Dark Decisions

A dark decision is an output that went out without anyone understanding it, checking it, or agreeing to own it. Not a hallucination, not an outage, and usually not anything that shows up in a dashboard. Just a confident answer that nobody actually decided to send.

The book comes out of eighteen months building and operating an AI compliance product for regulated health professionals in British Columbia. Everything worked in the demo. In production it produced exactly that class of failure, and the fix was never a better model. It was an architecture: gates that decide what gets through, a record of who accepted what, and a written rule about which decisions a machine may never make alone.

The Starter Kit is the practical half. Seven fillable tools across twelve pages, including the 8-Gate Diagnostic Card for auditing a product you already have in production, and the Go-Live Gate Checklist that turns the launch decision into twenty questions with clear criteria.

It is free, and the Five-Week Orchestrator Course follows it, one email a week, walking through each stage with an exercise and a worked example.

Twelve chapters, in three movements: what goes wrong, the architecture that prevents it, and what it means for the business around it.

1. The Operator Trap
2. Dark Decisions
3. The Three Ways AI Products Break
4. Stop Thinking in Prompts, Start Thinking in Systems
5. The Trust Ladder
6. The Orchestrator Model
7. The Constitutional Layer
8. Eight Gates Every Reliable AI Product Needs
9. The Spec That Builds Trust
10. From Features to Platform
11. Revenue Earned Through Transformation
12. The Cadence That Sustains

Plus a case reference section with documented real-world failures and their primary sources, a glossary in plain language, and two appendices that become the Starter Kit.

Pre-orders open shortly, and this page will carry every link as each becomes available. The eBook and paperback publish together on 17 November.

If you would like a note the day it is out, that is included when you join the list for the Starter Kit above, and there is nothing else to sign up for.

A separate workbook is in production, designed to be used after the book rather than alongside it: the framework turned into a sequence you work through on a real product, with the templates filled out rather than described.

It is not ready yet and it is not part of the launch. If you want to know when it is, joining the list above is the only thing you need to do.

If you are buying for a team, a library, a chapter or a cohort, write to darkdecisions@cerebrium.ca and say roughly how many and who they are for. There are three arrangements depending on whether you want copies only, copies with a session for the team, or copies with a readiness assessment.