Tessa Forshaw and Rich Braden: "Innovation-ish" and why most innovation doesn’t have to be a moonshot

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23:36Tessa Forshaw:Right now, as a listener of Design Better, you get at least 15 % off an annual membership at masterclass.com slash designbetter. That's 15 % off. Masterclass.com slash designbetter. Head over to masterclass.com slash designbetter to see the latest offer. Designbetter is supported by Qt. You know something I think about a lot? That gap between what designers intend and what actually ships. And nowhere is that gap wider than an embedded design. The interfaces in your car, your medical devices, your appliances. These are the screens that most people never think about, but they interact with constantly.

24:19Tessa Forshaw:Qt, spelled Q-T but pronounced Qt, surveyed over 400 UX and UI designers working in this space across six industries worldwide. And the finding that struck me was that six in ten said they want a different design tool. Not because they're not good at their jobs, but because the tools that they're using were built for the web and for mobile, not for hardware with specific screens and real constraints. And so they compensate. They build code. They create workarounds, custom fixes. It's all just a big hack to try to get the design tools that they want. And somewhere in all of that, the original design intent, it gets lost.

24:59Tessa Forshaw:It gets stripped down until what reaches the device barely resembles what was designed. That's a product experience problem, and it's more widespread than most people realize. If you work in embedded design, or you're just curious what that world looks like, Qt commissioned a research study to understand exactly what designers in this space need. Download the full study at qt.io slash designbetter. That's qt.io slash designbetter. I think you're going to find this research fascinating.

25:36Tessa Forshaw:And now, back to the show.

25:43Tessa Forshaw:So you've probably already spoken to this a little bit, but I want to just frame it slightly differently, because I think people can understand that these mindsets and processes might work very well in a classroom. But let's put ourselves in the mind of one of our designers or design leaders who wants to get a team together and try some of these techniques, but let's say they're facing a skeptical audience. These people have been through this before. They kind of feel like it's innovation theater. There's sticky notes and whiteboards or remote where there's like a Miro or mural board. And then we do the stuff and then nothing sort of comes with it.

26:15Tessa Forshaw:So if I'm this person, how do I pitch it to my teammates who've maybe been through similar things and let them know this is actually different and here's what we're going to get out of it? Two things come up for me in that question. One is, I think the headwinds that they are getting is what we described as innovation hesitation, that there is innovation hesitation in the environment and in the leadership that they have. And two, because the innovation-ish approach isn't a process, a dogma, a thing you must adopt, you don't have to evangelize the approach and convince them of the approach. Tess said this a week or two ago about stealth innovation was the term and what I was describing, where you can just hold a meeting and say, here's what we're doing in this meeting.

27:07Tessa Forshaw:Or you could go and do some interviews and process that and come back and say, I talked to some people and here's what I found out. Let's incorporate that. And one of the concepts that we put in the book is this concept of innovationishness. How much innovation? Does every project need all the innovation of everything completely? Or I have a project, I've been on it, it feels a little stuck. I think we need to adopt a mindset and do this move and do that little bit next and it improves things. And if that's all you do, great, you've increased your innovation-ish-ness a little bit. And if you can do two or you can do three, that's even better.

27:55Tessa Forshaw:So I think with adopting processes and things, there's a lot of momentum and there's a decision. There's a lot of fear. But if you just start integrating it day to day into the work, when it works, if it works better, people love success. And sharing the story, I mean, the best thing in the world is I came up with this result and here are my results. And people are like, how did you get that? That is fantastic. Tell me what you did. Now you can share that with them. It's a thing you can pass on, and it makes it really accessible. That's part of why Ish is so helpful and powerful, is it's accessible for anybody.

28:33Tessa Forshaw:And it doesn't take being sort of a superhero of design. I'm curious what you have seen through your research, the things that kill innovation at companies. There are things that can kill innovation immediately, a quick death. and then there's a slow death that just takes a while, kind of death by a thousand cuts. What have you seen in your research?

28:56Rich Braden:To what Rich said earlier, we have seen a lot of what we call innovation hesitation. And that really has three key components to it in how we conceive of it. So the first is this sort of myth of innovation that we've talked about. You know, it's this big thing that I can't do. It happens in Silicon Valley, in fancy buildings, with fancy innovators. the next is what we would say the creativity gap that initial discussion that we had around I'm not creative I don't see myself as creative a lot of people actually still believe in this very outdated concept of hemispheric dominance it's that you're either right-brained or left-brained and one is creative and one is analytical which is like just not true at all there's several studies that looked at hundreds of thousands of MRI and fMRI images and EEG, and they very much concluded that that's not entirely accurate.

