Kristina Hoeppner: 0:05

Welcome to'Create. Share. Engage.' This is the podcast about portfolios for learning and more for educators, learning designers, and managers keen on integrating portfolios with their education and professional development practices. 'Create. Share. Engage.' is brought to you by the Mahara team at Catalyst IT. My name is Kristina Hoeppner. Today, I'm excited to be speaking with Dr Tessa Forshaw and Rich Braden. Tessa stumbled upon my podcast through Dr Leticia Britos Cavagnaro, who was a guest a couple of years ago and has been mentioned infrequently in various episodes since. I look forward to talking to both of them today because they've just published their book 'Innovation-ish' that draws a lot on reflection and making learning visible. It's wonderful to meet you, Tessa and Rich.

Tessa Forshaw: 1:00

Thank you so much.

Rich Braden: 1:01

Wonderful to meet you.

Kristina Hoeppner: 1:03

Tessa, what do you do at Harvard University, please?

Tessa Forshaw: 1:06

I am the founding scholar of the Next Level Lab, which is a research lab that sits within Project Zero in the Harvard Graduate School of Education. I'm a cognitive scientist, and so I study, through the lens of the cognitive and the learning sciences, how people work, learn, and create.

Kristina Hoeppner: 1:25

Thank you, and you're a colleague of Leticia Britos Cavagnaro through the d.school, right?

Tessa Forshaw: 1:30

Yes, so Rich and I actually met when both of us were on the teaching faculty at the Stanford d.school several years ago, and now I am on the other side of the country, but now I teach still with Rich at the Harvard Innovation Lab as well.

Kristina Hoeppner: 1:44

Rich, what is your role at People Rocket? That's one awesome company name, by the way.

Rich Braden: 1:50

Thank you. I typically go by the Chief Innovation Evangelist. I am passionate about helping people access and participate in innovation in education, in government, in corporations, in social sector, across the board. I love to bring it to everybody. I do a lot of advising and leading design projects, and we put together specialised teams to match with what that project is. For 15 years, I've had a split focus with one foot - I'm not an academic, but I teach in academic environments for that long at Stanford. In fact, I met Leticia because I had a side career doing improv where it was being applied and taught an improv for educators class where we met, and she said, "Hey, this is so much like what my work is at the d.school. Why don't you come over here?" And really, sort of gave me my kickstart into this world, and so I started teaching at Stanford in the design school, but also in the Graduate School of Business, doing creativity and innovation.

Kristina Hoeppner: 2:49

That's fantastic to draw these connections between the different people and the different foci that everybody has, but then bringing them together, in this case through improv, in your case, Rich, and Tessa for you by having been on the staff at d.school, and I'm now meeting you also because of Leticia, so she's our connective tissue.

Rich Braden: 3:09

That's right.

Kristina Hoeppner: 3:10

When did you two encounter portfolios for the first time?

Tessa Forshaw: 3:15

In teaching design, they've always been a central part of how students demonstrate their learning. But for me, my passion, I suppose, for them and belief in their use, came when I was teaching at the d.school. I supported a class called 'Portfolios are for everyone'. The class was designed to support graduating students to help craft a portfolio of their work so far. The premise wasn't just a documentation in the sense of Project A, Project B, Project C, Project D, etc., but the goal was to help them use a story or a metaphor or some kind of connective tissue to bring their work together and tell the consumers of the portfolio, be that readers of postgraduate education applications, be that graduate programmes in consulting companies, post graduate jobs. The goal was to be able to help the students really articulate a story of who they were and how they become, and how their different projects had connected along the way. That really resonated with me because I spent many years focusing on this idea of learning transfer, and really that's the premise that you learn something in one context and you can easily apply it in a novel context. I have this inherent belief that people have skills from all the different projects and work and experiences that they've had in their lives, and that they can bring them together and bring them forward into novel roles and spaces. I think portfolios are a really powerful way of communicating that.

