314. Innovation Hesitation: Why Smart People Hold Back with Rich Braden and Tessa Forshaw

Most innovation programs don’t fail because people lack talent. They fail because people hesitate. That hesitation is subtle: the moment someone decides they’re “not creative,” the moment a team rushes to certainty, the moment a leader rewards only the safe answer and accidentally trains everyone to stop trying.

I’m joined by Rich Braden and Dr. Tessa Forshaw, co-authors of Innovation-Ish, to break down why everyday creativity gets trapped behind limiting beliefs, social fear, and a handful of stubborn neuromyths. We talk about the “creativity gap” we see in classrooms and boardrooms alike, and we use stories like Apollo 13 to show why analytical work and creative thinking are inseparable in real problem solving.

Then we get practical for leaders: how to build psychological safety without lowering standards, how to celebrate learning (even when an experiment fails), and how to start meetings by aligning the mindset you want people to use. We also challenge the way teams use design thinking and templates, treating tools as prompts that spark better questions rather than recipes that shut down human judgment.

We close with a timely conversation on AI and innovation. AI can lift the floor, but it doesn’t automatically raise the ceiling. The real edge comes from “active metacognition” checking how the work is going while you’re doing it, not just reflecting after the fact, so the team stays intentional, curious, and in control.

🌐 Connect with Rich & Tessa:
• Website: https://www.innovationish.com/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/richardcoxbraden/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/tessaforshaw/

📚 You can purchase Rich and Tessa's book on Amazon:
• Innovation-ish: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1394318901

Transcript

Mick Spiers: 0:01

Have you ever had that feeling that you're not creative enough, that innovation belongs to someone else, the designer, the artist, the entrepreneur, the genius in the room. And have you ever wondered how many ideas never see the light of day simply because we convince ourselves we're not the kind of person who creates them. In today's episode of the leadership project, I'm joined by Rich Braden and Dr. Tessa Forshaw, co authors of the book innovation ish, together, we explore why so many people believe they're not innovative, how limiting beliefs hold teams back from creativity and what leaders can do to unlock the innovative potential that already exists within their organizations, because innovation isn't just about breakthrough ideas, it's about helping people overcome the invisible barriers that stop them from trying in the first place. Hey, everyone, and welcome back to The Leadership Project. I have a special double treat for you today. I'm greatly honored to be joined by Rich Braden and Dr. Tessa Forshaw. They are together, the co authors of a book called Innovation ish. Now that's an interesting title already, and I want to ask about that title a little bit later. Rich is a professor at Harvard and Stanford, including D School and the London Business School, and the founder and CEO of people rocket and Dr. Tessa is a cognitive scientist and a founding scholar at next level lab at Harvard, and a recipient of multiple design awards. So we're going to be talking about innovation today, but mostly talking about how we get stuck. Why do people think they're not innovative? Why do people think they're not creative, and how can we get past our own limiting beliefs? So I'm really excited to get into this. So without any further ado, I'd love to understand from both you, but I'm going to come to you first Rich here, what inspired this book. Tell us a bit more about your background and what inspired you to write this book and to write this book. Now come to you first Rich and then on to Tessa.

Rich Braden: 2:18

Great. Thank you. I'm really thrilled to be here. I think we saw a similarity across the teaching that we've done, and we've been teaching together for almost nine years now, and in the work that my company does, and that Tessa joins me on frequently to bring that out into the world, is that the mistakes people are making with innovation, or the reason that it's not happening the way we would like it to happen, is not about their capability. It is about the decisions they make, how they make them, when they make them, and that usually comes down to either they hold back and they don't get started on things, and they never quite get there, or they rush through it too quickly to try to get to some certainty and barrel forward and end up solving the wrong problem. And so we saw this come up in all these places, and as we were teaching it, we started to change the way we teach, to nullify some of those effects. Out of that, we decided, yeah, that I think this is something that more people would resonate with and that we can share with the world.

Mick Spiers: 3:32

Yeah, really powerful, Rich and for you, Tessa?

Tessa Forshaw: 3:36

Absolutely, I've always been so interested in how our minds work and think and create, and what distinguishes, you know, good thinking performance from a poor one, and the features and practices of elite performers, be that athletes or Creatives or any other kind of Incredible eliteness, mostly, I think, just from an aspirational perspective, and through studying all of that, something that really started to come up in research I was reading and in my own work was this realization that it wasn't actually, and most times this is true. It's not actually about special powers. And so what I mean by that is like in creativity and innovation, often we think that folks are creative because they have some kind of special innate capability. And that's just not true. And the research was quite conclusive. And so when Rich and I started teaching together, I think we really bonded over a shared theoretical but also applied sort of belief in the fact that anybody can be creative and anybody can be innovative. And so we wanted to create something that was accessible, supportive of our students for their learning after class, and that would help people stay. Start to see that in themselves and change how they self limit.

