The Art of Starting Before You’re Ready | Tessa Forshaw and Rich Braden

Literally everywhere you look, people are talking about innovation, but only few explain how it really happens. My guests today, Rich Braden and Tessa Forshaw, are here to change that. They've taught innovation at Stanford and Harvard, worked with organizations like Airbnb and Google, and just published a book called Innovation Niche: How Anyone Can Create Breakthrough Solutions to Real Problems in the Real World. Today we'll explore how to turn hesitation into momentum, why cognitive science might be the missing piece in innovation, and how you— yes, you all out there— can start experimenting your way to a better future. Rich and Tessa, yeah, indeed, delighted that we get to spend some time together. Welcome.

Thank you so much. It's great to be here.

All right, uh, Richard Tessa, I'd love to start, uh, the way we do every episode, which is with your future bios. So I don't want to talk about your past. I want to talk about your future, but because that's something we can still shape, create, uh, design, whatever you want to call it. So imagine we are meeting 10 years from now. What would you love to achieve? Absolutely.

I think for me, success in 10 years or a fulfilling life in 10 years will look like meeting people who have had the ability to become masters of their own mind and to understand how they can use this amazing squishy thing that every one of us has in our heads to maximize their ability to exist in the world, to create new ideas and innovations, to learn, to think, to adapt. So for me, that would be success, meeting folks who have had that shift and are really using their existing assets for all they are.

Wonderful. Rich, what about you?

I think for me there are many more people that think innovation is not for them and they're kind of ruled out or they aren't the ones that can do it. And in 10 years, I would like that number to be quite a bit smaller. I would like to share this information with people about that they have everything they need to get started, that they are people that are innovators. These people that are disenfranchised become powerful innovators and start changing their worlds in small and in big ways. And I suppose if there was like, I don't know, I think 10 years, if there's an article, it would be something like, "This little consulting firm is the one that you've never heard of, but it's probably changed your life." Because I think there are a lot of, a lot of organizations, nonprofits and for-profits that do things behind the scenes. They aren't the Airbnbs and the Googles and the big names you've heard of. But they make all of the moving pieces and parts and systems that help all of that to go. And that whole group, I think there's a ton of innovation potential that can transform how they live and work day to day and produce what they do. And that, that can have a collectively large impact.

I love that. Yes. So, I have to start off because you innovated on your title, I guess, already, right? So you didn't call it just innovation or like the next book on innovation.

Yeah, that's one of my most favorite questions because I think it really actually encapsulates the, um, the story of the whole book. And that is that we have had students for years who've come into classrooms at Harvard and Stanford, as well as, uh, boardrooms and, um, nonprofit, you know, retreats and everything in between. And when we have asked them to step into this place of being innovative and creative, many of them have a physical reaction and shrink back from it. They step away from the brainstorm. They change their body language. They struggle to own that they can be in this place. And when you ask them about it, that's because to them, innovation just feels like this huge, big myth magical creature thing that's not for them and that they can't do it because they weren't born creative. Um, and, and so as a result, uh, they, they don't— they step back from it. So Rich and I decided that, uh, all of these students that we've had over the years are all, every single one of them, incredible people who we have seen be creative and innovative and blown our minds, in fact. And so, we decided the problem wasn't with them. The problem was with the word innovation. And so, we decided to make it innovation-ish. And so that you could kind of sort of do it. And it makes people kind of laugh, just like I saw you did, a small smile. It changes their posture. It changes their relationship to the expectation that's being put on them and how they think that they can engage and show up. And so, that's really what we were going for. And that's That's why we named it Innovation-ish.

Beautiful. I think ish means welcome to the party. It means you can do it. It means you have everything you need and you can get better at it. It just, yeah, lowers the bar.

