Innovating Out Loud

JoAnn Garbin and Taryn Kutches
  • 5.0 (1)
  • TECHNOLOGY
  • UPDATED WEEKLY

A live monthly webcast and weekly sense-making series where leaders say it ugly and build it better. Real conversations on regenerative innovation. Hosted by JoAnn Garbin and Taryn Kutches of Regenerous Labs. innovatingoutloud.substack.com

  1. MAY 3

    "This is the future. I'll Get You the Money."

    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/reframer Take 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 Microsoft Behavior 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

    6 min

  2. APR 29

    Serious Play is Serious Innovation

    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

    1 hr
  3. Show-iNstead of-Tell Part II: CANOPY

    APR 26

    Show-iNstead of-Tell Part II: CANOPY

    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 CANOPY There’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/canopy Connections 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 constraint 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. 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

    7 min
  4. Behavior is the Barrier

    APR 19

    Behavior is the Barrier

    Behavior is the Barrier: The Time for the Regenerative Data Center of the Future is Now For 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

    12 min
  5. Showing Instead of Telling

    APR 12

    Showing Instead of Telling

    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/innovationcoach Give 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 principle Sources ¹ 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/rpd ² 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.edu Also 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.org A 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

    8 min

  6. APR 5

    Building...Can't Talk

    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

    6 min

  7. MAR 31

    Hidden Returns in Your Innovation Portfolio

    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

    1 hr

  8. MAR 29

    The Same Old Same Old at New Speeds

    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 begins Sources: * Komura and Yamada, “Deepening ideas vs. exploring new ones: AI strategy effects in human-AI creative collaboration,” PLoS ONE, January 2026. Link 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

    9 min
See All (20)

About

A live monthly webcast and weekly sense-making series where leaders say it ugly and build it better. Real conversations on regenerative innovation. Hosted by JoAnn Garbin and Taryn Kutches of Regenerous Labs. innovatingoutloud.substack.com

Information

  • Creator
    JoAnn Garbin and Taryn Kutches
  • Years Active
    2K
  • Episodes
    20
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © JoAnn Garbin
  • Show Website
    Innovating Out Loud