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Innovating Out Loud

A monthly webinar series and podcast where leaders say it ugly and build it better. Real conversations on regenerative innovation. Hosted by JoAnn Garbin and Taryn Kutches of Regenerous Labs.

By JoAnn Garbin

ICYMI - Highlights from the last two months of the Innovating Out Loud webcast:

In May, Jayshree Seth - Corporate Scientist and Chief Science Advocate of 3M - joined us and shared a stack of frameworks she uses to help lead AI adoption in R&D. Check out the full episode for tools you can use tomorrow.

Then in June, Larry Robertson joined us to share the many lessons he learned researching and writing his new book Great Question: The Art of the Ask and Getting More of What Your Really Want. Questioning is not only our greatest gift, but it’s likely the most important skill we can develop for thriving in the future of work. Grab a copy here.

As always - thank you for tuning in to Say it Ugly and Build it Better with us. Onward!

- JoAnn & Dean

Last month I shared the founding story of Regenerous Labs — how a moment of clarity in a chemo chair led to a two-year exploration with trusted collaborators, and an architecture nobody predicted. Start With Who, practiced.

Since then, the weekly Innovating Out Loud series has shifted. For the first three months of 2026, I was exploring ideas — building vocabulary, testing frameworks against research, finding the connective tissue between the book’s four patterns and what I’m learning as a venture builder. That exploration produced concepts like dormancy, vital signs, complementary constraint, and the factory-versus-forest metaphor for how we organize AI.

Over the past month, the work changed. I stopped writing about innovation and started showing it. Three experiments went public. Each one tested the book’s frameworks in the real world. And each one taught me something the frameworks alone couldn’t.

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[Links to all three below]

Experiment 1: Innovation Coach

I built a diagnostic tool with the 77 innovation frameworks from The Insider’s Guide embedded in its architecture, powered by a stripped-down version of our behavioral intelligence engine. I ran the same problem — a real recruiting challenge the Lab is facing — through Innovation Coach and through several leading LLMs.

The LLM output was genuinely useful. Competent, structured, actionable. A smart strategy.

Innovation Coach did something different. It didn’t answer the question I asked. It questioned my question — then answered with an analysis that addressed what I actually needed.

The difference isn’t the knowledge. It’s the perception. Innovation Coach runs on the same underlying AI models. What’s different is the architecture: multiple expert lenses at different apertures running in a diagnostic sequence before looking for answers. Diverge-Converge-Synthesize — the rhythm from the book — operationalized in software.

Readers of the book will recognize what I was doing: developing in the open, the practice from the VS Code story. What gets seen gets tested. 150 people tried it. The feedback was honest: the reframe was something no general LLM produced. But the actionable output needed work.

Fair. So I built the next one.

Experiment 2: CANOPY

CANOPY is a four-step decision intelligence journey built in a single day using Claude as my full IDE — chat to design to code to deployment. Multiple expert lenses run independently, then converge. The tool reframes your question and coaches you through creating a commissioning brief and a 90-day action plan.

The architecture held. The pipeline worked.

But here’s what I lost.

On the Friday before the build, I sat in a design session with my partners Dan and Kent for one of the Lab’s expert products. What I built alone on Saturday over eight hours isn’t in the same league as what they produced in ninety minutes — and you wouldn’t need an expert eye to see it.

Worse: privacy by design, transparent AI, confidence scoring — requirements I know matter — fell out of my head entirely while I was designing the core workflow. I bolted some back on at the end. But bolting things on after the fact undermines the whole discipline of Diverge-Converge-Synthesize. I know that better than anyone. Building alone, even with excellent tools, I could only actively hold so much.

The lesson underneath the lesson: the expert building alone, even with AI that extends her capability, loses signal that the expert building with complementary collaborators wouldn’t.

That’s not a failure of the tools. That’s Pattern #3 — Innovating With Everyone — proved from the inside.

Experiment 3: The Data Center Blueprint

For three years I’ve had a technical and commercial blueprint for a community-scale regenerative data center. Modular, flatbed-deliverable, deployable in 90 to 120 days. AI-class compute with waste heat routed into greenhouses and district heating. Grid-interactive, community-embedded, and more economically viable over a ten-year horizon than hyperscale warehouses.

Every component is commercially available. Microsoft’s own Fairwater architecture — connecting the Wisconsin and Atlanta campuses via 120,000 miles of dedicated fiber as a single distributed supercomputer — proved the networking layer works at scale. An April 2026 study showed 3 to 21 percent cost reduction in grid investment from geographically shiftable AI workloads. FERC is advancing rules to expedite interconnection for flexible loads.

Everyone I walk through the blueprint says yes, obviously. Then nothing happens.

Four actors are each defending structures the current system rewards. Utilities defending a capex-driven rate base. Developers defending a construction-company operating model. Communities defending themselves from extraction — reasonably, given that $156 billion in data center projects were blocked by local opposition in 2025. Capital defending a hyperscale thesis committed in 2023.

Each one is rational. Each one reinforces the others. None unlocks alone. The technology isn’t the barrier. Behavior is the barrier. The line Dean and I wrote about 70 percent of transformations — it holds at infrastructure scale.

I published the full blueprint as prior art and coalition invitation. Because hiding the specification is the surest way to guarantee it stays unbuilt. The behavioral lock that’s kept the obvious solution unbuilt for three years is the same lock that protects it from capture. No utility, developer, or hyperscaler will take it to market — because their internal incentive structure forbids it.

The lock is the moat. And the coalition needs more minds than mine.

Where the Patterns Stand

Three experiments. Four patterns tested.

Pattern #1 — Innovating Every Day. The weekly IOL practice itself. Seventeen pieces. Saying it ugly, sharing before it’s perfect, learning in public. The vocabulary has grown from five terms to more than thirty — none existed in the book, all grew from the book’s root system.

Pattern #2 — Innovating Over the Years. We’re fourteen months into the adaptive cycle. Seedling is becoming young forest. The tools are in the wild. The vocabulary is accumulating. The experiments are teaching us things we couldn’t learn any other way.

Pattern #3 — Innovating With Everyone. CANOPY proved it by accident. The expert building alone drops things the team wouldn’t. The architecture holds. The principles need more eyes.

Pattern #4 — Innovating More Than Technology. The data center piece is the sharpest case. Every technical component exists. The missing innovation is the integrated system, the governance model, and the coalition.

The patterns hold. They’re generating new tools. And the community that uses them and pushes back on them is what makes them sharper.

That’s you.

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Try the Tools

Both are experiments, not products. Your data stays local. We can’t see what you do.

Innovation Coach — Give it a real problem. See what it reframes that a general LLM doesn’t. www.regenerouslabs.com/innovationcoach

CANOPY — Walk through a four-step decision intelligence journey with multiple expert lenses. A preloaded test case lets you experience it without bringing your own. www.regenerouslabs.com/canopy

Tell me what I got wrong. Help me build them better.

