The Truth About Innovation Mindsets with Dr. Tessa Forshaw and Rich Braden

Full Transcript

Emma Zone (00:00):
Innovation is often treated as something out of reach for most, but my guest on today’s episode see it differently. Together, we explore how innovation mindsets are learned and practiced, shaped by cognitive science, classroom experience, and years of work with educators and leaders. Join us as we dig into what it really takes to experiment thoughtfully in learning environments and beyond.
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Welcome to Teach and Learn, a podcast for curious educators brought to you by D2L.
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Each week we’ll meet some of the sharpest minds in the K-20 space. Sharpen your pencils, class is about to begin.
Emma Zone (00:38):
Welcome back to another episode of Teach and Learn. Today, I’m joined by Dr. Tessa Forshaw and Rich Braden, co-authors of Innovation-Ish: How Anyone Can Create Breakthrough Solutions to Real Problems in the Real World. Tessa is a cognitive science at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and a founding scholar of the Next Level Lab, where her work focuses on how adults learn, think, and develop creative problem solving skills across higher education and the workforce. She’s taught design and innovation at Harvard and Stanford. She works closely with institutions and organizations navigating change.
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Rich is a longtime design educator and founder of People Rocket. He teaches innovation and leadership across higher ed and executive learning, including at Harvard, Stanford, Alto University, and London Business School. And his background is really varied. It spans engineering, improv, and leadership development, all of which shapes how people access creativity and apply it in real high stakes contexts. Super excited about this conversation. Tessa, Rich, welcome.
Rich Braden (01:45):
Thank you for having us. It’s great to be here.
Emma Zone (01:47):
Yeah, I’m really excited to dive in. And so, we’re going to just jump right in and get started because I love that you both come to innovation through teaching, not just theory. And so, I think our listeners would love to start out by knowing what were you seeing in your classrooms or learning environments that really made it clear that I guess, innovation needed to be reframed in some way? How did your own teaching experiences really shape that realization? Tessa, I’d love to start with you.
Tessa Forshaw (02:14):
Yeah, thanks so much. So Rich and I have been teaching together for about eight years now. And one of the things that I think really struck us when we started teaching together was that when we would ask this question of hands up if you think you’re creative or if you think you’re an innovator, even in an environment like the Stanford D-School where students have opted into creativity and innovation classes in a design school, in Silicon Valley, we would see at most, a quarter of the hands in the classroom go up. And as we started to work together teaching not just in classrooms like at Stanford and Harvard, but also working together in boardrooms or in corporate learning contexts and things like that, we were seeing the same thing.
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In fact, I was just running a workshop in Melbourne, Australia, which is where I’m from, with a group of amazing female leaders. And I asked this question and only about 10% of hands in the room went up. And it was really, really confronting to everybody because they all realized in that exact moment, oh my gosh, how come only a few of us think this because everybody knew that everyone else in the room was actually an amazing powerhouse innovator creator.
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And what is really interesting to me, Emma, is that when I then ask this question in my five-year-old’s kindergarten classroom on the parents’ week where you get to come in and run a little activity, every kid’s hand goes up. In fact, usually, it’s like both hands and a leg, or they’re standing up and they’re saying, “Me, me, me, I’m creative.” And somehow, we go from that to this 25%, 10% situation. And that said to me that the problem, or I think said to Rich and I, that the problem isn’t, I think, us, it’s not that these students are not innovative or creative. They all are. We see them all be in the subsequent hours and weeks, but actually, that the problem is what we are creating of a mental model around what it means to be innovative and creative.
Emma Zone (04:24):
Love that. And how telling to see that drop off between this joy and embracing of your own persona and your context of being a creative person as a child and what happens along the way that maybe breaks that down over time. That’s really interesting. I’d love to know, I think I’m surprised by that, but not really because I do think that for some, innovation, especially in higher ed and especially in our current climate of higher ed, can feel a bit risky or maybe even out of reach. And clearly, some of what you’ve seen in context demonstrates or suggests that. So I guess I’m curious, and Rich, maybe you can lean into this one a bit. What makes certain academic environments uniquely resistant to experimentation and that innovation and what assumptions tend to get in the way?
Rich Braden (05:20):
Yeah. Well, I think we can safely say it’s not the students, as Tess just pointed out. I was just listening to your episode on Bloom’s Taxonomy being reversed by AI because we’re starting with creativity. And I taught a summer high school leadership and innovation camp, and those kids did incredible stuff with AI and just jumped in and did it. And then we did have to unpack and see what was underneath. So I think it’s not the students being the resistance, it’s the everything else.