Absolutely. Yeah, thanks for doing that because As you said, like, you know, people I think are smiling, they're opening up, they're curious, right? They don't see that innovation is only for the few ones, right, that are either at Harvard or Stanford or these big companies and whatever it is, right? And I remember, Rich, you probably too, when we first met, you ran, I think, one of the largest and loudest rock-paper-scissors tournaments for for some incredible Google leaders. And it, it was just wild. But that showed me that you can just create a, a different dynamic in the first 5 to 10 minutes where people start to open up. They are more playful. They wanna try things out. And so forth. So I think you really demonstrated that back in the days. So So I'm glad that you now turned that into an actual word, right, innovation-ish. And I hope that many more people will use that to not just feel inspired, but to open up literally to that world of innovation because that should be a world that is accessible and meaningful to so many people. So Tessa, you mentioned something interesting. You said we all hesitate, right? And hesitation is such a big thing that is true for a CEO in a big company, but also for maybe a kid on a playground, right, when they want to go on the swing, right? We first hesitate. So before hitting send on an email or before speaking up or before experimenting, right, we hesitate, right? So from your research and experience, what have you learned about what—

So hesitation is one of those things that we often want to completely get rid of because we don't like that we do it. But actually, hesitation is very helpful. And I think the first thing is to really acknowledge that hesitation has a place in our lives sometimes. If you are a little kid and you are standing on the edge of a 10-meter platform and you don't quite swim perfectly yet, hesitating and maybe reevaluating that choice, that instinct, is a really good thing. I'm all about that hesitation. If you smell an oyster and it smells not great, hesitating, really, really helpful again, right? And so I think that we need to remember that this sort of natural cognitive processes that we have that help us avoid risk, that help us minimize ambiguity, that help us reach for certainty and clarity and safety, that help us try to maintain membership as part of a group and avoid social embarrassment, all of these natural cognitive processes that result in hesitation serve us on a daily basis and are really helpful. But the thing is, in the context of innovation specifically, hesitation, you know, isn't always necessary. So, we sometimes misapply it because the reality is that, you know, if I am in a room and I'm doing a brainstorm, coming up with a crazy idea isn't going to result in my tribe leaving me behind and therefore me not being able to find food as part of a group. And my, um, hesitation to go out into the world and to talk to people and show them a concept to get feedback on it— if the, if the idea doesn't work, that isn't going to result in, you know, a bear in Yosemite National Park eating me. Like, the reality is the stakes are significantly lower, and so we just misplace replace it. So, um, I think in the context of innovation, this sort of natural hesitation, or cognitive caution as we call it, is often then also amplified a little bit by two factors. So one is this sort of mythology of innovation that we talked about, the idea that, you know, innovation happens only in elite places, only for specific people, it happens by lone geniuses, and it happens overnight, and you have unicorns, and it's magic with fairy dust. But then you also have, you know, the creativity gap, we call it, which is, is people sort of seeing themselves as born without being creative and others as born to be creative. And that really comes from this myth that is unfortunately persistent, that humans are right-brained or left-brained and therefore analytical or creative. But actually, decades of MRI and EEG have proven to us that there's no such thing as hemispheric dominance. So these sorts of ideas of the mythology and the creativity gap amplify this cognitive caution. And we end up in a situation where people are sort of frozen and stuck, and that hesitation is bigger than it needs to be. So the way that you overcome it, I think the very first thing, which probably doesn't surprise you given your background with mindfulness, the very first thing in a team can be to name it. Hey, I know that we're all talking about innovation today and that for many of us, there might be a sense of hesitation or I can't do that or concern about failing or being afraid of risk. That's really normal. Let's center for a minute and acknowledge how that's showing up for us. And then let's say goodbye. Let's say, hi, innovation hesitation. It's good to see you. I know you're there. You're not really very helpful to me today. So it's time for you to, for you to go away so that I can get on with this and to start moving forward. I think that that's sort of step one.

Wonderful.

I think that, um, might be a, a great lead into a mind state moment later on where we do, um, a quick moment on overcoming that hesitation, right? Mm-hmm. Just becoming aware that this is now in our way, but it's something that is just in our mind, right? And maybe it's a story we tell ourselves. So you're talking a lot about the squishy thing, how you called it, which is called our brain or our mind. So our brains really crave for clarity, right? But innovation asks for curiosity, right? So what practices or reframes help people move from fearing the unknown, right, which is all about innovation, right? The unknown, right? It's, it's something that has not been here before to actually enjoying it, to enjoying that unknown, that uncertainty. So what can we do?

