Stay in the decision instead of letting it get made by absence.
Take the Call is the workplace companion to The Wrong Default. Where the first book is for the citizen, this one is for the operator and the professional who can already feel the crosshairs, the person whose judgment is quietly being handed to a system.
It is about keeping that judgment: holding the context a working life builds, knowing which calls are yours to make, and refusing to let the important ones get made by nobody at all. It is not a book about the technology. It is a book about accountability, and about the individual who stays in the room.
Short and direct, it ends where it should, on owning the decision.
The call still got made. No one made it.
A woman in Michigan had just finished her training to become a police officer in Detroit. Then she failed the background check, and the job went away.
What the background check had flagged was a finding of fraud. Years earlier she had collected unemployment benefits, and a state computer system had decided, on its own, that she had lied to get them. She had never been told. The notice had gone to an online portal she had no reason to be checking, and when she did not respond within thirty days the decision became final and could not be appealed.
By the time it surfaced on the background check it was simply true on the record: she was someone who had committed fraud. No person had ever looked at her case. No human had decided anything about her at all.
The system decided fraud wrong most of the time. Tens of thousands were wrongfully accused. The humans who used to make the call had been let go, and the call still had been made.
An excerpt from the opening. The book is about making sure that never describes a decision you were supposed to own.
A field manual, not a lecture.
Short enough to read on a flight, pointed enough to change how you handle the next handoff.
Who it's for
The operator, the manager, the professional, and the risk, legal, and security functions that answer for what AI does inside the work.
How it's published
Independently through Always Questioning. Ebook first via Amazon Kindle, with a print edition to follow.
Its companion
The Wrong Default carries the same argument to the citizen, parent, and leader. One argument, two audiences.
The Wrong Default
The public-facing half of the argument: how the wrong defaults get installed when powerful technology outruns the systems meant to govern it, and who absorbs the cost when no one is deciding.
Visit the The Wrong Default book site →