On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Johann Roos, author of the new book, Human Magic. Johan and I talk about the risks and opportunities that AI brings to the world of creativity, critical thinking, collaboration, and much more. Let's get started.

Podcast Transcript with Brian Ardinger and Johan Roos

Johan Roos on Human-AI Leadership and Human Magic

[00:00:00] Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, and as always, we have another amazing guest. Today, we have Johan Roos. He is the co-creator of the Lego Serious Play method, chief academic officer at Hult International Business School, and author of the new book, Human Magic: Leading With Wisdom in an Age of Algorithm. Welcome, Johan.

[00:00:41] Johan Roos: Thank you, Brian. 

[00:00:43] Brian Ardinger: You've got an amazing career, worked with some amazing companies. Maybe to start the conversation, can you give a brief overview about your background and what led you to writing this book?

[00:00:54] Johan Roos: So, I spent, about three decades in the, you can say, in the business of business schools and business education and business research and business consulting and business advising, all of that stuff that comes with it. So, I have an academic background with everything that goes with it, all of the publication, all that stuff.

But also, became more and more interested the very notion of not just talking or studying leadership, but actually doing leadership. So, I've spent also quite a few years, decades now, as a leader or part of a leadership team of various organizations in sort of the field of, you can say, higher education, including think tank as well.

So, I've been in smaller, larger, private, public, so I'm starting to get a feel for it. But as, of this stage, I'm phasing out of all operational roles getting more into the advisory work.

How LEGO Serious Play Changed Strategy Conversations

[00:01:43] Brian Ardinger: Like to hear a little bit about some of your background. When you started this Lego Serious Play, I think you're fairly well known for that particular methodology and how it changed the way businesses- could think about creativity in that.

So, let's start there and tell me a little bit about how that came to be and what were some of the learnings and from that particular methodology? 

[00:02:01] Johan Roos: It's very interesting. This is right now almost three decades ago that we started to experiment with this. My good friend Bart Victor who is now an emeritus at Vanderbilt. But it was at a time when, a lot of companies used the same kind of frameworks, the same kind of models, the same kind of tools, same kind of consultant, or even the same consultants, the same professors, the same everything, to develop strategy. So I was a professor of strategy, and my buddy Bart was a professor of leadership at IMD in Switzerland.

He's doing a lot of executive education. And we came to the realization after a while that it's pretty amazing. They're using the same kind of stuff all the time, but they expect a different outcome. And as we all know, that's almost the definition of insanity and all that. But this idea of couldn't there be anything else to do?

Why Hands-On Creativity Unlocks Better Thinking

To make a long story short, we started to experiment with basically what comes out of what's called creative art therapy, I learned later on. And it's the whole idea of using stuff, using color, size, shapes, forms rigidity, whatever, texture as a language, as a language. I've described this in an article. I'm actually working on a book on it right now.

But this idea of using stuff as a language actually changes a lot. When we're kids in kindergarten we tend to be, or we tell our children or grandchildren or when we were children, to play with stuff. Use your hands, break stuff, mud, dirt, whatever.

Do things because that's for good for you, we think, yeah? And then we put them in school and tell them to shut up and listen to a teacher and sit on their hands. So, it's this brutality of going from this kindergarten idea to then being very much like focused on the cognitive, and today just look at a screen, that is a brutal thing if you think of it.

Bringing Play Back Into Serious Business Work

So, the whole idea of the serious play approach, which we then developed with and for Lego was to let's go back to this early idea of using your hands even as adults, serious adults. And I was playing around with serious leadership teams at that time, vand I can tell you not everybody thought I was in- sane, if I put it this way.

But it was pretty cool because we could see the effect was enormous. Like rather than having a more cognitive level conversation, suddenly people start to smile, they started to see new things, they shape with their hands again, they could take a 3D look at it, and they laughed and they pointed, and you can have a even a difficult conversations easier through a thing rather than look the other one in the eyes, et cetera.

So there was a whole range of things that happened during a couple of years of development times which I think has influenced me and I think now a lot of people in the world to start to look at things, not just use your cognitive, pure cognitive stuff, but also your emotional, your social capability and let things emerge in new ways through that approach.

So that is, you can say, the essence of that method. It's actually to open up, to see things in a new way, to together create entirely new perspectives that you don't get with a pen or paper and certainly not get through a Zoom lens.

The Human Side of AI and Digital Transformation

[00:05:08] Brian Ardinger: And it seems like your new book, The Human and Human Magic, it's the next chapter.

It, it seems like we are moving away from the ability to build and touch and play and the creativity side of things when we start relying on AI and the screens, as you said, as the core tools that we use. So, walk me through about how you decided to write a book about the human side of AI and how people can actually start tapping into that.

