Unlocking Innovation in Education with Tessa Forshaw & Richard Cox Braden S10E5 (135)
🔥 Have we mistaken “design thinking” for “design doing”?
🔥 What if education’s greatest success metric isn’t mastery, but metacognition?
🎙️ Episode Summary
In this engaging conversation, Louka Parry, Tessa Forshaw, and Rich Braden explore the intersection of education, innovation, and cognitive science. They discuss the importance of mindsets in fostering creativity, the role of AI in learning, and the necessity of navigating ambiguity in educational environments. The speakers emphasize that innovation is not merely a process but a mindset that can be cultivated through intentional practice. They also reflect on the changing landscape of education, the impact of technology, and the need for learners to develop metacognitive skills to thrive in a rapidly evolving world.
👤 About Tessa Forshaw
As a co-founder of the Next Level Lab at Harvard University, Tessa specializes in using cognitive science to develop creative and innovative potential in the workforce. She draws upon her academic research as a cognitive scientist and extensive background as a former designer at IDEO CoLAb and Accenture to turn the cognitive processes involved in design, creativity and innovation into practical insights that can be applied in the flow of work. These insights are also the foundations of what she teaches as a design educator at Stanford University and now Harvard University. Recognized for her impactful design projects, Tessa is the recipient of multiple design awards: a Fast Company Design Award for General Excellence, two Core77 Industrial Design Magazine Design Awards, and the Australian American Chamber of Commerce Innovation Awards.
👤 About Richard Cox Braden
Rich Braden is the founder of People Rocket LLC, a strategic innovation firm based in San Francisco. With over 15 years of academic experience, Rich is a recognized thought leader in design thinking, leadership, and innovation. He is a design educator at renowned institutions including Harvard University, Stanford University, and London Business School, helping shape future leaders. As CEO of People Rocket, he works with clients such as Airbnb, Google, the United Nations, Microsoft, Coca-Cola, Starbucks, and Red Cross to drive strategic innovation and responsible AI solutions. Rich holds degrees in Computer and Electrical Engineering from Purdue University and resides in the San Francisco Bay Area.
📘 Takeaways
Innovation is about how your mind works in context with others.
Cognition involves thinking, emotions, and relationships.
Mindsets shape how we perceive and interact with the world.
Exploring before explaining enhances learning retention.
AI should support human cognition, not replace it.
Metacognition is essential for effective learning and problem solving.
The purpose of education is to empower learners as agents.
Navigating ambiguity is crucial for creative problem solving.
Real-world applications of innovation require collaboration and communication.
Education systems must adapt to the changing landscape of technology.
🔗 Connect and Resources Mentioned
🔗 Stay Connected with Louka Parry
For the latest learning innovation follow Louka on LinkedIn
Share your thoughts by visiting www.thelearningfuture.com
Tune in to be inspired, challenged, and reminded why love truly is at the heart of learning.
[Transcript Automated]
Louka Parry (00:08)
everyone. Welcome to the Learning Future podcast. Today we are going in for a ride. We are speaking with two phenomenal innovators, Rich Braden and Tessa Forshaw. They are the co-authors of a book, Innovationish.
how anyone can create breakthrough solutions to real problems in the real world. And I don't know about both of you, but if we ever needed real solutions, it's this current moment. I know that both of you've got lots of expertise, Rich in running companies and kind of the Silicon Valley innovation space, having taught at Stanford and Tessa is a cognitive scientist, both having taught at Harvard and at Stanford.
Tessa Forshaw & Richard Cox Braden (00:29)
Hahaha.
Louka Parry (00:43)
I want to ask you this first question. What's something that you're learning right now that's kind of you've been paying attention to and then we'll jump into kind of the thesis of the book too.
Tessa Forshaw & Richard Cox Braden (00:51)
I think one thing that I am learning right now is excuse my voice. It's a little raspy How to integrate AI into a learning environment in a way that is helpful and doesn't detract from the
flash of the technology but becomes an actual useful tool. And an example of that is one of the things we were teaching is how to do good interview skills for collecting qualitative data and practicing what questions do you ask and what are the results when you get them. And so we got it to generate personas. So.
We could slow things down and have the class do a group interview and vote on the question and debate and discuss why we ask one versus another. And they were able to really hone their skills before they went out and did some field work. That was a great use of it. And I've seen lots of bad uses. So think I'm still learning how does this work as a thing that actually supports real learning objectives.
Louka Parry (01:46)
Yeah.
I love that. Yeah, we could definitely get into that. Rich, Tessa, what about you? What are you learning?
Tessa Forshaw & Richard Cox Braden (01:56)
Goodness, I mean, I am learning all of the time constantly, but something I've taken on very intentionally, and this probably sounds a little esoteric, but I've recently taken on learning more about...
viticulture and part of why I did that though was to get much more intentional and practiced about my own metacognitive skills during learning and so I wanted to take on something that is a structured slightly adjacent but definitely like motivated interest that I have and ⁓ to really practice what it means to be metacognitive during the learning process.
so that I can talk more to it, given it's such a, I research it all the time, but very rarely am a novice sitting in an instructed learning environment, engaging in practicing with it.
