420 Why Every Leader Needs to Rethink Innovation with Rich Braden and Tessa Forshaw

***DISCLAIMER: Please note that the following AI-generated transcript may not be 100% accurate and could contain misspellings or errors.***

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Mahan Tavakoli: Rich Braden and Tessa Forche, welcome to Partnering Leadership.

I am thrilled to have you in this conversation with me,

Rich Braden: Thanks for having us.

Mahan Tavakoli: Can't wait to talk about innovation niche, how anyone can create breakthrough solutions to real problems in the real world, . But before we get to that, would love to find out a little bit more about you, rich. How about we start out with you? Whereabouts did you grow up and how did your upbringing help contribute to who you've become?

Rich Braden: Great question. So I grew up in Indiana all the way through going to school at Purdue University and. I think one of the things is my mother was a teacher and so she encouraged me to explore and learn and be creative from a very early age. And I think that never really went away. So now that I do this work around innovation, it's so much about those same things we learned in [00:01:00] early lessons, and I think that's very true.

And I think the second thing is that there is a ethic in the Midwest of dig in and work hard, and I think that has shaped a lot of what I have done. And certainly the writing the book has been a labor of love and a lot to get it out there. But I think it's the passion for helping share with others to teach others to share these lessons that instilled from my mother and coming through the hard work to do this.

Mahan Tavakoli: That is wonderful and your mother must have been a great educator as well. Rich.

That passion, it shows and it transfers the way it's obvious. You have that passion for innovation.

Rich Braden: Absolutely. Yeah, she's for a long time been my hero and throughout all of the career and definitely is with me in the classroom all the time.

Mahan Tavakoli: That's wonderful. So Tessa, how about you?

Tessa Forshaw: My story is also a mother story and actually . As a quick side note, I have a [00:02:00] few memories of my mother and Rich's mother together and listening in, dropping on their conversations. I was always like, wow, these two women are incredible.

Rich Braden: Amazing.

Tessa Forshaw: But my mother is an airline pilot. And she first started flying when very few women, especially in Australia, especially from her upbringing were pilots.

I think , there was less than about 50 female pilots in Australia when she became one. What I learned from her was that you just gotta try. And that. Passion for testing, for giving things a go for not being afraid of failure, but instead learning from every time that you get rejected and figuring out what you're gonna tweak and change to move forward. I really learned that from her and that's really influenced my approach to my career. And also I think it really comes through in innovation ish.

Mahan Tavakoli: That is wonderful to hear and it's incredible. [00:03:00] Tessa, I have two teenage daughters, and even to this day when we fly around, they hear a female voice come. From the cockpit, their faces light up. It's beautiful. The example and the difference that makes in people's lives, including when we talk about innovation.

I know both of you have spent a lot of time  on this book, but there are a lot of misunderstandings that we have about innovation. Would love to get your thoughts on what do you see as the biggest misconceptions when it comes to innovation? 

Rich Braden: I would say in teaching innovation for so many years, we have heard some really consistent messages coming from people that are a little off track. One of those is people coming in and saying, I'm not creative. And that we know that's [00:04:00] not true. That everyone has creative skills.

If you think back to kindergarten, first grade class, if you ask that class is, are you creative? Every hand goes up. But in our classes, one or two sheepishly do, and then. An hour later, they have created incredibly creative ideas and expressions and stories, and so we've seen it time and time again that everyone is creative.

There's just this gap in our belief that we are creative.

Mahan Tavakoli: So with respect to that, rich . Mr. Long was my middle school arts teacher

And he was very frustrated with me and he said, Han, you are never going to amount to anything with your drawings. I'm gonna give you a seesaw. I don't have to see your face again. Obviously teachers going back to your mom make a

big difference, but I got the point from [00:05:00] him back then that I didn't have creative juices or those abilities. So I wonder if the world around us also tells us that we don't have it. It's not just our own self-belief.

Rich Braden: Yes, and I apologize that happened to you. My mother would have words with Mr. Long, I believe if that was the message I have been told. And I think that's it is so much of the world is out there telling us how we are not something I think social media has exacerbated that you're supposed to have and look all these different ways.

And the reality is you are enough that you individually you, the collective. Everyone that's listening have everything you need to create breakthrough ideas to really innovate. It is all within you. It's just been packaged in a way that makes you believe that it isn't.

Mahan Tavakoli: [00:06:00] So do you have it rich or do you need to develop it? Is it I have  creative abilities in me, or is it closer to the growth mindset of if I work on it, I can develop the creative abilities and the innovative abilities?

Tessa Forshaw: So I think that this is one of my most favorite questions I've ever gotten on a podcast. And the reason is when you are born, you come into the world straight away from that moment, like genuinely from that early on in your life. You start developing different cognitive processes.

