The hardest part of transformation was never the technology.
Seven essays on the fear that sits under AI decisions: the board's, your team's, and mine.
I advise boards and agencies on AI governance, and the technical questions are usually the straightforward ones. What takes the time is the part nobody writes into the brief. A chief executive who suspects the organisation is already behind. A director who cannot say out loud that he does not understand what he approved last month. A team that has worked out their manager is testing whether their roles still need to exist.
Every AI programme has an architecture layer, a data layer and a governance layer. It also has a fear layer. That one never makes it onto the diagram, and it decides more outcomes than the others. Programmes stall there. Budgets get spent there. Policies get written there to make people feel safe rather than to make anything safer.
This series takes that layer seriously, including my own. I have been anxious about this technology. I have held a position in a client meeting that a model drafted and then failed to reconstruct why I agreed with it. Writing that down turned out to be more useful than any framework I published that month, so I am going to keep doing it.
It will not reassure you.
I am not going to tell you that it will be fine, because I do not know that and neither does anyone selling you the opposite.
It will not alarm you either.
Predictions of collapse travel further than they deserve to and age badly. Where I do not know, I will say so.
Every part ends with something to do.
Naming a feeling is where this starts, not where it stops. Each essay closes with a decision you can make this quarter.
The examples are real or they are absent.
Named and checkable where the work is mine to talk about, and left out where it is not. No composite anecdotes.
The seven parts
1 of 7 published
What I Was Afraid Of When I Started Advising on AI
The fear I had at the start was not that the technology would fail. It was being the person in the room who is supposed to know, advising on systems that move faster than any one person can honestly track.
What you take away A test for separating fear that is carrying information from fear that is only noise, using the evidence standard I would apply to any governance claim.
Read article →Boards Are Asking for AI Strategy. Many Are Asking Because They Are Afraid.
A large share of AI spending is anxiety spending. The mandate arrives written as strategy and originates in the fear of being seen as behind by a peer, a regulator or a shareholder.
What you take away Three questions that reveal whether a mandate is a strategy or a symptom, and how to answer each without embarrassing the person who issued it.
In progress
What Looks Like Resistance to AI Is Usually Self-Protection
Stalled adoption gets diagnosed as a change management problem and treated with more training. The behaviour is rational. People are protecting their standing, their expertise and their income.
What you take away The one commitment that moves uptake further than any training budget, and the three sentences leaders should stop saying in town halls.
In progress
The Fear of Being Late Is Making Leaders Buy the Wrong Things
Being late is the dominant fear in the mid-market right now, and it produces procurement decisions that a readiness assessment would have stopped in an afternoon.
What you take away What being late costs, and an order of operations that protects a budget from its owner’s anxiety.
In progress
Governance Theatre Is What Fear Looks Like on a Slide
My own territory. Policies written to produce the feeling of control rather than control itself. They survive a board meeting and fail an audit.
What you take away Three tests that separate a control from a performance, drawn from ISO/IEC 42001 audit work.
In progress
How Do I Tell My Team Their Work Is Changing?
The conversation leaders postpone longest, usually because they do not yet have the answer and believe they need one before they can open their mouth.
What you take away What to say when you do not have the full answer, what not to promise, and why timing matters more here than wording.
In progress
What I Still Do Not Know About Where This Goes
The closing honesty. The forecasts I refuse to make, the ones I have already got wrong, and what I hold on to while the ground keeps moving.
What you take away How to make decisions that survive being wrong, which is the only kind worth making at this point.
In progress
I sat on this idea for months because it felt off-brand. Governance work is supposed to be unsentimental, and my whole practice is built on being the person who stays calm about this. Then I noticed that nearly every stalled programme I have been called into had someone in it who was frightened and had nowhere to put it, and that my technical diagnosis was never the whole story. If a part of this lands close to home, that is the point of it. Write back and tell me which one.
Seven essays, published as they are written.
Each part goes out to the newsletter first and is narrated for the audio library. If you would rather talk about the specific decision sitting on your desk than read seven essays about it, the other door is open.