A quick reminder that the live monthly webcast has moved to the Third Thursday of the month going forward. Sorry if we missed you in September, see you October 15th! One Year of Joyn: Player-Coaches AI can draft a company’s strategy in thirty minutes. Taryn Kutches and Kemi Johel have tested it, and sometimes the machine lands on the same plan their clients would have reached by hand. They still do it by hand. Their reason isn’t that the plan is wrong. It’s that no one will carry it out. The arguments, the trade-offs, the “oh, that wasn’t my perspective” moments are what make a leadership team own a plan. Skip them and you have a document. Nobody follows it. Taryn and Kemi are two of the co-founders of Regenerous Labs. A year ago they also founded Joyn Collective, which helps manufacturers, architecture and engineering firms, and other mid-size companies build AI roadmaps and then follow through on them. We called this the player-coach episode because they work on both sides. They coach leaders through the change while building a company of their own in the middle of it. The conversation covers the two architectures every organization runs on, why their ideal client is defined by the leader rather than the industry, how to keep a roadmap useful when the ground moves every quarter, and what roughly a hundred frontline workers told Taryn about AI this year. (It wasn’t fear.) This hour is for any leader who has been handed an AI mandate and a list of tools. It’s also for anyone who suspects the hard part is the people. Spoiler: it is. Five takeaways 1. Don’t hand AI your strategy. You’ll lose the part that makes people follow it. AI is useful for synthesizing inputs and surfacing patterns. But the value of a roadmap comes from wrestling over it: what are our criteria, where do we start, what do we give up? As Kemi put it, the process of building the plan is almost more valuable than the plan itself. Headlines say consulting is dead. What dies first is buy-in. 2. Every organization runs on two architectures. Most only fund one. The business architecture is the tools, the data and the processes. It’s tangible, so it gets the budget. The behavioral architecture is the team’s willingness to change. When the two fall out of balance, value leaks. Taryn and Kemi say their time is “50-50” between people and tech. They talk about people more only because organizations so reliably forget them. As Kemi said, this would all be easier without the people, but there would also be no point. 3. Look for leaders who stay amateurs. Business school says to pick your ideal client by industry and size. A year in, Joyn found their best clients had something else in common. A national firm building stadiums and a small aluminum-anodizing shop in a smaller city had the same kind of leader: decades of experience, still curious, still humble. Openness and growth mindset predicted success better than role or function, and much better than seniority. That’s also the business case for your interns. 4. You can’t jump from thin air. In a world that changes every quarter, why bother with a roadmap? Because you can only pivot from somewhere solid. Joyn’s method has three steps: map your current state across the organization, define the future you want, then chart the work as now, near, next, with quarterly checkpoints built in. Start from the outcome to decide how much risk each bet deserves. Experiment on the moonshots. Don’t experiment on the systems that hold the house up. 5. Proactive beats reactive, and the workforce is ready. Taryn sat down with roughly a hundred people across her client organizations this year. Every one of them wanted to hand off tedious tasks and do more strategic, creative work. Companies that use AI reactively, just to cut costs, are already struggling to show a return. Companies that ask how to repurpose the half of a role that AI frees up are raising the ceiling instead. Kemi’s analogy is fire: it’s dangerous and powerful, and what matters is what you do with it. We’ll also need the fire department. A final thought Near the end, we got to an image JoAnn has been turning over in her writing: a straight line is a loop someone cut open, with value leaking out at both ends. Kemi’s answer was that organizations always lost some of that value and quietly accepted it. Now the leak is too big to ignore, and we have to join the ends. Connections to The Insider’s Guide to Innovation at Microsoft * The small, helpful team. Joyn’s embedded model works the way the book’s small, helpful team does. It isn’t a new organization taking work away from people. It’s there to help people adopt the change. (00:12:39–00:14:00) * Everyone becomes an innovator. The book argues that the line between innovation and business as usual is disappearing. Taryn and Kemi described that happening on the factory floor. (00:12:47; 00:56:49) * From I-shaped to T-shaped. Everyone knows their own vertical slice of the current state. Very few can see across it, and that blind spot is where misalignment starts. (00:09:10; 00:37:08) Connect with Taryn and Kemi on LinkedIn, or reach them directly at taryn@ and kemi@joyncollective.com. They’re always up for a conversation about what you’re trying to figure out. Next up on Innovating Out Loud: Chris Hare, leadership storytelling expert and creator of Atomic Storytelling™. Chris helps C-suite leaders, combat veterans and professional athletes use narrative to clarify their vision and align the people who matter most. Thursday, October 15, 9:00 AM PT / 12:00 PM ET, live on Zoom. Register for the series at www.regenerouslabs.com/innovating-out-loud. Thank you to everyone who joined live and to everyone who follows along here and on LinkedIn. Say it ugly. Build it better. Onward! 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