I think part of it is it, uh, part of it is like you mentioned that rock paper scissors where we change where we are and start to play with and experience it in a way that maintains safety. So if you say, "Go and innovate, and you have to be really good, and, and, you know, you're going to compete with people like Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk, and go!" If that's, you know, a leader in a group, that's intimidating right off the bat. And so having a softer entry in, I think, can help with that, and engaging in the other cognitive processes that underlie creativity. So things like Divergence and convergence, those working together, um, are two cognitive processes that we know are how creativity happens. So divergence, just meaning expanding out on the number of ideas. And so as opposed to, I have to come up with the right idea, which would make me seize up and hesitate, why don't we do a lot of ideas? And they can be good ideas or bad ideas or kind of bland ideas. And over time, if we do enough of them, we'll, we'll get a lot of ideas. Now we have a lot of ideas. We can't just keep going with that or nothing gets done. We have to converge back and come back together so we can go through activities to eliminate and prioritize and sift through them. Each one of those, one small idea that doesn't have to be that great, eliminating one idea or classifying a few are small pieces of it. But when you collect that all together, just even for yourself, that works really well to break down this big, foreboding thing into a lot of little pieces. But then you're working with a team, because innovation is intrinsically collaborative. And there is a huge multiplier in that. Because not only do you get to play with your mind and your ideas, but you get to play with everybody else's there. Because when we come up with an idea or we are trying to brainstorm an idea, a whole lot of connections get made in our brain to all of the different pieces that are related with that. That is called our default mode network.

No, sorry, I just—

association—

I don't mean to—

whatever word is there that you get, um, all of those ideas.

So the default mode network is part of the divergent thinking. It's kind of like the daydreaming component of your brain. And that happens in— it's unconscious. So that's sort of a subconscious thing that is happening that helps fuel your ability to make connections. But when somebody else is giving you a stimulus, right, that's not necessarily as much of an unconscious or a subconscious process. And so instead, what's happening then is that stimulus is cueing your archival memory forward to bring forward existing associations, not to make new associations, to bring forward existing associations to those networks.

Right.

So when you get that prompt and you access all of those, you've built yours, but your set of associations is going to be different than the person next to you. And different than the person next to them. And so you get automatically, you are sparking other ideas in all of those other people, and they have associations that they come back with, and that sparks new areas that you, you wouldn't have automatically gone to. It will bring on new ideas. So there is this multiplication in a group that generates many more. So that really aids in that divergence of thinking. A lot of people say, we talk about how we know diverse teams give better and great, you know, more diverse and more creative ideas. That's how that works. It's the distributed and collective intelligence in the group and all of those different neural networks really firing together. So that is, that is one way that we can just start to access and to move that away is start working with other people. Take small steps and break the problem down.

Wonderful.

So if, if I would be a fly on the wall, which I would love to do at some stage, right? Come to you, Tessa, to Cambridge, to Harvard, or Rich, seeing you in action at Stanford. If we watched your students using the innovation compass that you talk about in your book, right? Which consists of mindsets and moves and metacognition. And they would use that in real life, in a messy meeting or a late-night idea jam or whatever it is to create their next startup or career move, what would we see?

First, you might see me interrupting Rich a lot with the science. Oh, wait, you already saw that. So we're okay. You've got the real vibe of our class. And then second, you would see a lot of student teams working at different paces.

Amazing.

