Innovating Out Loud

Innovating Out Loud with Chris Hare

No Tears, Just Onions: replay and key takeaways from the October 2026 webcast

A new CEO at a Fortune 500 company announced a rebrand and a new brand color. The data said the change would likely cost billions. His team showed him the data. He didn’t budge. Finally, the person running the rebrand closed the door and asked, “Sir, can you tell me what’s really going on here?” When he was a little boy, the CEO said, his mother made him wear a little girl’s raincoat on rainy days. The kids at school laughed at him. The brand color decision was never about the brand. It was about the raincoat.

Chris Hare has heard versions of that story over and over. He started in advertising, ran marketing at Amazon and Microsoft, and now works with executives, innovators, pro athletes and special operators as the creator of Atomic Storytelling™. His model has three layers, which JoAnn immediately saw as an onion. At the core is the story we tell ourselves about ourselves. Next is the story we tell ourselves about others and the world. On the outside is the story we tell through our actions and words. When the layers don’t line up, other people see it, often before we do. The conversation covers why you can’t read the label from inside the pickle jar, what an Amazon executive learned when a former boss said he wasn’t a CEO, how JoAnn builds teams like a dinner party, and why we keep crediting the idea instead of the work.

This hour is for any leader who has watched a smart team stall for a reason no one would say out loud.

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Next up on Innovating Out Loud: Toby Herzlich on Biomimicry for Social Innovation, or what nature can teach us about how humans work better together. Thursday, November 19, 9:00 AM PT / 12:00 PM ET, live on Zoom. Register for the series and watch past episodes at www.regenerouslabs.com/innovating-out-loud.

Thank you to everyone who joined live and to everyone who follows along here and on LinkedIn. Please share this with the leader on your team who’s sure the problem is the plan.

Say it ugly. Build it Better — Together.

Go deeper

Chris offered two resources: a workbook on personal and leadership narrative, and his OutThinker talk on getting people to buy into a vision of the future. It takes Amazon’s press release from the future one step further, to a Harvard Business Review article from the future, with quotes from the very people you’re trying to convince. Look for both on our Substack.

Connect with Chris on LinkedIn or at atomicstorytelling.com.

Connections to The Insider’s Guide to Innovation at Microsoft

* Start with the story, then build to it. The book argues that if you start with the story and build toward it, you ship something that lives up to what you’re saying. That works best when every point of view is on the table at the start. (00:10:20)

* Pioneers, settlers, town planners and boundary crossers. The book matches people to the phase where they thrive. Chris added a narrative layer, so each person knows why they’re doing what they’re doing at each phase. (00:40:25–00:42:10)

* An idea is not an innovation. The book opens with Rudolf Diesel arguing with the patent office. An idea is an idea, a prototype is an invention, and innovation is bringing it into the world so it creates value for others. NASA learned the same lesson the hard way. (00:42:50–00:44:20)

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 IMMEDIATE RELEASE OCTOBER 18, 2030: Host towns now get water, food, heat and funding from their data centers, three years after “yes, if” became the rule

Annual report finds communities that set terms before the permit are growing. Regenerative-by-design builds were most of the capacity permitted worldwide this year.

Anytown, USA — Clean water from the tap. Fresh food grown down the road in January. A town budget that grew three years in a row. That is what most data center host towns reported this year, according to the 2030 Host Town Report, released today by the Regenerous Ecosystem, a network of 340 host communities on four continents and the operators, growers and builders who work with them.

Every town in the report negotiated a “yes, if” agreement before the permit, with terms for water, heat, noise, light, land, jobs, and what happens when the machines leave. For the first time, builds designed to those terms made up most of the data center capacity permitted worldwide: 58 percent, up from under 5 percent in 2027.

Four years ago the story ran the other way. In the first three months of 2026, 75 data center projects worth $130 billion were blocked or delayed. New York passed a statewide moratorium. Thirteen Maryland counties paused new builds. Communities had one instrument: no.

Listen for the full press release.

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From The Insider’s Guide to Innovation at Microsoft

* Overcoming Cognitive Inertia. Inertia is a system staying as it is until an outside force changes it. In the book, that force is usually an innovator creating pull from inside. In this story it comes from outside: the town. The book’s “Dancing Guy” holds here too. The first county to write terms looks like the lone dancer. The second turns it into a movement.

* Create Mutualisms. Each partner brings something the other needs. The town brings land, water and consent. The operator brings heat, capital and a share of revenue and royalties. Win-win can be a one-time trade. Mutualism keeps paying both sides, which is why the 2030 town is still gaining, not just compensated.