Go deeper:

📖 The Insider’s Guide to Innovation at Microsoft

🎓 LinkedIn Learning course

📬 Innovating Out Loud weekly series — where all of this lives between monthly updates here, including our live webcast every 4th Thursday of the Month

🎤 Speaking and workshops — Dean and I bring the patterns to leadership teams and conferences. For internal events at Microsoft, reach out to Dean on Teams!

AI Disclosure: This piece was created with the help of AI — specifically Claude and a team of expert personas built by Regenerous Labs. Direction, judgment, and final decisions by me. Say it ugly, build it better. Onward!

If your bandwidth is the bottleneck in scaling your life’s work — and you’re tired of facing that alone — this is for you.

I’ve been writing a weekly series for Regenerous Labs called Innovating Out Loud as a companion to our monthly webcast — exploring innovation through the lens of living systems, behavioral science, and practice. This week is different. This is our founding story — and if you’ve ever felt your professional edge dulling while doing extraordinary work at scale, it will sound familiar. Read the full piece below or listen on the IOL Substack.

Innovating Out Loud

The Expert Who Couldn't Think Anymore

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…

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5 months ago · JoAnn Garbin

Three Minutes

Three minutes in, a metallic explosion went off at the bottom of my esophagus and started spreading. Then my whole body went hot, turned red. My eyes closed on their own. I started to cry — but I was calm. I even said to my care team, I’m not crying. It’s making me cry.

It was my first round of chemo, and my body was not having it. Anaphylactic shock. Nurses moving fast. That particular kind of clinical urgency where everyone stays calm but nobody’s relaxed.

And somewhere in those first minutes, while my body was fighting the thing that was supposed to save it, my mind got very, very clear.

I couldn’t go back to Microsoft.

Not because Microsoft was bad. It wasn’t. It was extraordinary. I’d been there a little more than three years, leading the Data Center of the Future program — reimagining the physical infrastructure of one of the world’s most powerful companies through the lenses of sustainability and mutual benefit. My team was incredible. The potential impact, at Microsoft’s scale, was enormous. You could change the world from that seat. I believed that. I still believe it.

But there I was in that chair, and two things became real in a way they hadn’t been before.

• One: life isn’t a guarantee. This is something everyone knows and almost nobody lives by. Cancer has a way of closing the gap between knowing and living.

• Two: I wasn’t really living. I wasn’t able to develop anything other than what I was working on for Microsoft, inside the boundaries of my role. Fourteen-hour days of back-to-back meetings. The gravitational pull of a massive organization that needs you to be exactly where you are, doing exactly what you’re doing, every single day.

The inability to diverge, to explore, to follow my curiosity wherever it leads — that was the greatest risk to living my life. Because what makes me happy, what makes me successful, what makes me me, is divergence. It’s exploration. It’s learning. It’s finding the white space where new things live.

I didn’t have any of that in my role at Microsoft. And from that chemo chair, it became clear that the cost of not having it was too high.

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The Messy Middle

I wish I could tell you I walked out of treatment and straight into building Regenerous Labs. The moment of clarity, the bold leap. That’s the founder story you’re supposed to tell.

That’s not what happened.

What happened was a year and a half of oscillation. I’d find the clarity, then lose it. I’d think about the scale of impact possible at Microsoft. Then I’d come back to the cost. Treatment would remind me. Every infusion, every appointment — a metronome beating the truth back into focus.

Underneath the oscillation, there was that something I couldn’t yet name: the sense that what I was reaching for wasn’t just freedom from something. It was freedom to — to think again, to build again, to follow curiosity into the unknown with people I trust. I didn’t have the shape of it yet. But I knew the ache of its absence.

The cost is too high. The cost is too high. The cost is too high.

By the time I finished treatment and was preparing to return to work, I was clear. Not from one dramatic moment, but because I’d lived with the question long enough to know the answer wasn’t going to change. No role, no title, no scope of impact would give me back the time and space I needed to be alive in the way I wanted to be alive.

So I left.

The Wall

What I was living wasn’t unusual. Every senior professional I’ve met in the last two years is hitting some version of the same wall.

I remember finishing a day at Microsoft and needing to stare at a literal wall. Not choosing to — needing to. There was nothing left. I’d get up the next morning and do it again. Saturday afternoon would come and I’d feel a flicker of brain space — the first quiet moment where something new might grow. Then Monday swallowed it. The weekends were never enough to fully recharge, let alone create.

I recently wrote about dormancy — the way a forest’s underground network keeps working even when the branches are bare. The mycelium doesn’t stop when the tree goes quiet. That’s where deep regeneration happens, the invisible substrate work that makes the next season of growth possible. But dormancy needs duration. It needs to not be interrupted. What I had — what every overbooked expert I know has — isn’t dormancy. It’s a gasp between sprints. The underground work never gets a chance to happen. We’re so depleted that when the break comes, we’re too exhausted to use it for the thinking that made us valuable in the first place.

Now add the layer everyone is feeling. At the same time our capacity to evolve is at its lowest, we see our abilities that we’ve spent decades mastering being approximated — imperfectly, but accessibly — by technology that never sleeps, never stares at a wall, and costs virtually nothing.

That’s not three separate problems. It’s one compounding crisis. And it has a clock on it.

The Amorphous Blob

When I left Microsoft, I didn’t build a product. I didn’t write a business plan. I didn’t launch a startup.

I called Kevin.

Kevin and I go back twenty-five years. He was the architect of my very first product. He’s been with me across roles, companies, decades. And the call was simple: Why don’t we do what we do for ourselves? The worst that happens is we make a good living. The upside is infinite — because we know what we’re capable of when we have the time and space to create together.

From there, we went through our bench. The people we love going into the white space with — a behavioral scientist, a sales strategist, a discovery leader, a storyteller, a PR mind, a magic pen. We invited them not to a company, not to a venture. To a conversation.

We called ourselves an amorphous blob.

Eight people, all accomplished, all with decades of building behind them, many of those years together. We didn’t know what we would build but we knew how we would go about figuring it out.

That was February 2024. I was still in treatment. Still technically at Microsoft. Just a gathering of friends, exploring.

We met on Fridays. A couple of hours each week to question, experiment, poke and prod, to see what emerged. We developed a training program. And a speaking series. We built a question-storming app, an experiment generator, a behavioral intelligence engine. Each one solved a different problem. And then Kevin did what Kevin does. He brought clarity.

“You know every one of these is our methods translated into software, right?”

I didn’t. I hadn’t seen it.

He was right. It was our various expertises emerging in a new medium. Kevin saw it before we did. The architect recognized the blueprint.

That’s what gave Regenerous Labs its foundation — not a business plan, but two years of divergence that produced an architecture we never could have predicted. The white space I’d been starving for didn’t just feel good. It produced something. The very infrastructure that could give other experts the same freedom.

The Living System

Along the way, we clarified what the Lab was for, what we wanted to do: to unleash the potential of eight billion individuals to thrive together. A mission that also told us something practical: we couldn’t do this alone. No one could reach 8 billion people on their own.