Louka Parry (02:46)
That's so awesome. We talk a lot about metacognition and agency and a whole range of other kinds of learning principles on, on this podcast. ⁓ I, for one, I'm learning, Joanne Mandarin at the moment, and I'm a languages teacher, but of course I've, I go into the, and I go straight into being a novice again and again, because it keeps me humble. You know, mean, like, my God, not like failing publicly. you know,
and excruciatingly over and over again, you know, getting corrected on your tone or pronunciation, et cetera. But there's such a beauty to that too. It's such a beautiful way to be, ⁓ take us into the thesis behind the work that you've been collaborating on, you know, like why, why this work and what, can you say we know about everyday innovation? that can, know, cause often it's thrown around and we'd see the data so many change X and X percentage of
Tessa Forshaw & Richard Cox Braden (03:13)
Yeah, and very quickly.
Please.
Yeah.
Louka Parry (03:36)
change projects fail and blah, blah. So yeah, what would you put to us?
Tessa Forshaw & Richard Cox Braden (03:39)
So I think we think about innovation a little bit differently and actually we've just been doing some work here in DC and one of the participants in a workshop pointed this out really beautifully to us yesterday and they said, I rang my boss because we need to have you come in and he said not another innovation thing and I said, no, this actually isn't about.
a process or anything like a normal innovation course or technologies or emerging tech or you know test kitchens or anything like that. What it's actually about is how your mind works in context with other people and using that to help you engage in creative problem solving. And I was like, yes, that's exactly what it is. Thank you. So that's really the central thesis, I think.
Louka Parry (04:22)
⁓ Wow.
So good.
Tessa Forshaw & Richard Cox Braden (04:29)
Yeah, absolutely, I would agree. think helping turn helping people discover that they already have the tools they need to do innovation and to be an innovator. And I think that term gets thrown around and misused and there's a lot of
scariness to it that creates this innovation hesitation that holds people back from it, but it also makes people want to package it in a way that's like digestible and easy and we know that learning takes effort and doing innovation is it's not hard, but it's hard work.
Each individual thing is that you have to learn multivariate calculus to get it done. But to do it and to do it with practice and diligence takes a lot of effort. And so how do we teach people the way to be so it isn't scary and that they can be effective by changing who they are and how they operate and how they approach it, not giving them an easy path or a recipe?
Louka Parry (05:32)
Yeah, I think that's one of the things with the design space too. It's like just follow the design thinking process and you're an innovator. Now you've done that. You've got to prototype and off you go.
Tessa Forshaw & Richard Cox Braden (05:42)
Well, and one of the things I think that is really fascinating, as we've talked about, I'm a cognitive scientist and I look at that and I'm often like, but you're outsourcing the cognition to a map. Like you're outsourcing the inherently human components of the creative problem solving process, which isn't like actually always the doing of an activity, but is the reasoning between what did I take from that activity?
I get what I expected to get from that. How is that shaping what I'm thinking about now? Have I potentially been anchoring too heavily on one of the interviews because that person looks like I do and I'm waiting that with the biases. What do I need to do next to answer the next most important problem that I have? Following a map takes that away from the human and that is actually the inherently human part of creative problem solving. So I think it's so important.
Louka Parry (06:23)
Interesting.
Yeah.
Tessa Forshaw & Richard Cox Braden (06:39)
I love what you said that it hadn't struck me this way before but it has become design doing I think people took design thinking and they turned it to design doing with a checklist a set of steps it's about Can I get things done that I can easily report and in a corporate structure? We want our metrics and we want yes You've done it and now you've done these steps and you can check it all off and it's easier for but that's
Louka Parry (07:00)
Hmm.
Tessa Forshaw & Richard Cox Braden (07:03)
That's like measuring in an education environment number of students that have gone through the course. That's a useless metric. And so I think taking the thinking out, the thinking and the feeling and all the things to make those decisions doesn't do it service.
Louka Parry (07:18)
I love this, ⁓ this reflection and you speak to this in the book as well. It's, it's not against, not just the doing, it's kind of the orientation, either mindset and you talk about these six mindsets, which I'd love you to take us through because you know, my view is that you can't change anything unless you yourself are willing to be changed. And that I think is, is the act of leadership is the vulnerability of being a leader is to say, well, I was wrong. Or this is, you know, I've changed, I'm stepping into novice again, adjacently.
Tessa Forshaw & Richard Cox Braden (07:26)
You
Louka Parry (07:46)
Tessa to become a viticulturist, know, whatever the case might be. So take us into that kind of mindset space. Like who do we, who are we already that we might forget or what are, you know, and I think you look at young, for me as an educator, I look at, you know, kindergartners and they're pretty good at a lot of kind of divergent thinking, at exploration, at, you know, they're developing their teamwork. There's something about that, that, you know, might.
Tessa Forshaw & Richard Cox Braden (07:48)
Yeah.
Louka Parry (08:10)
is remembering as well as like a learnable skill. So take us into that world a bit.
Tessa Forshaw & Richard Cox Braden (08:15)
Yeah.
It's a great question. So mindsets just for folks who maybe aren't so familiar with the term ⁓ is a term that means essentially a cognitive framework that acts as like a lens for how we shape and perceive the world. sorry if I go too deep here, but memory and perception isn't actually like an objective video recording, which a lot of people think it is. Like if I witness an event, like I am seeing it objectively and it's like I've video recorded it.