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So for one thing, universities work at a pretty slow pace. Classes are planned like six to 12 to 18 months ahead of time. And for good reason, they need to be, we need to put things out there, but that pace is a natural detractor to experimentation. We’ve had classes with a full syllabus and then came up with something three months ahead of time and go, “Oh, we should try…” Oh, but it’s already been printed and there’s a resistance there.
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The second is, I think as a parent, parents have some resistance to experimenting on their children like, “Don’t try this new way and turn my kid into a guinea pig. What if it doesn’t work? What happens in the class next semester?” As well as, “I learned it this way and it worked fine for me.” And so there’s parental and even, it’s shocking, but even in higher ed, parents call about grades and about assignments. And it’s a shocking email to get when it’s like, “I think they’re old enough. You could let them go and handle this one on their own.” But I can understand the concern as well, being a parent myself.
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And I think the third is, it’s harder work. As an educator, you’ve got your lesson plans, you have your decks, you have all the things laid out. Maybe they haven’t changed in four or five years and you’re like, “I know what I’m doing. This is comfortable. I can focus on my research or whatever else I’m working on.” To redo or experiment, I have to do more work and change things. And so, I think all of those sort of move forward.
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I think my antidote to that, I learned when I did my career, I had a side career teaching improv, which my mom taught first, second, and third grade, and she helped me understand teaching and learning and creating lesson plans and that you have to let them go and follow the students. And so, I think naturally, I had a more experimental style from that work coming into this. And so sometimes, I think to Tessa’s frustration and her back to me will come into class one morning and go, “I think maybe we should like totally redo this and try it this way.” And resoundingly, we both go, “Yes, let’s do that.” And I think that that support really helps us with keeping our experimentation upfront.
Emma Zone (08:16):
Yeah, I love that. Well, and just as parents might have that feeling of, “Well, this is how I did it, or this is how I learned.” I think to your point about the faculty as well and the educator and maybe not wanting to make a change to their practice, similar, this is how I was taught. And so, there’s this thing that continues as a result of that. So I think that’s-
Rich Braden (08:41):
My mom had a moment giving her PhD where she was watching a PowerPoint class on experiential learning.
Emma Zone (08:49):
Oh, geez.
Rich Braden (08:50):
The irony of, we can’t let go of it there was palpable.
Tessa Forshaw (08:55):
Yeah. I still see a lot of those around.
Emma Zone (08:58):
Yeah. It happens, right?
Rich Braden (09:01):
Yeah.
Emma Zone (09:02):
So shifting into this notion then of creative problem solving, and we know that maybe there’s either a gap or folks might be resistant to trying certain things, but you all argue that really creative problem solving is actually a learnable skill. It’s not just a personality trait for people who have a personality who are risk averse and they are not risk averse and they love to try new things. It’s not necessarily the personality piece. So how does that really change the way we think about teaching, learning, and really also continuous improvement in higher education? I think we’ve touched on it a bit if you have a faculty who isn’t willing to change course, right?
Tessa Forshaw (09:40):
So one thing about this that I think is really important to start with is that we are socialized into a bunch of different myths about how our brain work that are really unhelpful. There’s a lot of them and we can dive into as many as you like, but the one that I think is really pertinent to creativity and innovation is this idea that you are either right brained or left brained, and therefore, you are either creative or analytical. And this is a term or an idea that is called, in cognitive science, personality-based hemispheric dominance, and it’s utterly untrue. It’s completely unfounded. It’s been repeatedly disproven. So it’s not true. You are not right brained or left brain, and you are not creative or analytical.
Emma Zone (10:26):
I love that. How freeing?
Tessa Forshaw (10:29):
I know, right? And if you don’t believe me, believe the thousands of academics at the hundreds of institutions who’ve done the dozens of studies with hundreds of thousands of FMRIs that tell us this. There is a lot of evidence. And if you don’t believe that, just think about some of the most creative jobs that you can think of in your life. So like a choreographer is a very creative job, but that’s also a very analytical job. They have to think about beats and timing. They have to think about spatial awareness. And if there’s more than one person, they have to think about predictive probability of the movements and the interactions. Those are incredibly analytical components to a creative act.
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On the flip side, if you think about something very, very analytical like engineering often comes up or mathematics, a great example is I think, from Apollo 13, the space capsule, the CO2 scrubber had failed and all of the astronauts were going to die if they didn’t replace it. And so what they did was put all of the engineers in a room with all of the found objects that were on the space capsule, and they made them come up with creative prototypes using these found objects in really different ways to come up with a new CO2 scrubber, which they did successfully. But they also didn’t only just come up with one that would work, there were actually several prototypes that would’ve worked, but one that was really good. That’s very creative and very analytical. So I think this dichotomy is really unhelpful for us as a society.