There are different processes that you have now. They start obviously focused on survival and attachment and things like that. But pretty quickly, like within a very short amount of time, pretty quickly we start seeing processes like divergent thinking, so daydreaming, mind wandering, which can look really different for, [00:07:00] little kids, but is still in existence through ear, early childhood, through adulthood. Coming up with novel ideas, expansively considering things look at a five-year-old who goes outside and they'll say things like, Hey, I see a Superman castle with super Kitty coming out of it in the sky, mama. Like that is divergent thinking on Max. And then we're also, from that young age, we have the ability to engage in what we call convergent thinking, which is the ability to start narrowing and focusing and deciding.

So making choices and decisions doing things that have a very specific focus. And we also start to learn what we call executive function. And they are abilities to sustain things through time, to plan, to organize. Now that obviously can come a little bit slower. If you've ever met a 2-year-old, you'll understand that, they do develop and. Actually creativity [00:08:00] is built off those three core cognitive processes. Additionally to that, what I think is so interesting is that, creativity doesn't have to look how everybody thinks. It looks. So when I say creative to somebody, often I get a artist or famous musician or composer. when I say analytical to somebody, I get computer scientist or airline pilot, but actually a musician or a composer, it's a very analytical job.

There is a lot of very convergent thinking involved in that deep analysis. And at the same time, if you talk to my mother who we were just talking about, she sees the philosophy of flight as very creative. so I think part of what we need to do is reframe what we mean when we mean creative. in innovation is we talk a lot about [00:09:00] creative problem solving as our sort of centralized definition.

And that means finding novel and different solutions to problems that you're facing in the real world. And those skills I think everybody have, everybody has from from birth. But to your point, they need to practice them. We need to build the muscle, we need to keep going with it. Because if we don't, they do atrophy.

Mahan Tavakoli: Now I wonder, Tessa, I work with a lot of CEOs and leadership teams, and in most instances, when people to the role of CEO or senior level executive, they've had a lot of success in their careers. And I wonder whether in most organizations it's more of the convergent thinking leads them to those positions.

We'd love to get your thoughts on that.

Tessa Forshaw: I absolutely think that's true , I don't have definitive data on that, but my instinct is aligned with yours. I [00:10:00] think thinking often is associated more with business like work and often actually not associated with creativity, which is a really big error because if you have. Divergent thinking and novel ideas and coming up with unique insights and all of those sorts of beautiful things of divergent thinking to actually make decisions, bring them out in the world, test their usability, their desirability, their feasibility. You need convergent thinking to do all of those things. And also, I'm, I can't speak for everybody, but I'm gonna guess if you've got to that kind of level in your life, you also probably have quite good executive function skills. And a lot of people don't see that they're essential in creative thinking as well. So these CEOs, I think, are pretty well positioned to become very creative because they've got two thirds of the puzzle on lockdown.

Mahan Tavakoli: As [00:11:00] the pace of change picks up in part as a result of exponential technologies, whether AI being one of those contributors, Acquires much. Acquires much more of the innovation niche mindset in organizations. So therefore, that's an essential leadership capability. Now Rich, one of the things that see a lot is we celebrate primarily Silicon Valley types. A few names come to mind as the people who were creative or who are creative. What are your thoughts with respect to The examples of those folks that we share and the Silicon Valley mindset of innovation versus what is more practical and applicable for the rest of us.

Rich Braden: That's a great question because I think that is one thing that also helps hold people back from trying [00:12:00] innovation is we have these examples and these amazing stories and movies about, and they're very exciting about companies that overnight become this unicorn of billion dollar valuation and the genius that.

Had the epiphany. Most of the movies have that slow motion scene running down the hall papers flying when they've discovered it. It's a great story. It's just not true in it's a great story. It's just not true. The reality is that all of those overnight successes of those lone geniuses in reality was years of painstaking trial and air with a group of collaborators supporting them.

And they play more like the front man role in a rock band where marketing and business is maybe more on tap than [00:13:00] creativity and innovation. So those companies are fantastic. Those innovations are wonderful. But the reality is it's a team sport. It's collaborative. As an example, one of the ways I know everyone has those creative skills is with thousands of people.

We have run an exercise where we have them try to draw a face on paper and they accept the assignment. They go through and do it. Then we have them pair up, so they each are adding half of the drawing, trading the pen back and forth. And those drawings are infinitely more creative. And they say things like, but I wasn't responsible for it.

I was just drafting off what they did. But they're both the same people that just couldn't do it on their own. So there's something to how they work together that share the responsibility and relieves that creativity gap, that suppression and that [00:14:00] belief in the method mythology, sorry, that belief in the mythology that was holding them back and they're able to do it.

And that includes CEOs.

Mahan Tavakoli: , A couple of , beautiful points there, rich one. love that you also mentioned in the book that innovation happens in increments, not all at once.

I also have had a couple of conversations with John Rossman, who had launched Amazon Marketplace when at Amazon

Written Amazon waste series of books, and he even talks about the shipping with Amazon now that it's so simple, when you don't want an item, you send it back. we see so innovative, we take a package, we don't  need to put it in a box and give it to UPS and they take it back has been so many iterations of change, innovation over a period of time. So it's not one major innovation. It's over a period of [00:15:00] time. also love the Point, and Tessa, I wanna get your thoughts on the value of collaboration in that innovation.