We needed to bring in other experts — people who’ve spent their careers building methodologies as deep and needed as anything we’d created. People who are extraordinary at what they do, want to expand their reach and impact, and need more time and space to evolve.

Our role became clear too: we are builders and translators. We create bridges between human expertise and technology. Our role is to create the infrastructure and environment that enables experts to be the greatest version of who they are and what they do. With them, we co-create the connection between their expertise and the world that needs it.

We built the Lab to be a living system — a team and technology designed to evolve. An ecosystem where every expert who joins makes the whole stronger, and where the community of peers evolving together becomes as valuable as the infrastructure itself. Because the conditions that created the current crisis aren’t static. As the world keeps changing, we will face it together. Create together. Lead together.

When our experts succeed, we succeed. When the Lab succeeds, our experts succeed. That’s not an aspiration. That’s the structure.

The Open Door

Three minutes in a chemo chair, a year and a half to act on the clarity created in that moment, and two years of discovery and experimentation for the way forward to emerge.

I was the first case study. The expert who couldn’t think anymore — who found her way out by trusting the people she has built with for years. Who discovered, in the white space she’d been missing, the very architecture that could give the same space to other experts.

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.

Calendar-captive. White-space-starved. Watching the world accelerate while the gap closes on your ability to stay ahead. Your life’s work deserves better.

Life isn’t a guarantee. The cost of being consumed is too high. And you don’t have to figure this out alone.

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 joann@regenerouslabs.com.

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A year ago this week, Dean and I stood in the Microsoft Garage holding a book that started as a question nagging both of us.

Are there patterns that hold across every kind of innovation — regardless of the technology, the team, or the era?

We spent years chasing that question. Hundreds of interviews. Seven case studies. Four patterns. A foreword from Eric Horvitz. And then one night, a hundred people held up the finished book and smiled.

But it didn’t end there.

The conversation kept going.

Forbes and the Financial Times picked it up. The Next Big Idea Club featured it. Thinkers50 recognized us — twice! First on the 2025 Radar list and then the shortlist for the Innovation Award.

Over this past year, I’ve brought the innovation patterns to stages at the Conference Board and industry events, to corporate leadership teams navigating AI strategy, and to executive audiences trying to activate their innovation cultures. Dean gave author talks throughout Microsoft and his alma mater, McKinsey. LinkedIn Learning helped us turn the book into a course.

In every room, we heard the same question: Not “how did Microsoft do it?” — but “how do we do it NOW?” In today’s world with AI, accelerated change, uncertainty, and polycrisis.

So we haven’t stopped learning or sharing. Dean is leading AI transformation inside Microsoft. I left to launch Regenerous Labs — building not one regenerative venture but an ecosystem of them. We’re using the patterns and tools of Innovation at Microsoft every day and finding new ones. “Start with Who” wasn’t in the book. It’s how I built the Lab and then we recognized it was in all the case studies. We just hadn’t named it.

That’s why we launched Innovating Out Loud.

Innovating Out Loud

A monthly webinar series and podcast where leaders say it ugly and build it better. Real conversations on regenerative innovation. Hosted by JoAnn Garbin and Taryn Kutches of Regenerous Labs.

By JoAnn Garbin

If you’ve been following the weekly written series and the monthly live webcast, you know it started with a key insight: that 70% of transformations fail because they’re done to people, not with them. I shared how I’d seen this up close — leadership acquiring the language of psychological safety without the meaning — and the catastrophic result.

From there, the conversation has been building. Week by week, new vocabulary is emerging:

• Seeing-being traps. The mental models that keep us from perceiving what’s actually in front of us.

• Compressed complexity. The ability to hold big problems as a few load-bearing components instead of a thousand anxious details.

• Playable systems. Designed with enough constraint that people can actually move — because infinite resources aren’t freedom, they’re a game with no end condition.

• Complementary constraint. The biological principle underneath every real partnership: each contributes what only they can, and needs what only others provide.

• Vital signs, not KPIs. The shift from measuring what happened to sensing what’s unfolding.

None of this vocabulary existed in the book. But all of it grew from the book’s root system — from the four patterns we discovered studying fifty years of innovation at one company.

Here’s what I’ve learned about the relationship between the book and the work.

The book gave us the patterns that cut across. The work is giving us new experiences that go deep. Dean is applying them to one of the largest AI transformations in the world. I’m applying them to the earliest, most fragile stages of venture building — where there’s no brand, no budget, and no safety net. The patterns hold in both directions. And the learning and sharing — out loud, in real time, saying it ugly — is giving us new vocabulary we couldn’t have found any other way. That’s Pattern #1 in practice.

Pattern #2 said innovation happens over years through adaptive cycles. One year in, we’re in the seedling phase — just forming, watching for vital signs.

Pattern #3 said innovation requires leading with emotion. We hope you can feel how much we care about your innovation success, not just ours.

Pattern #4 said innovation goes beyond technology — it transforms the whole value chain. And that’s exactly what Innovating Out Loud is trying to do: not just talk about innovation, but practice it across domains, with everyone, in the open.

And the live sessions bring the ideas to life.

Dan Greenwald unpacked the behavior change journey behind every organizational transformation. Dean brought the innovation patterns to life. Sean Quinn from HOK showed us what regenerative design looks like when it’s built into the physical world. And next week, Juliana from Xbox joins us — bringing one of the book’s case studies full circle and forward.

Each session surprises me. Because when the pages meet real practitioners, the ideas they hold get sharper, stranger, and more useful than we could make them in print.

So here’s where we are, one year in.

A book. A LinkedIn Learning course. A thousand Insiders. Seven written pieces. Four live sessions with a fifth on the way. And a vocabulary that keeps growing because you keep showing up.

I don’t know what Piece #8 will be about yet. That’s the point. Innovation is loopy. The path wiggles. And the best ideas come from diving deeper than is comfortable and staying submerged in the possibilities longer than feels safe.

Thank you for being here. Thank you for reading. And thank you for innovating out loud with us.

Go deeper:

📖 Buy the book that started it all: innovationatmicrosoft.com

🎓 Apply the 4 patterns: LinkedIn Learning course

🎤 I speak to leadership teams and conferences about building innovation culture, navigating AI transformation, and the patterns behind Microsoft’s biggest breakthroughs. Dean does too. And we often present together. If your organization is ready to practice out loud — let’s talk.

To Dean — one question, four patterns, and now a whole year of conversations later. Here’s to what’s next!

To the Insiders — you made a book into a community. That’s the best kind of innovation. Thank you! And, as always….

Onward!

That satirical Onion headline opens an HBR article on what the authors call chronic transformation—organizations trapped in cycles of reinvention that breed fatigue rather than progress. Sound familiar?

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Each week, I publish a sense-making piece called Innovating Out Loud—a companion to our monthly webcast and a personal practice of “saying it ugly” (sharing ideas at 5 iterations, not 50). This week’s exploration connects directly to patterns we documented in The Insider’s Guide to Innovation at Microsoft.