Mick Spiers: 5:04

It's really powerful. I'm hearing three things here. One is where we get stuck in our own mind and where we start holding ourselves back. Number two there, Rich was when you said that that might that confusion might even lead to solving the wrong problem. We started off with over here, and somehow we ended up over here, and we're now, we're not solving the real problem or the right problem. And then Tessa, that's really interesting. What I'm hearing from you is the looking at those that are very successful, and thinking about, what is it that they do that's different to everyone else, and hearing you say it, it's making me stop and think about that, that a lot of the times, we just think, Oh, they're just gifted, or they just get their superhero right kind of thing. But it's not always the case, and we definitely want to dig into that, something that's jumping into my head when I listen to the two of you. I'm going to throw a quote to you from Timothy Galway, the author of the book The inner game. So he was a tennis coach, and he came from this from a sports perspective, thinking about elite sports people versus people that never make it. And his equation is, performance is equal to potential minus interference, and then he would spend all of his time realizing that the gold was in removing the interference that anyone and I'll use the I'll keep going with the tennis metaphor. Anyone can serve a ball, anyone can hit a forehand, anyone can hit a back end. And you can practice those things and get better at them. But the real gold was removing the interference, and that tennis was played a game of four inches, and the four inches was the distance between the players ears. Now I'm hearing you're saying that this plays out in innovation. How does this metaphor sit with you and the equation. Let's start with you, Tessa?

Tessa Forshaw: 7:02

Yeah. I mean, that really resonates with me. I think one thing that's really interesting for us is, when we go to the beginning of every class that we teach, we ask a question, which is, hands up if you think you're creative, if you think you're an innovator. And we ask this question in places like, you know, the Stanford Business School, executive education program in places like women's, you know, Leaders Group meeting in Melbourne at a private members club in the distribution center floors of a major supply chain in the middle of America, like really different places. And what is interesting is that the response is actually not that different, depending on any of those places, and even in the most elite design opted into creative problem solving, kind of contexts like a design school, where you're standing in a creativity class, really, we never see more than half of the students, but usually not more than 20, 25% of the students put their hand up in response to that question. And what's remarkable about that is that we then go on to teach them so rich, and I actually then get to see that all of them are creative, right, which we already knew, but we then get evidence, and so everybody should have put their hand up, and yet, in most cases, 75% of people don't.

Mick Spiers: 8:29

So where does the doubt come from, right? So is it imposter syndrome? Is it fear? Where does that doubt come from? I'm going to stick my own hand up and say, I don't think I'm creative, but if I'm honest with myself, I'm creative in different ways, like I'm not artistic. I'm not my wife is a beautiful painter, and all this kind of stuff. So my image of creativity is that. But when I think about some of the things I've done in the engineering world, I think if I gave myself an honest scorecard, I am creative and even business models. I'm creative with business models and how to solve problems and things like this. But if you had asked me the same question, Tessa, if you said, Are you creating, I'd say no, my instant answer would be that as well. So where does the doubt come from?

Tessa Forshaw: 9:15

So one major source of doubt is that humans have this obsession with how our brain works, but unfortunately, that obsession has sort of come to us believing a set of what we call neuro myths. So things about our brain, how they work, that are not true, and they're really pervasive, and one of them is that you are either left brained or right brained, and that you are either creative or analytical. So that in cognitive science, the term is personality based hemispheric dominance. It's a mouthful, but thankfully, we don't have to say it that often, because it's not true. It's completely unfounded in the science. And so that that also means that on the flip side of that. Everybody is able to be analytical and creative and actually rich. Told me this great story, and Mick, if you're okay with it, I might get rich to share it with us, but about one of the Apollo missions and some really great examples of engineers being super creative.

Rich Braden: 10:18

Absolutely, I'm an engineer by training and love space stuff in general. And so this moment has been told a lot of ways, and there's it's encapsulated in a movie as well, where a problem had happened on the Apollo 13 mission. They had two of the ships, one that was going to be on the moon, one that was coming back, fused together with a docking port, and they hadn't planned on that many people being in that ship for that long, and the CO two scrubbers had stopped working, or they were starting to stop working, but the filters for the two ships were different, and so the creativity came in that They took these very technical, analytical engineers and said, Hey, here's a box of parts that is what is available on the ship, including the manual. And said, You've got to make a filter that can fit in the other space from only what you have here, or we're going to lose astronauts. And so they threw it out on the table, and they started getting to work right away, and went through several different iterations and several different designs to finally come up with one that was not only worked, but also was buildable by people who are losing oxygen rapidly under stress, and could build it in a zero G environment, and so it's a great example of a success. But we society tends to think of engineers as very analytical. And you know, people like your wife, who can paint, as the creative ones. But the reality is to paint and to design a CO two scrubber interim, you need both things. You need to have creativity and analytical skills, and they work in concert, so you can't actually separate them. We are indeed all whole brained. And I think that's actually a hopeful message for me, coming from an engineering background, that I'm not pigeon holed into just that one or the other.

Mick Spiers: 12:22

Yeah, really powerful. And I love how that came together. There rich. So let's come to our leaders now that are listening to the show. And let's say that our leaders ask their own teams this, and maybe they do have a problem that they need to solve creatively. If they ask their teams, this is a call to action. Now go into your next team meeting and say who in the room thinks that they're creative, and see if you get a similar reaction to Tessa. But let's say I've got a saying that we use on the show sometimes, that it's hard to read the label on the jar from inside the jar. Let's say the leader's looking at the team, going, my team are super creative, and none of them think they are. How does the leader help them believe it? Let's go with, oh, Rich. Here you go.

