Amplify or Erode: The Daily AI Choice with Johan Roos

So I have a quick favor before we go.

I'm in the middle of my doctoral research and I need some CEOs. Here's the question: is there a point where working more hours actually indicates a worse leader? Nobody's measured it before. I'm measuring it now. So if you're a CEO or president with at least 10 people in the business and 3 direct reports, it takes just a few minutes and your team answers a few anonymous questions. But what you get back is a report comparing how you rate yourself to how your team rates you. That gap is usually the interesting part. The link is scalingcoach.com/study. Again, scalingcoach.com/study. The link's also in the show notes. Help me out now, please.

Oh, here we are again. I'm always delighted the music cues me to Feel good. I enjoy having our conversations. I hope you enjoy this conversation today. All the tailwind, the only tailwind, all the oxygen, all the money, everything right now is AI, AI, AI. Just a little caution about how AI might— and it's interesting, my guest today and I both have a deep connection to AI, family working in critical roles in AI. So, and years working with leaders, human beings, and like that. So, listen in. Hey everybody, Bill Gallagher, scaling coach and author of Busy Is Broken. My book's out now. Go order it, Amazon, amazon.com, or wherever you get your books, or go to busyisbroken.com. And there's extra things and our diagnostic and stuff like that there. This is all about how to not be the bottleneck in your company after you get it going, after you grow the company a little bit, like how you can get it. So great stories, great frameworks, history, research, lots of things like that, and then actionable steps. So all the right elements of a great book. I hope you love it. BusyIsBroken.com, Amazon, wherever you go to get that. All right, all right, all right. I'm joined by John Ruse. John is co-inventor of LEGO Serious Play. He's got a background running academics at Hult International Business. He's been involved for a long time in the Peter Drucker Forum. He spent decades in business work and consulting and research and academia and all of that kind of thing. He's got a new book, Human Magic: Leading with Wisdom in the Age of Algorithms. He's got a son who's an AI engineer and knows something about that, right? And like, our world is taking over— my practice, my clients, all of that. By the way, there's a little extra in my book, my conversation with Jack about what, what's happening with Anthropic and then our relationship and all that. So, Um, and then Johan, welcome to the show.

Thank you, Bill, and congratulations to your new book.

Thank you. And to you.

Thank you, Bill.

I know, have you done more before? I didn't see that in my notes.

Uh, I've been sort of an academic for a long time, so if you go back, I have 10 books plus academic books later on, but this is the most important book ever.

Of course, same here. Like, show us your book.

Here it is.

There you go.

There it is. That's my author stack. I just got them, but it's fairly new. Came out in April, May.

That's really cool.

I—

so this is my first book, and I also have a dissertation in that I'm writing right now, a PhD related to the book. Um, but for me, like, I'm very emotional about it, very excited, you know.

Isn't that interesting, Bill, that we— and as you say, when everything is about AI, yeah, just overwhelming day and night, yeah, conversations— we love books, at least you and I. But I, I don't think we're alone. I think there's a lot of people out there that love the touch of a book, and I think we're gonna get more I think the pendulum will swing back to also having books.

Yeah, you know, it's interesting. I think there's something about like the human element, the experiential, the stories, that kind of thing. My wife, when she finally— I didn't let her read the book for a long time when I was writing it because I just, you know, like we're married 31 years and sometimes her her, like I wear her critique a little too closely. And so she finally read it. She's like, oh, it's pretty good.

You know what? We shared that too. 30+ years. And she read it and she said, Johan, this is pretty good. Unlike some of your other stuff. So it is, it's useful.

Yeah.

Good feedback.

So, and then she said, it's a much more human-centered book. than a lot of business books, right? So, I mean, there's frameworks and there's talks about, but it's a lot of discussion about how behavior and behavior with other people gets in the way. So, why do we do what we do? How did we get here? What is the environment we're born into? Like all of that kind of thing is, you know, and I think like the reading the book, the stories, you could use AI to summarize a book now, but if you don't have it tell you some of the stories, it's all just cold. Like all of our books are like, I mean, really, they're fairly thin in concept, but the stories bring them to life for us, I think.

Well, thin in concept. Well, talk— perhaps you talk about yourself. I don't know, Bill, but, uh, but I don't think any decent published book is thin in concept. There has to be something to it. And this is, uh, uh, I, I love culture. I've spent decades in sort of developing concepts and working with concepts, but I sort of also got so fed up with it. I needed practice. I've been doing a lot of leadership development and this whole idea about the Lego tool, the Lego Serious Play tool, which I developed many years ago.

Yeah.

It's all about this embodied experience. It's about going beyond the cognitive thing. It's going into the social, the psychological, the social, the almost anthropological working together. holding stuff, using your hands. And that tactile thing with our hands and thinking with your hands is really powerful. You could say books are halfway between AI stuff and in a sense doing what we did in kindergarten.

