Dr. Cindy Burnett:
What if innovation isn’t just about the next big idea, but about the mindsets that make those ideas possible? In this episode, we’ve been joined by Dr. Tessa Forshaw and Richard Braden, co authors of Innovation Ish. Together we’ll unpack the Innovation Ish compass to explore what it really means to think and act like an innovator.

Dr. Matthew Warwood:
Hello, everyone. My name is Dr. Matthew Worwood.

Dr. Cindy Burnett:
And my name is Dr. Cindy Burnett.

Dr. Matthew Warwood:
This is the Fuelling Creativity in Education podcast.

Dr. Cindy Burnett:
On this podcast, we’ll be talking about various creativity topics and how they relate to the field of education.

Dr. Matthew Warwood:
We’ll be talking with scholars, educators, and resident experts about their work, challenges they face, and exploring new perspectives of creativity.

Dr. Cindy Burnett:
All with a goal to help fuel a more rich and informed discussion that provides teachers, administrators, and emerging scholars with the information they need to infuse creativity into teaching and learning.

Dr. Matthew Warwood:
So let’s begin. Richard Braden is the founder and CEO of PeopleRocket LLC, a San Francisco based strategic innovation firm. A recognized thought leader in design thinking, leadership and innovation, he has taught at Harvard, Stanford, Aalto University and London Business School and advises global organizations including Airbnb, Google, Microsoft and the United Nations.

Dr. Cindy Burnett:
And Dr. Tessa Forshaw is a cognitive scientist and founding scholar of the Next Level Lab and at Harvard University. Her research and teaching focus on how people best work, learn, and innovate. Building on her background as a designer at Ideo, Colab and Accenture, she has received multiple international design awards and teaches design and innovation at Harvard and Stanford. So welcome to the show.

Richard Braden:
Thank you, Hillet. Thanks for having us.

Dr. Cindy Burnett:
So we have brought Rich and Tessa on the show today to talk about their key insights from their latest book, Innovation Ish. Let’s start with the word innovation. And I want to talk a little bit about innovation ish as well. So it’s a word that people throw around like confetti and especially in organizations like Innovation. We want innovation. We want innovation, but they don’t really understand what it means. And our podcast is really about creativity. So we want to talk a little bit, just a little bit, because we’ve had other episodes, Matt around with Monica Kang about the relationship between creativity and innovation.

Dr. Cindy Burnett:
But we really want to revisit this with you to talk about what is innovation and what is innovation ish?

Dr. Tessa Forshaw:
Yeah, I hear that. I mean, it does really get, I think, thrown around. Like confetti is the best description I’ve heard actually in a long time. And I think that’s sort of part of why we used the word and added the ish on the End is because it is, it’s being said everywhere. People don’t always know what they mean. There’s a big sort of mythology and idea that comes with it. We’ve noticed, at least in our students, like innovation, like that’s a, I can’t, you know, do that. I don’t have a billion dollar circular building with glass walls and free cold brew.

Dr. Tessa Forshaw:
Like how could I do that? We really noticed that. So that was sort of for us where we went with the ish. But at its core, the book is about creative problem solving and innovation as a, as one of the sort of goals ish of creative problem solving. And, and while we talk a lot about creativity, I think we definitely mean creative problem solving and less sort of artistic creativity that we, you know, we might talk about when we’re talking about things like painting or music.

Richard Braden:
I think creativity is what underlies our ability to do innovation. Innovation is, I’ve heard literally thousands of definitions asking that question to a room of people. And almost all of them, I think are the right definition. So I don’t think it’s narrowly defined. Maybe that’s the confetti. But it’s creating something that’s really new to the world, something that is, hasn’t been done before. It’s a new take or solves a problem in a new way. And so inherently in that it’s really uncertain what you’re going to end up with at the end.

Richard Braden:
So you’re kind of diving into this pool of uncertainty. And I think the way you get to it is by using creativity. So the skills and the cognitive processes of creativity. And so that looks like being, having divergent thinking where you’re like expanding out on the number of ideas and then converging back down. Because you can’t like keep converging forever. We, we use an analogy of, of an airplane. So convergence would be the drag, the weight, gravity pulling down on the plane, and divergence would be getting up in the sky and going toward, toward really lofty places where it is more ambiguous. And so you’re constantly going back and forth between those.