Rich Braden: 13:08

Great. I think that's a perfect metaphor, actually, because there is a label on the outside of the jar, and that label we call innovation hesitation, and we've been talking about some of the facets of it, the Are you creative? Is called the creativity gap. It is that we tend to think we are not creative, or we, like you, define creativity in a certain way that excludes ourselves. Whereas Tess and I both have young children in their classrooms, everyone is creative. They all, if you ask that there, you get hands and feet and noses and like both hands, like everything going up. They're unbelievably creative, and they come and they have that confidence. We all still have that inside. But the classrooms change, the expectations change, and the envelope around it changes to where we start to shed that it becomes socially risky about sixth grade or so. What that if I put myself out there and I am creative, what if somebody criticizes it? So there's creativity gap. There's also a huge mythology around what innovation and creativity is, and it ends up in, like, books and in movies showing up as this, like one really smart person that has a slow mo run down the hall when the epiphany has hit them, and they create a million or a billion dollar valuation company overnight. And it's a great story. I love those stories, and those stories miss the years of failure and struggle and trials and experimentation that require is required by a team to really come up with innovation. So we again, we mislead. Well, creativity is artwork. We also say it has to be this giant project that's game changing and. And it's for elite people that are special. So the third piece on that label, there's like three parts of it, is called cognitive caution, and so I'm going to pitch to test it, to define that the cognitive scientists on the on the the podcast here, but it's those three together that show up on the label. And as a leader, you can acknowledge that, and that's the first step. But do you want to take cognitive caution, Tessa?

Tessa Forshaw: 15:27

Yeah, sure. So cognitive caution is, is essentially what Rich described as that young child who is about to sort of turn 12, 13, and starting to develop instincts that are around prioritizing social cohesion, around staying as a member of the pack, around perpetuating the status quo, stuff that they have seen that works and not disrupting anything. Those instincts that we develop in emerging adulthood are really important. They help humans survive. In fact, if humans didn't have those instincts, I would say to you that it would be very unlikely that we have survived as a species. However, they're also misplaced in innovation, and so sometimes that means a few things. One, we don't like to take risks because we're concerned about failing and about how we'll be viewed by the group. We also don't want to just come up with an idea that disrupts something that's going on and that works against the status quo. And so that means we often end up innovating within the status quo or from the place of the status quo. So for example, right now, all the time, I hear from clients and practitioner partners like we want to improve these sets of processes with AI. So improve the process. The process that exists is the status quo. We're going to improve it using AI rather than Is this the right process for us to even have? What's the problem we're solving? So we like to improve from the status quo, and then we also don't want to do things that are potentially risky. So for example, in evolutionary days, if you were had a hut and you were sleeping and you heard a rustling in the bushes, it's probably worth going to check if that is a predator that could harm your family. You want to eliminate any ambiguity that is possible from a protection point of view, and that's still true today. If I go camping, I want to do the same thing, but in innovation, often we get that same trigger of threat, and our goal is to rush to certainty and get through the ambiguity instead of to sit in it. And yet, for innovation, we need to disrupt the status quo. We need to take risks, and we need ambiguity to come up with good things that solve real problems. So this our brain sort of works against us, and it's important to acknowledge that and keep that in mind when you're trying to engage in innovation.

Mick Spiers: 18:05

Yes, really powerful from both you. I'm going to share something as I summer, as I head towards the summary of that in a moment, I taught a course yesterday about giving feedback. And the majority of time in the course I was teaching the sbia model, and I had a at the end actions sbia, but I spent three quarters of the time talking about overcoming the fear of giving feedback. And everything you just said is the things that stop people from giving feedback, I'm hearing it's the same things that stop people from experimenting and trying and get them into the into the cautious stage, the observations I was making. I was also thinking about my five year old son, and I was thinking about when I watch him and I you sit back. I love doing this, by the way, you sit there and watch him problem solve. He will do things that I've never considered to do because he doesn't know not to. He doesn't know not to. So there are two big chapters that I picked up from what I was hearing from you. If I can try and summarize it, one, I'm going to call it, I'm just making this up on the spot. Call it a curse of knowledge and curse of experience, which plays to your status quo thing Tessa, where we've already got thoughts in our head about what we can't do instead of thinking about what we can do, and our kids are just thinking about no one's told me I can't, so I'm just going to do it. So this challenging the status quo, but also getting stuck because we've got the curse of years of experience of what can be done can't be done, and it's and it's causing us to get stuck. But the big one I'm hearing is the social rejection and the biological response that if I put myself out there and I put my idea on the table, that I've got the fear. Of looking silly. I've got the fear of social rejection. I've got fear of being booted out of the tribe, and the primal instinct that that's somehow mortally dangerous, and it's not anymore, or the fear of the attack on my identity, that if I think I'm the expert in the field and I put a silly idea on the table, well no one's going to think I'm the expert anymore, coupled with the fear of failure. So two limiting beliefs here, the curse of knowledge and experience, that I'm stuck on what can't be done, and the fear of social rejection, is that what I'm taking away, Rich?