Louka Parry (08:31)
go for it.
Tessa Forshaw & Richard Cox Braden (08:44)
your
mindset is known to shape what you pay attention to, what you choose to notice, what you choose to clock, what choices you make, how you respond to stimulus. So it really changes what you're thinking about. a great example that I often give is my husband and I have very different mindsets for how we go to Costco. So I am a Costco like two out to 20 minutes, get in and out.
Like I know exactly where I need to go. So if I go into Costco with that mindset, it shapes what I pay attention to. I'm only focused on the things that I want and that I need.
I might pay attention to which line is the shortest, which route is less crowded through the store. It shapes the decisions that I make, so choosing where I'm going in what order and how and what I pick up and maybe if I only want 20 minutes I'll go, oh it's really busy over there, I'm not going to do that thing or something. So it shapes the experience and how I interact with it and what I notice.
If I choose to go into Costco with my husband's mindset, which is that I have two hours and want to taste test everything mindset, then here's how he navigates the store is really, really different, right? He's going to wander through the aisles. He's going to taste things. He's going to stop and, you know, look at something and maybe then look up online, the comparable price to that thing and like really have a different experience than me. And
Louka Parry (10:11)
Hmm.
Tessa Forshaw & Richard Cox Braden (10:13)
One of the things about mindset obviously is that like if I have this mindset and he has this mindset and we don't explicitly communicate that with each other as well, we're operating in the store with different mindsets and then that's, we have different video recordings, if you will, of the experience and what's going on and that causes friction. So in the context of innovation-ish, we distilled 80 different
problem solving frameworks, design thinking being one, human-centered design being another, double diamond being another, like everything you can imagine. And when we were doing that, initially we were looking for like common actions or phases.
And after we got about, I think it was about 10 of the way through also, we decided, hang on, actually what these are really getting at is they're trying to invoke a mindset. They're trying to say, it's not like when you read the process and you don't just look at the diagram, when you read like the content or the thesis underneath it, which I don't think everyone does when you do, what they're trying to do.
Louka Parry (11:03)
Yeah.
They're not as colourful Tessa, so it's difficult to do that.
Tessa Forshaw & Richard Cox Braden (11:17)
They're trying to get you to engage your mindset. So we distilled the six kind of most common mindsets that we saw across all of these frameworks. And I want to just make a really clear point.
while they're certainly the most common in these frameworks and we distilled them for ease of use, they're certainly not the only mindsets you can have of innovation. They're not a prescriptive list. I think you can have any kind of mindset with just about any quirky title, just like my get through Costco files mindset. And really the idea is about intentionally.
choosing the mindset that you need based on the goal that you have in the moment for innovation. So I need to understand the problem better. Great. Your mindset is that I'm going to go out into the world, talk to people and understand what's going on. So then everything you do is shaped by that. So A, you need to choose intentional mindset and B, you need to make sure that the people that you're working with on your innovation project are, you're all being very explicit about the mindset that you have and
so that you don't have that video recording friction like my husband and I at Costco.
Louka Parry (12:22)
I that's beautifully put. I would actually just draw that into all relational spaces, frankly. I think when there's a clash of mindsets that aren't made explicit, we get into trouble. that in all personal relationships, certainly in professional cultures. Because we're noticing different things. so the illusion that communication has taken place is one of the greatest challenges we have.
So that's really interesting, kind of getting on the same page about that. Fascinating. What would you say is like an example that you would want to share from this work where you can say, you know, here's an organization or a client or a team that actually were able to reach a breakthrough because they undertook a slightly different orientation or they were explicit in their mindsets or what's the story you might want to share?
Tessa Forshaw & Richard Cox Braden (13:06)
I mean, the jumps to mind for me was one of the biggest quick service restaurants, food in the US came to us and asked for some help with getting their supply chain aligned and being more efficient. They had optimized every single node down to as good as they could go, but they needed to go farther. And they knew they were not good at taking a step back to look in that way. And we took them.
people from end to end and top to bottom. So executives down to people on the floor, like we put on parkas to go visit in a freezer, pulling boxes off to take input on the truck and deliver, and brought all those people together. And we took them through a very specific, we set the mindsets, the intention, we taught them.
Louka Parry (13:42)
Ha
Tessa Forshaw & Richard Cox Braden (13:56)
about how they should think about it in that perspective and then they did the work. So each time we met, then they would go off and they would continue the work, practicing and building that mindset. By the time they came back when we saw them again, they were steeped in it. They had made mistakes, but they got through it and they built the skill over time. And that's really what it takes. That's what I mean by not hard, but hard work when I said that earlier.
And so by doing that, they started with, we think there are sort of these six main problems. And the two and a half sessions in, it became very clear with artifacts on the wall that they had taken from their work and talking to other people.
that the six problems were not the six problems and they had to reframe around a different six set and the six sets of problems and they reorientated the teams and we shuffled everything and then continued with this same mindset work and so that big pivot took a lot of courage. There was executive support, was briefings and we'd sold that these are the problems we're going to take on and what we found was the evidence said something different and so
They switched, but it was only because we went through those series of mindsets they were able to get the data. And they felt confident that that was the right decision.