Richard Braden:
But if that’s all you have, you’re in a helicopter. You’re not in an airplane because you’re not going anywhere. You’re just going up and down. And so executive function is the third cognitive process that moves you forward and gets you to accomplishing things. And you need all three of those to actually go somewhere. If you want to get to the innovation, navigate your way, there’s, you have to have all three working in concert and have everyone that’s working on the project aligned in it. So I think that creativity is a necessary component for being able to achieve innovation.

Dr. Matthew Warwood:
Okay. Rather than going down a rabbit hole having another conversation about creativity and innovation and semantics, I just want to throw out there with the word creativity and innovation. When you’re going and conducting a workshop or facilitating a workshop with a client, with which word do you tend to use more and why?

Dr. Tessa Forshaw:
So I would love to just jump in I, I from the class side. So we really intentionally talk about creativity, innovation and design as like three core things in our class, advertising and or our class description and syllabus. And that’s an intentional component because underlying them, a lot of them have the same to Rich’s point processes, cognitive processes that are involved, all the same tools and techniques that are used across the disciplines. And, and I think that, you know, when we get stuck in like is it design thinking or is it human centered design or is it this? We kind of lose the forest through the trees and the point. But I think with clients, one thing that I’ve really noticed and Rich, maybe this isn’t a fair observation and you’ll be like, no, Tessa. But what I really noticed is that they love the word innovation, which way more than they love the word creativity. And so for them it’s because innovation is the goal. It’s the outcome that they’re trying to achieve.

Dr. Tessa Forshaw:
And creativity is, or creative problem solving is the thing, is the mechanism by which we get there. But they’re kind of like we don’t care about the mechanism. We want to flashlight on the outcome that we’re trying to achieve as an organization.

Richard Braden:
I think that’s true. And so sometimes they have the, we use the proprietary 3xj process or the, the, there’s all kinds of different frameworks and things that exist out there. And I think I’m pretty agnostic to what we call that thing because it’s how do we actually get in and do it? How do we change people’s minds? To work in this way is the more important factor. So I think there’s a little bit of language neutrality and I think often we will Tess mentioned put out there that we’re talking about design today. Of course some people you may know this as and then list off a few different things, but whatever the language is that they use is going to connect with them. And I think it’s not here to say we’re not here to say you’re wrong or that process isn’t it. We’re here to say they all have some amount of value. But if we collectively pull together what we know, we can include the pieces that are helpful to each one.

Richard Braden:
But you have to really be agentic about how you go about your process to create innovation, to do design, whatever language you want to use. So I don’t. I think anti dogma would be part of it. But I think, Tess, you are spot on. Innovation is kind of the hot word, or has been for quite a while.

Dr. Matthew Warwood:
I love that. And I think I know that I sometimes when I go into schools, for example, I don’t use the word creativity, and I certainly wouldn’t use the word creativity. Believe it or not, with, you know, a faculty that’s primarily art teachers, I might go in and have conversations about design or I might go down with innovation. And I. And I do think it’s important to be aware with that. I mean, even within business, we’ve had conversations about really entrepreneurial mindsets. Being an entrepreneur, it’s the same thing, right? And so that’s another word that sometimes we talk about. And really, it’s about bringing to life something new that hopefully can, to your point, solve a problem.

Dr. Matthew Warwood:
And I, and I do think it’s important for our listeners out there to think about that, to be open. Okay. About changing what words you use, because ultimately, you’re promoting a process to meet an end goal, and the way it’s phrased or promoted probably should change based on the different groups that you’re working with. So I appreciate you.

Dr. Cindy Burnett:
I would love to push back on all of you. So this is fun. And I love having these conversations because they’re great intellectual debates. So I mentioned to Tessa that I taught at the center for Applied Imagination at Buffalo State University for 20 years before I went out on my own. And obviously they were the basis of the Osborne Parnes creative problem solving process. And I am. I would say I’m also process agnostic. And at the same time, when I look at innovation and creativity in the words I think people use innovation because it sounds good.