Rich Braden: 20:37

I think that's it, and I think as the leader, you can have such an impact on it, like we know that even just naming this is going on helps it to start to dissipate, and then what you do next, how you reward your team, can make a huge difference. We have a 16 week old puppy right now. He loves to come up and lick the dishes as we're putting with the dishwasher, which drives my, especially my wife, a little bit crazy. And we kept saying, No, don't do that. No, don't do that. When we switched and started making him sit next to it and giving him treats for sitting there, the behavior completely changed. Now, even when there's no dishes, he'll come up and sit right next to it, going, Are there any treats? And I think, as a leader, we tend to give that treat out for Hey, good job for a clear answer, for getting fast compliance, for, like, getting the right thing. But we don't as often go, hey, great job failing today. Good job learning that lesson that we had to pay some extra money for, but now we know better. Good job for the creative thinking. We can't do any of those ideas, but I love the thinking. We tend not to reward those things in business, and I think that's helps to add to all of these issues. And I'm not saying only reward failures. I'm saying you got you can change the environment to make and encourage and model this is the way we want to operate under around here, some companies do have failure awards, or they have mess up nights and they present awards, but it's all focused on, what did we learn by taking those risks and and risking the ambiguity and taking a chance. And I think that is an important role as a leader to help get past the ambiguity and the innovation hesitation.

Mick Spiers: 22:32

Yeah, really good. So we're going to celebrate the failure and celebrate what we're learning and go, Okay, thank you so much for taking the swing. I'm going to use another sports metaphor here for a second, the Wayne Gretzky one that I missed 100% of the shots I didn't take. Well, celebrate, celebrate all of those shots. Okay, that's that's really powerful. What about the status quo part? What if they're how do we get people to reset their brain almost of No, you're still stuck on what can't be done, or you're still stuck in the status quo. How do we how do you get them to do the step change?

Tessa Forshaw: 23:09

So really, the answer to that is mindsets. So just tell sort of level set for everyone who's listening. A mindset is a cognitive framework or lens which informs how you see the world. So a way to think about that is the old sort of saying of the rose colored glasses. If you put on rose colored glasses, everything you see around you looks rosy and happy. That's sort of a good analogy to a mindset. But concretely, let me give you an example. I go to Costco, the US grocery store, which still, as an Australian, I struggle with deeply. It's so big, and so because of that, my mindset going into Costco is always like, Let's get in. Let's get out. So that means that the choices and the decisions that I make, the things that I notice and pay attention to are influenced heavily by that mindset. When I walk in the store, I get a trolley, I go straight to the aisle where I know the thing is that I need. I put it in my cart. I'm going down a checklist, you know, I'm sort of watching the clock walking quickly. I don't stop at any of the things that aren't where I need them on the way. In fact, I don't even notice, and I get out as quickly as I can. By contrast, my husband sometimes has a different mindset about Costco, which is the I'm going to let this take all day mindset. And when he goes, he can spend a lot longer there, but he sees things on offer that I would never have seen. Will, you know, wander through here and find that there's like, amazing, you know, North Face Mick ins for the kids for like, 10 bucks that we'll need in a couple of months. And they'll go in the trolley. He'll taste a new type of, you know, sourdough. That is being offered in the baker representative is standing there, and he'll experience and navigate the store in a completely different route at time and pacing than me. So we're doing exactly the same thing at the same time in the same place. And you know, what we notice, what we experience, what we pay attention to, the decisions that we make, and in this case, what we buy and how much money we spend are totally informed by the mindset of how we show up. Now that's great that he and I have different mindsets if we're going separately, but if we're going together, that also causes friction, right? So a really important part about creative problem solving is that, if you're doing that in a team, is that you all have a mindset, you name it, and you're all sharing the same mindset. Because if I'm trying to get out of there as quickly as possible, but he is wanting to have the experience that I just described, then that causes tension. So in creativity and innovation Rich and I did an analysis of over about 80 different design thinking and innovation frameworks, from big consulting firms to university to academic frameworks and everything in between. And what we really started to notice is that any sort of attempts at writing down prescriptive steps, what they all were trying to do was to get people into certain mindsets through activities and names of phases, and we synthesize those mindsets into six core ones. But they're not, certainly not the only ones. I think you can have a mindset about just about anything, but they're just sort of six of some of the most common. And so if I'm a leader and I'm really trying to push my team to get beyond the status quo. One of the things that I would be doing is naming to everybody that we need to make sure we're coming into this room with a different mindset, and that that mindset might be in our book, we call it an ideas mindset, which is a mindset of coming up with wild ideas and focusing on abundance. So Mick, name that, and then I would probably model it. So for instance, for me, that means I want us to take on X problem, but I want us to be thinking about the art of the possible and not anything that we already do. So I'm going to start imagining how we could do this in all sorts of creative ways, like, if we were Disney, how might we solve this problem? Or if we had to spend $10 million to solve it, how could we solve it? And I'm going to push my team to come up with an abundance of ideas. We typically go for 100 in our class, because only when you are pushing that kind of number. Do you really start to see the crazy and through that attempt of having a mindset of abundance of ideas, through that attempt of intentionally pushing beyond the status quo and the known things and into the crazy and outrageous and totally wild and impossible? Can we start to then bring things in a little bit right to the edge of what's possible? So that wild idea that we all think is insane, but we all kind of love, if we did have to make that possible, what would that look like? And when you start with something really far away, and you bring it in a little bit, you get a lot further than if you start here and you try to move there. So that's how I would personally tackle that one.