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And so when we think about the learning sciences, I think what’s really important to consider is that creativity is actually not even a personality trait or a skill, but it’s actually a set of cognitive processes together. So the first process that’s involved is divergent thinking, which is the one that we all think about like, come up with wild ideas, let’s go big, high in the sky. Or like if you think about airplanes and lifts and aerodynamic, it’s like the, we’re going really high up, we’re going really high up, let’s go, let’s go, let’s go. Let’s come up with the biggest moonshot ever. But then just like with an airplane, if you keep going up, if you don’t come down, that’s problematic, right?
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And so, we have convergent thinking, which is a set of thinking processes that are about sorting and categorizing and evaluating. So that’s like gravity in this example of the airplane. You’re coming back down, you’re going to land, you’re going to go into focus, the trees become clearer, they stop being abstract, you can see that that shape is a house, you know what those colors are, you’re becoming much more concrete. And then if you just go up and down like on an airplane, but you don’t go anywhere, that’s not really good either, right? Same in creative problem solving.
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So the third process that’s really essential is what we would call executive function. So that’s things like planning and execution, holding yourself accountable, engaging other people, relationships, using them to move forward, knowing what tasks to complete and when to do them. So really thinking about the moving forward piece.
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So everyone has those three cognitive processes. Some people have strengths in different ones and we can talk about what that means for how we teach it. But I think it’s really important to recognize that all of your students and all of you, yourselves as educators or folks working in educational context have the ability to be creative and that even if you see yourself as the most analytical person in the world, I bet that there is some creativity in your job just like those engineers for Apollo 13.
Emma Zone (14:18):
Right. Love that. Very freeing.
Rich Braden (14:21):
I think as educators too, how do we make sure we address it is to know that those neuromyths, that right left brain is so entrenched that even after you tell people and you explain it to them, you can see the hesitation of like, “But no, I am left brained.” And so it’s really ingrained in there. It becomes part of their identity. Just like that people think they are visual, audio, kinesthetic learners, that is also completely [inaudible 00:14:50].
(14:50):
These identities hold us in place. And so we have to break through that and create experiences where students can demonstrate to themselves that those are not true and that they have this range. And when it first came out, I think it has evolved hopefully since then, but StrengthsFinder had a, let’s build on strengths, which is a great idea, but part of what that philosophy held was it’s not worth the effort to build on things you don’t already have a strength in, so you should just ignore those and only develop the strengths you have. And I think that’s gone the wrong way. That also gives you an identity.
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What we know is we can learn. We have an incredible capacity to learn. Maybe your way in, as Tessa mentioned, is I’m really good at divergent thinking or I’m really good at convergent thinking, and you’ve got a place, a seat at the table of creativity, but then you need to work those other muscles and expand out so you are more well-rounded. You can go with your collaborative team as they go on these other aspects and learn from them through cognitive apprenticeship. Go with the really good divergent thinkers if your strength is more convergent. And so I think you need a well-rounded team all around. And we need to be aware of that in making teams and group work in classes and seeing students for who they are and then seeing who they can be.
Emma Zone (16:16):
Yeah, that’s great. And I think listening to you, I’m reminded of in some ways, part of our roles as educators, wherever you fit on that spectrum, whether you’re doing corporate learning or even parenting, right? Part of it too is helping give those learners permission and courage to take those steps, right?
Rich Braden (16:35):
Yes.
Emma Zone (16:36):
And I know we’ll get into some more about the mindsets here in just a second, but I love that, that it’s not… You don’t have to box a person in and there is some level of freedom when you’re able to say, “Okay, give it a try.” But that’s where the risk part people think, “Oh, but I don’t want to mess it up. I know I’m good at this skillset, so I’m going to stick with that.” Versus, yeah, you may actually be better at certain things than you realize. And if you have that… I love the cognitive apprentice idea, how powerful. Love that.
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And one of the things that when we talked prior to this conversation today that really struck me is, I think Tessa, you said this, you can’t teach a mindset by just putting it on a slide, adding some bullet points, hoping people consume that. So how, from a learning science perspective then, not relying on these neuromyths, do educators really teach innovation mindsets and practice? And I’m curious, as we think about that conversation around courage and encouraging folks to try these different things, what conditions really have to be present?
Tessa Forshaw (17:37):
It’s so funny to me how, many times in my life I have seen a slide about growth mindset to teach kids about growth mindset, that’s literally like a growth mindset is, and then it has like four bullets and like that’s the thing. And you’re like, oh, okay. So I think cognitively, the reason that that’s fascinating is because what that is probably going to teach a student is how to recall what a growth mindset is. So if they’re in a test and they get asked a question, “What’s a growth mindset?” They’re probably going to be able to recall that from the direct instruction. Fine.