You know, that's a really interesting thing. So I had a little bit of unusual background. My parents were both educators and I went to both a Uh, what's the school that we have here? Uh, I'm so blanking. Yeah, anyway, there's like—

Listening, I hope.

Huh?

Your parents are not listening, I hope.

Not anymore. Um, uh, so, well, the one I'm thinking of— so there's common schools about self-directed preschools in particular here, but one of the ones that I also went to was this Rudolf Steiner school. And there was a particular focus, um, in that school around, um, arts and feeling and expression and creativity and that kind of thing, which was distinct from a lot of other places that, you know, taught you rules and, and painting and, and that kind of thing.

I mean, Bill, I think this is a— it's a very important conversation to have. Uh, there's a really good— I have a good professional friend Mitch Resnick. He happens to be the director of the MIT Media Lab.

Yeah.

He wrote the book and he's been kind enough to endorse my book, but he wrote a book called Kindergarten Throughout Life. And this whole idea is really powerful. Steiner is one, Montessori is another. There's a couple of these very much interesting European-based ones, which takes education as much more of a holistic way. It's almost like What is called in psychology and in therapy creative art therapy. This notion that you just don't lie on the couch and talk about your bad upbringing, but also actually you engage things. And there's a whole tradition here on not just on the child stuff, but on adults. Jacob Levi Moreno, Carl Jung, both of them sort of went away from Sigmund Freud. Both of them had this idea that you have to do more, there's more to it, there's an active imagination, there's actually an active working out of spontaneity, etc. These are old stuff, 100-year-old stuff, but we seem to have forgotten it in business. And the LEGO Serious Play idea is much more in that realm, that in a sense it's an embodied discovery. You think with your hands, you interact, you do things, you look at things in 3D, not just on a flat screen like we do now, but some artists called Flatland.

Well, that's a whole other book, Flatland. So I came back from windsurfing yesterday. I do this thing called wing foil surfing. So you use a foil surfboard and a handheld wing. And I and my wife's like, oh, you really love this so much. And like, you know, she doesn't love it and doesn't want to be around the wind and the thing. And I am definitely nurtured. She does understand like movement and exercise and that kind of thing a great deal. But I spend so much time talking and thinking and writing and, you know, in my work, reading, talking, thinking, it's all very cerebral. But then I go out and I ride the waves and you grab the wind and then you go up and then you are up and you're down, you fall. And, you know, and along the way, you know, you can't think about anything. And then there's room for a little thought. And then there's like gratitude and, And then you see something and whatever. And like, so there's little snippets of whatever, and that whole like experience comes together. And I find myself often like joyful and laughing, and then sometimes, uh, move to tears and I'm crying, uh, usually like with gratitude, right? Or, or humbling. Like, and all that happens in like an hour, you know? Um, I think there's something Like that connection of it's physical, 3-dimensional, multidimensional, right? Like, um, that.

Yeah. Bill, your experience, you're describing sort of what I would call an embodied experience, a full experience of something. Now, so where you're riding the waves, I'm riding a horse, you know? So, so I was not— you're more tanned than I am. That's because I spend too much on airplanes and inside, but, uh, where you went out Riding the waves, I'm shoveling horseshit in the morning when I'm at home because we are living on a farm.

You have horses?

My wife is a horse girl from her youth and upwards. So when I go out ride as well, it's the same experience, you know, your connection, not with a wave, but with a big animal, bigger than you, you know, a horse is much stronger. It's amazingly strong. And you feel that connection and you get into it and you do that and you, You can go slow and you can go for it. And it's sort of, you get almost delightfully petrified of the moment. It's exhilarating. It gives you something extra. And unlike you, I don't cry like that, but you maybe are a much more of a softer person. I don't know, or a more human person, but I get excited. I get excited. I get excited about that. And that is a good experience to have, Bill. whether we ride the waves or we ride a horse or something else that sort of connects us with something bigger than us.

Yeah, I have an unusual sort of emotional range and emotional expression compared to most people, and certainly more than a lot of Northern Europeans. But tell me about horse, horses, horse or horses. Tell me, what do you have? Like in what?

Oh, we just have a couple of, my wife, as I said, she was born on a stud farm and we've lived in several countries and we always sort of, my wife obviously decided and say, hey, where's our manège? You know, where's the stable where we can put a horse and then where do we live?

Yeah.

So it's been that thing in Switzerland and in Norway and, and in Sweden now. And so it's not a, it's, it's, I'm sort of an extra person. I, I can ride. I've ridden when I was small and so forth, but it's, it's sort of a, a really big thing for my wife, who's seen more horses than people, probably, when we met. But this whole idea of caring for something, I think it's fantastic. I think young people who work with horses very early on become, in a sense, more human because they have this unconditional caring relationship with something that is an animal. not a rat, but a big thing that you can actually have a connection with. I think it's super good and I just enjoy it. I'm not a fanatic, but I enjoy it every now and then. And it's just good for your mind, I think, and your body, obviously. But that's good.