Mick Spiers: 28:29

Yeah, it's really powerful, rich. You got something to add there.

Rich Braden: 28:33

One important thing about what Tessa just said is, while I am more aligned with her husband, about Costco in particular. Neither one of them is wrong, and neither one of them that's who they are. It's not an identity. It is a thing you can change easily, because I have seen Tessa in bookshops and creative and educational toy stores where she is, like, we've got days to hang out here and just like luxuriate, and so she can play both sides. And of course, that's true of her husband and everyone else you can The lovely thing about mindsets are they're very dynamic and changeable. And so as a leader, it's not about getting the right people and finding the right mindsets. It's about aligning and saying, Hey, let's enter a phase, and everybody put this on for a minute, and then we're going to move to a different phase, where we're going to put on a different one, and that eliminates the friction, but lets everybody still retain who they are and be fluid.

Mick Spiers: 29:40

So what I'm really hearing here is a very intentional act, but also a conversation that we're having before we even start and listening to both you. I think all of us can imagine this in our home life, that if we don't have those conversations, we're going to walk away from experiences both parties, frustrated. The way, let's double down on the Costco. If Tessa is going, we've already been here two hours, why are we still here? She's frustrated, and her husband's going, why she rushing? Me? This is awesome. He's frustrating. So if you don't have the conversation, you're both going to be frustrated. And now I'm going to bring that to the workplace. Think about how many meetings that you have where people walk away with a different understanding of what just happened, both frustrated because they didn't achieve what they set out to achieve, because they didn't have the conversation at the start of the meeting. So I'm hearing it's a very intentional act to reframe at the start. Okay, this is the kind of conversation that we're going to have today. We're going to get a bit experimental. We're going to we're going to try a few things. We're going to imagine a new reality. We're going to put aside our beliefs of, oh, this is the way that we've always done it. For the next two hours, am I getting it right?

Rich Braden: 30:58

Absolutely. And you can imagine the meeting where, for creativity, you want to invite really wide perspectives and get different views. And so you bring some finance people into the room, and now you're brainstorming the wild ideas Tessa was mentioning, if you don't upfront, say, this is not a decision making meeting, we're going to do some crazy things and not do them all, they're going to get really agitated as they see the costs of generating this incredible idea when we're just throwing ideas out, the idea we might come up with might be free or really inexpensive, and so doing that allows them to show up in a different way. It's really a gift to the people there to say, here's how you can show up and address the concerns and risks that you might feel for whatever phase that is.

Mick Spiers: 31:51

I think that's an important part of the conversation about how it's going to go, because I'm picturing with Tessa's example of Imagine if you threw $10 million at the at the problem. If you don't have that conversation before the finance business partner that's in the room is having a mild panic attack the whole time.

Rich Braden: 32:10

Yes, perfect example. One of the methodologies we use, we call brainstorming levers, ways to help generate and get lots of ideas. And one of them is constraints, and we have used exactly the prompt you just said. You can say, how could we solve this for free? But how could we solve if we had to spend over $10 million and so that can have an impact on people? It's just a way of stretching to get to those far out ideas and see what's possible.

Mick Spiers: 32:39

All right, really, good. So I want to peg a few pillars that I'm picking up so far. So first of all, that it is normal, it's biological. Some of these fears that hold us back. Okay? So we've got this, this fear of a failure, fear of identity, challenge, etc. What I heard from you before Rich is that it's okay to have a conversation about that, or maybe even encouraging our leaders to say, upfront, hey, creativity, you are creative, but it's normal for you to hold yourself back. And here's why, normalize it. Normalize it. That's a normal biological reaction. Then have the celebration of failure. To say, It's okay to fail. In fact, we're going to celebrate that failure. Thank you for taking the swing. What did we learn from it? And now we're going to start our meetings with a reframing of mindset. But it's a reframing of mindset to make sure everyone's on the same page about what we're about to do when we go into this meeting, so that people don't get frustrated going, What the heck are we doing here? And we got people in the room operating at different operating systems, almost at that Okay, now let's get into the meeting. Rich, You and I had a chat yesterday. I am a big fan of the design thinking, tools, techniques, because they do help. I agree with both you that it's the people at the end that make the magic happen, but the tools and the techniques do help. So once we're into the meeting, how do we get the how do we get those repartee going to get people activated?

