A MORE HUMAN FUTURE IS STILL OURS TO DRAFT

AI is a mirror
before it's an engine.

AI has given us more possibility than we know what to do with. Humanum Huis gathers what you already know and gives it back as one honest picture, so you can argue with it and decide where and how to move.

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The thoughts and minds once separated become a picture we see as one.

WHERE THIS LEADS ↓

ROOMS THIS WORK HAS BEEN IN

What is now possible

THE HUMAN READINESS GAP

The ceiling used to be access: who could be reach, what could be afforded, how long it took accomplish Moving forward a struggle. AI has removed most of that ceiling.

The temptation now is pointing AI at the existing system - improving efficiency the easiest to imagine. But our old system was built on limits no longer exist. Used deliberately, AI capability offers something else: the chance to hear our vision in scope, decide what continues, and draft what is next.

The distance between what's possible and what people can imagine doing with that possibility is the Human Readiness Gap. It widens naturally as possibility grows, and it narrows when we can see ourselves at scale and imagine beyond what exists.

What we can imagine doing with it

METHOD & PURPOSE

How the work moves and what it's for.

Two questions run through everything here. What is actually going on — the pattern you are living inside? And once you can see it and start to move, what is all that movement for? The method answers the first. The purposes answer the second. The work only holds when both get answered.

HUMANUM HUIS BECOMING

Meet Parker.

Parker Woodroof, PhD.

FOUNDER · AMSTERDAM

I had been tinkering with AI before I lost my finger, but a few early experiences changed what I thought it could do. I once forgot a report an associate dean had asked me to prepare. I was untenured and thought I was a dead duck. I gave AI the context and what the report needed to accomplish. Five minutes later, I sent it. “That’s perfect,” she wrote back. So I kept testing it. My dad, a programmer for SEDONA, gave me a coding problem he had not been able to solve. I am not a programmer. I asked enough questions to understand what it needed to do, worked through it with AI, and sent him something that worked.

Those experiences gave me enough confidence to try something bigger. I was chairing a culture task force at a business school of just over a hundred people. We collected more qualitative material than a committee could realistically hold in its head. I used AI to synthesize it, then had colleagues go back through the raw responses and challenge the picture. It held. The machine had not discovered some secret truth. It had taken what was scattered across an entire building and made it visible at the same time. Once I saw what a building could accomplish when it learned to listen to itself, I started wondering where the limit was.

That question kept expanding. I built a method for helping people see what is true, imagine what might still be possible, and decide how to move together. Then I asked myself what question was most worthy of it. I keep coming back to the biggest one I know: what kind of world are we going to build with intelligence this powerful? That is where I have chosen to point the work.

Realization

Meet Parker

In October of 2024, I lost my ring finger dunking a basketball on my daughter. On an eight-foot goal, for the record. I came down, looked at my hand, and the first coherent thing out of my mouth was, “How am I going to type?” Which, in retrospect, is a pretty revealing thing to say after losing a finger. Enter artificial intelligence. I started dictating because I had to, and started using AI because suddenly the way I had always worked wasn’t available to me. I got more productive. A lot more productive. But that turned out to be the least interesting part.

More production gave way to better questions. Why am I making this? What am I actually trying to understand? Who is this for? What becomes possible if the old constraints disappear? The quality and ambition of what I could create started to feel almost unbounded. I could talk something through, follow an idea I barely understood myself, argue with it, turn it around, connect it to something else, and emerge somewhere I might never have reached alone. AI didn’t just help me work faster. It changed my sense of what was possible. And then I started noticing something else: the technology was revealing me. My habits. My ambition. My blind spots. The questions I knew how to ask and the ones I didn’t.

Once I saw that in myself, I started seeing it everywhere. AI was entering organizations as a productivity tool, but underneath that, something much more interesting was happening. It was exposing how people think, how much they trust one another, what they’re afraid to say, whether they know where they’re going, and what they imagine is possible when old limitations begin to fall away. That question eventually became Humanum Huis.

