Reimagining Creative Problem Solving: From Learning Sciences to Everyday Creative Practice
We are thrilled to announce the launch of Innovation-ish: How Anyone can Create Breakthrough Solutions to Real Problems in the Real World
We all attempt to solve real problems at work, school, and in life regularly. We plan, we test, we adjust. We come up with novel solutions to problems, without even realizing we do it.
And yet, many of us don’t see ourselves as creative or as innovators. Even fewer of us have a clear understanding of how innovation and creative problem-solving truly work in our minds and within our teams.
What might change if research made that clearer? How would we build and teach innovation and creative problem-solving differently? What level of creativity would we expect of ourselves and of others?
Next Level Lab is sharing an exciting new resource. One of our founding scholars, Tessa Forshaw, has published a new book, Innovation-ish, that goes on sale today. It is based upon her and her co-authors' years of experience teaching creativity, design thinking, and innovation at the Stanford d.school, Harvard Innovation Lab, and Harvard Division of Continuing Education.
Innovation-ish, in true Next Level Lab style, applies learning sciences, cognitive science, and psychology to explore how people can effectively engage in creative problem solving. It breaks the science down into accessible insights and frameworks that anyone can use.
Here are some highlights from where research insights from the Next Level Lab are drawn upon inside the book:
Innovation grows when metacognition is contextual, and people are empowered to engage in short plan-do-check-adjust cycles within real tasks. This builds the contextualized agency needed to thrive in messy and unstructured work.
Awe supports discovery and persistence. Wonder helps you treat surprise and mistakes as information that leads to the next step. However, the way we teach both science and innovation today in schools and universities often leads people to think they are doing it wrong when their results do not match expectations.
Managing amygdala hijack enables people to think flexibly when facing uncertainty. Naming the state and using basic regulation moves helps you act with clarity. Taking measures to prevent or manage an amygdala hijack can help maintain momentum in the face of ambiguity and uncertainty.
Learning transfer is the process of applying knowledge, skills, and abilities learned in one context to another. Creative problem-solving thrives when people transfer their learning from one context to another, and it also means that anyone has a starting point when approaching creative problem-solving.
Let's dive a little deeper into each of these concepts, with examples from the research.
1. Metacognition helps us see and steer our own thinking and actions.
Decades of evidence show that metacognition is “one of the most powerful strategies” for improving learning. It supports learners in planning, monitoring, and adjusting their work, enabling them to adapt and apply their knowledge in real-world settings. In Next Level Lab studies, we’ve found that metacognitive prompts encourage individuals to recognize how cognitive, social, physical, and emotional contexts influence their performance and to make subtle adjustments that carry over into new situations. In design and design education, reflection questions that encourage self-awareness, evaluation of thinking, and identification of specific next steps help people recognize their patterns and enhance ideation, development, and problem-solving. The result is a practical user’s manual for the mind, preparing learners to apply knowledge in complex and dynamic contexts.
In Innovation-ish, metacognition is an essential ingredient to the practice of creative problem-solving. It is through metacognition that readers can step away from unthinkingly following a predefined innovation process and start building the muscle of integrating and shaping their thinking, actions, decisions, choices, and emotions.
Learn more:
Metacognition in Design and Design Education
Harnessing the Power of Reflection for Learning in the Workplace
Leveraging the Power of Metacognition and Contextualized Agency for Workplace Learning
2. Awe supports discovery and persistence, helping us turn failure into feedback.
Awe often appears in scientists’ own descriptions of their work and is closely tied to their processes of learning and discovery. In workplace studies conducted by the Next Level Lab, brief moments of everyday awe have been found to help people find meaning, stay engaged, and approach challenges with fresh curiosity. Many schools and universities present science and innovation as linear procedures with correct outcomes, which often leads learners to conclude they are doing it wrong when results do not match expectations. However, by framing inquiry as iterative and full of wonder, learners are invited to engage in careful observation, revision, and the next step.
In Innovation-ish, readers are encouraged to adopt a stance of curiosity and take small next steps when outcomes are unexpected. The book invites people to embrace ambiguity, reframe failure as a valuable source of feedback, and utilize simple experiments to sustain momentum.
Learn more:
Experiences of Transformative Awe and the "Small Self" in Scientific Learning and Discovery
“The Awe is In the Process”: The nature and impact of professional scientists' experiences of awe
3. Amygdala hijack can narrow thinking and performance, but it can be managed.
Emotions can influence our cognition and bodily responses, a phenomenon described as the "amygdala hijack." In learning and work, this can reduce working memory, shrink attention, and disrupt judgment. In Innovation-ish, this is particularly important to understand when navigating ambiguity. As it happens, the amygdala is quick to treat ambiguity like a threat, and as a result, often facing ambiguity can trigger an “amygdala hijack.”
Research from the Next Level Lab suggests that learning to take a contextualized, agentic approach to managing moments of amygdala hijack can promote adaptive responses, enabling individuals to navigate high-pressure learning and work environments more effectively. Helping people recognize early signals, name what is happening, and choose regulating strategies is a helpful approach for maintaining clarity in uncertain moments and moving forward calmly. When we recognize that our hesitation to innovate, fear of failure, or tendency to freeze in the face of ambiguity is a phenomenon that we can manage, we can harness the power that ambiguity offers us.
Learn more:
4. Learning transfer enables us to apply familiar skills to new problems.
Learning transfer involves applying existing knowledge, skills, and abilities to a novel problem or context. It occurs when learners identify opportunities to transfer what they already know and build upon it. Next Level Lab’s research highlights that other people play a crucial role in supporting individuals in transferring learning. For example, having managers who mapped a worker's past experiences to a novel project, or hearing concrete stories of how others carried a move across contexts, can enable it.
Learning transfer matters for people's approach to creative problem solving for three main reasons. Firstly, because novel problems rarely match a pre-defined map or process, they require unique and often uncommon approaches. Secondly, utilizing skills, knowledge, and abilities that a person already possesses and applying them to a novel problem enables anyone to start somewhere. And finally, when two different disciplines overlap, we often get a magical edge effect where they meet to create abundant possibilities.
Learn More:
“Your Network is Your Net Worth”: Revealing the Social Aspects of Transfer of Learning at Work
How Next Level Learning Enables A More Powerful Vision for Transfer
Facilitating Existing Skills and Knowledge Transfer into New Roles at Work
Transferring Existing Skills and Knowledge into New Roles at Work
Emerging Findings on Learning Transfer Between Novel Roles for Working Learners and Learning Workers
Understanding how your mind works is a powerful tool. By doing so, we can all be empowered to learn something new or engage in creative acts.
This is a sampling of the ideas in Innovation‑ish and resources from Next Level Lab. If you want to delve deeper into metacognition, awe, amygdala hijack, and learning transfer, you can find more about the book at innovationish.com, along with self-guided modules and research briefs on these topics on the Next Level Lab website. The materials work well for individual learning. They also provide a clear structure for team sessions, classes, and professional development.
