AI can write, analyze, summarize, code, and create—and its capabilities are advancing at a remarkable pace. So as machines become more intelligent, what will keep humans indispensable?

Johan Roos believes the answer lies in what he calls “human magic”: the distinctly human capabilities that technology can support, but never replace. Johan is an internationally recognized strategy scholar, former business school dean, co-creator of LEGO Serious Play, and author of Human Magic.

In this episode of Career Sessions, Johan and J.R. explore why our advantage in an AI-powered world comes not from trying to compete with machines, but from becoming more human as AI gets smarter.

They discuss the five capabilities at the heart of human magic—curiosity, creativity, critical thinking, communication, and collaboration—and why practical wisdom and sound judgment are becoming increasingly valuable. They also examine the danger of “cognitive offloading”: relying so heavily on AI that the very skills that differentiate us begin to atrophy.

Johan shares what leaders should be doing differently in the AI era, including asking better questions, creating the conditions for their teams to think deeply, and focusing the AI conversation on transforming tasks rather than eliminating jobs.

The conversation also revisits the origins of LEGO Serious Play and what Johan learned about creativity, collaboration, and better decision-making by getting people out of conventional meetings and thinking with their hands. Those lessons may be even more relevant as organizations figure out how humans and AI should work together.

The takeaway: use AI intensely to prepare—but when the room is watching, show up as a human.

Check out the full series of “Career Sessions, Career Lessons” podcasts here or visit pathwise.io/podcast/. A full written transcript of this episode is also available at https://pathwise.io/podcast/johan-roos/.

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How To Stay Human In The Age Of AI, With Johan Roos

Artificial intelligence is changing the way we work at a remarkable pace. Every day, it seems like there’s a new tool that can write, analyze, summarize, code and even create. It sparked an important conversation about productivity, but perhaps an even more important one about people. As AI becomes more capable, what’s going to keep humans being indispensable? Will it be our knowledge, our experience, or could it be something even deeper like our judgment and creativity? Our ability to navigate ambiguity, or our capacity to lead other people through uncertainty, or something else perhaps.

My guest Johan Roos, has spent decades exploring these questions even before AI became mainstream. Johan is an internationally recognized strategy scholar, former dean of several leading business schools, and one of the pioneers behind LEGO Serious Play, a groundbreaking approach that’s transformed the way that organizations work, think, collaborate, and problem solve. His latest work, a book called Human Magic, explores how leaders can preserve the uniquely human qualities that technology can support but never replace.

Defining Human Magic And Core Human Capabilities

In our conversation, we’re going to discuss what wisdom looks like in an age of algorithms, why better leadership starts with better thinking, and how each of us can continue to create value in a world where intelligence is increasingly abundant, but sound judgment still remains remarkably rare. I’m J.R. Lowry, this is Career Sessions. Here’s my conversation with Johan.

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Johan, thanks for joining me today. It’s good to meet you.

Good to meet you, too.

Let’s get going. You have a new book out called Human Magic. You’ve spent decades studying strategy and leadership in organizations. Talk about what you mean by human magic and why it matters in particular now.

I define human magic as a set of distinctly human capabilities that machines can support but never replace. In the book, I group this into five, such as curiosity, creativity, critical thinking, communication, and collaboration. The magic is not mystical. It’s what happens when a person, you and I, frame the question that algorithms hadn’t posed or we hold the room with real conviction. That’s what I mean with human magic.

This is particularly important now in an era where AI seems to be able to do more and more things every day. For the average person who’s thinking about how to survive in this world of AI from a professional perspective. What advice would you have for them about how to think about these uniquely human capabilities and to sharpen their thinking and use them to their advantage?

You’re right that the time is now to think about these things. The AI tools are amazing. I’m a user. I’m sure you are too and all our audience. We should do that. I’m a techno-optimist and techno-positive person. There is a certain danger to this as well. There is a seductive danger. Seduction is great. When things are nice and it flows and things are effortless, we are fantastically enchanted by this. There is a risk of a slippery slope that we, in a sense, stop doing certain things and we delegate.

I wouldn’t say our soul, but we delegate some of these capabilities or a part of our human magic to machines. We should be careful about that. Overall, it’s about being careful to think about what you’re doing. There’s lots of research now showing some dangerous patterns. Be careful and don’t get too enchanted so you go down what I call in the book the slippery slope of erosion rather than using these tools to amplify yourself and your human magic, you can say.