Rich Braden: 34:16

I love that you have enjoyed some design thinking, and it's a great toolkit. It's a great place to start with things, to get things going. There's lots of fun tools and things you can play with there. And in the 80 frameworks we saw, they're all full of really valuable things, but there is a formula or a recipe that each one of them is promoting, and the value is it forces you to change your mindset and do different activities. You don't have to follow them. Though, my daughter loves avocado and now, because of Auntie Tessa, she loves Vegemite and avocado toast. But as a result of that, she makes guacamole in our family. When she first started, she would she started very young. She loved cooking. She would stand there and add the things we handed her to the bowl so she was making it, and then we wrote down what she's supposed to put and she'd go to the spice store and get out the things she wanted, and she would make it, but she's following exactly the recipe. That's about what design thinking does. It allows her to make the same guacamole every time, and it comes out great. But now she has transcended that to where she will taste it and say it needs a little acid. I'm thinking lemon, or I'm thinking lime, I'm going with lime and put that in. And so she has developed the ability to create her own way of achieving the goal, but doesn't have to follow anything rote. That's what we are talking about in innovation. Ish, it's about start from anywhere, use a couple of tools, and get yourself to where you don't need a process or recipe or anything to force you through it. It's a great starting tool. And in doing that, she also will bring in things she's cooked before, things she has experienced and been like, Oh, I really like this. So I'm going to add a little and try that and experiment and just like that, with innovation ish, you have that mindset on you've got a tool that you learned back in school when you were getting a marketing degree or a biology degree, and you're like, I'm going to try that on my project. It's not a design thinking tool, but will it work? Does it get you where you're going? Absolutely. And we call each of those things that you do the actions, the small actions you take. We call them moves like in a chess game or a checkers game. You make different moves, and you're already full of them. So I think the thing is, you are capable already. You have creativity. You've got a full toolkit. So in terms of the tennis coach, we're saying, Get rid of the innovation hesitation barrier and get to performance, and if you allow for the failure and the mistakes and the learning, you can continue your practice really forever. You'll she'll make better and better guacamole, and you can make better and better solutions to problems as you go.

Mick Spiers: 37:16

I think you've just summarized why my wife is an amazing cook, and I'm not. But what I love, I've seen both elements of this with my own eyes in a previous company, where we embraced design thinking quite deeply, where people where the tool was useful. I'm going to say where the tools and the templates and the techniques were useful would be what let's use Business Model Canvas. Let's use something where it would stimulate us to ask a question that we hadn't thought of. So the stimulation was powerful. What I also saw is, when we go down the path and there'll be some people in the room that this is the way that their mind works, by the way, but some people in the room where we'd start going on a bit of a tangent, and someone would say, No, no, no, no. The template said to do this. The process says, do this. So I'm hearing from you, use the tools, use the templates, use the techniques to stimulate, not control, constrain. How does that sound?

Tessa Forshaw: 38:22

I think a key part of how we teach creativity and innovation is by enabling the conditions for a type of thinking that's called meta cognition. So just quickly for folks listening, meta sort of means above cognition, means how you think, feel and act. So therefore it's sort of like how you know thinking about how you think, feel and act. It's self referential in that way. And in creativity and innovation, the act of metacognition throughout the creative problem solving process has been empirically associated with more creative ideas, the number of creative ideas increases and how creative the ideas are increases, and ultimately, products and solutions that are more innovative in terms of ideas to go to market. So there's pretty good evidence around the use of metacognition. So we use metacognition a lot, because one of the biggest challenges when you're following a process, or you're getting to that box on the business model canvas, and your colleagues are saying, we have to fill this one in, is that you're taking the thinking away from the people doing the design work right? You're making them do a thing that's in front of them in an order, in a sequence, and you're not making them evaluate whether that's the right thing to be doing or not. You're telling them that the next step is step c, and they've done B, but actually. They're not allowed in that kind of context to go, oh, but actually, we need to go back to a for a minute. Well, we need to do B again. I don't think we got what we were supposed to get from this, right? So you're taking the sense of evaluation, of adjustment, of regulation and control over thinking processes and choices and decisions away from the humans, and you're outsourcing it to a like static map that was written by someone once somewhere. And I say this as someone who publishes a lot of these like static map type things like, please don't bank all your stakes on a static framework that I want to produce right use your own thinking, if only for no other reason than when the person wrote that map, they it was a different time they have. They're a different person to you. They're working with a team that was different to your team that has different skills. They were taking on a different problem in a different context, and probably a different industry, right? So so much about it was different, and just because their map worked doesn't Mick for them, doesn't mean it will work for you. The analogy often use in class is like you're, you know, you open up a map of New York City, and you think it's the best map in the world, and then you're trying to use it, and you get lost, only to realize that you're standing in Melbourne, and the map is of a completely different city, right? So I think, yeah, I think one of the key things that we need to do as leaders is to really interrogate our team's thinking and to encourage them to think about what is the goal of what we're trying to do right now, is it to come up with as many ideas as possible? Okay, now let's go do the thing. Did that work? Have we done that? Do we think we need more ideas? Do we think we've got as many ideas as possible? What strategies did we use? Are there any other strategies we could try? No, we feel really confident in this. Okay, well, what is the next thing we need to do now, since we have all of these ideas, oh, okay, the next thing we might need to do is evaluate them against some kind of framework based on a central question we have or something. So really putting that thinking back into the teams to own, instead of just having them sort of blindly follow the map or the template.

