The Human Readiness Gap
Updated: Oct 8
This is Part 2 of a four-part founding note. Part 1 opens with the most painful moment of my life and the mirror I started building afterward. If you're arriving here first, you can start at the beginning — or keep going. This piece stands on its own too.
The Human Readiness Gap
There is a distance between what AI has made possible and what most people and institutions are ready to do with it. I've come to call this the Human Readiness Gap. At its core, I think it's a human formation gap. What's missing isn't a tool. It's the clarity, imagination, and moral architecture to decide what all this new capability is actually for. Efficiency can't be the finish line. AI can make a harmful system more efficient too.
Efficiency can't be the finish line. AI can make a harmful system more efficient too.
The harder questions are whether what we're making faster is actually making life better, what parts of the system need to be reimagined altogether, and what kind of human future we do want all this new power to help us build.
From what I've seen, and from what the large surveys keep reporting, many institutions now have AI deployed everywhere and are pointing it at just a couple things: automating tasks, cutting costs, and improving processes they already had. That work is real and it gives people time back for sure.
But the risk comes when those are the only things anyone asks of the technology, because organizations that only ever ask how AI can make them more efficient may miss something they can't get back, and may amplify something dangerous along the way. The same tool that could give a teacher back an afternoon with a student could also give a manager one more dashboard for distrust.
And look, this choice isn't made by the technology. It's made by the organization's imagination of what the technology is for. So I think the better question — harder, riskier, more generative — is: what becomes possible NOW that wasn't possible before? What futures are worth building? Who gets to co-create them?
Increasingly, the contrast I'm interested in isn't what the technology can do. It's actually what the human beings using it can imagine doing with it. That's the gap I'm trying to close.
Better Ambition
This isn't a call for slowness, caution, or some kind of ethical hand-wringing. I'm for scale. I'm for ambition. I believe the AI age needs more creative, committed, courageous people working seriously, together, on problems worthy of our tools. But ambition alone isn't enough. The question that must be considered is what that ambition is pointing at. What I am against is ambition that has never stopped to ask what it is for.
The question that must be considered is what that ambition is pointed at. What I am against is ambition that has never stopped to ask what it is for.
Rebecca Henderson's work has mattered deeply to me because she has spent years making a serious case that purpose belongs inside the work of business, not somewhere around its edges. But I keep coming back to another problem: even when the argument is strong, the human dream is losing the cultural competition.
The ideas of human flourishing, responsible AI, and dignity-first leadership need the cultural force that Nike gave athletic identity. Right now those ideas are being outrun by their opposites, mostly by default, mostly because we have not built the cultural and institutional infrastructure the human dream needs in order to survive, spread, and become real.
AI on Purpose
To use AI on purpose means intentionally — not by default and not because the efficiency case was easy to make. It means you have thought about what you are building and why before you deploy the technology that will accelerate it.
To use AI with purpose means something more difficult and more consequential: purpose and intention become the operating system underneath everything you do. It means whatever you decide to build, you do it with values, commitments, and questions about what your organization owes its people, its community, and its industry. Then all of the sudden, this approach becomes a lot more than a branding exercise. It becomes a load-bearing structure everything is built on.
To use AI with purpose means something more difficult and more consequential: purpose and intention become the operating system underneath everything you do. It means whatever you decide to build, you do it with values, commitments, and questions about what your organization owes its people, its community, and its industry.
Organizations that learn to use AI with purpose, on purpose, have a chance to become more honest, more imaginative, more worth being part of. That's the bet I'm making with my career, my savings, and my family's sense of what is possible in Amsterdam. A future is not humane because it is advanced. It is humane because someone made choices in that direction.
What Humanum Huis Is Building
I spent too long describing this work as a list of services, so let me say plainly what it is.
Humanum Huis helps people and institutions build three capacities:
The first is called the Mirror: a way of listening so that a person or an entire organization can see what is actually true about itself, and can argue with that picture until it gets truer.
The second we call the Future Draft: an imagined future state built from what the listening revealed and from extensive outside research, describing a destiny ambitious enough to be worthy of the power we now hold.
The third is moving with intention, which is where a described future turns into decisions: what can begin now, what to test first, who owns it, and what would change our minds. A picture nobody acts on is just a better-informed version of standing still.
The Mirror is where the listening begins, and the Future Draft is where the imagining gets written down so people can correct it. The ideas are tested in practice, and the practice stays open to evidence. The more I do this work, the less I think the answer can remain a consulting practice.
The human dream needs an institution behind it — not just companies doing good work, but a public-interest body with real accountability structures, real transparency about what is working and what is not, and real imagination about what becomes possible when you recruit the most creative, empathetic, and ambitious people you can find and give them a serious problem to work on.
We're not that institution yet.
What I'm building is larger than what I can build alone, which is exactly why I'm writing this. I'm moving toward it carefully, with the right people, with every piece of infrastructure I can wire in now, toward a foundation with receipts, a movement with methods, and a house for the conversation that most needs to happen.
The Commitments
That's the ambition. We're at the beginning of it. And we hold ourselves to three commitments, wired in:
Accountability
We say what we set out to do and we are honest about whether we did it. There is one thing we will never publish, and it is the first commitment rather than an exception to it: what someone said to us in confidence. The honesty that makes this work possible comes from a promise about where words go, and a promise kept only when it is convenient is not a promise. Where a client chooses to be named, we will say so, and let them describe the work themselves.
Transparency
We show our reasoning, not just our conclusions. When a framework is incomplete, we say so. When the evidence is uncertain, we say so. When we were wrong, we say so first. The work is confidential. The method is not. You can see how it is done, what it costs, and what we would do differently, in enough detail to judge it before you spend anything.
Imagination
We refuse to accept that what is currently possible is all that is possible. We ask what becomes possible now before we ask how to automate what already exists. And we widen the room because imagination changes depending on who is allowed to imagine. Artists, philosophers, parents, poets, strategists, technologists, students, and people who live with the consequences of the systems being redesigned all see different parts of what could be.
The future gets better when more kinds of human experience are allowed to shape it.
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This is Part 2 of 4. Continue on to Part 3: Where will you point AI →
What Humanum Huis is building starts with a conversation, not a proposal. →
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