Saying goodbye to certainty and hello to possibility.

I came to this through discomfort the kind that rearranges what you think the future is and makes possibility feel fragile and specific. The discomfort at carried through my work.

I sat in meetings about using AI to monitor students for cheating, and meetings about how to keep this new technology out of the building. Both concerns made sense if the goal was to protect the model were in, but they failed to appreciate the evolving reality. The real questions to be asked were - what do our students need to become, or what formation is required when answers are abundant and judgment is scarce. How do we adapt in this tectonic shift of intelligence?

In this situation, what I eventually came to realize is that the status quo model was going to be defended rather than reimagined, and that the change could not come from me. It required fully aware leadership, and the desire to look to the future with curiosity, creativity and hope.

I had spent years getting serious about the discomfort I mentioned at home and at work. What I began to imagine was a relief that scales, and I realized I could not build that and stay in my comfortable tenure. In America, tenure is too often the arrangement we spend a decade earning so we never have to be brave again. I had it. And now, I was feeling the call to leave it, and so it happened - my family crossed an ocean, and started over, and we get to see what courage looks like from close range.

Materials

Change the text to include your own content. Adjust the font, size or scale to customize the style.

I grew up in business schools

I have been inside business schools for almost as long as I can remember. My dad was a professor, and when I was five he would let me sit in his classes and watch him teach. In 1995, he helped build SEDONA, an early web-based system for faculty data and accreditation. Years later, I became a faculty member in schools that used the system he built. Looking back, I think I grew up around a problem I am still working on: institutions know far more than they can usually see at once.

I spent more than a decade as a professor and became an Associate Professor of Marketing at the Collat School of Business at UAB. My research appeared in the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, the Journal of Business Ethics, and the Journal of Business Research. Much of that work was about how organizations signal who they are through their stories, promises, and behavior, and what happens when those things stop lining up. Then AI arrived, and I found myself asking a question I could not shake: if a student can now access extraordinary amounts of knowledge, analysis, and creative help on their own, what should a university give them that they could never accomplish alone with an AI?

Eventually I realized that question was bigger than universities. Every institution has intelligence scattered everywhere: experience, judgment, disagreement, imagination, things people have noticed but never quite said out loud. My work is about getting more of that into view, arguing with what emerges, and deciding what comes next.

Parker Woodroof, PhD.

FOUNDER · AMSTERDAM

I had been tinkering with AI before I lost my finger, but a few early experiences changed what I thought it could do. I once forgot a report an associate dean had asked me to prepare. I was untenured and thought I was a dead duck. I gave AI the context and what the report needed to accomplish. Five minutes later, I sent it. “That’s perfect,” she wrote back. So I kept testing it. My dad, a programmer for SEDONA, gave me a coding problem he had not been able to solve. I am not a programmer. I asked enough questions to understand what it needed to do, worked through it with AI, and sent him something that worked.

Those experiences gave me enough confidence to try something bigger. I was chairing a culture task force at a business school of just over a hundred people. We collected more qualitative material than a committee could realistically hold in its head. I used AI to synthesize it, then had colleagues go back through the raw responses and challenge the picture. It held. The machine had not discovered some secret truth. It had taken what was scattered across an entire building and made it visible at the same time. Once I saw what a building could accomplish when it learned to listen to itself, I started wondering where the limit was.

That question kept expanding. I built a method for helping people see what is true, imagine what might still be possible, and decide how to move together. Then I asked myself what question was most worthy of it. I keep coming back to the biggest one I know: what kind of world are we going to build with intelligence this powerful? That is where I have chosen to point the work.

Realization

Meet Parker

In October of 2024, I lost my ring finger dunking a basketball on my daughter. On an eight-foot goal, for the record. I came down, looked at my hand, and the first coherent thing out of my mouth was, “How am I going to type?” Which, in retrospect, is a pretty revealing thing to say after losing a finger. Enter artificial intelligence. I started dictating because I had to, and started using AI because suddenly the way I had always worked wasn’t available to me. I got more productive. A lot more productive. But that turned out to be the least interesting part.