That we become more innovative when we are collaborating and together.

Tessa Forshaw: Yeah, absolutely. One of the best things about having a partner in collaborating on innovation is that, or lots of partners, is that they don't think the way you do. a lot of us have a view of the world that is everybody is just like us. They know the things we know, they think the way they, we think, and their mind works in the same way that ours does. Hate to break it to you. That's not true actually. There is incredible diversity in how people think and even more diversity in how our minds are architected together. When we learn things through observing them or going out in the world and trying, or just, passively learn things, we put them into our [00:16:00] archival memory and then we build connections between little bits of knowledge. that means is when I see something in the world let's say I walk outside and I see a. A self-driving car, right? A I think about when I see the self-driving car is going to actually be completely different to what Rich thinks about when he sees the self-driving car because we're queuing forward different associations than the other person. when you engage in creative acts with multiple different people, you are all bringing forward exponentially more connections than if there's just one of you and you are able to build off each other because that person has this connection that they bring forward. And then that cues you to bring this forward and then that cues that person to bring this thing forward.

And so where you get to is a completely different [00:17:00] place than you are actually possible of getting to by yourself. 

Rich Braden: . When Tess and I met, we were very aligned on many ways that we saw the world, but they come from really different places to the point she just made. I spent about a dozen years teaching and performing improv in San Francisco. When you teach beginning improvisers, one really important thing is to bring what they know implicitly and say their obvious thing because what's obvious to you isn't obvious to someone else.

And as opposed to trying to be funny, which is quite hard, and I don't think I can do improv because I can just turn my filter off 'cause I've practiced to say whatever is right in front of me and not filter it. And the build on those things working collaboratively together to say yes and to whatever your partner or your coworker says and build on their idea is so powerful.

It's powerful for two reasons. [00:18:00] First, everyone loves to hear yes. After they say an idea, they're taking a risk and they're putting it out there. And if you say yes and build on it, it makes them look good. The core tenet of improv. The second thing is that distributed and collective intelligence that Tess was talking about, of all those different brains together, is gonna create something that nobody can do on their own.

It's intrinsically got so much more in it and the richness of it, and it will resonate with a wide audience of people because they all think differently too. So if you are the ideas person, if you think I'm the ideas guy, the sad news is that's not really the brag you think it is. It's not all that important in the world of innovation.

It's the team. If you are great at team sports, you're probably a better innovator.

Mahan Tavakoli: So it does take being able to capture [00:19:00] the potential of that. Team. One of the things I wonder, , is that I would imagine most of the CEOs I interact with would not and would agree with the statements that you make. However, that's not the reality of the interactions in leadership team and in the organization.  what gets in the way of that being the reality? What do leaders need to do to make that collaboration and that kind of innovative thinking as a part of a team and group a reality rather than an aspiration?

Tessa Forshaw: One thing that we talk a lot about in our classes to prepare students for this exact point is a principle that we call cognitive caution. And essentially that is your body's rightful. And innate practiced instinct to [00:20:00] seek acceptance of a group to be in favor with people and the majority to not feel embarrassment or shame and to avoid threat or uncertainty. As I said, it makes perfect sense that's our instinct. When you're, like, we talked about a brand new baby, one of the first things that they do is mirror their adults because they adults then are more likely to accept them and love them and show them care. And so that is, that, is that instinct working exactly as it should. That instinct is also present when you are at a campsite and you think there's a bear, like your on anxiety, minimize threat, let's address the uncertainty and move to safety response, also very warranted. But the thing about innovation is that I've never at least come across a bear, right? Tr trying to [00:21:00] innovate and the stakes have never been so high as they are for a newborn who needs an adult to care for them either. So I think that this response is misplaced or this cognitive caution is misplaced and it's not helpful to us in trying to innovate. And so what leaders really need to think about is that. people on their team. This is a natural human response to innovation, and so they need to engage a culture that counterbalances it. They need to model innovating and novel ideas and divergent thinking and testing and failing in all of these things. They need to name the culture name cognitive caution and acknowledge that everybody here might experience and explicitly ask people to try to it and turn it off or step away from it. One colleague of mine gave a great [00:22:00] example of how she does this when she feels like she's under, threat or having a moment of cognitive caution. She, in her mind, she closes her eyes, she puts cognitive caution on a little boat, and she sends it out into the ocean, which I thought was fantastic. And she finds that strategy really helpful. So I think for leaders, yeah, it's about knowing it exists, normalizing it, and then modeling the behavior that they want that will exhibit this kind of acceptance and normalization so that the cognitive caution isn't triggered.

Mahan Tavakoli: That's an outstanding way of thinking about it. As you said, it's recognizing it, naming it, and then acknowledging that it exists, that people feel that it's not necessarily something I, as the leader have done and therefore working to. Overcome it sometimes. I find is [00:23:00] leaders get a little upset when they're like, wait, I haven't done anything for people to be hesitant or to not share their ideas. What you are saying is that cognitive caution for whole host of reasons is already there.

Tessa Forshaw: Yeah.

