act — so metacognition then is being self-referential about your thinking, feelings and actions. A lot of people will just say thinking about your thinking.

Metacognition is a very big word for actually a very simple task. It’s the pausing and the quiet noticing of what you’re thinking, your strategies, what you’re doing, assessing if they’re working or working for you in that moment, and then making the decision about how you want to adjust to move forward.

So an example for your listeners…you know, I might say to them right now, take a minute and notice how you’re listening to this podcast. Are you doing something else? Are you driving? Are you letting your mind wander and maybe listening to, or making connections to other things? Or are you sitting and listening really intently?

And then I would say, what’s your goal for engaging with the podcast? Is it that you really want to learn this or is it that you want something interesting to ponder and some ideas while you clean up the house? Like whatever your goal is. And then, is your strategy working for you? Is how you’re thinking helping you achieve that goal?

So that’s a really small little example of metacognition. But if you do that on a project, that can really help you make sure that the strategies that you’re engaging in and the way that you’re thinking and the choices in your actions are serving you or adjust them as you need.

Van

So, you talked about mindset, moves, metacognition. These are examples of almost like creativity muscles that you have to practice. I’m wondering, aside from reading your book, do you do workshops that help a team get started building these muscles?

Rich

Absolutely. So we do a wide range. It depends on where the organization is. Later this week, I’m doing a workshop with a group who has already done a fair amount of innovation and they want to dive deep on one particular mindset of iterations and prototyping and how they can do that better.

We do introduction to give an overview of a little like what we’ve talked about today to open people up to make it possible for them to start experimenting and doing things.

And then we can create a certification for you and certify some people in your organization to carry that work on by doing a more deep — several weeks to a couple of months — version of it that then the people there can carry it on and license it inside the company to spread it further.

So for a large organization or we’ve done it for a government organization, they can help to propagate it itself.

And one of the exciting things about this approach is we say innovation is not hard, it’s hard work. The individual techniques are not difficult. But I mean, that’s true of meditation as well. Just clear your mind and breathe is a form of that. But it’s hard to do that. It’s a practice to develop but it’s something that people can take on and translate.

Recently, I think two years ago, I had a student who was a general counsel for an organization and went back after our class and ran workshops herself to teach what she had just learned. And that spread to their customer service department, engaging and using several of the moves that we had taught successfully.

She’s not an expert teacher. She’s also not an expert innovator at that point, but they are easily translatable and now that’s doing a lot of good in that organization.

So I think a lot of what we are is we can be a catalyst to help accelerate and to draw forward the potential innovation and creativity that exists in the whole organization, and that is really powerful when you think about if everybody is doing a little bit, how much innovation can happen across the whole organization?

Van

It sounds to me like innovation, creativity is just like exercise. No matter your age or where you are in your career, it’s a good thing getting started, right? You can always get better, but getting started is important.

Rich

Yes. Absolutely.

Van

Let me ask you a clarifying question and then we’re going to head towards our closing question, which is: Is continuous improvement and creativity or innovation the same, or different?

Rich

That is a great question. So I think many people think of innovation as sort of reinvention of an organization or a big dramatic moonshot. Like in ten years, we’re gonna go to the moon — a moonshot.

And there are many good examples of moonshots like CRISPR gene editing and Waymo self-driving cars and cryptocurrency. Big, giant innovations, really fun and interesting to talk about. But that is only a small slice of what the innovation picture is.

So if you think about, if there are moonshots, there are also orbit shots, and there are cloud shots and roof shots. I mean, even jump shots. They’re small, little innovations. Not everything has to be a giant effort.

You asked about organizations…another thing you can do is redefine innovation and take off a small piece and do some small steps.

A quick example…a jump shot innovation might be if you can highlight incomplete sentences in a document that you’re working on, that helps you a little bit. This is incomplete, let me fix that one.

But a roof shot version of that might be a smart text editor, a few different features altogether that help you not get off track.

And then maybe a cloud shot, a little bit bigger version, would be adding auto-complete to mobile phones. I think all smartphones got auto-completion, I do not know, five or six years ago and now every application on the whole phone works better. So it’s a little bit bigger impact with still not a revolutionary change.

Large language models are really a very souped-up version of autocomplete. Instead of a couple words or a sentence, they can do whole paragraphs or longer things. So generative AI might position as an orbit shot kind of innovation.

And then people talk about generalized AI like smart thinking, reasoning. We’re not there yet. That’s maybe a moon or I do not know, Jupiter or Mars shot kind of thing.

So across that whole spectrum, you can jump in and do innovation at many different levels. It does not have to be a giant thing.

The example I often go to is, let’s say expense reports are a thing we all have to do. Most people do not love it, and it takes some time. And if you could fix that, if you could come up with an innovation to make it easy and the process simple and accurate for everybody in the organization, people would cheer, but nobody’s gonna call that a moonshot idea like CRISPR. It’s just a great innovation.

So you can aggregate all of those small pieces together and create a lot of innovation by activating the whole organization.

And usually it’s at best ten percent of an organization that is involved with what traditional innovation is — of product and research and development. That leaves everybody else out. So let’s get them all doing some amounts of it.

I’d say it’s different than simple continuous improvement. It’s a different approach to creating an evolving, engaged and flexible organization that is constantly adapting to the new future that they need.

Van

Wonderful. And Tessa, how would our audience get their hands on your new book?

Tessa

So our book Innovation-ish is available anywhere books are sold. So Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Target, independent bookstores. And you can also learn more about it via www.innovationish.com,  which works whether you use a hyphen or not.

Rich and I are also both quite active on LinkedIn, so please feel free to follow us and connect and continue the conversation there.

Van Ton-Quinlivan

Congratulations to both you and Rich for completing your book and getting this great book out into the world.

Now let me go to the final question for the both of you, which is, what makes you optimistic about the future of humans in the future of work? Tessa, why don’t we start with you?

Tessa

Yeah, I love this question because so often we get the opposite question. This is really great.

I think that what makes me the most optimistic is, if you think about it, humans have been solving problems creatively since the beginning of time. Like, since the existence of our species on Earth, we have been solving problems creatively.

In all of the examples of life — through archaeology, through historical texts, everything like that — we see great examples of jump shot through moon shot or pyramid shot in some instances, creative problem solving.

And so I think that what makes me so optimistic is remembering or holding on to the fact that this is a skill set that we have that we’re born to do and is an inherently human thing.

And I think that makes me feel like no matter what we face, we can find creative solutions to overcome it. I just hope, I think, that we use creative problem solving for good. That’s just, I think that’s what I hope as we move into the future.

Van

What about you, Rich?

Rich

I think for me, it’s because innovation is not magic. It’s practical, it’s accessible, it is for everyone. And we’re all filled with innovation tools and everybody has it within their ability.

If everybody who hears this podcast, or everybody who picks up our book adds a little bit of innovation to the world, and then if they tell one friend and they start adding it, I think it can spread.

I think at my most optimistic, it feels like maybe there’s a movement of creative problem solving and we’re a piece of that, but that we can really change and adapt the world in a wonderful new way by approaching problems with a little bit more intention.

Van

Wonderful. It was terrific to have you both, Tessa and Rich, with us today on this podcast. We sure learned a lot about being creative and innovative and how we all have that skill set in us that we need to burnish.

Rich

Thank you.

Tessa

Thanks for having us.

Van

I’m Van Ton-Quinlivan with Futuro Health. Thanks for checking out this episode of WorkforceRx. I hope you will join us again as we continue to explore how to create a future-focused workforce in America.