I’ve heard the expression cognitive rot to refer to at least one part of what you’re talking about, which is that people become so reliant on these tools that they start to dull the very skills that they need, like critical thinking, as an example. You’ve got the fact that the tools sometimes aren’t as great as we are at doing things. Hence, the idea of work slop and people handing over something that an AI tool has done and saying, “This is finished work,” without trying to add their human intelligence on top of it is another issue. We’re seeing both of those things, at least from my perspective.

You’re absolutely right. There’s plenty of words for this. The lighter touch, which is started with, I believe in ’24 or ’25. People started the word cognitive offloading. That doesn’t sound so dangerous, then there was like a cognitive surrender, cognitive replacement then I’ve heard brain rot. That’s a little bit too much because rot means you can’t go back. There’s something to this. Think of it as a muscle. I often tell people, “If you don’t use your muscles, what happens? They atrophy. If you don’t use your language skills, for instance, they atrophy.”

If you don’t use your jelly bean, it will atrophy. It is what I mean by the danger. These tools are so good now that they become almost effortless, then it’s very easy. None of our audience, neither you and me are lazy, but some people are lazy. It becomes like, “It’s so nice. Why don’t I just let the machine do this?” I start the morning and I immediately get my coffee and the screen up and running. I stayed there all day.

If you deduct AI from what you need to do? What’s left? It’s more just give it a thought. That’s why I have, after each of these chapters, a very friendly, nice little self-assessment. Not judgmental. It’s like, where are you on your creative thinking? Where are you on creativity? Where are your curiosity on communication? I’m not pragmatic. It’s like flagging a little bit of a warning. That’s all I want to do.

Part of the irony is that the people who are likely to pick up your book are a subset of the people who need your book. They’re probably the ones who are most already focused on continuing to keep their critical thinking, communication and collaboration skills sharp. This is something we all need to be working on. You can either let the tool take over for you, or you can figure out a way to harness these AI tools to your advantage. That’s going to be a key determinant as to whose careers are better than others.

Johan Roos: Don’t get too enchanted so you go down the slippery slope of erosion, rather than using these tools to amplify yourself and your human magic.

First of all, a lot of people will pick up the book. I’m super delighted that it came up on McKinsey’s list of AI books. I trust that they have some good judgment but I also trust that people then say, “This is an interesting book. Why don’t you pick it up?” It’s for everybody. I addressed the book to all AI-anxious and AI-excited professionals of the world, of which there’s many on various levels. For most things, there’s a short-term thing and there’s a longer-term thing.

Focusing On What AI Tools Cannot Replace

We tend to exaggerate all kinds of short-term impact of new technologies, and then we forget about the potential long-term radical consequences that we may not be seeing. You can say there’s going to be the have and the have-nots, the do and the do-nots, and the can and the cannots. Now, a lot of the tech brokers people respond to the question, what should young people do now? They say, “You should learn all of these amazing tools and you should be capable.” They’re right but it’s half true.

If you only try to run after what the tools can do, you will always be a little bit behind. I always tell people maybe you should focus more on what the tools cannot do. That is, they cannot be you. This is the grand message or almost the irony of the time. That the more capable the algorithms become, the more value humanism becomes. You cannot be replaced. Part of you can be replaced but your experience, your curiosity, creativity, and way to communicate cannot be replaced. It can be mimicked but your living experience cannot be replicated. Ensure that you continue to gain this living experience that is you.

That is an important point because as the tools are able to create a higher baseline answer for about anything, then what you add on top of it is the stories and the experience that you’ve got. Which the tools by definition aren’t going to know. For a lot of people, this is going to require becoming better storytellers and thinking more about what they can add on top of the tools. That’s going to be a challenge for some people that some will grab onto. It’s a challenge that others will probably feel intimidated by.

You could say storytellers, but also story creators and all of these fundamental things. Again, I have a whole chapter on communication. I start that chapter and each of the chapters you’ve seen with an anecdote about ancient times. We met some famous historical people. In communication, we meet Cicero, the famous consul in ancient Rome who was known because his slave Tiro took notes, stenography from what he did. We know that he could sway an audience in an amazing way.

He’s one of the first that has been documented on how you sway the audience. He didn’t do it by standing, holding his hand and talking, or telling people to sit down, shut up and listen to him. Rather he used what the Romans called the eloquence of the body. What we would refer to as body language and almost theatrical skills. I use some theatrics in this.