(18:16):
But what we actually want to teach, I think, when we’re putting a slide up like that, or at least in our class when we talk about mindsets, what I want to be teaching is how do you access that mindset? How do you know what it feels like to have a growth mindset? How do you know what it feels like to have a fixed mindset in the case of the growth mindset example, and how do you know what it feels like to have either? And so, to do that, we need to really change how we’re approaching teaching it because we need to actually create the conditions in which the learner can practice how to access the mindset.
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So one activity that I think is often really helpful is to have something like, have our students go to the, what would you call it? Like the convenience store kind of thing on campus or something like that, and have them do an activity where they walk in and they need to go in with the mindset of understanding the diversity of offerings in the store. Okay? You got to go in the mindset of seeing all of the diversity of offerings and then have some other students go in with the mindset of getting Tim Tams and coming in as fast as they can, out. Sorry, I had to throw in an Australianism, coming out as fast as they can. Or Rich did this recently with high school students in a parking lot, taking them to the parking lot in a school that needs to be redesigned. What does it look like if we go into this with a mindset of understanding how people use it versus like what happens if we go in with the mindset of like trying to make this architecturally beautiful, right?
(20:03):
You’re going to get like different things at the end of that. And the students then come back to the group and they discuss what they noticed and saw and they realize that they had completely and different experiences in exactly the same place and exactly the same time standing next to each other. And that’s because mindsets cognitively alter what we pay attention to, like what information we choose to process because we choose things that are based on our mindset and what we’re trying to do. They choose how we perceive that information, how we internalize it. They influence what decisions we make, what things we might say, how we show up. And as a result, completely shift our experiences.
(20:51):
So the first thing we need to do is help learners, a lot of whom may not have exposure to the impact of mindset, especially we know that is true for learners who are from typically marginalized or vulnerable populations, help them really understand what it means to have a mindset. So that’s the first thing we need to do.
(21:09):
And then the second is, if we’re having a classroom where we’re teaching innovation, we need to create conditions in which they can experience the different mindsets of innovation. So for us, one of those mindsets, for example, is about abundance, coming up with as many things as possible. So we need to create conditions, hold a space, set up activities, etc, that lead them into it to know what it feels like, to be in a place where they are going for abundance, going for wild ideas, coming for everything. That’s the whole focus, that’s how they should come up so that they know what that feels like.
(21:50):
And then we need to come back together as a group and unpack what just happened? How did that feel? How did you access it? Was it hard? Where was it sticky? How does that feel compared to your normal mindset? So this approach is called explore before explain, and it’s really essential to all sort of mindset or any kind of habit of mind or cognitive thinking kind of teaching. And it’s not developed by us, it’s from NASA. And so I often say to my students, if it’s good enough for astronauts, it’s good enough for you.
Emma Zone (22:24):
Yes. Yeah, I love that. And that idea of trying something, doing something first and then being able to step back to try to process or make sense of it. But also, like you said, leaving that space for the meaning making to occur. So I’m curious in hearing this, it’s reminding me a bit, and maybe I’m totally off, but I think we hear the phrase metacognition all the time in teaching and learning, and not everyone might know what that is, first of all. So I’d love just from your perspectives, as both of you have engaged in this work, what does that actually mean? How is that different from just cognition? And what does that effective teaching of metacognition look like? So in that explore and explain exercise or environment, does metacognition then play a role in that in terms of post? Is that part of the explain? Would love to hear more on your thoughts on metacognition.
Tessa Forshaw (23:17):
Metacognition, I agree. It’s often used as a bit of a buzzword to mean reflection. People often, if they’re a little bit more astute, might think it means thinking about your thinking. Actually, what metacognition is the thinking, monitoring and adjusting of your thinking, feelings, decisions, and actions. So it’s not just like thinking about your thinking, not just like, “Oh, I had that thought. I wonder why I had that thought. That’s interesting.” It’s actually a lot more than that. So in the case of creative problem solving, it might be something like, last time I approached this kind of problem, what was the strategy that I used? Was that a helpful strategy or not a helpful strategy? How would I change aspects of that strategy to fit it to this problem based on its unique things? How will I know if the strategy’s worked? Okay, now let me have a go at going about it.
(24:18):
So the last thing I’ll say about metacognition before I hand it over to Rich is just that, you cannot be cognitive and meta cognitive at the same time. It’s not possible. It’s not possible. It really, really is not possible. It’s different types of thinking circuitry and you’re engaging different parts of your brain and we know that humans can’t multitask, we cannot parallel process. That’s a another neuromyth. You cannot do both things at once. And so educators, one of the biggest mistakes that they make is that they decide to throw in a bit of metacognition into their reflection or into their course, and they throw it into the middle of students being cognitive. And so the reflection they get is cognitive reflection. Like, “We went here, we did this, we met this person, they said that, I thought the class was fun.” That’s what you get. So if you want metacognition in your class deeply, you have to make a lot of intentional space for it. So Rich, how do we do that?