The exploration:

I wondered: what if chronic transformation isn't just an organizational problem, but a symptom of a broken economic system? Single-value capitalism has no win condition. More is always better. You can never finish—only keep playing.

Good games have "enough" conditions. Thresholds that, once satisfied, release attention for more play. Without them, there's no level complete. No satisfaction. No fun.

I brought in Kate Raworth's Doughnut Economics to explore this at the global systems level—a floor and ceiling across multiple dimensions. The goal isn't to maximize one metric. It's to find configurations where multiple dimensions have "enough" together, and none have too much or too little.

The Microsoft connection:

The exploration maps directly to several frameworks from Innovation at Microsoft:

• Bing's turnaround under Satya mirrors the Boston Scientific case—realistic hope over unrealistic hype

• B2Me Journey: The three "enoughs" I explore—clarity, value, readiness—map to the cognitive, visionary, and emotional stages that determine adoption

• Trust Levers: "Enough trust to entertain the change" is structural, not soft

• Mutualism: Configurations where multiple parties reach "enough" together is biomimetic design applied to organizational and economic systems

A question for the community:

Where have you seen "enough" operate as a design principle—inside a company or elsewhere? When has defining a threshold enabled movement that endless optimization couldn't?

Read or listen to the full piece on the Innovating Out Loud Substack:

Innovating Out Loud

Enough is Enough

One of the more famous quotes attributed to Einstein (which ironically is just enough of what he said, but is 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 de…

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8 months ago · 2 comments · JoAnn Garbin

And join the practice - leave a comment. Say it ugly!

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Warmly,

JoAnn

Our next live webcast is this Thursday, January 22 at 9 AM PT / 12 PM ET. Our. next guest is Sean Quinn, Global Head of Regenerative Design at HOK. Register here: www.regenerouslabs.com/innovatingoutloud

This is a cross-share from Innovating Out Loud—a weekly companion to our monthly webcast where I share research and sense-making in progress.

This week’s piece starts with a reframe: What if “I’m not creative” could become “I’m too dumb to know I can’t”?

That joke was my shorthand for years. Turns out there’s research behind it—two trainable capacities called creative self-efficacy and compressed complexity that enable innovative behavior.

It connects directly to something we observed in the book: Microsoft’s Cognitive Services team found that junior staff were more comfortable with the effort and risk needed to innovate than mid-career and senior employees. This week’s research suggests why that gap exists—and how organizations can close it by building innovators rather than hunting for born ones.

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Read or listen to the full piece on Innovating Out Loud:

Innovating Out Loud

Too Dumb to Know I Can't

This week’s innovating out loud writing practice started with a question: What do I want to understand more deeply right now…

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8 months ago · JoAnn Garbin

For those of you leading transformation efforts: What would it look like to design for creative self-efficacy in your teams?

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Register now for the next live recording of the Innovating Out Loud webcast. Jan 22nd (and the 4th Thursday monthly) at 9 AM PT / 12 PM ET. We’ll be exploring all things regenerative with Sean Quinn, head of regenerative design at HOK.

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Happy New Year, Insiders! This is the first edition of a new weekly practice I’m building—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 there’s value worth sharing. Not precious—putting it on the table so we can pretty it up together.

In other words: saying it ugly. Which, as it turns out, is exactly what the research this week is about—modeling the behavior we want to see more of.

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We’ve all felt that silence. The announcement lands. Then... nothing. No follow-up. No visible change from the people who announced it. And in that gap, fear fills the space faster than facts ever could.

50% of employees have lost confidence in leadership due to poorly managed transitions. Not bad strategy. Bad experience. The difference between transformation that sticks and transformation that stalls often comes down to one question: Is change being done to people or with them?

The full piece explores what shifts when we move from change management (project-based, reactive) to change capacity engineering (systemic, adaptive)—and why that distinction matters more now than ever.

It also digs into something I found particularly useful and validating: not all vulnerability builds trust. Some kinds undermine it. The research lays out which is which—and it explains a bit about why “psychological safety” sometimes backfires.

For those familiar with The Insider’s Guide to Innovation at Microsoft: the frameworks we built are all over this. B2Me Journey. Trust Levers. Boundary Crossers. Pattern #2. This week’s research validates what we learned—and extends it.

I’m curious what you’re seeing. Where is change being done with people—and where is it still being done to them in your worlds?

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Read or listen to the full piece on Innovating Out Loud:

Innovating Out Loud

"Done To" vs "Done With"

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…

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8 months ago · JoAnn Garbin

And you know you need to do the work. That’s not news either.

But sometimes the vision gets so big, so personal, so loaded with consequence, that you can’t look at it directly anymore.

You freeze.

Not dramatically. Not obviously. You just... get busy. You tinker around the edges. You call it progress. You avoid the thing you actually want because wanting it that much feels dangerous.

I’ve learned to hold big visions without freezing—it took years of practice. But this week, three conversations gave me clearer language for how it actually works. Language I wish I’d had sooner.

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A vision that scares you is doing its job

Remember that quote from Kareem in the book? It’s one of our favorites. This week, Michael Gervais, high-performance psychologist and host of Finding Mastery, talked about vision in the same way: if it doesn’t scare you a little, it’s probably not worth chasing.

You have to know where you’re going. And that destination has to be compelling enough that when things get hard—and they will—you keep moving anyway.

The flip side of that, though, is that a truly big vision can be overwhelming. The thing you’re aiming for can be so large that staring at it every day doesn’t motivate you. It paralyzes you.

That’s not weakness. That’s human.

So what do you do?

Stop staring at the vision—instrument it

This is where Rita McGrath’s work on early warning signals clicked for me in a completely new way.

Rita’s method allows you to stop trying to hold it in your head all the time.

How? By translating the vision into signals you can track. Then building systems—processes, data, teams—that monitor those signals for you. Signals that tell you when you’re drifting and when the ground is shifting beneath you.

Then let go.

Externalizing the monitoring gives you permission to put your head down and work without the constant anxiety of “am I drifting?” You don’t need to white-knuckle the future. You need to know when you’re off course and trust that your signals will tell you.

Look up occasionally. Check alignment. Adjust. Then get back to work.

No drama. No daily existential crisis. No freezing.

I’ve thought about vision and execution for years, but I’d never seen this piece so clearly before. The early warning signals aren’t just strategic tools—they’re psychological relief. They let you hold a vision that’s big enough to scare you without being crushed by it.

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Innovation is practice, not perfection

Dean Carignan brought this home during our Innovating Out Loud session this week.

Innovating Out Loud

Innovating Out Loud Replay - Navigating the AI Transition

Why Your AI Adoption Is Probably Stalled—And What Actually Works…

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9 months ago · 1 like · JoAnn Garbin and Taryn Kutches

The conversation was framed around AI, but the insight cuts across every domain. From The Insider’s Guide to Innovation at Microsoft, one pattern shows up again and again: the teams that succeed aren’t the ones obsessing over the future every day. They’re the ones building repeatable practices that move them toward it.