I urge people to say, “No machine can hold the room. You can hold the room.” That’s an extraordinarily important capability as a human being. We are social and we work. We work with other people, so we have to communicate. We have to explain. We have to describe. We also have to persuade. In doing that, we should learn even more how to use the eloquence of the body. Those are incredibly important skills to not forget.

Johan Roos: Shift the whole idea that you should know everything. Instead, focus on being able to ask really good, penetrating questions.

I would agree with you. At the leadership level, organizational level, what advice would you have for companies and other organizations about how to lead in this era of AI in the right way or how they are using AI in the right way?

I’ll speak as a scholar of strategy and leadership, but also as a leader because I’ve led several organizations. I’ve been part of the leadership team of several organizations. As a leader, often you think you should have the answer to all kinds of questions, and pretty quick because then you’re smart. You have a quick answer to things. These days, you can say that data is almost free. You can have anything around you all the time.

It shifts the whole idea that you should know everything. Instead, I often tell people, and I’m not the only one, a lot of people have been saying this. That you should be able to have some good questions. I’ve been reporting to five board of directors in my career. The best board members are the one that pesters you with good penetrating questions. Not to embarrass you or anything. It’s like a good academic reviewer. Not the one with a bad attitude.

It’s like somebody who’s asking these questions to help you. Now, that is a tremendously important leadership skill. Number two is creating the context in which your people, your team, your amazing teams can try to answer this. They’re probably closer to the action. Closer to the front line where things are happening. They probably know the best. They know the answers. If you can work on those two things, asking good, smart questions and creating the context of it then the algorithm will help to find the answers, challenge some of these questions, come with suggestions, and simulate whatever.

Leading With Judgment And Asking Penetrating Questions

The tools are amazing, but you should hold on to some of these things because no machine will have the lived experience you would have. With all the scars that we have, being through all of this, and anyone who’s done change processes and all that. All of the scars we have is your experience from which you draw, you intuit, and you bring things out. Invaluable. That is how you climb the value creation ladder in this world.

As a leader, you should be extraordinarily careful to delegate some of your judgment. Judgment for me is the behavioral output of wisdom, and nota bene. In 2024 and 2025, I was chairing a global group of very senior people in the context of another global organization. These were very big names and they were all CEOs or board members.

The only thing they talked about was efficiency. How many people can we get rid of because of the ChatGPT at that time? The conversation has shifted now because they start to see efficiency isn’t everything. Effectiveness could be a good thing. Peter drops his stuff, doing the right thing or doing things right. That’s very important.

I wonder how much of that is because of some of the backlash that they’ve been getting from employee populations. They want them to use these tools and the employees are like, “All you’re telling me is you’re going to use these tools to get rid of me. Why should I use these tools?” There’s been a bit of that tug of war that’s been going on between leaders and employees. I wonder how much of the shift that’s happening at the executive level is because of that. I wonder how much of it is more just they’ve had their own rethinking of this.

It feels to me like the conversation around AI has been very fluid over the months. We’ve gone from it’s something that people aren’t familiar with to, “It’s going to eat all of our jobs,” to, “I hate it and I don’t want to see it.” There’s this Gen Z rebellion against it. Now, there’s a bit of defensiveness going on among the big AI players and companies about trying to reposition it. It’s been fascinating to watch that play out. I’d love to get your views on that.

It’s equally fascinating because, as I said, you’ve spent the last couple of months meeting God knows how many CEOs, board members, CPOs, learning and development managers in 7 or 8 cities in different countries. The conversation is shifting but it should be shifting. The backlash is because of bad leadership. I say that generally, because how do you expect people to use some new technology if you scare the heck out of them?

If you start to look at the data now, there was a Microsoft report out in May about how co-work is used in the office suite. You can see almost more than half of it are like thinking tools, persuasion tools. It’s about decision and thinking. People are using this as well. The problem is when you start to talk about jobs, I keep telling people, “Don’t do that. Talk about tasks instead. Shift the unit of analysis from jobs to tasks.”

Here’s an anecdote. I met an interesting person whose CEO months ago said, “We’re going to be an AI agentic workforce.” With 25,000 employees, a big global company, and B2B, everybody said, “What does that mean?” He said, “I don’t know. What we should do is that we should develop more than 50,000 AI agents in six months.” Everybody goes, “Wow.” He said, “Nobody will be fired because of this. You’ll get fired because of something else but we will do this together.”