And so just to dive in on one of them. We'll, I'll walk you through a bit of an example. So, um, in a traditional design classroom, you might see, uh, students being told that today we're doing interviewing and you have this challenge, and I want you to go out into the field and I want you to find people with this job, and I want you to go interview them. And then you're going to come back and you're going to put that interview data into a very specific template that we're giving you called something like an empathy map. And then from that, you're going to have an insight. Instead, we often will work with our teams to help them understand what is the single most important question that you need to answer right now based on where you are with your work. And that takes a lot of practice. And so for some teams, that might be interviewing, but for other teams, it might, it might not be. It might be that they've already got a rich body of knowledge that they're drawing upon. And instead, what they want to do is like test to learn and put some things out there and sort of see what happens to help them understand something. Or they might want to think about, this is a really touchy space. That we're operating in that's highly sensitive. We want to think about the unintended consequences and implications of intervention in the space first. That might be their most important question. So what we do is help our students come up with what's the most important question you need to answer right now to, to move forward, and what mindset do you need to take on to be able to answer that question. So mindsets are a core component of our approach. And essentially, they are a cognitive framework that influences how you pay attention, perceive, interact, and act in the world. And so if you have a mindset on, like that old phrase, like rose-colored glasses, everything you see is going to see rosy and cheerful and and happy and it might influence your actions. You might go get an ice cream 'cause it's a happy day and everything like that. Well, mindsets are essentially that. And we've seen a lot of really good research in the work of mindsets actually out of Stanford where they have seen that simply changing mindsets and using an intentional mindset shift can cause better outcomes than sometimes interventional drugs and other things like that in weight loss. And in chronic disease management, which is kind of incredible given it is just the squishy thing in your head. So we will say to students, what's the mindset you need? Now that could be just about any mindset. There are no magic mindsets out there. So the mindset that they might need is we need to put on a mindset of abundance, of coming up with all of the different things, of being generative, of seeing possibilities. And so then they're going to approach the next phase of their work, how they solve that question through that mindset. And that's going to direct their attention, their perception, the choices they make, what they notice, what they choose to do. And then at the end of that, they're going to have a discussion around what happened, what did I expect to happen, and how is what happened different? Did we answer the question? Are there any biases in how we're interpreting the outcome? What do we need to do next? And so they're going to engage in a process that is essentially metacognition, so thinking about their thinking choices and actions. And so for us, using the compass looks like individual groups navigating to their own destinations and their own problem-solving processes based on what they need and where they need to go using the cognitive tools they have.

I'll just add in that moves are the things that Tessa was mentioning that the students were doing. It's a thing you can watch someone do. It's the actions. So like an interviewing is an innovationist move. It's something you can go and do. It has a start and an end. You can't see metacognition. You can experience cognition. You can talk about what came out of that, but that's something that's more invisible, whereas the moves are action. So the metacognition helps you understand your thoughts and feelings, where things are going. That helps inform the mindset you might choose. What do I need to do to move things, to, to take the next step? And then you would execute a move. So the 3 pieces of the compass help navigate And they are always in motion. They are dynamic. It's not a sequence or a process or an order. You're constantly evaluating where you are and what you need to do next.

So I still want to spend a little bit more time on that notion of hesitation because that's something that is just fascinating to me, right? We see like, we see CEOs hesitate to put the right culture in place to have people innovate, right? We see individuals hesitating when they want to make their next career move, right? We see all of that hesitation. And I have just a personal story that I just want to share briefly. Last week I was in Poland. And I was able to speak to 46,000 students online. And so they tuned in on a Friday for 2 hours to spend time to think and talk about the future, their future. And so I didn't want to do a keynote because I, you know, feel like if you talk to students in that format, it just doesn't resonate, right? So I asked 2 students to interview me, right? And only one student actually was doing the interview. The other student was hesitating. She didn't want to kind of like go in front of the camera and like ask me questions and because she felt like, you know, she might stumble upon words, she might, you know, not come across as intended and all of those hesitations, right? And I was— I failed. I was not able to coach her and convince her that this might be a great opportunity, that she shouldn't hesitate. She should, should try and experiment with, right? And so what can I do better next time? Or like, what are some, some tricks you are using to really help to overcome that hesitation that you might experience yourself, but also help others to overcome that?