Dean’s point was grounded and practical: pick a problem that’s painful enough that solving it is worth the learning.

That’s the behavioral key. If the problem doesn’t hurt, the friction of change won’t feel justified. If the problem does hurt, the learning suddenly becomes worth it. That’s when new practices stick—not because someone mandated them, but because the pain made them necessary.

Especially with AI, resistance shows up fast: fear of getting it wrong, anxiety about designing yourself out, frustration with ambiguity. The antidote isn’t more inspiration. It’s finding a problem painful enough to make the discomfort worthwhile.

Bringing it all together

You don’t need to stare down your biggest ambition every morning.

You need three things:

1. A vision big enough to scare you.

2. Signals that tell you when you’re drifting.

3. Practices that let you focus on execution instead of anxiety.

That’s it.

What to do with this

If you’re leading through uncertainty—AI, transformation, reinvention—here’s where I’d start. As usual, with questions.

• Is your vision exciting enough to pull you forward and valuable enough to sustain you?

• Do you have early warning signals that tell you when you’re drifting—or the environment has changed—so you don’t have to hold the whole thing in your head?

• Are you building practices that let you and your team focus on doing the work instead of fearing the future?

If not, don’t overthink it.

Say it ugly. Do the work. Let the systems help you carry the weight.

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Resources

🎥 Michael Gervais webcast — Vision that’s big enough to scare you

🧭 Rita McGrath — Early warning signals & strategic inflection points

🎥 Innovating Out Loud with Dean Carignan — Navigating AI with practice, not panic

📘 The Insider’s Guide to Innovation at Microsoft — Patterns that make innovation repeatable, scalable, and sustainable.

Question for you:

What’s the vision you’ve been avoiding looking at—and what signal would tell you if you’re still on course?

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Read by AI-JoAnn

Let’s identify the emerging patterns and share how to shift them toward success.

Register Here

Can’t make it to the live session? Comment on this post to submit your questions in advance. And catch the replay on Spotify, YouTube, or here on Substack.

Please share this with your friends and colleagues. See you Friday!

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Our conversation with Dan Greenwald—CEO, White Rhino and creator of the B2ME framework introduced in Pattern #3: Innovating With Everyone of The Insider’s Guide to Innovation at Microsoft—highlighted:

• The psychological decision-making journey we all move through as we make decisions.

• Why emotion is the necessary, and often missing, ingredient of successful innovation.

• A real-life innovation and behavior change case study from JoAnn and Dan’s work at Microsoft.

You can find the B2Me curve we discussed below and a link for our next session with Innovation at Microsoft co-author and Microsoft leader, Dean Carignan, where we’ll be diving into his work leading the massive AI transformation inside Microsoft.

Innovating Out Loud - December Episode: https://us06web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_GGodH3dITKqjs5q1k5wAsQ

We hope to see you Friday, December 12th at 9 AM PT / 12 PM ET!

Onward!

JoAnn & Taryn

PS - Never miss the live Innovating Out Loud session - subscribe on Substack:

Innovating Out Loud

A monthly webinar series and podcast where leaders say it ugly and build it better. Real conversations on regenerative innovation. Hosted by JoAnn Garbin and Taryn Kutches of Regenerous Labs.

By JoAnn Garbin

B2ME Journey of Behavior Change

What’s it gonna be?
🍏 🧁

Maybe you’re team apple. Maybe you’re team cupcake. Maybe you’re thinking “depends on the day.”

Here’s what’s wild: that split-second choice? It’s the same neural pathway your customers travel when deciding whether to say yes to your solution. Except in B2B, that journey can take months—and most innovators don’t realize they’re asking people to navigate it blind.

That’s why Taryn Kutches and I are thrilled to kick off Innovating Out Loud with Dan Greenwald, who’ll walk us through the Journey of Behavior Change—the psychological map that explains how humans actually move from “not interested” to “all in” and the tools you can use to help guide them.

This isn’t theory. Dan and his partner Teri Sun built the framework by synthesizing decades of research from Kahneman, Prochaska, Glaser, Forbes, and (Herb) Greenwald. It’s the same behavioral science foundation that’s powered breakthrough innovation at Microsoft and beyond (see Pattern #3 in The Insider’s Guide to Innovation at Microsoft: Innovating With Everyone).

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In this session, you’ll learn:
🍏 Why most innovations fail before they start (hint: wrong stage, wrong message)
🧁 The trust levers that move people through each decision stage
🍏 How to turn “no” into “not yet”and “not yet” into “yes”
🧁 Why your best advocates aren’t created at the close, they’re created in the journey

Whether you’re selling a regenerative datacenter partnership to a skeptical community, pitching AI transformation to set in their ways teammates, or launching any innovation where people need to change to adopt it—which by definition is all innovation—this framework is the key.

Join us live: November 19th at 10 AM PT / 1 PM ET
Register: www.regenerouslabs.com/innovatingoutloud

Come ready to think differently about how decisions actually happen. And maybe bring a cupcake. 🧁

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Three things happened recently that show the difference between the narrative and the reality:

How to Use External Pressure as Internal Permission

Last weekend, I wrote a LinkedIn post about local opposition to data centers and the execution gap it highlights—a post that went viral for a variety of reasons based on the comments. But the main point I was trying to make is: those communities just handed innovators inside tech companies the business justification they’ve been waiting for.

When breakthrough designs sit unshipped inside organizations, it’s rarely because the solution doesn’t work. It’s because of internal inertia. Everyone from leadership to legal to finance want proof that the market demands it.

External pressure creates that proof.

Communities blocking datacenter projects unless they include regenerative design aren’t just protecting their interests—they’re changing the business case for internal teams who’ve been trying to ship those designs for years. Suddenly, regenerative design isn’t a “nice to have.” It’s a market requirement for project approval.

This is a transferable pattern. When you’re trying to deliver breakthrough work, asking “who outside our organization has leverage over our success?” can reveal unexpected allies. Regulators. Communities. Customers. Investors. Employees.

The innovation move isn’t fighting external pressure. It’s translating it into internal permission.

And “external” can also be another group within your company. We demonstrated this at Microsoft with water foot-printing. When the sustainability team framed it as voluntary reporting, they couldn’t get funding. When we reframed the same work as operational waste solved through innovation, the money showed up. Same solution. Different leverage points.

Where’s the external pressure in your work? And how could you translate it into the business driver for the transformation that’s already sitting on your shelf?

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The Opportune Moment

Earlier this week, I was in London at the Thinkers50 summit and gala. Dean and I were named to the 2025 Radar List earlier this year—30 people Thinkers50 identified as shaping the future of management thinking—and then shortlisted for the Innovation Award. Huge honors! But the real fun was that I got to spend two days in a room packed with the world’s leading management thinkers, academics, and coaches. And even though this was not a sustainability audience, everyone was talking about regenerative solutions.