Mahan Tavakoli: if we haven't, as leaders contributed to it, we can therefore do what it takes to reduce the cognitive and increase the chances of people participating with that innovation. 

Rich Braden: As a leader, being aware of the impact you have around you, the power dynamics of that. , Some colleagues of mine at Stanford University Business School teach a class in acting with power that is about how you show up, not what you say, but how you show up your presence can really impact other people.

So you might be broadcasting, I'm not open to these kind of ideas or changes and it's not safe here without even knowing it. And [00:24:00] I think, modeling it as the leader. Being vulnerable is really important in this is to make it okay. I was recently teaching a group of predominantly CEOs in C-Suite at the Stanford Executive Program on this, and I have them up doing brainstorming and every one of them, we've talked about it, we've primed them for doing it, they all understand it.

And I still had to walk around group to group and encourage them and step in and very loudly be like, yes. And that's a great idea to get them into it. And they would laugh and go realize they weren't doing it and start doing it. And you can watch the number of ideas that, that every group that I talk to flourishes.

So I think you can, it's infectious. You can help to engender it in others as a leader. And if you don't, you are probably shutting it down.

Tessa Forshaw: We use in the book a great [00:25:00] analogy for this that leaders might find helpful based on what you said. So we talk about creative problem solving, the cognitive principles of creative problem solving as as innovation ish dynamics. So like aerodynamics, but for innovation ish.

If you can't remember, my mom is an airline pilot that may or may not have influenced the aerodynamics analogy in this analogy. You have lift, which is divergent thinking. You have gravity, which is convergent thinking. You have executive function, which we talked about, and that's thrust. But you also have drag and drag in this case is innovation hesitation. One of those things is is cognitive caution. The other being this creativity gap and sort of myths of innovation that Rich already talked to and. I think if the analogy here is just like a leader doesn't, like a [00:26:00] pilot doesn't create the drag, right? Neither does the leader necessarily, like they're not creating the drag that the innovation plane needs to get through. But the aerodynamics are the aerodynamics. And if you wanna get to the, if you wanna fly across the country, you're gonna have to figure out how to overcome drag and in some cases how to use it to your advantage.

And that is the same here. If you wanna be innovative, you're gonna have to acknowledge that cognitive caution exists. And that to get to the other side, to get to innovation ish, you are going to have to address the cognitive caution and overcome it.

Mahan Tavakoli: That's a beautiful example for so many different reasons, now , there is a lot of what you also call and I see as innovation theater , people get together in the organization for a day or two focused on innovation or some larger organizations even start [00:27:00] an innovation team or group. How can innovation Part of the culture and approach of an organization, rather than either a two day experience or something that is assigned to a group to go out and do.

Rich Braden: I think the first thing is a two-day innovation. A one hour innovation workshop is a great start. It's a start, not a solution. It's something that can get you excited to start exploring a practice that grows over time. And like any practice, like yoga or gym or swimming, at first it might be a little rough and you might only do a little bit.

As you build some momentum, you get more practiced at it. It will compound over time and build into something that is every day innovation. And that's for every part of the organization, not [00:28:00] just an r and d side of an organization. Everyone has the ability to do innovation in whatever their role happens to be.

Mahan Tavakoli: With the mindsets, you also mentioned your first mindset is interactions. Getting out of the office to discover real human needs. And the challenge I see is twofold. in that many leaders feel like they already are doing that.

And then secondarily, besides that, there is an overwhelming. Responsibility on their shoulders for leading the organization, the team managing day to day. So how do you say leaders can balance these six mindsets? In a way that is incorporated into their daily practice of leading [00:29:00] in the organization.

Tessa Forshaw: really interesting insight, this idea of I already do that. We hear that too a lot. I hear that. Have a noticeable reaction inside my body to the leader because it typically tells me that there's a lot of cognitive bias at play. one of the things about innovation or thinking in general is that we have a lot of pitfalls and shortcuts in how we think our brains are designed to auto automatize and routinize our thinking, to make it as efficient and handy as possible. Which is, again, not a bad thing. Like it, it happens all the time. There are biases that you have that help you every day. So for example a confirmation bias about. Seeing things that give you the signal that what you are thinking is right is a really helpful bias when you are [00:30:00] walking to pick up your child from school and you see them walking down the steps like, like you use these biases in mundane, everyday situations, and they're really helpful. But in innovation, they sometimes work against us. And one thing that I would say that's really important to be able to understand what kind of mindsets you need, is to really be thinking about your biases in a detailed way. Did I make an assumption here? Is this confirming something that I already think?

Am I listening to a cross section of voices or only seeking out the ones that I know will tell me what I wanna hear? Am I downplaying the importance of contradictory data? So really interrogating how you think to make sure that you are pausing and checking in on these biases and if they're helping you or harming you. . 

Rich Braden: A great illustration of the surprises that only come through direct interaction. Was working [00:31:00] with a large quick service restaurant and their, one of their distributors that distributed one of their products in large stainless steel containers. We were at a distribution center.

