Advice for CEOs on automation trade-offs

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 Ques...