Everybody, the receptionist to the CEO should develop agents of various levels and stuff. Internship and interns and everything. Lo and behold, six months later, they had developed 54,000 AI agents with awards and ceremonies and all cool stuff across all functional areas of all levels. It’s super interesting. I said, “How many are useful?” They said, “A couple of hundred are useful and can help efficiency and effectiveness.” People were very happy and people were positive towards this. This was good leadership. You can say we get what we ask for if you scare people. That’s how it is.

Johan Roos: Don’t talk about jobs; talk about tasks instead. Shift the unit of analysis from jobs to tasks.

It’s a great example of how you turn it around and say, “We’re going to do it together. Not to you.” It completely changes employees’ mindsets about this. I see that happening in my own travels. I see that happening more lately where companies are encouraging people to use this and trying to demonstrate from the top down that it is about how to do tasks differently. Not necessarily how to replace people.

The Origins And Strategy Behind Lego Serious Play

I want to shift gears a little bit because before you wrote this book, you were one of the co-founders of LEGO Serious Play, which has had a massive impact on the business world. The idea of LEGO® and SERIOUS PLAY® is unconventional at first glance. Talk about the origins of it and the problem that you were trying to solve when it was first created.

It’s a bit of a baby for me. My colleague Bart Victor and I were professors at the IMD in Switzerland, a top renowned executive education place. For various reasons, we ended up doing experiments and stuff. People particularly thought I was a bit crazy because I pushed pretty hard. The real problem was this, and it’s very similar. The real problem was lack of depth in strategy conversations. I was a strategy professor and strategy consultant. I was teaching and doing a lot of stuff, working with companies. I found that I used the same tools, the same language, the same models and the same consultants and expected a different outcome. Which we know what that is. I thought that in these strategy conversations, it was pretty superficial.

The obvious people talked. The more introverted people were silent and so forth, so we changed the playing field. We changed the mode of what we call intentionality from, “Let’s not just have serious work. We could be a little bit playful,” then we changed the medium of communication from 2D flatland, Post-It note, flip charge or whatever, to physical stuff and it happened to be that LEGO® bricks are pretty useful but it’s not about the LEGO®. It’s the physicality of the stuff. What happened was, when people started to build their strategy or build their environment, their competition, their customer relationship, first of all, using their hands, they started to see different things.

Johan Roos: When people started to build their strategy using their hands, they started to see different things. Neurologically and sociologically, they started to talk to each other in a different way.

This is neurologically very interesting. Sociologically, they started to talk to each other in a different way. Almost anthropologically or psychologically, the introverts started to talk. The silent people got a voice. Suddenly, you got more out of the group than before. You had people say, “I didn’t know you thought that. Why haven’t you told me? We’ve been working together for five years.” Somebody leaned back and said, “I haven’t seen it this way before because they could look at it in 3D and they can change their perspective.” That was extraordinarily gratifying.

Out of that came a developmental process, and I’ve written about that. It is extraordinary what can happen. This is now, as you say, is used from NASA to small companies, universities, all over the world. Tens of thousands of people are using it. I’m super proud of it. It was a depth problem. My buddy Barton and I published a paper on what this method can be used for in the future, namely to get the same depth in specifying and designing the work that AI agents should do.

Now, you sit and do this. All the agents should do this and give me a prompt. We should have sub-agents or eight sub-agents doing this but that’s very superficial. Most of this research shows it already. Most of these are not super good. You can do much more. We’re proposing in a sense that if you use these kinds of more experiential, more almost creative arts therapy type of approaches, you can very quickly get to a better design, better specification of what AI agents should do. The same method, different problem, but same principles.

Clearly, creativity, collaboration and communication, the three of the five C’s that you talk about in Human Magic are also deeply enmeshed in LEGO Serious Play. I’m curious to get your perspective about how those three things and others, if relevant, evolved in the way that you think about them, creativity, collaboration, and communication and that LEGO Serious Play constructs how we interact with AI tools.

It is interesting. I’ve drawn on data from different sources, three sources. First is my own experience as a scholar, but also as a leader. Also, having implemented one of the first AI implementation projects globally in higher education two months after ChatGPT. The other source is talking to a lot of leaders about what do you think is going to be the impact of AI on leadership throughout 2025. I even designed an AI voice assistant to interview people to do this. It’s super interesting.

The third one is a 2024-2025 research project on LEGO Serious Play facilitators. I did study how they used AI tools in their facilitation. That’s where I got the inspiration for this. You can say that the five C’s, and which we haven’t talked about, practical wisdom, the overarching capability, is all through LEGO Serious Play.