[00:05:33] Johan Roos: It's interesting because I, even if I'm academic, I've more and more moved into leadership and also leadership development. That interests me more in the sense. So, you can say that LEGO SERIOUS PLAY is the most interesting thing I've done on this stuff. But about 10 years ago, I worked with about a dozen of leaders in large branded European companies, and they were all concerned about the effect of what, at that time, you remember, we talked about the digital transformation.

All these business analytics capabilities, big data, everything that come in, and look at patterns, and have evidence-based decision makers on anything. And interestingly enough, during a year of conversations, they came up with this, and one of them stopped and said, "Hey, with all of this information, with all of this data, with all of these patterns, it's served on a plate for us through digital transformation. What should I as a leader do?" And that sort of question struck with me because, if you have sensors and everything and you get everything what should you do?

How Generative AI Changed the Leadership Question

Push the button in a sense. And you can say with AI, of course, it's been accentuated. The question is very real, and the question is so much more profound now. So, when ChatGPT came in November, early November 2022, it took me a few days and I was onto it. Two months later, I started initiated a global task force through this most global business school in the world, Hult International Business School, with campuses in Dubai, London, San Francisco, and Boston, all that.

I said, "Hey, we got to take this on and move very fast because this is big. It's going to be big." So with a little bit of resistance I got at least this going. Great people working on it, pushing it through, and we got best practices and so we basically did an implementation of generative AI at the time when countries banned this.

China banned it, Italy banned it, and a lot of people were wondering what's happening and hey, here's a new fad. But we pushed this through, and then I started to see like this is going to change it. This is going to change a lot. So, I started to talk to leaders as well, and I've been heavily involved in what's called Global Peter Drucker Forum, which has a lot of senior leaders involved.

From AI Efficiency to Human Capability

And I started to talk to them about this, and they say, "Hey, great. This is going to be helping us with efficiency. We can get rid of a lot of people and..." That was really the comment for a year or so. And then I started to get my hands dirty by developing some voice assistance to have actually interview people to do things, get data, but also to show what these tools can do.

And the most senior guy on, among the 60 I interviewed talked to 27 minutes to a voice agent in their iPhone at home, and this is like super senior. So, they told me afterwards, "It's amazing what it can do." So, I said, "Yeah, that's the point. That's the point." And then I started to interview others and say, "Hey, what's the impact of this?"

And I started to look at our school and other schools, and I'm very heavily involved in the business of business school. And the implication was clearly, this is big. So, I started to put together that together with some research I was doing in 2024 and 2025 on Lego Serious Play facilitators- which I think is the most challenging analog type of facilitation job you can do, but half asking them to use an AI tool while... before, during, and after. So, I have lots of data of this, and I did serious science on this. Putting this together and saw, hey- There is a risk we will lose our minds, as good as these tools are, and they are amazing, and I'm on top of it.

I have a dozen agents working for me and all that. Super cool. But I see how we can lose our basic human capabilities if we're not careful. So, the book is about that. That was the trigger for the book. So, I spent most of last year working really hard to frame this, and the way I framed it, you saw in the book on, on certain capabilities.

AI Amplification Versus Cognitive Offloading

[00:09:22] Brian Ardinger: Yeah. Yeah, you talk about, every professional now faces a daily choice of can they use AI to kind of amplify their human capabilities, or is it quietly eroding their cognitive offloading and ability to think creatively or use judgment in different ways? What are you actually seeing? And what was that-- what are some examples of of that disconnect? 

[00:09:43] Johan Roos: There, there's zillions of examples of that disconnect. You can also ask any young person how they use the AI tools these days, and you'll see how it's being used. And unfortunately, you can see bad examples in very early ages now.

So, I'm talking to a lot of people about this, and I see it all the time. But I'll move back into the professional realm, and I was just spending a couple of days with about 35 chief learning officers in major corporations. I was in Amsterdam for a few days, just came back yesterday, and they are facing this as well.

So, in a sense, there's plenty of examples of organizations that are not doing a lot, but there's a plenty of examples of organizations who are now at the stage, not just of using AI tools, but of implementing AI agents at scale. And I'm talking at scale. I talked to a wonderful person who is a CLO in a really cool company, and they set out, say, "In six months, we'll develop tens of thousands of AI agents and innovate in, in every function across everything and see what happens."

What AI Agents Mean for Managers and Leaders

But again, the conversation then becomes, so what happens with the managers? What happens with the leaders? How are you going to lead an organization when a lot of the tasks you do are being automated to the machine? And this is across the board. You can find examples in every function from law and finance to strategy and marketing and HR all of...

