Assembling the Array
The work has been moving fast lately — fast enough that I keep asking whether the team around it is wide enough for the moment we’re in. Most of us sense that kind of gap before we can name it.
These last few weeks I’ve been sharing some of the experiments we’re running in the Lab. Tools built on our CORTX behavioral intelligence engine.
But around the things we’re building is a bigger build. An ecosystem. At its core is the Lab — a network of longtime collaborative partners. Supporting that core is a system of AI-powered tools we can call on at any hour and expand as the work demands. We’ve been building that out for over a year. More recently, we started building an advisory board — a network of people operating at strategic altitudes most of us only read about.
What we’re doing is a practice I wrote about a few years ago: expanding the range of domains and perspectives you receive signals from, and surrounding yourself with people who’ve done the same. Repeat innovators build arrays. That’s how they detect faint signals earlier and act on them sooner. That’s how they turn change into opportunities.
Our Array
Each layer does something the others can’t.
The AI expands the array’s reach. We can interpret what we’re hearing across far more domains than we could otherwise access. We can pull a perspective from biomimicry, incentive architecture, or historical systems analysis into a working session in minutes.
The advisory board expands the array in a different direction. There are rooms none of us in the Lab have been in. Conversations at the Fortune 100 CEO level, on the global policy stage, at the tables where heads of state make decisions. Those rooms are receiving signals we’re not. The advisory layer is about finding people positioned differently, whose vantage point is higher and wider than ours.
The Lab is where signal becomes something real. The other two layers are perception infrastructure. This one is the synthesis.
Our Bet
Three layers, one question: what does the moment require?
Major technical shifts have sometimes enabled major economic shifts — not by accelerating what already exists, but by making a different set of ideas structurally possible. We in the Lab believe this is one of those times and have an idea of what that shift might look like: an economy less organized around consumption and more organized around builder verbs. Not just producing new things. Maintaining what exists. Tending what’s growing. Clearing what no longer serves.
If something like that shift is underway, the people building toward it now — rather than waiting for confirmation — will have years of compounded perception and preparation that others won’t. We’ll have had a hand in creating it.
The question isn’t whether we’re certain. It’s whether the bet is worth making.
Seizing the Opportunity
Faint signals, received alone, are easy to misread. Combined across a diverse array, they become clearer.
What is the breadth and depth of your current view, and is it enough for the moment you think you’re in?
Connections to The Insider’s Guide to Innovation at Microsoft
Network of Known Collaborators: Build the relationships before you need them. The lab and the advisory board are pre-assembled networks, activated when the work demands.
Customer Hypothesis Instead of Idea: DevDiv’s reframe applies here: the bet on what this moment is isn’t a conclusion to defend. It’s a hypothesis to test.
The Regenerative Datacenter of the Future case study: A core team of six flexed to dozens on any given day through an intentionally built ecosystem of experts — the same architectural move, applied to a different problem.
Innovating Out Loud is a weekly series developing ideas in the open. As with all pieces in this series, AI was used as a research and writing partner throughout. All conclusions, opinions, and editorial decisions are mine. Say it ugly, Build it better. Onward!