Louka Parry (15:15)
Yeah, so it's so interesting. You know, I wonder how often we're solving the wrong problem. You know, or we just can't, you can't even see the thing. I know it was because we're so focused even in education systems, right? We want problem solvers. And of course we do. But you also want discerning problem finders or definers. You know, I just, I always wonder about that. And of course we don't judge, unfortunately, our learners for the quality of their questions often.
Tessa Forshaw & Richard Cox Braden (15:19)
Yes.
Mm-hmm.
Louka Parry (15:40)
We judge the quality of
their answers. And those answers are usually to prescribe questions that we've created, that we haven't even co-created. So I just find that really interesting. Yeah.
Tessa Forshaw & Richard Cox Braden (15:47)
And they have right
answers in so many cases in education. Right.
And this is what I mean one of the things that I think is so interesting especially when it comes to innovation is that we need to Often we actually need to throw out the the right answers because the way that Often we get novelty is by people reaching back into their past experiences drawing ideas concepts knowledge and learning from analogous Context or analogous tasks or you know other things and transferring that forward into an
new context and landing it and then seeing kind of what happens in that moment. And I think when we are so prescriptive about, there's only one way that you could answer this. ⁓
Louka Parry (16:31)
Hmm.
Tessa Forshaw & Richard Cox Braden (16:31)
And there's only one right answer. We actually lose a lot of the right answers, right? And I mean, we've seen this, this is probably a little learning tangential, but this is like the classic problem with even measures of learning transfer and Thorndyke for the last century is the idea that like we teach you something, then 10 minutes later, we test you on it. Firstly, what learning can be encoded properly in 10 minutes?
Secondly, like who says the thing that you learnt 10 minutes prior was taught well? And thirdly, if I answer it correctly, but drawing on much more durable, deeply encoded learning from my life and the answer is different, but it's still accurate, I technically fail the test. And I think that's a really beautiful sort of simile to innovation.
Louka Parry (17:14)
Yeah.
That's
so good. I'd love to step into the learning space a little bit because both of you have taught, know, prestigious universities, know, still are. So what would you say about the learning experience, especially, and feel free to bring in the kind of AI component here, because we are in the middle of this enormous debate in education, right? Even about the relevance of some of those traditional ways, including university degrees. Because cognition now has...
is being automated and offloaded. And sometimes in my view, diminishing the learning experience itself because we're using these things as assistants rather than tutors. So take us into that space a little bit around, you know, the experiences you're trying to create for your learners.
Tessa Forshaw & Richard Cox Braden (17:56)
think one of the key things that we believe in, and this is actually really what brought us together as a teaching team, was meeting when we were at the D-School in one of the Wednesday lunches and realizing that we had this sort of deeply shared perspective on how the container necessary for learning and the holding space necessary for learning around creativity and innovation. And I think...
Central to that is, I think, two principles that we talk a lot about. So the first is, and we can't claim credit for this, this is NASA, explore before explain, it's called. So the idea is that you engage in exploring with the subject matter in a contained and intentionally created, I just want to make that clear, space. It's not like a free-for-all space. you bring, the learners then bring forward what
Louka Parry (18:31)
So, well, you know.
Tessa Forshaw & Richard Cox Braden (18:50)
they already know and they bring that from their archival memory into their hippocampus and they're using that to make sense of and engage with all of this content and start warming it up and actively utilizing it. And then once we've done that for a while, we pivot to explaining. And when we explain, you're then connecting this new knowledge to the existing knowledge, therefore making it more durable by the strengths of the connections. ⁓
can imagine if you just try to file it away without it being connected to anything it's kind of like if you put an index card and throw it into the know the Dewey decimal library drawer like you're gonna have no idea where it went right so and so we really anchor I think around
around that as being one of the core tenets. It's like explore, first plain. And the other, I was thinking ambiguity, you go with it. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. So the other thing, and this is, mentioned innovation hesitation before. One of the components there is the idea of cognitive caution. That to do innovation, we are, you're required, you're doing something novel, something new. There is uncertainty. There is vulnerability. There is.
such a good chance that you're going to fail. It's almost a certainty that you're going to fail. And so you're taking a lot of risk on all of those things. There's social risk involved. You're doing it maybe in front of your boss or your teammates. And all of those things warm up that amygdala, getting ready to protect us from, you know, historically from the bear that's going to eat us or the people that are a threat.
But in innovation, those things don't exist. Maybe a slight bit of embarrassment, but there's no real threat. But that's still palpable for us. And so it is we fear ambiguity and we push it away. Since we know we have to step into it, we consistently would see two or three classes in, the ambiguity would start to rise, and the students would start to...
Louka Parry (20:35)
you
Tessa Forshaw & Richard Cox Braden (20:45)
I'll say revolt, but not really. They would ask questions. They would start to ask very specific, but when you say come up with 100 ideas, is it exactly 100, and is it by Wednesday, it, right, to try to get some concreteness in because of the ambiguity? And that's when we realized we had to actually directly address the ambiguity.