Everything is being now, you can say, a lot of it is being automated. So, the question people are having what are we going to do with the, you put it this way, with the people? Because these-- the unit of analysis, I think, should not be people. It should be tasks because then you don't think about making people redundant immediately, but rather to say what tasks will be affected and what will be changed across every business function.

And my interest in particular is to look above and say, "Hey, what about the boss? What are they doing? Do they know what they're talking about?" And the same thing in higher education. The students are way beyond most professors, so do the professors know what they're talking about? So this is where I spend some time.

But the book is really to say, "Hey, this is not just very abstract. It's about your curiosity. It impacts your creativity, your critical thinking, the way you communicate, so you don't sound like an LLM, and how we collaborate and now with agents, and how we remain reasonably in the loop and perhaps in the loop of the agents that supervise the other agents."

So this is how I've taken it on. But ultimately, you know if you looked at the book, it's not just about capability, it's about something higher as well.

Protecting Creativity, Judgment, and Communication

[00:12:20] Brian Ardinger: It's really about mitigating the risks that AI brings to the table. It's obviously very powerful, but if you rely solely on it it has the ability to impair your, like you said, everything from creativity to critical thinking to communication to collaboration.

And I'm not sure a lot of folks are really understanding that yet maybe 'cause there's early into the learning phase. It's one of those things when you start playing with this it is magic, and it starts you get that dopamine hit every time you put, a prompt in and get the answer that you want. But at least for me personally I realize, like, when I'm working with an AI and especially in a domain that I really know really well, it feels like it's not quite as magic versus when I'm- ... working in a domain that I don't know anything about then it seems super magic.

And trying to understand the nuances in that and given that context, what can people do who are beginning to use AI or even, in the thick of it, start recognizing when those risks are creeping in and what they can do to mitigate the potential temptation to go and use the AI as the, as a solution?

Practical Wisdom as a Human Advantage in the AI Age

[00:13:24] Johan Roos: These are all very important questions, Brian, and I wish more people would reflect over it. And the book intends to just trigger those questions. After it, every chapter have a little bit of a self-assessment, non-judgmental, but just to trigger your own thinking along the lines you're doing also, Brian.

Because it's obvious to, you can say, those who are experts in a field, and I think we both are, we can say we're some kind of experts. We don't look that young anymore. But this whole idea that we can use this tool to our extraordinary benefit because we know when it's reasonably right and when it starts to go off track, everybody knows that, and there are ways to do that, and some people tell them to be Caesar and speak Latin and all that but take on different personas.

There are tips and tricks to do this. But ultimately, I think what we need to ask ourselves is this higher level thing, which I also talk about the book. On top of these five Cs, we have practical wisdom, which is across, across culture, you have the same thing. You have Ba in Japan Xi in China, you have Ved- Vivek in, in this-- You have hikmah in Islamic scholarship and all.

This whole idea of wisdom as something you gain over time, the capacity, the habit to make good decisions that are not just good for you, but for the world you're part of or the community you're part of. And I think this is where you can see the worrying, a little bit more of a societal worry because to me, that's what I have in this model I call the wisdom compass, but it's really these four questions, what matters? What matters? And there you need some kind of moral sensitivity to this. What matters in this situation here now? What is right? And that's a moral judgment, right? What is right? It's a value integration on the conflict sometimes. What resonates in the context and the people you work with right now?

The Four Questions Leaders Should Ask About AI

And that's both thinking and emotion and all of that stuff. And then eventually what works? What do you think works here? And that's what people... "Oh, it's my hunch. I know what will work." But these four questions are super important and to me, the essence of wisdom in a sense, when you can answer those questions.

The worry I have is that we automate the foundations of this away, right? And I've said in the book, I say, "Hey, this practical wisdom stuff is an emergent property of these four- curiosity, creativity, et cetera. So we have to cultivate them, otherwise we may risk, as Brian, as you allude to, it's called cognitive offloading.

Now people call cognizing surrender, and there's even people going brain rot. I wouldn't go that far, but because I think it's curable. Rot is not curable. But I think it's an awareness of how do we do this. So, in higher education, I'm going off to Spain in two days to be at the big higher education conference.

I'm going to talk about the necessity of preserving apprenticeship- ... not just in, in organization, but in university. We have to teach for apprenticeship. We have to create apprenticeship, because without apprenticeship, Brian, it's the times when you and I got feedback from our peers and slapped on the hand and said it was worst paper they've ever seen, and then we improve and we do this. I'm afraid that when we automate some of the grunt work, we lose the possibility or the capacity to offer young people apprenticeship.

The Junior Talent Crisis Created by AI Automation

[00:16:49] Brian Ardinger: Yeah, you talk about that in the book, this junior talent crisis where you warn that companies, if they cut junior staff and choose AI as the efficiency path, you risk the long-term wisdom of the company. What would you tell a CEO today who's looking at making those cuts and looking at, headcount decisions based on automation? Where's that balance and what can CEOs think about? 

