Innovating Out Loud

Years ago a bottle of shampoo erupted in my backpack — coating everything I owned, right before I boarded a ship where I wouldn’t see a washing machine for days. I have sealed my liquids in a plastic bag every trip since. Long before TSA required it.That memory floated back to the surface this weekend when I picked up my 16-yr-old niece from the airport. She flew across the country on her own and navigated the trip, with connecting flights, beautifully — right up until she took home someone else’s bag.That’s how the useful stuff actually gets built. Not from the average day. From the exception — the one that marks you. I will forever bag my toiletries even on road trips. She will forevermore triple check her luggage tag.And that’s the next topic of discussion on Innovating Out Loud this Thursday, July 23rd with my guest, Angus Fletcher.Join us to continue the conversation and learn more about how he trains everyone from 8 yrs old to Special Forces on developing the four pillars. Register here. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit innovatingoutloud.substack.com

The sun always goes down faster than you expect when you’re deep in the forest.You think you have plenty of time. And then all of a sudden, the trail is grey, then the trail is just a suggestion, and then you are standing in a place you can no longer see. You reach for your flashlight or headlamp.This is the moment.Your thumb is on the switch. You can end this whole situation in one second.Turn it on and ten feet of path reappears ahead of you. Past the beam and all around you is still a black wall — six inches beyond the light it seems even darker now. The forest that was around you a moment ago is receding. Something breaks low and fast off to your right. You can’t see it. And you won’t.But what if you wait? What if you stand there in the darkness?The first few minutes aren’t great, for me at least. My heart races and I imagine all the things that are lurking in the shadows. Stalking me. I feel like I’m doing something stupid. My instincts argue with my choice.Then a trunk emerges from the dark — the white birch always show up first. Then a few feet of the trail. Not brightly, but there, a pale rift in the darkness. Then the space between the trees gains depth. A smear of foxfire on a rotting log. A lightning bug or two (fireflies to anyone not from Jersey). Looking up, I can see a canopy that is not black but very dark blue, with holes in it. Some stars shine through.I wouldn’t have noticed the foxfire in daylight. Lightning bugs don’t come out until dark. The forest has a light of its own that illuminates far more than my flashlight. I just have to wait for my eyes to adjust.Great QuestionIn the June episode of the Innovating Out Loud webcast, Larry Robertson and I talked about questions — the subject of his new book, Great Question: The Art of the Ask and Getting More of What You Really Want. Forty minutes into our effort to question questions, Larry asked me a doozy.What do you already know that you will realize soon?I have made a living out of asking questions. I train people how to do it. This question did something only a handful of questions have done throughout my life — it hit my mental pause button. My mind went blank.Except that’s not right, and I got this wrong the first three times I tried to write about it. My mind wasn’t blank. It was dark. There was a there there — you can hear my oooooo reaction in the clip — I just couldn’t see it. Still can’t.But as I sat with it, my mind became a room with the light off. Dark, but it had depth.And then it wasn’t a room anymore. It was the forest.On or Off?I have been sitting with this question for nearly three weeks. I still can’t see very far down the trail but things are starting to emerge. My mind’s eye is starting to adjust. What was at first a surprise — the sudden darkness and wanting to find an answer — has eased into a calm abiding. It’s actually become rather nice. I’m enjoying the not knowing.I feel pretty sure that nothing is going to eat me if I just stand still for a little while. And I believe I will see some things that would have otherwise scattered.And I think that is the point of the question.It would be easy enough to ask AI to help me find an answer faster. I could pull together a panel of my experts to generate ideas, hundreds of them in minutes. But that would be like turning on the flashlight in the forest. Sure, I’ll see the trail. The worn path. But everything else will disappear into the shadows, maybe never to be seen again.My refusal to use AI in this case is harder than it sounds, because I’m an AI champion. I use it constantly and find it astonishing. But there’s a distinction in how I use it that I couldn’t have articulated a month ago.* Expansion by exposure — transcripts, research, arguments, other people’s thinking, ten times more of the forest than my legs could ever carry me across. That’s exploration.* Expansion by generation — hundreds of options, on demand, right now. That’s a flashlight pointed at my own uncertainty, and what it returns is the average of everything ever said about my problem. It’s the worn path with the rest of the forest gone black behind it.The average is in the beam. The extraordinary is in the dark, running away from the light.You and Only YouThought experiments have produced some of the largest breakthroughs in human history. Galileo mentally dropping rocks off the Tower of Pisa dismantled Aristotle’s theory of gravity. Einstein chased a beam of light in his head. No data. No lab. Just a person sitting with a question, adjusting their mind to it.That is the dark adaptation of innovation — of creativity. It is the oldest and most powerful cognitive practice we have, and it works precisely because we don’t turn the light on. The answer was already there. What was missing was someone sitting with the question long enough to perceive it.More specifically, what is missing is you. Perception cannot be delegated. Not because the other people or machines are stupid but because we do not have your perception. Your senses. Your collection of experiences. Someone didn’t come up with the theory of special relativity. Einstein did.So the Monday morning practice is not one of patience or even courage. It’s trust. Trust in yourself. Trust that your eyes will adjust. That your mind can work its way through a darkened path.There is a time and a place for artificial illumination. There are trails you actually need to see, deadlines you need to meet, and questions that already have answers somebody else found that are worth knowing. For those, use the light. I do, every day.But the truly novel answers, your truly novel answers, can only be found in the deep forest of your mind. And they may only emerge if you stand still for a little while and let them.I could not ask for a better next guest to continue this conversation: join me on July 23rd at 10:30 AM PT / 1:30 PM ET with Angus Fletcher. He’s the author of Wonderworks and Primal Intelligence — books that have come up in IOL conversations frequently — a story scientist at Project Narrative, and professor at Ohio State University. Angus argues that the human mind starts with story. A process he calls Narrative Cognition. By the time we chat, I will have spent a month sitting with a question that has become a dark forest. I THINK he’ll tell me that’s exactly how it’s supposed to work.Connections to The Insider’s Guide to Innovation at Microsoft* Diverge-Converge-Synthesize As we say in the book, the best innovators diverge more often, and for longer, than everyone else — resisting the urge to converge early for the sake of order, control, or security. Because just like the flashlight in the forest, early convergence returns the middle of what's known, and misses the extraordinary.* Intentional Discovery Discovery doesn’t fit between meetings. That’s the finding from the book, and it’s the one people most often nod at and then ignore — because a calendar full of open space looks, to almost everyone, like a calendar full of nothing. Three weeks of not answering a question looks like nothing too. It isn’t.* Think Week Twice a year, Bill Gates would disappear to a remote cabin with a stack of papers and no company. The value was never in the cabin — it was in the removal of input long enough for something to surface. You can now recreate the cabin and fill it with a machine that will hand you three hundred ideas before lunch. That is not a Think Week. That’s a very expensive flashlight.* Questionstorm The technique in the book is to generate questions instead of solutions — who, what, when, where, how often — and hold off on answering. We use it to help open up the problem space, and by extension, the solution space. This piece was written with AI assistance. I use it to research, to think out loud, and to argue with. The judgment, the errors, and the sitting are mine. Onward! This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit innovatingoutloud.substack.com