I haven't ridden in many years, but I loved to ride as a kid. We had a horse in the backyard as a kid. My mom grew up with a number of horses and rode in rodeos and parades and things like that. So she grew up with horses and misses them like So much. Like, you could still— in her 80s, later 80s, like, she still talks about, you know, like, growing up with the horses. And like, it's a deep, deep, like, love and connection. And that, like, that riding with is a little bit like a dance, you know? Like, you're moving with the other animal, with the other being. And, uh, and they think and feel, and they read you. Oh my God.

They read you, they sniff you, they smell you in a distance. They can read you through the smell. And they see things, they hear other frequencies, but also they smell you. Their sense of smell is extraordinary. So they know who you are.

So what had you write this book?

Both an excitement and a concern. So in my job, I work a lot with leaders and I've done this for 30 years and I've been a leader myself for many years now. And I had a hunch. Well, we all have hunches, but I remember in 2014 when there was a Financial Times Oxford study that came out and said, hey, all of these jobs will be automated away by computers. There was a big debate, blah blah blah, and I wrote a little piece in Financial Times and I said like lessons to beat the computer. And so I said, so we have to do— it was building on this whole idea of imagination, creativity, and all this is what we need to do. And we need to teach students this. We need to hold on to their creativity and imagination, in fact. And so all of that sort of came to a little bit of a top out 10 years ago when I was working with a dozen or so leaders in the spirit of digital transformation. You remember this was a big term 10 years ago with all the big data coming in. Everybody should have these dashboards of, you know, like in an airplane, or we have data from this and data from coming in. And the leaders were sitting there like, wow, I'm the pilot. I know exactly what's going on. And then of course we have Salesforce and other companies developing these things, right? So, so, and, and I remember a conversation I had with a bunch of people, leaders, and they said, well, if the computers and all the sensors and all the data come in, if they know so much about everything and all the time and very fast, what's my role? What should I do? You know, what's my value added basically? So that became sort of a starting point for thinking more about this during COVID and everything, you know, na na na. And then when ChatGPT came out, I was on it immediately, nonetheless, because I read my son's master's thesis, which was very much about some of these things. I said, holy, lo and behold. And he just said, dad, wait until the damn thing talks back to you. And lo and behold, it came. Yeah. And, uh, so 2 months after that happened, I launched globally through this, the most international business school in the world, Hult. Uh, campuses in Boston, London, San Francisco, Dubai.

San Francisco.

Yeah. Yeah. Just, just launched. a global task force on this. And some of the professors were really onto this, and some of my colleagues were onto this. Others wondered, why do we spend time on this? So, but we did very— we were probably among the first in higher education to really go for it. And I set the game. I just said, hey, we welcome this, but we're careful. So when we develop this, we learn from others and we talk to all of the great minds in the world, but we set some guardrails away and then we launch it. So in a couple of months, we had practices policies, you can say, tactics for academics, for students, for staff and all that. And I went out talking on this and this, and I felt like this is really big. And but I felt sort of people are not coming along super fast. This was at a time when Italy and China banned ChatGPT for 6 weeks, right? Now there's 100 hours of compulsory LLM studies for kindergarten in China, basically. So things are happening very quickly. But then I went worked with a lot of leaders through the Drucker Forum, some really cool groups there, very senior leaders throughout the globe. And I was chairing that for a while, for a couple of years. And the first conversations, it's all about, oh great, how many people can we fire? Efficiency, efficiency, efficiency. And then eventually the conversation sort of moved gradually into, hey, shouldn't we pay a little bit more attention to the consequences of this for our organizations and indeed for leadership. So that was sort of a couple of triggers for this. And at the same time, I'd been doing research on these Lego Serious Play facilitators using AI tools. And I tell you, that is one of the most challenging facilitations you can do. Standing in front of a flip chart and Post-it note is one thing, but working a group using materials and really keeping it serious yet playful, that is really challenging. So I, I developed a GPT for them to test, and we did some research on this— how did they use it before, during, and after— and all of that became super important inputs for the book. And I developed an AI agent to interview people, just also show what the technology can do while researching. So all of this came in, and I said, wow, there's so much interesting data here about how to use it, what to watch out for, and how fantastic it can be, but also what it do to you. So that became the foundation for saying, hey, look at some— we need to focus on the human capabilities that we can either amplify or erode, so our jelly bean goes weak.

Yeah.

Or so, so that was sort of a starting point, and then that's, that's put this together in the book.