Kristina Hoeppner: 4:48

Absolutely. That really exemplifies the portfolio work because it is not just about the documentation, it is very much about that reflection and then also that transfer of knowledge into other areas. Rich, what is your experience then with portfolios, please?

Rich Braden: 5:05

I would say my earliest experience that I can recall is for a slightly different purpose of influence and connection creating. I did some work with the Clinton Global Initiative in their annual meeting where people make huge challenges to try to go out and projects and change the world and connect with the other members there for funding, for connections, and influence. My job was to help these individuals who were out in the world changing the world, so it could be a doctor working in a country, helping to do ear surgeries, to tell their story, to create a portfolio of what is a lifelong career, and tell it in a very short period of time. Doing that by showcasing it, as opposed to listing, was a really important facet of that. That was really to influence and create connections. The reflective in education in classes like Tessa was just mentioning, we've also used it as an end-of-class project where the students show up, there is a stool with a note on it from the teachers saying, 'Here is your assignment,' and they have to then collaborate and work together to create a work product and an article that we then edit and post on Medium if it needs any editing of what was their learning experience of the entire class. It's a moment, instead of a final on the last day, for them to stop reflect on their work, to work together, to share and create something that predominantly is for them to remember and to seek their learning, so that they can go back and reflect on it later, to bring that forward when they want to access some of the tools we've covered.

Kristina Hoeppner: 6:38

You now mentioned another two aspects of portfolio work that I find really important, namely, the first one was the storytelling that we should not just list things, but really tell the story and therefore also shape how we are entering a particular subject or how we are viewing something that somebody presents. The second aspect is then to use it as an alternative assessment method, in your case, making it really visible to the students what they have actually learned in class.

Tessa Forshaw: 7:05

One thing about portfolios that is really important in our class is that they provide an assessment method for us that helps students not feel wed to their innovation having to be successful in a classical sense. What I mean by that is, before we use portfolios, in the early years that Rich and I were teaching together, we had this tendency in our class for students to think that getting an A in our class meant having found an innovative idea that worked and was like going to be a start-up. And so they would try to present to us like they got the question right, and they got the right insights, and they were trying to put square pegs in round holes to make sure it looked like it fit because they thought that that is what a good grade meant. When we changed that, the portfolio approach let it be that they could try something and learn actually, that that was a really terrible idea and fundamentally not the right problem that they were solving, demonstrate that learning in their portfolio and then how they moved on and went to something else. That fundamentally changed what they were willing to present to us, what they were willing to share with us, and was really transformative for us in how we communicate actually what good innovation and design work is, which is not making something look beautiful if it shouldn't exist because nobody wants it and it doesn't work.

Rich Braden: 8:27

I think another aspect is that, especially with our approach to teaching the class, we have very few slides or any kind of traditional pieces, and the students are rarely in front of any kind of device or screen. They're at whiteboards. They're interviewing people. They're doing post-its. So most of the class and the learning happens in the activity, and so the reflective article at the end is also a chance for them to make sure that they've captured the notes, and they are building a memory device for themselves because so much has happened not there. We don't give a syllabus up front that tells them what's going to happen because we want the experience to unfold. And so I think that becomes an important piece for their ongoing learning and helping them to transfer.

Kristina Hoeppner: 9:14

Which reminds me a lot of having been at the d.school once, seeing all of those whiteboards and movable walls and all the creative pieces of work that are showcased, even in the foyer. Having that documentation piece and then also the reflection built into it, so that they then can take that away because at some points they might not have access to the physical evidence that they have created for their project.

Rich Braden: 9:40

Yes, often they will capture digitally the whiteboards that you're talking about, and it becomes part of their portfolio and their notes because that, for them, cues the memory of what happened, and they can even zoom in and read them.