Rich Braden: 42:18

Well, and even, as you often say, Tessa, it's not even about let's generate some ideas. Okay. How did that go? It is, let's generate some ideas. We're generating some how is it going in doing this? Yeah, in the middle of it, yeah. Do we need to make an adjustment? So really getting the points where we trigger that, thinking of checking in down to really small moments, because you can adjust the last quarter of or last half of the brainstorming session based on how it's going. And so it's really developing that metacognition, that awareness, active metacognition, is, I think, the term that Tessa coined for, how do we really incorporate into it all the time? And that is key to innovation like that is if there's a secret sauce that may be it, it is also incredibly powerful for life, for everything. If you're at Costco and you see the friction, and you stop and say, How is this going? You can rectify that situation or make an adjustment, or then name it or adjust it. And that is such a powerful concept. We're so changeable, we're so flexible, and the process maps lock us in and eliminate the potential for that. And I think that's the disservice of them. They get misused.

Mick Spiers: 43:35

Yeah, really cool. Okay.

Tessa Forshaw: 43:38

Quick story about metacognition, just for fun is I recently did a TED talk on metacognition in creativity, and I was practicing it with my five year old. I made her watch it, which is like quite an ask right to have her watch me stand there and do like 15 minute talk. And she did, and at the end of it, she looked at me, and she goes, so mama, if I have a meltdown, but then I know I'm having a meltdown, and I decide to take deep breaths, because I don't want to have a meltdown anymore. I'm being metacognitive. And I was like, yes, that's exactly right. But then she goes. The best part of this is that she goes, except today I'm a cat, so I'm being me out of cognitive

Mick Spiers: 44:27

That's my favorite story I think I've ever heard. That's brilliant. I tell you what I'm taking away from this. This is really powerful for me personally, and I think it's going to be powerful for people in the listening to the show I practice in my own life. I practice a daily practice of self reflection. I ask myself the same five questions every day, and I'm going to reframe those questions in a moment. So at the end of every day, I ask myself, what went well, what didn't go well? What would I do differently next time? What did I learn about myself and what. That I learn about others, but I'm doing that at the end of the day, what I'm hearing now is I should be pattern interrupting and going in the middle of something important. Not everything is important, but in the middle of something important. What is working? Not what not what worked well, but what is working? What is not working? What can I try differently in the moment, not in the after replay? Is that what I'm taking away?

Tessa Forshaw: 45:26

That's absolutely it. That is act, what we've Rich said, called active metacognition. And it's interesting, because so many people think of reflection as something that you do at the end, and so did we. I just want to make that clear so folks don't feel bad, but we actually taught class for years. We've been teaching together for nine years where we did reflection at the end of the class, and it was like this lovely moment. And everyone stood in a circle and said, like I used to think, but now I think, and made all these reflections, and it was great. Then they left the class, and like nothing happened. They couldn't act on their reflections. We couldn't act on their reflections. And so it didn't work. And sometimes their reflections revealed that there were differences in, you know, understandings that we wanted to level out, that perhaps they needed some more support. They needed more stretching in a certain area, because they've clearly nailed it, like things came up and we wanted to adjust it, and it was too late for us, and it was too late for them in their design projects too. And so we started doing metacognition every single class, and having students do it in the messy middle. I call it of doing the work. And we found that our students went further with their projects, which was really amazing. But the best part was that they had a much better grasp of the skills we were teaching, and their ability to transfer them outside of the classroom became a lot crisper, as measured by this incredible number of students that reach out to us and say things like, I'm sitting here two years after taking your class, and I still think about this moment and this thing all the time, and it applies to everything I'm doing. And that's also because they're in control of their learning journey if they're being metacognitive. So yeah, that's it.

Mick Spiers: 47:21

Yeah, really brilliant. Thanks, Tessa. All right. So we're coming to an end. I'll give you a hint. I've got one more quick fire question I'm going to ask you in a moment, but I'm going to take a moment now to sumise. I think it's about five key points that I'm taking away from today's conversation that leaders can lean into, and that is that people are more creative than they think, but they have limiting beliefs in their mind that we need to help them get past. It is a fear. It's a fear of failure, it's a fear of social rejection. It's a fear of looking silly, a challenge to their identity, and that we can have conversations with them to say, hey, that's normal. That's biology. That's your brain trying to protect you. Now let's get but let's get beyond it. The second one was the relationship with failure, and celebrating failure, celebrating that they tried, and then looking at what we learned from the failure. Then when we're getting into a discussion, to reframe before we start, and to get everyone on the same page so you don't have frustrations of, what are we doing here, right? So the reframing, including the ability to put the status quo aside for a moment and to give people the the license to dream and to dream bigger. The fourth one was the tools, to make sure that the tools that we use are just there to trigger the right questions, not to constrain the creativity. So it's not to become a recipe book where you just follow the bouncing ball and innovation comes out the other end, but those tools and techniques and templates, they might trigger the conversation, but just don't let it constrain the conversation. And then really big moment for me, Tessa, is this metacognition. Don't just do the after Replay at the end to go, Okay, what you know the reflection at the end, interrupt in the middle, and ask yourself, Is this working? What can we do differently? Is going to challenge your thinking and your feeling as you're going along, and that's going to be my biggest takeaway from today. Everything has been powerful, but that's going to be my biggest takeaway from today. The question is, because we don't have time to probably this is another podcast interview altogether, just on AI. Do you see AI as a good thing or a bad thing for innovation, or is the answer yes, it's good, and start with you?