Louka Parry (20:47)
Hahaha
Tessa Forshaw & Richard Cox Braden (21:10)
with the class starting at the beginning, prepare them for it, and then meet them in that moment. And by making them aware, this is what's happening, it's why it's happening, and here are the benefits to swimming in that ambiguity. The good creative power that it has, it takes the...
the being afraid of ambiguity away a little bit and lets them engage with it. And that's really what has to happen for them to create innovation. So with Explore Before Explain, there's ambiguity in that to begin with of do this thing you've never done. then you're going through a process where you're trying to abstract insights out to a, you know, how can we do this? How do we define this problem that's esoteric?
doing the addressing the ambiguity upfront lets them get there and then they get to the other side and they start it gets concrete again. They learn they over time in repeated cycles of doing that you build resilience to that fear and it dissipates and it helps you build your practice of becoming an innovator by making it a ambiguity not.
I just want to add though that for an educator, it's really hard, right? Like I just want to like name that. It's really hard to hold that space to have, you're not ambiguous about what's going to happen and the instruction, but you're holding space that feels ambiguous for students and there is.
and it takes effort to maintain it. But providing certainty and providing over-clarity is actually not the answer. What it will get you is it will make it easier for you as an educator and it will make them, for sure, tick off the class successfully. What it won't do is set them up to be able to apply and transfer that learning anywhere else ever.
Louka Parry (22:42)
Hehe.
Tessa Forshaw & Richard Cox Braden (23:03)
And so what we always tell our students is the entire purpose of this class is that you can go into the world and do design. Like that is the success metric.
The success metric is not, you have fun immediately at the end of the class when you're filling out a sheet? The success metric is not, are you not tired at the end of a workshop? The success metric is not, can you cram for an exam and reproduce information? The success metric is, can you apply this in the real world? And so that's what we're optimizing for.
Louka Parry (23:20)
Yeah.
Fantastic. I'd love, I'd love just to stay on this for a moment. Cause I feel like across the world, especially in Australia, we're not education systems are a bit trapped. We've seen across most weight measures, especially in the Western world, learning outcomes go down for the last 20 years or so. And you know, there's a correlation with the introduction of social media and technology and big conversation about that. Love your thoughts on that.
Tessa Forshaw & Richard Cox Braden (23:52)
Thank
Louka Parry (24:02)
⁓ and of course we also got mental health as a massive challenge. So it feels like the Faustian bargain that systems are making is, okay, well, let's just try to control the experience as much as possible. And then at least we can know that we're doing this part well. And I can fully understand why you would take that. But my concern of course, is that if you're not allowing enabling young people or any adult to navigate in the
through the volatility, uncertainty, complexity, know, you're, you end, might have the transcript, but what it's just now completely diverged from what the landscape of work has now become. What are your thoughts on?
Tessa Forshaw & Richard Cox Braden (24:35)
Yeah. You're also not
an empowered agentive learner who is able to use and have command of their own mind if instruction is so tightly taught. think, I mean, I know in Australia, and I'm hesitant to comment on this as an outsider, but I know that, for example, cognitive load theory has become a very popular tool. And it's interesting to me as a cognitive scientist,
One of the things about...
cognitive load that I think is being neglected in the conversation is that when you start to automatize and routinize knowledge, you start to pull it in and it costs less cognitive load. So you've got to think about your cognitive load not as how many individual pieces of things and complexity am I holding, but how many sort of individual points of entry to the rest of my neural network am I holding.
Does that make sense? And so if you focus on like this process that I just said, explore before I explain, like if you focus on helping learners connect new things to existing knowledge, you're helping them connect it to like durable, often automatized or routinized knowledge circuits and therefore actually producing the cognitive load that is necessary for them to call that forward. And so I think what I would caution is that like it's...
Cognition exists inside a mind, inside a person who exists inside a context and in relationships with other humans. And like none of those factors can be isolated from one another. And I think when we optimize for one,
we often do so at the cost of optimizing for another. And I think that has consequence. So if we're optimizing for just the mind, then an example of the cost, I think, is we're losing the pot.
Like we're reducing the potential for deep, enduring teacher-student relationships, which we also know are incredibly predictive of success because teachers are not capitalizing on moments that matter because they're scripted, right? They're not capitalizing on moments that matter and intentional learning moments and following that ridiculous thread that the entire student body is obsessed with and, you know, taking the learning to the 10th degree and it then being the project that everyone
Louka Parry (26:52)
Ha ha.
Tessa Forshaw & Richard Cox Braden (26:57)
remembers when they're 35, right? So from my perspective, I think we've just got to remember what the purpose of learning is and that it is about minds inside human people, inside context with others.
Louka Parry (27:13)
That's beautifully reflected Tessa. Thank you. I have many questions. Rich, can you, I want to get your input on the AI question. Cause I know you've got, you know, you have a background in computer electrical engineering. You know, you do this work across a lot of different corporate spaces through People Rocket. What's, what do you think is happening in that space? I know it's moving very quickly, but where do you see us now? you know, yeah, it's yeah, October, 2025.
Tessa Forshaw & Richard Cox Braden (27:23)
Sure.
What time is it? Right?
Louka Parry (27:41)
You know, because we need to date it because it'll be dated in a few months. So yeah, what's your reflections?