Kristina Hoeppner: 9:53

Which now really nicely leads us into the start of the conversation about your book because recently, on the third of September of 2025 you published your book

'Innovation-ish: 10:03

How anyone can create breakthrough solutions to real problems in the real world'. Why did you decide to team up? Well, I guess, since you've been already working together multiple times, and what is the story behind the book's title? How are we supposed to pronounce it? Is it innovation ish? Is the emphasis on the 'ish', or is the emphasis on the 'innovation'? What would you like us to know about it?

Tessa Forshaw: 10:30

That is the best question I have got so far through this experience. I love it. My answer is both. It's'innovation ish'. Sometimes, if you're saying, like, 'Should we try be a little innovative?' And at the same time, if you're trying to say to someone, 'Hey, be innovative, but don't take it too seriously,' you could be like, 'Look, just be a little bit innovation-ish.' So I think it could be either, depending on the situation. Rich and I started teaching together nearly 10 years ago. That is, wow. I honestly felt a little bit like in the classroom, I had found a kindred spirit who felt really similarly about design education to me, in the sense that everybody that I'd ever met I believed had creative potential. And I think Rich really believed that, too. We also were both frustrated at how many people around us didn't see themselves as creative when we could see how amazing they were, and how many students would struggle to identify themselves as someone who should even be in a conversation about innovation, let alone doing it. This book really came second to our teaching together and formulating a class, which was really built around this idea of, let's get rid of all of the jargon. Let's get rid of all of the fancy words and all of the processes and the need for expensive spaces and beautiful Birch buildings, and you know, all of that, and get down to the people and how their mind works and empowering them to have the agency and the capability to unlock creativity in their everyday lives.

Rich Braden: 12:09

I was just going to add that I think the 'ish' is just taking this big thing, that's innovation that kind of frightened people, softening it to be a little more cuddly, like stuffed animal [Tessa laughs] or a Pokémon or something like that, to be like, 'Oh, it's just innovation-ish. It can't hurt you. Now that it can't, now you can go and play with it.' That's at the end of the day what we want is people to engage in the work.

Kristina Hoeppner: 12:33

You've certainly done that. We didn't really have a lot of time between Tessa contacting me, us scheduling the interview, and now actually talking to each other. It was just a little over a week. So I've read your book over the weekend, and I really must say, I devoured it just in one session because it was so very easy to read. It was so engaging to read because you really spoke to me. You engaged me just through the language that you used. And yes, jargon free. And of course, there's a lot of references at the end of the book if somebody wants to know the theory behind it or wants to read up more of it, but the book itself just really felt so nice to read and follow along because it had this very personal view also with all of the stories that you shared with your personal stories in there, with stories from your students and your community. So it's really a wonderful read.

Rich Braden: 13:26

Thank you. I think there are two things. One, we very intentionally wrote it to be accessible language because we think that what's in it is very accessible. And two, Tessa is gifted to break that down and explain it in ways that even me, a simple improviser, can understand clearly and that everyone can. Much of it makes sense. I've heard her go on wonderful, long explorations of all the technical terms underneath it. I love and appreciate her for that, but it really takes that something extra to bring it down to where everybody can just absorb it. That makes it actionable and accessible, so that you can really start to use those tools and use your brain the way it works to help you to do better with creativity. And I think that's a really powerful concept that she's brought to it.

Kristina Hoeppner: 14:16

Yeah, it also follows in your book that it's innovation-ish, that it makes innovation accessible. It's not this daunting big thing, but everybody can do it.

Tessa Forshaw: 14:26

Through working with Rich I've had the opportunity to also get out of the ivory tower, so to speak, and I'm so grateful for that because People Rocket does amazing work with all sorts of different organisations, from small non-profits to massive quick service restaurants, global entities, and everything sort of in between. One of the best things as an academic, I think, is going out into the real world, and this is sort of being innovation-ish, that's a little bit meta. But like going out into the real world and seeing how people talk about this, what language do they use and bringing that to the work because the language I use isn't the point. It's about speaking it in a language that can be understood and interpreted and heard.

