Managers often use their strong analytical orientation to make sense of increasingly diverse “big data” to better grasp and envision their company’s ecosystem — customers, technology, competition, and stakeholders interacting in myriad ways. Not surprisingly, the demand for data analytics competence and digital transformation is exploding. But is a sharp analytical mind enough?

I, like others, suggest a creative analogue mind is equally necessary. As long ago as the 1930s, Chester Barnard wrote about the importance to leaders of non-logical processes. Donald Schön described in the 1980s how intuition supports more rational, deliberate processes. Daniel Kahneman and others have shown that our beliefs are far from objective and we use all kinds of shortcuts to make decisions, including intuition, improvisation, and heuristics. Experienced business leaders like Jack Welsh have confirmed the importance of trusting “the gut.”

More than two decades ago, I experimented with groups of busy managers working with strategic planning. My colleague at that time, Bart Victor, and I modified two constraints of the traditional way to do serious strategy workshops. First, we changed the mode of intention from (serious) Work to Play. Second, we changed the media of communication from two-dimensional papers, slides and flipcharts to three-dimensional construction materials, specifically LEGO bricks. Out of this came the concept of Serious Play and, in collaboration with the LEGO Company, the LEGO Serious Play product was born.

Drucker Forum 2019

This article is one in the “shape the debate” series relating to the 11th Global Peter Drucker Forum, under the theme “The Power of Ecosystems” taking place on November 21 & 22, 2019 in Vienna, Austria.
#GPDF19 #ecosystems

The essence of the serious play process is to enable participants to also “think with their hands.” Working with 3D materials, the mind starts to see problems in entirely new ways, developing new knowledge about Self, one’s job, and the world – i.e. one’s intertwined ecosystem. Today, thousands of trained LSP facilitators-practitioners help leaders enhance their analytical side using specially designed sets of pieces from the versatile LEGO construction system.

The LSP method is grounded in theories from the natural and social sciences, in particular, in complex adaptive systems theory that looks at living systems with lots of interconnections and that often have strange properties, including sudden novelty and changes on different levels of scale. Here, a tiny difference in a system’s initial condition could make a huge difference to its ultimate evolution. This is why, despite sensors and super computers, we still cannot accurately predict human behavior during a football game nor customers’ reactions to a new product.

Complex adaptive systems theory is rich and lends itself to better understand human systems like companies, industries, project organizations, and the like. Using LSP thus helps participants better understand relations among the parts of a system –be they atoms, cells, integrated circuits, business units, people, or tribes – that unifies them into a whole. A major element of the LSP practice are exercises to articulate, visualize in 3D, spatially place, and connect relevant parts of an ecosystem, i.e. to create interconnected “knowledge landscapes.” that may look like the photos below. These spatial and heavily interconnected ecosystem models lend themselves to deep dialogue leading to new insights (see exhibit 1-2).

Exhibit 1: Photo by Johan Roos

Exhibit 2: Courtesy of IntHRface

Peter Drucker saw himself as a social ecologist and so I wish he could have experienced the 3D social ecology of LSP. But, you can. Join me at the pre-conference workshop Global Peter Drucker Forum in Vienna November 20.

About the Author:

Johan Roos is Chief Academic Officer & Professor, Hult International Business School, previously CEO, Dean and Professor of JIBS in Sweden, President of CBS in Denmark, Dean of MBA Programs and Professor at SSE, Sweden, Founding Director of Imagination Lab, Professor of IMD and co-inventor of LEGO Serious Play.

This article is one in the Drucker Forum “shape the debate” series relating to the 11th Global Peter Drucker Forum, under the theme “The Power of Ecosystems”, taking place on November 21-22, 2019 in Vienna, Austria #GPDF19 #ecosystems

Technology literacy

This model is required because technology is making the world increasing efficient, complex, and prone to sudden change. Whatever was learned at the university is insufficient, as courses, programs and even professors constantly lag behind the exponential developments in technology. Who can keep abreast with advances in data analytics, blockchains, robotics, machine learning, and nano-technology as well as what is happening in the fin-tech, auto-tech, med-tech, agro-tech and any other industry disrupted by technology? Graduates today have to keep filling their skill gaps simply to maintain employability by topping up their degrees with short courses with or without diplomas.