So that, um, uh, in— I, I referenced this like side conversation that I had with Jack for the audiobook in my book, but I, I, um, my— so my son Jack Gallagher is a pre-training AI scientist at Anthropic, and before that he built Midjourney, and he dropped out of college to go work in AI safety, and then eventually we did some several companies and then, uh, and then Midjourney and now, um, Anthropic. And, um, and so I'm talking to him all the time about it and, and he's like, oh, just all intellectual work is wiped out by AI within like 2 years. And that's largely the view of, you know, a lot of people at the company there. And I, and I think mostly that freaks out a lot of people. And, and I am torn between my initial experiences is empowering and liberating. Um, but I also can see like, oh, but maybe like I can, I can see sort of both sides of it. So I ask him, so are you scared or optimistic? Are you like, oh, the robot overlord will, will just take away our jobs and we'll have nothing, or it'll empower us and we'll just be wealthy and everybody can just pursue their creative And he's like, I don't have either of those things. I don't really have any idea. I'm curious, like, where things are headed. I like— there's something to manage and to be aware of, but, but who could say? Like, and I, I love, I love the uncertainty of that outlook. Like, we don't know where it's going. It's too powerful and you can't ignore it and you can't stuff it. I mean, we have certainly certain governments, including quite a few in Europe, who would like want to stuff it.

Right.

Well, I think, I think, uh, a knee-jerk reaction in universities and in countries was, well, how do we stop this so students don't cheat? You know, but that's like, it's so old-fashioned if you think of it in the thinking, it's like, well, that's weird. But like, how do you stop a dam about to, to burst? You can't. But, um, but I think it lends itself to some really cool conversations. So, uh, we could conceptualize about it or we can be really practical. So on the one hand, we can talk about it. Thinking Fast and Slow, you know, Kahneman's work on this. Like, this is forcing us to go from thinking slow to thinking fast.

Yeah.

With all the drawbacks to that, that we become super fast and superficial.

Yeah.

Then we can talk about reality. So I've just spent a couple of weeks traveling around talking to CPOs and CEOs or global companies, mostly in Europe, but global companies. And they are— I always ask them, and it turns out that they are both like yourself. They're both AI excited, but they are also AI anxious with good reason.

Yeah.

Because they are typically somewhere below the top or the top, and there's always a top, and that's the board. In some boards I see panic. We can be kind and say, oh, it's uncertainty, ambiguity. I just say it's outright panic. somewhere because they see, holy cow, they read this in the paper like, oh, they're unleashing millions of agents or doing— everybody's doing this. And, and, and so what do they do? Well, many people in the board, not anyone listening to this of course, but many others haven't got a clue, sort of to say, because they don't understand the technology. They haven't even tried it. Maybe they do a little ChatGPT at home and so forth, but like there's, there's not this technological understanding of that your son have and my son have, like, wow, this is really changing things because we're stuck in where we came from. And whereas others, of course, outstanding. So one example of the opposite is a CEO that said 6 months ago, we're going to have— this is a global $80 billion company, 25,000 people, whatever. In one year, we're going to be an agentic workforce. And everybody stopped like, what does he mean? And he said, I don't know what it means, but one thing we'll start with is to develop 50,000 agents. Of us, 24,000 people should develop 50,000 agents across all our functions, from accounting to strategy, and do all of this stuff. And we will innovate and we will have awards and we will have competitions and everything. And none of you will be fired during this process unless there's another issue. But for these reasons, absolutely not. That was something they said very explicitly. And in fact, IKEA have done very similar stuff now on the call center. So there's a way to do this that doesn't scare people, right?

Mm-hmm.

Doesn't scare people. And I think that's a very smart move when you wanna change as a leader, which I've done several times. If you scare people, they say, well, thanks, you're gonna change. After you, goodbye. You know, so it's more a matter of how do you get people on board? Think of it as a change process. What do you do?

Yes.

So I think there's an excellent example of how you do this without scaring people and treating people badly. So it's in a sense like, this is in my spirit of like, well, do this smart now, use this. Of course we have to be more efficient. Of course we have to be more profitable. And there's gonna be trade-off when the CFO come in and say, we're gonna use 100 agents to eliminate a lot of tasks accounting and finance within 2 months, and some of you will have to go, some of you will be upskilled. Just, just do this with respect and human dignity and so forth. I think that's, that's possible. It can be done. I've seen it. But of course we have to use this. Of course we should use all the possibilities. You can't stop this. And why should you stop this? It's development. And by the way, the Chinese people will not stop developing stuff that maybe are not so nice, right? So, so we can't have this. Nobody will agree to stopping everything because we have what's called a collective action problem in sociology. Yeah, yeah.

So, so talk about this tension of erosion versus amplification, right? The different ways of using the same tools. I think you're hitting on it with like jobs get eliminated or jobs get empowered, companies get improved or companies get Eliminated. Talk about that.

And you can think of it as a brutal distinction, it's sort of a raw differentiation to make a point, but you can think of it in all kinds of levels, almost like in a fractal way. It's everywhere and all the time at different levels of scale, but it is a choice. My message is really, it's your choice. Every day you and I, Bill, and everybody's listening, making micro decisions about you know, our own sense of curiosity, what we use the tools for, to be curious. Do we ask like, uh, um, I'm thinking of this, uh, help me refine my thoughts. Um, I'm thinking of this, challenge it to, you know, challenge it, which is a good way to kind of, oh, I have this hunch. I want to be challenged. I want to use this. So there are amazing ways of doing this, of course. And, and one way is to just sit still for a while and say, I'm thinking of this, and then don't touch the keyboard. And then does, I'm thinking this refining, or are you rushing in after your morning coffee, sit in front of the laptop all day long, uh, using Perplexity, Cowork, using Gemini, whatever, anything, and sort of just on and on and on. Um, one path will lead to you sort of, hmm, improving yourself, sharpening your senses, and the other one will lead to you eventually asking, what should I be curious about? And you can think of this on curiosity, creativity, on critical thinking, and then also on communication and collaboration. We can get to that because that's a little bit on another league. But that's, that's my message is you, you have a choice.