Rich Braden: 15:09

I think when we set out what you just said for everyone, we thought through it, and we had an idea at first, oh, this is who this book is for, and then we would realise something else. So people that are brand new to innovation, we wanted to make it easy for them, but then in there, we found people who would struggle with it or imposter syndrome or think of themselves as not creative, and we're like, 'We can lower the bar to make that easy and safe for them as well.' We definitely had people come in a little sceptical, going,'Look, I've tried this stuff. I've taken the other class, or I've done this other thing, and I've seen it not work.' We have been able to turn that around in some of the ways it's taught and that people are told I think are fundamentally flawed, and we tried to fix that. When we talk with expert innovators about it as well. There's nuance in the way that we're doing this with the approach. We talk about it as there are a certain set of mindsets that are required for innovation. There are a certain set of actions you take, we call'moves'. And then the most important piece, I mean, they're all important, they work together, but metacognition of reflecting on how it's going, your thinking and feelings during it, and how you use new strategies to improve what you're doing. Pretty much every group, they come to it in a different way, and they get a different thing out of it. But it really is speaking very broadly, and we include all other methodologies within what we're talking about.

Kristina Hoeppner: 16:33

On this podcast we are talking very much about portfolios, and so I do want to tie it always back, and Tessa has said that you are using portfolios in your class, and that it has transformed how you're teaching because you're encouraging your students to also talk about their failures, to talk about ambiguity, which, of course, is very much what reflection often is about because we are learning through the things that do not quite go so well. Can you please share a story that illustrates then this mindset shift using the strategies that you have developed and also present in the book?

Rich Braden: 17:09

A good story that illustrates this is actually the'interactions mindset' where you have to get out into the field and interact with real people. We were working with a distributor of a product. Their customer was a big quick service restaurant. We went out into the field with them to a distributor so they could see the flow of the products and the supply chain and how things come in and out. This was a group of executives from both companies that were there to see this. They knew how things worked, but I had convinced them that the reality in the field isn't always what we see on paper or get in our reports. At one point during the tour, we went out onto the parking lot. There was a truck full of big cylinders of product that was from one company delivered to the other. A manager was there giving a wonderful tour, explaining everything, answering all the questions, and then he hopped up in the truck and he said, 'You excuse me for a minute. I have to actually do the inventory, and then I'll be back with you.' He clipped a tag off, and he went inside so he could record the number. As soon as he clipped it, the whole energy of the group tightened up. I saw them go a little stiff, and I had no idea what was going on. As soon as the guy went in the building, I looked and they started talking together, and I asked them,'What's going on?' He had clipped the security tag that is involved with the chain of custody of this product, which is a very important thing. He didn't do it because he's a bad guy. He did it because 'I have to take this in. I have to make sure the numbers are right. This is the quickest, most efficient way to get my job done.' So he'd come up with a little innovation to help everybody there make it work, but it violated the policies that they had put in place, and they knew that something was wrong. They were shocked to find out that that's how it been done for quite a while. That insight of that's how it works, is something that you could only see when you go out and talk to people and you can then solve that problem. How do we successfully record the tracking information that we need and get it accurately and quickly? You can use barcodes, you can use RFID, you can use scanners, you can make a piece of the tag that comes off. There's so many different solutions once you see it, but they wouldn't have known that that was what was going on without going out into the field, and that's because they put on an observational mindset of this interactions with other people.

Kristina Hoeppner: 19:23

That's very powerful story. Tessa, does a story come to mind for you?