On the corporate side, CEOs are taken aback when they realize the extent to which activities within so many jobs in their companies can be automated. The prospect of replacing 20% of the workforce with algorithms every year over the next few years is a daunting leadership task and terrifying social project. It is not surprising that rapid upskilling of the workforce is high up on the leadership agenda in many boardrooms, and in governments.

Technology wants what life wants – more of itself, which makes the world more complex. There is no stopping this evolution.1 Higher education, especially older traditional universities, quickly need to adapt to the new circumstances that technology is creating. Some have already argued that the purpose of universities should primarily be “robot-proofing” people.2 Of course, not everyone can be, or needs to be a star coder or gene editing expert, but life will be tough for graduates who are ignorant of basic vocabulary and syntax in the technology fields, especially if they aspire to leadership roles.

Continuous technology literacy is the new normal in life-long learning.

Human literacy

Humans are not robots and neurons are not digital switches. All the brilliant discoveries and inventions from technology will not solve the grand challenges of today’s world — mass-ignorance, poverty, intolerance, famine, and conflict – without knowing how to make the most out of being human. In view of what technology wants and can do, we need to ensure that our precious human potential is valued and used rather than going underused or moved to the aft behind awe-inspiring technology.

If we do not carefully consider how technology can and should be applied to our very humanity, we will end up as dull, ignorant and rather useless automatons in an incredibly complex and fast world, with our humanity lagging behind. That danger is clear and present if or when the current machine-learning algorithms running refrigerators and accident-prone autonomous vehicles finally evolve into artificial superintelligence with an IQ of, say, 20,000 and accelerating, compared to our measly 150.3 When parts of job are replaced by robots, or rather algorithms, we need to learn how to work with and complement what machines can and should do.

Unlike any other species, homo sapiens has ways for individuals who have never met to share strong religious, political, national, and corporate identities. We can make moral choices, persuade and convince, be culturally sensitive, empathetic, globally agile, and able to read and speak body language, imagine, intuit, improvise, and so much more. If technology advances our capacities to perform ever-greater actions, we must also advance our capacities to think ever greater thoughts and co-create, and know how to become masters of machine-human interfacing.4

Continuous human literacy is the new normal in lifelong learning.

A Cambrian explosion of variety of possibilities

Over the last decade, we have witnessed an explosive increase in diversity of institutions offering higher education of all kinds. Yet, although universities think they are delivering, experts are still saying that employers are not happy with university graduates. It is time to sound a few alarm bells; universities cannot stay the same. The ed-tech and tech-ed landscape will become even more complex and dynamic. There will be an enormous need for more on-demand, customised, and stackable courses, milestone degrees, micro-masters, and badges of all kinds. Universities will continue to play important roles, but the ever-changing landscape will see a wider range of suppliers, formats, credentials, and validations.

Universities can participate in this evolution. Within a few years in the early 2000s, there will likely be just one market segment in which providers of all types become partners for lifelong learning, co-creators of knowledge, catalysts of innovation and enablers of individual, organizational and societal prosperity. Expect lifelong education to become the normal for experienced adults, as well as the unemployed, and even retirees reconnecting to help junior workers progress.

Learning to know, to do, to be, and to live together remain the classical pillars of lifelong learning,5 with obvious benefits for individuals, organizations and our shared society. But, the idea and practice of life-long learning is being disrupted. The game is changing and a new normal is emerging that will challenge the status quo of universities and create new opportunities for the illiterate and literate alike.

About the Author:

Johan Roos is a Chief Academic Officer, professor, author, and co-inventor at LEGO Serious Play

This article is one in a series related to the 10th Global Peter Drucker Forum, with the theme management. the human dimension, taking place on November 29 & 30, 2018 in Vienna, Austria #GPDF18

This article was first published in LinkedIn Pulse

Western society in the 21^st century is clearly built on the notion of the commons – the very human right to be part of a prosperous culture that values intelligence, tolerance, peaceful lives, and progress. This commons makes up the foundation of our nations, as much as the air and the oceans, and it did not come easily. Philosopher Slavoj Zizek reminds us that all features we identify today with liberal democracies – like the freedom of speech, voting rights, gender equality, mass education and the right to a decent livelihood –  were gained through often violent popular struggles during the 19^th century. In the 20^th century, it took two World Wars and myriad local conflicts to arrive at a modicum of global peace and prosperity.