The whole group of executives we were leading to do this observation, being led by a kind manager at the distribution center, giving us all kinds of information, really giving us a great tour. He hops up in the truck, explains everything, and says, I need to pause so I can actually log this in. I'll be right back.

And he clips off a tag and hops outta the truck and runs into the building. The whole energy of the group changed. I didn't know what was going on, and I looked around, they're all looking at each other and I said, what is this? And they told me he had cut off a security tag for chain of custody of this product.

That was a, against the. To cut that tag off was against all of the rules they had put [00:32:00] in place. He didn't do it maliciously, he had to transfer the number inside. The fastest way for him to do that accurately was to do that. He came right back out and reattached it so it's not nefarious, but it broke something that he was unaware of and they had no idea that this had been going on for years.

It's the kind of discovery that only by getting out into the field and seeing how the world works, not the rules that you designed for it, you can actually see what's happening. And those are the things that you can then design for many possible solutions to get around tracking those numbers and digits with QR codes and RFIDs, or having a tablet.

So many ways to solve it and still maintain the chain of custody, but you can't do it if you don't know what the problem is.

Mahan Tavakoli: That's such an outstanding example because it also requires a certain level of judgment and [00:33:00] human involvement. I'm a big fan of data and collection of data KPIs metrics and all of those things critical. there are certain things like the example that you gave where it's the human judgment, human perception, and being out in the field that actually exposes you to, not just looking at the data.

Rich Braden: I I would say it's looking at different data. Because many of the things you mentioned are in the qualitative side. Qualitative data has lots of great insights and can help direct us. But qualitative information about humans and their interactions and their processes is equally valuable, if not more.

And helps you understand because it's people who are doing the work. And we talk about this creative problem solving as a human centered way of designing. So designing for the people who are involved [00:34:00] with doing that process, checking that tag, whatever it is. If you can't solve for the people, no amount of technology can win over human judgment.

Mahan Tavakoli: Absolutely couldn't agree with you more. Now, one of the things that I know you are not necessarily a big fan of, which is used a lot in innovation thinking or associated with innovation, is brainstorming lots of ideas and putting them up there. How would you approach coming up with new, innovative ideas from a group, not through brainstorming?

Tessa Forshaw: I think I just wanna qualify that 'cause I totally see how that could be interpreted that way. What Rich and I are not huge fans of is brainstorming in an unstructured and unintentional way. So often something that we see and in our class, actually, let me give you an example of this. [00:35:00] In our class we spend a significant chunk of the first morning doing , what we call design process zero, where we have the students experience the, a design process that they are without too much guidance or instruction. And and we do that for a few reasons, but in. In this case, one of the things that we often see is all of them standing around a whiteboard with a pen and one person holding the pen. And other people like this. Some might be sitting really not that engaged and they're, the question is like, all right, so how will we solve this? And people throw up an idea or two. That is what brainstorming normally looks like and that doesn't work. There are a few things that we know are really important to brainstorming.

One thing that we know is really important to brainstorming [00:36:00] initially is an opportunity for people to bring forward ideas themselves quietly.  So we often encourage getting post-it notes, writing one idea per post-it note and get each person getting a few out there that does a few things. One is it helps the individual start to surface their ideas and get those connections that we talked about going. But it also starts to help you see patterns or clusters as people start to bring them forward. A second thing that we find really important, rich already talked about and that's saying yes and to anybody's ideas that they put up instead of cutting them down or saying why it won't work. Because if you do that straight away, going into that evaluation place, we'll put that cognitive caution on and then, you have the drag on your airplane and you're not going anywhere. the third thing is that you need to engage in [00:37:00] practices that help you supercharge your neural network's ability to bring forward, rapidly divergent ideas. And so we encourage people to do this through a particular tool that we call brainstorming levers.

Rich Braden: Each time you ask a question for a brainstorm, a certain number of answers come out that are the obvious ones that are related to whatever you've just asked. For instance, if I say, let's plan a birthday party, what should we have? A whole bunch of birthday party ideas pop in your brain like cake and party streamers and balloons.

If I change that question though and say, how might we celebrate a birthday? Sure cake balloons that could be in there, but other things come in such as fireworks or a band or a parade because a celebration is slightly different than a birthday. [00:38:00] That's an example of adjusting the question that you ask for.

Your brainstorm gives you a different set of solutions, so we have brainstorming levers that help with that process. The first one being called twist the question. If you just take the question and the main words in it, like I just gave you the example of party and celebration, it adjusts something. A second lever is the designer lever.

So you can change who you are as the designer. So let's come up with the solutions. If we worked for a big brand name, say Nike, what would Nike come up with for their solutions? They would be different than if we said BMW or Apple. So you can change those, and each one of those sparks your brain with a new set of Apple centric or BMW centric ideas.

You can do the same thing by changing who you're designing for. If you're [00:39:00] designing for students, what if you design for teachers? What if you design for administrators? So each time you do this, you keep giving yourself a new jolt of ideas. So coming up with ideas is more of a big numbers game, and it's not the hardest part of it.