In our class, we tend to, especially when, when it comes to like trying something new, using a pedagogical structure or a way of teaching, a philosophy of teaching that's known as Explore Before Explain. And that particular approach was popularized by NASA. So I often say, if it's good enough for astronauts, it's good enough for me. But essentially the way that it works is that the educator is responsible not for standing up there and imparting content, but instead for holding a container, a very rigorous and intentional container of sensemaking and meaning making. And so the way that you do that is by first having students come in and explore and bring in what they know about something and take approaches that they might already have in their lives to start interacting with a thing. So you're bringing in everything that they they already know and they already do. And you're having them start approaching the problem from a place of asset, like the things that they have, instead of deficit, the things that they don't and they should do, which is often how things can be taught, where we, you know, where people will start with a, um, a, okay, we're going to do this activity, you have to do it this way. That's assuming that no one in the class knows how to do that, right? So, you start from this place of asset. And once everyone has had some time to maybe think about, like a classic example of this in our classroom is, on the first day, we will give everybody a problem and we will say, come up with a way to approach this, right? How would you solve this problem? And they will bring forward all the different things that they know. We'll hear frameworks that they use at work, things that they did when they were a kid, stuff that they use at home when they have a problem. Little, little tricks that they use in their job, you know, things that they've read, they'll bring in everything you can imagine. And then we will start to use all of that goodness and bring it up and add structure to it as a way of explaining what we're saying. And so we, we sort of like, okay, we noticed that a lot of the approaches that you just talked about here involved Really wanting to understand the problem and make sure that you're building from the true problem and not a symptom of the problem. That came up a lot. And so, that is about, we would call that like part of the insights mindset, finding insights and coming up with things. We also heard a lot of XYZ. So, that kind of process of being assetful in the exploration before you explain something is a really helpful tool. In overcoming innovation hesitation because it helps people come in already standing on firm ground, standing on a contribution, standing on valid skills and perspectives, being seen for who they are and what they have. It means that they have self-efficacy, right? And so that is like a really exciting place for them to stand up. And then the second part of our class, what we then do is we spiral. So, a cognitive scientist named Jerome Bruner has this approach that he called spiral curriculum, and it's the idea that you visit something quickly once, and then you visit it again in more detail, and then again in more detail, and each time you go deeper and deeper and you build on the existing knowledge of the spiral before, rather than going really deep into one thing and then changing module and really deep into the next thing and changing module. And that is another strategy that can really help with overcoming innovation hesitation because it again is helping students go bit by bit, complete a small spiral that they see, that they understand, they can do that project. Then the next one is a little bit bigger and more extensive, but they can do that because they just did the one before, and you're kind of increasing, um, the depth as you go.

I think I would, I would say similar. I obviously agree with all of that, but a similar thing is to give them such a small step and take— find a way to take the pressure off, increase the ishness of it. Like, you could ask What would be a couple of bad questions that you could ask? It would be terrible questions. And then help them by turning those questions around. Say, so the opposite might be you would ask me this. I can answer that. And give them a moment where what they've produced produces something that might be better than what they expected if they asked the question and it came from them. And then slowly they build some confidence as they go along until maybe they're able to do it on their own.

I love that. Yes. So one of the things I tried is I asked the students to think 5 reasons why you should start, right? Because our mind is automatically producing all these thoughts why we should not, right? So just turning that around and like, you know, trick your mind and, and just have it think about why you should actually start, I think, might create that momentum that you talk about. And we could do a quick Mindstate moment maybe on it so that our listeners can maybe try it themselves. So what I want everybody to do wherever you are, if you were on a run or in the car or listening while walking in a forest. Just take a deep breath, and I want you to think of something you've been hesitating on lately. It might be a decision, a conversation, or a creative idea. But don't analyze it, just notice it. And now ask yourself, what's underneath that hesitation? Is it fear of failure, uncertainty about what comes next, or maybe that quiet voice whispering, "Not yet"? And now imagine that hesitation is not a stop sign, but a doorway. What if this pause before action is your mind's way of saying, This matters. And before you walk through that doorway, ask yourself 5 simple questions, 5 reasons why you should start. First, what might I learn if I take the first step? Second, who could be inspired by seeing me begin? Third, how might this open new possibilities I can't yet imagine? Fourth, what would it feel like to simply try? And last, and what could happen if just once I stopped waiting for perfect and began with what's real? So now in your imagination, take that step, send that message, sketch the idea, start the thing. Feel how even the smallest motion changes your energy. That's innovation, or maybe innovation-ish, not as a process, but as a pulse, because the future doesn't begin when you're ready. It begins when you begin. So let's take one deep breath in. Just let that sit with us and, um, We're going to continue our conversation. So if we want to translate that into the real world, right? You, you mentioned real in your book title twice, right? Real problems in the real world. So let's make that real. What's one small move that we can start doing today that really helps us to put innovation-ish in our, in our lives.

