Mikko Aro

Mikko has spent the last decade-plus turning fuzzy people problems into slightly less fuzzy organizational futures. He’s built People functions from scratch, led teams, advised leaders, recruited quite a lot of people to different kinds of roles, and somehow stayed curious through it all. If it involves people, strategy, and some messiness, chances are Mikko is already in the middle of it – with a notebook, a question, and sometimes a useful metaphor to offer clarity in moments of ambiguity.

By day, Mikko is Demos Helsinki’s People Lead. By later that same day, he’s also a PhD researcher asking slightly unreasonable questions about organizational resilience, complexity theory, strategic human resource management, time, and why we keep pretending organizations are machines (they’re not – they’re much weirder).

Mikko moves a lot: through cities, water, theory, and the grey area between strategy and people. He thinks running clears the mind, and speculation should be classified as a core human right. When he’s not moving, he’s probably listening to techno or jazz, reading something, laughing at funny memes, or staring out the window wondering what kind of world we’re actually building.

Mikko believes that music is what emotions would say if they had synthesizers, and that management and organization should be more interesting than most people think. If forced to choose, he would rather discuss ontology than org charts (but is happy to discuss both).