Rich Braden (25:30):
Yeah. Well, I think reflection at the end is a great thing. Excuse me. It’s helpful. And what we saw is that the students that, when we would stop in and coach, we would ask them questions and ask them to engage in metacognition, they would start figuring it out and solving things and come up with better solutions that would work well together. They would get farther in their work. And I think you still use this term, but Tessa coined this term of active metacognition to put a, this is not just a thing at the end. This should be throughout the entire process. And like developing any kind of a practice, you need coaching and help and practice at doing it because at first, you do a thing and then you stop and you reflect on it. And then soon, you can start to have moments of stopping in the middle to reflect on it.
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And as you develop this ability, it becomes more natural that you are naturally engaging of, “Hey, how is this going? I think we could adjust it.” And making little micro adjustments all the way through. And that’s when it really becomes a powerful tool. So, it’s easy with almost anything to reduce it down to a short phrase like thinking about your thinking, but when you dig in and really start to explore it, it’s more helpful. So for educators, we can start to help that process of bringing people along to start an activity and after two minutes, stop and have them check in, see how it’s going and if they want to make an adjustment and moving them through it and building it in throughout, I think is a great scaffolding of how you can start to teach it.
(27:22):
You can’t just give them the definition and ask them to do it. You have to create the conditions. Like we were just talking about before, it’s about scaffolding a activity that they do that they don’t have to have any understanding of what they’re doing until they have done it and then you can unpack it. And in the previous question as well, the traditional model was you tell them what it is, then you model it for them, then you ask them to repeat it. And that’s the opposite of the explore before explain. And it is a lot harder to do that as an educator, but it has so much more value for the students. And I had a moment where about half of what I was doing was done in that traditional model and after really sinking my teeth in on this, had to go back and redesign a whole bunch of material I had done for years.
(28:18):
It didn’t take forever because I knew the material and it was just reshuffling the order and making a few adjustments. But when I did, I saw a dramatic shift in how the students could take that material and then transfer it themselves to use on their own problems and their own work that they were doing. So I think we have to build it in and bring them along so they can use active metacognition in a natural way that’s integrated as part of their practice.
Emma Zone (28:48):
Yeah. And I love that. I think as I’m listening to you, then I’m also wondering, okay, so the educators who are mired and needing to prove or create data stories around the work that they’re doing, we know that that’s also a big push within the landscape. So I guess we think about that phrase, “If it can’t be measured neatly, it won’t make the cut.” Right?
Rich Braden (29:09):
Right.
Emma Zone (29:10):
So how then do educators start to think about that assessment piece? How do we assess metacognition creative problem solving without defaulting to what’s easiest to count? Because I love what you said there around, it’s about the process and there’s also something that you’ll see in the outcome that makes you realize, you know what? It’s clear that these students got to do something first before we got to this. It’s not just spitting back a rote answer. So what does that look like? How do we measure it for an educator who’s listening that says, “Yes, I’m on board. I’m going to try it. I’m courageous, but maybe my old assessments aren’t working anymore.” What does that look like?
Rich Braden (29:48):
I think Scantron sheets are clearly the only way. In seriousness, I think we have to think about what do we mean by measurement and it doesn’t have to be quantitative. There are methods like you can establish a rubric if you want to take something more subjective and turn it into data. And that might be helpful and that’s not an unreasonable way to start to see that. What does it look like in characterizing when people are engaged in this? But also, I think you know your students well and you know how they have been evolving and changing over time. If you build a relationship with them, you see them making different choices, stopping and you hear them engaging in, for instance, in this case, metacognitive reflection in the middle of it. You can hear it in the dialogue. You can hear it in the interactions in the group. You can see them when they change their mindsets. Maybe you’ve seen them take the same course several different times and now they’re going a different way with it. They’ve shifted in their mindsets. You can inquire about it.
(30:55):
So I think there’s a lot of non-quantifiable or difficult to quantify ways that are still, as an educator, you know your students and how they are changing. So you can see that. And of course, you can come up with instruments and objective measures and there are ones for creativity. I think it’s not limiting yourself only to those, but seeing the larger picture and evolving your own measures as well. Like maybe if I see these three signals, that for me is showing me the progress. You don’t have to have a well studied instrument for everything you do to understand that change has happened. There are contexts for grants and reporting and other things where you may have to show some of those measures. But I think as an educator, if you’d have a more holistic view, you can see and watch the transition happen in how the students interact.
Emma Zone (31:50):
Yeah.