Well, I can think of— your questions sort of inspired a thought for me. We have a set of questions that are for a slightly different purpose. It is, how can we come up with moves? If people already have moves inside them, things they could do, but they're having trouble accessing them, We've got a, a set of questions that we call the Start Somewhere questions. And it helps you to generate, use divergent thinking to come up with a list of what are things you're already familiar with that you could take as the next step. Because once they're in front of you, now you could choose to do them, even if you haven't decided which one yet. And so one of those is, how could I better understand the problem? And just think of all the different ways you could start to understand what's going on better. Different resources you could learn from, people you could talk to, experts you could go to, experiments you could do. Like any number of things you could go out and do, including just go have a chat with somebody. And another one is, how can I activate other people to help me solve it? So, who can I go get to join me in this? Even if that's a, I'm gonna call Frederik and just do a 10-minute jam session on what can I do here? What would you do to borrow some insight? Inspiration. But you could also, you know, maybe invite someone to join you for an afternoon of, of exploration, or somebody to join you and your— you on the project as a team. There's lots of ways that you can. There isn't a particular tool, framework, or thing that should come next. And you've got lots of them. And it doesn't really matter what your background is. You can access your own resources. And if you were a geology student or an artist or a computer programmer, there are things that you do and you have learned, you've trained on, and have experience to solve problems that all of those are game in an innovation-ish world. We had a, we had a student in class that was a family therapist, and they were processing some information, some data they had collected, and going through it, and they said Oh, I can just use Family Systems Mapping. And we immediately said, yes, that's a great idea. Go ahead and do that. And we kind of looked at each other and we're like, what's Family Systems Mapping? And we didn't know. And it didn't really matter. We found out after talking with a student that it was a way of mapping the relationships that was used in therapy. But for her, it was a tool she was confident with. It helped her arrange the information and she was able to pass that along to someone else. We've never taught it. I dare say that Tessa and I are not qualified to teach family systems mapping from therapy, but it worked for her. And whatever your background, you've got tools, whatever your experience, you've got ways you've used. Bringing those forward is a powerful way to incorporate what you already know into doing innovation. And if you're doing it from a mindset of this is what I'm trying to solve, and I think this will answer the questions that I have in front of me. That's a great way to do it. I think a lot of hesitation from starting comes from, I don't know the right tools. I didn't finish the certificate, or I didn't take the whole class. I only took the one-day workshop, and I don't know if I know it enough. And you do. I think that's, that's the message to the people that are listening. You already know enough. To be able to move forward. Can you learn interesting new tools and tricks and things that other people that have gone before you? Sure, everybody can do that. I learn new stuff all the time. But you don't have to to get started. And if you start with what you know, it becomes easy.