Mm-hmm.

And the first path takes energy and costs time. The other one is soothing and nice and a little bit invisible. That suddenly you're drawn into this and less of you and you will be there and more and more of the LMM output will be in what you produce.

Well, I, uh, so, uh, I think there's so many ways we could do this. And the first thing, one of the things I notice is that I have a lot of CEOs and C-suite talking about the need for AI initiatives but not using it themselves. And in a couple, one of my clients in particular, I'm like, guys, stop already. If you're not using it yourself, then you should just stop talking. Your challenge is to use every hour of every day, be using AI in some way. So when you start to, when it starts to be a background for all the ways that you work, then let's start talking about the pros and cons and the good and bad and ways to work with it and not like, but you gotta start using it, not like trying to formulate a policy on something that you have no, Like you have only an intellectual, you have no direct experience of. So that I would say is the first one.

I totally agree with you. I said that earlier on, in a sense. How can you lead on this if you don't understand to some extent the technological possibilities of this? So 15 months ago, I wanted to do something that was partly shocking and partly exciting. So in front of 1,300 business school leaders from all over the world, I staged— and kudos to the conference organizers, I've done this many times, so they obviously trusted me to do this— but I staged for a short while an Oxford Union-style debate.

Yeah.

Just to remind people that this is how it used to be, that we have a motion of something and then there's somebody talking about I'm for this emotion. Others are talking against it. We have cross-examination, we have rebuttals, and then we synthesize and all that. So I did a vote before and after, and we moved everything 10% units, you know? Yeah. Super good. And people are like, oh wow, we've forgotten how to do this. We should do this more. And this is how we run the faculty senate. Come on, guys.

Good luck.

And then, and then I said, all right, thank you guys. And then I brought up on stage my laptop. with an AI voice assistant.

Yeah.

Right. And a big screen, you know, 1,300 people. I thought, well, may the technology work. And lo and behold, the technology worked. So I put the— I've sort of confined this agent or this voice assistant to a lot of papers and stuff about the future of something, right? So that was the first task. Don't just go out randomly and find something. And then I started those questions. And you could hear a pin drop when this agent answered. And then they thought I was faking it. So I said, let's take some questions from the audience. And it worked. And they were like, whoa. So this, I, they said, you have to write this up. So I did it. But the point, the message, the medium was the message. The medium was the, it's back to, uh, what's his name? Uh, Marshall McLuhan. The medium is the message.

Mm-hmm.

You know, show them what can be done. This is 15 months ago. Like, just do this and then you see, wow, it's actually— it's the same thing with the Lego Serious Play. The medium is the message.

Yeah.

We use a different medium to send the message that you can see things very differently. You can have worked in the same leadership team for 5 years and your neighbors will say, wow, I never thought you've seen it this way when they build the construction. Why didn't you tell me? You know, so there's a whole range of different ways you can do that. But it boils down to we have to understand the medium. Otherwise, how can we send a message?

You know, it's a, it's an interesting thing when you talk about the different, the forces and ways it can play. You may notice this if you're watching, if you're listening in your own thing as well, but like your AI use can go in different directions. If so, sometimes I will just have something that I'm mulling over, feeling, and I just want to have an open conversation and I want I want to work it out, so I want a discussion partner. And then I will like ramble around and talk, and I could go 2 hours sometimes working through an idea back and forth. And so AI is my thinking partner, but I don't really have an end. It's creative, it's reading, it's grappling with something that it could be personal, psychological, family, it could be business, um, a philosophy, like— I'm, I'm just working through something and I need a thinking partner who's patient and, and who's not bored with me.

Right?

Like, so, and, and who, in my case, I've set my profile to challenge me and push back and, and counter-argue and that kind of thing. So I have that going on. And then other times I just want to get something done. Like, okay, I need to, I need to write a post on this right now, or I need to counter this article that just came out. And so it's very task-oriented. I just want to get something done. And they're, they're, they're 2 different directions. If I confuse the 2, I run into real mischief. So if I go to do a task and then I let AI take me down some ADD rabbit hole with too many options, I have to say, stop it. I just need to get this post in. I don't need 10 options. I just need like one thing.

No, I think it sounds very sensible to me in a sense that We can talk about this in various ways. We can also get back to business broken, but for me, there are these basic human capabilities that are at stake here.

Yes.