Tessa Forshaw & Richard Cox Braden (27:41)
Yeah. I think that's actually a great tie into what Tessa was just saying is.
Learning necessarily has got to change because what we need to do is create learners, not fill them with knowledge. They have to be able to go and get it themselves because it is changing. There was no such thing as a prompt engineer three years ago and now that's popular. And that's going to go away faster than we can imagine to the next thing. And so better to be able to adapt and adjust.
as it goes so you can move with it. Along with that, I think AI gets you is wrong much of the time now. And I think that is trying to get AI to give you an answer as opposed to trying to have AI support to help facilitate your own thinking. So an example of that would be as opposed to
putting in your homework question, asking for the solution to the problem, asking for references in theory about the nature of solving a problem like that, taking that information and solving the problem yourself. It could be distilling information about a topic, getting several different sources, having a conversation with that, and then you doing the cognition yourself.
It's too easy to just ask it and get an answer. And then you're going to end up necessarily with an averaged answer across all words the human species has generated across all time. It will give you a probabilistic mid of all of that stuff. And that is never going to be your best answer. And there's research that is now coming out that is supporting that. saw at a... ⁓
I think you attended and I zoomed in to a conference in France where they showed this of different control groups with one that was trying to do, create creative futures and using AI and one that was not. And while...
the group with AI could quickly get to a sort of medium good answer. They never, even when you take the AI away, get to a great answer. And the people that didn't have it could because it strips you of that ability to think through things in the same way. And one of my favorites about this study, sorry, and Louka I can share it with you for the show notes if that's helpful, ⁓ is they also showed that
Louka Parry (30:09)
So, have a great.
Tessa Forshaw & Richard Cox Braden (30:13)
When the students who didn't use AI in their creative futures work, they were actually asking much more, not only creative visions, but they were asking provocative questions and making, you know, statements and reflect, reflective statements on society about the futures instead of just painting an end game. So.
their work was critical and formative and interactive. wasn't just an addict on a position. And I think that was a really fascinating nuance that I took away from it. Absolutely. So the thing that I have been saying, and I'm totally ripping this off from
Louka Parry (30:49)
Mmm.
Tessa Forshaw & Richard Cox Braden (30:54)
JFK from the United States, but is ask not what you can, what AI can do for you. Ask what you can do with AI. So how do you use it to help yourself facilitate getting to the answer and coming up with something where you're doing the real work? A good example of that is even in writing the book, we used it to be like,
Tell me about the grammar in this chapter and the structure. Reflect it back to me. Now I go in and make all the edits. We didn't say fix the chapter. It always hopefully says, would you like me to rewrite this anyway? And I always say, no, I'll go do it. But it's a good way to in mass get a reflection of what's going on inside. And so what percentage of each chapter is a story? Absolutely. That was helpful for us. Like, this is really unbalanced.
Louka Parry (31:25)
Yeah.
Great question.
Tessa Forshaw & Richard Cox Braden (31:46)
balanced like yeah that was great. Yeah so I think I think it's it's looking for the ways how do you use it in a way that's successful and how do you use it not to relinquish your thinking to a machine. Also just to be clear it's not thinking. We all know it is there is no thought there is no reasoning that is actually happening in them as they are today. Will there be?
Sure, maybe someday, but it's not now.
Louka Parry (32:14)
there yet. Yeah, the indexing of, you know, I, just, I really am so curious about this question because I, well, part of me also holds the thesis that AI as a disruptive technology in some ways has unbalanced education systems such that they are now being forced to change. And a great example for us, and again, at university level is assessment. If your assessment, the whole point of writing an essay at Tess, you would say this is a co-scientist, right?
Tessa Forshaw & Richard Cox Braden (32:36)
Yeah.
Louka Parry (32:42)
Is not that the essay is written. It's that you've had to kind of grapple and struggle and then edits and refine, put together some kind of cohesive arguments, which is actually improving the quality of your thinking. And then the output is what we measure, as a proxy for that thinking. And so this whole idea of just being product oriented. And I'm really curious about this too. You know, it will just do the single assessment and that's it. That world to me seems to be completely collapsing.
Tessa Forshaw & Richard Cox Braden (32:47)
Yeah.
you
Louka Parry (33:08)
And it's shifting into one that was like, what's the process that you've gone through? How can you document your thinking? And maybe even looking at the way learners have prompted AI as part of that discernment, I think might just be the way we need to go.
Tessa Forshaw & Richard Cox Braden (33:23)
So interesting, one of my undergraduate professors, name was Alastair Greig, this amazing...
sociology professor at ANU and he said the purpose he told me this because I you know didn't edit an essay and he said to me Tessa the purpose of editing the essay actually isn't about improving the grammar the purpose of editing the essay is about refining the thinking that goes in the essay and that really changed then I was like I'll edit my essays because it stopped being about like is my grammar good but understanding that the reason I was reading it again was to
Louka Parry (33:53)
Yeah.
Tessa Forshaw & Richard Cox Braden (33:58)
was to be metacognitive, was to understand like did that strategy work? Is this what I want to say? Am I getting it across? Does that make sense? Is there a better way that I could say that?