29:50Rich Braden:And in fact, if you think about it, many things that we would consider very creative, like being a music composer, are actually very analytical tasks, right? So that's the second. And then the third is this thing of cognitive caution. And I think that this is where like a lot of the slow death happens. And cognitive caution is our normal and natural innate tendencies to resist innovation. And that can be because we feel like we're being judged. We feel like we're under threat. We're reaching for certainty. We're not staying in the ambiguity. Our amygdala is on hijack and the little almond shape in our brain is sending all of these signals to our body to say like, there's a bear that's about to eat you and you're going, oh my gosh.

30:39Rich Braden:And I think that a lot of company cultures accidentally play into the bear. And so they increase individual sort of resistance to innovation. And something that's interesting to me is I've actually experienced this. I studied like creativity, innovation, my background before I was an academic, I worked at IDEO and I worked at Accenture in these spaces. and I have been recently doing a new task to help with innovation in a big, massive institution being Harvard. I found a moment the other day where I was like, but we can't do that. And I had sort of slowly succumbed to some anxiety around like these that are very common in not just Harvard, like every slow-moving sort of big institution.

31:25Rich Braden:And I had to really sit myself down and say, Tessa, there isn't a bear that is going to eat you. It is okay. And reset that. I really think that that sort of accidental creation of angst and urgency and risk as terrible and ambiguity is bad and certainty is good, that accidental fueling of that behavior is the slowest way and the surest way to kill everyday people trying to solve everyday problems in an innovative way.

31:58Tessa Forshaw:For people who are listening, who are in some sort of a management role, who may be killing innovation and they don't know it, what are the behaviors that they should be aware of in themselves, speaking of metacognition? Yeah.

32:11Rich Braden:One behavior that is really important is when you're asking people to innovate, immediately naming, hey, I know that there might be some innovation hesitation here, but there isn't a bear that's going to eat us. And let's talk about it and name it. We know from a lot of work more on the psychology side and like cognitive behavioral therapy and things like that, that kind of naming can really help us. And then in that interrogation and discussion, you can start to like cognitively restructure your thinking around what some of these signals mean about innovation in your organization. So naming it is really important.

32:51Rich Braden:The second thing I think is as a leader, sometimes it can feel like we're at fault for everything that happens in our team, or at least the world perceives us as at fault for everything that happens in our team. And so I think the second thing is to remember that the existence of innovation hesitation, specifically cognitive caution, like is not entirely your fault as a leader. It's a thing that happens in the world that we all have innately to some degree that is like a social cognitive construct. And it's present in your team whether or not you are amplifying it. So naming it isn't about you.

33:32Rich Braden:It's about just like the reality of the world. So I think that's a really important thing for managers to recognize because I've often heard back from them like, oh, but I didn't make the innovation hesitation. So I don't need to address it. And it's like, well, it's there whether you made it or not.

33:49Tessa Forshaw:So we were fortunate to have the heads of the Moonshot Factory on a handful of episodes ago. And they're in a pretty fortunate situation where they have a parent company that's given them a lot of funding. And they have a lot of leeway to work on interesting things that have a lot of potential. But obviously not every team is in that position. In your book, you talk about this idea of roof shots versus moonshots. Rich, maybe could you talk about that a bit? Yeah, I think that's a misconception that people have, again, about innovation, that it has to be this giant moonshot idea that makes or breaks the company.

34:24Tessa Forshaw:It's a disruption or a huge pivot. And the reality is that for any moonshot, just that has a bunch of cascading innovation that needs to happen to make it true. So Tessette and I, end of last year, got to go visit Neom in Saudi Arabia. And Neom is a region about the size of Belgium that has a set of landmark huge, there may even be a beyond moonshot, maybe Marshot kind of projects. 170 kilometer, 500 foot tall city in a straight line across the desert. Lots of reasons why it's a line, but it's a huge, huge project. And they have green hydrogen and they've converted an island into a huge luxury harbor.