We take a lot for granted in innovation. Chief among them: that questions are where it all starts. So this episode, Larry Robertson and I decided to poke at our own assumption and see if it held up.Larry’s an innovation advisor and the author of Great Question, a book he built by talking to more than 140 people — neuroscientists, teachers, artists, CEOs. What he found is that we’re a questioning species. Our brains actually do their best work in uncertainty, not away from it. We got into why “best” isn’t a fixed answer but something you build together, why asking “why” too early kills the good stuff, and how I once flipped a data center project by asking “What if communities asked us to build one?” instead of “How do we get permission?” We closed on AI — useful, but only if you’ve already got the muscle it can’t teach you. An hour in, our assumption held. Questions really are where it starts.Five things worth carrying with you* Questions aren’t a technique. They’re how we’re built. Your brain does its sharpest thinking in change, complexity, and uncertainty — Larry’s neuroscientists call it “innovation mode.” So questioning isn’t something you bolt onto the work. It’s the work.* Quit leading with “why.” Start with “why” and you’re down a rabbit hole you won’t climb out of. Try Deb Meyer’s five instead: How do we know what we know? Is there a pattern? What if? Is there another way? Who cares? As Larry put it, a question is just going there. You’re not committing to anything yet.* Flip the question and watch the whole thing change. For years the industry asked, “How do we get permitted to build a data center?” We asked, “What if people were asking us to build one?” You can’t solve that the same way. What came out didn’t look, sound, or run like a data center at all. Because innovation is value creation — if it’s not changing someone’s life, it’s just a cool idea.* It starts with trusting yourself. Every field Larry studied circled back to the same thing: faith in your own questioning, earned from the wins and the flops. You can’t build that trust across a team if it isn’t there in you first. When you’re stuck, lean on the three things you can always trust — curiosity, play, and search.* AI can’t teach you to question. It can help. But AI averages toward an answer, and you can’t amplify a skill you don’t have. Build the muscle yourself, and how you use AI will change. Skip that, and you’re just handing over the thinking that would’ve made you better.You can find Larry’s book, Great Question: The Art of the Ask and Getting More of What Your Really Want everywhere books are sold.Next up on Innovating Out Loud: Angus Fletcher. Story Scientist and author of books that have come up in many previous episodes. Wonderworks and Primal Intelligence live on my desk. This is a not to miss session. NOTE the change of time: 10:30 AM PT / 1:30 PM ET. July 23, 2026. Register here and see you then! This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit innovatingoutloud.substack.com

Northern Wisconsin, 1905. A windstorm flattened whole stands of sugar maple across the Menominee reservation — millions of board feet on the ground, already starting to rot. The Menominee wanted to salvage the fallen timber and mill it themselves. The federal authority refused. Downed Indian timber, sold at volume, would depress the price of white-owned timber. Better the trees rot, he decided, than the price of white-owned timber fall.----America turns 250 this weekend, and innovation retrospectives will hand the credit to technologies like the assembly line and the transistor. I wanted to sort 250 years differently — into what was encoded and endured, regardless of intent. A generous billionaire doesn’t pass the test; bylaws do. A bigoted clerk doesn’t fail it; maps do. I discovered a wide range of examples.And what I believe is the opportunity to encode now what will endure for decades or even centuries.----Menominee history: https://www.americanforests.org/article/menominee-forest-keepers/Written with a team of cus tom AI assistants as part of my Innovating Out Loud practice. The ideas, mistakes, and final words are mine. Say it Ugly, Build it Better. Onward! This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit innovatingoutloud.substack.com

Something you believe in is stuck. You can probably picture it without trying. Six, twelve, eighteen months in and still “almost there.” The room nods and nothing moves after. The champion’s gone quiet. You ask what went wrong and you get a shrug and four theories, none of which tell you what to do differently.This week on IOL, we're releasing the latest version of Innovation Coach to help you get unstuck. But you have to dig deep for it to work.Try it here: Innovation Coach 2.0If you want to know when V3 arrives, comment “Let me know” and I’ll add you to the list!From the book* B2Me Journey — behavior change as a journey, steps not leaps; emotion before cognition. The updated tool respects the journey instead of skipping it.* Do The Work — the knowing–doing gap. The deeper read is where knowing turns into doing.* Minimize Uncertainty (a Trust Lever) — concrete next steps cut ambiguity and move you along the journey, instead of leaving you with a verdict and no path.* Developing in the Open — the VS Code posture. We show you the tool and what we changed about it, not just describe it.Developed in the open, with AI as a thinking and drafting partner. The thoughts and final words are mine. Say it ugly, Build it better. Onward! This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit innovatingoutloud.substack.com

Three days short of 33 years at 3M, Jayshree Seth now leads the effort to put generative AI use-cases to work in R&D — which puts her between the hype and the people who have to live with it. Her message is bracing and oddly reassuring at once: AI can accelerate every step of the climb from data to wisdom, but it can't make the climb for you. Skip the human work and you don't reach the answer faster — you arrive at a confident-sounding one you can't defend. What she handed us was a working toolkit for doing it right, folded into four frameworks and one phrase we won't forget: Trace, Fast, Arcs, Flow.JoAnn and Taryn spoke with Jayshree on the May 28th episode of IOL. Here are a few key takeaways.Five takeaways1. AI can accelerate the climb from data to wisdom. It can’t make the climb for you.2. AI flips the pyramid — and DIKW becomes WIKD.3. It’s not artificial intelligence. It’s "artificial diligence."4. AI narrows the access gap and widens the judgment gap.5. AI doesn’t just change jobs — it changes the jobs to be done.ClosingThe technology is ready. The organization usually isn’t — and that gap is human. Jayshree’s whole toolkit points at the same quiet truth: AI is most useful to the people who’d still know what to do without it. Watch the full conversation for all four frameworks, the books behind them, and why she thinks the unlikely candidates are the ones true innovation needs.Check out Jayshree’s books, The Heart of Science Series: Engineering Blueprint (2024); Engineering Fine Print (2022); Engineering Footprints, Fingerprints, & Imprints (2020). All sales proceeds go towards a scholarship for women in STEM administered by Society of Women Engineers (SWE).Our next session of Innovating Out Loud is on June 25th at 9 AM PT / 12 PM ET with special guest, Larry Robertson. He’s an author, advisor, innovator, speaker, columnists and collaborative partner of the Lab! He and JoAnn will be talking about his new book, Great Question: The Art of the Ask and Getting More of What You Really Want.Never miss a live episode. Register for the series at: www.regenerouslabs.com/innovatingoutloud This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit innovatingoutloud.substack.com