Tessa Forshaw (31:51):
I think it’s, just to add to this… I just want to firstly express empathy with all of the educators who face this. It is really hard, right? Because I think we all know everything you just said Rich, intuitively. And at the same time, face such incredible pressure to improve NAPLAN scores or whatever the thing is. A question that I try to ask myself as an educator is, what is the point of me teaching this class? What am I trying to do? And so, I think for Rich and I, for our class and I’m saying I think, because I don’t want to speak for you, Rich, in case yours is [inaudible 00:32:37] different, but the point is to help students to be able to engage in creative problem solving outside of the classroom for the rest of their lives. For me, the point is not anything else. It’s, can you do this later?
(32:55):
And in fact, in writing our book, we had some students reach out to us as they’ve seen it. And I had one student reach out who actually said, “Your class was the hardest and most frustrating class and I really didn’t like it. And five years on, it’s the class I use weekly.”
Emma Zone (33:11):
Wow.
Tessa Forshaw (33:11):
And I was just like, “Yeah, that’s 100% right.” Because learning is effortful. Learning is hard. Learning is not easy. If something’s easy, you won’t learn it. You can’t forge a new neural connection. You need effort. Literally, imagine between two places in a piece of… Like you’ve got two places on a beach and you’re drawing a line in the sand. You need some kind of effort to get that groove deep enough that it will stay in the sand, won’t just collapse on it. So you need effort to create new neural pathways. That’s just the fact of the matter.
(33:50):
And kids don’t love effort. Adults don’t love effort. So these strategies of like smile sheets aren’t going to work. And having an exam that just says, can someone recite what a growth mindset is as we’ve just talked about? That’s not going to work either. So it’s a really tough situation to be in. So a few thoughts. I think that creating student trajectories or journey mapping is a really helpful tool from a data visualization perspective. I’ve found that impactful to be able to create visuals that put all of my students’ journey maps on the one thing so that everyone can see where they started, what they struggled with, how they came out of it and where they got to at the end. And they can see that change occurred over time.
(34:48):
I think understanding maybe what you’re trying to do. So let’s say the class you’re teaching, you’re trying to build comfort with ambiguity, like having them answer a few questions in day one of class, write it down, have them answer the same questions again in the middle, have them answer a few questions again in the end, and then show those trajectories and then allocate a score to each one. So if you needed to make it numerical, you could. So there’s some strategies you can think about, but don’t default to what’s easiest because then that’s what you optimize for.
Emma Zone (35:28):
Sure.
Tessa Forshaw (35:28):
And if you’re really stuck, feel free to reach out to me at Next Level Lab. I love these kinds of conversations. So I’m a resource too.
Emma Zone (35:36):
Love that. Love that. And I want to go back to this idea of faculty or educators or trainers who may be risk averse and like what they’re hearing, but still think, “Geez, I’m in a really high stakes setting. And so, when I think about innovation, it feels so big.” So can we talk a little bit about how we break this into some of those smaller, maybe lower risk moves, either to help with the comfort level of somebody trying something for the first time, but also, just still produce learning and data around the work?
Rich Braden (36:10):
When you are engaging in innovation, you do a series of activities and experiences and collect data in different ways. Each one of those we call a move. It is a discreet action that somebody decides to take and takes. It has a beginning, has an end, it’s not too long, and you produce something out of it. So Tessa just mentioned a user journey map. I could make a user journey map on an interview and I could share it with her and she would know it would have value to her. We could discuss it. So a move is just doing some small action. And moves come from lots of different places. Anyone who has any kind of education or experience, which I think includes everyone, has a set of moves that they have used. And you’ve learned them in a variety of different ways.
(37:01):
I’ve got engineering moves from school. I’ve got improv moves that are from my improv training. So whatever thing you have done, a social group, a sports club, all of those, you have moves of organizing or rallying a team or bringing people together. Those are all moves and they’re all innovation-ish moves as long as you have adopted a mindset and you are using it toward a creative problem solving effort. You also can go and look online or take a course and find all kinds of other moves, like really fancy moves that are design moves like user journey mapping and empathy maps and those kind of things. And those are all fine moves also, but they aren’t special because they happen to be there. Just designers tend to default to those. So you can use any move that you want and making those moves and doing them in a series does two things.
(37:57):
One, you do a short thing as opposed to winding up for a large project. So the barrier to entry is much lower because it’s like, “Hey, I’m only going to take a day and try this move and see what I get before I decide if I move on with it.” As opposed to, “I’ve got four weeks of research that I will engage in.” And the second thing is, after doing one, it works or it doesn’t and you can see, make an adjustment, do it again. When they start to work, you start to get that like little hit of dopamine where you’re like, “Oh, hey, that was fun. Let me try it again.” And it encourages and motivates you just like yoga and going to the gym and everything else. When you do something and you start to see a little success, it helps drive you on.