It's just going through all those combinations and if you take each of those letters and stack them. BMW four students and add several other things. You have so many different questions and each one sparks a few ideas. The last, oh, I was gonna say the last one I will say is that all of those are effectively putting on a constraint.

And we know that by constraining something, you actually get more creativity. It's like necessity is the mother of invention. That phrase comes from that same idea. If you narrow things down and say, how could we do it for no money? Or if we were gonna spend a million dollars, you get really different ideas.

So all of these spark new, [00:40:00] fresh ideas and getting an avalanche of those ideas. Now the job is, let's find the good ones.

Tessa Forshaw: So the way that this actually works really simple. If you come back to this, what we were talking about before in the sense that you have a. An archival memory that has everything you've ever learned stored in it. when you bring forward one thing into your working memory, you bring forward all the associations that are connected to that one thing, right?

And so if you, and it might seem really trivial especially for leaders to be like, okay, we'll change the question, or we'll pretend we're Airbnb or Nike. But what you are doing is making every person in that room bring forward different and new associations that makes it easier for them to retrieve novel ideas.

So you're actually helping their brain surface novel thinking. So even if it, they're [00:41:00] crazy, even if you don't wanna do things like. company X does them or you don't wanna have this solution be cost you $1 million or no dollars. Even if that's not what you want. By putting those constraints on, by putting, using these levers, you are encouraging everybody participating in your brainstorm to bring forward those associations, queuing them forward  so that they can then think and connect based on those, so you're accessing more of their mind, which is amazing.

Mahan Tavakoli: It is, and not only is it not trivial, Tessa, I think this is absolutely critical. Love what Rich said and you built on that. The way the question is formed totally change the perspective of the individuals and their contribution. And then the other layers of view it from the [00:42:00] perspective of Nike or from perspective of Airbnb or whatever other organization totally shifts the way people view it and brings out different thoughts and ideas. A lot of times leaders get frustrated that people aren't coming up with new ideas, innovative ideas. We're doing things the same way. This is an outstanding way to tap into the brilliance that your people already have. through the power of questions. What Warren Berger calls a beautiful question.

These are beautiful questions. You have many of them in your book as well, which is why I love in that innovation and that innovation ability, as you mentioned at the beginning, resides within the individuals and the collective has even more of it. It's the kind of questions that we ask, [00:43:00] the perspectives and the views that we have people take that pulls out that innovation.

So absolutely love that. Now, one of the elements of this idea sharing, you do talk about. Letting hundreds of wild ideas come out with complete humility and that I underlined it because that is also really hard to do.

Rich Braden: In terms of generating ideas, but I think throughout the whole process, the idea of humility is replete in how we see innovation happening. To be able to set yourself aside in an interaction and go in as if you don't know when you are already maybe an expert in the area, takes humility to throw out ideas that just pop in your head without filtering and wondering what will people think of me takes [00:44:00] humility to put it out into the world.

And so that's a key component that we often say design means being humble.

Mahan Tavakoli: Te that, you study cognitive science? How do you recommend we do that? 

Tessa Forshaw: So one of my very close colleagues Megan Kaino, she studies all and other episodic emotions in learning and professions. And she spent quite a long time studying science education and then professional scientists. And one of the things that she talked about that really resonated with me in her work was how in science education we teach students to follow very specific lab work and then get an expected result. And then write it up. And if the experiment worked, that means you did it how you were supposed to [00:45:00] do it, and you got the result. And we do that in high school. We even do that in university with scientists. And then yet, science exploration as a profession is so often actually about testing something novel and not getting the expected result. So often people feel as though they failed. And so I say that to you to just say that like even scientists who have spent their entire education, their PhDs, their, the whole thing, all of this work then have to put themselves out there in a way that is counterintuitive to the education system to get novel discovery.

So you are not alone like that. Every, even in extremes, we feel this, the way that I recommend managing it. Through a practice that I call metacognition or rather cognitive science calls metacognition and it's a big word, but really what it means is being meta above or [00:46:00] if you say to someone, oh, you are meta about that, you were thinking above or extra or big, and then cognition, you are thinking and feelings and actions and behaviors. So it's thinking about your thinking, feelings, actions, and behaviors. And so what that means in a really grounded way in this sense is checking in with yourself. Hang on, am I not saying things because I'm worried about how I'm going to be perceived in this situation? Oh, and is that serving me? Is it, am I, is that helping me meet my goal in this situation or no?

The goal is to get as many wild ideas as we can out there and to cue other people to come up with ideas based on the things that I put. So it's not, let me change my strategy. So is a really good example of in idea generation, how metacognition helps you be humble in interactions. As rich suggested. Same thing applies [00:47:00] if I show up into this space as an expert pretending I know everything, even though I have studied it or worked in it for 20 years. Is that going to help me achieve my goal or not? sometimes the answer might be yes, but if your goal is to understand how things are happening on the ground, and to see that instance of the tag being ripped off and the chain of custody disappearing, then walking in there as the boss who knows the process and telling everyone about it going to get you that insight. So I think that's the key here, is understand if what you need to achieve your goal is humility, and then if it is like lean into it.