Louka Parry (34:06)
One final question I'd love a couple of couple of final things. This one is one I'm struggling with at the moment too. The kind of so-called negative Flynn effect. And this is the idea, the Flynn effect of course is that every generation achieves a higher IQ score than the generation before such that you need to re-mean the IQ tests however valid they may or may not be.
And so the whole idea now because of technology and the impact of technology, and of course, Jonathan Hyde at NYU is probably the most outspoken on this globally. had a big impact here in Australia. you know, is that our, is this current generation because they have effectively been positioned as consumers and their attention is now the currency. What's that doing to our thinking, our cognition on the one hand, and what's it doing in the workplace space rich about what, how teams can function together.
Tessa Forshaw & Richard Cox Braden (34:54)
Mm-hmm.
Louka Parry (34:54)
What's
your current view on that?
Tessa Forshaw & Richard Cox Braden (34:57)
I would say that what I've noticed the most, and I can only say this as a university educator at some pretty great schools, is that I've certainly noticed a change in the students that come in in the last few years. And I think...
One of the things that I've noticed has definitely been a really deep desire for a very specific rubric and like a very, but like beyond anything for every assignment for a half paragraph reflection in campus, like a very specific rubric. They want like a checklist of every single submission.
you know, throughout the course of the semester and the word lines and that, you know, like it's and, and everything upfront to know where the course is going. That's hard in design because we do intentionally hold the space to be a little ambiguous. Like we know where we're going, but I don't always want to tell them because part of what I'm teaching them is to navigate it. And we've certainly found that
Louka Parry (35:55)
us.
Tessa Forshaw & Richard Cox Braden (35:57)
And I will say I've spoken to other educators who are like, yes, this has been tough. And I think we need to ask if we want to react to that, right? Like in the way that means let's lean in and give it, or if actually what we need to do is lean much further out and start to do that analysis of like, why is this happening? And then is this good?
So I feel like that's one thing that I would say. But the other thing...
is a lot of these young people are also coming with completely new skills into our classroom. And we, I think, for the first couple of years didn't consider these new, really cool skills as a way in our assessments or in our ways of doing the work. And so we've totally changed that now. Now they do anything, they make anything. so I think it's a mix of stuff has changed and there are
new skills that and new types of intelligences or to be how gardener new theories of mind that like, or habits of mind that unnecessary and like maybe we also need to shift. So that was probably not a very filling answer. ⁓
Louka Parry (36:58)
Yeah.
No, no, it's just, no thanks Tessa. Cause
it's, I just think that's lovely to hear you reflect on that because that's also with all the teachers and school leaders that we work with, that's the same conversation. You know, this idea that I've heard, I don't need to find the source, but that your generation actually now has more of an influence on you than your nuclear family. And I'm like, it's like a very interesting piece because of the horizontal connectedness of technology. You're just so connected to your peers in a way that was.
Tessa Forshaw & Richard Cox Braden (37:17)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Louka Parry (37:36)
never possible before but Richard any reflection on the workplace context what are you intergenerationally you know what's what's happening
Tessa Forshaw & Richard Cox Braden (37:42)
Yeah, I think there has always been a this new technology and it's going to destroy society, the latter that has happened with the radio and with television with all these other things. And so I am hopeful that we will make it through this as a human species. But it is going to require us to adapt.
Louka Parry (37:51)
You
Tessa Forshaw & Richard Cox Braden (38:04)
It's also changing faster than any technology adoption thus far. So the amount of change we need to do is going to reflect that as well.
What one person can do now with the augmentation of AI, because I mean, don't want to come across as I don't like AI. I love it. I use it all the time. There's a lot of utility and utilitarian things you can do to make yourself much more productive.
Louka Parry (38:27)
Mm.
Tessa Forshaw & Richard Cox Braden (38:30)
Today, I asked my email, what are all the important school dates for the rest of the year so I could, and then add them to my calendar, right? That's a great thing. It is an answer, but it didn't take any thought. is just administrative. And so those kind of things can make one person more powerful. And the kids that are growing up now are gonna come in with all of those skills to be able to do things that they couldn't before. So whereas,
Louka Parry (38:56)
Mm.
Tessa Forshaw & Richard Cox Braden (38:57)
you would start off as like, I'm an intern working the front desk, answering the phone and filing some papers was a really common first place to start. And now that same kid can come in, revise the website over lunch with AI and create a new app to communicate with the clients. So that is a total game changer.
So I think it's exciting what the potential is for how people are going to use it. But if they are dependent, like we mentioned before, and aren't an ongoing learner, they can't adapt and adjust to what these new things at the same pace either. So I think it might create a divide of learners to not learners that we're going to have to deal with as well. And we're going to have a lot of people that we don't need the jobs that they might have been qualified for.
Louka Parry (39:30)
Hmm.
Tessa Forshaw & Richard Cox Braden (39:48)
So how do we get them there?
And you've been seeing clients asking you for creative problem solving training, like standing up creative problem centers of excellence and in leadership programs and stuff. mean, what do you think that need? I'm just doing your job, Luca. I'm sorry. I think a lot of the need is things are changing so fast that we need to solve problems that we need to solve them in a different way. If we could solve them with algorithms, if we could solve them
Louka Parry (39:51)
Mmm.