Tessa Forshaw: 19:28

In a slightly different vein, a story for me that talks about the value of a portfolio was we were working with a different organisation, but again, in that quick service space. They came up with a series of ways to think about reducing waste in the back room of their cafés. And what they coalesced around was this one idea that they all fell in love with that included Alexa or voice activation system like that and was very sexy and fun. There were several other ideas that have sort of made it to that initial stage, and they were keen to go all in it. But Rich and my counsel was actually, no, you need to hold a portfolio of ideas at this moment. That's really important. They're communicated via a portfolio so that people can understand them and see them, the value of them, and build a shared mental model around what each one is. They went out and they tested this idea already talking about how much it would cost to roll it out to every instance of the organisation, what that would look like, all of these things. And then it turns out that when you're in the kitchen area of a restaurant or a café, voice activated systems are really tricky because a) not everybody speaks English in the same accent or to the same degree, b) they're really noisy. There's fans and yelling and all sorts of things, and so stuff gets picked up and missed. It didn't actually work. Thank goodness that they had this other portfolio of ideas that they'd actually considered and fleshed out, rather than just going with it from idea stage and running out and implementing it because otherwise, they would have been millions of dollars in implementation until they figured out that it didn't work. Instead, they came back up. They were able to pick a different idea from the portfolio, this time with much more of a testing mindset. They tested a couple and then they eventually did go with some of the items in the portfolios. That was a great example for me of how a portfolio can also help you face failure because it's not about your singular idea being the right thing, but it's more about there's a selection of things. Then you can learn about and you can test different things and take them forward, and then come back to the portfolio. It sort of changes the mindset about how you go about the testing and the iteration and the product development.

Kristina Hoeppner: 21:42

It also comes down to what you call passive reflection and metacognition that you can say yes, the idea failed and leave it at that point, more the passive reflection. You've realised that something didn't work. Versus the active metacognition where you're noticing that something went wrong, and that also, I think, aligns really nicely with Leticia's book 'Experiments in reflection: How to see the present, consider the past, and shape the future' because the most important thing is the noticing. From noticing, having awareness, go into evaluation, so considering the evidence and determining whether it's working or not, and then controlling using the evaluations to adjust the plan and then switch tactics if needed. In your case, Tessa and also Rich that they evaluated more ideas, discuss things more. Do you want to talk a little bit more about that distinction that you're making in the book between the passive reflection and active metacognition because typically in portfolio work, we just talk about reflection.

Rich Braden: 22:47

You know what story I'm thinking of, don't you? Yeah, go for it. No, no, it's your story.

Tessa Forshaw: 22:52

Okay. My mother-in-law, Nada, was the most amazing woman. She would go travelling a lot through Europe. This one time, she took her daughter on a trip. She would take diaries. I had the privilege of reading some of her diary entries. They say things like, 'I woke up. I ate breakfast. We went out to lunch here in this square, saw the church. It was big, went for a walk, met a couple from Germany- I remember that explicitly once - did this.' That diary entry, I think, is a really great example of passive reflection. It's recounting what happened. Yes, there is value in that you're playing it back. You might be implicitly connecting some dots or thinking about things, you might get warm memories that cue forward when you read it later and you think about the day. But it serves a purpose of recounting what happened. If you think about passive reflection versus active metacognition, as we call it, take Nada's diary, and we're going to make it up a little bit. Now it says, 'Woke up this morning and I realised I was feeling really tired from the night before. I wonder if perhaps we went to bed a little bit too late. Vicky and I went up. We got dressed, we had breakfast. The smell of fresh omelet really puts me in a good mood for the day, and I was so excited to take it on. We went for a walk through the old city. It was really beautiful. And then we met this couple from Germany, and that interaction of talking to people from other sides of the world about how beautiful this place we were standing together in, even though neither of us was from there, was really energising, and I got so much out of that. I was so glad we met them.' That's a completely different situation. That is active metacognition, where you're thinking about how the day went, what you did, maybe I need to adjust something for next time. What gave me energy, what took it away? How did my emotions appear in the day, not just my thinking and not just my actions? What decisions or choices did I make because of things? When I think about reflection in design education, I think we all want active metacognition, but sometimes we accidentally scaffold to only get passive reflection. I love thinking routines a lot. One thing that I learned the hard way in my own design classroom [laughs], I think Rich and I both learned this the hard way, is that having students reflect on the last day of class in the last 20 minutes by standing in a circle, saying a thinking routine out loud, isn't actually the kind of reflection that we need to teach them to make them better designers in the real world. That active reflection is more like recounting something that happened in the class, and even if it is active, it's happening at the end. So they can't change their actions and their choices and their decisions because the class is ending in five minutes. They probably want to get out the door as quickly as they can. When we think about active metacognition, we've started trying to change what reflection looks like in our classroom and in the book, we really lean on this as an important concept. Every design choice that you make, every time you're trying to think about what mindset you need, what move you need, how that move went, you are engaging in reflection, constantly, in situ and throughout, so that you can be making those dynamic decisions to change your experience, so that in the case of my lovely mother-in-law, Nada, you're at the end of the day, she then isn't repeating things that maybe didn't bring her joy on her trip. She's doing things that did. She's talking to more strangers because that gives her energy, and she's learned that about herself. She's realising that the smell of eggs in the morning makes her really happy, and so that's a good choice to go to for breakfast. I think there are small things and big things that come through being active in our metacognitive reflection practice.