Dr. Cindy Burnett:
It sounds like what you’re saying is, it sounds like, oh, yeah, I want to be innovative because that’s sort of an appeal, a more appealing word. Whereas when I always talk, especially with educators, it’s like, you cannot have any sort of innovation without creativity. So my recommendation, or my thought is, why don’t we spend more time talking about creativity and making the creative side more appealing and showing them. You know, Matt and I are working on a book right now and showing them, you know, there, there’s hard, complex stuff that you have to go through in order to get to that innovation and making that more appealing and exciting so that it’s not about just like this flashy word. Right. So there’s an equal balance between creativity and innovation. So I always go in with, I don’t teach innovation, I teach creativity. I will teach you everything you need to know to get to a place where you can put something forward.

Dr. Cindy Burnett:
So it’s a totally different perspective and I’d love to know what your thoughts are on that.

Dr. Tessa Forshaw:
Yeah, I mean, I don’t feel like it’s a totally different perspective. To me. I talk about creative problem solving very intentionally. Even though that’s a very cumbersome creative problem solving, you know, right to write. I’m very intentional about that use. I’m also process agnostic. I think all of those, all of these processes are versions, are maps of creative problem solving that some have done before. I agree.

Dr. Tessa Forshaw:
I think it’s really important to talk about creative problem solving. And I know I’m biased as a cognitive scientist, right? Because like there are literally ways that we can support our brain to engage in creative problem solving and things that we can do to really stamping it down and make it not happen. There are things that we can be doing to help foster it in others. There are you know, all sorts of, I think, realities of the skills that are necessary in creative problem solving that are also really essential to, to life today. I mean, we were chatting a little bit about that before the show. Like I think fundamentally the skills of being able to hold multiple truths at once, being able to navigate ambiguity, solve novel problems, like all of those are essential to today. So I, I’m with you. I’m all about the like creative problem solving.

Dr. Tessa Forshaw:
But I think the ish came from for us is sort of a nod to this. Like we, we thought the idea of like the word innovation or the big sexy word that gets thrown around in HBR articles is kind of not helping anybody. Because by most people, if you say to them like, okay, like we’re going to get a little bit creative right now, they’re kind of like, oh yeah, I can kind of sort of do that. But if you say to them like we’re going to do innovation today or I need you to be innovative, we’re falling behind on Gen AI get come up with innovative ideas. A lot of people go, I can’t do that. Like I’m freezing. And so the ish was sort of a nod to like the terminology isn’t working. For us, it’s not the definition.

Dr. Tessa Forshaw:
It’s not the only thing to care about. Like, let’s kind of move past that and start caring about what’s underlying it and how we do it.

Dr. Cindy Burnett:
So to build on that, I noticed in your book that you have Both looked at 80 or 90 different creative problem solving methodologies, and you found a similarity. So can you talk a little bit about what you uncovered?

Richard Braden:
Sure. I think we. We started with our students coming in, and they would. We’d be teaching and they’d say, well, what about this process? Or I’ve used this at work, and we take a look at it and we start to explore it and unpack that and put it in context of what we were talking about. And then it happened again, and it happened again. And then we were like, let’s. Let’s dig into this. We had them go out and bring first assignment.

Richard Braden:
Everyone go out and find one and bring it in. Let’s do some analysis and have them create their own. And what we realized is there was so much similarity that we thought this. We have to take a deeper look. And so we went in and coded, like, the first 10 or 15, and it looked. We saw a signal in there, so we went on and did the rest. And so now I think the total is over 80. And what we saw is that there are six really common mindsets that are showing up, and that all of those processes and frameworks are sort of a forcing function to get you to align and change the mindset you approach in.

Richard Braden:
And so what evolved out of that was the important thing is that you align on a mindset. Whatever you call it, whatever it is, that is the thing that will help you get to the next step. Now, the six that are in the book are the ones that were most frequently the common denominator across all of those. But it’s not all of the mindsets you. I mean, you can’t list all of the mindsets that could exist because you can make them up as you go. And so I think the main thing is that those six are good ones to include. They have a high probability of being part of your evolution to create that innovation. But if you keep your team aligned, it really gives you an advantage in staying on track and working together and collaborating on getting to your innovation.

