Innovation-ish, with Richard Braden and Dr. Tessa Forshaw – Episode 507 of The Action Catalyst Podcast

In this episode, Richard Braden and Dr. Tessa Forshaw, co-authors and innovation educators from Stanford, challenge common myths about creativity and reveal why innovation is a skill anyone can develop, not an innate talent reserved for a select few. Drawing on cognitive science, design thinking, and real-world consulting experience, they explain how “innovation hesitation” holds people back and how adopting the right mindset can unlock creative problem-solving, collaboration, and breakthrough thinking. The conversation explores the science behind creativity, divergent and convergent thinking, neuroplasticity, team innovation, and practical strategies for overcoming uncertainty in business and life.

About Richard and Tessa:

Rich Braden is the founder of People Rocket LLC, a strategic innovation firm based in San Francisco. With over 15 years of academic experience, Rich is a recognized thought leader in design thinking, leadership, and innovation. He is a design educator at renowned institutions including Harvard University, Stanford University, and London Business School, helping shape future leaders. As CEO of People Rocket, he works with clients such as Airbnb, Google, the United Nations, Microsoft, Coca-Cola, Starbucks, and Red Cross to drive strategic innovation and responsible AI solutions. Rich holds degrees in Computer and Electrical Engineering from Purdue University and resides in the San Francisco Bay Area.

As a co-founder of the Next Level Lab at Harvard University, Tessa Forshaw specializes in using cognitive science to develop creative and innovative potential in the workforce. She draws upon her academic research as a cognitive scientist and extensive background as a former designer at IDEO CoLAb and Accenture to turn the cognitive processes involved in design, creativity and innovation into practical insights that can be applied in the flow of work. These insights are also the foundations of what she teaches as a design educator at Stanford University and now Harvard University. Recognized for her impactful design projects, Tessa is the recipient of multiple design awards: a Fast Company Design Award for General Excellence, two Core77 Industrial Design Magazine Design Awards, and the Australian American Chamber of Commerce Innovation Awards.

Learn more at Innovationish.com.

The Action Catalyst is presented by the Southwestern Family of Companies. With each episode, the podcast features some of the nation’s top thought leaders and experts, sharing meaningful tips and advice. Learn more at TheActionCatalyst.com, subscribe below or wherever you listen to podcasts, and be sure to leave a rating and review!

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(Transcribed using A.I. / May include errors):

Richard Braden
Hello.

Dr Tessa Forshaw
Hey there.

Stephanie Maas
Where are y’all calling in from?

Richard Braden
I’m just south of San Jose.

Dr Tessa Forshaw
In Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Stephanie Maas
So let’s dive in, and just real quick, I would love for both of y’all just to share your story, just a little bit of how did we get here?

Richard Braden
So Tessa and I met teaching at Stanford University, and we had both come to a couple of realizations around how creativity and innovation had been taught. And when we met, we started a conversation, and we kept saying, “Oh, yeah, yeah, I believe that, and and realized how similar our view was. That also was a little bit of a departure from how things had been taught, or how we had come up to speed on teaching, primarily design thinking at that point, but the broader world of creativity and innovation. And when we did, we decided to start teaching together. And as we did, we realized we could change the way we were teaching, and that it worked better in the same kind of material, the same setting. The approach made a significant difference on the students, and so we kept making adjustments and making adjustments, we realized that this wasn’t just a a little bit of a twist on how we saw it. It was really a different approach entirely. Design thinking and innovation and creativity has been taught by giving people a recipe that has worked before it, sort of the tried and true version of it, but in reality, it was only tried and true on the example project or the particular case that those people were using when they wrote down this process, this map of take steps A, B, and C, and you’ll get to the you know the promised land, and we realized that the journey was so diverse, and it depended so much on the people involved in the problem we were solving that it really wasn’t a map. So we wanted to take a really different approach.

Stephanie Maas
Okay, real quick, I want to jump in just from an education standpoint. When I think of innovation, design, creativity, I think there is no map. There is no recipe. It’s just this gift that you get bestowed. So, design thinking. What exactly is that?

