Microsoft Insiders Podcast

Putting the Patterns to Work

*clip from this month’s live IOL session with our guest, Leo Chan, LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® 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. [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 [http://www.regenerouslabs.com/r-dotf] 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. 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 [http://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 [http://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 [https://www.innovationatmicrosoft.com/] 🎓 LinkedIn Learning course [https://www.linkedin.com/learning-login/share?account&forceAccount=false&redirect=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.linkedin.com%2Flearning%2Fthe-insider-s-guide-to-innovation-at-microsoft%2Figniting-change-through-emotional-leadership%3Ftrk%3Dshare_video_url%26shareId%3DHGR25747QZy7W6h1kQUP%252Bg%253D%253D] 📬 Innovating Out Loud weekly series [https://innovatingoutloud.substack.com/] — where all of this lives between monthly updates here, including our live webcast [http://www.regenerouslabs.com/innovatingoutloud] every 4th Thursday of the Month 🎤 Speaking and workshops [https://www.bigspeak.com/speakers/joann-garbin-2/] — 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! This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit joanngarbin.substack.com [https://joanngarbin.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]

One Vision. Three Practices. Zero Freezing.

One Vision. Three Practices. Zero Freezing. You know you need a big vision. You’ve heard it a thousand times. 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. Keep listening to learn more Resources 🎥 Michael Gervais webcast [https://findingmastery.com/course/] — Vision that’s big enough to scare you 🧭 Rita McGrath — Early warning signals [https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/2025-you-able-turn-navigating-uncertainty-asset-rita-mcgrath-mkqge] & strategic inflection points 🎥 Innovating Out Loud [https://youtu.be/j4womAMk8Wk?si=7TYoTZ0GsRFa0Awe]with Dean Carignan — Navigating AI with practice, not panic 📘 The Insider’s Guide to Innovation at Microsoft [https://a.co/d/gsGDoIW] — 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? This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit joanngarbin.substack.com [https://joanngarbin.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]

Innovating Out Loud - November 2025 Replay

Taryn Kutches and JoAnn Garbin in conversation with Dan Greenwald (CEO, White Rhino) highlighted: — The psychological decision-making journey we all move through as we make decisions. — Why emotion is the necessary, and often missing, ingredient for successful innovation.— A real-life innovation and behavior change case study from JoAnn and Dan's work at Microsoft. Follow here, on YouTube, or LinkedIn to never miss an episode. Next live webcast is on Friday, December 12th at 9 AM PT/12 PM ET. We'll be talking with Microsoft leader and JoAnn's co-author, Dean Carignan, about the massive AI transformation happening inside Microsoft. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit joanngarbin.substack.com [https://joanngarbin.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]

Let's Talk About What's Actually Happening

If you only followed the headlines, you’d think regenerative innovation is stalling. But here’s what’s actually happening: the gap between idea and impact is closing. Not because the work got easier. Because the infrastructure to support execution is finally being built. 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? 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: * Most of the value created throughout history has come from business model innovation. * Regenerative business is a business model innovation. * 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 [http://www.innovationatmicrosoft.com] http://www.innovationatmicrosoft.comknow is step one in finding innovative answers. 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 [http://www.regenerouslabs.com/innovatingoutloud] 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 [https://innovatingoutloud.substack.com/], gives you the support to succeed at it. See you November 19th. Onward,JoAnn Register for Innovating Out Loud - Episode 1 Here [http://www.regenerouslabs.com/innovatingoutloud] Note: Article read by AI-JoAnn created with ElevenLabs This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit joanngarbin.substack.com [https://joanngarbin.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]

Behind the scenes: Innovating with AI

Note: The Training Course is a real offering from Regenerous Labs [http://RegenerousLabs.com]. If you’d like more information, reach out: joann@regenerouslabs.com The article below is an example of the powerful collaboration possible between humans and AI. In a matter of hours, I crafted it using NotebookLM, synthesizing insights from my Labs’ training documents, "The Insider's Guide to Innovation at Microsoft [http://InnovationAtMicrosoft.com]," and additional sources on emergent strategy, adaptive thinking, design and systems thinking, and behavior science (see source notes below). It wasn't a one-click process but a true iterative co-creation: I provided initial content and engaged in multiple rounds of questions to refine it further. NotebookLM generated the foundational draft, which I edited and exported. Then, my custom GPT (via OpenAI) refined it to align with my personal brand and voice, after which I finalized the editing and polishing. One particularly surprising feature of NotebookLM is its "Audio Deep Dive," which I used to create the 5-minute audio overview shared above. What I like about it is that it’s not just a simple reading of the article we wrote. It compliments the article and adds new insights. I was genuinely surprised. Beyond article summaries, there's a deeper innovation use case: I leveraged this audio feature to summarize several weeks of detailed research and ideas visually organized on a Miro board for another project. The resulting audio summary gave my teammates an accessible entry point—one even listened during his commute. All responded with excitement about the concept! This burst of enthusiasm was essential, 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! Additional Sources: Peter Compo - Emergent Strategy [https://agile-strategies.com/peter-compo-the-emergent-approach-to-strategy/] Gerd Gigerenzer - Adaptive Thinking [https://www.bookey.app/book/adaptive-thinking] Systems Thinking - Integrating Design and Systems Thinking [https://thesystemsthinker.com/integrating-systems-thinking-and-design-thinking/] Behavioral Scientist - Integrating Behavior Science and Design [https://behavioralscientist.org/a-new-model-for-integrating-behavioral-science-and-design/] Upwork’s 2025 Most In-Demand Skills [https://investors.upwork.com/news-releases/news-release-details/upwork-unveils-2025s-most-demand-skills] This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit joanngarbin.substack.com [https://joanngarbin.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]