It’s a warm evening in Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin, and you’ve brought a glass of wine out to the back deck the way you have for years. The grass, the fence, the slow blue dark coming down. And underneath all of it, something new. A hum. The kind you feel in your chest. A low, constant drone, loud enough to carry over a television and conversations around the fire pit. Some nights you give up on the backyard altogether. You’re considering moving. Three miles away, a 315-acre campus is running 24/7. The hum is the sound of it exhaling.Your backyard is where this story really starts, but not how it was told this week at Microsoft Build.Read or listen to the full piece here and on innovatingoutloud.substack.comConnections to The Insider's Guide to Innovation at Microsoft:Pattern #4: Innovating More Than Technology — The piece's spine: "not a technology challenge, a business model challenge." Every component already exists — heat exchangers since the early 1900s, quieter-fan designs sitting on the shelf. The book makes the same move, that the decisive innovation is rarely the device but the business model and value chain around it.Pattern #3: Innovating With Everyone — "Build with the place, not around it." Bring community and nature to the table before the design sets. The DOTF team's own precedent in the book — 200 conversations inside and outside before a single concept was drawn — is the proof that the early, optional conversation is the one that changes the outcome.Aim for Positive (#15) / Regenerative Design (#51) — Closing the loop to send a stream of value back into the place instead of throwing waste heat over the fence: surplus by design, not harm reduction. The book quotes Satya asking whether, at the core of the business model, "are you creating a surplus around you?" This piece asks him to finish the question.Top-down, Bottom-up, Outside-in (#16) — All three are in the room and none are wired together: top-down names what to protect (electricity, jobs, tax base); bottom-up is the engineers who already want to build the heat loop; outside-in is the backyard no one invited. The book's argument is that durable change needs the three connected — which is exactly what "external pressure creates internal permission" names: the outside-in voice unlocking what the bottom-up already wants to build.This piece was developed in the open, with AI as a thinking and drafting partner. The argument, the judgment, and the final words are mine. Say it Ugly, Build it Better! Onward! This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit innovatingoutloud.substack.com

Between two stories sits one idea: technology is never neutral. It takes on the character of whoever designs it, builds it, and runs it. The tower and the city are built with the same stone. What changes is who decided and who participated.Connections to The Insider’s Guide to Innovation at MicrosoftThis piece connects directly to four frameworks from the book:* Innovating With Everyone — Nehemiah didn’t hold a stakeholder meeting — he called his neighbors together and gave each family a section to own. The seven-company coalition that designed the Regenerative Data Center operated on Pattern #3’s central premise: engage early, engage widely, engage with empathy. Meet people where they’re at and move forward together.* Top-Down, Bottom-Up, Outside-In — The windowless hall is a pure top-down artifact — decisions made in rooms far from the plain, ignoring the ground-level feedback and community signals coming in. The Regenerative Data Center inverted this deliberately: designed from the bottom up, with hundreds of outside-in voices, human and otherwise.* Aim for Positive — A data center that takes from the county’s water, pulls from the county’s grid, and returns a number on a tax form is aiming for less bad. The Regenerative Data Center aimed for abundance — heat returned to homes, power that steadies the grid, ecology restored, economy supported — mutual benefit by design, not compliance.* Language as Strategic Tool — Leo XIV’s encyclical is a masterclass in strategic language: naming “Babel” and “Nehemiah” rewrites what builders optimize for before they pick up a stone. “Mutual benefit by design” and “each neighbor builds a section” work the same way — deliberate terminology that reframes what a coalition believes is possible, and then makes possible.Sources1. Leo XIII. “Rerum Novarum: Encyclical of Pope Leo XIII on Capital and Labor.” Vatican, May 15, 1891. https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_l-xiii_enc_15051891_rerum-novarum.html2. Leo XIV. “Magnifica Humanitas.” Vatican, May 15, 2026. https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/encyclicals/documents/20260515-magnifica-humanitas.htmlWritten with AI assistance. The thinking — and the stretch of wall — are mine. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit innovatingoutloud.substack.com

In December 2020, I was one year into my time at Microsoft and four months into intentional discovery for my mission, creating the Data Center of the Future.Listen to the full episode to hear behind the scenes stories of what is possibly THE most important practice of innovation as a discipline. How AI, as it's packaged today, erodes it. And why you should make the space for it no matter how hard it may be.---Don’t miss this week’s live Innovating Out Loud webcast with special guest Jayshree Seth — Corporate Scientist and Chief Science Advocate of 3M. She’ll be sharing her experience and frameworks bridging the gaps between research and practice, business and technology, and data and wisdom.Thursday, May 28th at 9 AM PT / 12 PM ET.---Connections to The Insider's Guide to Innovation at MicrosoftIntentional Discovery: purposefully exploring with the goal of ultimately having an impact on the world, residing in Pasteur’s quadrant (of the Stokes framework by the same name). The 200 interviews, the catalog of parts, the journey map from dirt to data — that is intentional discovery in practice. Because intentional discovery is a foundational practice of repeat innovation, it connects to many other frameworks in the book. Here’s a short list: (see the full piece on Substack) This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit innovatingoutloud.substack.com

Last week I signed up for an expedition to Antarctica.I get terrible seasickness. I hate small planes. Antarctica has never appeared on any version of my bucket list.I signed up anyway.----Innovation culture talks constantly about the courage to change. It almost never talks about the voice that tells you not to.Over nineteen weeks, this series has mapped a lot of terrain: systems, tools, collaboration architecture, AI as thinking partner, expert perception, incentive structures, the ecology of innovation at scale.I’ve spent most of that time one level above the person doing the work.This week I’m inside. Not to get philosophical — to get practical. The gap between knowing what good innovation practice looks like and being able to sustain it under real conditions lives right here. In the space where either one or both voices show up.----Connections to The Insider’s Guide to Innovation at Microsoft* Behavior is the Barrier: The barrier isn’t always in the organization — sometimes it’s in the practitioner. The first voice is Behavior is the Barrier operating internally. The innovator who can’t quiet it becomes the bottleneck in their own work.* Cognitive Inertia: The first voice is cognitive inertia in first person. It doesn’t resist change in others — it resists change in you. The second voice is the compelling force that doesn’t come from policy, incentive, or peer pressure. It comes from accumulated internal evidence.* The B2Me Journey — Applied Inward: B2Me, applied outward, is the journey a stakeholder takes from unawareness to advocacy, guided by the innovator. The second voice runs that journey internally. When the first voice fires the fear response — are we even doing anything worth doing? — the second voice doesn’t lead with logic. It leads with emotional reset: not every day is a breakthrough. We worked. We learned. Recovery before rationale. The internal B2Me journey is the same architecture as the external one.IOL is produced with the help of AI, specifically Perplexity, Gemini, Claude, and a team of custom personas developed by Regenerous Labs. All insights, editorial choices, and final content are mine. Mistakes too.Say It Ugly, Build It Better. Onward! This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit innovatingoutloud.substack.com

