Seven postures facing AI: the Honestly Disoriented.
An ICT manager from a multinational — one everyone cites as among the most innovative in the sector — calls me. Almost verbatim: “I have two hundred thousand euros of AI budget. I have absolutely no idea how to use it.”
I listened, and thought it was the sanest thing I’d heard anyone say about AI in months.
But the Honestly Disoriented isn’t just him. It’s a posture, and that ICT manager is only one specimen. You find it in the CEO who admits in front of the board that they haven’t understood much. In the professional who tells you “I know it’s going to change my job, I just don’t know how.” In the founder who has read everything and feels more confused than before. Different roles, the same gesture: saying “I don’t know” out loud, from a position that institutionally rewards the opposite.
There are many of them. More than you’d think, because most of the time their role forbids saying it. Those who say it anyway have chosen maturity: acknowledging vulnerability before spending it on rushed decisions. It isn’t weakness. It’s the most respectable of the seven postures.
The blind spot comes after the admission. When you say “I don’t know,” the first move is to look for someone who does. And whoever knows, usually, is whoever answers loudest: the supplier with the complete package, the consultant with the ready-made roadmap, the quote that closes the case. The clearest answer is almost never the right one. The right one asks you to stay a little longer in the not-knowing — to work on the questions before the decisions. What problem am I actually solving. Where AI genuinely adds value, and where it just seems obvious that it should.
Staying there is the least comfortable thing to do. And it’s exactly the point where honesty risks becoming the sponsor of the wrong choice.
Admitting you don’t know is their strength. Buying the first certainty that comes along is their trap.
P.S. In the next post I’ll introduce their twin: the Quietly Disoriented. The one who nods with authority and sends you to the intern.