35:14Tessa Forshaw:and they have a ski resort. There's many different things. It's fascinating to read about. But just in the context of the line, that in and of itself is at least a moonshot project. So it's an incredible smart city that will revolutionize things if it's built, when it's built. And along the way, there's going to be a ton of spinoff from it. But to build that, it's 500 meters tall. That is as tall as the tallest building on earth right now. And they're going to build, I think it's 130 of them side by side to make this city. So to do that, the construction scale is massive. And so building that, they have to build the sections on the ground and raise them up to place them as they do the construction, up to 500 meters.

35:59Tessa Forshaw:Oh, and it's in one of the windiest places on the earth. So cranes are kind of out because you do not want that, you know, 100-meter-long, giant, concrete piece of building swinging around too much. So they had to come up with what we might call an orbit shot of a lift system with hydraulics to lift these things and put them in place. But to build those, I mean, that's a huge piece to build and move. They have to use, I didn't know this existed until we talked to them, 40-millimeter rebar. 40-millimeter is like bigger than a broomstick. It's like those big wooden drapery rods you can find. And to bend those, they had to invent robots to bend them because you can't bend them in any other way to make the cages to pour the cement.

36:45Tessa Forshaw:So now we've got sort of a cloud shot level, we might call that. And then just to get enough cement, which is some double-digit percentage of the world production of cement that they need to do, they had to work out the logistics of the trucks to make sure that it came fast enough from where they were making it and get it all in there. And so now we're sort of a roof shot. Truck logistics is not a game-changing, world-changing thing, but it's a necessary new innovation for how they are going to construct it. So no matter what level it's at, you need that cascade to get there. And the second piece is, if you look at most organizations, the majority of the people are not the ones designing the big main thing that they do.

37:34Tessa Forshaw:whether it's a social media thing. Not everybody is designing the rocket for SpaceX. But to make that whole organization work, there are thousands and thousands of people that have to do the same things that all organizations do with organizing people and finance and all of those other pieces. And if we exclude all of them from innovation because they don't have moonshots, we're missing the game. And so there's little innovations that if you aggregate them can really transform any kind of company, whether it's a big moonshot idea or it's the manufacturer of 30 % of the bed linens that everybody use that you've never heard of before.

38:13Tessa Forshaw:That's a big company that can really bend it from innovation all over the place. And so I think there's this scale of different amounts of innovation. It doesn't have to always be a moonshot. One thing that I couldn't help but think about with your book is how we should be balancing speed, which is often associated with innovation. We want to move very quickly. And experimentation. Those two things are not always compatible. And then there's this additional dimension, which is ethical and social responsibility that is often kind of swept under the rug as we press forward. For example, with AI and how fast we're moving with that.

38:53Tessa Forshaw:How do you think about those components and how to make space for all of those?

38:58Rich Braden:I would say that in our class what we have observed is that moving to the sort of compass approach instead of the process-based approach our students get a lot further and that's because they're not spending time doing things that aren't the thing that they need to do and just following the steps only to realize that they haven't actually done the thing that they needed to do or cracked the inside or really tested the idea or spent a lot more time going back out to use it Like they are doing steps that are the steps they need to be doing. And that improves their momentum, but it also improves their agility and adaptability to new constraints, new contexts, new limitations, new environments, and things like that.

39:42Rich Braden:And so I think that that's a really important part of being innovation-ish is being agile and adaptable and recognizing when and what you need to do.

39:52Tessa Forshaw:I started as a software engineer, and I was continuously frustrated that we were pushed to just deliver and just get it done. And I think to what Tess was saying, if we don't have time to do it right, do we actually have time to do it over when we don't get the good result? If you get lucky and win the lottery, sure, you zero in, you absolutely nail it one time. But that's not normal. That's not the typical case. So taking the time to do it and do it faster. But where that ties into the experimentation, I think, is what I learned for prototyping, what I held for a long time as an engineer was a prototype is mostly built, core functionality done, and let's put that out in the world and start testing for functionality to make sure we got that right.

40:43Tessa Forshaw:But instead, I think a better approach for innovation is to test very early, very often, and very fast. To do lots of small tests to prove the ideas that don't work and get rid of them. Stop spending any time on ideas that aren't going to work. There's lots of examples of this out there where you can get a feel for, does this really land with users with almost no effort involved? There's a great example I've used in class that comes out of the Nordstrom Innovation Lab. They took a team, like four or five people, put them in a store in the sunglasses area and wanted to have an iPad app to help increase sunglasses sales.