(38:43):
So that’s what a move is and why moves are important. Small actions that move you forward. It ties right to that executive function of you’re pushing forward doing tasks and taking actions. All right, over to you.
Tessa Forshaw (38:59):
Yeah, thanks. That was the perfect explanation. And moves are so helpful because as we know in big institutions like the one that I sit in, the Harvard Graduate School of Education, sometimes, momentum can be challenging and steering a ship can be challenging and change can be really challenging. What’s really helpful with a move is that rather than getting somebody to sign on for like a five-year transformation of an initiative, and we’re going to have a year of scoping calls and there’s going to be a team of 25 people who are on the scoping committee calls and we’re going to have to get to consensus, but we don’t actually do anything over the year. And at the end of the year, we have a five-page document to show for all the work.
(39:46):
Instead of that strategy, which I know we all know and love, I go for a strategy that’s, let’s do a really small thing quickly. It’s a thing that’s going to last a day or two days or maybe a week. We’re going to try it, we’re going to learn something and then we’re going to use that information to make a decision about if we do something again. And once we do a series of small things, we start to then come up to bigger questions.
(40:16):
So in the case of HGSE, there has been… So we’ve been looking at creating a educational offering in workplace learning, which is one of my areas of expertise. And HGSE has typically not served like learning in corporate learning and development or workforce development, community college administrator kind of communities, and has stuck a little bit more traditionally to K-12 or formalized higher ed audiences. And so, rather than debating this to the nth degree and coming up with this whole thing, the very first thing we did was like, “All right, well, let’s figure out if anybody in that population wants anything from us.” So we created an ad that was like, learn about workplace learning at HGSC on LinkedIn and then we target it to the community and we had really great conversion. So now it stopped being an if, but, maybe, who, and instead it was like, great, we have really strong data that like mid to late year career professionals in L&D want a little bit more support, like let’s support them. Okay.
Emma Zone (41:23):
Yeah. Yeah.
Tessa Forshaw (41:24):
Then the next thing is, all right, well now I’m wondering what kind of support they want. All right, well, let’s throw a few different things out there and see which one they pick and we’ll put it again up as ABC ads for a couple of days and we’ll just see which one is the one that people express interest in. And then we’ll contact everyone and say we’re doing that one and invite them all to do it, but let’s try that. Okay. Well, we did. Now we know in literally a week, we’ve just figured out that a community wants it and this is what they want. And so now we build it, instead of this huge initiative. So that would be my guidance is convince people to do the one small thing for a couple of days and promise them that you won’t do anything else until we’ve done that and we’ll talk about that. And if they get anxious or nervous, they can stop. And I’ve never had someone want to stop. That’s just my experience.
Emma Zone (42:18):
Yeah. I think too, a couple of things come to mind. I mean, obviously the work we do at D2L, we’re working with large institutions, we have K-12 folks, we have associations, corporate, so it’s a pretty diverse group of learners. But anytime you start to talk about technology implementations and change, that feeling of that five-year plan that you’ve referenced at the start of that is what people are fearful of. So I think it’s really interesting too, because as I’m thinking about this idea of small moves and the impact of that, I think it also tells you something about the culture of your organization and readiness in terms of, is there a culture of innovation already existing that maybe is underlying that hasn’t surfaced yet, or maybe it’ll surface up some gaps or concerns that would be critical in that long-term implementation. So I love that notion too of how it could potentially help to expose or in some way, surface some of that as well, which is really, really cool.
(43:21):
I know we’re moving along on time. I do want to ask about how AI plays a role in all of this. Of course, I feel like we can’t have a podcast episode with at least one comment about it. And I know you’ve described AI as this co-creator, right? Rather than a replacement for human creativity. And we’ve obviously read a lot too around risks with cognitive offloading. I’m wondering if there’s creative offloading as well that might be a risk. But in teaching and learning contexts, what does that responsible co-creation with AI actually look like for both educators and institutions?
Rich Braden (43:55):
I think it’s about placing AI in the right perspective. What is it? What can it actually do versus what does the hype say it can do or what do we believe it can do? It’s not smart. It doesn’t think. It just processes… It’s like the most fancy auto complete that you can imagine is really what’s going on with most of what is today commonly available as large language model. And so, it doesn’t give right answers. I think we need to get away from it’s going to give you the answer. It might help you process or take different perspectives. So use it for what it is.
(44:36):
A good concrete example is when we were writing the book, I would write something, I’d be like, “I better grammar check this.” So I would start putting that into AI and it would give a few suggestions. Okay, I’d give a lot of suggestions, but it would give some suggestions. I would then implement some of those, put it back in, and it would give the opposite back to what I just had because it is a predictive model. It is not concrete and always right and there’s subjectivity and language. So I could flip back and forth between two different right answers and then sometimes I’d get a third. So I think we need to stop thinking I’m going to put something in, I’m going to get an answer out, which is why I have been using the phrase for a while now with all difference to JFK, don’t ask what AI can do for you, ask what you can do with AI. You can use it, but you have to be the one that’s in control. And the second, I think, really incredible use of AI is with experimentation.
