Innovating Out Loud

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

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

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

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.

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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

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.

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Three Minutes

Three 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 next

Our 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 ET

And 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 & Taryn

P.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.

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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.

Sources

Schön, 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