This piece was created with the help of AI as a writing partner and judgmental reader. The image was generated from sketches by Regenerous Labs co-founder Kent Pilcher and converted to photorealism with Gemini. Direction, judgment and final words 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

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 [email protected]. 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!

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 published the Builder Economy framework we use in the lab and asked you to run it on something real. I did the same. I ran it on one of the biggest projects in the news.

Project Jupiter is a 1,400-acre AI campus going up in Santa Teresa, New Mexico, built by STACK Infrastructure for Oracle and OpenAI. It will run on its own gas-powered plant. Somebody named it after the biggest gas giant in the solar system, probably as an inside joke. We should read it as a warning.

Say it ugly. Build it better. Onward!

From The Insider’s Guide to Innovation at Microsoft

* Adaptive Cycle of Innovation. Plan for disruption instead of being surprised by it, and watch for the rigidity trap: a system that can’t adapt when conditions change. An islanded plant with no grid connection is that trap. A bridge to the grid builds the next phase in from day one.

* Decision Matrix / Impact Test. Clear criteria, set before the pressure arrives, make a hard decision rigorous and defensible. The veto-class rule does that: two sorting tests written down before the first case, so a community under pressure doesn’t have to invent them.

AI Disclosure: This piece was created with the help of AI — as a research assistant, drafting partner, and judgemental reader. All ideas, words, and mistakes 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

What are you building? And what is it built on?Someone ate today because of you.

Maybe you also checked on a parent, fixed something in the neighborhood park, showed someone how to do something properly, or answered a stranger’s question on a forum.

None of it counted.

At least, it didn’t count in today’s economy for you. Here’s the test: if you had paid someone to do any of those things, the economy would have grown. You did them yourself, so they registered as zero.

And the one value they cannot have (to paraphrase Daniel Aronson’s favorite quote) is zero.

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I was going to write about killer robots this week (since my mom called to ask me about them!)

But it’s Climate Week in New York City, we’re relaunching the Regenerous Labs site, and The Digital Economist will be announcing updates to its Regenerative Digital Infrastructure 5.0 initiative, which we’ll be helping lead. There’s also a quieter reason the timing is right: the UN’s Beyond GDP expert group delivered its report in May, and General Assembly deliberation is live. The question of what a country counts is genuinely open for the first time in decades.

So the robots will have to wait (sorry mom 💖).

Instead, I’m sharing, for the first time publicly, the Builder Economy framework we use in the lab to ensure what we build — data centers, knowledge networks, digital trust layers, innovation playbooks — are regenerative by design.

Two things I need to establish before you read or use it.

It’s a rubric, not a manifesto. It runs before we build, not after. Applied after the permit, after the code, after the commitment, it produces a finding not design guidance.

It’s built on other people’s work. I started assembling this in February by synthesizing researchers and institutions who have been at this for decades — Indigenous relational ontologies got there long before any of us: you build with, not on. The full reference list is in the PDF, along with what we got wrong along the way and fixed to get to Version 6.

What we added is structure from firsthand experience trying to make regenerative innovation survive contact with a P&L.

The framework is published under Creative Commons, free to use, adapt and build on commercially, so long as you never composite the R values and you name the framework as your source.

This isn’t a GDP replacement. GDP tells you magnitude. R tells you sign. We’re not competing for the magnitude slot. We’re adding the sign that magnitude has always been missing.

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One last thing. Every time someone runs a real case through the framework, that case is meant to come back and make the next run better. We can’t populate that from inside the lab alone.

So take it to something you’re actually building this week. Run it. Tell me where it breaks.

Say it ugly. Build it better — together. Onward!

Connections to The Insider’s Guide to Innovation at Microsoft

* #34 Metrics (strategic measurement). Measurement shapes behavior long before it reports on it, and the real danger isn’t bad data — it’s measuring the wrong thing, or letting the metric quietly replace the mission. A single averaged R would manage both at once. That’s why the license forbids it.

* #60 Language (as strategic tool). Flights instead of launches. Hypotheses instead of ideas. A mission in twenty-seven words. Terminology that’s memorable and survives the trip between domains is how people build together — which is why the plain version of this framework is the one I published first, and why it says materials rather than capitals.

* #36 Assumption Mapping. Dean’s practice: write down the assumptions behind a decision, then go back later and ask whether the world has moved. The payoff is almost always timing. Step 0 is that discipline aimed at the ground — ask while the answer can still change something.

* #15 Aim for Positive. We pushed teams past a minimum trustworthy experience toward transformational value. R draws the same line between sustaining and regenerating. Holding steady isn’t the goal. It’s the floor.