And I'm urging people just to be careful. And you see, so what I said is that there's nothing strange about these 5 C's like curiosity and creativity and all that, but in every chapter follows the same style. So I start with sort of an anecdote about ancient times. You'll meet Socrates, like you meet Leonardo da Vinci, you'll meet Cicero in the Senate, 62 before—

Yes, yes.

You'll meet William of Sens, you'll meet Pericles, you'll meet, you know, all the— but it's just a page and a half for those of you who are a little bit worried now. But it's just to make the point that the conversations about curiosity, creativity, critical thinking, communication, collaboration is an ancient one and it's sort of what makes our society progress. You know, this is— we have to hold on to these. We can use tools to improve them. Like the typewriter was approved, the calculator was approved, the pen was approved, you know, a tool for improving these things. But I'm saying beyond this, beyond this, almost like what's called in complexity theory an emergent property of all of these things interacting. is something much more valuable. It's much more valuable. And that is the notion of practical wisdom, which goes across all culture. This ability, this habit of making decisions and taking actions that are good, not just for me, myself, and I, but also for the community I'm a part of, for my family, community, society, whatever. And that is at risk. And that I talk about the wisdom compass at the end. But every chapter has this rhythm that here it is, here's how you should use AI, here's the theory of it, here's how AI can ruin it, here's how AI can improve it, and here's a little self-assessment to see where you are here and now.

Let's, let's pick into that a little bit. Uh, practical wisdom—

what is it?

What do we mean by practical wisdom? And what are the 4 threats? Let's go through a little bit of that.

You can say this— I, I mentioned what practical wisdom is sort of— you can't say you're practically wise. I would have to say to you, Bill, that based on your behavior, based on your actions, what you've done over the last whatever, I think you're practically wise because you have made decisions and taken actions that are beyond your own egoism, right? So this is back to ancient times. You say, what's the— what is the qualification of a leader? You know, well, you should know how the world works, you know, the laws of nature. And also you should know a little bit of technology, you should be a little bit street smart and cunning, but you should go beyond. That's not good enough. You have to be thinking of the community. So that's the idea of it. And you find it in Islamic scholars, you find it as, I think the hikmah is the— in Vedic science, it's called viveka, right? And there's a Confucian equivalent, sehii, I can't pronounce it. And you have space for it in Japan called Bah. So this is something global and something we treasure. This is what we see in people that look like Dumbledore, right? That's the ultimate sort of idea of a wise person. You're old and have— if you're a male, you have a beard, right? But today it's more about like, well, we all are reasonably practically wise because we all make decisions that are not just good for me and myself and I, but also for others. So I put that into a simple compass. And I'm issuing sort of a warning that when you use AI on that level to answer these 4 questions, you should be extra wary. And the 4 questions are, what matters? What matters? What is right? So that you can see there's a moral judgment there. What is right? What resonates with people's emotions that are around you? under pressure? You know, what resonates where you are? And what do you think works under your circumstances here as well? And that is a moral motivation as well. What do you think will work? And if you have those questions— what matters, what is right, what resonates, and what works with you— if they rest ultimately with you, you're in green zone, right? But if you start to ask LLMs who are trained on data and ultimately will find the median of their training data— remember, they are large language models, not large thinking models, although it looks like that— if you are using those tools to answer these questions, you're on a slippery slope to erode your practical wisdom or some of your basic capabilities that would result practical. That's my not-so-subtle message, but just, just be careful. Hold on to those. That's your magic.

Yeah, let me see if I got it. I, um, so when I think practically, right, like, uh, as I am working through my PhD, I use AI nonstop. As I wrote my book, I used AI nonstop, which isn't to say I had AI write the book for me, but as a thinking partner through every step of it. I mean, and Um, so I will, like in the literature review, I'm looking at my area of study and I am, what are the relevant papers here and who explored that and what do we conclude about that? And, and I, I find that I, I went through about 12 revisions of which papers to focus on. So I end up, you know, I do a big scan of a whole bunch of papers and then I end up focusing on like 15 and then talking about the gap and the research that exists. And, And, um, but I go through 12 revisions because it's like, well, I think this is important. I'm like, no, that's bullshit. Like, I, you know, so AI will present something to me at first and then I'll be like, I think you're missing the point here. Like, or you're overcomplicating this or whatever. Like it just sort of spews out something that makes sense, but it could go any direction.