Richard Braden:
I mean, I think of it like when we go to the grocery store my kids and I love, let’s wander every aisle and inspect everything that we might want to get, and we get a lot more groceries than we do. My wife is Much more surgical. And she is like, we need bread, eggs, milk, two other things. Let’s get in, let’s get out, and off we go. And those are different mindsets we’re entering the store with. But it really changes the nature of what we do in there. And so in that same way, picking the mindset you do next dictates how you’re going to go about the next step of solving your problem.

Dr. Tessa Forshaw:
And just to sort of back up a little on. On that. I think one thing that’s really interesting about the application of mindsets to creative problem solving is, or where this came from is Rich and I share a belief that creative problem solving is inherently a learning process. You are engaging in learning a lot about a subject matter and an area and human needs and experiences to be able to start to solve a problem in it creatively. You are coming up with ideas and learning about possible new solutions that could exist and combining them and exploring and making new connections. You are also learning a lot about how your ideas exist in the world when you test them and you watch them. And there’s. Inherent in this work is a lot of learning.

Dr. Tessa Forshaw:
And so in the cognitive science of learning, as you would know, like mindset is a really important part of how we think about learning often. Most famous is Carol Dweck’s growth mindset, which is an amazing mindset. But it’s, to Bridge’s point, certainly not the only mindset. We think of mindsets as the cognitive frameworks by which we see the world that guide our attention, perceptions, interactions, and decision making. So different mindsets would mean we pay attention to different things, we perceive different things. You know, we attend to different things, we make different decisions and choices. And. And it’s quite compelling, the scientific literature on mindsets.

Dr. Tessa Forshaw:
You people often think of memory as like this objective video camera of, like, I saw an event happen, and I objectively recorded it in my mind. But actually, mindsets play such a huge role in noticing what we pay attention to and perceive and how we engage with what’s going on around us. And so when we were reading these, all of these process maps that existed out there, what we really noticed was once you got past the picture and you started, like, reading the process and how the people were describing what their process was, what we really started to see through that lens of, like, creative problem solving as learning was, oh, they were really trying to encourage their participants of this process to engage in a mindset. And they were doing that by naming a phase and putting an activity that helped you get There, so they were scaffolding it. But really what was underneath a lot of these steps was this idea of, like, it’s really helpful if you take these mindsets in creative problem solving.

Dr. Matthew Warwood:
So let’s, you know, to put this a little bit into a school environment, let’s just take some of the mindsets that are applicable to identifying and noticing problems, because we, you know, we know we have to notice problems. I think that some students, at least in my experience, can have challenges with that, and we know why that might be. So what are some of the things that a busy teacher could do to cultivate noticing problems? And the reason why I bring that up is my biggest fear, of course, is, is with. With AI, if, if we’re going to go to AI to say, give us topic, give us a problem, we might find ourselves obviously working on problems that are already known and lose our capacity to see things that have yet to be solved. And that’s one of the things that I think is really important. So if you could just put that in a teaching and learning environment, what are some of the things that we could do as educators to note to one, elevate the importance of that mindset with AI, but B, just cultivate it, because there’s a point at which I think we can start losing that mindset a little bit.

Dr. Tessa Forshaw:
So for me, one mindset that I think is really important in problem finding is what we in the book describe as an insights mindset. And so that’s the ability to look at different data. And whether that be like you’ve met with people and interviewed them, or you’ve observed something happening in your classroom, or you’re looking at a story and you’re trying to comprehend what’s going on. So the insights mindset is about finding the sort of sticky and interesting insights from that, from that data. And. And so one thing is to sort of name first for everyone in the class, like, what we’re looking for in here are we want to go into this with the mindset of finding things that are interesting that make us want to, like, you know, follow that lead a little bit more that are maybe surprising. We didn’t expect to see that or to hear that or for that to be there, or perhaps they’re in tension with each other. It’s one piece of.