We’ve all given the presentation that flopped. The content was right. We knew the material. We rehearsed. And we walked out of the room knowing — somehow — that it didn’t land.The post-mortem is honest. Nothing was wrong with the vision. The argument was sound. The slides were clean. The case was the right one to make.And still...Listen to the full piece on Substack or Apple Podcasts. And then try the next experiment: CORTX Reframer.www.regenerouslabs.com/reframerTake a deck or script you’ve been working on, run it through, and tell me what you find.Say it ugly, build it better. Onward!Connections to The Insider's Guide to Innovation at MicrosoftBehavior is the Barrier — Seventy percent of transformations fail for human reasons, not strategic ones. This piece is the pattern made personal: every presentation that flopped, every pitch that didn't land, every meeting where the right argument got the wrong response — the gap between knowing your audience and writing for your audience is where most of it lives.The Knowing-Doing Gap — Knowing what to do and doing it are not the same. Holding three or four audience models in your head while you decide what goes on a slide is expensive cognitive work, so we shortcut and write for ourselves. The reframer pays the cost so you can act on what you already know.Language as a Strategic Tool — Same vision, different register, different decision. The reframer doesn't change the case. It changes which version of the case the listener's brain can actually run. The lenses moving is what this pattern looks like in practice.Start With Who — The reframer's first move is to ask who is in the room before it touches the content. The pattern most often applied to assembling the team applies just as much to addressing the audience. Different listeners need different stories — Start With Who, then build the case.Innovate Upstream to Succeed Downstream — The decision happens in the room. The conditions for it are made before. The reframer is upstream work — done before the pitch, the renewal call, the board meeting — that determines what's possible downstream. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit innovatingoutloud.substack.com

Last week on Innovating Out Loud, we sat down with Leo Chan — keynote speaker, corporate trainer, and LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® facilitator — to take play seriously as a tool for innovation. Leo treats creativity as a muscle that atrophies without use, and play as the discipline that keeps it strong. We worked through what LEGO Serious Play actually does (it lets people think with their hands instead of their mouths), why teams that jump straight to solving pain points collapse divergence before it can do its work, and why showing up as yourself is the precondition for the joy that makes better thinking possible. Taryn drew the through-line: courage to be yourself unlocks play, play unlocks creativity, creativity unlocks innovation. The conversation didn’t argue that work should feel less serious — it argued that taking play seriously is how the work gets sharper.Key Takeaways* Creativity is a muscle. Without practice it atrophies. Play is the workout that keeps idea-generation strong.* Think with your hands, not your mouth. LEGO Serious Play turns the model into the basis of knowledge — visual, auditory, kinesthetic — and uses metaphor to carry meaning words can’t.* “What Might Be All the Ways” (WMBATW) — Leo’s stretch on “How Might We.” It treats divergence as a discipline, not a phase to rush through.* Stress shuts down the prefrontal cortex. Conformity is a stressor. Being yourself isn’t indulgence — it’s a precondition for the cognitive state innovation requires.* To bring play into risk-averse rooms: build relational equity first, acknowledge the elephant, and promise the outcome. You won’t win everyone — focus on the ones willing to come along, and let the result speak.Watch the replay for the exercises you can run Monday morning — and the moments where the polished answer gets set aside.Say it Ugly, Build it Better. Onward!Never miss the live session - register at www.regenerouslabs.com/innovatingoutloud This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit innovatingoutloud.substack.com

Two weeks ago I shared Innovation Coach — a tool that runs a question through multiple expert lenses and reframes the problem before answering it. 150 people tried it! And the feedback was clear: the reframe was something no general-purpose LLM produced. But Gemini and others gave more actionable results. Fair.CANOPY is the response.This is what Regenerous Labs is here to do — give experts the infrastructure to build in relationship instead of alone. CANOPY is the latest experiment. Try it. Tell me what I got wrong. Help me build it better.Try CANOPYThere’s no storage, no database — everything stays local. We can’t see what you do. This is an experiment, and we’d love your feedback. Add a comment in Substack or use the feedback tool in the bottom right corner of the app (click the Regenerous icon).www.regenerouslabs.com/canopyConnections to The Insider’s Guide to Innovation at Microsoft* Developing in the Open — The VS Code story: sharing unfinished work accelerates learning and builds trust faster than polished launches* Start With Who — Assembling complementary collaborators before defining solutions; the build revealed what happens when you skip this* Say It Ugly — The series as the practice; this piece as the latest demonstration* Behavior is the Barrier — The gap between knowing what matters and executing it under constraintThis piece was created with the help of AI — specifically Claude, Perplexity, and a team of expert personas built by Regenerous Labs. Direction, judgment, and final decisions by me. CANOPY itself was built using Claude as an integrated development environment. Say it ugly, build it better. Onward! This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit innovatingoutloud.substack.com

Behavior is the Barrier: The Time for the Regenerative Data Center of the Future is NowFor six years I’ve been inside the data center meets community problem space. I’ve had a technical and commercial blueprint in hand since my team delivered it internally at Microsoft in 2023.The design is more desirable for communities, as technically feasible as what’s currently being built, and more economically viable over a ten-year horizon than hyperscale warehouses. Everyone I walk through it says yes, obviously.Then nothing happens. The problem is a question of who and why not how.Download the full How from www.regenerouslabs.com/R-DOTF. Listen for the who and the why.Connections to The Insider’s Guide to Innovation at Microsoft* Behavior is the Barrier — 70 percent of transformations fail for human reasons, not technical ones. Data centers are the current large-scale case.* Say It Ugly — Publishing the blueprint before it’s perfect is how we find the parts that need work fastest.* Aim For Positive — A well-designed community-scale cluster generates surplus for the community, the grid, and the compute customer simultaneously. The regenerative design holds all three.* Innovating More Than Technology — Every technical component exists. The missing innovation is the integrated system, the governance model, and the coalition.Sources[1]: FERC Docket RM26-4-000, Large Load Interconnection rulemaking, with action anticipated in 2026. See Holland & Knight analysis, April 2026.[2]: “To Defer or To Shift? The Role of AI Data Center Flexibility on Grid Investment and Operational Costs,” arXiv 2604.05376, April 7, 2026.[3]: Microsoft, “Infinite scale: The architecture behind the Azure AI superfactory,” November 12, 2025. The Fairwater architecture connects Wisconsin and Atlanta campuses via 120,000 miles of dedicated fiber, operating as a single distributed supercomputer.[4]: New York Times, “At Least $156 Billion in Data Center Projects Blocked by Local Opposition in 2025,” March 26, 2026, drawing on Data Center Watch and related tracking.[5]: Washington Post–Schar School poll, April 2026, showing Virginia voter support for new data centers at 35 percent, down from approximately 69 percent in 2023.[6]: Maine LD 1280, passed April 2026, blocks new builds drawing more than 20 MW until autumn 2027.[7]: Institute for Local Self-Reliance, “Customers Pay When Big Utilities Make Big Errors in Electricity Forecasts,” 2024. Review of seven of the ten largest U.S. utilities.AI Disclosure: This piece was created with the help of AI — specifically Claude, Perplexity, and a team of expert personas built by Regenerous Labs. Direction, judgment and final decisions by me. Say it ugly, build it better. Onward! This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit innovatingoutloud.substack.com