I do it, it's great, now I've lost control, it's okay.
Tessa Forshaw & Richard Cox Braden (40:19)
with spreadsheets, we would have done it because we're good and we're agile and we're fast at that. I think the most important problems, and I think this has been true for a long time, is that the problems are in the people, the communication. Can you be effective? Do you have the same mindset? Is it hidden that you are working from a different perspective? You have to...
be vulnerable, have humility, and talk to each other to do that. The creative problem-solving skills are the skills you need to collaborate, to communicate, to understand others so that you can spot the problem, find the problem, and then generate something that solves it. And those are no longer just product development needs to...
get a market-penetrable product that we know will land. But internally, when you're talking about the internal processes in a company, from expense reports to how do we roll out this new learning and development program.
You need to go out and talk to people and understand what that is before you design the new program and launch it. Because I mean, how many programs or initiatives do we see that kind of come out, flop, and then just linger along because it's too much work to do it over besides we just did and we spent on that. So I think the creative problem solving tools are really exciting places to learn the collaboration and to solve things in a different way. We just need to expand the lens.
and where we can solve those problems and how we go about it.
Louka Parry (41:50)
Wow. This this has been such a great conversation. You know, we've, we've touched on metacognition. We've touched on AI cognitive offloading. we've touched on collaboration, video culture. even got to as well. mean, the concept of mindsets as well as, as the way to be during creative transfer or creative problem solving as opposed to, we're just going to do the thing and then it's done. I really, I'm really interested in that, in that piece on identity.
And I'm really taking away this explore before explain kind of line, which you've shared with us from NASA. It's such a great way to think about it. Cause sometimes you just go, okay, cool. I'm just gonna explain this and pump through it. Just stay with me instead of like, let's be explorer explorers, because that's, that's the kind of connections that we want to be making.
Tessa Forshaw & Richard Cox Braden (42:26)
Got it.
I'm also like, I mean that got us to the moon so like I'm pretty good with going with it.
Louka Parry (42:35)
Not too bad. We choose to go to the moon.
Yeah.
Tessa Forshaw & Richard Cox Braden (42:40)
Yeah.
I will say when that landed and I think I had been operating in some of that before, but when Tessa and I talked through it and it crystallized, I had to go back and look at a whole bunch of the material I had done and classes I had taught and realized that I had done them all backwards. And I had a moment of crisis going, no, all my stuff.
And it was actually not that hard of a process once I reversed it. And it comes out so much better in doing that. It takes a little bit of effort. But the Explore Before Explaining is really a magical step. So if you have a class you've done for a while, you might want to take a look and re-examine that.
Louka Parry (43:21)
I've got a final question for both of you and it's, it's just a, what's a take home message? It can be from the book, innovation-ish, can be something else that you've jamming on, but what's something that you want the sticky part from our conversation for the listeners that have got to this point?
Tessa Forshaw & Richard Cox Braden (43:34)
I know. If you want to creative problem solve, I'm so excited about this, can you tell? If you want to solve creative problems, if you want to innovate, you can do it. You have all of the skills and the tools that you need already. You don't have to take a design thinking class or go off and get a degree or do something special, get a certification. The tools already within you,
Louka Parry (43:39)
We can tell.
Tessa Forshaw & Richard Cox Braden (43:59)
from whatever your background or life experience, whether it's an educated one or a experiential one, you've got the tools that you need to do it. If you put on intentional mindsets...
then you have a lot of tools to choose from. And so if you bring back the spreadsheet thing that you did before or the journalism class that you took that taught you how to teach or talk to people and learn from them, those are great innovation-ish tools. And you don't have to go get special ones. So you have what you need. Go innovate today. That's my message. That's a good message.
Louka Parry (44:33)
It's beautiful.
Tessa?
Tessa Forshaw & Richard Cox Braden (44:34)
You're getting great insight into what it's like to work with this guy all the time. I think my message is, you know, it's about mental cognition. I think because, you know, the discussion of cognition and so...
Louka Parry (44:37)
It feels good.
Tessa Forshaw & Richard Cox Braden (44:49)
I would love folks to just remember that the mind doesn't operate in isolation of the body and that cognition actually is about your thinking, feelings and actions, so behaviours. It's situated in you in context, in relationships with others and the most important skill that I think...
we can have as that we can support students to learn is to be metacognitive. And that is to really start to be self aware, self referential about their thinking, feelings and actions so that they can understand their strategies and their choices and use their mind deliberately. To me, I mean, that is just in creative problem solving, but also in learning.
in general is I think just fundamentally essential and even over our collective product or output creation with AI like being metacognitive about our tool use and the thinking and the strategies of AI and in our process too also essential so metacognition. And now you have the insight into what it's like working with Tessa. This is why it works so well. I love that.
Louka Parry (45:59)
I was just, I was about to say you're an absolute dream team. can see where the magic is. rich Braden, Tessa, for sure. Thank you so much for sharing your work with innovation ish, your book today and just having a fantastic chat.
Tessa Forshaw & Richard Cox Braden (46:15)
Thank you for having us. you. Yeah, thank you. And for this great podcast, it's so great.