Dr. Tessa Forshaw:
One piece of information is saying, you know, it’s this way, and another one is saying it’s that way. And inherent in that could be really interesting. So we find that naming the mindset and helping students sort of practice what it feels like to adopt it can be helpful. So in this case, it could be using a story of a paragraph or two of something from a text and saying, like, what were some of the things that were surprising in here? Let’s read this with the lens of we’re looking for surprises, right? And then having the students emergently sort of surface some of the things that were surprising to him. That moment there, that’s practicing that sort of insight. So mindset that looking for insights, looking for things that are sticky. So that would be a very small but concrete way that I think we could see that apply in a K12 environment.

Dr. Matthew Warwood:
And I love that, particularly the word practice, because one of the things I sometimes have found it challenging is there’s. When you’re talking about, you know, design research and, you know, if you take the time, design thinking, empathy, let’s go. Surveys, data, create Personas. That’s quite difficult sometimes when you know you’re a middle school, high school student, you don’t necessarily have the level of expertise a for your subject domain. The teacher of the classroom environment doesn’t always have the time to which to dedicate your ability to go out and get all of that data. But what I’m hearing, what I really liked about that, Tess, is that it’s, that’s okay. There are still ways to practice it. And therefore, as you further the expertise and land in the domain where it is you’re going to be creative or engage in creative problem solving, it’s.

Dr. Matthew Warwood:
You’re not practicing it for the first time. You’re now equipped with even more knowledge that hopefully can make that practice even more successful.

Richard Braden:
I think another mindset that falls in there and matches well with that is one about learning from others in the world. So going out and learning through observations as well as through talking with people. And this summer I ran or I was leading the innovation Piece of Innovation Leadership and Entrepreneurship camp for high school students. And the day I was going to introduce this to them, I walked in. The first thing I did is I called half the students over and I said, I want you to take a walk across the parking lot. Just stroll out there. I want you to observe all of the details and things that you hadn’t seen before. Just be really observational and notice everything.

Richard Braden:
And the other group, I told them, the owners of this building have hired you as a team to redesign the parking lot to make it work better. I’d like you to take a walk across the parking lot. So they both made the same walk and they came back with Wildly different observations. And we talked through that and then they went through an insights process. Sifting through and trying to come up with what things they could take on as a challenger, what they might want to solve as a problem to show. Here’s a practice in how we start out guides what we notice and observe and what problems we’re going to find. And that you can do. The same person can do multiple of those and pull on different things that feed into that insights process.

Richard Braden:
So there’s many ways I think you can just really practice and hone this skill of noticing and seeing the problems and spotting them.

Dr. Cindy Burnett:
That is so much fun. And I would love to hear a few of the ideas they came up with. How are they different?

Richard Braden:
We happen to have construction also going on just beyond the parking lot. So the redesign in the parking lot, there was a lot about how the spaces were laid out and they wanted to redo the lines on it and make it easier for flow. The other ones saw that the cars were all concentrated in one area and that they got to the other side and there were no other cars. And so they were talking about how getting in and out would be easier if they were more spaced out. So I don’t know if they were great architectural parking lot design ideas because that’s not what my role is. But I was just thrilled that they had found so many different things that they were the ones that noticed it. And so part of that is just empowering them to. You can look and spot problems.

Richard Braden:
And I think kids in school can come up with incredible ideas. And I think that I don’t want to speak for all teachers, but by and large, I think people underestimate a little the ability that kids in school can have on creating things in the world. I do remember working with a K6 group and we paired up kindergartners with. It was K2, 4 and then the first, third and fifth graders together. And they interviewed their teachers. So they’re learning and their interactions mindset was about having a conversation. And so they interviewed the teachers. One of the teachers was talking about their morning routine and how they didn’t have enough time.

Richard Braden:
And the kids came up with it through drawing pictures. Their brainstorming and prototyping was they just drew a picture of making their teacher’s life easier. And they came up with a 13 hour clock so that they had an extra hour in the morning, which is incredibly creative and I love that idea. And I mean, if we all collectively decided 13 hours and now meetings are slightly shorter, that there’s an idea that could work, it wouldn’t do exactly what they thought it would do, but you could see the empathy and the understanding that it was about timing for them. And I think, I love that there is a really easy to access version of creativity that happens with young children that we tend to drift away from as social pressures come in. As you get older, you know about sixth grade and that’s still in there. I think that’s part of what we are trying to get out in the world is that’s in there. It might be a little dusty or dormant, but we can dust that off and we can access that.