Kristina Hoeppner: 26:52

Tessa, what is a thinking routine, please?

Tessa Forshaw: 26:55

A thinking routine is typically a strategy or a scaffold that an educator might give a learner. 'I like, I wish, I wonder', is a great example, or 'I used to think, but now I think' is another one. I'm a huge fan of them. However, I think that the magic doesn't happen from the routine. You can complete a statement like 'I used to think, but now I think', and not be metacognitive. A great example is sometimes at the end of class, when we were first doing this, as I mentioned in the last five minutes, at the very end, we would hear things like, 'I used to think talking to people at McDonald's would be full on, and now I think it smells bad.' That's not really a metacognitive reflection, right? That's a recounting. When we changed it to incorporating it in all the time and making it about the small movements, not the big things, we started to see things like - in that exact same context, we would have started to see something like 'I used to think that approaching people who were strangers in a place would be really confronting and they wouldn't want to talk to me. Now I think I'm making that anxiety myself, and by calming that down and focusing on them and serving them and asking them questions about themselves, I can overcome that and engage in productive conversations.' That would be a really good example. Or 'I used to think that the answer to X question was Y, but now I think I was bringing in a lot of biases from another context that don't actually have a place here.' That reflection got so much deeper, even though we were using a really good reflection tool, a thinking routine that Project Zero at Harvard came up with. That tool, it needs to be used properly. It can't just be copy and pasted.

Kristina Hoeppner: 28:40

Is that then where instead of just giving those prompts, you also give those additional question types that you've developed so that you give more detail of what you expect your students to talk about or what they should be thinking about?

Rich Braden: 28:54

The move map is a great example of giving a scaffold or a tool to help prompt active metacognition. We have the students stop and document so we can externalise and let them inspect the steps and the questions that they're asking as they go through. So before they choose what they do next in their project, we have them think about, what have you learned? Where are you now? And what is the most important thing that you need to answer if you're going to move your project forward. Then they can examine the different mindsets and create really a little portfolio of moves. Here are the different options that we have and what we think we'll get out of them. Now they can evaluate that and make a decision what they choose to move forward with, but they already have an expectation of what they think they're going to get. At the end, they're comparing their expectation to the results they actually got. That helps them with their decision making. By repeating that cycle over and over, they're very intentionally moving forward, knowing what, why, and where they are going to do the next step of their project, and they can then go back and inspect their thinking and say, 'Ah, I think this didn't work as well as we wanted. Let's make a different choice here.' So it sort of creates a map of their decision tree, and they can go back to inspect at any time.

Kristina Hoeppner: 30:12

You've documented a number of moves in your book so that students really have lots of different tools on hand that they can use dependent on the situation that they are in. Rich you wanted to talk about one important thing in regards to portfolios.