Dr Tessa Forshaw
Yeah, absolutely. So, this idea of creativity being an innate gift is not true. There’s no such thing as you know that old myth of like you’re either left-brained or you’re right-brained, you’re creative or analytical hemispheric dominance is not a thing. It’s been disproven in dozens and dozens of studies, and I think one of the reasons we have things like design thinking, which I will explain in a second, is because people felt that it was this special thing that only some people had, and so for me to be able to do it without that sort of innate gift, I had to follow a set of steps. So design thinking and other creative problem solving processes are essentially like thinking strategies full of steps that they want you to take. Generally, they follow something along the lines of like interview somebody, hear about a pain point that they’re facing, come up with sort of an insight around that pain point, a unique way of sort of distilling it or framing it or understanding it. Take that unique insight and come up with an idea, and then test that idea a couple of times with different people at different levels of fidelity, and then bring that idea to life in the market. And that idea is going to be the basis of your company or your unicorn. That kind of process is often sold to businesses as this like replicatable, you know, confirmed stamp of authenticity and validity process. That if you do these things, you will be creative, right? It’ll help you reach that thing that only some innate people naturally have. So both of those things obviously are not true. Firstly, everybody is creative. Creative tasks require analytical skills. Analytical tasks require creative skills. There’s just no such thing as a person not being born creative. So that’s the first thing. And the second thing is these process maps are not a recipe to be followed exactly.

Richard Braden
So one of the things we noticed as we taught in these universities where there were really incredible students. It’s it’s a high bar to even get into the class, and when we went out and did consulting work with other companies that had incredible award-winning departments using this same methodology, some consistent things happened. One, we’d start off the class asking who in here feels like they’re creative, and almost no hands would go up. And we know from some teaching when we’ve been in like young classrooms, like third graders, like my third grader right now. If I ask that in her classroom, every hand, sometimes both hands and a foot show rise up because they are infinitely creative. And all of that is still in us all, but over time, there is this gap that develops between how creative we are and how creative we perceive ourselves to be, and so as that goes, people tend to get afraid. They start getting some hesitation to think I can creatively solve a problem or I can engage in innovation. And then there was a second piece where we felt there was more hesitation coming from the students, and it’s a really natural thing to create something new-a new innovation, a creative solution. It’s novel; no one’s ever done it before. So, of course, there’s a lot of uncertainty. There’s a lot of ambiguity. Can we even get there? Is sometimes the question, and that faced with that kind of ambiguity, we react in a pretty consistent way, and it’s it’s a good reaction. It’s kind of like a reflex that if there is a real danger or real threat, long ago, if there was a real bear or tiger that was going to come and get you, or there was a person coming that you weren’t sure about coming to your group, you would be really cautious. You would avoid that. You would try to stay away. But when we’re working on solving creative problems, there is no tiger, there is no threat for real. But we get that same response, and so there’s this cognitive caution to approach and step into ambiguity, which is a requirement for innovation, and then you layer in people would come into the class with all kinds of questions, many of the same questions about how Silicon Valley innovates, and this whole mythos around the really bright non-college graduate person who one night has an epiphany and the next night has a billion-dollar valuation company, and there’s just all this mythology that there’s this one person, and it’s all them, and it happens so quickly, and it just works, and that is complete mythology. It’s just not true. If you look at all of the big unicorns and innovations that have happened, it’s a team over time that fails a lot of times to get there. Like the iconic Post-it note before it was a business tool that we had in offices. It was a a hymnal bookmark. It was a failed, extremely strong adhesive. There, there was a a decade of figuring out how they had failed until they realized their success. So there’s all these things that we call it innovation hesitation that prevent people from even entering the game.

Stephanie Maas
Okay, so how do we do that? How do we take that away? How do we break that down?