Practical wisdom has a manifestation in a behavioral manifestation in judgment. When we make a judgment call, we say, this is good versus bad. This is the right thing versus the wrong thing. In fact, also this is beautiful versus not. It is also about, what in LEGO Serious Play, we call the simple guiding principles. That typically comes out of things. It’s your guidelines. Your gut feels articulated, which is an integral part of an LSP process.

In a sense, these are intertwined. LSP is in this and this is in LSP. All of it, all of the five Cs and practical wisdom. I’ll make that very clear in the next book, which we call Mastering LEGO Serious Play. I’m super delighted because in this world of AI and algorithms we can go back to hands-on, minds-on physical stuff and see how powerful that remains in order for us to remain and develop us as humans.

As you said earlier, just the very nature of working with your hands has a neurological impact that sparks different brain patterns than would happen if you were just staring at a whiteboard and trying to have the same conversation or sitting around a conference table. That’s the piece, coming back to the idea of human magic, that people need to grab onto. That’s the idea of how you are tapping into your human uniqueness as opposed to replicating things that increasingly a machine could do for you.

You’re right. My good professional friend, Mitch Resnick, who is the director of MIT Media Lab and who’s kindly endorsed the book as well. He’s written about this for a long time. They’ve done wonderful stuff. He’s written about kindergarten throughout life. Think about that. When we put our children or grandchildren in kindergarten, what do we tell them to do? What do we encourage them to do? Play with their hands. Eat some dirt, maybe. Use some bricks or some clay or Play-Doh or paper drawing.

All of that stuff is wonderful because why? We know it’s experimenting. There’s old theories about how we experience the world or we discover the world through our hands. What happens when we put them in school? Sit down, be silent, and listen. His idea is we should have this kindergarten feeling throughout life and I am so with him. LEGO Serious Play is an attempt in all modesty to encourage that feeling in the spirit of human magic.

Practical Wisdom, Ethics, And The Limits Of AI Thinking

Many people lose that childish nature. Almost everybody does by the time they become adults, certainly. You’re essentially trying to tap back into that to get them to step back from a problem. See it in a different light and have fun with their colleagues. Those things don’t happen very often in workplaces anymore. Yet they can unleash great, collective, and creative ideas. That’s the power of the whole thing.

It won’t happen if you scare the heck out of people by saying, “Use these tools and we can make you redundant.” That’s not the way to go. Hopefully, collectively, leadership has learned and approached this as a smart way. We cannot be naive. There are fields where we have to push hard and do hard stuff. I do talk a little bit about defense and the military in one of the final chapters. What happens in a world where we delegate these decision calls, the ultimate one as well, to a machine?

I do refer to some of these amazing science fiction authors at the end. You have Philip K. Dick and Arthur C. Clarke. They are not just movies, but good quality literature on imagining a world where the machines decide what happens when humans are either drugged or through pleasure, as it is in A Brave New World, or through fear, as it is in 1984.

We do Robert’s dream of electric sheep. It’s a very good question asked by Philip K. Dick many years ago. I often urge people at the end, I’ll say, “Read more stuff. Expose yourself to what’s happening out there and broaden your mind and show that you as a human are broad enough,” and move ahead so that you’re not bitten in the rear end by the machine.

This comes back to your idea of wisdom relative to intelligence. There’s a difference between the two. We’re realizing now, to your point from earlier, practical wisdom is much more important and much more human than mere intelligence. You can find the answers to almost anything online now. It’s amazing. At the snap of a finger and written in a paragraph form for you or whatever form you want for that matter. The interpretation of that, the judgment of that is a very key human skill that we need to hang on to and get better at.

Isn’t it interesting that when we talk about wisdom in a sense, we visualize wisdom typically by somebody looking like Dumbledore? You’re wondering what is wise about this person? It’s almost like a life experience. You think of it as somebody who’s experienced a lot in life and that’s what it is. This is nothing new in it. Throughout different cultures, there are words for wisdom. It’s the habit of making a decision and taking actions that are good, not just for me, myself and I, but for the community I’m part of. This was the idea that leaders should have more than intelligence, know what, or technical skills like know how, and being a little bit street smart.

