Citizenship, Wisdom, and Purpose: The Human Magic that will allow us to flourish in the age of AI

19 May 2026

Ian Hawkings discovers how John Roos' new book adds the magic ingredients to making AI and humans work.

When Johan Roos developed the LEGO® Serious Play® method for leadership communication and team-building in the 1990s, one of the central tenets was something know as ‘complex adaptive system’ (CAS) theory.

CAS proposes that a dynamic network of interactions, such as a team working together to solve a problem, is not predictable according to the behaviour of the components. It is adaptive in that the individual and collective behavior mutate and self-organize corresponding to whatever unfolds in the various interactions.

Effectively, stick a group of people in a room together with a problem, and the way they work together to come up with a solution is uniquely human. It’s something unpredictable, something akin to magic.

In his new book – Human Magic – Leading With Wisdom in the Age of Algorithms, Roos aims to answer a central question: “if algorithms now make all the decisions, what do leaders actually do?”

Reading an advance copy, it’s clear that Johan is bullish about human’s chances in the age of AI – if we collectively make the right moves. Referencing American science fiction author Isaac Asimov, he says that the idea of an ‘optimistic path in which properly designed automation becomes a fundamentally humanising force’ is possible – but that leaders will have to practice citizenship, wisdom, and purpose ahead of algorithmic efficiency.’

Roos acknowledges that hard choices have to be made, and that there will be unavoidable casualties along the way. But that the reward for getting it right might be the world Asimov envisioned all those years ago - where machines do the mundane and routine work, leaving humans free to do the things that make existence pleasant and worthwhile.

Ultimately, this book is a roadmap for identifying and then utilising the distinct human abilities that will allow us to thrive in sympatico with AI. In the process jobs will be lost, companies will reorganise, and a new reality will emerge. How to navigate this period successfully is the question.

The answer? It harks back to the Lego method – you leverage the one thing that no algorithm can replicate. Human Magic.

Human Magic can be purchased at https://humanmagic.one/