Library
Four threads of work. Choose one to read the essays, research, talks, and books that belong to it.
Most organizations put the human at the end of the loop, as an approver. By then the question has been framed and the options generated. Nothing is left to shape, and when agents produce thousands of decisions an hour, nobody can review them anyway. A human who rubber-stamps is deferring, not heeding. Human Magic in the Loop puts people upstream, where the questions are still open, and splits work by consequence rather than speed. Johan makes the case in Human Magic (Routledge, 2026).
Drucker called management the organ of society. When it falters, every institution feels it. Yet bureaucracy is back, now powered by AI-driven scorecards. Managing complexity by compression yields fragility, distrust and diminishing returns on talent. The Next Management, a Drucker Forum project Johan helped initiate in 2023 and has contributed to since, answers with balances to hold rather than a model to adopt. Those balances must survive real decisions. When a leader proposes a hundred agents and the savings are real, good intentions lose to arithmetic. Building the answer that does not is our shared work.
People think with their hands more than they know. Teams build their way into problems that talk alone cannot reach, which is the premise behind LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY®, the method Johan originated and co-invented and that is now used worldwide. Imagination is the engine, and the through-line across decades of work on strategy, learning and renewal. He has chaired the international conference at the LEGOLAND resort in Denmark since 2016.
Everyone agrees business schools must change, and they have agreed for sixty-five years. Johan has helped four of them reform themselves from the inside, dissolving departments, winning accreditations, turning a deficit into a surplus, improve their global reputations at in one instance, losing to internal politics. The reforms held. The field did not move. Which makes this a coordination problem rather than a knowledge problem, and coordination is the work he now does with AACSB.