Dr Tessa Forshaw
Yeah, so I’m a cognitive scientist, and my default perspective is always to go back to well, like how does the mind work and act and create and behave? And so, my very first instinct is to say, all right, well, we know that these there’s these mythologies that there’s all these misconceptions. So let’s start with how your brain, Rich’s brain, my brain, how all our brains and the listeners’ brains, how they engage in creative problem solving. Really, there are three essential processes in creative problem solving. So the first is what we would call divergent thinking, and so divergent thinking is a a process that involves many different systems in the brain. You can think about it as sort of becoming untethered, going out for abundance, coming up with lots of different things, with new things, with connecting new things-it’s kind of that up into the sky. But the opposite of that is convergent thinking. Now, this is not something that a lot of people associate with creative problem solving, but it’s essential because you come up with 30-500 ideas, you somehow have to get that down to a manageable number. You have to evaluate them, put them into a framework, consider different things, make decisions. So all of that is convergent thinking. So you can think about that sort of as coming back down to the ground from up in the sky, and and then in addition to that, you you need what we would call executive function processes, and they are the processes that help you sort of get from not just up and down, but sort of that forward momentum. So that’s the processes involved in planning, in sticking to deadlines, in deciding who needs to be involved, in keeping track of what you’re doing. And sort of helping you move forward. So those paying attention, being focused, executive function skills, and we often think about this in an analogy of aerodynamics. So in aerodynamics, you have lift that helps you come up into the sky. You have gravity or weight that’s what helps you come back to the ground. You have thrust. That’s what helps you move forward, and you also have have drag, which in in aerodynamics obviously is air, and it’s the thing that you’re trying to overcome to become airborne. So in the case of innovation issue, we think of lift as that divergent thinking, that going up into the sky. Convergent thinking as weight or gravity as coming back to the ground, thrust as executive function, and drag as what Rich was talking about before, which is innovation hesitation-the thing you’re trying to overcome. Every person can overcome innovation hesitation, and and that’s something that we know. And one of the the first ways to start overcoming it is to start acknowledging and accepting that you have these abilities to engage in creative problem solving. The second thing from a cognitive science perspective that we think about a lot is really making sure that you are intentionally choosing your mindset. So even by walking into a room and putting on a different mindset, you will actually notice and observe different things and make different decisions. So, a mindset can really be anything. I often joke that I have a specific mindset for when I go to Costco. I have the “Let me get through it as quickly as possible. Mindset. So, if you imagine if I wear that mindset when I walk in the door, it’s going to change the trajectory of my route. I’m going to ignore aisles. I’m going to visit the places exactly where the things are that I know.

Stephanie Maas
How do you buy the things that you don’t need?

Dr Tessa Forshaw
Exactly. Right. But it’s going to shape my choices, right? Whereas my husband has a really different Costco mindset, which Stephanie, it sounds like you share and Rich shares. You’re going to make different choices. You’re going to notice different things. You’re going to make different purchasing decisions, right? So you are literally going to have a different experience in that shop. So when it comes to innovation, self belief is one, but number two is intentionally choosing to see situations in the world through different mindsets, is the second thing that can be the most helpful.

Richard Braden
Absolutely, going back to what I had said before about there was a map. The purpose of the map really is a forcing function to get you to change your mindset as you approach the work. I started as a software engineer and suffered from this for quite a while, where I designed the coolest, most incredible things. Except that that was my view of what those cool, incredible things were, and not someone else’s. And so I had to learn through some painful experiences that I was less important and they were more important. If I was going to try to deliver software to someone else, it really requires some humility. That is a learn from other people mindset. Another example of that would be an iterations mindset. What can I build to make this idea really concrete, and then learn how it works, learn what the good and bad parts are, and then iterate and change those. So these mindsets, you can take them off, and you can put them on. And an important aspect of this is collaboration is key to doing innovation and creating creatively solving problems. If Tessa and her husband go to Costco at the same time, it can, I’m guessing, create a little friction when you have a two-hour and 20-minute agendas that are opposing in that team of collaboration. If you decide upfront, hey team, today we’re going to all put on an interactions mindset. We’re all going to go out and learn from other people. Now we’re all doing the same thing, so nobody’s trying to throw out ideas and defend them while you’re all have agreed on it. And so the idea of changing your mindset and doing it uniformly really helps the team to cohesively work together in what is this ambiguous, as you said at the beginning, the creative process is a little chaotic, and and you don’t always know what step is next, and you have to make those choices. Doing them together helps keep everything on track.

Stephanie Maas
It makes me think of, I remember hearing there’s only, you know, 13 notes, and yet look at all the different types of music. But at the end of the day, to your point, we’re working with the same stuff, but with the right mindset, the right collaboration, what we can design or fix or problem solve is limitless.