Tessa Forshaw: 49:47

Yeah. Great question. So I think I like go up and down, like a year you? I think for creative problem solving, there is a lot of good but I think one of the things. That we have to really remember is to retain the human judgment over the tool. So in studies that I've seen quite a few now, where people have used AI for creative problem solving, two things are true. One is that the ideas that an AI tends to come up with tend to converge on the mean of ideas. And that's not that surprising. That's what they're designed to do. So the ideas are like better than bad ideas, but not as good as good ideas, because they're the mean. And so from a student work creativity perspective, it's lifting the bottom, but it isn't raising the top, if that makes sense. So the power is in the human plus the the AI. The second thing is that there's now studies that are showing us that a way to massively amplify the top is metacognition. There was a great article in HBr just a couple of weeks ago specifically on this, using AI for creative problem solving and metacognition from folks at MIT. And it's a very good, very good paper. I would encourage you to read it. I can give it to you for the show notes. But what that the problem with that? I think the catch that I would say, is that a lot of these tools are actually designed to eliminate the situational cues for metacognition. So they give you a very, very quickly, they give you a polished output that they're very they use confident voices in returning to you. And so your cues for is this quite right? Do I have that gut feeling that this doesn't look very good yet? How do I think the reasoning is, does that make sense to me, or does that feel different than how I would reason through that, like all of the cues that would maybe naturally trigger someone to engage a posture of metacognition are like largely being eliminated, and so you need to be a lot more intentional.

Mick Spiers: 51:51

Yeah, really good. Rich?

Rich Braden: 51:54

I think I can encapsulate my view of this is, don't ask what AI can do for you. Ask what you can do with AI, so how can it augment and adjust a few things you're doing, but you're still doing most of the work. If you're asking AI to do all the work, you're not learning, you're not thinking, you're not stretching. Learning is effortful, much to the chagrin of our students, sometimes because we force them to learn and how we teach, there is no easy path. If it's giving you the easy path, you're probably not leveraging it in the right way, and it can do some amazing things to help you. Framing a problem is setting the language you use changes what answers you get. So if you you know, if you say, Let's plan a birthday party versus birthday celebration, you get different things from those two answers, because your brain gives you, it makes different associations, you get different answers. So here's what I think my problem is, give me 10 different versions of this same question will give you lots of different frames, and if you use all of those, that can be a great way to leverage AI to help you think in a different way, but you're doing the work, not it.

Mick Spiers: 53:12

I've heard a number of people say this, and I just wish it was what we did. Like to call it augmented intelligence, not artificial intelligence, and to say it's an extension of the human experience, not a replacement of the human experience. And then if you give it the right prompts and you use it in the right way, it's now just a new business model canvas. That's a new tool, but, but you're using absolutely and you're not getting constrained by the tool. Yeah. Really good. Okay, all right. So thank you so much both Dr Tessa and rich. I've thoroughly loved this conversation. Thank you so much for sharing your time, your wisdom and your experience with us. You've given us a lot to not just think about. You've now given us things to think about the way that we're thinking about, and you've given us things to action. So thank you so much for your time today.

Rich Braden: 54:06

Thank you.

Tessa Forshaw: 54:08

Thank you for having us. It was an absolute pleasure.

Mick Spiers: 54:13

Well, that conversation was a true highlight for me, but before we wrap up, let's take a moment to reflect on a few key ideas from this conversation, Rich and Tessa reminded us that innovation isn't reserved for a select few creative geniuses. In fact, one of the biggest barriers to innovation is the belief that we're not innovative at all. When people label themselves as not creative, they often stop trying before the process even begins. For leaders, that insight carries an important responsibility, because innovative cultures are not built by demanding new ideas. They are built by creating environments where people feel safe to experiment, curious, to explore and. Confident that their contributions matter. So perhaps the reflection for you as a leader is this, where might your team be holding back ideas, not because they lack creativity, but because they lack the confidence to share them. And my challenge for you this week is to think about what small shift you could make to encourage experimentation, curiosity and creative thinking in your team. In the next episode, we're going to be joined by the amazing Mark Andrew, a fire captain and author of leading through the heat, and we're going to be talking about leading in those great high pressure moments. You've been listening to The Leadership Project. If today sparked an insight, don't keep it to yourself. Share it with one other person who would benefit from listening to the show. A huge thank you to Gerald Calibo for his tireless work editing every episode, and to my amazing wife Sei, who does all the heavy lifting in the background to make this show possible? None of this happens without them around here. We believe leadership is a practice, not a position, that people should feel seen, heard, valued, and that they matter, that the best leaders trade ego for empathy, certainty for curiosity and control for trust. If that resonates with you, please subscribe on YouTube and on your favorite podcast app. And if you want more, follow me on LinkedIn and explore our archives for conversations that move you from knowing to doing until next time, lead with curiosity, courage and care.