[00:17:11] Johan Roos: Yeah, and of course the CEO that's under pressure from the board and the shareholders to increase efficiency and double the profit in six months is a very difficult speaking partner, right?

I also talked with a bunch of really wise chief learning officers who also face that, but most of them realize that in a sense it is stepping outside the immediate role and think about what's the bigger picture here, right? What is the capacity for creating, you can say- practically wise leaders as we progress.

We say, "Yeah we do that in education." Maybe not, but we do that at work certainly. So, I would say to this CEO, hopefully that they see they're not super stressed about cutting people all the time, but rather to say, "Change your unit of analysis from people to tasks- ... and start thinking instead of what tasks should be automated away and will be."

Upskilling People for Agentic AI Work

Ultimately, they will be. Everything that can be automated will be automated. But think about instead how do you upskill and retrain people to do other tasks now. So, I just talked to somebody who's amazing guy who said they are retraining everybody into three levels of AI agentic work.

This is way beyond generative AI. Now it's about how do we use agents and multiple agents and agents of agents and all that, swarms of agents, and there's three levels to it. Yeah, everybody have to go through and be able to create an agent that reads their email and draft a response, not send a response, but draft a response.

Then next level is doing a little bit more advanced, and then there's a third level that's more advanced. So, if you do that, I think, and this is what I hear and see, people will start to innovate in all functions. Just think of how much boring administrative work that can be automated away this way across the functions.

I mentioned legal and finance. I bet you the most innovations will be about automating away boring stuff there. And then comes procurement, and then comes any marketing, all of the stuff we do. And the question I ask CEOs and say, "Hey, which part of you can we automate away?" Some think that's a little bit of an impertinent question, but I think it's a good one as well.

Building a Better Human-AI Partnership

[00:19:18] Brian Ardinger: Let's end on an optimistic note. You're an optimist. It seems like, there's a lot of again, there's a lot of change, and a lot of people can in, instantly go to the doom side of this conversation.

But when you think about this optimistically and the future, what's the best possible human-AI partnership? What does it look like in 10 years? And what can leaders do to begin to prepare for that optimistic side of using AI as, as a tool rather than a force for bad? 

[00:19:42] Johan Roos: I am an optimist, Brian.

I'm glad you say it, and it's also through the book. I'm an optimist with just urging a bit of caution because the choice I about in the book is you either use it to amplify yourself or erode yourself. And if you don't work hard, you will default to erosion because it's so subtle and nice.

You will not notice it. Erosion is invisible. What is the optimistic way is that we are more aware of the risk. Like any technology comes with risk. We know, learned that through our ages and again, I don't believe in Luddites trying to stop things. So of course, I often, most often say to leaders, "Just use it yourself. Make yourself comfortable and aware of how you do this because then you will see what will happen."

Using AI to Amplify Human Potential

It will come naturally to you to actually not sit and watch, but actually be part of it and lead the way to try to innovate and do stuff and set some kind of meaningful direction that will enthuse and don't just threat.

And again, when you change the unit of analysis from jobs to task, people will not feel threatened to the same extent. And I think that's super important for leadership to not scare people off but actually enthuse them to work ahead. I see a pretty bright future. Have some concerns about the have and the have-nots and the people who will do and the people who will not.

But handled correctly here I think this can create an enormous amount of value in society and actually makes people life better. There is a dark side to it, and I also take that up in the chapter. I don't want to talk about that now, but what's happening on the frontline in Ukraine and is a test or a sample of the terrible things that can happen with this. But in general, I'm super optimistic. I think leaders have a strong responsibility to positively lead the way here as well.

Where to Learn More About Human Magic

[00:21:34] Brian Ardinger: I encourage people to pick up Human Magic. It gives a really good overview of the things you should be aware of as you start using these particular tools, and again, so you don't go down the erosion path. So I encourage people to pick that up. If people wanna find out more about yourself or more about the book, what's the best way to do that?

[00:21:50] Johan Roos: I put together a website for the book and some of my work as well, and it's humanmagic.one. One, not anything else, because then you probably come to the world's association for magicians. That's not as fruitful, perhaps. I don't know. Humanmagic.one. 

[00:22:08] Brian Ardinger: Humanmagic.one. Excellent. I encourage people to take a look at that. Johan, thanks for coming on Inside Outside Innovation. Look forward to having further conversations in the years ahead, and I appreciate your time.

[00:22:17] Johan Roos: Thank you, Brian. Great to be with you.


Today's episode was produced and engineered by Susan Stibal. If you want to learn more about our teams, our content, our services, check out insideoutside.io. And until next time, go out and innovate.