Innovating Out Loud

About Innovating Out Loud

A live monthly webcast and weekly sense-making series where leaders say it ugly and build it better. Real conversations on regenerative innovation. Hosted by JoAnn Garbin and Taryn Kutches of Regenerous Labs. innovatingoutloud.substack.com (https://innovatingoutloud.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast)

Publisher

JoAnn Garbin and Taryn Kutches

Category

business · technology

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

14 Dec 2025

Latest episode

6 Oct 2026

Latest episodes

36 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   6 Oct 2026

   Innovating Out Loud with Joyn Collective

   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 (https://www.linkedin.com/in/taryn-kutches-bb343959/) and Kemi (https://www.linkedin.com/in/kemi-johel/) on LinkedIn, or reach them directly at taryn@ and kemi@joyncollective.com. They’re always up for a conversation about what you’re trying to figure out. Next up on Innovating Out Loud: Chris Hare, leadership storytelling expert and creator of Atomic Storytelling™. Chris helps C-suite leaders, combat veterans and professional athletes use narrative to clarify their vision and align the people who matter most. Thursday, October 15, 9:00 AM PT / 12:00 PM ET, live on Zoom. Register for the series at www.regenerouslabs.com/innovating-out-loud. (http://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 (https://innovatingoutloud.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1)

2. 

   28 Sept 2026

   Project Jupiter Is Living Up to Its Name. That's the Problem.

   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 (https://innovatingoutloud.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1)

3. 

   20 Sept 2026

   What Are You Building? And What Is It Built On?

   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 (https://www.linkedin.com/in/danielaronson/)’s favorite quote) is zero. --- 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 (https://www.linkedin.com/posts/thedigitaleconomist_meet-the-speakers-the-digital-economist-activity-7507453532917321728-6ZU0?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop&rcm=ACoAAAaWGI0B9iaIrBnRbcw77YgmIILWsii-1WU) 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. --- 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 (https://www.linkedin.com/company/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 (https://innovatingoutloud.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1)

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