Richard Braden
Yeah, to pull on your musical thread, if you think about a classical piece of music, you know something popular that you’ve heard over and over. They use them in cartoons sometimes in animated films. That is always the same piece of music, and depending on if they play it a little more lively or a little bit slower, it changes the tenor a little, but it’s still the same song. In jazz, you have rough divisions with just a chord that can have many different notes in it, and you choose the notes as you go. And so, there’s a lot more freedom within it. There’s still a little bit of structure, but just enough to keep everyone on the same page as they create new music. And even the same song, it’s going to be different every time. There’s different solos. People wander into different constructions of the note. It makes you a on-the-fly composer, and I think that’s what we’re talking about. Is there’s enough structure in how you define things to let you have essentially more freedom to follow and create the way of solving a problem that is right for you in this particular instance.

Stephanie Maas
So I’m curious, as you have been rolling this out in a teaching environment, how have you seen the masses, if you will, respond? Like, what have been some of the revelations of it?

Dr Tessa Forshaw
So, two things happen for the students. One is they build that sense of self-efficacy. They see themselves actually struggling through the innovation hesitation. They feel the drag, and then they feel themselves fly over it, and that is a very empowering feeling. And it’s not a feeling that you know we get a lot in life. And so I think that is one massive thing. They build self-efficacy around it. The second thing is they actually know and already are thinking about their direct application of the things that they have learned, so we start to hear things like, “Oh, I have this problem at work, and after class, I went home and I started thinking about this in that problem. The goal is always, can they do this two years later outside the classroom by themselves?

Richard Braden
We often say innovation is not hard; it’s hard work, and the hard, if anything, comes up in the the social aspects, the working in a group and collaborating, the communicating effectively, the being humble and allowing for other people, or the going out and talking to gasp strangers about this thing. Like, there’s so much in that, but once you start doing it, it isn’t complex or difficult.

Stephanie Maas
It’s so incredible to hear because I am one of those people that I do think you know, like this next generation, maybe one or two behind mine, I mean, I think they’re going to solve some of the world’s problems that the rest of us have struggled with. But there, it’s because they’re going to learn to think differently. You’re bringing in this next generation to say, “Hey, don’t think like those who have gone before you. In fact, let us teach you to expand. And I think that’s a huge key for how we’re going to solve really major world problems as well as today’s problems.

Richard Braden
Well, I can tell you that you and the listeners that are out there still have plenty of neuroplasticity in their brain to learn new tricks because anyone can do this. Part of that is that you don’t have to boil the ocean. You can do a little bit. You can start with a small step, like we outline in the book that there are six common mindsets. So let’s just limit ourselves to just those. There’s plenty of others you can do, but let’s limit ourselves to those. You’ve got a project. You’re not at the beginning, so you’re not going to start at step one of any process, but you’re in the middle of it. If you pick one mindset and say let’s let’s do something with this focus, and that’s all you do on the project. You get a little bit more what we would call innovationishness. There’s a little extra innovation stuck in there, and you’re better off to do that one thing. And if that works well, and you have capacity, the next week you might do a second one, and maybe a third. And so, like starting off a new workout regime or starting off with yoga, if you can make it once a week and do that for a month, you’re doing great. It’s not going to transform things, but it will get you started. And when you start to see, oh, I can do this, then you start to add a little bit more and a little bit more and try a little bit and just see for yourself. I think is a good way to get started.

Stephanie Maas
So I have to ask. So Rich, you mentioned your background is in software engineering. Tessa, you’re a cognitive scientist. Those feel very certain brain ish, and yet together collectively y’all are talking about innovation, which seems very creative. Did either one of y’all have any idea when you started having conversations that this is where it was going to go?