I think there's two things that really stand out. First one is that it's such great advice for leaders as well. Right? As leaders are hopefully not the people who have all the answers, right? But always ask a better question. Like you just showed up in class as well, Rich and Tessa, saying like, how can you use this to make progress in your work, right? Without being an expert in their work, right? If it's family therapy or if it's other things, right? But you asked the question that really triggered them to move forward and do something, right? I think that's such great advice for leaders out there is like you don't have to have the answers or the certificate or the subject matter expertise or whatever it is, right? You just have to be the person who asks the better question, right? The question that helps people and your team to move forward. The second thing, and I want to spend a little bit more time there, is You talk a lot about tools, right? We don't know all the tools and all the technologies and so forth, which is okay. And we now live in a world where like literally every second there is a new technology, a new tool that is just make your mind go, wow, right? Like this is possible. So we're living in a world for me at least that is truly surprising. It's exciting. I'm very curious about all of these things. And I'm talking about AI specifically, right? So what have you discovered that could be really helpful to—

Yeah, I think we often think about this question in two ways. So one is like how you can use it in creativity and innovation in problem solving. And then the other is a little bit more about how do you use a cognitive science-based approach to innovate with technologies that you you know, don't necessarily know yourself deeply. So a great example of this is like, how could you think about how to use virtual reality even though you can't sit down and code Unity yourself, right? And often we've noticed in our classrooms, and especially this is especially true for women, we've noticed in our classrooms that when they don't understand the technology in that sort of really deep expert kind of way, they often actually step back from the brainstorm storming and the engagement with the ideation around what the technology can do and how it could be used. And so we worked to create this really fun deck of cards a while ago that is, uh, is called the Our Lady of Technology cards. And, um, and we talk about them a little bit in Innovation-ish as well. And really they are based on this central principle of affordances. So that is a thing that the technology gives you. Not that it's a technical part of it, but a thing that that technology affords you. Like a, um, a chair, for example, affords you a place to sit. If it's a chair that's at like a right angle, kind of classic wooden solid chair, it could afford you the stability to stand on it, could afford you the ability to hang a coat on the back. Like objects and technologies have affordances. So with generative AI especially, we've been pushing people to think about how to brainstorm from the place of the affordances of the technology instead of like needing the deep expertise, the Unity coder equivalent of the technology. And so that might be, uh, what could you, um, like if you put you know, finance together with something that does real-time transcription? Like, what could you— what would that— what could you do from that, right? The technology also— generative AI also affords us the ability to translate across languages rapidly. Like, what could that give you if you mixed that with human resources department? There are lots of things that generative AI affords us, and, um, and we've been creating a sort of more specific, uh, card deck to, to Gen AI. But what is it— what happens when you, when you brainstorm from sort of those affordances and the different units or problems in your organizations and businesses, uh, instead of just trying to be like, well, okay, so, uh, guys, we've got to use Gen AI at work because the you know, the private equity company that owns us is telling us to use it, so, so where are we using it? Come up with ideas. You know, that just doesn't— it doesn't work. People are a bit like deer in the headlights. We end up seeing them repeating exactly the same use cases. Like, if we have one more, like, payroll question, um, manager, uh, agent, great payroll GPT agent idea come up, I, I will just like— but so you kind of get the point. So the idea is, how do you brainstorm from the affordances of something instead of needing to deeply know it, right?

I think, I think for me, what— two things. AI is much more than ChatGPT or large language models. There is a whole world of what is under the big classification of artificial intelligence. And there are much more interesting, deeper questions that you can do and ask, uh, in doing that. And from there, you can even use affordances for those to— what can it do without having to know those technologies deeply? And I think especially to large language models, uh, to all forgiveness to JFK and what he said, but I think ask not what AI can do for you, but ask what you can do with AI. AI can put the ability to create things and build prototypes and sketches and with very little effort that you can't do on your own. Like I can use like a paint program on my Mac, but I'm not creating illustrations and large things, but I can get AI to generate a bunch of images for me. They're probably not final production-ready images, but if I look at several of those and go, this is the wrong direction, I'm not going to continue and invest more money with buying a graphic designer to create a bunch of things that are expensive when it's the wrong direction anyway. You can create a website or an application in moments with just 1 or 2 paragraphs of text. It's not going to change your life or be ready to ship and be a million-dollar company, but it can— you can put it in front of a few people and see, are we even in the right direction? So it, it allows you to create so many different things, music and visuals and like all these things. That you couldn't do on your own. And I think that's a useful way because it sort of extends your expression of your ideas to, to sort of test them out. But I think you can't get to final answers. And the other place that I think it's interesting is you can get it to reflect back and help ask you some questions and work back and forth with it to sort of give yourself a collaborator when you're working on your own and let you sift through your thoughts or see your thoughts reflected. I think all those are great ways to incorporate it in, but I think the magic of Commander Data, can you synthesize a solution to this very complex problem, is still, you know, still off in the world of Star Trek, and we're not going to be there for, I think, a long time.