Mahan Tavakoli: And that humility, Tessa, requires what you just mentioned , is thinking about our thinking, and I love. Yuval Noah Harare's perspectives on why that becomes [00:48:00] even more important the age of ai, we have to think about our own thinking more in order to understand some of our reactions and how we can guide our own decision making.

Otherwise, if we don't think about it, we won't be able to be innovative, innovation out of others, and make the improvements and progress that we need to make. one other thing that I was wondering about is that the fact that a lot of leaders are measured primarily on a quarterly or annual basis, you do mention ideas are not enough, you must take responsibility for them. So want to know where that balance comes in from where there is. Innovative thinking to the responsibility, accountability, and action that needs to follow.[00:49:00] 

Rich Braden: I think that if you are going to design something, create a solution, or put something out in the world or roll it out inside your company, you own that. Action that intrinsically you are responsible for it. Thinking ahead to what the outcomes and the possibilities are of that is just being a good actor in the world.

There are many examples of where an accidental, unintended consequence can have some bad or catastrophic impacts. There are agricultural products that have been introduced that have eliminated butterflies in an area, very important for the ecosystem. Mistakes have been made. There are modified foods that have been introduced into cultures that have [00:50:00] not helped with nutrition and caused other problems.

So there's many examples, not just in agriculture, but all over. Many of those are preventable if you think ahead to, it doesn't take even that long to what. Who and what are the impacts of this? An exercise that we like to do is to just take the idea that you're thinking about putting forward, put it on the center of a whiteboard or a piece of paper, and then list out everybody who is impacted and how they will be impacted.

And then you can look at each one of those impacts and say if that happens, what happens next? And it, go two or three. You don't have to map out the entire world, but just that small step done in a short time, you can start to see some of the effects. And if you're gonna put a global product out in the world, like what has happened with social media, of course we have seen some negative effects that have happened from [00:51:00] that.

Many of them, I think, are not that hard to get to or see if you create echo chambers in social media. What can happen in polarization? How can we design. To not have that effect, but still get the impact that we're trying to have. So you can make adjustments if you look ahead, but it is on you if you put something out in the world.

Mahan Tavakoli: So Rich, you started touching on what I was going to push back on in that we take that perspective, a lot of Silicon Valley companies and right now, AI companies would not be putting out their innovation out into the world in that they are running very fast. it's the Sam Altman's of the world or Elon Musk of the world, they say, we have no idea this is working, , what implications it's going to have, but we just want to get there faster than the next person. 

Tessa Forshaw: When we first started working [00:52:00] together and we were looking at lots of different innovation frameworks out there, something that really struck me about the 80 or so that Rich and I analyzed was how few of them talk about the implications of a product in the world And I think that and not just a product, , this is a really important strategy also for things like strategic plans. If our goal becomes true, what happens? And then what happens, right? Like understanding strategies, products, services, like this isn't is any idea really, but what I think is interesting is that we often think about, this as unsexy and not the cool thing that's gonna get us to the finish line as fast as possible. And I would say. This could be a controversial point, but I would say [00:53:00] that you're probably gonna save yourself a lot of stress and drama. If you understand the unintended consequences or the potential unintended consequences, good and bad for different stakeholders in front of you early on, you may not choose to act on them, right?

Or you may choose to slightly modify something so that you mitigate it. And keep going with your product. you might just choose to know about it and have a strategy built out for what happens if it eventuates. But and other people may choose to completely abandon it if it, reasonably was going to result in the world ending. But I think that it's a really worthwhile exercise. And so sure, it might take you an hour less time or a few days less time to get to the finish line if you really bake this exercise or type of practice into your process. But I think in the long term, there are many examples of products out there right [00:54:00] now, and I think social media is a good one.

And with all of the government inquiries and lawsuits and everything where reasonably it would be logical to conclude that having had to think and prepare through the unintended consequences may have helped mitigate some of the risk that they then took up. 

Rich Braden: I think one other effect is when you do this exercise, you don't only find the negative things you gotta watch out for. You find the positive things. So I think it plays on both sides and even with Silicon Valley and AI, like you mentioned. Yes, there's a lot of fear out there about what, where is this going?

Are we going too fast or are we going beyond our skis? But I think if you lay out the map for this one, there are other actors out there and there are geopolitical implications of who's first in that race that also have national security. So if you really invest in this, we may be [00:55:00] unaware of some of the intended or unintended consequences around that one that are very important.

I hope people smarter than me are watching all that carefully to make sure that the balances there, but there is that danger. It is very real that the unintended aspects, especially with something like AI where it has done unpredictable things, could really have terrible Im implications. And that's a struggle on every level.

Not all of them are. Globally destructive. So you're, you are improving your expense report process within your company is a great little small innovation thing, and it's unlikely to destroy the world. But it's the, i the sphere of impact mitigates how much the impact is. Sorry, that was terrible.

The size of the idea is the size of the impact that it could have [00:56:00] regardless of that size. Looking ahead to make sure you understand the positive and negative impacts is really important.