Rich Braden: 30:28

For me, portfolios are not just a history or a catalogue of what has happened. They are also an analysis and decision making tool. Many people think of innovation as one big monolithic thing, like a moon-shot idea. In 10 years, we can reach the moon, or we can create this amazing new electronic currency that will change the world, right? These really grand ideas, and those are lovely. Tessa and I had the experience of travelling to Saudi Arabia, to a region called Neom. Neom is a grand vision of the future by the Crown Prince, and it is many different projects, including one, for instance, the Line. It is a vertical city, 500 meters tall. It's supposed to be over 100 kilometers long. It's in construction. It's not finished yet. That's a moon shot, maybe even, I think Tess has called it a Mars-shot idea. It's a giant idea. But when we got there and we saw what was happening really on the ground, what we realised is it is a giant portfolio at many different scales of innovation. While you have the moon-shot idea of the Line, to do that there are some really tight construction techniques. To raise, I think it was 100 yard or meter segments of the building and lift them up in one of the windiest places on the planet, there's some special things you have to innovate to do that. To do that and to build those, the amount of cement that they need meant they had to innovate in cement production and logistics to bring in the number of trucks, including building roadways. To make that cement set and last in that kind of environment, they had to come up with robots to bend 40 millimeter rebar inside the cement. There's this cascade of ideas, from a moon-shot to an orbit-shot to a cloud-shot to a roof-shot even down into jump-shots of how do we day to day do the scheduling? Innovation really is a portfolio of ideas at a very different scale, and by mapping that out, you can see where maybe you've made too big of leaps. You can make decisions on that. You can see where maybe you're deficient in one area or another with the organisation or the idea that you're working with. There is this portfolio of shots that you can do, from sort of roof-shots to moon-shots that I think is a really important idea.

Kristina Hoeppner: 32:49

No matter how big the task is, even if it's a small one, you can reflect on it. It doesn't always have to be something very big.

Rich Braden: 32:55

Absolutely.

Kristina Hoeppner: 32:57

Often when we think about innovation, it is these crazy ideas, and you need to be very creative, and it needs to be something that already says creativity on the outset. However, we are using portfolios quite frequently for assessment purposes in classes like engineering or mathematics or plumbing or also for professional certification, so for nurses that just need to make sure that they create their portfolio to showcase how they are treating patients and fulfilling all their requirements. Often such scenarios might be regarded as quite rigid or not really allowing for a lot of creativity or innovation because there is an assessment framework or certification framework involved. How can students or professionals make use of the ideas from your book in these scenarios? How would you bring in that creative element or show them you can still be creative and innovative?

Tessa Forshaw: 33:54

Coming back to the title of the book,'Innovation-ish', is that we don't have an all or nothing mentality. So a lot of creativity, design, creative problem solving, innovation frameworks out there are, you know, beautiful framework that's lovely in its design. And you start here, and then you have to go through all of the things and all of the steps and get to the end. And then at the end you have, you know, your unicorn or your magic, innovation. Our approach is a little bit more along the lines of, if you read the book and there's one tiny thing that you think you can do, you know what, I'm going to take on an interactions mindset and just chat to a couple of people in the coffee shop line to learn a little bit more about how they perceive X, you are being a little bit more innovation-ish. We call it innovation-ishness. The more moves you do, the more innovation-ishness you have. I used to work at the IDEO CoLab. People around there, they're very high on the innovation-ishness because they're doing these kinds of moves with the mindsets every day, all the time. That's their job. But not every job is like that. And so we would say, do one thing, a little bit is a little bit more than nothing. Two is a little bit more than that. Rich, I think you often use a gym analogy to explain this, right?

Rich Braden: 35:10

If you go to the gym one day a week, it is not going to transform your health, but it is better than not going to the gym one day a week. When you're routinely going one day a week, you get used to it, and you are motivated to maybe go a little bit more, so maybe do a second day and a third day. The amount that you do indicates the amount of benefit you're going to get out of it. If you're training for a triathlon, you better be hitting the gym quite a bit, or it's not going to go very well. If you're just trying to do a little bit of connection with your family, and you take an after dinner walk for 30 minutes a couple times a week. That's the amount of that that you need. So true with that portfolio of innovation, if you do a couple of roof-shots and a couple of jump-shots and maybe every once in a while a cloud-shot, that might be enough for what your needs are, not everything has to be a giant innovation. But if you do want more, the pathway is just increase your practice, and you will get there.