I suggest that the commons is at risk of cracking from the stresses of an increasingly aggressive battle to control power and wealth. The rise of the 1% and the relative fall of the 99% add anger to hopelessness. Numerous voices, including economist Thomas Pikkety, have warned us that capitalism has a very dark side that is upsetting the world order. Huge income differences make fertile ground for revolts, and the risk of massive social unrest, if not revolution, can no longer be swept under the table.

A major concern we should have is the shattering of the middle class, a necessary component of any modern economy. In 2011, British economist Guy Standing published The Precariat – The New Dangerous Class, in which he recognized a vast new substratum of society – “a multitude of insecure people, living bits-and-pieces lives, in and out of short-term jobs, without a narrative of occupational development, including millions of frustrated educated youth who do not like what they see before them, millions of women abused in oppressive labour, growing numbers of criminalised tagged for life, millions being categorised as ‘disabled’ and migrants in their hundreds of millions around the world.”

I perceive an even newer split happening, further dividing his precariat into two sub-strata — frustrated educated youth with limited job opportunities vs. an increasingly large segment who are neither educated nor enlightened. The former, with their education, at least have a chance to create employment or participate in the part-time economy, but the latter have almost no outlet for their humanity to develop or shine. They are high school dropouts (7% of American males, 6% of females, 7.5% of Blacks, and 10.5% of Hispanics leave high school), or they are graduates who cannot afford or are not motivated to go to university (35% of American high school graduates do not go to college).  Uneducated, unqualified and unhappy, these millions of youth are afraid of life, unprepared and unable to take constructive steps forward in an increasingly complex, skill-based world.  Add to them the millions of war-torn migrants fleeing into Western countries, many of whom are illiterates and/or unassimilated, and thus a long way from even very simple jobs that welfare states make available to them.

This lower “tribe” of the precariat is easily prone to fear-baiting and hate-mongering. They denigrate hard-working immigrants for “stealing their jobs” (even though these are jobs they would never accept doing). They seek scapegoats everywhere and blame diversity and globalization as the cause of job loss and the decline of their neighborhoods and communities. Worse, they find conspiracy theories in everything and are drawn to autocratic political leaders whose charisma and jingoist language matter more than ideas and who project the notion that strength trumps principles.

The anger, sense of hopelessness and growing social unrest that defines this tragic segment of the precariat will not promote the emergence of the coming Entrepreneurial Society, such as what Peter Drucker predicted. We see many instances already of how some will even sabotage it, becoming lifelong haters, Luddites, fascists, racists, violent extremists, thieves, disruptors, or even terrorists.

Those of us who believe in the value of the commons must recognize this growing shadow on society. We need to begin discussing what new policies and pragmatic solutions can effectively, creatively and quickly deal with this rising tragedy. It is irresponsible to leave tens of millions behind in a rapidly changing world. If we do not become aware of and debate sensitive matters like this, we should not be surprised when extremists of any kind protest, occupy, throw stones, sabotage and threaten lives. To paraphrase Plato’s famous metaphor, we cannot stay sitting in our caves, anxiously watching as the shadows from the dystopian campfires outside dance on our walls.

About the author:

Johan Roos is Chief Academic Officer & Professor, Hult International Business School, previously CEO, Dean and Professor of JIBS in Sweden, President of CBS in Denmark, Dean of MBA Programs and Professor at SSE, Sweden, Founding Director of Imagination Lab and Professor of IMD.

But it cannot be so. Unless we begin recognizing that the same pace of discovery in STEM fields needs to be applied to our very humanity, we will end up as dull, ignorant automatons, our humanity lagging behind our scientific-mathematical brains.  If science and technology advance our capacities to do ever-greater actions, we must learn from them and advance our capacities to think ever greater thoughts. We must use both capacities of our brain.