Thanks for sharing that. Yes. So I'd love to go on a lightning questions round with both of you. So great. Let's start with you, Rich, this time. And I have a set of questions. Maybe we can do it. I'll ask the question and then, Rich, you can answer that and then, Tessa, you can go. Second, yes. So if you want to name a person you'd love to innovate with today, who would that be?

You mean besides the two of you? Thanks. I don't know that one single person kind of jumps to mind. I think my favorite person is somebody who thinks really differently differently than me. And in doing the work that I do with lots of different companies and organizations, like I knew nothing about supply chain and then worked for 9 months on an accelerator about how to redesign a supply chain. And I learned so much. But the amplification of those two things where I didn't know and they didn't know what I did was really, really useful. So I hope that's not dodging to say somebody who thinks differently as me and there's a new one on the—

I clearly cut from the same 'Cause my response immediately was my biggest critic, like the person who disagrees with me the most, who pushes up against everything that I think, that is the person I want to innovate with.

Thanks for sharing that. So Rich, what does a radically better future look like to you?

I mean, I think a radically better future to me looks like one that is informed by a sense of responsibility in everything we're doing and creating as we create the future. Every choice we make in things we invent, in things we produce and we manufacture, put out into the world has ripple effects that go and those ripples hit other ripples. It just cascades out. And so being thoughtful about what those impacts are and what happens as a result, if they are positive or things that we want to happen, that's great. That's a great magnifying, but in so many cases, we launch something into the world and then realize, oh no, look what else happened. And I think a radically better future has to include looking ahead at that in everything that we do.

It's one that we have taken ownership of and that we are not hesitating to step into and letting happen to us. And instead, one that we are taking ownership of, we are in the design seat. We are making choices and decisions and really taking the position of authority to shape it and to Richard's point, shape it responsibly, but yet not one that just happens to us.

I suppose I should have said one in which everyone on the planet reads our book and applies the principles. Isn't that the The answer I'm supposed to give.

Perfect. Rich, how do you personally stay innovation-ish? So what are some of the personal practices that you, you know, do when you wake up or like go to bed or like throughout the day?

I think one of my favorite things to do is I have built a habit of doing terrible work. And by that I mean, if I have something to do, I try really hard to immediately get out a terrible version of it and like just build it, put something out there. And then I look at it and say, no, this is not good, but I know how I can make it better, and inch my way toward it. If I try to sit down and create, I don't know, a document or a new page on a website and I'm trying to get it right, I watch myself get frustrated and retype the same line over and over to get it started and realize I just got to get something out. And so I'll do a bad version first and then it all, uh, all will eventually— I believe it will come together and it always does. I trust—

I go out into the real world and I talk to people.

Tessa, what about you?

About anything and everything. I listen to them, I learn from them, I see what they're interested in and they're thinking about and watch how they're approaching things. No matter what the topic is, my gut instinct is to always start with going out and just learning stuff from other people.

Wonderful. Thank you. So friends, uh, thank you so much for all of your insights, your, um, wisdom, your experience. Um, um, I truly enjoyed that conversation and I hope our listeners too. So Tessa and Rich remind us that innovation isn't magic. It's a set of small human mindsets and moves practiced every day, and it starts in our mind. And if you want to learn more, their new book Innovation-ish is out now in all stores online and, um, also in your favorite, uh, stores, uh, in your neighborhood. It's out from, uh, Wiley Publishers. Um, and you'll find the link in the show notes as well. And friends, remember, the future isn't waiting for you. It's shaped by how you choose to begin. I'm Frederik G. Pferdt, and this is The Future Is How.