Kristina Hoeppner: 36:08

Thank you so much. Tessa, I think you will be an honorary German because you've mastered compounding words or elements of words and making them into longer words. So we are not just having innovation, there's innovation-ish, and now there's innovation-ishness. Yes, you're an honorary German.

Tessa Forshaw: 36:26

That's the best compliment I've got all day[laughs]. I love that.

Kristina Hoeppner: 36:30

Now to our quick answer round. Which words or short phrases do you use to describe portfolio work?

Rich Braden: 36:38

Reflective, influential, and decision making.

Tessa Forshaw: 36:43

When I talk about portfolios to students, I say things like, they help me see your process. They help me see how you think as a designer.

Kristina Hoeppner: 36:53

What tip do you have for learning designers or instructors who create portfolio activities? Let's start with you, Tessa.

Tessa Forshaw: 37:01

I think it would be that thing that we learned in class at the beginning, which is make sure that the portfolio is about the process more than it is about the product. It's okay if some of them show products or ideas or things that weren't successful because they're all part of the portfolio. So making sure that you don't signal to students that only the fidelity of a final product is what matters.

Rich Braden: 37:29

I would say show iteration. Do bad drafts. Show the next step and the next step as it evolves. Retain where you came from because all those ideas are the building blocks of the future ideas, and it's nice to see all of it. Depending on how you present it, you may curate from your portfolio, but keep everything and let it be messy.

Kristina Hoeppner: 37:53

Now, final piece of advice for our portfolio authors and for students or anybody really who's creating portfolios. What advice would you give to them?

Rich Braden: 38:03

A concept from our book is let them be divergent and convergent. Put a lot of things out there, fill up your portfolio, then curate and move forward to the next iteration with the things that are resonating and work. So you constantly are building new things and then curating new things.

Tessa Forshaw: 38:22

I would say function is more important than form. It's very easy in this era of Instagram, we're so far focused on the façade, on what a thing looks like, and if it's beautiful or Instagramable, or, you know, whatever. And actually, the thing that matters the most in good design is the function. If it doesn't do the thing that the users need, if it doesn't fulfil the purpose, if it doesn't do for the nurses demonstrating patient care, if your portfolio doesn't do that, it doesn't demonstrate the you know, appropriate care of patients and the competencies that you need to exhibit, but it looks pretty, who cares? Function over form. That is my advice.

Kristina Hoeppner: 39:07

Thank you so much for that final piece of advice, and thank you so much for the chat today. It was really, really awesome hearing a bit more about your book. Of course, we've not even exhausted maybe 10% of it because it is both beautiful in function and also in form that I'd really like to invite everybody to get it, to read it, and also try a lot of those concepts. You choose one of the mindsets. Give it a go. I'm certainly going to try the ideas mindset, so getting beyond the 10 or 12 initial, very obvious ideas, and trying to see if I can get to 50 or 100 and any of the other mindsets. Check out the moves. And then also, I think, report back to Tessa and Rich and let them know how your journey into creativity and innovation is going. So thanks so much to the two of you.

Tessa Forshaw: 40:01

We definitely would love folks to share on LinkedIn anything that they try. We take feedback, excitement, and sarcastic remarks. All of those are welcome. We look forward to hearing about it.

Rich Braden: 40:13

Absolutely. Thank you for having us.

Kristina Hoeppner: 40:16

Now over to our listeners. What do you want to try in your own portfolio practice? This was 'Create. Share. Engage.' with Dr Tessa Forshaw and Rich Braden. Head to our website, podcast.mahara.org, where you can find resources and the transcript for this episode. It would be great if you shared our podcast with a colleague of yours so they can listen as well. Until then, create, share, and engage.