Richard Braden:
And by intentionally shifting your mindset to this is what I’m doing now, we can give you access to that so that you can bring it forward. And once you practice it the way you had mentioned before, practice is the way to bring it out consistently to make it that ongoing everyday habit. And I think innovation is better if it’s just infused as an everyday activity, not a special. It’s innovation day. And now I go back to working. I think integrating it is the best way.

Dr. Cindy Burnett:
So I really hear the words around creative confidence with that. And I’m thinking about the teachers listening right now saying, okay, give me an intervention or a strategy or something that when I see a student losing their creative confidence that they could, what could, what could they do? What could the teacher do?

Dr. Tessa Forshaw:
Often when we think about creative confidence, I think we do think about, we need to sort of attack that head on. What we, I’ve not done this in a K12 environment. This is what I’m talking about is the technique I use in origin, I use with university students. So I think take this with a grain of salt. But so instead of attacking or addressing it head on in that way, we tend to alter our pedagogical practice to be about creating the conditions necessary for which the students can access easily and sort of fall into the practice of maybe the mindset that we’re doing and have a moment of seeing something differently or of, you know, coming up with an idea and in through an ideas mindset and then having that moment of recognition that they can. And so for us, what that means is we adopt an approach that is typically called explore before explain. It’s certainly not our. We didn’t name it, I think NASA did.

Dr. Tessa Forshaw:
So if it’s good enough for astronauts, it’s good enough for us. But the idea is that you in, you engage, you have the students bring in what they already know. So you build from an asset based approach on a Topic. So for example, we might say, all right, so today we’re going to go out in the world and learn from others. I want you to come up with a plan. What are the ways that you go out in the world and you learn from others and come up with a plan for how you might approach that today. And so they’re bringing in everything they know about how they exist in the world and got away from others. And we might ask questions like, you know what? Like, who’s had a job in retail? And folks will be like, oh, you know, I have.

Dr. Tessa Forshaw:
And I was like, great. Did you have to talk to people and learn about customers? Oh yeah, I did. Okay. That’s a way I’ve learned from others. And they’ll, you know, do you. Who on here likes to read from Reddit? Oh, I love Reddit. I use it for everything. You know, ask me any things are my favorite.

Dr. Tessa Forshaw:
Great, that sounds like a way that you learn in the world. So we sort of start that process. We have them come together and create ways of going out and in the world and, and then we have them do a thing that they know how to do, like a move. They already have something that is from their existing knowledge, experience and abilities and go and do that in the world with this very specific mindset of going out to learn from something and then they come back and they’re success. Because we’re building on an asset based approach. We’ve had them bring in the existing knowledge that they already have and build on it and then achieve something through this lens of sort of the mind of a mindset. And so that typically is, if we find a student is struggling with some creative confidence, we will sort of double down into that. What do you already know? Like, and how do we bring that forward and then like shift the mindset that we’re using to practice it and to go out.

Dr. Tessa Forshaw:
And because they’re doing something, they know they have these moments of success. I think often with creative education or creative problem solving education, we really focused on teaching rapid round robin prototyping, empathy mapping, these like specific tools that have sexy names and can be cognitively complex. And that can mean that students are like, it’s a new tool, it’s a new mindset, it’s a new thing. I don’t know how to do that. And so we really try to approach it from this perspective of you’re an asset filled human who knows things.

Dr. Cindy Burnett:
Let’s start.

Dr. Matthew Warwood:
And I just, I just want to build on that a little bit, Tess, because I totally agree I think one of the challenges, particularly when when design thinking, which got really popular as we know, there was this desire to go and practice the entire design thinking process. And to your point, it becomes about a step of procedures. And one of the things that I’ve always felt as an educator who teaches design thinking classes, not ideos design thinking, but to your point, the mindsets and also created problem solving classes. I recognized in my mind the limitations of the classroom environment. I mean to get through all of these stages. And one of the things with your story Richard as well when you’re talking about the parking lot is you’re listening about real world application. When you go into the parking lot, you’re actually now have an opportunity. So one creating an opportunity where there is a real world application to nurture and engage this mindset.