(45:37):
In a matter of minutes, literally, I can create a video bumper for a new video series that I want to do. I can have something like Lovable create an entire application based on one prompt and then do some editing with it. It’s not production ready, but can I see quickly what this might look like, imagine it, see it in a real way and share it with others incredibly fast? Yes, I can do that. So that experimentation just flourishes things that I am not capable of doing. I have not yet learned or built the creative tool skills for like an Adobe Illustrator or Adobe Premiere or After Effects to create those things, but I can get a version of it that’s good enough. And once I see and do some testing like Tessa mentioned, that this is what I want to move forward with, I can find the other people and skills to collaborate with me that I need, but I’ve also got a better representation to share with them of expressing what’s already in my head for them to build upon it and take it to the next level.
(46:43):
So I think it’s a collaborative experimentation tool is another huge asset of it. I think it gets overplayed and there’s a lot of hype of it’s coming for your jobs and it’s going to take over creativity and all these things that I think are more movie than they are reality today.
Tessa Forshaw (47:04):
We did a study where literally the manuscript is due in like five days. So this is unpublished insights. So a very serious-
Emma Zone (47:13):
All right, we love it.
Tessa Forshaw (47:16):
We just did a study where we created a non-convergent AI coaching agent for managers as a leadership coach. So non-convergence means that the AI resists giving you an answer. So essentially, it forces in many ways, you to be metacognitive and also cognitively reflective, but both of them. So for example, if you are supporting somebody to transition to a job they’ve not done before in your team, you might need to coach them to be able to do that. And so that’s a specific skill that you need to build. So that would be something you could do with a leadership coach or an executive coach. And so, a traditional AI response from like ChatGPT might be like, “Here are the three most commonly cited strategies in HBR that you could use.” And so, again, to that direct instruction piece, the next time you might need to do that, you might know what the strategy is called and be able to describe it but that doesn’t really mean you know how to execute on it.
(48:32):
So instead, the non-convergence coach was designed to ask you really specific questions about how you would go and do it. “All right, so thanks so much for telling me about this team member that you have joining your team. Where have you had to support somebody into a novel role before?” Okay, give the answer. “What did you do there that worked and what didn’t work? Based on that learning, how could you apply that here?” So really not giving them the answer.
(49:06):
And we compared that to a human coach, which was quite interesting. And what we found was mind-blowing. So firstly, to our point of effortfulness, people hated the AI coach. They hated it, hated it, hated it.
Emma Zone (49:21):
Why?
Tessa Forshaw (49:21):
Because they all said it was so much effort. It asked me so many questions. They hated it. They really didn’t like it. I can’t express this enough. But they all love a human when the human is doing the same thing. And I think that is probably because of the relational nature of it. But they all performed the same as if not better in the AI condition than they did in the human condition, in the tasks that we had them do after, the onboarding tasks. So even though they hated this non-convergence, it actually was very effective. And I think that’s really fascinating just as we come into this era of AI.
(50:07):
The reason I say this story to educators is let’s remember that eliminating friction isn’t the goal. In learning, we need friction, productive friction is important, effort is important. And so if we just bring in AI to help people be more creative and remove the process of coming up with ideas and the discomfort of ambiguity and we remove all of the friction because it’s easy, then I think we’re not going to get the learning outcomes we need.
Emma Zone (50:37):
Yeah. I think that’s an awesome way to wrap this episode. What a great takeaway for all the educators listening, regardless of your context, the goal is not to eliminate the friction. And we need those efforts. I think about the line in the sand, and that might mean we get sand in our eye or maybe we get bit by a crab along the way, right? But that there is some meaningful pathway that’s being created as a result of that. So this was such a great conversation. Thank you so much for joining me. Innovation-Ish for our audience, just so you all know, it’s available now and you can order your copy, you can learn more about our guest work and dive into all of the topics that they talked about today just by checking out the resources section of our show notes as usual. We’ve linked everything there.
(51:28):
And of course, thank you to our dedicated listeners and curious educators everywhere. Please remember to follow us on social media. You can find us on X, Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook, @D2L, and you can also subscribe to our D2L YouTube channel. You can also sign up for our teaching and learning studio email list, and that will give you all the latest updates on episodes, articles, and our masterclasses. And of course, if you like what you heard, remember to rate, review, and share this episode and remember to subscribe so you never miss what we’ve got in store.

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Emma Zone (52:08):
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Resources Discussed in the Episode

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