Here are three reasons why that matters for all of you, not just the sustainability folks in this community:

1. Most of the value created throughout history has come from business model innovation.

2. Regenerative business is a business model innovation.

3. Andrew Winston and Paul Polman’s taking the #1 spot on the Thinkers50 list for Net Positive: How Courageous Companies Thrive by Giving More Than They Take validates regeneration as the leading management practice of our time.

But as we talked about in the first section, validation isn’t enough. We need external pressure to create internal permission.

Generative AI is that pressure.

Think about what happened when smartphones arrived. Companies had to figure out mobile-first business models—not just add mobile features. The technology itself forced business model transformation.

GenAI is doing the same thing, only bigger. It’s forcing even the companies building it (like Microsoft) to rethink their business models. You can’t bolt GenAI onto an old business model and expect it to add value.

This is the opportune moment. Regenerative business models aren’t just good for people and planet. They’re the business model innovation that meets the transformation GenAI is demanding. Aiming for positive requires that we ask different questions, which the readers of The Insider’s Guide to Innovation at Microsoft know is step one in finding innovative answers.

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Innovating Out Loud: Where Leaders Say It Ugly and Build Better

This brings me to something new we’re launching through Regenerous Labs.

Taryn Kutches and I are starting Innovating Out Loud—a live monthly webinar series where leaders have real conversations about regenerative—scalable, repeatable, net positive—innovation. Not polished keynotes. Not safe corporate messaging. Real talk about what it actually takes to drive transformation.

If you read the Visual Studio Code chapter in the book, you know how effective their “develop in the open” method has been. That’s exactly why we’re adopting it in the Lab. Learning together, iterating in public, building better by being willing to say it ugly out loud, in conversation with our community. You!

Our first episode features Dan Greenwald, CEO & Chief Creative Officer at White Rhino—and the timing couldn’t be better. The datacenter story I just told you? It’s fundamentally about behavior change. You can’t innovate without behavior change. And you can’t drive behavior change without understanding decision-making.

Dan has spent his career translating behavioral science into business action. He’s going to help us understand why smart organizations keep announcing new programs instead of implementing existing solutions. Why innovation theater feels safer than execution. And what it takes to shift from “we should” to “we did.”

Episode 1 will be hosted live November 19th at 10:00 AM PT / 1:00 PM ET.
Register Here

If you’ve ever wondered why your organization talks about innovation more than it does it—and want to learn how to change that—this conversation is for you.

Why This Matters Now

These three pieces—the external pressure pattern, the Regenerative-Generative AI transformation, and Innovating Out Loud—aren’t separate stories. They’re the same story told from different angles.

Transformational innovation starts with collaborations that ask different questions. The question right now isn’t “should we transform our business model?” GenAI already answered that. The question is: “what business model innovation do we build toward?”

Regeneration gives you direction. External pressure gives you permission. And this community, now open for live conversations via Innovating Out Loud, gives you the support to succeed at it.

See you November 19th.

Onward,
JoAnn

Register for Innovating Out Loud - Episode 1 Here

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Note: Article read by AI-JoAnn created with ElevenLabs

Welcome to Fall (or Spring), Insiders!

What better way to start the new season than with the world’s largest private hackathon. Each year 70,000+ Microsofties and partners come together to challenge assumptions, collaborate across domains, and create breakthroughs that may not find a way forward otherwise. Just like the evolution of Immersive Reader and Reading Coach did, which we explored in the first bonus chapter.

Download the Bonus Chapter Here

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What’s a hackathon for?

A hackathon isn’t just about writing code or staying up all night on energy drinks (though those things certainly happen). At its core, it’s a chance to step outside the daily grind and test what’s possible. It’s structured play with serious intent—time set aside to stretch your skills, cross boundaries, and chase an idea without worrying if it fits neatly into the quarterly plan. You don’t need a badge from Redmond to do that. Every workplace, team, or even individual has their own version of a hackathon if they choose to make space for it.

When we wrote The Insider’s Guide to Innovation at Microsoft, we found this spirit again and again. The Xbox team hacked culture inside a productivity software company to make space for gaming. The Office team hacked their own success by redesigning the way they worked, even when revenue looked just fine. And Cognitive Services came to life because junior program managers hacked hierarchy, building extreme collaboration across seven layers of management. Different problems, different outcomes—but the common thread was giving themselves permission to challenge assumptions and push past the obvious.

Make every day a hack-day

So here’s the real lesson: you don’t have to wait for permission or a global hackathon week to try something new. You can hack your calendar to make time for learning. Hack your assumptions by asking a teammate from a different background to poke holes in your idea. Hack your value chain by spotting one small process that’s slowing everyone down and reimagining it. Innovation isn’t magic, and it isn’t just for the tech elite—it’s a discipline, a practice, and sometimes, a little bit of rebellion.

Onward!

…or rather, Hack On!

Stay tuned for some exciting announcements in October from Regenerous Labs!

And find us out in the wild or online in these upcoming events:

• Podcast: How to Be Awesome at Your Job - release data TBD (recording today)

• Events: NYC Climate Week

  • AI for Energy, Energy for AI

  • Female Founders & Funders

• Keynote: Sustainable Brands ‘25

  • Wednesday, 9/15 Morning Plenary Session

  • San Diego, CA

• Event: Thinkers50 Summit & Gala

  • Award Nominee: We’re on the shortlist for the Innovation Award!

  • London, UK November 3-4

Finally, the next bonus chapter is in the works: the story of Teams during the pandemic. Guaranteed to offer insights on blitzscaling. Coming Soon!

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NotebookLM’s "Audio Deep Dive," was unexpected but, I think, very valuable. What I like about it is that it’s not just a simple reading of the article we wrote. The “discussion” compliments the article and adds new insights. I was genuinely surprised by the output.

Beyond article summaries, there's a deeper innovation use case: For another project, I leveraged this audio feature to summarize several weeks of detailed research, ideas, and visuals I had organized on a Miro board. The resulting audio summary gave my teammates an easy catch-up to my current thinking—one even listened during his commute. And all responded with excitement about the concept!

This burst of enthusiasm is exactly what the B2Me framework (Pattern #3 in the book) identifies as critical to gaining buy-in and moving towards adoption.

I also hypothesize that having the concept presented by someone other than me (AI, in this case) might have amplified its impact—though that's TBD.

I'm curious—how are you experimenting with AI in your own work? How might these tools shape the way we think, communicate, and innovate together? Let's discuss!

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Note: I also frequently use Claude, Perplexity, and several other AI tools. For content generation, this particular combination currently works best for me. However, tools evolve regularly, so my approach evolves too. I only recently started using NotebookLM. And remember that not all AI tools excel at everything—for instance, GPT cannot do math. Don’t trust it.

Six Tools for Thriving in Change

Training Overview - written by JoAnn, NotebookLM, and JoAnn’s customGPT

In today's dynamic and unpredictable world, traditional, rigid strategic plans often lead to missteps and missed opportunities. To thrive amid uncertainty, you need practical tools and insights into how to apply them effectively. Our 90-minute virtual training, based on six essential tools from "The Insider's Guide to Innovation at Microsoft," is designed to provide exactly that.