Let me give an example of what we can learn from STEM—take Moore’s law. In 1965, Gordon Moore, co-founder of Intel, forecast that the progress of miniaturizing transistors would proceed at an exponential rate in the future.  His projection—that the number of transistors on an integrated circuit would double every year (which was later revised to every two years, and then to every 18 months)—seemed preposterous to imagine. What gave Moore the confidence to predict what he called “circuit and device cleverness”? How could humans achieve such a technological feat given the unimaginable hurdles that would have to be surpassed to make it happen?

Yet, we did it. Human minds made the discoveries and invented the technologies necessary to go further than ever imagined. Moore’s law has proven to be largely true, thanks to the brilliant work of many who improved the thinness and performance of circuits, who reduced their size, who learned how to pack more and more on ever smaller wafers. In 2014, bioengineers at Stanford even developed a circuit that simulates 1 million brain neurons with billions of synaptic connections. Scientists are now pondering whether Moore’s law might also apply to the rate of advancement in Artificial Intelligence, while the public debate and the number of movies are growing about the consequences if and when computers become capable of designing computers and robots better than themselves, exceeding human intellectual capacity and control.

In the meantime, however, our humanity has seen an enormous increase in global problems. Since Moore’s forecast in 1965, international, national, regional conflicts and wars continue to kill and claim millions of innocent civilians. Billions of dollars are spent on increasing the effectiveness and efficiency of war machines. Religion-based conflict destroys not only people but also humanity’s earliest settlements and historical treasures. While prosperity has reached millions of people around the globe, creating enormous new middle classes, billions more still live in abject poverty. Millions of children die each year from preventable diseases. Thousands die on the ships of human traders in the Mediterranean and Indian Ocean. Our cities are teeming with social ills and archaic infrastructures while hope for a better life attracts more desperate people to them. And we are consuming the resources of the Earth without a global strategy to halt human impact on the climate.

The chasm between how the STEM field flourishes and our progress as humans is shocking and sad. If we can land a Rover on Mars, transplant organs, build self-driving cars, and translate a paragraph from Swedish to Tagalog in about 30 nanoseconds, can we not make equal progress to lift billions from ignorance and poverty; save innocent children from war, famine, and disease; protect girls from genital mutilation; learn how to solve geopolitical and religious conflict without guns and bombs; and all else that humanity must do to keep our planet from succumbing to our own failings?

In my view, we can learn a lot from the advances our researchers in STEM make, because they teach us lessons about our humanity.  For every new scientific, technological, engineering, and mathematical notion or discovery, I submit to you that there is a corollary humanities discovery to reclaim.  Moore’s law, for example, tells us that we might begin to think that, yes, we can attempt to double our human capacities every few years, too.  While we cannot measure this progress in any type of quantitative way, the metaphor of doubling our human qualities in a short period of time can act like an objective we set for ourselves in the same way that Moore’s law has inspired the competitive tech industry to chase Moore’s prediction for 50 years. We can indeed seek out new strides to grow our humanness and reduce our baser tendencies of aggression, greed, and ignorance. We can achieve the seemingly insurmountable barriers to bring prosperity, education, good health, and peace to every single human on Earth if we apply Moore’s law to our human progress.

There is every reason that the advancements in science and humanities must go hand in hand. According to the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a 21st century liberal education should empower individuals and prepare them to deal with complexity, diversity, and change. We cannot accomplish these goals through STEM alone. We can look to Moore’s law as a metaphoric driving force in this regard— an inspiring goal that we set for ourselves in everything humans do.  Just imagine if our capacities to be open-minded and free from dogma, preconception, conscious of our opinions and judgments, reflective of our actions and aware of our place in the social and natural worlds would double every 18 months. Of course, Moore’s law is just one of many STEM advances that I believe we can apply to reclaim our humanity. More will come.

About the author:

Dr. Johan Roos is Dean and Managing Director of Jönköping International Business School (JIBS), where he also holds a professorship in strategy. From 2009 to March 2011 he served as President of Copenhagen Business School.