Dr Tessa Forshaw
I mean, we were brought together, we both taught at the Stanford University D School, which is a very creative space. I I am a cognitive scientist, but I study how adults specifically are creative and cognitives of how we think and how we create and how those two things relate with each other and things like how we embody our cognition in the process of making and all sorts of fun things like that. And so I think, for me, that actually came came too. I spent the decade of my career before I moved into into academia in consulting with design firms and with big, huge multinational consulting firms, and doing a lot of this work. And I became very interested in it, I noticed a lot when we would teach it internally or work with clients that people did have that sort of physiological reaction to this idea that we’re going to do something creative. I would see the transformation that people would go through, watching that sort of self-efficacy of oh, I I made a thing, wow, like I’m capable of this, and I just was very inspired and interested in how we can give that gift or help every adult see that they’re capable of doing that. And I mean every adult, like Rich and I have worked with quite genuinely like groups of people who pack refrigerator freezers on the the supply chain for floor in the middle of the country, distribution centers for the biggest supply chain of a quick service restaurant in the country. Like, I mean, everybody can do it, you know, and right through to like boardrooms of insurance companies. Like, I’m the whole spectrum. Everyone can do it, and so that belief in helping everybody have the the joy and the opportunity to make their circumstance and their world around them better through creativity was just has always been a driving force.

Richard Braden
I think when I started with software engineering, I was also doing music, and so I had what I thought of was analytical and creative, and the hemispheres of the brain being different never resonated with me. I always was like, no, I think I’m whole-brained. I’m not right or left because I can do both of these things. That must mean I’m both. And so later, discovering that it had been studied and we are all whole-brained was really satisfying to me. But I came from this this software and science and math background in my study. But I had the music, and then later I had a side career teaching and performing improv in San Francisco for about a dozen years. So, if you would ask me in college or my first job if this is where things are going to lead for me? Absolutely no way. I was like, it is programming and hobbies all the way. By the time Tessa and I met, I had this. I had been teaching a form of creativity by improv and acting for a dozen years, and then we both had this experience around teaching design thinking and create process. So at that point, I think I would have had a different answer. Of yeah, I can see that this flowers. At the end of the day, we are creating innovators that feel that they have the agency to go and apply as much as or as little as they need to solve problems in a different way, and I think that’s valuable. And that’s what the future needs because the simple answers, the the things we’ve already figured out are done, and now the new things, the what we don’t know, it’s changing so fast. We need to be able to adapt and resolve problems or solve the new problems as we move into the future.

Stephanie Maas
So meaningful. Is there anything we have not yet talked about or addressed that you are hoping to in our time? I feel like this has flown by.

Dr Tessa Forshaw
I think my parting gift, if you will, Stephanie, to or not gift message to your audience would just be know that I haven’t met you, but I believe that you can do this. I believe that by changing your mindset, and the science, cognitive science tells us this too. That by changing your mindset, you can change what you see and observe, and how you interact with the world and decisions that you make, and that alone will help you start to be a little bit more creative and a little bit more innovative. You can still use the tool of of changing your mindset, and tomorrow, something that you used to do, you’ll do a little bit differently.

Richard Braden
I think my final thought would be, you don’t have to buy into any of the frameworks or process or patterns that are out there, and the reality is you’re already full of different techniques and tools and frameworks and things from whatever background you have, whatever experience you have, and you can bring all of those to bear because if you do pick a mindset, and say you took journalism in school and you learned how to interview people and and really understand what’s going on, that is an innovationish tool. It won’t necessarily be taught in a design class or a certificate program, but if you have it and it’s comfortable, if you put on the mindset and use it, it’s totally valid innovationish tool, and so anything that you can think of while you have a mindset on is fair game. So you’re full of innovation tools right now already, and you can always learn more if you want to. But it’s not a requirement.

Stephanie Maas
Thank y’all both so much.

Richard Braden
Thank you. It was a great conversation.

Dr Tessa Forshaw
Thank you, and thanks so much for having us. I, when I was looking at some of the different podcasts my colleagues were on, Rich and I went through a bit of a listening spree, and I loved how sort of authentic and honest and not fancy and overproduced yours is. This feels like I’m hearing some people have a really interesting conversation, and so I just want to say thank you for doing what you’re doing, and thank you for having us.

Richard Braden
Well produced, not overproduced.

Dr Tessa Forshaw
Yeah, yeah, good, good distinction.

Richard Braden
Yeah, and not all of them are this way, from having done a few others, and this was lovely. Thank you for a great conversation.