In this concise and interactive session, we'll spend 90 minutes demonstrating and discussing how each tool directly addresses the challenges you face daily, whether you're navigating organizational change, adapting to market disruptions, or guiding teams toward meaningful innovation.

Here's how each tool can benefit you and your team:

1. Diverge, Converge, Synthesize

• Your Challenge: Change isn't neatly planned—it's emergent. Teams often converge too quickly, missing opportunities for breakthroughs.

• Your Benefit: Learn how this disciplined yet flexible process of exploration, alignment, and synthesis helps consistently identify breakthrough opportunities.

2. BXT (Lead with X)

• Your Challenge: Business-first or tech-driven models often fail to truly meet your users’ needs, leaving solutions disconnected from reality.

• Your Benefit: Understand how leading with user Experience (X) simplifies decision-making and aligns your solutions with genuine customer value.

3. Assumption Mapping

• Your Challenge: Initiatives fail when based on untested assumptions. Asking “will it work?” instead of “what’s our next experiment?” creates unnecessary risk.

• Your Benefit: Discover how to make hidden bets visible and systematically test your hypotheses, enabling proactive adaptation to uncertainty.

4. Double-Loop Learning

• Your Challenge: Focusing solely on doing things right without questioning underlying assumptions can trap you in rigid, outdated methods.

• Your Benefit: Learn to regularly question underlying assumptions, guiding your organization to quickly adjust strategies and maintain adaptability.

5. Aim for Positive

• Your Challenge: Traditional innovation often yields incremental, "less bad" outcomes, limiting your impact to small gains.

• Your Benefit: Explore how shifting your mindset from "less bad" to "more good" drives regenerative innovation, yielding systemic impacts.

6. Innovate with Everyone

• Your Challenge: When innovation is confined to a few, diverse perspectives and critical insights are often missed.

• Your Benefit: See how fostering cross-functional collaboration taps collective intelligence, builds trust, and creates robust, widely adopted innovations.

Through this focused virtual training, you and your team will move beyond static planning to confidently embrace uncertainty, design collaboratively, learn continuously, and lead with purpose. You'll leave with clear insights and actionable knowledge on how to innovate successfully, no matter what challenges the future holds.

Additional Sources:

• Peter Compo - Emergent Strategy

• Gerd Gigerenzer - Adaptive Thinking

• Systems Thinking - Integrating Design and Systems Thinking

• Behavioral Scientist - Integrating Behavior Science and Design

• Upwork’s 2025 Most In-Demand Skills

Note: The Training Course is a real offering from Regenerous Labs. If you’d like more information, reach out: joann@regenerouslabs.com

Apologies for the extended absence in your inbox. Dean and I have been working on a number of things that we’re excited to share with you.

First up, our latest podcast episode went live yesterday. Episode 4: Divergence in Practice. Available on Spotify, Apple, and here in Substack:

Next, in case you missed it, our LinkedIn Learning course went live on June 3rd! And, for now, it’s available for free. Use it as a 1-hr quick start or refresher on the patterns and practices of the book. We’ll be choosing 5 learners from the first 500 (we’re at 380 as of yesterday) who share on LinkedIn that they completed the course and will send them a signed limited print edition of the first bonus chapter.

Subscribe now

As for articles, Dean and I have both been sharing new content on our LinkedIn profiles and resharing it to the book’s page. If you’re not following us or the book there, please join us. Some recent articles:

• Rediscovering My Guiding Principles - JoAnn

• The Divergence Dilemma - Dean

• The Ford Trap - A Cautionary Tale for the Age of AI - JoAnn

• McKinsey Author Talk: The Insider’s Guide to Innovation at Microsoft - Dean

• Catch up on everything and never miss a post by following the book’s LinkedIn page.

Finally, my partners at Regenerous Labs and I launched a new 90-min live training session available to leaders who want to bring the practices of the book to their teams, access new AI-powered tools to support turning those practices into habits, and lay the groundwork for building a culture that can adapt in real-time—something that is quickly becoming required not just for thriving, but surviving in the age of AI.

Want to know more? Use our Contact form and make sure to select “Speaking/Training.” We’ll get back to you within the week! If you think your team would benefit but you need to convince your boss, share this page too.

Now booking sessions for the second half of July and beyond.

That’s it for this edition. We’d love to hear from you in the comments, on LinkedIn, or direct message. Let us know how your innovation journey is going and any feedback you have for making this community a high-value space.

Onward!

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Our LinkedIn Learning Course:

• 1hr quickstart to the lessons of the book. Free for now!

• Give away: Limited edition signed bonus chapter. We’ll pick 5 learners from the first 500 who complete the course AND share that they completed it on LinkedIn. Current count of learners is 380.

• Course: http://bit.ly/3ZIuHhW

Dean’s article on the “Divergence Dilemma”: http://bit.ly/4k7ht5E

Early Access to Regenerous Lab’s Qurious app - sign up here: https://www.regenerouslabs.com/contact

Not yet an Insider? Join here: https://www.innovationatmicrosoft.com/contact

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At the time, it may have raised eyebrows. Culture? That sounded soft—almost off-topic—for the tech behemoth known as much for its internal competition as its products.

But Satya knew better. He understood something too many leaders still miss: your culture is your innovation infrastructure. It doesn’t matter what your strategy says if your culture can’t support it. If risk is punished, learning is performative, or success is narrowly defined, even your best ideas won’t survive first contact with the org chart.

That’s why at modern-day Microsoft we say Culture is a Verb.

It’s not a vibe. Not a set of aspirational posters. Not a keynote.

It’s what people do throughout the org, day-in and day-out:

• Who gets invited to speak in the meeting.

• Which hypotheses get funded.

• How failure is talked about. IF failure is talked about.

• What gets shared, protected, or celebrated.

Want to know how serious a company is about innovation? Don’t look at the strategy. Look at the behaviors it rewards.

Quick steps build momentum. Big vision keeps the direction.

Satya didn’t just talk about culture. He defined the future state he wanted to create and then identified the steps to get there. He knew it would take time, that people change slowly, so he looked for quick wins that would allow everyone to experience the new way early.

Experience is the foundation of culture change. The Results Pyramid—as my Regenerous Labs partner Taryn Kutches recently shared—illustrates this clearly.

It boils culture change down to a simple flow: people’s experiences shape their beliefs, which drive their actions and ultimately, the results. If you want different outcomes, you can’t just demand new behaviors—you have to give people different experiences. That’s where change really starts. No new habits, no new results.

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The 1st new experience at Microsoft

Just four months after becoming CEO, Satya sponsored Microsoft's first Global Hackathon hosted by The Garage. It was an experience over 11,000 employees joined, showing just how widespread the desire was for a culture shift. In top-down, guns blazing Microsoft, a select few in the org chart created the ideas that everyone else implemented. In the Hackathon, ideas could and did come from everywhere.