More production gave way to better questions. Why am I making this? What am I actually trying to understand? Who is this for? What becomes possible if the old constraints disappear? The quality and ambition of what I could create started to feel almost unbounded. I could talk something through, follow an idea I barely understood myself, argue with it, turn it around, connect it to something else, and emerge somewhere I might never have reached alone. AI didn’t just help me work faster. It changed my sense of what was possible. And then I started noticing something else: the technology was revealing me. My habits. My ambition. My blind spots. The questions I knew how to ask and the ones I didn’t.

Once I saw that in myself, I started seeing it everywhere. AI was entering organizations as a productivity tool, but underneath that, something much more interesting was happening. It was exposing how people think, how much they trust one another, what they’re afraid to say, whether they know where they’re going, and what they imagine is possible when old limitations begin to fall away. That question eventually became Humanum Huis.

Saying goodbye to certainty and hello to possibility.

I came to this through discomfort the kind that rearranges what you think the future is and makes possibility feel fragile and specific. The discomfort at carried through my work.

I sat in meetings about using AI to monitor students for cheating, and meetings about how to keep this new technology out of the building. Both concerns made sense if the goal was to protect the model were in, but they failed to appreciate the evolving reality. The real questions to be asked were - what do our students need to become, or what formation is required when answers are abundant and judgment is scarce. How do we adapt in this tectonic shift of intelligence?

In this situation, what I eventually came to realize is that the status quo model was going to be defended rather than reimagined, and that the change could not come from me. It required fully aware leadership, and the desire to look to the future with curiosity, creativity and hope.

I had spent years getting serious about the discomfort I mentioned at home and at work. What I began to imagine was a relief that scales, and I realized I could not build that and stay in my comfortable tenure. In America, tenure is too often the arrangement we spend a decade earning so we never have to be brave again. I had it. And now, I was feeling the call to leave it, and so it happened - my family crossed an ocean, and started over, and we get to see what courage looks like from close range.

Materials

Change the text to include your own content. Adjust the font, size or scale to customize the style.

I grew up in business schools

I have been inside business schools for almost as long as I can remember. My dad was a professor, and when I was five he would let me sit in his classes and watch him teach. In 1995, he helped build SEDONA, an early web-based system for faculty data and accreditation. Years later, I became a faculty member in schools that used the system he built. Looking back, I think I grew up around a problem I am still working on: institutions know far more than they can usually see at once.

I spent more than a decade as a professor and became an Associate Professor of Marketing at the Collat School of Business at UAB. My research appeared in the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, the Journal of Business Ethics, and the Journal of Business Research. Much of that work was about how organizations signal who they are through their stories, promises, and behavior, and what happens when those things stop lining up. Then AI arrived, and I found myself asking a question I could not shake: if a student can now access extraordinary amounts of knowledge, analysis, and creative help on their own, what should a university give them that they could never accomplish alone with an AI?

Eventually I realized that question was bigger than universities. Every institution has intelligence scattered everywhere: experience, judgment, disagreement, imagination, things people have noticed but never quite said out loud. My work is about getting more of that into view, arguing with what emerges, and deciding what comes next.

HUMANUM HUIS BECOMING

Meet Parker.

The house is still being built. The work has already begun.

A MORE HUMAN FUTURE IS STILL OURS TO DRAFT

AI is a mirror before it's an engine.

ROOMS THIS WORK HAS BEEN IN

What is now possible

THE HUMAN READINESS GAP

What we can imagine doing with it

METHOD & PURPOSE

How the work moves and what it's for.

HUMANUM HUIS BECOMING

Meet Parker.

FOUNDER · AMSTERDAM

Meet Parker

FOUNDER · AMSTERDAM

Meet Parker

HUMANUM HUIS BECOMING

Meet Parker.

AI is a mirror
before it's an engine.