Mahan Tavakoli: It really is. And that's why I love the point that you make in that it is important for us to pause and take a look at that. You're absolutely right. For most of our organizations, that's not the case where we're going to change the future of the globe. That said, a lot of times in innovation process. We don't think about the implications even within the organization. there are positive implications and potential negative implications. Thinking about it ahead of time makes a difference and is important. So I appreciate that point that

Made. Now would love to know, since we lightly on ai, it has been on a lot of our minds. It is impacting knowledge work a lot, and humble opinion, [00:57:00] talked to some of the brightest minds in ai, it is going to transform knowledge work next few years. Would love to get your thoughts on how you believe AI will play a role in innovation in organizations. 

Tessa Forshaw: I think Rich and Maya. Each year is really that it's a really great tool to be using when appropriate in innovation. I think I have loved watching how our students use it in many different ways. So one of my favorite use cases is not actually that we don't see or hear about this a lot, but it was transformative for our students. So students struggle to go out in the world and talk to strangers. That happens every class failure. 95% of the class is terrified that we're about to make them walk into Harvard Square and go talk to strangers about Harvard. That's like terrifying. [00:58:00] So we have them practice using a agent. They get used to the kinds of questions they might ask.

They get used to seeing what the different responses could be, the difference between an open-ended and a closed ended question. And they start to build some of those skills in a really low stakes way that makes them laugh about that are hilarious on their laptops. That is a great example where this tool is supercharging and amplifying their ability to now go out into the wild and build real human connections and get real human insights. And I like, I love that we have got that from the technology. similarly, I think it's a very helpful tool with our students use it a lot with idea sorry, not with ideation. students use it a lot with iteration, with prototyping vibe coding has meant that we can have [00:59:00] them build things much more quickly and test things and get reactions to them.

They can do mockups more quickly or copy language and all those sorts of exponential improvements in their prototyping. Fidelity, I think has been really nice. And the benefit that gives us is that when they go and show things to people, to have them test them and interact with them, the level of the fidelity of the test is a bit higher.

And so  we can be a little bit more confident in some of the results. 'cause it's a, looks like and a works like not just a beautiful paper prototype, which I am of course still a very big fan of. 

Rich Braden: A great example of that is I taught a two week, entrepreneurship and leadership camp This summer, I was one of the instructors teaching to high school students. We only had a couple of days in that time. They were able to create fully functioning websites [01:00:00] that were applications using AI that Tes just said.

And so there was a app that you could start to interact with that would help you to find healthy alternatives for making food for your family. There was another one that was dealing with how you could have a sleep coach to monitor yourself tied into your watch and your phone. All that came to life in a very realistic way in terms of getting feedback from people that is a really high level of fidelity for a prototype that took almost no time.

When I started doing some web work way back turn of the century, that could have taken days to weeks to get what they did in hours. So I think productivity, helping you move faster with the things you're already doing that are utilitarian is a great use for ai. It just doesn't reason or think the work that is intrinsically still [01:01:00] human needs to be done, but you can clear the decks to have more space for your brain to work on those things.

Mahan Tavakoli: Those are both outstanding examples, Tessa and Rich, and I really love those because what they are doing is they are building on that human capability, creativity and intelligence, and magnifying it, leveraging. , But not replacing it. is why when it comes to innovation, that is something that we as people, as individuals, and even more so in collaboration with others, can do a lot better some of what you've mentioned, including the kinds of questions that are asked, the perspectives that are taken, the views. , So for the audience to follow your work, find out more about your book and your research as [01:02:00] well. Where would you each send them to?

Rich Braden: I'd say the first easiest place is to go to www.innovationish.com, with or without the dash. They both work. We also have substack dot innovation ish.com where we're sending out Tessa's an amazing, one of her gifts. One of Tessa's gifts is that she can take cognitive science, which is very complex and communicate it in a simple, approachable way.

 What I love working with her and understanding how our brains work has unlocked so much for our students. And so we have a lot of that kind of content. And then we have examples from the field that come out on our substack as well.

Tessa Forshaw: If you'd love to know more about the research, you're also very welcome to visit the Next Level Lab website at Harvard's Graduate School of Education. That's the lab that I sit within  and we approach similar topics and [01:03:00] several key insights from the book come from novel research in the Lab.  And the other place that I would say in terms of looking for  rich or I is our LinkedIns we are both that classic prolific LinkedIn generation and definitely use that and share a lot of what's going on there.

Mahan Tavakoli: We will put a link to those in the show notes, and I appreciate the conversation most especially in that. You both mentioned the example that leaders set in this process. I do. Believe that is critical. But I love the example that Tessa, you and Rich set in, that you compliment each other. Your creativity, your innovation would not have been as powerful individually as it is together. It shows in the book, it shows in the conversation. So I so appreciate conversation and your book [01:04:00] innovation ish, how anyone can create breakthrough solutions to real problems in the real world. Thank you so much, Tessa Forshaw, and Rich Braden

Rich Braden: Thank you so much for having us.