Last week I kept IOL brief because I was building.I am building. Every day. Experimenting. Running things, seeing what they surface, learning from what they miss. Most of it stays inside the Lab. This week, I’m letting some of it out.What I’m sharing today isn’t a commercial product. It’s one of my daily experiments. Lightweight, live, and instructive whether it works or not. In this case, it’s The Insider’s Guide to Innovation at Microsoft made interactive. Readers of the book will recognize what I’m doing — developing in the open, a practice shared in the Visual Studio Code story. What gets seen gets tested. What gets tested gets sharper.Try it: Innovation Coach is live at www.regenerouslabs.com/innovationcoachGive it a real problem. Then give the same problem to your favorite LLM. See what each one sees — and what each misses.Tell me what you find!Connections to The Insider’s Guide to Innovation at Microsoft* Developing in the Open — VS Code’s transparent GitHub development as a learning accelerator; what gets seen gets tested* The 77 Innovation Frameworks — The book’s full framework library serves as the Innovation Coach’s action library* Language as Strategic Tool — “Expert perception” as new vocabulary that changes what we can see and scale* B2Me Journey — The Innovation Coach diagnoses cognitive mode first, consistent with the book’s emotional-before-cognitive principleSources¹ Gary Klein, Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions (MIT Press, 1998). Klein’s Recognition-Primed Decision model, developed from fieldwork with firefighters and military commanders, showed that experienced decision-makers recognize situations as familiar types and simulate one response forward rather than comparing options. gary-klein.com/rpd² Angus Fletcher, Storythinking: The New Science of Narrative Intelligence (Columbia University Press, 2023). Fletcher argues that narrative cognition — causal speculation rather than correlational reasoning — is a distinct mode of intelligence that precedes and shapes logical analysis. cup.columbia.eduAlso read: A. Mark Williams et al., “Expertise and the Interaction between Different Perceptual-Cognitive Skills: Implications for Testing and Training,” Frontiers in Psychology 7 (2016). Research on perceptual-cognitive expertise demonstrates that experts process environmental information through structured perceptual frameworks that shape anticipation and decision-making before conscious analysis begins. frontiersin.orgA note on how this piece was made: This piece was created with the help of AI — specifically Claude, Perplexity, and a team of expert personas built by Regenerous Labs. Direction, judgment, and final decisions by me. Say it ugly, build it better. Onward! This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit innovatingoutloud.substack.com

It’s Easter Sunday and I’m building things. Not egg baskets — products, prototypes, the kind of work where the inspiration and energy don’t pause politely for holidays. What I feel is momentum — the particular forward motion that comes when you’ve been circling an idea long enough and something finally clicks into place.What to Read, Watch, and Listen to This Week🎧 Listen: Lenny’s Podcast — Anthropic’s $1B to $19B Growth Run with Amol Avasare, Head of Growth at Anthropic📖 Read: Genius at Scale: How Great Leaders Drive Innovation by Linda A. Hill, Emily Tedards, and Jason Wild (Harvard Business Review Press, March 2026)📺 Watch: Baltimore Bridge Collapse — PBS NOVA and Key Bridge Disaster: Reflect, Recover, Rebuild — MPT/PBS-----I’m going to get back to building. Thank you and have a great holiday weekend. Onward!Connections to The Insider’s Guide to Innovation at Microsoft:* Pattern #1: Innovating Every Day — Innovation is a discipline, not an event. The same applies to building. The floor sander didn’t know it was Easter.* Pattern #3: Innovating with Everyone — Hill's "bridger" role maps to what we call "boundary crossers" in Innovation at Microsoft. Her research finds the pattern across a wide variety of global organizations; our book goes deeper into the practices, tools, and disciplines that make it work. The two books are natural companions — Genius at Scale as the leadership narrative, Innovation at Microsoft as the practitioner's workbook.* The Key Bridge and systems resilience — The book’s case studies repeatedly show that organizations wait for crisis before investing in systemic innovation. The bridge collapse is no different.About the AI in this piece: I use AI as a writing and research partner throughout the Innovating Out Loud series. The observations, opinions, and editorial choices are mine. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit innovatingoutloud.substack.com

Most organizations are sitting on far more value than they realize—not because it’s exotic, but because it’s submerged beneath the waterline of conventional measurement. In this Innovating Out Loud session, Regenerous Labs partners JoAnn Garbin and Taryn Kutches hosted Daniel Aronson, founder of Valutus, for a conversation about the growing gap between the value organizations create and the value they actually see.Daniel’s central provocation is disarmingly simple: when something matters and you don’t quantify it, you assign it the only value it can’t possibly have—zero.Read the key takeaways on Substack.Thank you for being apart of this community! Register for the live webcast series here. And join the conversation - leave a comment or ask a question. Say it ugly and we’ll pretty it up together (as we say)! This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit innovatingoutloud.substack.com

Why these 3 Ds of innovation matter more now, not less. I built four profitable businesses in the first 25 years of my career. I’m on track to build four THIS YEAR with the help of two things I never had before.----Thank you for reading and listening. Don’t forget to register for our live monthly recording of Innovating out Loud. Our next guest is….TBD! But we’re aligning calendars with a few interesting folks. Stay tuned!Connections to The Insider’s Guide to Innovation at Microsoft:* Discover-Design-Develop with Diverge-Converge-Synthesize within each phase* Adaptive Cycle of Innovation — The cycle that once played out over years now plays out in weeks and months. Expansion doesn’t slow the cycle — it ensures each loop is aimed at the right thing.* BXT (Business, Experience, Technology) — Cross-disciplinary discovery that expands the aperture before design beginsSources:* Komura and Yamada, “Deepening ideas vs. exploring new ones: AI strategy effects in human-AI creative collaboration,” PLoS ONE, January 2026. LinkThis piece was created with the help of AI — specifically Claude, Perplexity, and a team of expert personas built by Regenerous Labs. Direction, judgment and final decisions by me. Say it ugly, build it better. Onward! This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit innovatingoutloud.substack.com

For eleven weeks now, I’ve been exploring ideas in this space — what dormancy makes possible, why factories fail at ecosystem-shaped problems, how mutualism works, what “enough” actually means. Each week, I’ve tried to say it ugly and see what emerges.But I’ve never told you why.This week, I’m sharing my founder story. It’s the origin of every thread we’ve been pulling. If you’ve been reading along, you’ll recognize the ideas. Now you’ll know where they came from.---Three MinutesThree minutes into my first round of chemo, a metallic explosion went off at the bottom of my esophagus and started spreading. My whole body went hot. My eyes closed on their own. I started to cry — but I wasn't crying. It was making me cry.In that moment, my mind got very, very clear. And I knew there was no going back. Only forward.This is my founder story. It's about cancer, and white space, and what happens when an expert builds her way to the life she wanted — not alone, but with people she's trusted for twenty-five years.If you’ve spent years — maybe decades — building methodologies organizations depend on to thrive, and your bandwidth is the bottleneck in delivering or scaling your impact, this was written for you.I’d like to hear your story. No pitch - just a conversation between peers who have hit the same wall. You can reach me at [email protected]. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit innovatingoutloud.substack.com