It was more than an event. It was a signal. A new leadership behavior, resourced and sanctioned from the very top. A low-friction onramp to experimentation. A safe space to work on the "what ifs" without having to ask permission from above. Blanket permission was already granted.

In a company once known for in-fighting, it was a cultural jolt—and the first step to the new Microsoft. Over time, the annual Global Hackathon has grown to 75,000 participants, and many mini-hacks are held in between. The Garage has become a platform for bottom-up innovation supporting more than 100,000 employees on a regular basis. It’s a proving ground for new ideas that come from all over the company, many of which scale into products, features, or entirely new approaches.

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Regenerative innovation requires a regenerative culture.

My partners at Regenerous Labs and I have seen it too many times to count: a company invests in developing the groundbreaking technology or identifying the new business model to set themselves up for the next decade of success. But then they fail to innovate how their company works, internally and with partners and customers. They try to force-fit the new what into the old how. And they fail.

This quote from the Office case study in The Insider’s Guide to Innovation at Microsoft, reflects the impact of Satya’s culture-first leadership. As we share in the book, the Office team had no need to innovate the way it worked. It had been the dominate productivity suite for decades with no real competition. Yet, Office leadership was one of the earliest adopters of Satya’s culture vision, which in turn set the team up to be the first product suite in the company to roll-out the power of GenAI to its billion users worldwide.

Office leadership recognized that if you want regenerative innovation—self-sustaining, compounding value creation—you need a regenerative culture. That means:

• Designing feedback loops that help your people grow, not shrink.

• Resourcing experimentation, not just celebrating it when it happens to happen.

• Protecting space for reflection, the source of deep learning and mental leaps.

• Rewarding behavior that supports long-term value, not just short-term wins.

How do you lead this transformation at your company? The same way you would lead any new product initiative.

• Paint a vision of the future, of what the culture should enable.

• Establish a set of guiding principles for how it should work, principles everyone adopts.

• Create a roadmap with quick wins, compounding habits, and big bets.

• Track and respond to key performance indicators that measure what matters: safety, engagement, velocity, resilience.

The companies that get this right don’t wait for culture to change. They build for it.

They understand that innovation isn’t just an outcome. It’s an environment where culture is the climate. The choices you make determine whether that climate produces spring showers and May flowers—or 100-year storms and organizational disasters.

A first quick step for you.

If you’re a leader, a builder, or just someone trying to move the needle in your org, here’s a quick step you can do this week. Ask yourself:

What is one visible behavior I can introduce, protect, or celebrate that supports the culture we say we want?

And then act. Make it small. But make it impactful.

Because culture isn’t what you write down. It’s what you do.

Culture is a verb. Treat it like one.

This article is part of our Regenerative Innovation series, helping leaders, teams, and organizations move from extractive to generative models of growth.

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Direct Link: https://joanngarbin.substack.com/survey/3127803

Looking forward to hearing from everyone!

All the best,

JoAnn & Dean

As you know, we’re passionate about helping leaders and teams unlock true innovation—moving beyond incremental tweaks to achieve real, transformative breakthroughs. In The Insider’s Guide to Innovation at Microsoft, we share stories and lessons from the front lines of one of the world’s most consistently innovative companies. But we also know that every organization faces its own unique set of challenges when it comes to driving non-incremental change. So we want to hear directly from you.

Whether you’re in tech, finance, healthcare, or any other sector, the obstacles to bold innovation can be surprisingly similar and surprisingly persistent. Below, you’ll find a list of the most common challenges we’ve seen and heard about in our work. Just hit “Star Survey” below the list to weigh in on what you face most often. If you have a story or example to share, we’d love to hear that too!

Common barriers to breakthrough innovation:

1. Risk-averse culture: Fear of failure discourages bold, disruptive ideas.

2. Bureaucracy & delays: Complex processes slow down decision-making and innovation.

3. Siloed teams: Lack of cross-team collaboration limits creative breakthroughs.

4. Strategy misalignment: Innovation efforts aren’t prioritized or aligned with business goals.

5. Tech adoption challenges: Difficulty keeping up with or integrating new technologies.

6. Resource constraints: Limited funding or talent for high-risk innovation projects.

7. IP & legal barriers: Intellectual property or legal issues block new initiatives.

8. Slow market entry: Long timelines for launching new products or services.

9. Over-controlled processes: Excessive oversight stifles experimentation and agility.

10. Other (please specify): Please share any additional barriers you face.

Start Survey

Your insights will help us shape future content, workshops, and events. Together, we can surface the obstacles to innovation and, more importantly, share ways to overcome them.

Thank you for being part of this community and for your commitment to driving meaningful change.

Looking forward to your insights,

JoAnn & Dean

Excerpt from The Insider’s Guide to Innovation at Microsoft

Picture a meadow: nothing but grass and wildflowers as far as the eye can see. Then some seeds are carried in by the wind or animals, and, with a bit of sun and rain, they grow into a stand of trees. Over time, that meadow evolves into a forest. But inevitably, disruption strikes! A single spark from a lightning bolt during dry season, for example, is enough to lay waste to years of growth, reducing a rich forest back to a seemingly barren field. Over time, seeds, sun, and rain come together again, new seedlings emerge from the charred earth, and a new forest begins to take hold. Left to its own process, field and forest are in a perpetual cycle of regeneration—from seedling to forest to disruption, back to seedling.

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Regenerative Innovation is the practice of creating value in ways that restore, renew, and revitalize the systems it touches—economic, social, environmental, and organizational. It’s innovation that doesn’t just sustain what exists, but actively improves it.

At its core:

• Regenerative means to give more than you take. To replenish. To design systems that are self-sustaining and life-supporting.

• Innovation means creating new value—solving problems, meeting needs, unlocking possibilities.

Put together, Regenerative Innovation is a mindset and method for building products, services, and systems that create compounding value—for people, for communities, for nature, and for business.

It’s not a tradeoff. It’s a multiplier.

Looking inward, regenerative innovation also refers to an innovation culture that sustains itself. It’s not just about the value created out in the world—it’s about how that value is created inside the organization.

A regenerative innovation culture is one that:

• Adapts continuously to change

• Builds momentum through shared learning

• Generates new capacity as it creates new solutions

It’s not just repeatable—it’s replenishing. Innovation begets innovation. Culture becomes the fuel, not the brake.

That kind of fuel—creative, collaborative, resilient—is the real work of the future. And learning how to do that regeneratively is the key to long-term success and thriving. For individuals. For teams. For companies.

This article kicks off a new series on the What and How of Regenerative Innovation. Each week, we’ll explore a different dimension—from mindset and models to methods and measurement.

We’ll start with the foundation: Culture is a Verb—a look at why no innovation effort succeeds if the environment can’t support it, and how to treat culture as the first focus of regenerative innovation.

Follow along as we map the path from extractive to generative growth—one post, one practice at a time.