Dr. Matthew Warwood:
So I really like that. And to that end, I wanted to shift a little bit more to the cognitive sciences and talk about the bias piece because that’s something we know as adults, we suffer from bias. You’ve listed all the different biases that you tend to see manifest in the creative process. And I’ve recognized particularly in today’s world that we have to help students recognize that they do also suffer from bias. Despite their background, they suffer from bias. So how does that influence how they apply all of the things that we’re teaching to the real world? So I wonder if you could talk a little bit about A the different biases that you’ve referenced in the book and B you know, educators across the grades how they might try and again raise awareness of these biases in the classroom.

Dr. Tessa Forshaw:
There’s like 50 odd something known cognitive biases. Right. Like, and that means that when I say known, that doesn’t mean they’re the ones that are like that exist it and there could be way more. They’re the ones that have been like identified by a scientist, studied, you know, then replicated in another study, had instruments created that have been validated and then you know, identified again very rigorous sort of sides to identify that they’re very common biases that humans have. And I think the thing about cognitive biases is is a few fold like one is we all have them. There is even actually a bias for the people who think that they don’t have a bias. But we are all bias filled. And that is okay.

Dr. Tessa Forshaw:
Right? Let me just say that one more time. It’s actually okay that we have bias because the reason we have bias is because our brains tend to routinize and automatize things to help us with very quick pattern recognition and decision making that is helpful in so many parts of our day to day life. So we don’t want to get rid of our bias and we also can’t, can’t get rid of it. What we want is to have awareness of bias and to practice the awareness of bias and, and to in practice that one component of the book is metacognition. To practice metacognitively what it means to identify if we have a bias, if it’s helping us or hurting us, and how it is or isn’t useful in the current moment or activity that we’re doing. So that sort of. I just wanted to name that because I think so many people want to be like, I’m not biased, what are you talking about? Like bias is bad. Or they’ll say how do I get rid of my bias? You don’t want to get rid of your bias.

Dr. Tessa Forshaw:
That’s sort of just a level set. But my, my sense is, I think a couple of biases that we see a lot that come up in creative problem solving particularly so one is design fixation and that is a tendency to love your idea and try to make it work no matter what because often it’s sort of because of things like sunk cost fallacy, like you’ve invested a lot of time and effort and thinking into it already. Another is a typical bias that we have to tend to agree with the first thing that we hear more than the second or sub or subsequent or to put those subsequent things in context of the first. So and funnily enough, like chat gtbt GPT really does this because it’s trained on humans. If you give it like five transcripts to code to like to tell us what’s in them, It’ll put transcripts 2, 3 and 4 in reference to, in reference to 1. So it starts with the first one. It anchors, it’s called anchoring bias. It has its anchors in this like very first thing and then it puts everything in reference to that.

Dr. Tessa Forshaw:
So that’s a really common bias that we see. Another is the tendency to elevate the perspectives of the people that sort of look and sound like you. So when people look like us or have similar backgrounds to us or went to the same university as us, or you know, have similar view on the world as us and we have an affinity in some way, whatever reason, maybe it’s just that we both like coffee, but if we have an affinity with someone, we have a tendency to weight their perspectives more highly than others as well. So These are some biases that we see pop up a lot. And. And the way that we really intentionally try to practice awareness of those biases is through incorporating metacognition throughout our. Both our coursework and our work with clients. And that often looks like.

Dr. Tessa Forshaw:
Not waiting until the very end. Like, I’m. I’m sure we’ve all done this, where you have that lovely reflection class at the end where everyone is, like, uses a thinking routine and says something soft and fluffy about the class, and it’s delightful. And as an educator, you’re like, yes, I’m amazing. Or in a team, often you’ll have, like, a splashdown at the end of a sprint or a retro retrospective review or a stage gate. What we try to do is bring the metacognition into the messy middle of the doing of the design work. So making space for it every day after every single thing that we do. And we’ll ask things like, you know, if we’re doing interviews, we might be like, whose voices are we elevating? Are we missing any voices right now? Are we waiting some voices more intentionally than others? Do we.