ICYMI Last month, Juliana Tioanda, a senior leader in Xbox, joined Taryn and me for an hour of sharing and exploring how individuals and teams can drive innovation amid constant disruption by focusing on mindsets, “the right kind of” introspection, and what they can personally control.What’s nextOur next Innovating Out Loud session will focus on uncovering the submerged value of your initiatives to 5-10X your ROI. Our guest will be Daniel Aronson of Valutus, an expert in quantifying hard to quantify impacts, the author of The Value of Values, and a strategic advisor to leaders driving change in some of the world’s largest companies.Sign up for the next session →Live on March 26, 2026 at 9 AM PT / 12 PM ETAnd mark your calendars for the 4th Thursday of every month for future episodes at the same time.Thanks for being part of this community. Leave a comment if you have questions or want to share what’s working (or not working) in your own innovation journey.Thank you,JoAnn & TarynP.S. If you missed our first three sessions all the replays are available on Substack and YouTube. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit innovatingoutloud.substack.com

Ecology has a near-ironclad law called competitive exclusion: two species occupying the same niche in the same environment cannot coexist indefinitely. One outcompetes the other — not because it’s better, but because even tiny adaptive advantages compound over time.The losing species doesn’t always die. More often, it shifts. Example: way back in the day, wolves and coyotes were competing for the same terrain. They overlapped. Over time, both adapted. Today, wolves take large prey in deep forests. Coyotes hunt smaller prey at the edges. Same landscape. Resolved overlap. Complementary roles. Ecologists describe these shifts as niche partitioning — and when traits actually diverge due to competition, character displacement.⁴ It’s how nature converts competition into cooperation.The “thing behind the thing” insight: species don’t decide to specialize. The system pressures them into it. Scarcity—not abundance—drives differentiation.What This Means for Organizations - read or listen to the full episode to find out.---Thank you for coming on this journey with me these past 9 weeks. I hope you are finding it as interesting and informative as I am. I’d love to here your reactions and extrapolations in the comments here, on Substack, or LinkedIn.Sources:¹ U.S. Energy Information Administration, “U.S. electricity customers averaged five and one-half hours of power interruptions in 2022,” November 2023.² WIRED, “Why US Power Bills Are Surging,” 2025.³ KBIA, “Higher electricity bills driving inflation, consumer frustration,” February 2025; The Century Foundation, “Fueling Debt: How Rising Utility Costs Are Overwhelming American Families,” 2025.⁴ Ecologists have documented niche partitioning and interference competition between wolves and coyotes across shared landscapes. See: Mastro, L.L., “Evolution in coyotes in response to the megafaunal extinctions,” PNAS, 2011; Newsome, T.M. & Ripple, W.J., “Interference competition between wolves and coyotes during variable prey abundance,” Ecology and Evolution, 2021.⁵ National Hydropower Association, “Winter 2021 Storm Event in Texas: An Assessment of the Energy System Reliability Failures,” 2021.⁶ Introl, “PJM’s 6GW Capacity Shortfall: The Grid Crisis That Could Reshape Energy Markets,” 2025.⁷ Reuters, “US grid rules for faster data centers favor on-site gas plants,” January 2026.⁸ World Economic Forum, “Energy experts on building the power systems of the future,” January 2026.Connections to The Insider’s Guide to Innovation at Microsoft* Language as strategic tool — How you name the intervention shapes how people experience it. “Reorganization” signals top-down assignment. “Differentiation” signals agency.* Assumption mapping — Overlapping teams often exist because the original rationale has changed but the structure hasn’t. Revisiting assumptions is how you find the niches that no longer need to exist.* Double-loop learning — The practice of asking “Now that we know what we know, what is possible?” breaks conservation-phase thinking and opens the door to differentiation.* Biomimicry — The adaptive cycle: meadow → forest → release → reorganization. Niche overlap accumulates in the forest phase. Scarcity initiates the release.* Boundary Crossers — The people who manage the interchange between differentiated teams, translating across niches so that specialized groups can exchange value without losing their distinctiveness.This piece is part of Innovating Out Loud, a weekly practice of sharing research and sense-making at early iterations rather than polished conclusions — a companion to the monthly IOL webcast. Register at regenerouslabs.com/innovatingoutloud.AI Disclosure: This piece was researched with Perplexity and written and edited with my custom Claude writing partners. The ideas, research direction, and editorial judgment are mine. Audio is me too, flubs and all. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit innovatingoutloud.substack.com

What would innovation look like if we Started With What—if present-tense introspection were treated as essential infrastructure rather than optional self-improvement? Not moments of silence and meditation at the start of design charrettes but intentional moments of noticing in real time. And could we initiate the shift to this practice (and regenerative innovation) by Starting with Who—intentionally hiring and developing more “unicorns”?Thanks for listening to this week's Innovating Out Loud, say it ugly attempt at sense-making. Don't forget to register for this month's LIVE Innovating Out Loud webcast with our guest Juliana Tioanda of Xbox. Thursday, February 26th at 9 AM PT / 12 PM ET. Register at www.regenerouslabs.com/innovatingoutloud.Connections to The Insider’s Guide to Innovation at Microsoft:* Boundary Crossers (#68): The translators who live between systems may be the natural practitioners of “what” over “why”—and the leaders this moment requires.* Language as Strategic Tool (#60): Just as Bing’s shift from “launch” to “flight” changed how teams related to risk, the shift from “why” to “what” changes how practitioners relate to unintended consequences.* Assumption Mapping (#36): The introspective extension asks: what assumptions about myself am I carrying into this decision?* Double-Loop Learning (#35): Reflection’s power tool—but even double-loop learning stays retrospective.SourcesSchön, D. The Reflective Practitioner. Basic Books, 1983.Eurich, T. "The right way to be introspective (yes, there's a wrong way)." TED Ideas, 2017.Winner, L. "Do Artifacts Have Politics?" Daedalus, 1980.Cranfield University. "Embedding ethics up front in AI and robotics." PMC, January 2026.Inner Development Goals Foundation. innerdevelopmentgoals.org.IDG Guide. "Inner Development Goals: from inner growth to outer change." OpenEdition Journals, 2024.AI was used as a research (Perplexity) and drafting partner (multiple custom Claude experts). All thinking, conclusions, and editorial decisions are mine. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit innovatingoutloud.substack.com

In Yellowstone, researchers found ravens present at wolf activity 99.7% of the time in winter—not just at kill sites, but while wolves traveled, rested, and hunted. Why?Neither needs the other to survive—but together, they’re dramatically more successful.Ravens lead wolves to food sources they would otherwise miss. Wolves tear open what ravens never could. Together they create a surplus that cascades outward: magpies, foxes, insects, and soil all benefit from a single partnership between two species that chose proximity over independence.¹It’s not a frictionless relationship. Ravens steal up to a third of a wolf pack’s kill. Some biologists believe wolves evolved pack hunting partly to defend against that loss.²Real mutualism involves ongoing negotiation, not harmony. The relationship works not because it’s easy, but because what each partner uniquely contributes outweighs the cost of sharing.If ravens and wolves (and insects, protozoa, fungus…) can get this right, why does it seem humans cannot?Thank you for reading or listening. Each week, my goal is to help build the knowledge and tools we need to create the regenerative future. I’d love to hear what the piece sparked for you.Go Seahawks!Register for our live monthly webcast at www.regenerouslabs.com/innovatingoutloudOur next guest is Juliana Tioanda from Xbox. February 26th at 9 AM PT / 12 PM ET.AI Disclosure: Researched with Perplexity. Written and edited with the help of my custom Claude assistants. Header image generated by Gemini Nano Banana.Sources:* Stahler, D.R., Heinrich, B., & Smith, D. (2002). “Common ravens, Corvus corax, preferentially associate with grey wolves, Canis lupus, as a foraging strategy in winter.” Animal Behaviour 64(2): 283–290. See also: Heinrich, B. (1999). Mind of the Raven: Investigations and Adventures with Wolf-Birds. HarperCollins.* Vucetich, J.A. & Peterson, R.O., Isle Royale Wolf-Moose Study, Michigan Technological University. 50+ year longitudinal study.* Hoek, T.A., Axelrod, K., Biancalani, T., Yurtsev, E.A., Liu, J., & Gore, J. (2016). “Resource Availability Modulates the Cooperative and Competitive Nature of a Microbial Cross-Feeding Mutualism.” PLOS Biology 14(8): e1002540.* The Allegory of the Long Spoons appears independently across Jewish (attributed to Rabbi Haim of Romshishok), Hindu, Buddhist, Christian, and Middle Eastern traditions. In the Chinese version, the utensils are long chopsticks.* Raworth, K. (2017). Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist. Chelsea Green Publishing.* Image, Parable of the Long Spoons, https://www.iciclefund.org/founding-parable This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit innovatingoutloud.substack.com