As always, AI was used as a research assistant, drafting partner, and judgemental reader. All the ideas, words, and mistakes are my own.

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

Americans would rather live next to a nuclear reactor than a data center.

Lead with Purpose - Ron Boire and I were chatting about data centers last week when he raised the point. We’re less inclined to live next to a facility whose worst day is a hum and a higher bill than one whose worst day is Chernobyl.

I don’t think either facility is inherently bad. Obviously one makes a gigawatt and the other consumes one. But that’s not what people hate about one or like about the other. So I went looking at the whole arc — groundbreaking to retirement — for where one is genuinely better, where the other is, and where they’re essentially the same thing.

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As always, AI was used as a research partner and judgemental reader. All the ideas, words, and mistakes are mine. Say it ugly. Build it Better.

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Connections to The Insider’s Guide to Innovation at Microsoft

#9 — Overcoming Cognitive InertiaA system stays as it is unless changed by an external force. Here the town is that force. Every fix in the piece is available and unused until somebody requires it.

#47 — Shift LeftResponsibility costs less at inception than as an end-stage checkbox. That's the whole "yes, if": setbacks, water caps, heat off-take, and bonds are cheap before the permit and unavailable after.

#74 — Innovate Upstream to Succeed DownstreamA community's leverage lives upstream of the site plan. Abilene went fast by deleting the upstream steps — pre-permitted land, on-site generation — and the neighbors found out from the dust.

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 almost every other kind of building, the structure and the envelope dominate the budget. Walls, roof, foundation, grounds — that’s most of what you’re paying for.

In a data center it’s ten to twenty percent. One industry cost guide says it outright: the mechanical and electrical systems are the project, and the building is just the box they go in.

Fifteen percent of the budget. One hundred percent of what the neighbors experience.

Ask someone inside the industry — someone who has spent a career packaging megawatts of compute, storage, and memory into smaller and smaller footprints, only to string them together into bigger and bigger ones — and you’ll find someone who sees a thing of beauty. A technical marvel. A life’s work.

They’re not wrong.

Ask almost anyone else and you’ll find someone who hates the big windowless boxes. The 24/7 noise and light. The construction that never ends.

Beauty on one side of the wall. Ugliness on the other.

The people deciding what it looks like never have to look at it. So that isn’t a taste problem. It’s a distance problem.

The true cost

Total cost of ownership (TCO) is a number every CFO in this industry is trying to drive down. Most of it isn’t theirs to touch. The silicon costs what NVIDIA says it costs. Electrical systems and the redundancy standards behind them account for most of the rest.

The shell and grounds are the line items they can cut, so they do. Cheaper and uglier win, because 15% of a big number is still a big number — $20M/MW across 100MW is $2 billion, and nobody walks past $300 million.

But value engineering never asks whether the wall has a function. It asks how to build this wall cheaper. A decade of that gets you a point or two of project cost, thinner and uglier every pass.

Here’s what the point or two bought.

Seventy-five data centers in the first three months of this year — worth $130 billion — blocked or delayed, matching the whole of 2025 in a single quarter.

It has not slowed. New York enacted the first statewide moratorium in July. In Maryland, thirteen counties have passed their own — that’s more than half the state. The mayor of Chicago and the governor of Texas, who agree on almost, have both called for a pause this summer.

A point or two saved. All that lost.

What we built instead

Two weeks ago I shared the design: no dumb walls, ground improvement instead of slab, permeable surfaces instead of pavement, and a mound that reads as land because it is.

What I didn’t do last time was put money on it.

Here’s the money. My team took the walls out rather than thinning them. That isn’t shaving a point from the line — it’s deleting most of it, and the foundations underneath it, and the years of on-site construction that go with both.

We used the displaced soil for berms instead of hauling it off. Planted in native species, the perimeter became local ecology instead of steel fences. Fences stop a person; berms stop trucks.

And the cost? Pennies on the dollar of today’s approach.

The beautiful version isn’t the expensive version with landscaping on top. It’s the version where the expensive, ugly thing never gets built.

That’s why we didn’t try to improve the existing design. You can’t get there with incremental — every gain is a fraction of a line item nobody should be defending in the first place. We went back to blank sheet of paper with 20 years of lessons and technology advancements in hand.

When we added it up a few years ago, just before the ChatGPT moment of 2022, the number was in the billions. It’s not hard to justify 10X-ing that today.

The walls and fence are only the start. Water, land use, jobs, supply chain, capital timing, employee satisfaction, end of life — ask the same cost vs value creation question of each and the pattern holds: the regenerative version doesn’t only cost less, it makes the money the extractive version loses. More on those parts over the next several weeks.