They should also have this above idea of looking after the community. It’s so true today. I define it in the book as the almost emergent property of these five Cs, or even the orchestrator, you can say also. These are things we should pay extraordinary heed to and be careful about cultivating. When people say to me, “What is it?” I said, “You can think of it as the ability to answer in the way I just said. That’s good not just for you, but also for others. The question, what matters? What is right? What resonates where you are in your context? What will work in your situation?”

It’s very context-specific stuff. If you start to delegate these questions to the algorithm, you are moving from green to amber towards the red light in your warning signal system. You should be extraordinarily careful so that the last question will not be or should I think, what is right? What works? When you do that, you are almost like abusing a large language model assuming it’s a large thinking model with ethical standards and living experience. Sorry, folks, it’s not.

The tools are so good. We’ve talked about that at several points in the conversation they will give you an eloquent answer to just about any question that you ask. They do a pretty good job of imitating thinking. Not just a probabilistic collection of words strung together that turns out to be pretty gosh darn good. Most people don’t understand the technical underpinnings of a large language model. They take it more at face value because they see the outputs of it. That’s where you start to get into the slippery slope that you talked about earlier.

The producers of this, as smart and brilliant as they are, also read psychology. They know what happens if you add to an output or you start an output and answer with. This is brilliant. What a great question you’re posing. You get sucked into it. This is like a smart move. I’m just awaiting an advertising model for this and then it will be dangerous for us but this is very important. It’s very important for young people to be aware of this and be made aware of this. I met parents in different countries who are very worried about their 8 to 12-year-olds, for example, who challenge them and say, “No, mom. ChatGPT says, or perplexity says this. You’re wrong.”

Also, I’ve had parents who are senior professionals, and they bring up these issues such as, “How will our children be able to communicate and collaborate? There’s evidence that people are using this. This is when people withdraw.” You almost like to reduce your emotional intelligence. You reduce your critical thinking. You reduce your sense of engaging with others except online. There’s some real warning signals out there about young people’s first best friend or boyfriend or girlfriend is now an AI tool.

Critical Thinking And Optimism For The Future Of Work

I’ve heard some of those same stories, too. People are using it as a replacement for therapy because therapy is hard to get, especially here in the United States. We have a shortage of therapists available, so people are turning to these tools for that. We have to keep reminding people, and we saw this with social media. There is a dark underbelly to this whole thing that you need to be aware of. If you’re not aware of that or you’re ignoring the perils of it, you’re going to be slipping down that slope.

You’re so right. I was at the Luxembourg School of Business and met Joel Mokyr, the Nobel Prize winner in Economics in 2025. When asked, he said very clearly, “AI will answer your questions. It will not tell you which questions matter,” which of course is a statement anyone can say but said from such a strong person and super charming man. It’s a good reminder. You can get answers to anything but who’s in charge here? You or the machine? Who should ask the question? You can bounce things. There’s a wonderful way of using the tools as a critical thinking of yourself for a reviewer.

You have to work hard on that. If we don’t work hard on this, we will go down the slippery slope. If you work hard and I work hard with these tools, I work 25 versions of this and I challenge myself. I go back and forth. I’m a professor, so I’m used to tough reviews, but go for it. If you don’t do that, it’s so easy to take this first thing and say, “This is my output.” It’s potentially devastating. Three of the big four consulting firms in the last nine months have had to retract and pay for things that were wrong in their major report.

Which is always embarrassing when you’re a big consulting firm.

Potentially devastating.

With all of this in mind, what gives you optimism about the future of leadership and work?

I am an optimist in myself. I’ve always been an optimist and I’m a techno-optimist, but to quote Mokyr, “What could possibly be wrong? Political stupidity.” It is in a sense. I think it’s fantastic. New tools have always come to us and we’ve used them in the same way. First, there’s a hype and then we know the curve and then go down. It’s always changing. This one is just bigger and faster than anything else we’ve seen.

We’re humans. We survive. It’s a species we survive. One or two of us may fall around, fall outside but as humans, we will survive. We are super agile. It’s going to be a rough ride here, but it’s going to be a heck of a ride. I’m very positive in a sense that this will be a better world. It’s very easy to be a doomsayer. A lot of people make a lot of money, selling books and saying the world will go under or technology will kill us and all that. We love to go and see all of these movies about Terminator and all that but we will prevail.

We will come up with new stuff. There will be technologies throughout history. We’ve seen these technologies that change things dramatically. It will destroy and will pollute. There will be new technology that will take care of the pollution and it will reduce things. There will be like two steps forward, one back. Three steps forward, one back all the time. We have a bright future ahead of us.