Like most of us, I’m trying to wrap my head around what is happening in Minneapolis.There are so many thoughts I have that add nothing constructive to the conversation. But the reality in Minneapolis is the thing I’ve been trying to make sense of all week—writing about anything else would have been disingenuous. So I looked for a question that I could try to answer that builds on what my team and I have been exploring. The question I landed on is:When systems operate at scales you can’t influence, what can you actually do?Read or listen to the full piece on Substack or Apple Podcasts.Want to support our neighbors in Minneapolis-St. Paul? Check out this post with links to vetted organizations on the ground there. Thanks, Charlie Sellers, for showing us all how it’s done.Sources:Eric Roper, “How Minnesota’s civic culture fueled a tough ICE resistance and took the feds by surprise,” The Minnesota Star Tribune, January 29, 2026. LinkZ. Marie, “What’s It Like to Coordinate a Mutual-Aid Network in Minneapolis?” Harper’s Bazaar, January 28, 2026. LinkOrganizations mentioned:Defend612DHH Church (Dios Habla Hoy) - LinkSEAMAAC (Philadelphia)Stand With Minnesota (comprehensive giving directory)Unidos MN, “Our Story.” LinkCommunity Aid Network MN. LinkMonarca Rapid Response Network. Link This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit innovatingoutloud.substack.com

Last week I asked: What if “enough” is what makes our systems playable? On our latest episode of the IOL webcast, Taryn and I got to explore that question with someone who’s been designing more than “enough” into physical systems for years.Sean Quinn is the Director of Regenerative Design at HOK, one of the world’s largest architecture and design firms. He was one of the people who first introduced me to regenerative principles when I was leading Microsoft’s data center of the future initiative—and fundamentally changed how I think about problem-solving.Our conversation wandered from Stanford medical campuses to Napa vineyards to the question of whether a data center could function like a forest. We talked about why patience is the real barrier to change (not cost), why “win-win” isn’t the same as mutualism, and what happens when you ask obvious questions like why do we even have walls?Never miss an episode - register to attend live at www.regenerouslabs.com/innovatingoutloud This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit innovatingoutloud.substack.com

Consider two paintings by Picasso.The first: Science and Charity, painted when he was fifteen. A doctor takes a sick woman’s pulse. A nun holds a child. The scene is realistic, technically masterful, emotionally clear. You know immediately what you’re seeing and what to feel.The second: Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, painted ten years later. Five figures, fractured into geometric planes. Faces that look like African masks. Bodies that seem to exist in multiple dimensions at once. You’re not sure what you’re seeing. You’re not sure what to feel.Which one do you prefer? Which one do you understand?Most people find the realism easier. We can say “that’s beautiful” or “I like that.” The Cubism is harder. We have to work to see what’s there. We have to construct meaning rather than receive it. And somewhere in that difficulty, a thought creeps in about the abstract: My kid could have painted that.But could they? This week, I wanted to better understand abstraction—what it is and how to get better at it—because I know, intuitively, that it’s a core skill of innovation. I set out to confirm that intuition and landed somewhere I never expected.------Thanks for exploring with me! Read or listen to more at Innovating Out Loud on Substack ... and join us next month for our live Innovating Out Loud webcast. Our next guest is Juliana Tioanda of Xbox! Register at regenerouslabs.com/innovatingoutloud.Sources for your poetry practice:Start with Poetry 180 (loc.gov/poetry/180) — Former Poet Laureate Billy Collins selected 180 poems for high school students, one for each day of the school year. They’re designed to be understood on first read. No analysis required. Just experience.Sources* O'Sullivan et al. (2015), "'Shall I compare thee': The neural basis of literary awareness," Cortex; University of Liverpool fMRI research showing poetry activates central executive and saliency networks* Biomimicry Institute design methodology* “The Teaching of English” (1902), quoted in Jackson Hole Classical Academy* Cambridge University Poetry and Memory Project; New York Times, “Memorize That Poem!” (2017)* City Journal, “In Defense of Memorization” (2023), citing cognitive development research* McKinsey (2018), “AI, automation, and the future of work” This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit innovatingoutloud.substack.com

One of the more famous quotes attributed to Einstein (which ironically is just enough of what he said, but are not actually his words) is “make things as simple as possible, but not simpler.” The aphorism was derived from Einstein’s work trying to conceive of an irreducibly simple theory of everything. I’m not afraid to admit my aim is more modest: to design simple enough systems to enable “8 billion individuals to thrive together.” The Lab’s mission.To that end, we’ve been exploring what “enough” looks like as practical infrastructure—not philosophical stance, but conditions that enable action—with our collaborative partners.Listen here or read on Substack.Thank you for entertaining another week of my Innovating Out Loud, Sunday say-it-ugly practice. I’d love to hear your thoughts and reflections on the ideas and questions presented. Whatever it sparks for you, leave a comment. Join the practice and say it ugly!And don’t forget to tune in this Thursday, January 22, at 9 AM PT / 12 PM ET for our next live recording of the Innovating Out Loud webcast with our guest, the global head of regenerative design at HOK, Sean Quinn. Register Here!AI Disclosure: Based on research completed with Perplexity, writing and editing with my custom writing companion on Claude, and image generation with Gemini. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit innovatingoutloud.substack.com