Yes. And this is, I have an old saying I tell people long before the AI era, because I wrote about a paper on spontaneity once. I said, trust the spontaneity of experienced people more than you trust the spontaneity of novices, right? Because this is the whole idea. If you know your stuff, Bill, as you do doing your doctorate, and I can hopefully know my stuff as well, you know what's— what matters here, what matters for what you want to do. You know what is right. Correct. I'm not talking about the hallucination. Well, you could say that hallucination stuff as well, you know, that, that's not correct, you know. But here's what's right under these circumstances for what you're doing. You know what resonates with your audience and, and some of the other literature or ideas or people you want to talk to. And you know what in your study or in your thesis, what really should work, what works in your— when you go out and talk about this. You know that because you've been through the grunt work. You have fallen sometimes. Maybe you haven't. I have the scars to prove it because I've done real change management in organizations, and that's never easy, right? So, so we know what works. We know what matters to people when we smell them, we see them. We just don't write— have LLM write an email and declare something. This is what you should do. And we sound like an LLM ourselves. We know how to collaborate now these days with agents, right? Agents as our teammates. We have that. I have 12 probably working. It's asking for my inputs now. I have 12 working for me on research right now. So all of this, it's our— this is what we have to preserve. And Bill, you and I very likely do that, and a lot of people listening to this, but there's research now right now about younger professionals, younger people, and we can go all the way down to teenagers and so forth, how they use these tools as a substitute for their own thinking, as a substitute for their own groundwork, right?

Mm-hmm.

And we know, we know this is dangerous. This is dangerous. I've been to Riyadh, I've been to Berlin, Amsterdam as well recently, and I often ask young people, professionals, they say, how many of your children are 10, 12? And yes. And then I ask them and they're like, oh gosh, they're challenging me. They're saying, no, no, mom, ChatGPT or Claude says this. And they go in, they lock themselves in the room and they get friendly with this thing. So we know there are some warning signals, if I put it diplomatically.

Yeah.

Just be careful with these. Super important questions.

Yeah. So let's pick it, uh, let's pick it workability and morality for a minute, because like, what is right or moral or just or that kind of thing? I find a lot of people who are obsessed with something and I'm like, I fundamentally disagree with you. And, um, and I, uh, and I think you're missing the big picture or another perspective. And, or even the facts, right? We know the ancient story, some people know of the blind men and the elephant, right? We all have what appear to be conflicting views, and yet sometimes we're missing the big picture. In fact, maybe all the views might be correct from a perspective.

Yes.

And I encounter people and they're like, this is right. And I'm like, that seems fundamentally wrong to me. And, uh, right, like moral. And I, I always get like People being too sure of themselves around either the facts or the virtue of something is always concerning for me.

You know, Bill, what's concerning for me, and I'll now put on my professor hat, please, is how reasoning has been degraded relative to feeling. It is this whole idea, it doesn't feel right to me, rather than I don't think it's right because I won't. And this is one of the reasons I staged this Oxford Union type of debate, because this is where we reason. We had leaders play roles, right? You can role-play and take a perspective, and that's actually a good way of practicing empathy. As well, right? You take somebody else's perspective. I'm a little bit concerned in society when people say, this is my alternative truth, or there's several truths. I mean, you can say it's more about like, here's my perspective.

Yes.

And we talk about it. Just don't call it truth. Yes.

Right.

You know, we have different views and that's perfect in, in a, in an open democratic society. You, you should have debate. I love debate, you know, but you should—

Yes.

Yeah, but you have people now saying, dare to refuse the debate. And, and, and that's very sort of concerning to me in my scholarly background where you're supposed to talk and debate and engage. And, and, you know, if you're— if you feel hurt, tough love, that, that's your problem, not mine, unless I beat you. breaking the law or something. But otherwise, if you feel a little bit hurt, well, I am also hurt sometimes, but it's not your problem or my problem. So it's more of, this is a little bit concerning thing I have about here. And remember now, the LLMs are trained on all, everything out there, everything out there. And we're looking at whatever median of this you will eventually get out of it.

Yeah, I'm struck by people who adopt a position and then today they like develop it or explore it further with their AI that tends to be like, you know, flattering to them and tell them what they want to hear, sycophantic.

Yeah.

And confirm that they're, oh, you definitely have cancer, you know, like. You just have a cold. Like, relax a minute. Like, you know, they go down for sure, like whatever it is. And I have a friend who was sharing some conspiracy theory with me, and he wasn't interested in sharing with me any evidence for the conspiracy theory. Or it's just he's decided a thing. He looked at a few things. He's not interested in picking apart. He wants to have a position. I'm like, okay, that's like a belief. That's like, you know, I believe or I don't believe in God because I feel a particular way. Yeah, or I believe in this version of God versus your version of God, or like, okay, but like, only this belief versus it is the truth kind of thing.

And in a sense, what's the antidote to that? It is, in a sense, a discussion, you know, an open discussion, actually a debate. Debate. Yeah, the antidote. This is what the Europeans hundreds of years ago called enlightenment. It's the whole idea of you are enlightened.

Enlightened.

You see the light. And it's going back to almost like medieval time when you had what was called a liberal education. It was not liberal in the political meaning it has today, but it was liberate— liberate because it was liberating you from being stuck in dogma. That was the idea. And the dogma, where did it come from? From the authorities at that time.

Yeah.