Last question. If there’s one idea that you would want our audience to take away from human magic in particular about the way they lead or the way they make decisions or the way they approach their careers, what would it be?

I can do an overall and a little bit more practical one. Overall, in a sense, our advantage is to become more human as AI gets smarter. Not less human. Our advantage becomes more human as AI becomes smarter. Not less. For anyone who’s working as a professional, we like to do things. We read stuff. We prepare, and then we present them. We do all of this stuff. I will say use AI at full intensity to prepare but then show up as a human when the room is watching.

Johan Roos: Our advantage is to become more human as AI gets smarter, not less. Use AI at full intensity to prepare, but show up as a human when the room is watching.

It’s been a fascinating conversation. It’s certainly a very thought-provoking one and a very timely one, given that AI is upon us in full force. I thank you for being with me. It was great also to hear your perspectives as one of the co-founders of LEGO Serious Play, which as I said earlier, it’s a huge impact on the business world and beyond. Thank you for your contributions. Thank you for your thoughts and your time.

Thank you. If anyone is interested, it’s very simple, I’m at HumanMagic.one. If you do dot-com or org, you’ll get into the magician’s society.

Good enough. Thank you again.

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Key Takeaways: Cultivating Your Human Advantage

Lots to think about from the conversation that I had with Johan. First, as AI becomes more intelligent, it becomes even more important for us to tap into our unique human capabilities. Things like curiosity, creation and collaboration. That’s because it’s becoming less important to be the person who knows the most. It’s about becoming the person who has sound judgment, who can navigate ambiguity, who can ask better questions, who can build trust with others, who can help others make sense of complexity. These are the capabilities, as Johan said, that become more, not less valuable as technology advances.

Second is that leadership is increasingly about the idea of creating conditions for better thinking. Johan started down this path when he first conceived the idea of LEGO Serious Play. In fairness, he probably was thinking about it before then. He changed the world in the way that people started to look at how you can take something like playing with a bunch of Lego bricks and use it to foster better judgment, decision making, collaboration and creativity in an amazing way.

In our era of AI, this becomes even more important. The way that you can tap into our human uniqueness and help people harness it in a way that will help make them better as individuals, as teams and as organizations. The third thing that I would highlight is the fact that how you use these tools is important. If you are using them to do your work for you, you are just hurting yourself in the long term because you are going to erode your strengths. The things that make you human, the creativity and the curiosity and all of those things.

If you use AI to make you better, then you are tapping into its strengths without giving up the things that make you strong. That, to me, is a huge difference that will determine whether you thrive in our era of AI or potentially struggle in our era of AI. I would encourage all of you to think about how do I make these tools work for me as opposed to being imposed upon me?

All of that will come together in the way that we go through our careers, the way that we progress through organizations, the way that we lead others, and ultimately the way that we coexist with AI and aren’t undone by it. It’s an important moment. I hope you took a lot away from this conversation. As always, I invite you to subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, YouTube and Spotify. If you found the discussion enlightening, sign up for my membership community, which is called PathWise or our newsletter PathWisdom. Thanks.

Important Links

• Johan Roos
• Johan Roos on LinkedIn
• Human Magic: Leading with Wisdom in an Age of Algorithms
• LEGO Serious Play
• Mitch Resnick on LinkedIn
• Joel Mokyr
• PathWisdom Newsletter
• PathWise on LinkedIn
• PathWise on X
• PathWise on Facebook
• PathWise on YouTube
• PathWise on Instagram

About Johan Roos

Johan Roos serves as Senior Advisor to the Global Peter Drucker Forum, where he helped initiate the Next Management initiative on leadership, and he is Professor in Strategy and Executive Advisor at Hult International Business School (Boston, San Francisco, Dubai, London). Throughout his career, Johan has been driven by curiosity about how people and institutions learn, adapt, and rediscover their imagination when technology changes the rules. This interest led him to co-invent the globally adopted LEGO® Serious Play® methodology, enabling thousands of organizations to tackle complex challenges through imaginative, hands-on exploration.

His latest book, Human Magic: Leading with Wisdom in an Age of Algorithms (Routledge, 2026), distills multi-year research with executives and organizations into a practical framework for preserving curiosity, practical wisdom, and human agency when intelligent machines can provide instant answers. Across his roles as educator, advisor, investor, and speaker, Johan’s work is animated by a simple conviction: management, at its best, is humanity at work.