From The Insider’s Guide to Innovation at Microsoft

* Think-Act-Feel (#27) — In reality, we Feel, Act, Think. And feel is the channel the big ugly wall broadcasts on, all day, to everyone who drives past.

* Sustainable by Design (#25) — embedding sustainability from inception. Inception is the whole argument; there is no later.

* Metrics (#34) — teams prioritize what the incentive system makes measurable. TCO didn’t account for beauty and that has turned out to be an expensive mistake.

AI was used as a drafting partner, research assistant, and judgemental reader. All the ideas, words, and mistakes are mine. Say it ugly. Build it beautiful. 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 most of Western history, calling someone an innovator was an accusation. The word was a heresy — condemned by the medieval church, whispered about Machiavelli, rehabilitated only when Francis Bacon decided the future belonged to people who did new things. Angus Fletcher, Ohio State professor and student of everything in the brain that doesn’t think like a computer, joins JoAnn to trace that history and then bring it uncomfortably close to home: every organization now says it wants innovation, and most still punish the people who deliver it.

What follows is a conversation about the psychology of the heretic — why you have to attach your self-worth to a mission instead of an institution, why real heresy begins with conscience (”this is wrong”) rather than confidence (”I’m right”), and how to bring people along a journey instead of handing them conclusions. JoAnn brings the scar tissue: Microsoft’s underground innovators, air cover, arrows, and what three years of reimagining the data center taught her about the cost of seeing the future early.

This hour is for anyone who’s ever been called a jerk (or treated worse) for seeing the future early — and anyone who has one of those people in their organization and hasn’t yet asked what they’re fighting for.

Key takeaways

If you’re the heretic

* Stop waiting for permission. You will never be granted a license to innovate — Eve didn’t have one either. If you’re waiting for it, it’s already over.

* Heresy starts with conscience, not confidence. The first move isn’t “I’m right,” it’s “this is wrong.” That feeling obligates you to research — humility before conviction — and it’s the conviction people see and mistake for arrogance.

* Socialize the problem, not your answer. Keep building the solution quietly while you make the problem impossible to ignore. When the organization finally feels it, your answer comes off the shelf looking five steps ahead.

* Walk people down the road of heresy step by step. Nobody likes being told what to think. Start them at the moment of conscience and let them arrive at your conclusion as if it were their own.

* Air cover stacks. Every success story JoAnn found had a champion absorbing arrows — and when the champion leaves, the work goes back underground. Find yours, even outside the chain of command, and be one for the people behind you.

If you’re the one watching the heretic

* Before you write someone off as obnoxious, ask one question: what are they fighting for? If it’s something other than themselves, that’s not arrogance — there’s something heroic in it, even if you don’t yet understand the cause.

* If you’re senior, your gift to the system is protection. You were probably a heretic once. Keep your eye out for the young people with radical ideas and help them stick around long enough to make the changes you wish you’d made.

* Don’t ask employees to “be heretics” and expect comfortable answers. A company that invites heresy is really asking for the ideas it wishes it had thought of. Real heretics will hand you the ones you didn’t.

To carry with you

* Your job isn’t to keep your job. Your job is to do something. Untangle your self-worth from the institution and attach it to the mission.

* Learn the anger-to-joy pivot. Anger powers the fight but burns you out; joy comes from looking past the obstacle to the future you’ve already seen. Cycle between them or the burnout wins.

* Good work always finds a way forward. If you saw the problem correctly, your answer gets implemented eventually — maybe not with you, maybe not on your timeline. The better the visionary, the longer the wait.

* Emotion, not data, drives change. People don’t want to be managed by story; they want the authentic account of the moment your heart was touched. Tell that honestly and the change begins.

A final thought from Angus:

Connections to The Insider’s Guide to Innovation at Microsoft

* Air cover is the book’s recurring ingredient — Angus gave it a psychology. (00:11:19–00:12:43)

* The ClearType story became Angus’s proof case for “moment of conscience.” (00:21:00–00:23:56)

* The Garage validates Angus’s claim that heretics must find each other. (00:17:12)

* AI as a Service proves the book’s point about where ideas actually live. (00:47:21–00:48:38)

* “I’m not an innovator” is the objection both the book and the episode exist to dismantle. (00:08:40–00:09:01)

Thank you for everyone who could join live and to everyone who follows us here and on LinkedIn. Please share with your friends, colleagues, champions, and fellow heretics. It takes the village to overthrow the status quo. 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

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 Question

In 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 You

Thought 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!

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