Dr. Tessa Forshaw:
Do we think that we have a full range of perspectives here? Or we might ask ourselves, students, what do you expect to happen? And then we’ll ask them after they’ve done the thing, how did that line up to what you expected? Are you anchoring the results in what you thought would happen? What if that isn’t what you thought would happen? How would that change how you interpret this? So we use a lot of metacognitive questioning as our primary way to help help us overcome bias.

Dr. Cindy Burnett:
So before we go, we have a final question, which we ask all of our guests, which is, what was your most creative educational experience? And tell us a little bit of details about it.

Richard Braden:
I have two experiences that I think are sort of landmark for me. The first happened when I was getting engineering degrees and I took a class on software design. It was the only class at the time that had design in the title. And in there, we did an activity where we were engineers designing, and we had to design a device that would move an injured person. And it was on a flat surface. It didn’t have to move very fast. It just had to get them to rescue. And we went through stages, and then they’d give us a little more information, and we’d redesign and redesign, but nobody asked any questions.

Richard Braden:
And finally the last thing they said was, this flat services vertical because it’s for rescuing climbers. So everything we had done up to that point had to be completely thrown out because it was supposed to be. Everybody had things on wheels. And it was this revelation that unless you look more deeply and ask questions, you don’t know the problem you’re solving. And if you don’t know the problem, you cannot solve it. That was pivotal in sort of a design frame. But the second one was a class that really pivoted my entire life. That happened in 2002.

Richard Braden:
I took my first improv class ever. And I can remember most of that class. It hit me really hard. And I remember activities where I opened a box and a groundhog leapt out and ran around the stage. And it was the beginning of a long thread of exploring improv. And I went on to have a dozen years of teaching and performing improv and teaching thousands and thousands of people beginning improv where that creative confidence that you mentioned, people come in terrified to that class. And so creating a safe environment for them to start to explore because it’s very vulnerable. Your creativity is on display.

Richard Braden:
Everything you say, you fear your own and others judgment on it. And so it’s a proving ground of complete ambiguity, not knowing what’s going on. And so it really helps develop all of those skills. So for a teacher, you mentioned a thing you can do to help the practice is some theater and improv activities. And then of course to talk about them and what was going on and, and use that as a basis for building some of the fundamental skills for creativity.

Dr. Tessa Forshaw:
Mine is from my 8th grade voice and speech teacher, Ms. Mina was her name or is her name. And, and I remember going into this class which was sort of like a small group elective situation and there’s just a few of us in there and expecting to be given like the play that we were going to do and we had to learn the parts or at least like the choices of what we might be able to pick as a group. And instead she was like, well, what are you going to do? And we were all like what do you mean? And we couldn’t decide what we were. And we were sort of arguing. And she asked this one question and she said, who said that it had to be one full play? Can’t it be components of lots of plays? And I remember that moment really distinctly changed my perspective on understanding what is possible out there and not pre imposing constraints on myself when I don’t even know that they exist for sure. And I think she, what she did was very simple. She knew where we were going, but she was, I think, trying to let us have that experience of, of it’s a we want to do different things.

Dr. Tessa Forshaw:
We’re having this argument. We’re imposing a rule that she never, ever set because it’s a norm of society and typically what theater looks like. Then she said, well, why do you think it has to be that way? Like, who said it has to be that way? And all of us were like, oh my gosh, it doesn’t. And so, yeah, that’s really, really, really stuck with me.

Dr. Matthew Warwood:
So, Tess and Rich, thank you so much. This has been a wonderful conversation. If you’ve enjoyed this conversation with Tessa and Rich, check out their book Innovation Ish, which we will link in our show notes. And be sure to follow us on social media, where we’re now sharing regular snippets from our interviews in the form of short, engaging clips. And as always, don’t forget to subscribe on your favorite podcasting platform and sign up for our Extra Fuel newsletter to keep fueling your creativity in your classroom. My name is Dr. Matty Werwood.

Dr. Cindy Burnett:
And my name is Dr. Cindy Burnett. This episode was produced by Cindy Burnett and Matthew Warwood. Our podcast assistant is Anne Fernando and our editor is Sheikh.