Too Dumb to Know I Can't - Replace "I'm not creative" with this and see what shiftsRead by my JoAnn-AI assistant created with ElevenLabs.This week’s writing practice started with a question: What do I want to understand more deeply right now?The answer was another question—one I get asked often: How do you do what you do?For years, my shorthand was a self-deprecating joke: “I’m too dumb to know I can’t.” It felt like an explanation. Recently, I learned a new phrase for it though: compressed complexity.That sent me down a research rabbit hole that overwhelmingly supports innovation as something learnable. It’s not a born thing—it’s a built thing. Most people were just never trained to think this way or put into situations that required it.²I love this, because (1) I want to share practical discoveries and (2) every future-of-work headline says the same thing: innovation is the new currency.¹ Yet one of the hardest problems to solve in innovation leadership is that so many people don’t see themselves as creative or as “innovators.”Listen to hear how anyone can learn the skills of innovation.Or read the article and leave a comment on Substack.And don’t forget to register for the next live recording of Innovating Out Loud, the webcast. Jan 22nd (and every 4th Thursday monthly) at 9 AM PT / 12 PM ET. Our next guest is Sean Quinn, head of regenerative design at HOK.Sources* Shawn Kanungo, “The Infinite Mindset: Why Innovation Now Beats Knowledge” — https://shawnkanungo.com/blog/the-infinite-mindset-why-mediocre-jobs-are-dying-and-innovation-is-the-new-currency* “The influence of creative self-efficacy, creative self-identity, and innovation support,” International Journal of Business Innovation and Research (2023) — https://www.inderscienceonline.com/doi/full/10.1504/IJBIR.2023.128334* Tierney & Farmer, “Creative Self-Efficacy,” Academy of Management Journal (2002); Frontiers in Psychology (2022) — https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.937971/full* Miller, “The Magical Number Seven”; Förster et al. on Construal Level Theory — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chunking_(psychology); https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11943103/* Beghetto, “Creative Self-Efficacy Among Children and Adolescents,” Frontiers in Psychology (2020) — https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.02237/full* Dweck, “Growth Mindsets: The Power of Praising Process and Persistence” — https://www.library.pima.gov/blogs/post/growth-mindsets-the-power-of-praising-process-and-persistence/* Bandura, “Self-Efficacy Interventions,” Handbook of Behavior Change — https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/handbook-of-behavior-change/selfefficacy-interventions/D4EC41A2F16CB6171058C5B00AE575AB* “Flexing the Frame: Training Abstract, Concrete, and Ambidextrous Thinking” (Dissertation, UT Arlington) —https://mavmatrix.uta.edu/psychology_dissertations/163/ This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit innovatingoutloud.substack.com

Happy New Year, Community! This is a new weekly practice I’m trying to build—a companion to our live monthly Innovating Out Loud recording. Every Sunday, I’ll share research and sense-making in progress. Faster synthesis. Five iterations instead of fifty. Stopping before it’s perfect, once I feel there’s value worth sharing. Not treating it as precious—putting it on the table so we can pretty it up together. Building on it in my own thinking throughout the week, and hopefully in yours too.In other words: saying it ugly. Which, as it turns out, is exactly what this week’s research is about—modeling the behavior we want to see more of.Listen here or read the full article at innovatingoutloud.substack.comAnd, if you want to join the practice, leave a comment or question.Here’s a question I have:What’s one way you’re moving from “done to” to “done with” in your organization? I’d like to hear what’s working—and what’s not.Sources* Behavior Change Research Compilation, Perplexity — https://www.perplexity.ai/search/find-recent-articles-and-resea-Yr7gtUUgTLe25thuLeGdMg and https://www.perplexity.ai/search/2473db6e-56c1-4a95-9ed0-73524d3e797f* Forrester, “Build Trust Through Strategic Communication During Reorganizations” (January 2026) — Report RES190191* McKinsey, “Transformational Behavior Change” (2025) — referenced in source 1* HR Executive, “5 Ways to Build Transformations That Really Matter in 2026” (December 2025) — https://hrexecutive.com/5-ways-to-build-transformations-that-really-matter-in-2026/Connections to The Insider’s Guide to Innovation at Microsoft: B2Me Journey (emotional appeals precede cognitive ones), Trust Levers (establish trust, create personal connection, minimize uncertainty), Do The Work (bridge the knowing-doing gap through practice), Boundary Crossers (translation teams that ensure consistent interpretation across functions), Pattern #2-Innovating Over the Years (building change capacity as ongoing capability, not one-time event).AI Disclosures: Written with Claude and my custom AI writing partner persona. Infographic created by Gemini nano banana from Perplexity research. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit innovatingoutloud.substack.com

Why Your AI Adoption Is Probably Stalled—And What Actually WorksWe just wrapped our second Innovating Out Loud session, and it was packed with takeaways and resources for everyone.Dean Carignan—my co-author on The Insider’s Guide to Innovation at Microsoft and someone leading AI transformation with a large team inside Microsoft—joined Taryn and me to talk about what’s actually happening on the ground.Not the hype. Not the theoretical frameworks. The real stuff.Here’s what struck me most: even inside a technology company building the AI tools, adoption patterns look remarkably similar to what every organization is experiencing. The early adopters are off and running. The early majority is waiting. And a lot of people have tried AI once, found it underwhelming, and written it off entirely.Dean introduced a concept that we really like: the sampling rate. How often do you go back and try AI tools you’ve dismissed? Because the tools are improving at a pace we’ve never seen in software, what couldn’t work last month might work today.We also got into:* Why starting with AI (instead of starting with the workflow you want to change) almost guarantees you’ll stall out* The “rule of five”—a simple heuristic for deciding what to automate* How capturing “digital exhaust” from meetings can give you richer information while attending fewer of them* Why leaders modeling AI use matters more than mandating it (Satya’s onstage demo moment is a perfect example)* The pioneers, settlers, and town planners framework—and why not everyone should be swinging for the fencesWe got into some “say it ugly” territory that I think a lot of organizations need to hear. So if you missed, catch the replay here or on our YouTube channel. And share it with your team.What resonated with you? Reply and let us know—we read every response.Coming up next month: We’re diving into regenerative design with the man leading it at HOK for clients in every industry, Sean Quinn. Join us and find out how you can create mutual benefit, accelerate internal and external innovation adoption, and stretch your organization’s imagination by aiming for positive.Sign up for the next session →Live on January 22, 2026 at 9 AM PT / 12 PM ETThanks for being a part of this community,JoAnn & TarynResources Mentioned in This EpisodeBooksResourceAuthorLinkCrossing the Chasm Geoffrey Moore Amazon | Author’s Site The Insider’s Guide to Innovation at Microsoft Dean Carignan & JoAnn Garbin Amazon | Simon & Schuster Wonderworks: The 25 Most Powerful Inventions in the History of Literature Angus Fletcher Amazon | Simon & Schuster Primal Intelligence: You Are Smarter Than You Know Angus Fletcher Amazon | Author’s SitePodcasts & ShowsAI Daily Brief Daily 15-minute show breaking down how companies are approaching AI transformation. Dean’s recommendation. Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Website Finding Mastery Dr. Michael Gervais interviews high performers on mindset and excellence. JoAnn mentioned participating in a vision webcast. Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Website JoAnn’s interview on YouTubeFree AI TrainingMicrosoft Learn - Copilot Training Free courses on Microsoft 365 Copilot and AI fundamentals Microsoft Learn Google AI Essentials Free course on AI fundamentals from Google (under 10 hours) Grow with Google | Google Skills The Insider’s Guide to Innovation at Microsoft on LinkedIn Learning The many frameworks of innovation, and how to use them, JoAnn and Dean mentioned from their book of the same name. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit innovatingoutloud.substack.com