386: Unlock Your Creative and Analytical Skills to Drive Innovation with Tessa Forshaw and Rich Braden

In a world that constantly demands breakthrough solutions, do you ever feel like innovation is reserved for a select few, or that you’re simply not "creative enough"? 

This week’s guests are here to set the record straight: that we are all capable of creative thinking if we just give ourselves permission and a little guidance. 

Tessa Forshaw and Rich Braden are the co-authors of Innovation-ish: How Anyone Can Create Breakthrough Solutions to Real Problems in the Real World. Tessa is a cognitive scientist exploring how we work, learn, and innovate. She is a co-founder of Harvard's Next Level Lab and teaches Design Thinking and Innovation at Harvard, DCE, and Stanford D School. Rich is the founder and CEO of People Rocket, which helps leaders and teams overcome innovation hesitation; there, they guide clients through the innovation-ish approach, a flexible human-centered framework built on mindset shifts, small adaptive steps, and reflective practice he also teaches at Stanford D School.

In this episode, we're cutting through the myth of the "right-brained" innovator. You’ll learn how to integrate the six innovation mindsets into your work, overcome "innovation hesitation," and embrace your "whole brain" approach to problem-solving. This conversation offers practical tools to foster fresh thinking within your team, create space for ideas to thrive, and give you the concrete tools to move those ideas forward, no matter your role.

Plus, in the extended episode, Tessa and Rich share tips for normalizing failure and using “F-Up Nights” to build a culture that learns from failure.

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Conversation Topics

• (00:00) Introduction – Why experimentation beats opinion-driven decision-making
• (01:18) The root of spiraling: fear, assumptions, and cognitive bias
• (04:02) Why small experiments create big clarity
• (07:10) The danger of optimizing parts of a system instead of the whole
• (10:42) A real-world case study: redesigning a supply chain through small tests
• (15:45) Why most ideas fail and why that’s a good thing
• (18:04) How emotional attachment to ideas sabotages good decisions
• (21:30) Cognitive caution: What your brain is really doing when you avoid failure
• (25:14) Practicing emotional regulation while testing ideas
• (28:33) Creating a culture where testing > guessing
• (30:20) [Extended only] How leaders can use data to reduce conflict and opinion-driven debate
• (36:24) [Extended only] Normalizing failure and learning from it as a team
• (40:18) [Extended only] Global “F-Up Nights” and how leaders can model healthy failure

📚 Additional Resources:

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Keep up with Tessa Forshaw & Rich Braden

• Follow Tessa on LinkedIn here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tessaforshaw/
• Follow Rich on LinkedIn here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/richardcoxbraden/
• Get a copy of Innovation-ish here: https://a.co/d/5Dhg9wH

Guest Bonus: 1st Chapter of Innovation-ish: How Anyone can Create Breakthrough Solutions to Real Problems in the Real World

Innovation-ish is your no-nonsense guide to unlocking your innate creativity. This book shows you how to solve problems and generate solutions in a huge variety of personal and professional situations. Tessa and Rich demystify the myths tha