41:28Tessa Forshaw:So the iPad, you could take pictures of yourself and help people decide so they can zero in on it. But day one, they didn't have any software, so they used paper. And they just drew on there and ask people to act as if that was a real iPad, what button would they press? And they learned a ton on that day about what they should even start to implement. Drawing on paper takes no time. And in a day, you can get incredible feedback from experimentation, including you might get the feedback of, I don't want this. And if that's true, stop there because software is expensive to develop and you don't want to continue on with that.

42:05Tessa Forshaw:And we've seen that time and time again, Again, making experiments much smaller than people think is a critical piece to speeding things up by focusing your time. So Rich and Tess, for both of you, what have you learned about in the course of making this book or starting to market this book? Or it could also be not work-related that's inspiring you right now. One thing for me is with the advent of AI, AI is like a magic pencil as far as I'm concerned. With AI, I can put out sketches, whether that's make an image that is like this, draw a diagram that is like this, write a draft of this couple paragraphs I want very quickly.

42:51Tessa Forshaw:I can experiment and prototype in all types of media that I don't have access to. I'm not a graphic designer. I love it, but I can't do it myself, or I haven't put the time in to get there, and it doesn't help me. But I can express my ideas. I can build tools and applications and things really, really quickly. And so it's kind of like this magic toolbox that I get to play with, and that has been inspiring me a lot. I think you have to fall short of thinking AI can actually solve the problem for you or take over and give you the solution, at least in my view of the world. I'm more of a don't ask what AI can do for me, ask what I can do with AI.

43:33Tessa Forshaw:All deference to JFK. But I think it's an enabling technology that's like really fancy, autocorrect and autocomplete.

43:42Rich Braden:Yeah, mine is so not as futuristic and timely as you. I think part of coming out of the book that's been great has been some of the questions that have popped up and then sort of influenced some of the academic work that I'm doing right now. And so one thing in particular is the explicit impact of metacognition on creative problem solving. So there's a great study that came out of University of Kentucky that found that students who engage in metacognitive practice throughout their design program had twice as many ideas as the students who didn't receive the metacognitive intervention. Those ideas were three times more novel and their final projects were rated significantly higher by an outside team of design experts.

44:30Rich Braden:Similarly, a study at Virginia Tech looked at high-performing designers out there in the world and they found that the most high-performing designers as measured by sort of revere were those who were also demonstrating really strong metacognitive practices. And so we've been doing research in design consultants and looking at their metacognitive practices. And one of the things that is really exciting me through that work has been noticing that the practice of metacognition doesn't actually happen at the end, which is like, if you think about it when we all often talk about metacognition we think about reflection or we think about the retro or the splash down or the whatever you call it the thing that happens at the end of your work that lovely class at the end of class where everyone stands together and says a thinking routine and reflects whatever it is we always think about sort of reflection is happening in these designated moments but one of the insights that I'm really starting to see is how metacognition of these like really fantastic design consultants happens in these messy middle moments in the middle of doing something.

45:42Rich Braden:So it'll be like, oh my goodness, I'm in an interview and this person was just saying all of these acronyms and I was so distracted by all of the acronyms that I wasn't hearing any of the insights. And so I decided that for the next interview, I needed a different strategy. So I thought about the different strategies that I could take and I decided I would write down the acronyms but ignore them, completely engage and be present in the interview and then decode the acronyms at the end of the day and put them back in context with the transcript. So that's an example of someone being metacognitive about their thinking and their process not in like a sexy flashy way but in like a really tangible in the messy middle of a doing thing way.

46:22Rich Braden:So that's making me really excited at the moment is looking at that and just how amazing these thinkers and doers are.

46:30Tessa Forshaw:That's great. Rich, Tessa, the book is Innovation-ish. Where can people learn more about you and the book? They can go to www.innovationish.com. And of course, it is available wherever books are sold. We like independent booksellers. They should be able to have it or order it for you, but it's at all of the big stores as well. Fantastic. Well, thank you so much for being on the show.

46:54Rich Braden:Thanks for having us.

46:55Tessa Forshaw:Thank you. Yeah, it's been a lovely conversation.

47:02Tessa Forshaw:This episode was produced by Eli Woolery and me, Aaron Walter, with engineering and production support from Brian Paik of Pacific Audio. If you found this episode useful, we hope that you'll leave us a review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to finer shows. Or simply drop a link to the show in your team's Slack channel, designbetterpodcast.com. It'll really help others discover the show. Until next time.