So the whole idea was, well, you should know a little bit of everything from geography, geometry, whatever, because it frees yourself. It frees— and I, I'm a firm believer in this idea. So Another antidote is actually to teach more of the humanities to people, actually to teach even rhetoric, you know, these ancient— it's nothing new. Chapter 5 in my book is sort of critical thinking. What do I do? I talk about theories of critical thinking here and there and there, but then I say, here's a great tool. What tool is that? It's a tool that was published in 1950 in the '50s by an English philosopher called Stephen Toulmin. It's called argument mapping. It's to map up an argument. Simple. What do you claim? What's your ground for your claim? What's your assumptions? If you just map that out, you will just see through all that is being said. And most that are being said is groundless claims.

Yeah.

And if you can map that out, you can actually get the AI tools to help you map that out. And I mapped out the book as an example in this, and I've used this tool for 25 years. But in turn, this is back to the ancient Greek. They said, this is how we reason. You know, there's a way of presenting your argument. So all of this is an antidote. And here, education from kindergarten to higher education and university have an extraordinarily strong tradition and a strong responsibility to not give this up.

It's, it's, uh, that was so much changing and developing. And then these fundamental human, uh, needs to train, to learn, to mentor, to bring wisdom to that kind of thing. At some point, does it change? Or what is your thought or fear, um, about, uh, wisdom being embodied in the LLM?

I'm— 2 things here. One is that there's a lot of fake wisdom, if you put it this way. And I said, just don't let somebody else tell you what matters and what is right and what works.

That's right.

But I think when companies are now doing this, and I'm sort of heavily involved in this as well, they're doing sort of AI workforce redesign, right? And they're doing it at grand force with grand scale. And you can say they are concerned mostly with redesigning roles around AI. So they see which tasks should be automated and hopefully who should be reskilled and upskilled and so forth. So we don't have people do obsolete work which can be automated. And in a sense, this is perfect, fine. They should do that rather than have roles contract because of sloppiness or accident. They should be designed. So there's a lot of work being done right now, and I'm working with some really cool people who have 30,000— I mean, millions of job— doesn't matter. But I'm worried about, and they are worried about, that the companies are asking for this, like, here's, help us counter the structural erosion of our tasks and jobs and work. Perfect. But then I'm asking, like, well, what about your behavioral erosion? You redesign the roles, but your people sort of started rely on AI rather than staying skeptical. And this is where actually these 2 things come together, sort of a structural erosion and the behavioral erosion that needs to be countered. So I'm actually working with some companies, helping others now to kind of— how do we do both this smart workflow redesign with AI as much as possible, and how do we ensure that the organization and the people hold on to their human magic. That is, to me, the essence of the challenge here. Do both. Don't just do the first. That's, in a sense, the whole message of what's happening right now.

Awesome. Curiosity, creativity, critical thinking, communication, collaboration. Those are the 5, right?

And practical wisdom on top of it.

Uh-huh. The practical wisdom wrapping it all around. So the 5 The 5 C's in this case and the practical wisdom wrapping it together, right? Like, what is, what is that wisdom and heart at whatever stage of life? Um, I feel like I, as I forget more things, I still am building wisdom across the thing. There's an innate feeling or sense of what works and what's workable, um, and right relative to.

I challenge leaders with a couple of questions. My favorite one is this. Whenever you're sitting and discussing in your board or your leadership team or whatever, if you subtract the AI output from that, what's left and how do you measure it? And I get blank faces now.

Yeah. Why do you think? Because they don't know, because they're not thinking, or because they just don't have an answer yet? They're working through it.

All 3.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, so the book Human Magic, uh, humanmagic.one. Yes, uh, humanmagic.one. That's the first time a .one, uh, URL that I've, uh, that I've seen. So, uh, humanmagic.one, um, is where to go get more information. But how do we hang on to what makes us magic as human beings even as we add in not resist, but add in and use to amplify us, not to erode us, the new AI tools, right? And if it's not starting with you and with key people on your team, then all of your big thoughts and initiatives and strategic moves are kind of like not led by an informed leader.

Yep.

You've got to be using yourself, right? You gotta eat the dog food, walk the talk, as they say. humanmagic.one. John— Johan Roos, um, thank you for coming on and talking with us a little bit today and with our listeners.

Well, been a pleasure.

Yeah. Hi everybody, also my book Busy Is Broken, go find it now wherever you get your book, uh, right? Get, uh, get Human Magic, get Busy Is Broken, and deal with it very human. I mean, I— look, I used to write I talked about AI in this, but Johan's book is much more AI-centered. Mine is much more about the human aspect of the evolution of your leadership. But both of them useful. Go find them now. I want to thank Wanda, Vern Harnish, etc., all, and Claude for helping get our show ready, produced, scheduled.

Thank you.

Every week, week in, week out, over 700 episodes now. Wherever you're getting this, like, subscribe, notifications, that kind of thing. Uh, until next time, keep scaling. Thanks for listening today. One last thing. If anything in this episode hit home, my book digs into it further. Busy Is Broken: Do Less, Scale More. It's all about how to stop drowning in work and build a business and a team that scales without you. Available right now with content samples at busyisbroken.com. Go grab it.

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