Confidently Wrong

What Good Companies Must Settle Before AI Decides

For the executive ready to treat every confident answer as a hypothesis.
A book by Christian Haeussinger and Michael Gilmartin.

The dashboard said eighty-seven percent. Behind that number, four teams inside a European logistics group had spent six months holding four different versions of what was happening to its anchor customer. The service desk noticed the tickets changing. The team that owned the usage data watched engagement fall. Finance saw invoices paid on time. Sales recorded an excellent relationship. Nobody put the four together. The forecast came from the sales view alone and told the board the customer was safe. The customer left, and the fifty-million-euro distribution center built around it was written down.The technology did its job. The forecasting model ran exactly as designed. The failure lay in the foundation underneath it, four systems that had never agreed on what an account was, and no amount of intelligent processing makes up for a foundation that was never built.Confidently Wrong is about what happens when AI is deployed into organizations that never built that foundation. The enterprises that mastered the previous era turn out to be the most exposed in this one, because the competencies that made them excellent are the ones producing the confident error. Companies invest in exactly the wrong order, starting with whatever a board can see. And a judgment handed to a machine before anyone wrote it down is gone on the day the machine is wrong.

INSTRUMENTS

Four Sheets, Ready to Use

From the book, free to download and fill in.The Personal ARI Worksheet
Shows where a decision will break before a machine takes it over.The Stakeholder Interview
Maps what each person a change depends on stands to lose, and why.The Reasoning Record
Tracks the beliefs you change, including the one you held too long.The Deployment Audit
Keeps the door locked until the system has passed every gate.

The reasoning behind each instrument is in the book.

IN PRACTICE

The Method at Work

We built the method into software as well. The screenshots show both applications at work on the composite logistics case from the book.The Instruments. The same four sheets run in a single application where one step hands its output to the next. It builds the board slide from your scores and flags where interview maps, logged beliefs and audit gates conflict.

The Rehearsal. Hear how a rollout lands across the roles that have to live with the change before they see it. Round by round, the simulation traces where support starts to erode as each group reads the announcement. It questions the executive leading the transition and drafts the ninety-day plan. Findings state their argument alongside the research they reason from, so the diagnosis can be challenged before the first real conversation.

AUTHORS

Who We Are

Christian Haeussinger works on the distance between what a machine can decide and what a company is ready to let it decide. He has stood on both sides of it, from the automotive industry to the office of the CFO, alongside executive teams around the world. He wrote this book for the people who have to close that distance.

Michael Gilmartin has spent over two decades solving problems with technology and being a liaison between functional and technical teams both as a consumer of technology and as the vendor. Through his participation in this project, he hopes to help others understand the important role that the humans play in the adoption of new technologies and the criticality of being able to question the unquestionable.

Contact

Write to Us

Tell us about a decision that broke in your company, an instrument that worked or an argument that did not survive contact with the boardroom.

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Solitudeallee 57
71636 Ludwigsburg
Germany

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CONFIDENTLY HUMAN

Safe with us

Thanks for reaching out. We have received your message and will review it soon.While we formulate our response, you can explore the four executive instruments in the "Instruments" section of the site. They are ready to download and designed to help you audit current AI and decision-making initiatives right away.Recommended Action: If you have not secured your copy yet, read more about the methodology in Confidently Wrong.