Nov. 14, 2025

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

Show Notes

Today on The Future is How, Frederik's guests are Tessa Forshaw and Rich Braden – authors of Innovation-ish: How Anyone can Create Breakthrough Solutions to Real Problems in the Real World

Rich Braden is the founder and CEO of the San Francisco-based consulting firm, People Rocket. For the past 15 years he has been a design educator at universities around the world including Stanford University and Harvard University.

Tessa Forshaw is a cognitive scientist, senior researcher, and co-founder of the Next Level Lab at Harvard University. She teaches design thinking, creativity, and innovation at the Harvard Innovation Lab and Harvard University DCE. She also served on the Teaching Faculty at Stanford’s design school for several years.

In this episode:

• How the Innovation-ish approach can lead to real innovation

• Why hesitation isn't bad and how you can overcome it

• How complex issues can be addressed playfully

• Joint efforts of testing and iterations lead to good results

• Exploration comes first, explaining later

• A mindstate moment with 5 questions about your future

• How to integrate Innovation-ish into your daily life

• AI as a partner for innovation

Chapters

00:00 Intro

02:25 Tessa and Rich's future Bio